“For the perfections of Language, not properly understood, have been one of the chief causes of the imperfections of our philosophy.” (John Horne Tooke ‘The Diversions of Purley’ p. 19)

The above quote, taken from ‘The Diversions of Purley[1]’, demonstrate John Horne Tooke’s views on language and its relation to philosophical thinking; and anticipate views which would become prominent in twentieth century analytic philosophy. In particular the above quote would put one in mind of the work of the later Wittgenstein. There is no evidence that Tooke’s work in anyway influenced Wittgenstein’s philosophy. However, we do know that Tooke’s work influenced the philosopher and logician Willard Quine and psychologist B.F. Skinner.

Skinner came across Tooke’s work in the early thirties when he was a junior fellow at Harvard:

“Henderson urged me to look at John Horne Tooke’s ‘Diversions of Purley’…the book was out of print but I advertised, and several booksellers sent me quotations. I brought two and gave one to Van Quine inscribed Verbum Sat.” ( Skinner “The Shaping of a Behaviourist” p. 158) (ibid p. 282)

In his autobiography ‘The Time of My Life’, Quine recalled Skinner giving him a copy of Tooke’s book:

“It was particularly in language theory, rather, that Fred opened doors for me. My linguistic interest had run to etymological detail; he put me onto Bloomfield and Jesperson and gave me an American first edition of John Horne Tooke.” (Quine: The Time of My Life p. 110)

In this blog-post I will discuss the influence that Horne Tooke’s book had on both Quine and Skinner, and what their respective reactions to Tooke, reveals about their different behaviourist philosophies.

Quine and John Horne Tooke

In 1946 Quine gave a series of lectures on the philosophy of David Hume. In the lecture series he obviously related Hume to the other empiricists and rationalists who were contemporaries and near contemporaries of Hume. During these lectures Quine discussed the work of John Horne Tooke, who Quine believed, had made an advance over the British Empiricists. When discussing the British Empiricists Quine noted that they were all wedded to the idea idea conception of epistemology. Tooke’s ‘Diversions’ was an attempt to move away from this idea centric epistemology. Tooke considered and critiqued the work of John Locke but didn’t discuss either David Hume or George Berkeley’s work.

Tooke argued you could translate Locke’s talk of ‘ideas’ with talk of ‘words’ and you would increase the clarity and correctness of Locke’s philosophy. Quine agreed with Tooke’s assessment of Locke’s philosophy, and thirty years later in his paper ‘Five Milestones of Empiricism’ argued that Tooke’s move away from idea centric philosophy to an emphasis on words was one of the key milestones in the development of empiricist philosophy.

Tooke’s philosophy reduced all discourse to two main categories; nouns and verbs. He argued that one could explain other linguistic phrases such as ‘prepositions’, ‘adjectives’ etc by analysing them. Upon analysis he claimed that such words contained a hidden complexity. Thus, for example, Tooke analysed the preposition ‘for’ interms of the underlying notion of ‘cause’. He did this by analysing an incredible amount of sentences containing the word ‘for’ and showing how the sentences could all be correctly analysed by treating ‘for’ as meaning ‘cause’. Thus Tooke was satisfied that he could analyse away the preposition ‘for’ and treat it as a verb. He used similar processes of analysis on a variety of other prepositions, and on adverbs, conjunctions etc. As well as analysing various different parts of written language to reveal its function; Tooke also tried to explain how these words evolved over time by examining their etymology.

Quine admired what he called Tooke’s the method of abbreviations (Quine ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of David Hume’ p. 62). In his ‘Divergence’ Tooke argued that when trying to understand speech we need to conceive of it as words which are necessary to communicate our thoughts and abbreviations which help with expressing these thoughts clearly. Tooke argued that there are two sorts of words necessary to the communicating of our thoughts; nouns and verbs. Everything else he conceived of as being abbreviations which when analysed closely will be shown to be either nouns or verbs. His analysis of the word ‘for’ above is a good example of his understanding his method of abbreviation. In his 1951 ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ Quine related this method of abbreviations to the verification theory of meaning:

“Radical reductionism, in one form or another, well antedates the verification theory of meaning explicitly so called. Thus Locke and Hume held that every idea must either originate directly in sense experience or else be compounded of ideas thus originating; and taking a hint from Tooke we might rephrase this doctrine in semantical jargon by saying that a term, to be significant at all, must be either a name of a sense datum or a compound of such names or an abbreviation of such a compound. So stated the doctrine remains ambiguous as between sense data as sensory events and sense data as sensory qualities; and it remains vague as to the admissible ways of compounding. ( Quine ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ p. 38)

John Locke believed that we begin with simple ideas derived from perception and combine them (somehow) to form complex ideas when thinking. Locke further argued that the words in our language got their meanings by referring to these ideas. What Quine admired about Tooke’s work was that he cut out the middle man so to speak. Tooke was emphasising the fact that our words got their meanings in by picking out things and events in the environment. On Tooke’s picture ‘ideas’ were a theoretically superfluous posit:

“Every purpose for which the composition of Ideas was imagined being more easily and naturally answered by the composition of Terms: whilst at the same time it does likewise clear up many difficulties in which the supposed composition of Ideas necessarily involves us.” (Hooke ‘Divergences’ p. 20)

Quine asks us to note that we shouldn’t read Tooke’s criticism of complex ideas as denying the importance of mental activity, nor should one think that the concept of complex definitions (abbreviations) don’t involve mental activity. Rather, Tooke was just pointing out that ideas as explanatory posits don’t do much work in clarifying how we connect stimulation with discourse (Quine ‘Lectures in the philosophy of Hume p. 63). In his 1977 paper ‘Facts of the Matter’ Quine made the point as follows:

“Let us therefore recognize that the whole idea idea, abstract and concrete, is a frail reed indeed. We must seek a firm footing rather in words. The point was urged by John Horne Tooke only shortly after Hume’s time, in 1786. Tooke held that Locke’s essay could be much improved by substituting the word ‘word’ everywhere for the word ‘idea’. What is thereby gained in firmness is attended by no appreciable loss in scope, since ideas without words would have come to little in any event. We think mostly in words, and we report our thoughts wholly in words. Let us then take one leaf from the old-time philosophy and another from John Horne Tooke. Philosophical inquiry should begin with the clear, yes; but with clear words. (‘Facts of the Matter’ p. 271)

In Quine’s ‘Five milestones of Empiricism’ (1978), he again, credits Tooke with emphasising the importance of words over ideas, arguing that this move was a key milestone in the development of empiricism. The other four milestones Quine discusses are Bentham’s emphasis of the sentence having semantic primacy in language over words, Duhem emphasis of the primacy of systems of belief over sentences, his dissolution of the analytic/synthetic distinction which he argues this leads to methodological monism, and his demonstration that there is no first philosophy.

