Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scientific theories are nothing but constructs re-describing people's behaviour. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, on a par with the unobservables in science, such as electrons and electromagnetic fields. While behaviourism has gone out of fashion in psychology, it remains influential in economics, especially in ‘revealed preference’ theory. We defend mentalism in economics, construed as a positive science, and show that it fits best (...) scientific practice. We distinguish mentalism from, and reject, the radical neuroeconomic view that behaviour should be explained in terms of brain processes, as distinct from mental states. (shrink)

In this article, I critique Jonathan Floyd’s method of normative behaviourism (NB): that we should measure political preference for a political system from levels of crime and insurrection. First, I distinguish between problems with the data and problems with the theory. I proceed to examine 6 groups who present a difficulty for NB and identify the common thread: NB abstracts the capacity of groups to commit crime and insurrection, and therefore, misreads them in the data as normative approval of (...) a political system. Next, I argue that this a problem, especially as that capacity is often caused by the conditions of the political structure such groups live within. This lack of capacity often means they are amongst the most vulnerable. Consequently, NB needs to be careful of overlooking corrective justice. Subsequently, I offer some simple amendments to NB, followed by two complementary approaches: ethnography and fictional narratives. (shrink)

My response to Joel Katzav’s original article looks at potentially competing claims about perspectivism, psychology, and our understanding of concrete experience. De Laguna offers an early example of pluralism when conceiving of psychology, biology, physiology, and other sciences as essentially different perspectives abstracted from our experience of the world. Each science serves as a single perspective on experience, one that may shed light on our experience and behaviour from a particular standpoint, but does not represent ‘the real’ over and above (...) all perspectives. While remaining generally consistent throughout her career, I argue de Laguna’s exploration and endorsement of behaviourism—especially as it concerns emotion and affect—pushes her a bit closer to reductionism than originally intended. I explore this issue not by simply pointing out the potential inconsistency in her work, but by focusing on whether perspectivism makes sense in light of redundancies and complications between theoretical perspectives. (shrink)

Professor C. A. Mace, the psychologist, once wrote: ‘It is difficult … to present and defend any sort of behaviourism whatever without committing oneself to nonsense.’ I shall illustrate this thesis. I shall comment on the writings of some psychologists. This is relevant to my topic; for psychologists' expositions of behaviourism contain much more philosophy than science, and the inconsistencies which permeate their versions of behaviourism reappear in the works of eminent philosophers. My quotation from Mace comes (...) from a paper defending what he calls ‘analytical behaviourism’; which he distinguishes from ‘methodological behaviourism’ and ‘metaphysical behaviourism’. According to Mace, analytical behaviourism does not question the truth of our everyday statements about a person's mind or states of consciousness; what it claims is that such statements ‘turn out to be, on analysis, statements about the behaviour of material things’, that is, about a person's ‘bodily acts, bodily states, bodily dispositions, bodily “states of readiness” to act in various ways’. The father of behaviourism, J. B. Watson, rarely says anything suggesting this doctrine. As he presents it, behaviourism is both a methodological principle and a metaphysical theory. (shrink)

Even those who have not yet read Dr. Broad’s recent book on The Mind and its Place in Nature have not improbably had their attention drawn to his carefully considered pronouncement on Behaviourism. At the close of ten pages of critical discussion he says: “ It seems to me that Reductive Materialism in general, and strict Behaviourism in particular, may be rejected. They are instances of the numerous class of theories which are so preposterously silly that only very (...) learned men could have thought of them. I may be accused of breaking a butterfly on a wheel in this discussion of Behaviourism. But it is important to remember that a theory which is in fact absurd may be accepted by the simple-minded because it is put forward in highly technical terms by learned persons who are themselves too confused to know exactly what they mean. When this happens, as it has happened with Behaviourism, the philosopher is not altogether wasting time by analysing the theory and pointing out its implications”. I quote the passage at length so that those of us who dally with Behaviourism may realize just how they stand. (shrink)

