Each of us is uniquely subject to certain kinds of stimulation from a small part of the universe within our skins. Mentalistic psychologies insist that other kinds of events, lacking the physical dimensions of stimuli, are accessible to the owner of the skin within which they occur. One solution often regarded as behavioristic, granting the distinction between public and private events and ruling the latter out of consideration, has not been successful. A science of behavior must face the problem of (...) privacy by dealing with events within the skin in their relation to behavior, without assuming they have a special nature or must be known in a special way. (shrink)

Ned Block. Psychologism and behaviorism. Philosophical Review, 90, 5-43.) argued that a behaviorist conception of intelligence is mistaken, and that the nature of an agent's internal processes is relevant for determining whether the agent has intelligence. He did that by describing a machine which lacks intelligence, yet can answer questions put to it as an intelligent person would. The nature of his machine's internal processes, he concluded, is relevant for determining that it lacks intelligence. I argue against Block that (...) it is not the nature of its processes but of its linguistic behavior which is responsible for his machine's lack of intelligence. As I show, not only has Block failed to establish that the nature of internal processes is conceptually relevant for psychology, in fact his machine example actually supports some version of behaviorism. As Wittgenstein has maintained, as far as psychology is concerned, there may be chaos inside. (shrink)

Behaviorism and the philosophy of the act are widely believed to be inconsistent with one another. I argue that both are true, Fulfilling the requirements of scientific psychology and the phenomenology of mind, Respectively. The key to understanding their mutual consistency lies in the idea of parallelism and its corresponding requirement that all descriptive features of mental states be analyzed as properties, None as relations (to anything physical). So the intentional link itself must be a 'logical' and not a (...) descriptive connection. More broadly, It is required to free the act from its origins in the metaphysical notion of 'activity' and the substance ontology from which that motion derives. (shrink)

Despite its short historical moment in the sun, behaviorism has become something akin to a theoria non grata, a position that dare not be explicitly endorsed. The reasons for this are complex, of course, and they include sociological factors which we cannot consider here, but to put it briefly: many have doubted the ambition to establish law-like relationships between mental states and behavior that dispense with any sort of mentalistic or intentional idiom, judging that explanations of intelligent behavior require (...) reference to qualia and/or mental events. Today, when behaviorism is discussed at all, it is usually in a negative manner, either as an attempt to discredit an opponent’s view via a reductio, or by enabling a position to distinguish its identity and positive claims by reference to what it is (allegedly) not. In this paper, however, we argue that the ghost of behaviorism is present in influential, contemporary work in the field of embodied and enactive cognition, and even in aspects of the phenomenological tradition that these theorists draw on. Rather than take this to be a problem for these views as some have, we argue that once the behaviorist dimensions are clarified and distinguished from the straw-man version of the view, it is in fact an asset, one which will help with task of setting forth a scientifically reputable version of enactivism and/or philosophical behaviorism that is nonetheless not brain-centric but behavior-centric. While this is a bit like “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy, as Shaun Gallagher notes (2019), with the shared enemy of behaviorism and enactivism being classical Cartesian views and/or orthodox cognitivism in its various guises, the task of this paper is to render this alliance philosophically plausible. Doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02432-1. (shrink)

Comments that perhaps few psychologists would now describe themselves as strict behaviorists; however, a review of the literature suggests that methodological and radical behaviorism continue to exert a powerful influence on current research, even in such nominally cognitive areas as imagery and hypothesis learning. In many ways this influence has been healthy, leading to a productive emphasis on the importance of environmental variables in shaping behavior, but some of its consequences have been rather less benign. After reviewing the historical (...) arguments against the use of introspection, the author concludes that most either are invalid or no longer possess their original force, so the benefits from a wider use of introspection now seem likely to outweigh the possible costs. (shrink)

Behaviorism and mentalism are commonly considered to be mutually exclusive and conjunctively exhaustive options for the psychological explanation of behavior. Behaviorism and mentalism do differ in their characterization of inner causes of behavior. However, I argue that they are not mutually exclusive on the grounds that they share important foundational assumptions, two of which are the notion of an innerouter split and the notion of control. I go on to argue that mentalism and behaviorism are not conjunctively (...) exhaustive either, on the grounds that dropping these common foundational assumptions results in a distinctively different framework for the explanation of behavior. This third alternative, which is briefly described, is a version of non-individualism. (shrink)

ONE Introduction The history of psychology in the twentieth century is a story of the divorce and remarriage of psychology and philosophy. ...