I won’t here speak of his last four milestones of empiricism, given that the subject matter of the blog is John Horne Tooke, I will focus on Quine’s first milestone of empiricism. Quine noted the following:

“The first was the shift of attention from Ideas to words. This was the adoption of the policy, in epistemology, of talking about linguistic expressions where possible instead of ideas…I think of it as entering modern empiricism only in 1786, when…John Horne Tooke wrote as follows: “the greatest part of Mr. Locke’s essay, that is.  All which relates to what he calls the abstraction, complexity, generalization, relation etc., of ideas, does indeed merely concern language.” British empiricism was dedicated to the proposition that only sense makes sense. Ideas were acceptable only if based on sense impressions. But Tooke appreciated that the idea idea measures up poorly to empiricist standards. Translated into Tooke’s terms, then, the basic proposition of British Empiricism would seem to say that words make sense only insofar as they are definable in sensory terms” (“Five Milestones of Empiricism” p. 68)

Quine notes that this approach of Tooke’s leads instantly to problems. The grammatical particles which we use to organise our concepts don’t easily reduce to sensory experiences. As we saw above Tooke tried to avoid this problem by saying that sentences could be reduced to two functions ‘nouns’ and ‘verbs’; thus nouns refer to sensory experiences while verbs say things about these experiences. To work within this austere empiricist frame work Tooke had to explain away grammatical concepts such as ‘if, and, but, there’ etc interms of nouns and verbs. Tooke justified this approach by giving unpersuasive etymological definitions of these grammatical concepts.

Quine was pretty dismissive of Tooke’s attempts to explain the grammatical concepts interms of nouns and verbs. He argued cogently that Tooke didn’t realise that these concepts were syncategorematic; they couldn’t be defined in isolation but only in context.

Quine was largely correct in his argument that grammatical concepts are not definable in isolation. But he didn’t sufficiently appreciate the possibility that grammar may be an innate imposition on how we group words together. Quine was working in the logical positivist tradition which worked to reduce our theories to sensory experiences and logical constructions based on sensory experience. While he was correct that grammatical concepts cannot be defined in terms of sensory experience and are syncategorematic; he seems to entirely ignore the possibility that grammatical concepts be indefinable (by which he means they cannot be explained interms of sensory experience), because they are innate and are used in helping us interpret sensory experience. In short in his discussion of the five milestones of empiricism Quine was guilty of underplaying the role of non-empirical Kantian (or at least Chomskian type knowledge). I am not arguing that the Kantian/Chomskian alternative is the correct explanation of the grammatical particles. I am just noting that his empiricism is blinding him to an alternative explanation. And this blindness is particularly interesting to note given that Quine noted many times in his interactions with Chomsky that he had no difficulty with explanations which appealed to innateness.

However, it is not within the scope of this particular blog-post to discuss the evidence for innate syntax so I will not pursue the above criticism of Quine here. The key point to note is that while Quine agreed with Horne Tooke’s movement from explanations in terms of ideas to explanations in terms of terms; Quine didn’t agree with Tooke’s analysis of grammatical particles. In the next section I will explore how Skinner deals with Tooke’s analysis of grammar and Tooke’s criticisms of idea centric philosophy.

Skinner and John Horne Tooke

 “The French novel of the nineteenth century was possibly close to what I wanted, and I reread Stendhal and Balzac. I was caught up in a renewal of interest in George Eliot and tried rewriting parts of ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Daniel Deronda’, replacing references to feelings with references to the actions from which feelings were inferred. It did not work. Mentalistic terms were like the “abbreviations” of John Horne Tooke; they were the products. Accurate reports of the same contingencies ran to much greater length.” (B.F. Skinner ‘A Matter of Consequences’ p. 245)

1. F. Skinner began working on whether language could be explained behaviouristically in the mid-nineteen thirties after a challenge set to him by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. For over fifty years after his discussion with Whitehead, Skinner at various times in his career worked on the nature of language. Throughout this fifty year period whenever he discussed language the name of John Horne Tooke came up. In his 1947 lectures on language (later called the Hefferline notes), Skinner briefly spoke approvingly of Horne Tooke’s work:

“John Horne Tooke, Englishman of the 18^th century, wasn’t liked and was popped into jail once or twice by the government. He had one trial which hinged on the interpretation of the word ‘that’. This got him going and he wrote a book…He was a good behaviourist although he didn’t know it.” (Skinner ‘The Hefferline Lectures’ p. 21)

Unfortunately despite speaking approvingly of Horne Tooke in ‘The Hefferline Lectures’ Skinner didn’t expand on what it was about Horne Tooke’s work that he found impressive. Forty years later when discussing the evolution of ‘Verbal Behaviour’, Skinner again mentioned Horne Tooke’s work:

“An early effort by John Horne Tooke in the ‘Diversions of Purley’ (1776) has not been fully appreciated. That Tooke was not always right as an etymologist was not as important as his efforts to explain how English speakers could have come to say such words as ‘if’, ‘but’, or ‘and’.” (‘The Evolution of Verbal Behaviour’ p. 120)

It is no coincidence that Skinner’s interest in Horne Tooke centred on his analysis of concepts such ‘if’, ‘but’, ‘that’, ‘and’ etc. Skinner was also impressed with Quine’s analysis of similar concepts in his ‘Elementary Logic’. In fact in ‘Verbal Behaviour’ where Skinner discussed Horne Tooke in most detail he notes that Horne Tooke’s analysis of language was similar to Quine’s analysis in ‘Elementary logic’ (Verbal Behaviour p.342).

It was in his ‘Verbal Behaviour’, that Skinner discussed John Horne Tooke in most detail. Interestingly Skinner’s discussion of the Tooke was along the same lines as Quines. Skinner, like Quine, discussed Horne Tooke’s criticism of Locke’s ‘Inquiry into Human Understanding’ for being better thought of as being concerned with words rather than ideas. Skinner even cites the same passages from Horne Tooke re-John Locke that Quine did. However, while Quine was careful to note that Tooke was primarily speaking about language over ideas because ideas were non-explanations, he also noted that we shouldn’t read Tooke as denying that mental activity underlay verbal behaviour. Skinner on the other hand read Horne Tooke as arguing that all thinking involved verbal behaviour; Skinner then goes on to argue that Tooke is incorrect in arguing thusly and points to things such as mental imagery, and spatio temporal reasoning as a refutation of Tooke’s purported views (‘Verbal Behaviour’ p.449).

Skinner and Quine’s different readings of Horne Tooke are understandable. Horne-Tooke is very articulate on what he sees as the problems with idea-centric philosophy. He also has skilled arguments for using terms and their analysis and historical development to make our philosophy more objective. But he says little (either positive or negative) about whether he thinks that there is cognitive apparatus underling the ability to use verbal behaviour. So there is scope for both Quine and Skinner to differ in their interpretations of Horne Tooke on this issue and little textual data to settle the matter conclusively.

