Greg Detre
Monday, 04 March, 2002
�The behaviourist takes minds not to be inner psychic mechanisms merely contingently connected with their outer behavioural effects, but to be (at least to a significant extent) constituted by those outer effects�
epistemological advantage: this would explain how we can tell so much about others� minds just by looking at their behaviour
uses the analogy of a clock
behaviourists would say that �a clock is simply something with such time-indicating exterior parts [hands]� � the inner workings are irrelevant
anti-behaviourist: �clock as an inner mechanism which, in favourable circumstances, can cause some exterior parts to move in a way which reliably indicates the time�
�suppose that we never open up any clocks to examine their inner parts. Clock anti-behaviourism would then seem to give us an epistemological problem: how do we know that there are any clocks?�
physical behaviour = a physical change to an agent's body (perhaps in relation to his environment), such as the rising of the agent's arm
agential behaviour = an agent does, such as raising his arm
physical and agential behavioural dispositions
relation between actions + physical changes:
on some accounts: identical
on other accounts: agent's action must involve some physical change, but is not identical to it
wide definitions of agential + physical behaviour are possible:
agential behaviour could include: calculating in his head
physical behaviour could include: any physical change in a person's body - even the firing of a certain neuron
�Of course, to claim that the mind is 'nothing over and above' such-and-such kinds of behaviour, construed as either physical or agential behaviour in the widest sense, is not necessarily to be a behaviourist. The theory that the mind is a series of volitional acts - a view close to Berkeley's - and the theory that the mind is a certain configuration of neural events, while both controversial, are not forms of behaviourism.� why not???
�So either the behaviourist needs a less inclusive notion of behaviour or, at the very least, if he does allow some loner processes to count as behaviour, he must minimize their importance.�
�Wavings or visible arm movements (together with, for example, blushing and standing still, which do not involve bodily movement) are included, inner goings-on are excluded�
�eliminativists about the mental repudiate all or most of our commonsense psychological ontology: beliefs, conscious states, sensations, and so on.�
replace folk psychology with the vocabulary of physical behaviour (or perhaps kinematics etc.)
introspective school (Wundt, James and Titchener): the subject matter of psychology is consciousness, and the proper methodology for its study is introspection
psychological behaviourism (Watson + Skinner): �scientific psychology should just concern itself with what is 'objective', and 'observable', namely, according to him, behaviour�
tried to explain behaviour as the product of the history of stimulation plus some simple processes
Skinner added operant conditioning
Watson: �'the behaviourist [places] no more emphasis on the brain and the spinal cord than upon the striped muscles of the body, the plain muscles of the stomach, [and] the glands�
unclarities:
whether stimuli + responses can be described in mentally loaded terms, or only physical descriptions
vascillated between:
a) eliminativism about the mental
Watson: �belief in the existence of consciousness� goes �back to the ancient days of superstition and magic�
b) the claim that mental states exist but are irrelevant to the scientific study of human beings
c) the claim that mental terminology can be translated into vocabulary of physical behaviour
Quine: two reasons for eliminativist behaviourism:
a) belief and desire talk resists regimentation in first order logic, which Quine takes to be the litmus test for complete intelligibility
b) argument for the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, which purports to show that there is simply no 'fact of the matter' as to what someone's language means \ no �fact of the matter� as to what someone believes
��statements containing mental vocabulary can be analysed into statements containing just the vocabulary of physical behaviour�
powerful and straightforward kind of (non-eliminative) behaviourism
�All psychological statements which are meaningful, that is to say, which are in principle verifiable, are translatable into statements which do not involve psychological concepts, but only the concepts of physics.� (Hempel)
a) verificationist theory of meaning: �the meaning of a statement is established by its conditions of verification�
b) a person's physical behaviour is a large part of the evidence for ascribing particular mental states
however, Hempel allows for changes in blood pressure, digestive processes, CNS etc. as part of the meaning of �toothache�
also known as analytic behaviourism
unlike Hempel, Ryle was no physicalist � spoke of agential behavioural dispositions which he didn't analyse away into physical behavioural dispositions
�Ryle was indeed, as he reportedly said, 'only one arm and one leg a behaviourist'�
Geach: �there can be no question of a simple atomistic behavioural analysis: one which matches each belief with a different kind of behaviour (whether specified in the language of agential or physical behaviour). A given belief may issue in practically any sort of behaviour, depending on the agent's other attitudes�
contemporary behaviourist views derive from three sources to avoid Geach�s attack on atomistic analytic behaviourism:
a) (analytic) functionalism (e.g. Lewis, Armstrong)
�the meanings of mental terms are determined by their role in our commonsense theory of behaviour: folk psychology�
alleviates the problem of other minds: �one may reasonably conclude that a creature has a mind on the basis of its behaviour, just as one may reasonably conclude that a car has an engine on the basis of its motion�
b) ��opposition to the functionalist idea that an organism needs a certain kind of inner causal organization in order to be a genuine believer�
c) �Wittgenstein's attack on the possibility of a 'private language', which some take to show that meaning and belief must be 'manifestable' in behaviour�
three corresponding behaviourist theses:
a) behaviour-as-necessary
�necessarily, anything that has no physical behavioural dispositions of a certain kind and complexity does not have a mental life�
analytic functionalism: �anything which has no behavioural dispositions above a certain level of complexity either (a) has no mental life; or, (b) is an atypical member of its kind�
b) behaviour-as-sufficient
�necessarily, anything that has physical behavioural dispositions of a certain kind and complexity has a mental life.�
�functionalism in general is therefore inconsistent
with the behaviour-as-sufficient view� ???
