Online research in philosophy

Introductory texts in the philosophy of mind often begin with a discussion of behaviourism, presented as one of the few theories of mind that have been conclusively refuted. But matters are not that simple: behaviourism, in one form or another, is still alive and kicking.

A biological neuroscientific theory must acknowledge that the function of a neurological system is to produce behaviors that promote survival. Thus, unlike what Gold & Stoljar claim, function and behavior are the province of neurobiology and cannot be relegated to the field of psychological phenomena, which would then trivialize the radical doctrine if accepted. One possible advantage of adopting such a (correctly revised) radical doctrine is that it might ultimately produce a successful, evolutionarily based, theory of mind.

The central claim of philosophical behaviourism is this: what it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way. Most philosophers think that this claim is obviously false. They also think it is offensive. They think it is offensive because it appears to reduce or eliminate what is most valuable to us – our minds. It puts the notion of behaviour in the place of mind, and so removes what distinguishes us from automata. B. F. Skinner, one of the most famous (notorious) behaviourists, thought that behaviourism was a tool for social control, albeit a very liberal sort of control. He thought that by understanding how to condition people’s behaviour we would know how to achieve a better society.

Alternative models of similarity judgments that do not rest on metric space assumptions are known to be better descriptions of actual human behaviour but are ignored by Edelman. The internal spaces he postulates are a convenient fiction for artificial intelligence, but not compatible with what is now known about psychophysics at both behavioural and neurological levels of perceptual processing.

Language is a spontaneously evolved emergent adaptation, not a formal computational system. Its structure does not derive from either innate or social instruction but rather self-organization and selection. Its quasi-universal features emerge from the interactions among semiotic constraints, neural processing limitations, and social transmission dynamics. The neurological processing of sentence structure is more analogous to embryonic differentiation than to algorithmic computation. The biological basis of this unprecedented adaptation is not located in some unique neurologieal structure nor the result of any single mutation, but is vested in the synergistic interaction of numerous coevolved neurological biases and social dynamics.

Introductory texts in the philosophy of mind often begin with a discussion of behaviourism, presented as one of the few theories of mind that have been conclusively refuted. But matters are not that simple: behaviourism, in one form or another, is still alive and kicking.