Another area where Skinner and Quine discussed Horne Tooke was in relation to his treatment of grammar. Skinner was particularly interested in Horne Tooke in relation to what he called autoclitics. Before proceeding to discuss Skinner’s take on Horne Tooke re-autoclitics I will need to briefly discuss Skinner’s explication of the various different functional units that make up ‘Verbal Behaviour’. A Mand is a Verbal Operant in which the response is reinforced by a particular consequence; and hence is under the functional control of relevant conditions of deprivation or aversive stimulation (‘Verbal Behaviour’ p. 36). In other words the mand is a type of response that is under the control of and singled out by certain controlling variables. A paradigm of a mand is saying ‘water’ when thirsty and receiving water in return (being reinforced for saying ‘water’).

A tact is a verbal operant that is controlled by non-verbal stimulus. The child says ‘doll’ in the presence of a doll and is reinforced. Used as a mand the word ‘doll’ would result in the child being handed a doll. But as a tact the child says the word ‘doll’ in the presence of a doll and is reinforced by his peers (through praise, attention etc).

An echoic is Verbal Behaviour that is controlled by other Verbal Behaviour. Thus the child repeats the word ‘doll’ upon hearing the word ‘doll’ spoken. Intraverbal Behaviour is behaviour where Verbal Behaviour is controlled by other Verbal Behaviour; but where the there isn’t a formal correspondence between the stimulus and response product (Verbal Behaviour p. 71). An example of echoic behaviour would be one person saying ‘the wheels on the bus’ and the other person saying ‘the wheels on the bus’. Whereas, an example of an Intraverbal behaviour; would be one person saying, ‘The wheels on the bus’, and the other person saying ‘go round and round’. Skinner uses Intraverbal behaviour to explain analytic truths. ‘Thus 2 plus 2’ ‘equals 4’ would be explained as an Intraverbal where 4 is under the control of 2 plus 2.

The autoclitic is a form of Verbal Behaviour that modifies other verbal operants such as the mand, the tact etc. Skinner notes that there are different types of autoclitics. One type is the descriptive autoclitic which says something about the particular verbal operant that is used; so if you take the word ‘heads’ this can be modified by a descriptive autoclitic as follows (I said (heads)), (I will say (heads)) etc. There are many different sub-types of descriptive autoclitics such an autoclitics with indicate my strength of belief in a verbal operant I have emitted; thus I could modify the tact ‘the cat is black’ with the autoclitic of weakness (I hesitate to say (the cat is black).

As well as descriptive autoclitics Skinner also discusses qualifying autoclitics, quantifying autoclitics and manipulative autoclitics. It was in relation to autoclitics that Skinner discussed John Horne Tooke’s work.

As we saw above Horne Tooke was concerned with explicating language in terms of nouns and verbs. Tooke believed that he could explain away the other aspects of language by analysing them as being abbreviations which ultimately were nouns or verbs. Horne Tooke’s method was drawing out the terms meanings through analysis, and explain how the terms had the form they did by tracing their etymology. Thus when analysing the preposition ‘through’ Horne Tooke analyses it as deriving from the nouns ‘door’/ ‘gate’/ ‘passage’; his justification is dual. He shows how he can analyse common uses of ‘through’ interms of ‘door’/’gate’/’passage’ and he traces the etymology of the term ‘through’ to justify his analysis (‘Divergence’ pp.180-183).

Tooke’s analysis is interesting and puts one in mind of the work of Lakoff and Johnson who analyse our language as deriving from embodied experiences to more abstract realms. Thus a common physical object  such as  a door or a gate that we have an embodied relation to are used in more abstract senses to think about more complex objects. It is not within the remit of this blog-post to evaluate the truth of Tooke’s analysis rather I just want to trace what Skinner and Quine made of Tooke’s views.

Skinner admired Tooke’s analysis of language, however he didn’t agree with Tooke’s contention that all language could be reduced to verbs and nouns. As we saw above Skinner didn’t analyse language interms of traditional grammatical categories; rather he argued that the key to understanding language was to analyse it in terms of various type of behavioural functions (mands, tacts etc). Skinner noted that Tooke’s analysis was hindered by the fact that Tooke had no real understanding of the fact that some words were used to deal with other parts of language. According to Skinner, Tooke’s abbreviations were just words which were used to manipulate nouns and verbs, and not grasping this fact held back Tooke’s analysis of language (Verbal Behaviour p. 341):

“What Tooke lacked was a conception of behaviour as such. He was still under the influence of British empiricism and, in spite of an heroic declaration of independence…Struggling against an enormous weight of tradition, Tooke is talking about verbal behaviour. He has “disabbreviated” the puzzling terms which cannot be accounted for as object words or by appeal to images-terms which we would classify here as autoclitics- and  has found that they are verbs. This leads him to an important generalization which we could paraphrase in this way: some verbal responses are evoked by external state of affairs. These Tooke wants to call nouns. Other responses are communication itself. They affect the listener and have no function aside from that effect. Tooke wants the listener to have no function aside from that effect. Tooke wants to call them verbs. Writing more than a hundred and fifty years ago, he had no alternative, but a fresh formulation is possible today.” ( Skinner ‘Verbal Behaviour’ p. 343)

Skinner was impressed with Tooke’s recognition that language had a dual function; referring to objects in the external world; and communicating about these objects via verbs. However, Skinner noted that as a thinker of his time Tooke didn’t have a sufficient grasp of the various different functions of language and the social reinforcement controlling these behavioural functions.

Both Skinner and Quine were impressed with Tooke’s move away from Locke’s idea idea epistemology. Though they interpreted Tooke’s move in different ways; Quine seemed to believe that Tooke’s views were compatible with a mild form of cognitivism though not of the sort that would vindicate folk-psychology. While Skinner read Tooke as overplaying the linguistic nature of thinking. When it came to grammar both Quine and Skinner, while impressed with Tooke’s work, had some reservations. Quine argued that Tooke didn’t appreciate the contextual nature of grammar and erroneously tried to reduce them to sensory impressions and judgements about these impressions. Skinner on the other hand disagreed with Tooke’s grammar because he didn’t think that Tooke sufficiently appreciated the various different functions of language; nor the reinforcing contingencies that shaped these functions.

Skinner and Quine’s different criticisms of Tooke aren’t necessarily incompatible but they do illustrate their divergent interests. Quine the great critic the idea that our epistemic contact with the world can be purely cashed out in sensory terms; railing against Tooke’s attempt to explain our linguistic capacities in terms of sensory experiences. And Skinner attempting to explain language behaviourally and functionally, admiring Tooke’s attempts to step out of the Cartesian Tradition he was trained in, but lacking an account of behaviour powerful to complete the job.