It is widely thought that philosophical behaviorism is an untenable and outdated theory of mind. It is generally agreed, in particular, that the view generates a vicious circularity problem. There is a standard solution to this problem for functionalism, which utilizes the formulation of Ramsey sentences. I will show that this solution is also available for behaviorism if we allow quantification over the causal bases of behavioral dispositions. Then I will suggest that behaviorism differs from functionalism mainly (...) in its commitment to anti-representationalism, and I will offer two new objections to anti-representationalism. The first will be based on considerations concerning the contents of desires and intentions. The second objection concerns inner speech and mental imagery. We will see that the objections are of relevance to contemporary debates, as they apply with equal force to the currently popular anti-representationalist versions of embodied and enactive cognition. (shrink)

In Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey zeroes in on the authoritarian cast of recent economics, arguing for a re-focusing on the liberated human. The behaviorist positivism fashionable in the field since the 1930s treats people from the outside. It yielded in Williamson and North a manipulative neoinstitutionalism. McCloskey argues that institutions as causes are mainly temporary and intermediate, not ultimate. They are human-made, depending on words, myth, ethics, ideology, history, identity, professionalism, gossip, movies, what (...) your mother taught you. Humans create conversations as they go, in the economy as in the rest of life. In engaging and erudite prose, McCloskey exhibits in detail the scientific failures of neoinstitutionalism. She proposes a "humanomics," an economics with the humans left in. Humanomics keeps theory, quantification, experiment, mathematics, econometrics, though insisting on more true rigor than is usual. It adds what can be learned about the economy from history, philosophy, literature, and all the sciences of humans. McCloskey reaffirms the durability of "market-tested innovation" against the imagined imperfections to be corrected by a perfect government. With her trademark zeal and incisive wit, she rebuilds the foundations of economics. (shrink)

Sellars’ verbal behaviorism demands that linguistic episodes be conceptual in an underivative sense and his theoretical mentalism that thoughts as postulated theoretical entities be modelled on linguistic behaviors. Marras has contended that Sellars’ own methodology requires that semantic categories be theoretical. Thus linguistic behaviors can be conceptual in only a derivative sense. Further he claims that overt linguistic behaviors cannot serve as a model for all thought because thought is primarily symbolic. I support verbal behaviorism by showing that (...) semantic categories are in the first instance teleological explanatory categories and consequently can be observational. And I show how theoretical mentalism can be maintained even though thought is primarily symbolic. (shrink)

Beyond Behaviorism explores and contrasts means and ends psychology with conventional psychology -- that of stimuli and response. The author develops this comparison by exploring the general nature of psychological phenomena and clarifying many persistent doubts about psychology. Dr. Lee contrasts conventional psychology (stimuli and responses) involving reductionistic, organocentric, and mechanistic metatheory with alternative psychology (means and ends) that is autonomous, contextual, and evolutionary.

Radical behaviorism is fundamentally different from traditional psychology, so it is not surprising that is has been widely misunderstood. It offers an alternative to the traditional treatments of mind that avoids some of the insoluble problems raised by those views. B. F. Skinner attempted many times to describe this alternative with limited success, partially attributable to the opacity of his prose and the excessiveness of his proposed applications. We offer annotated excerpts from one of his books dedicated to this (...) end in an effort to show how his approach deals with topics usually viewed as "cognitive psychology." While modern radical behaviorism has progressed beyond Skinner's conception in important ways, his writings remain instructive. (shrink)

In this article I examine Skinner's objections to mentalism. I conclude that his only valid objections concern the "specious explanations" that mentalism might afford ? explanations that are incomplete, circular, or faulty in other ways. Unfortunately, the mere adoption of behavioristic terminology does not solve that problem. It camouflages the nature of "private events," while providing no protection from specious explanations. I argue that covert states and events are causally effective, and may be sufficiently different in their nature to deserve (...) a name other than "behavior."To call such events"mental"does not force a dualistic metaphysics: Such a distinction can be easily assimilated by an "emergent behaviorism." Emergent behaviorism would make explicit use of theories. It would be inductive and pragmatic, and would evaluate hypothetical constructs in terms of their utility in clarifying and solving the outstanding problems of the discipline. (shrink)

Sellars’ verbal behaviorism demands that linguistic episodes be conceptual in an underivative sense and his theoretical mentalism that thoughts as postulated theoretical entities be modelled on linguistic behaviors. Marras has contended that Sellars’ own methodology requires that semantic categories be theoretical. Thus linguistic behaviors can be conceptual in only a derivative sense. Further he claims that overt linguistic behaviors cannot serve as a model for all thought because thought is primarily symbolic. I support verbal behaviorism by showing that (...) semantic categories are in the first instance teleological explanatory categories and consequently can be observational. And I show how theoretical mentalism can be maintained even though thought is primarily symbolic. (shrink)

