Behavior Implies Cognition

Abstract

My background and orientation is that of a psychologist with particular interests in animal behavior, and in what may be described as the evolution and natural history of minding. Because we are concerned here with the problems of communication between different scientific disciplines, it may serve a useful purpose if I begin by reviewing some general assumptions which I, as a working scientist, accept rather uncritically and which I believe are also accepted, at least implicitly, by a majority of empirical scientists, whether their principal interests are in behavior, or in some other field. I will treat these as areas of consensus, although I have never sought any direct evidence that this is the case. In my experience, scientists do not spend time discussing what they regard as self-evident truths. Instead, they proceed as though those with whom they form a community of interests hold the same basic attitudes and beliefs, until events prove them wrong. When that happens, of course, the problems of communication become acute, for it is seldom clear precisely where or why consensus breaks down. In the second section, I will consider some properties that are peculiar to behavior. They raise some difficult methodological and conceptual issues that are the subject of heated discussions within the behavioral sciences and are a continuing impediment to communication with other scientific disciplines. Next, I will present a perspective on behavior which is not new, but is different, I believe, from that held by scientists in other disciplines (and probably most non-biologically oriented behavioral scientists, as well).