The identity theory’s rise to prominence in analytic philosophy of mind during the late 1950s and early 1960s is widely seen as a watershed in the development of physicalism, in the sense that whereas logical behaviourism proposed analytic and a priori ascertainable identities between the meanings of mental and physical-behavioural concepts, the identity theory proposed synthetic and a posteriori knowable identities between mental and physical properties. While this watershed does exist, the standard account of it is misleading, as it (...) is founded in erroneous intensional misreadings of the logical positivists’—especially Carnap’s—extensional notions of translation and meaning, as well as misinterpretations of the positivists’ shift from the strong thesis of translation-physicalism to the weaker and more liberal notion of reduction-physicalism that occurred in the Unity of Science programme. After setting the historical record straight, the essay traces the first truly modern identity theory to Schlick’s pre-positivist views circa 1920 and goes on to explore its further development in Feigl, arguing that the fundamental difference between the Schlick-Feigl identity theory and the more familiar and influential Place-Smart-Armstrong identity theory has resurfaced in the deep and seemingly unbridgeable gulf in contemporary philosophy of consciousness between inflationary mentalism and deflationary physicalism. (shrink)

For psychology to mature into a natural science, it must confine itself to what can be observed, viz. behaviour. Behaviourist psychology, according to Watson, aims to discover scientific laws correlating external stimulus and behavioural response. A stricter psychological behaviourism would disregard physiology and concentrate upon searching for laws correlating stimulus and behavioural response. A stricter logical behaviourism would search for analyses which restrict the analysans of psychological statements to specifications of behaviour and behavioural dispositions. Behaviourism is first (...) cousin to dualism. Cartesians pictured the soul's relation to the body rather like that of an immaterial hand within a visible glove. Disillusionment with dualism bred behaviourism, which rightly rejected the Cartesian (and empiricist) conception of the mind, but accepted the associated conception of the body and behaviour. The human body is the best picture of the human soul not because the soul is something bodily, but precisely because the soul is manifest in behaviour. (shrink)

Abstract The accumulated case studies in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge have been taken to establish the Strong Programme's thesis that beliefs have social causes in contradistinction to psychological ones. This externalism is essentially a commitment to the stimulus control of behaviour which was the principal tenet of orthodox Skinnerian Behaviorism. Offered as ?straight forward scientific hypotheses? these claims of social determination are asserted to be ?beyond dispute?. However, the causes of beliefs and especially their contents has also been the (...) subject of intense study in the quite different domain of cognitive science where internal states, images, rules, representations and schemas are postulated as explanatory constructs. Such explanations which postulate mental states are described by Bloor as infected by the ?disease? of ?psychologism? and Bloor has defined his Strong Programme in terms of its diametrical opposition to mentalistic theories. For example, Bloor has explicitly endorsed the Behaviourist rejection of mental representations such as images. Accordingly, a direct comparison of these radically divergent approaches to a common subject matter is of considerable interest. The paper attempts to reveal the unnoticed enormity and recidivism of the sociological programme, and how its vulnerability is betrayed in Bloor's response to criticism on central issues. (shrink)

The object of this article is not to criticize Professor Watson's psychology, still less his physiology; neither do I wish to attempt a fundamental metaphysical criticism, such as that contained in Professor Lloyd Morgan's article in the April number of the Journal, but it appears to me that a purely logical criticism, admitting Professor Watson's facts and observations, and assuming his mechanistic point of view, may be a useful preliminary to such wider and more fundamental inquiry.

Quine tries to combine truth conditional semantics with linguistic behaviourism. To this end, he identifies the truth conditions of a sentence with the conditions that prompt speakers to assign truth or falsity to the sentence. The first problem with this conception is that truth conditions determine not when truth-value assignments are made, but when they are correct. This fact vitiates Quine’s account of observation sentences (section 2). A second difficulty pertains only to theoretical sentences. The correctness of truth-value assignments (...) to such sentences depends not on current experiences, but on what can be experienced on other occasions. This observation militates against Quine’s general verification holism and against his account of predications (section 3 and 4). Combining truth conditional semantics and linguistic behaviourism is possible, though, if both these lessons are taken into account (section 5). (shrink)

Functionalism has become one of the predominant theories in the philosophy of mind, with its many merits supposedly including its capacity for precise formulation. The most common method to express this precise formulation is by means of the modified Ramsey sentence. In this article, I will apply work from the field of the philosophy of science to functionalism for the first time, examining how Newman’s objection undermines the Ramsey sentence as a means of formalising functionalism. I will also present a (...) formal variation on Newman’s objection through mathematical induction. Together, these proofs suggest that functionalism formalised by the Ramsey sentence trivially reduces to a kind of behaviourism plus a cardinality constraint on the number of relations holding between mental-relevant behaviours. As most functionalists see functionalism as a distinct theory of mind from behaviourism, this suggests that the modified Ramsey sentence cannot form a satisfactory formalism for functionalism. (shrink)

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.

