The thesis of this paper is that in dealing with problems of "mind," the philosopher of mind needs to be as well grounded in his relevant sciences (e.g. psychology, anthropology) as the philosopher of the physical sciences needs to be grounded in his relevant sciences (e.g. physics). The thesis of this paper is also that the psychological analysis of solipsism and the philosophical analysis are not independent (or at least not independent in all of their aspects), and that therefore the (...) psychological analysis sheds light on the philosophical, and vice versa. It is argued that solipsism is untenable on at least two grounds: because (1) there are no such physical phenomena as acts of "immediate perception," and because (2), that there can be no such thing as an "individual mind" without some form of a "group mind.". (shrink)

1. Outline of the Project. This paper is intended to be a progress report on a project in philosophy of science. The immediate stimulus of this report is the eightieth birthday of E. A. Singer, Jr., who was the inspiration of the project, and, needless to say, though responsible for the whole is not responsible for the misconceptions in the specific parts.

The boundaries of psychology have never been very distinctly defined and, as a consequence, science has witnessed frequent border incidents. But it obviously is not psychology alone which suffers from such lack of delineation, but its neighbors, the biological and social sciences, do as well. Cooperation between sciences becomes difficult under these conditions. All agree that psychology is the science of mind, but few agree to what “mind” is. At least within our century “mind” has been taken to be “behavior”, (...) for the present day outlook is that mind is behavior rather than that which is responsible for behavior. The metaphysical dynamism of a prime mover has been replaced by an experimental concept, i.e., one that is susceptible to scientific investigation. There is no need to review the complex history of behavioristic psychology in its many ramifications, ranging from Watson's mechanism to the various vitalistic teleologies. We turn instead to a fundamental problem on which there is little agreement: “What kind of behavior should be called mind?”. (shrink)