Before his death, George Windholz was known to many of the older members of our society as a unique source of historical information about the details of Pavlov’s life and work. The other best-known source was, of course, the founder of the society, Horsley Gantt, who had actually spent some time in the early twenties working in Pavlov’s laboratory, and hence had a personal perspective on this great physiologist, who has had such a prominent influence on the discipline of psychology.
In contrast to Gantt, George’s knowledge of Pavlov was that of a historian, who relied not on experience but on his extensive reading. During George’s time as a member of our Society, it was his detailed historical wisdom that struck me most about George. I called upon it, for example, in a recent biographical entry on Pavlov in The Encyclopedia of Learning and Memory, when I referred to both the positive and negative influences of the young Pavlov’s father on Pavlov’s intellectual and emotional development. And other members of the Society will no doubt recall the historical papers that George would give at meetings, as well as the informal sharing of his knowledge during conversations held at our conferences . It was knowledge that George shared in an unassuming and scholarly way; we all knew him as a decent and gentle man.
After George’s death I received some of his articles that I had not previously read from his colleague and often co-author, Peter Lamal. This material is the basis of the title of to-night’s brief tribute to a member of our society who was much more than a mere source of historical curiosa. As my title suggests, I think he provided critical contributions to the discipline of psychology in at least two important respects.
Firstly, papers like Windholz and Lamal’s “The vagaries of science: Priority, independent discovery, and the quest for recognition”, in the Psychological Record, 1993, provide a searching analysis of the issue of scientific priority. The abstract of this paper, which discusses who was the first to discover the method of sensory discrimination, ends with the following sentence:
“Historians should be wary because the intricacy of scientific discovery makes the determination of priority an onerous task” (p. 339).
I think that this reflects the wisdom of our Society’s “observation and observation” motto applied to the scholarly, rather than laboratory-based, search for truth.
Still, one might argue that the priority issue, while it may be of interest to historians, is not central to the scientific discipline itself. So, in mathematics and physics, whether Newton or Leibniz was the first to discover the calculus, is not a matter of central concern to those two disciplines. This is why I think that George’s second set of critical contributions, that dealt with myths perpetrated in textbooks of psychology, is of still greater importance for the discipline than are his contributions on priority issues.
I take as one example of this myths-exploding work yet another joint paper with Peter Lamal, namely the piece in the Faculty Forum of the 1996 Teaching of Psychology, entitled “Kohler’s Insight Revisited”. The topic is the two-stick chimpanzee experiment that pschology texts often present as a demonstration of insight learning. The paper allows that the experiment itself is replicable, but argues convincingly that the insight interpretation is, to quote the abstract, “not warranted in view of alternative interpretations”, such as trial-and-error learning.
Now whether the paper, is as convincing to others as it is to me is not the central point. The function of a scholarly critic is to raise, rather than to finally resolve, issues. But raising issues is a critical function when it comes to textbooks, which is the way that the culture of science is passed on from generation to generation. If the young learn, by example, that in a scientific discipline uncritical accpetance of so-called “convenient fictions” is okay, they will eventually transform the discipline from a search for truth to a search for fanciful fads. It is this sort of “corruption of the youth” that is detrimental to inquiry. In leaving his scholarly tracks in the sands of time, George Windholz protected the discipline of psychology, as well as hewing to the Pavlovian dictum of “observation and observation”. Not only our Society, but also the discipline of psychology, is the poorer for his passing.