This paper aims to do three things: First, to provide a review of John Staddon's book Adaptive dynamics: The theoretical analysis of behavior. Second, to compare Staddon's behaviorist view with current ideas on embodied cognition. Third, to use this comparison to explicate some outlines for a theoretical analysis of behavior that could be useful as a behavioral foundation for cognitive phenomena. Staddon earlier defended a theoretical behaviorism, which allows internal states in its models but keeps these to a minimum (...) while remaining critical of any cognitive interpretation. In his latest book, Adaptive dynamics, he provides an overview and analysis of an extensive number of these current, behaviorist models. Theoretical behaviorism comes close to the view of embodied cognition, which also stresses the importance of behavior in contrast to high-level cognition. A detailed picture of the overlaps and differences between the two approaches will be sketched by comparing the two on four separate issues: the conceptualization of behavior, loopy structures, parsimonious explanations, and cognitive behavior. The paper will stress the need for a structural analysis of behavior to gain a better understanding of both behavior and cognition. However, for this purpose, we will need behavioral science rather than behaviorism. (shrink)

The issue of materialism has recently been raised again. Mr. Putnam argues against philosophical behaviorism [4]. Such a position holds, as he construes it, that statements like ‘Jones is angry’ can be analyzed in solely behavioral terms. When one argues against philosophical behaviorism, he might be expected to distinguish this metaphysical position from behavior science. Putnam, however, does not make the distinction. Consequently he argues against both. I shall first state the distinction between these two different things, namely, (...) philosophical behaviorism and behavior science, as I see it. The behavior scientist adopts the thesis that in principle it is possible to predict future behavior on the basis of data concerning environmental, behavioral, and physiological variables. All three of these he considers in physical terms. The behavior scientist thus speaks about physical objects and properties of such. Talking in such terms, he believes that it is in principle possible to coordinate to statements asserting that person X has or is in state of mind Y another statement, employing only the above mentioned physical terms, such that either both are true or both are false. The reasons for the behavior scientist's program are the well known quandaries involved in the observation of other people's minds and the need for intersubjective verification in science. One can further distinguish between a narrower and a broader view of behavior science. The former restricts itself to environmental and behavioral variables at what some call the macro level; the latter includes, or even concentrates upon, physiological variables. As scientists neither the behaviorist nor the physiologist asks or answers philosophical questions, either epistemological or ontological, about minds, bodies, and mental contents. (shrink)

Linguistic Behaviorism (Place, 1996) is an attempt to reclaim for the behaviorist perspective two disciplines, linguistics and linguistic philosophy, most of whose practitioners have been persuaded by Chomsky's (1959) Review of B. F. Skinner's (1957) "Verbal Behavior" that behaviorism has nothing useful to contribute to the study of language. It takes as axiomatic (a) that the functional unit of language is the sentence, and (b) that sentences are seldom repeated word-for-word, but are constructed anew on each occasion of (...) utterance out of units, words, phrases and turns of phrase, that are repeated. On this view, the problem of discriminating the true from the false arises from the use of novel declarative sentences (statements) to depict or, to use Skinner's term, "specify" contingencies the like of which the listener need never have encountered and to which he would otherwise have no access. In such cases the listener needs to distinguish among the sentences he receives from other speakers between those where the situation depicted/specified corresponds to that which actually exists at the time and place specified in the sentence and are, therefore, true, and those to which no actual situation corresponds and which are, therefore, false. (shrink)

Since James defined emotion as consciousness of bodily reactions and Cannon and others detailed the nature of these reactions, there has been an increasing tendency among behaviorists to equate emotions with visceral reactions and to neglect some of the genetic and adaptive aspects of emotion which had been discussed by Darwin.

A common assumption among both behavioral and cognitive psychologists is that behaviorism and cognitivism are alternative theoretical positions addressing a single set of phenomena. Were that so, then it would be reasonable to expect that at least one of these theoretical positions is dispensible. But it is false that behaviorism and cognitivism address the same thing. The object of behaviorism is to establish the relation between behavior and the context of its occurrence. The object of cognitivism is (...) to establish the design of the internal machinery through whose functioning organisms are capable of behaving in context. Behaviorism and cognitivism are representative examples of more inclusive theoretical stances that might be called, alternatively, contextualism and organocentrism. (shrink)

Rachlin's idea that altruism, like self-control, is a valuable, temporally extended pattern of behavior, suggests one way of addressing common problems in developing a rational choice explanation of individual altruistic behavior. However, the form of Rachlin's explicitly behaviorist account of altruistic acts suffers from two faults, one of which questions the feasibility of his particular behaviorist analysis.

