Editing C. Lloyd Morgan (section)

=== Morgan's Canon ===
{{further|Morgan's Canon}}
Morgan's Canon played a critical role in the growth of behaviourism in twentieth century academic psychology. The canon states: ''In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher mental faculty, if it can be interpreted as the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.'' For example, Morgan considered that an entity should only be considered [[conscious]] if there is no other explanation for its behaviour.

[[W.H. Thorpe]] commented as follows:<ref>Thorpe W.H. 1979. ''The origins and rise of ethology: the science of the natural behaviour of animals''. Heinneman, London. p28/9 {{ISBN|0-435-62441-5}}</ref><ref>Griffin D.R. 1976. ''The question of animal awareness''. Rockefeller University Press, New York.</ref><ref>A similar comment was made by [[Edwin G. Boring]] in his ''A history of experimental psychology'', 2nd ed 1950: chapter 10 British psychology, p474.</ref>

{{Blockquote|The importance of this was enormous... [but] to the modern ethologist dealing with higher animals and faced as he is with ever-increasing evidence for the complexity of perceptual organisation... the very reverse of Morgan's canon often proves to be the best strategy.}}

The development of Morgan's Canon derived partly from his observations of behaviour. This provided cases where behaviour that seemed to imply higher mental processes could be explained by simple [[trial and error]] learning (what we would now call [[operant conditioning]]). An example is the skilful way in which his [[terrier]] Tony opened the garden gate, easily imagined as an [[insight]]ful act by someone seeing the final behaviour. Lloyd Morgan, however, had watched and recorded the series of approximations by which the dog had gradually learned the response, and could demonstrate that no insight was required to explain it.