CAUSATION AND COMPLEXITY - OLD LESSONS, NEW CRUSADES

A body of experimental work performed by Israel Goldiamond and his col leagues over 30 years ago is used to help define the evidential proble ms raised for inferences concerning the causal efficacy of human thoug ht. This work suggests that matches of public indicator responses of i nferred private rules Dr states to experimenter score sheets may be co nsidered only as weak evidence for causality. Further, the problems of inferring causality raised by Wittgenstein's skeptical challenge, and its implications for investigating the role of human thought in deter mining human behavior, are briefly described. A selectionist approach, which is currently being used by biobehavioral scientists to investig ate the behavioral complexity which concerns Bandura (this issue) and others, is suggested as one way to study the role of private events in human behavior.