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. (shrink)

Can robots have significant moral status? This is an emerging topic of debate among roboticists and ethicists. This paper makes three contributions to this debate. First, it presents a theory – ‘ethical behaviourism’ – which holds that robots can have significant moral status if they are roughly performatively equivalent to other entities that have significant moral status. This theory is then defended from seven objections. Second, taking this theoretical position onboard, it is argued that the performative threshold that robots (...) need to cross in order to be afforded significant moral status may not be that high and that they may soon cross it (if they haven’t done so already). Finally, the implications of this for our procreative duties to robots are considered, and it is argued that we may need to take seriously a duty of ‘procreative beneficence’ towards robots. (shrink)

Many have interpreted Wittgenstein as advocating a form of behaviourism. Through an examination of Wittgenstein's own remarks about behaviourism, and further textual evidence from his notebooks, it is shown that categorizing Wittgenstein as a 'behaviourist', of whatever ilk, serves not merely to obstruct an appreciation of his thinking, but perversely to distort Wittgenstein's views by flying in the face of the central critical thrusts of his later philosophy.

This paper critically assesses John Danaher’s ‘ethical behaviourism’, a theory on how the moral status of robots should be determined. The basic idea of this theory is that a robot’s moral status is determined decisively on the basis of its observable behaviour. If it behaves sufficiently similar to some entity that has moral status, such as a human or an animal, then we should ascribe the same moral status to the robot as we do to this human or animal. (...) The paper argues against ethical behaviourism by making four main points. First, it is argued that the strongest version of ethical behaviourism understands the theory as relying on inferences to the best explanation when inferring moral status. Second, as a consequence, ethical behaviourism cannot stick with merely looking at the robot’s behaviour, while remaining neutral with regard to the difficult question of which property grounds moral status. Third, not only behavioural evidence ought to play a role in inferring a robot’s moral status, but knowledge of the design process of the robot and of its designer’s intention ought to be taken into account as well. Fourth, knowledge of a robot’s ontology and how that relates to human biology often is epistemically relevant for inferring moral status as well. The paper closes with some concluding observations. (shrink)

The debate on bottom-up approaches in political theory has been recently enriched by Jonathan Floyd’s “normative behaviourism”, an approach that starts from and refers to actual behaviours so as to let normative concerns emerge and political responses be found. Despite its merits, I argue that normative behaviourism suffers from three weaknesses: the _tip of the iceberg_, the _invisibility_, and the _over-inclusive justification_ problems. These problems emerge because behaviours can be normatively significant only when the beliefs behind those behaviours (...) are known. To overcome these problems, I suggest a “revised” version of normative behaviourism, which makes use of focus groups to reach two objectives: first, to understand the beliefs driving behaviours; and, second, to filter out unacceptable beliefs that might lead to inappropriate political solutions when their corresponding behaviour is considered normatively relevant for institutional reform. While revised normative behaviourism is still at the stage of a drafted proposal, it has the potential to pave a way for data collection to contribute to the very _formulation_ of normative standards rather than just to the identification of practical constraints to the _application_ of normative standards. (shrink)

If Alison McQueen is right that there is a broad ‘family’ of realist approaches to political theory, then it follows there are several ways of ‘doing’ realism, as illustrated by this collection. Here, I set out one such way, normative behaviourism, by explaining its realist character on four fronts: Its starting point; its values; its ambitions; and its treatment of a shared problem. The argument then considers two key objections to the described approach, both of which affect a range (...) of possible realisms. (shrink)

In his 1913 behaviourist manifesto John B Watson urged psychologists to adopt "a unitary scheme of animal response...(that) recognizes no dividing line between man and brute." His call was heeded. By the 1930s, methodological behaviourism and animal behaviour research were dominant features of the psychological landscape. To document the origins of behaviourism, this series collects the theoretical and empirical articles that set the terms of the behaviourist debate. It includes the most important pre-Watsonian monographic contributions to objectivism and (...) reprints the first full text of the new behaviourism. (shrink)

Byrne & Russon's target article displays all the difficulties encountered when one fails to take a methodological behaviourist approach to imitation. Their conceptual apparatus is grounded in a mixture of introspection and folk psychology. Their distinction between action-level and program-level imitation falters on goal imputation for sequential acts. In an alternative gradient descent model, behaviour can be simulated as a frustration/satisfaction gradient descent in the animal's “potentiality space,” as defined by knowledge, inventiveness, and the surrounding environment.

Gomes-Nelson_Physicalism-and-early-behaviourism.