[1] Henceforth I will refer to ‘The Diversions of Purley’ as ‘Diversions’.

“Yet, Skinner and Quine do not have only different aims. If one examines Quine’s views about causal explanation in psychology, their behaviouristic theories turn out to be in fact incompatible…Even if the physiological variables between stimulus and response were to be completely specified, Skinner maintains, the laws are to be found on a behavioural level; physiologists and neuroscientists can at best fill the temporal and spatial gap between a stimulus and a response. Quine, on the other hand, defends the opposite view. He believes that behaviour ultimately requires a physiological (or better, a neurological) explanation instead.” (Verhaegh ‘The Behaviourisms of Skinner and Quine’ pp.36-38)

 

In his ‘The Behaviourisms of Skinner and Quine’ Verhaegh argued that Skinner and Quine held diametrically opposed views on the relation of behaviour to neuroscience. On Verhaegh’s picture; Quine believed that a true explanation is at the neuroscientific level, while the behavioural explanation is just a shallow stop gap, whereas Skinner believed that there are behavioural laws independent of what we discover in neuroscience. There is a lot to recommend Verhaegh’s interpretation of the data. Skinner did sometimes argue that neuroscientific explanations can only serve to plug up some gaps in behavioural knowledge, but that the functional laws were the most important thing:

“The physiologist of the future will tell us all that can be known about what is happening inside the behaving organism. His account will be an important advance over a behavioural analysis, because the latter is necessarily “historical”-that is to say, it is confined to functional relations showing temporal gaps. Something is done today which affects the behaviour of an organism tomorrow. No matter how clearly that fact can be established, a step is missing, and we must wait for the physiologist to supply it. He will be able to show how an organism is changed when exposed to contingencies of reinforcement and why the changed organism then behaves in a different way, possibly at a much later date. What he discovers cannot invalidate the laws of a science of behaviour, but it will make the picture of human action more nearly complete.” (‘About Behaviourism’ p. 237)

The above quote from Skinner’s 1974 ‘About Behaviourism’ is an interesting perspective on Skinner’s take on the relation between neuroscience and behavioural science. Skinner is arguing future neuroscientists will make important advances over behavioural science. This indicates that for Skinner; behavioural science isn’t entirely autonomous, and that behaviourists can learn something from neuroscientific studies. Skinner is arguing that behavioural science, like the science of natural selection is necessarily historical. If you want to establish a behavioural law you will need to do experiments that are historical in nature. These experiments will typically involve studying the three term contingency (antecedent, behaviour, consequence), to pick out a behavioural law. But with a sufficiently advanced neuroscience we may be able to discover the chemical laws that underlie the causal regularities discovered by the behavioural scientist. These discoveries in neuroscience won’t refute the discovered behavioural regularities but they will be an advance on our overall picture of the behaviour of organisms.

However it is difficult to see how Skinner’s above approach is incompatible with Quine’s approach. Consider the following statement of Quine’s (which Verhaegh quotes):

“An explanation, not the deepest one, but of a shallower kind, is possible at the purest behavioural level. One can hope to find, and I think one does find, behavioural regularities.” (Quine 2008 pp. 69-81)

On the face of it Quine and Skinner seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet; we can discover behavioural laws; but ultimately we should be able to discover more fundamental neuroscientific laws.

The obvious rejoinder to this is that while the above quote may indicate that Quine and Skinner were in agreement on this topic, a closer look at Quine indicates that he held views which are much stronger than the above quote indicates, in numerous different places he argued that behaviour is not the explanation, but something that must be explained by more fundamental sources e.g. physiology (Quine 1998 p. 94).

However, even the above claim by Quine finds resonance in the writings of Skinner:

“Eventually, we may assume, the facts and principles of psychology will be reducible not only to physiology but through biochemistry to physics and subatomic physics.” (Skinner: Cumulative Record p. 302)

It should be noted that Skinner wasn’t always consistent in his views on this topic. As we saw above Skinner sometimes argued that behavioural laws are independent of neural discoveries (though they may be enriched by them). But above he is arguing that behavioural laws can ultimately be reduced to neuroscientific laws. The same inconsistency seems to dog Quine’s explanations of behavioural regularities. In some places he is arguing that behavioural regularities exist, but in other places he seems to think that such regularities are unimportant other than as pointers as to what is going on in the brain. There is obviously no contradiction in believing that ‘regularities occur’ and also believing that ‘such regularities are unimportant’. But there is a tension in the two beliefs.

There many behavioural laws that have been experimentally and observationally studied over the last few decades. An extinction burst is a clear behavioural regularity. Applied Behavioural Analysis is the most effective scientific treatment that currently exists for managing challenging behaviour. In a hospital setting, where some patients with severe learning difficulties exhibit dangerous challenging behaviour, such as, a child punching themselves repeatedly in the head; analysts must try to discover what reinforcements are maintaining such behaviours. To do this Skinner’s three term contingency is typically applied. The analyst will carefully record the instants before the behaviour occurred, the behaviour itself, and the consequences which immediately follow the behaviour. Through this process he can discover which procedures are reinforcing the behaviour.  By removing these reinforcers the analyst can extinguish the behaviour.

The process of functional extinction has been verified in many studies and across many species (‘Applied Behaviour Analysis’ p. 473). By removing the reinforcers controlling the behaviour, the analyst can make the behaviour extinct. However, prior to extinction there is an increase in the said behaviour occurring, and this is called an extinction burst (Lerman, Iwata and Wallace (1999), Goh and Iwata (1994). The occurrence of extinction bursts are well established in basic behavioural research.

When Quine says that there are behavioural regularities but that the fundamental regularities occur at the physiological level it is hard to parse what he means. In the case of extinction bursts we have clear regularities; understanding the physiology better would add to our knowledge of what is going on. But it is hard to see how the underlying physiology is any more real than the behavioural regularity which has been discovered, and which can be predicted and controlled using behavioural science. When we discover behavioural laws, as Quine admits that we do, then these laws are real patterns that have been discovered, we can learn more about the underlying causal sequences that make these patterns occur, but such real patterns are more than just pointers towards the underlying physiology they are law like facts in their own right.

Thus far we have seen that Quine and Skinner are both a bit inconsistent in their views on the relation of relation of behaviour to physiology. There is a side of Skinner, and of Quine, which comes close to endorsing a kind of crude reductionism; where the ultimate explanation is at the physiological level; with the eventual aim being to give our explanations in terms of basic physics. However, this preference for the underlying physiology as the real explanation is much more prominent in Quine’s philosophy than in Skinner’s. The general thrust of Skinner’s philosophy is that there are real behavioural laws and while neuroscientific data enrich our behavioural laws; they cannot supplant them.

