The Evolution
55
Accordingly the experimenter would then be justified in concluding
that "deception" has a part-whole link with "placebo," or at least with
a concept closely related to "placebo." Then by varying the associative
context from "hospital" to "military," to "White House," to "communist,"
etc., the experimenter could arrive at a collection of intersection
responses from his subjects, a collection that profiles the various
part-whole links of "deception."
The same procedure could then be applied to other concepts suspected
of having part-whole links, with the end product being a list telling
what is linked to what and how. This network could then be used to
make accurate predictions of how memory processes, stores, and retrieves
information.
Conclusion
The psychologist,s normal method of working requires that he gather
data about memory and then deduce from these data how memory is organized
The method employed within these pages breaks with that tradition by
seeking the organization of memory not within memory itself, but in the
forces that helped mold and shape it. This line of reasoning inevitably
leads to the conclusion that the evolutionary forces of the environment
have fashioned memory with an infrastructure employing two types of links
and that even though this infrastructure plays a direct and rather