�Dennett - on whom Ryle had a direct influence - has been a longtime opponent of the idea that to have a mind is tox have a specific type of inner causal structure�
intentional stance: �predictive strategy of ascribing intentional states such as belief and desire to a system�
�any object whatever its innards - that is reliably and voluminously predictable from the intentional stance is in the fullest sense of the word a believer�
c) supervenient behaviourism
�psychological facts supervene on physical behavioural dispositions: necessarily, if x and y differ with respect to types of mental states, then they differ with respect to types of behavioural dispositions�
much stronger form of behaviourism � even the conjunction of the two weaker forms �does not imply that any two behavioural duplicates necessarily share the same mental states�
analytic behaviourism entails supervenient behaviourism, but not conversely
�supervenient behaviourism may be broadened to include the supervenience of linguistic meaning on behavioural dispositions, or narrowed to exclude, say, sensations� ???
�supervenient behaviourism can accommodate the view that content is not entirely 'in the head' by taking the supervenience base to comprise physical behavioural dispositions together with facts about the subject's environment�
compatible with eliminativism
Davidson�s third-person version
of Cartesianism: �someone has, under ideal conditions, complete and infallible
access to the mental life (or perhaps, propositional attitudes) of another� � aka interpretivism
(Johnston)
ideal interpreter: �idealization of a human being, in ideal epistemic
circumstances. The ideal interpreter is capable, according to interpretivism,
of discovering exactly what a subject believes, desires (and/or means)�
a) �the interpreter's powers are not to be
construed - on pain of triviality - to be just whatever powers are necessary in
order to deliver the facts�
b) �the interpreter's official evidence does
not include the contents of the subject's mental states, or the meaning of his
utterances�
c) �interpretivism does not offer a reductive
analysis � at least of the attitudes � for the reference to our best judgments
(captured in the heuristic device of the ideal interpreter) is supposed to be
an ineliminable part of the story� ???
interpretivism about belief: �x believes that p if and only if, if there
were an appropriately informed ideal interpreter, he would be disposed to
attribute to x the belief that p�
cf Davidson: �what a fully informed Interpreter could know about what a
speaker means is all there is to learn; the same goes for what the speaker
believes�
Dennett: �[a]ll there is to being a true believer is being a system
whose behaviour is reliably predictable via the intentional strategy, and hence
all there is to really and truly believing that p (for any proposition p) is
being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the best (most
predictive) interpretation�
�As Ludwig Wittgenstein, not to mention Dewey, G.H. Mead, Quine, and
many others have insisted, language is intrinsically social. This does not
entail that truth and meaning can be defined in terms of observable behaviour,
or that it is 'nothing but' observable behaviour; but it does imply that
meaning is entirely determined by observable behaviour, even readily observable
behaviour. That meanings are decipherable is not a matter of luck; public
availability is a constitutive aspect of language.� (Davidson) ???
�
perhaps i.e. �our warrant for saying that someone speaks a certain
language, or has certain beliefs, is ultimately founded on behaviour, observed
as physical behaviour (or, perhaps: observable as the holding true of
sentences)�
�to refute the view that a certain level of behavioural dispositions is necessary for a mental life, we need convincing cases of thinking stones, or utterly incurable paralytics, or disembodied minds�
e.g. �the typical example is of a puppet controlled, via radio links, by other minds outside the puppet's hollow body� � what if you replace the remote-puppeteers by a machine brain?
also Putnam�s X-worlders who feel pain but give no sign of it
some have taken Quine�s indeterminacy of translation as a reductio of his behaviourism
Byrne suggests that if behaviourism is finally laid to rest, it will probably be because the behaviourist�s worries about other minds and the public availability of meaning have been shown to be groundless or not to require behaviourism
what would a functionalist say about the clock???
disposition???
�quantify over mental states�???
operant conditioning???
functionalism vs behaviourism??? are they reconcilable in the middle???
teleofunctionalism???
is Lewis a functionalist or physicalist/identity-theorist??? how different are the two???
does it make sense to see behaviourism as a theory of mind on its own, when it can be reduced to both physicalism and functionalism???
well, can it??? it depends on which variant of behaviourism you�re talking about