Quine seems to acknowledge that we have behavioural laws but argues that these laws are just pointers we can use to get at the real data; the neuroscientific data. Quine’s position on this subject isn’t entirely inconsistent with Skinners. Both admit that behavioural laws exist, and both admit that the underlying physiology can enrich our behavioural laws. To the extent that they disagree it is on the status of the behavioural laws; Skinner takes the importance of these behavioural laws seriously, while Quine argues they are mere pointers to the real data; the underlying physiological facts.

Where Quine and Skinner’s views diverge it is pretty obvious that Skinner’s views on the nature of laws of behaviour are more accurate than Quine’s are. The laws of behaviour that are studied by behavioural scientists do much more than merely point towards underlying physiological states they are tools that are useful in the prediction and control of the behaviour of both human and non-human animals.  The success of disciplines such as Applied Behavioural Analysis are clear evidence that Quine’s dismissal of behavioural laws as mere pointers towards underlying physiology is very wrong headed.

Aside from Behavioural Analysts using and discovering behavioural laws; behavioural laws have proven to be useful tools for neuroscientists to use. In the years since Quine and Skinner were writing, conditioning has become a vital tool which neuroscientists use to understand the circuitry of the brain. Classical conditioning has proven more useful than operant conditioning in these experiments:

“And work by my laboratory and the laboratories of colleagues using Pavlovian fear conditioning was very successful in achieving, in a few short years, what instrumental avoidance conditioning had failed to do- identification of the brain areas and connections between them that constituted what came to be known as the brain’s fear system.” (Le Doux: Anxiety p. 31)

While classical conditioning has proven a useful tool for neuroscientists to use when trying to understand how the brain works, these studies have also revealed some useful information about the neuroscientific basis of types of classical conditioning. In his lab, neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has done some ground breaking work on the neuroscience of fear and has used classical conditioning as a tool. His research not only helps us understand fear but also helps us understand the circuitry of fear conditioning:

“One of the targets suggested by the tracing studies was the amygdala. When we lesioned this area, or disconnected it from the auditory system, the fear conditioned responses were eliminated. Within the amygdala, we also found an area that receives auditory CS input (the lateral amygdala, LA) and connects with an area (the central amygdala, CeA) that sends outputs to downstream targets that separately control freezing and blood pressure conditioned responses. Further, we were able to locate cells in the LA input region that received both the auditory CS and the shock US. This was an especially important discovery because the integration of the CS and the US at the cellular level was thought to be required for fear conditioning to occur. After the circuit and cellular changes involved in the process was identified, we turned to the molecular mechanisms in the LA that underlie the learning and expression of conditioned fear, many of which were the same as those discovered by Kandel and others invertebrates.” ( Le Doux: ‘Anxious’ p. 30)

Research like this is important because it provided experimental evidence of the underlying circuitry involved in fear conditioning. This is only a small piece of the puzzle; classical conditioning is a much more general process than the conditioning that occurs in fear conditioning. There is more research needed into how general the neural processes are which underlie classical conditioning in general. But research is proceeding at break neck speed and we can only hope that these general problems will eventually be solved:

“Numerous studies by my laboratory and others have confirmed that when the CS is paired with an aversive US, LA neurons do respond more strongly to the CS. Further, we and others have identified many molecules that contribute to the induction of these changes during learning and the stabilization of these changes in the storage of memory. Once the associative memory has been formed, the CS can, on its own, strongly activate LA neurons.” (ibid p. 95)

Why Classical Conditioning is more useful than Operant Conditioning is not entirely clear. In general classical conditioning is a type of learning that is useful in helping an animal passively learn from environmental experiences, and operant conditioning is more suitable for an animal to learn as it actively moves about its environment. The different functions of classical conditioning and operant conditioning may explain their relative uses for neuroscientists. A passive form of learning would obviously be more useful to in studies involving neuroscientific instruments.

                                     The Evolution of Conditioning

When discussing the work of the Le Doux lab he made a distinction between Classical and Operant conditioning in terms of their utility for neuroscientific research. This distinction is well established in the literature; since about Skinner’s time. But there is some evidence that while Operant and Classical Conditioning are not identical they may both rely on the same underlying neural architecture. In their recent paper; ‘Classical and Operant Conditioning: Evolutionary Distinct Strategies’ Bronfmann et all argue that classical conditioning and operant conditioning are different facets of the same underlying associative learning system (Bronfmann et al. p. 34). They suggest three criteria to use to help discover whether operant and classical conditioning are separate capacities or if they rely on the same underlying architecture; (1) Functional Distinctiveness, which can be inferred by double dissociations, (2) Taxonomic distinctiveness: members of one animal taxa will have one system (CC), while members of another animal taxa will have another system (OC), (3) Adaptive evolutionary distinctiveness:  distinct forms of learning should have distinct evolutionary rationales (ibid p.35)

In answer to their first question they note that there has been some experimental research indicating dissociation where through brain damage a creature can learn through operant conditioning and not classical conditioning (Brembs et al 2008, Lorenzetti 2006, Ostland, et al 2007). However they note that there are only a few experiments indicating this dissociation is possible and that these studies haven’t been replicated. So before drawing any large scale conclusions more research is needed. On question two they claim that there no evidence of any animal who possesses one type of conditioning but not the other. Again research is in its infancy and more research is recommended. On the third question they argue that given that OC and CC are paradigm domain general learning processes it is unlikely that theorists will be able to construct a plausible evolutionary rationale of them being selected for in different way.

On the whole then a theorist who wanted to argue for two distinctive processes underlying OC and CC could appeal to the few experiments indicating that dissociation of the  OT and CC is possible. But overall there would be very little evidence to support their views on the topic. So Bronfmann et al argue that despite the consensus in behavioural science there is little evidence to suggest that we should adopt an absolute distinction between classical and operant conditioning.

With new evidence chipping away at the neuroscientific nature of conditioning, with cross comparative and experimental data being use to discover if classical conditioning and operant conditioning use similar underlying neural circuitry, and even some data on the evolution of conditioning we are learning much more about conditioning than either Quine or Skinner knew. And so far everything we have learned seems to support the less reductive position than the one Quine proposed. We are learning more and more about conditioning and its neural basis; but this hasn’t come close to reducing the behavioural regularities to mere pointers to underlying states. Rather despite what we have learned behavioural analysts are today are still using behavioural laws (some of which were discovered by Skinner), to shape the behaviour of human and non human animals. There is no reason at present to follow Quine in treating behavioural laws as some kind of shallow explanation.

The sense of fundamental Quine typically appeals to is one that relies on a strong sense of physicalism:

“Nothing happens in the world, not a flutter of an eylid, not the flicker of a thought, without some redistribution of micro-physical states. (Quine ‘Goodman’s Ways of World Making’ p. 98)

Quine’s above statement that all forms of behaviour depend on some kind of underlying microphysical process is relatively uncontroversial. It is hard to imagine a behavioural scientist who would object to the claim that any behavioural laws discovered will have an explanation in terms of underlying physical processes. Likewise, it is hard to imagine an evolutionary scientist who would deny that all examples of natural selection have underlying physical causes. But it obviously doesn’t follow that because a process is causally dependent on underlying physical states that the process is shallow piece of information that will ultimately be explained away.