This paper examines the relationship among behaviorism, constructivism and Socratic pedagogy. Specifically, it asks if a Socratic educator can be a constructivist or a behaviorist. In the first part of the paper, each learning theory, as it relates to the Socratic project, is explained. In the last section, the question of whether or not a Socratic teacher can subscribe to a constructivist or a behaviorist learning theory is addressed. The paper concludes by stating that while Socratic pedagogy shares some (...) similarities with each learning theory, ultimately it is fundamentally incompatible with both. (shrink)

Conceptual Foundations of Radical Behaviorism is intended for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students in courses within behavior analytic curricula dealing with conceptual foundations and radical behaviorism as a philosophy. Each chapter of the text presents what radical behaviorism says about an important topic in a science of behavior, and then contrasts the radical behaviorist perspective with that of other forms of behaviorism, as well as other forms of psychology.

Let psychologism be the doctrine that whether behavior is intelligent behavior depends on the character of the internal information processing that produces it. More specifically, I mean psychologism to involve the doctrine that two systems could have actual and potential behavior _typical_ of familiar intelligent beings, that the two systems could be exactly alike in their actual and potential behavior, and in their behavioral dispositions and capacities and counterfactual behavioral properties (i.e., what behaviors, behavioral dispositions, and behavioral capacities they would (...) have exhibited had their stimuli differed)--the two systems could be alike in all these ways, yet there could be a difference in the information processing that mediates their stimuli and responses that determines that one is not at all intelligent while the other is fully intelligent. (shrink)

Philosophical critics standardly read behaviorism as a program for defining the concepts of folk psychology in equivalent behavioral terms. This is a misreading. Behaviorism is a program for getting rid of ill-defined mentalistic terms in favor of better defined behavioral idiom. In short, it is a program not for conceptual analysis but for verbal reform. Therefore, criticizing behaviorists for failing to define mentalistic concepts is like criticizing opponents of the Spanish Inquisition for failing to define witchcraft.

This paper examines the relationship among behaviorism, constructivism and Socratic pedagogy. Specifically, it asks if a Socratic educator can be a constructivist or a behaviorist. In the first part of the paper, each learning theory, as it relates to the Socratic project, is explained. In the last section, the question of whether or not a Socratic teacher can subscribe to a constructivist or a behaviorist learning theory is addressed. The paper concludes by stating that while Socratic pedagogy shares some (...) similarities with each learning theory, ultimately it is fundamentally incompatible with both. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose that influential arguments of Jacques Derridas's and Judith Butler's rely on behaviorism and relativism, a reliance which has implications for, among other things, the issue of hate speech. I begin with a brief discussion of the philosophy of W. V. O. Quine, a thinker seldom discussed in relationship to continental poststructuralism. Quine is interesting because he explicitly defends an ontological relativism combined with linguistic behaviorism, the latter as influenced by B. F. Skinner and (...) John Watson. I then show that Butler's and Derrida's theories demonstrate a similar yet unacknowledged lineage. I devote the final section of the paper to a discussion of hate speech, and the problematization of behaviorism and relativism it entails. (shrink)

Teleological behaviorism, unlike Skinnerian behaviorism, recognizes that are needed to account adequately for human behavior, but it rejects the essential role in behavioral explanations of the subjective perspective of the agent. I argue that teleological behaviorism fails because of this rejection.

This commentary discusses critically the proposal of Foxall's intentional behaviorism that, when the use of intentional categories can be justifiably portrayed as heuristic overlay to theories incorporating radical behaviorist principles, intentionality may be part of behaviorist interpretations of behavior that occurs outside of the controlled conditions of the laboratory and practical behavioral interventions. I sketch an argument that typical uses of intentional categories for the explanation of human agency (e.g., its exercise in conducting scientific research) are not properly grasped (...) as being such heuristic overlay and so are not illuminated by behaviorist interpretations. (shrink)

As interpreted here, Garfinkel's "ethnomethodological experiment" (1967) demonstrates the existence of a social convention by flouting it and observing the consternation and aversive consequences for the perpetrator which that provokes. I suggest that the hostility which behaviorism has provoked throughout its history is evidence that it flouts an important social convention, the convention that, whenever possible, human beings are treated as and must always give the appearance of being rational agents. For these purposes, a rational agent is someone whose (...) behavior is controlled by a logically consistent body of means-end beliefs ("rules" in Skinner's terminology) and complementing desires which between them provide a basis for predicting how the individual will behave and for suggesting what arguments will persuade the agent to modify his or her beliefs and the behavior based upon them. The behaviorist flouts this convention by suggesting that its fictional character makes it unsuitable for the purposes of scientific explanation of behavior. The hostility that this suggestion provokes is evidence of the importance attached by the verbal community both to preserving a consistent and rational connection between what is said and what is done and presenting it as part of the natural order of things. (shrink)

