Research

Publications

Delmore, T. (2024). "Re-Charting Tolman's Cognitive Maps". Dialogue.

Final draft *here*.

Delmore, T. & Andrews, K. (2024). "Animal Cognition". The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Wiley.

Final draft *here*.

Dissertation

Maps, Minds, and Mechanism: Edward Tolman and Behaviorism’s Untold Varieties (Dissertation). 

My focal point, as the title indicates, is Edward C. Tolman. Tolman was an experimental 

psychologist whose career spanned much of the ‘behaviorist age’ in American psychology (a period usually dated from the 1910s until the 1950s). Received views and academic historiography usually present Tolman as having been an outlier, if not a dissident, within behaviorism’s ranks. Ultimately, it’s said, he arrived at a set of experiments on rat maze-running that led him – in 1948, specifically – to publicly renounce behaviorism. 

It is a near consensus among scholars that said ‘maps’ are the “map-like representations” familiar from contemporary work in neuroscience and comparative psychology. Accordingly, Tolman is often celebrated as having helped break behaviorism’s siege on psychology and to have prepared the way for cognitive science’s ascension. 

Contrastingly, I argue that Tolman remained a genuine and steadfast behaviorist; that his experiments have become distorted by present-day commentators; that his “cognitive maps” were not mental representations; and that the portrayal of his work as a harbinger of cognitive science is unfounded.   

Where, in the foreground, I position the above challenges to standard narratives, my larger goal is to present an improved understanding of the history, science, and philosophy under discussion. To this end, much of my dissertation aims to provide an alternative ‘positive’ account, not only of Tolman, but of behaviorism writ large. 

In correcting the account of Tolman, I offer a broader reconstruction of the intellectual setting of the behaviorist age. Three common tenets ascribed to behaviorists are that (a) they denied or ‘blackboxed’ the mind, (b) they favoured scientific eliminativism or reductionism / physiologized concepts, and (c) they disallowed reference to unobservables (or demanded that unobservables be given an operational characterization). 

I challenge each of these contentions. The majority of behaviorists were not positivists or reductionists, but functionalists. As such, they did not reject the mind (or a science of the mind). They merely held a view of the mind as a dynamic, biological function that governs certain organism-environment relations. This entails that they rejected many of the views of mentality that we find most familiar, especially those that individuate the mind in abstraction from concrete motivation-learning-stimuli dynamics. But this is not a reductionism or an eliminativism, and we get a great deal of history wrong if we don't attend to the functionalist influence upon behavorism.