There are real patterns that exist in the world that will be missed out on if we try to understand something at the wrong level of abstraction. If we stick to just understanding a portion of the world in terms of subatomic particles and forces acting on them then our explanation will be incomplete; such an explanation will be entirely blind to things like sexual selection. The fact that sticking entirely too fundamental physics will blind one real patterns at the evolutionary level obviously doesn’t mean that physics is irrelevant to evolutionary theory.

Physics can provide constraints to what type of creatures can be built by natural selection; see for example work on scaling laws and invariants in animal locomotion Bejan and Marden (2006), and Trevisian et al. (2006) on the physics of bird songs. Now suppose one adopts the Quinean approach to evolutionary explanations of the origins of life, and argues that explanations interms of natural selection are shallow, the real explanation is at the level of basic physics or chemistry. As we saw above if we adopted this approach in its reductionistic sense we would be ignoring real patterns in the world and explaining away patently real phenomena. A less radical approach would be to accept that physics can constrain, and inform explanations in evolutionary science but not supplant.

When it comes to behavioural science and biology things are similar. The degree to which Quine and Skinner disagree on the status behavioural laws and their relation to neuroscience; isn’t always clear. But it is clear that any radical reductionism that tries to reduce behavioural laws to mere pointers to underlying neural states is untenable.

                                       Part 1: The Logic of Misogyny

In her recent book ‘The Logic of Misogyny’ Kate Manne has explored the concept of misogyny. Manne noted that a lot of attempts to understand misogyny rely on hypothesis of the psychological attitudes men hold towards women. Manne’s analysis of the concept is different. She notes that a sexist person will hold certain attitudes and beliefs about women; but the same isn’t true of misogyny.  A sexist will believe things such as; women are less intelligent in general than men; women aren’t competent to do the same work as men etc. A misogynist doesn’t have to hold particular beliefs about women’s competencies or role in a society. In order to count as a misogynist a man merely has to behave in a way that involves policing woman’s behaviours; of punishing them when they fail to act according to dominant patriarchal standards etc.

Manne conceptualises misogyny as follows:

“Rather than conceptualising misogyny from the point of view of the accused, at least implicitly, we might move to think of it instead from the point of view of its targets or victims. In other words, when it comes to misogyny, we can focus on the hostility women face in navigating the social world, rather than the hostility men (in the first instance) may or may not feel in their encounters with certain women- as a matter of deep psychological explanation, or indeed whatsoever.” (Kate Manne ‘The Logic of Misogyny’ p. 59)

In the above quote Kate Manne’s use of the term “target” is ambiguous.  When you say that one person makes another person a target of violence this typically implies some kind of intentionality. Does a dog target a rat when it attacks it? In a sense it does target the rat to some degree. But does the dog conceptualise the rat and act on these conceptualisations? This is unclear; see Brandom (1995), Davidson (1990), versus Fodor (1975) for debates on this issue. But nobody would argue that a hurricane targets the island it lands on. The hurricane’s behaviour isn’t intentional behaviour so the hurricane cannot be said to target an Island it hits. When Manne speaks of ‘targets’ of misogyny, she notes that we shouldn’t focus on the psychological states of the agents who ‘target’ women. Conceptually this seems confused. If psychological states are barred then how can we distinguish between a hurricane ‘targeting’, versus a dog targeting, versus a human targeting? It would seem that by focusing on the logic of the situation Manne is ignoring very real distinctions. Her sidestepping psychological explanations seems to imply a simply behaviouristic explication; x occurs and it has consequences for y; but her use of the word ‘target’ seems to slip in intentionality and moral judgement.

So is Manne guilty of a contradiction in her explication of misogyny? I don’t think so. Manne seems to be gesturing towards what Dennett calls ‘competence without comprehension’. Dennett explicates competence without comprehension in terms of free floating rationales. A free floating rationale is pretty much a paradigm of Manne’s ‘Logic of Misogyny’. A Cuckoo egg is placed in a nest of another bird. When the Cuckoo is hatched it typically systematically pushes the eggs of the bird whose nest they have landed in out of the nest. It is clear that the Cuckoo doesn’t represent rival eggs in the nest as rivals to be destroyed. The Cuckoo is born with competence to destroy rivals without having comprehension as to why he behaves as he does.

On Manne’s conception of the ‘Logic of Misogyny’ it is similar to the Cukoo’s behaviour. But it is not identical. Manne obviously isn’t saying that misogynists are identical to Cuckoo’s or stotting Deer. On Manne’s picture some Misogynists may represent their misogynist views and consciously act on them. Some Misogynists may be partly conscious of their views but they may be acting on unconscious frustrations (a deep routed psychological contempt for women). But while it is difficult to disambiguate whether behaviour is intentionally planned, an unconscious strategy, or an innate programme created by natural selection; we can abstract from these messy details if we focus on the structural situation and who it benefits.

The ‘who benefits’ approach; has yielded an incredible amount of results for Ethno-Scientists. Ethnologists aren’t always concerned with philosophical distinctions. When they study ethnology they are often ambiguous as to whether they are speaking of conscious non-verbal thought, unconscious computations, or free floating rationales. Nonetheless, ethnologists still manage to study the behaviour of non-human animals and discover who benefits.

Though Manne doesn’t use this logic she also seems to be discussing the issue of who benefits. And in the issue of who benefits; she correctly notes that the beneficiaries are typically white western heterosexual men. Those who deny the validity of Manne’s understanding of misogyny must accept that she is using  similar logic that ethnoscientists use. If they want to attack Manne’s approach they need to extend their critique to the study of all animal behaviour.