Roughly, behaviorist accounts of self-knowledge hold that first persons acquire knowledge of their own minds in just the same way other persons do: by means of behavioral evidence. One obvious problem for such accounts is that the fail to explain the great asymmetry between the authority of first person as opposed to other person attributions of thoughts and other mental states and events. Another is that the means of acquisition seems so different: other persons must infer my mental contents from (...) my behavior, whereas I need not. In this paper, I articulate a specifically Sellarsian behavioristic account of our knowledge of our own and others’ minds, and defend it against these two obvious objections. I further defend it against objections from Davidson, to the effect that Sellars’ account in particular cannot properly formulate the asymmetry at issue, and that behaviorism in general cannot account for the a priori character of the asymmetry. I argue that Davidson misinterprets Sellars at key points, and also misconstrues his own explanandum: What Sellars account can explain is an asymmetry in the reliability of first and other person attributions, but this asymmetry is not a priori. What is a priori is an asymmetry in the practice of according epistemic authority to such attributions. I argue that this asymmetry is what Davidson can and does explain, by appeal to the constitutive features of radical interpretation. But accepting this explanation does not require the rejection of Sellars’ account of the way that first and other persons in fact arrive at beliefs about their mental contents. The two approaches — one descriptive and empirical, the other constitutive and ideal — are compatible. (shrink)

Skinner has repeatedly asserted that he does not deny either the existence of private events or the possibility of studying them scientifically. But he has never explained how his position in this respect differs from that of the mentalist or provided a practical methodology for the investigation of private events within a radical behaviorist perspective. With respect to the first of these deficiencies, I argue that observation statements describing a public state of affairs in the common public environment of two (...) or more observers which those observers confirm as a correct description provide a far more objective and secure foundation for empirical knowledge than statements describing private events in the experience of a single individual. In the course of this argument, I also invoke Wittgenstein's (1953) demonstration — his 'private language argument' — of the incoherence of traditional subjective empiricism. Regarding the second deficiency, I argue that observation statements describing private events can serve as data for an objective study, provided that (a) the verbal behavior in which they consist and its context are objectively observed and recorded, and (b) an explanation is given of how this verbal behavior is generated by the events it reports. (shrink)

The Philosophical Legacy of Behaviorism is the first book to describe the unique contributions of a behavioral perspective to the major issues of philosophy. Leading behavioral philosophers and psychologists have contributed chapters on: the origins of behaviorism as a philosophy of science; the basic principles of behaviorism; ontology; epistemology; values and ethics; free will, determinism and self-control; and language and verbal behavior. A concluding chapter provides an overview of some scholarly criticisms of behavioral philosophy. Far from espousing (...) a `black box' perspective on human cognition and philosophical reasoning, behaviorism (as derived from the works of B. F. Skinner) represents a contemporary and viable approach to conceptualizing important philosophical and psychological issues. Audience: This work will make an excellent text for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in the fields of philosophy and psychology, as well as being of interest to established scholars in those disciplines. (shrink)

The evolution of behaviorism from its explicit beginning with John B. Watson's declaration in 1913 to the behaviorisms of the present is considered briefly. Contributions of behaviorism to scientific psychology then and now are critically assessed, arriving at the conclusion that regardless of whether or not its opponents and proponents are aware, the essential points of behaviorism have now been absorbed into all of scientific psychology. It will assist the progress of the science of psychology if its (...) focus now shifts away from incessant relivings of outdated argumentation to empirical discovery and theory construction based on those discoveries. (shrink)

The conceptual framework of behaviorism is reconstructed in a logical scheme rather than along chronological lines. The resulting reconstruction is faithful to the history of behaviorism and yet meets the contemporary challenges arising from cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and philosophy. In this reconstruction, the fundamental premise is that psychology is to be a natural science, and the major corollaries are that psychology is to be objective and empirical. To a great extent, the reconstruction of behaviorism is an elaboration (...) of behaviorist views of what it is for a science to be objective and empirical. The reconstruction examines and evaluates behaviorist positions on observation and the rejection of introspection, the behavioral data language, theory construction, stimulus-response psychology, the organization of behavior, complex processes, agency, and the interpretation of mentalistic language. The resulting reconstruction shows behaviorism to be a pragmatic psychological version of positivism based on a behavioral epistemology. (shrink)