| Abstract | [Introduction]
For about the first half of this century, the psychology of learning was unified by a set of metatheoretical concepts and beliefs that may loosely be termed the general process view of learning (Seligman, 1970). Although the major general process theorists (Pavlov, Thorndike, Watson, Guthrie, Tolman, Hull, Spence, and Skinner) differed sharply on a number of theoretical issues, they all shared a set of common assumptions about learning that allowed those issues to be clearly defined and that enabled workers in the field to agree on the nature of important questions to be asked about learning. The issues that were debated included those of S-S versus S-R learning, reinforcement versus contiguity, the nature and role of drive states, and the importance of cognitive processes in learning. Underlying these theoretical arguments was a common set of metatheoretical beliefs that, within the general process tradition, were not called in question. These included the belief that there are general principles of learning that apply to all learning situations, that the same learning processes are involved in all animals, and that learning is to be equated with the formation of associations of some kind.
The last 25 years have seen a gradual retreat from the general process view of learning as its underlying assumptions began to be questioned. the view that learning is explicable by a single set of general principles has given way to a belief in a multiplicity of principles, a development that was anticipated by Tolman (1949). Thus we have seen a proliferation of “minitheories,” each dealing with a restricted range of learning phenomena such as classical conditioning (Rescorla, 1972; Rescorla & Wagner, 1972), expectancy (Kamin, 1968, 1969), discrimination learning (Mackintosh & Sutherland, 1971), and avoidance learning (Bolles, 1970, 1971, 1972). The phylogenetic generality of learning processes has been questioned by proponents of the “biological boundaries” approach to learning (Bolles, 1970; Kalat, 1977,; Rozin & Kalat, 1971; Seligman, 1970; Shettleworth, 1972) . In the literature on human learning in particular, associations is on the wane and cognitive theories of learning are preeminent (Haugeland, 1978).
The current state of the psychology of learning, in short, is one of great conceptual diversity in which little attention is being paid to the prospects for a unified approach to the study of learning. It may perhaps be argued that such diversity is in fact just what is required to free the study of learning from the remnants of the general process view and to provide a broader data base on which to build new theories. An alternative argument, however, is that without a competing metatheory to set against the general process view, theoretical unification of the field will be greatly retarded, because there will be no basis for agreement on the theoretical issues to be resolved and on the important questions that must be asked (see Kuhn, 1962, for arguments and examples supporting this philosophical position). Our aim in this article is to sketch the outline of such a competing metatheory. To do this,we have chose to stand outside the mainstream of much current psychology of learning and to consider learning within the conceptual framework of evolutionary and ecological biology. The biological boundaries approach to learning has set an important precedent for taking ecological considerations seriously in the study of learning, but we shall attempt to offer a more radical alternative to general process theory than is provided by the latter approach. |
|---|