The Burning of Bridget Cleary

With these preliminaries aside it I think it is worth thinking through a particular case that exhibits what Manne was worried about. The case I am talking about is a horrific murder that occurred in 1895 in Tipperary in Ireland. Bridget Cleary a twenty six year old woman was murdered by her husband. Her husband Michael Cleary was aided and abetted in the wife’s murder by his wife’s father and by neighbours and other family members of Bridget Cleary. The murder was horrific and made headlines around the world. Domestic violence was common in Ireland at the time Bridget Cleary was murdered and a husband murdering his wife while not an everyday disturbance; wasn’t entirely unheard of either. The reason the murder made worldwide headlines wasn’t because a husband murdering his wife was considered shocking; rather it was his reason for murdering her. Cleary murdered his wife because he believed she was a changeling who fairies had left in place of his wife. Furthermore, this belief which Cleary held wasn’t a lone delusion he held, the story of changelings being left in place of people was a folk myth in Ireland of the time.  Changelings were traditionally used in folk stories to explain strange behaviour of members of the family; neighbours, friends etc. Today we sometimes hear parents say that their child was developing normally and that when the child got a vaccine he developed autistic symptoms. In Ireland through-out the medieval period and up until the late 19^th century, if a child appeared to suddenly change his behaviour there was no concept of autism, nor any mythology of vaccines causing autism, for people to fall back on. People though did have a system of folk beliefs to rely on which told of fairy abductions and people being replaced by changelings to explain the otherwise inexplicable behaviour of their children. Though the changeling myth was sometimes used in relation to children with various developmental disabilities, it could also be used to explain someone who had a stroke. Even today with modern science and some very effective therapies; family members of someone who has had a stroke have to face up to the person post-stroke being an entirely different person than pre-stroke. In medieval Ireland when people in general had such poor understanding of science, a concept such as a stroke would have been unknown to the peasant class. A woman could go to bed with her husband and wake up to find him unable to speak and move half his body. Again the notion of fairy abduction offered an explanation of a kind. The person who you woke up beside who could no longer talk and couldn’t move half his body was a changeling; the real husband was “away with the fairies”.

The events leading up to Bridget’s murder began innocuously enough, while out on a delivery Bridget  was caught in the rain and developed symptoms that which her doctor later diagnosed as mild bronchitis. When Bridget was having trouble recovering from her illness, her husband Michael contacted a doctor to see her, and a priest to see her, as well as a local fairy doctor[1] Jack Dunne. The doctor didn’t seem to be overly worried that Bridget’s illness was very serious and he prescribed some medicine for her. The priest bizarrely, gave Bridget last rights (a Catholic ceremony reserved for terminally ill patients), despite the doctors good prognosis. However, it was the fairy doctor who set the tragic turn of events in place. Upon seeing Bridget in her sick bed he pointed and said “that is not Bridgie Boland[2], before turning and leaving the house. This behaviour from a fairy doctor was taken as evidence by Michael Cleary that the person in his bed was no longer his wife but was a changeling left by the fairies.

Bridget’s mild case of bronchitis was treatable with the medicine of the time. But a variety of different events conspired to make things spiral out of control. Despite multiple attempts to get the doctor to see Bridget it was days till the doctor arrived. The priest giving last rights implied that she was dying and in Ireland of the time a priest’s word would have been as trusted as highly as a doctor. This state of affairs would have led to Michael Cleary panicking and possibly resulted in his susceptibility to believing Jack Dunne’s story of the fairy abduction and replacement with a changeling. The doctor didn’t seem overly interested in Bridget Cleary and didn’t turn up for days and when he did he smelled of Alcohol, and the priest seemed to have given her up as dead. Michael Cleary’s disorganised mind may have believed that Jack Dunne’s fairy story was the best explanation and way of saving her. On the day that he murdered his wife Cleary’s father died and this didn’t help Cleary’s mental state.

Before continuing I should note that the above paragraph could be construed as a paradigm case of what Kate Manne calls himpathy “the flow of sympathy away from the female victims toward their male victimizers” (ibid p. 23). When discussing himpathy Manne notes that it involves:

“In the case of male dominance, we sympathize with him first, effectively making him into the victim of his own crimes” ( ibid p. 201)

It could be argued that by noting the role the doctor, the priest, and the witch doctor played in Bridget’s murder, and the death of Michael Cleary’s father I am trying to elicit sympathy for him; portraying poor Michael Cleary as a confused victim of his own crime while ignoring the real victim Bridget Cleary. This is not my intention I am merely setting up the circumstances under which the brutal crime was committed; before detailing the actual crime; I will later discuss what this crime reveals about the logic of misogyny.

With dwindling faith in medical science Michael Cleary followed Jack Dunne’s advice and obtained a fairy remedy which was supposed to be a cure for his wife’s ailment. The remedy was a collection of herbs that he boiled in milk; he then tried to force his wife to drink the remedy. Because of the horrendous taste of the drink Bridget refused to drink it. In response to this Michael threatened to burn her with a hot poker if she didn’t drink the remedy immediately. Michael then (with the help of visiting neighbours) pinned Bridget to the bed and her arms were held and the drink was forced down her throat. While she was being threatened and forced to drink the potion, urine was thrown on her intermittently, as part of a ritual to remove the supposed changeling. She was asked continually “are you the daughter of Patrick Boland?”, while they tried to force the potion down her throat. They eventually dragged her down to the fire and threatened to throw her in it if she didn’t answer their questions correctly and drink the potion. Near the end of the night with Bridget exhausted, tired and terrified, they seemed to temporally accept that she wasn’t a changeling and Bridget was allowed sleep.

The next morning at 7am Michael contacted the local priest and got him to say mass for Bridget. Later that evening Michael started forcing her to drink holy water. She was offered a cup of tea, and he made her partake in a ritual where she had to eat a slice of bread and answer “Are you Michael Cleary’s husband?”, this was supposed to be done three times; she did it twice but refused on the third time. Cleary flung her to the floor and began forcing the food into her; he continued with the assault, ripping her clothes off. He lit her clothes on fire and emptied the paraffin oil all over her. Bridget lay there burning to death.

                 Part 3: Understanding the Murder

Bridget’s ordeal was so horrifying that it is hard to even understand it today. Seemingly as a result of her husband’s strange folk beliefs in fairies Bridget was force fed, threatened, abused, and eventually burned to death. What could explain such a horrific murder? It is tempting to seek an answer in terms of the internal thought processes of Michael Cleary; however, there is little reason to think that at this remove we can extrapolate what Michael’s exact thought process was when he committed the murder[3]. However we can understand the murder in terms of cultural systems and who they benefit

Strangulation and Force Feeding

“But Bridget Cleary was the one who ended up dead. She had accumulated power, both economic and sexual, it seems, far in excess of what was due to a woman of her age and class, and when the balance tipped, all anger flowed towards her.” ( ‘The Burning of Bridget Cleary’. p. 136)

In the introduction to her ‘The Logic of Misogyny’, Kate Manne discussed the case of strangulation. She noted that strangulation is typically called choking, but that this terminology is incorrect. Choking involves an internally obstructed airway, where the airway is obstructed by an external object, where as strangulation is caused by external pressure exerted on the throat or the neck (Manne: ‘Logic of Misogyny’ p.1). Such strangulation is a common form of domestic violence which can sometimes lead to death. Strangulation is predominantly a male type of violence that occurs in all known cultures and socio-economic groups (ibid p. 2).

