Tom Allaway's is an excellent answer to Phil's question.
Two small points:
>Both were, of course, S-R neobehaviorists...
Very often, Tolman's is called an 'S-S' theory,
for stimulus-stimulus (later variations substute
"sign" for the first S and/or "significate" for the
second one), to emphasize what-leads-to-what
expectancies. Hullians protested that Tolman
never found a convincing way to predict actual
Rs at all.
>it was Tolman who won the war...
Yes, OK, but posthumously. I think that some
version of Hull's theory was most cited and was
most applied and most experimentally tested until,
say, the late 60s or even the early 70s. Rather a
lot of people made careers out of showing what
was wrong with Hull's ideas -- but Tolman was
relatively ignored because it wasn't at all obvious
how to falsify his hypotheses.
-David
Tom Allaway wrote:
> Well, I'll take a swing at Phil Gervaix' "many-fold" question about Hull
> and Tolman, and then others can correct me:
>
> The two weren't quite fighting opponents, but there is some truth to
> their portrayal that way. Both were, of course, S-R neobehaviorists,
> but their styles were quite opposite. Hull was extremely mechanistic
> and saw behavior as very passive and reactive. Tolman gave a heavy
> explanatory burden to "expectancies", in anticipation of modern
> cognitive approaches.
>
> The chronology is complicated. Technically Tolman came first, with
> "Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men" in 1932, while Hull's
> "Principles of Behavior" didn't come out until 1943. Logically,
> however, much of the 1940's was spent by Tolman in offering challenges
> to Hull's system (latent learning, detour learning, place vs. response
> learning, etc), and Hull then going through intellectual contortions to
> try to explain Tolman's problemmatic results. In general, Tolman kept
> saying "it's not that simple" and Hull kept trying to make it simple,
> and instead making it more complicated, until his system lost its one
> attraction, parsimony.
>
> My impression is that, at the time, it was Hull who had the "grand
> system" and Tolman who was sniping from the bushes, but it was Tolman
> who won the war (and, as he said, he had fun doing it).
>
> One could say lots more, but I think that covers some of Phil's
> question. Other comments?
>
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David G. Likely, Department of Psychology,
University of New Brunswick
Fredericton, N. B., E3B 5A3 Canada
History of Psychology:
http://www.unb.ca/web/psychology/likely/psyc4053.htm
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