Manne makes the following point about strangulation:

“Strangulation is torture. Researchers draw a comparison between strangulation and waterboarding, both in how it feels-painful, terrifying-and its subsequent social meaning. It is characterizes as a demonstration of authority and domination.[4]” (ibid p. 3)

Because of the gendered nature of strangulation and the fact that it is a type of torture used to implement a type of social control it is a paradigm case of misogyny for Manne. As we saw above Manne understanding of misogyny is non-psychological. Whatever the reasons the man may give to justify his use of strangulation, from the point of view of behaviour it is a form of torture that serves to control the victim and punish her for violating some implicit patriarchal laws.

There are aspects of Bridget Cleary’s murder that fit Manne’s discussion of the logic of misogyny. As we saw above Bridget Cleary was murdered by her husband with the help of her father and neighbours because they thought she was a changeling who was left by the fairies in replacement of the real Bridget. In 1895 in rural Ireland belief in fairies still persisted though the belief was becoming less and less prevalent.

When Michael Cleary murdered his wife Bridget Cleary he didn’t strangle her; instead he brutally assaulted her and then burned her to death. Prior to murdering his wife; Cleary and his accomplices, engaged in force feeding her a herb/milk remedy, holy water and bread. Bridget Cleary’s husband was forcing her to swallow food against her will, the subjective terror of choking on food forced into ones throat would be similar to the horror of being strangled or being water boarded. Furthermore, whatever her husband’s motives; by forcing her to eat something against her will he was establishing dominance and the ritual had social significance; Bridget’s body wasn’t her own it was owned by her husband. Bridget had to answer in a particular way, eat what she was given on threat of violence. Independent of any motives we can impute to Michael Cleary his behaviour was the behaviour of a man controlling body of another human being against their will.

In her seminal book on Bridget Cleary’s murder Angela Bourke noted that the act of holding down Bridget down and forcing food down her throat, was a signal to Bridget and whoever else was watching that Michael Cleary was in charge of Bridget Cleary (‘The Burning of Bridget Cleary’ p. 106). Bridget was described by those who knew her as an attractive, and self confident young  woman.  Unlike the vast majority of women in Ireland at that time Bridget was self sufficient, she had a job as a sewist which earned well and she also earned money from the eggs of the chickens she owned. Michael was living in Bridget’s town near her relatives. After eight years of marriage Bridget and Michael had no children. While not having children would have seemed unusual at the time; a lack of children would have given Bridget more freedom than other women of that era. There were rumours that that both of the Cleary’s were engaged in extra marital affairs.

By the standards of the time Bridget Cleary was an exceptionally confident and free woman. Independent of the motivations underlying Michaels attack on Bridget it illustrated one key point. Michael was in control of Bridget; he was in control of what she ate, how she answered questions, and ultimately he had control over whether she lived or died. Michael’s behaviour was a concrete and horrific instance of the logic of misogyny. Bridget had more freedom than her peers and Michael’s behaviour was a way of policing her behaviour and putting her in her place. When she didn’t accept that place the result was her death. As Angela Bourke noted:

“Her refusal to eat what he gave her had sinister implications for the body politic within which they lived. It was not so very different in its significance from the force-feeding of suffragists and other prisoners by state authorities in later years”. (ibid p. 107)

Against this background we can see that independent of Michael’s actual views his behaviour was operating as a form of misogynist policing force punishing Bridget for not conforming to societal standards.

Even the use of the Fairy and Changeling myth in relation to Bridget may not have been entirely coincidental. The Fairy myth was used in a variety of different circumstances. It was used to label those who were viewed at the time, as less than human; those we would today label autistic or with a psychiatric disorder, a neurological disorder, learning disability etc. But it was also used to stigmatise women who were considered too assertive, angry or clever (ibid p. 177). Angela Bourke put the point succinctly:

 “The Fairy-belief tradition which is pejoratively called superstition might more positively, if less felicitously, be labelled a vernacular stigma theory. It is precisely a way of labelling people as not quite human, and serves to rationalize the ambivalence or hostility felt towards those who are different.” (ibid p. 207)

It is no wonder then that the fairy myth played a big role in the torture of Bridget Cleary. As a woman who was assertive, and self-sufficient she was a perfect exemplar of what the unconscious misogynistic police would consider a paradigm example of a woman who was away with the Fairies.

Free Floating Rationales

In our above discussion analysed the logic of Michael Cleary’s murder of Bridget. We noted, following Manne, that this logic could be understood independent of his idiosyncratic beliefs. We did this by considering Bridget in relation to her society, what ends Michael’s behaviour achieved as opposed to how he thought about these ends, and we also briefly examined the role that Fairy tales played in facilitating this behaviour. These Fairy Tales are better off thought of meme structures; or free floating rationales which were selected in their particular environment for a variety of reasons. But these reasons need not have been represented by the agents who were moved by these memes.

Looking at some memes we can discern certain uses they had in shaping behaviour:

“Fairy-Legends carry disciplinary messages for women as well as for children, warning them about behaviour considered by a patriarchal society to be unacceptable. Undoubtedly, too, some of them have been used as euphemisms for domestic violence. Roddy Doyle’s novel ‘The Woman Who Walked into Doors’ takes its title from such a euphemism in modern life. A woman in nineteenth-century rural Ireland who had obviously been beaten might explain the marks of violence as having been inflicted by fairy abductors, while a violent husband might account for his actions as loss of patience with a fairy interloper.” ( Angela Bourke: ‘The Burning of Bridget Cleary’ p. 37)

Patricia Lysaght in her ‘The Banshee: The Irish Death Messanger’, noted a similar pattern in ‘The Banshee’ myth where the mythology was used to influence human behaviour:

“Many of the variants stress that the encounter with the being and the improper actions towards her are the result of a dissipated life- being out late at night carousing and card-playing or the like…the legend also teaches the value of good behaviour in stressing that those who are violent, discourteous towards women or given to drunkenness and late hours may run great risks. The Lesson not to pick up combs and such-like objects accidentally found is also spelled out, especially to children…” (Lysaght ‘The Banshee’ pp. 179-181)

 

Many of these idiosyncratic myths and fairy stories were simply adopted because their hosts found them catchy. But a lot of them were shaped because those in their environment found them useful for shaping behaviour. In a patriarchal society a lot of this behaviour would have been shaped to serve those in power e.g. men. It is for this reason that we need to carefully study our current mythologies and see how they are structured and most importantly who they benefit?

[1] A fairy doctor was an Irish equivalent of a witch doctor.

[2] Boland was Bridget’s maiden name prior to marring Michael Collins.

[3] There is little reason to think there is a fact of the matter about what Michael Cleary was thinking when he committed the murder; see Quine ‘Word and Object’ 1960 and Rosenberg ‘How History Gets Things Wrong’ 2018.

[4]  Manne cites the work of Sorenson et al (2014) “A Systematic Review of the Epidemiology of NonFatal Strangulation, a Human Rights and Health Concern” as evidence that strangulation is a form of torture.