In the last two decades Anglophone political theory witnessed a renewed interest in social-scientific empirical findings—partly as a reaction against normative theorizing centred on the formulation of abstract, intuition-driven moral principles. This brief paper begins by showing how this turn has taken two distinct forms: (i) a non-ideal theoretical orientation, which seeks to balance the emphasis on moral principles with feasibility and urgency considerations, and (ii) a fact-centric orientation, which seeks to ground normative conclusions in empirical results. The core of (...) the paper then compares and contrast three variants of fact-centric political theory: normative behaviourism, grounded normative theory, and radical realism. The upshot: normative behaviourism achieves focus on observable behaviour at the cost of status quo bias, grounded normative theory achieves radicalism at the cost of endorsing an activist orientation to theorising, and radical realism combines a non-activist orientation with the potential for far-reaching critique of the status quo. (shrink)

Does Normative Behaviourism Offer an Alternative Methodology in Political Theory?

Behaviorism was a peculiarly American phenomenon. As a school of psychology it was founded by John B. Watson (1878-1958) and grew into the neobehaviorisms of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Philosophers were involved from the start, prefiguring the movement and endeavoring to define or redefine its tenets. Behaviorism expressed the naturalistic bent in American thought, which came in response to the prevailing philosophical idealism and was inspired by developments in natural science itself. There were several versions of naturalism in American (...) philosophy, and also several behaviorisms. Most behaviorists paid homage to Darwinian functionalism; all forswore introspection and made learned changes in behavior the primary subject matter and explanatory domain of psychology. They differed in their descriptions of behavior, modes of explanation, and attitudes toward mentalistic concepts. Watson was a strict materialist who wanted to eliminate all mentalistic talk from psychology. Edward Chace Tolman (1886-1959) regarded mind as a biological function of the organism. He permitted mentalistic terms such as 'purpose' in behavioral description, and posited intervening processes that included 'representations' of the environment, while requiring such processes be studied only as expressed in behavior. Clark L. Hull (1884-1952) developed a hypothetical-deductive version of behaviorism, akin to Tolman's functionalism in positing intervening variables but without his cognitivist constructs. B. F. Skinner (1904-90) rejected intervening variables and developed his own account of the behavior of the whole organism, based on the laws of operant conditioning. The naturalism in American philosophy of the early twentieth century showed respect for the natural sciences, especially biology and psychology. John Dewey (1896, 1911), George Santayana (1905, 1920), and F. J. E. Woodbridge (1909, 1913) expressed this attitude. It animated the neorealism of E. B. Holt and Ralph Barton Perry, who gave special attention to psychology, and the evolutionary naturalism and critical realism of Roy Wood Sellars. This naturalism differed from Watson's in regarding mind as part of nature from a Darwinian and functionalist perspective, and treating behavior as the product of the mental functioning. It fed Tolman's version of behaviorism. It was not materialistic or physical-reductionist. Only later, with Quine and logical empiricism, was behaviorism seen as essentially physicalistic. (shrink)

The article highlights George Herbert Mead’s and Wilfrid Sellars’ reliance on a behaviourally-grounded conception of meaning as strictly related to the possibility of distinguishing mental from non-mental phenomena as both related to the semantic dimension. Mead’s position is in fact akin to Wilfrid Sellars’ argument that the concepts of ‘inner events’ are essentially inter-subjective. Thoughts are displayed as consisting of related linguistic acts linked inferentially through intra-linguistic moves that respond to a particular ‘language practice’ governed by norms. Introspection is an (...) ‘inner conversation’, namely an ‘inner’ speaking analogous to linguistic activity that does not involve actual equivalents of the words in the mind. (shrink)

While John B. Watson articulated the intellectual commitments of behaviorism with clarity and force, wove them into a coherent perspective, gave the perspective a name, and made it a cause, these commitments had adherents before him. To document the origins of behaviorism, this series collects the articles that set the terms of the behaviorist debate, includes the most important pre-Watsonian contributions to objectivism, and reprints the first full text of the new behaviorism. Contents: Functionalism, the Critque of Introspection, and the (...) Nature and Evolution of Consciousness: Theoretical Roots of Early Behaviourism: An Anthology [1842-1914] Robert H. Wozniak (Ed) 360 pp Studies of Animal and Infant Behaviour. the Experimental and Comparative Roots of Early Behaviourism: An Anthology [1840-1911] Robert H. Wozniak (Ed) 412 pp An Introuduction to Comparative Psychology [1894 edition] Conway Lloyd Morgan 628 pp Comparative Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology [1900] Jacques Loeb 342 pp Fundamental Laws of Human Behaviour. Lectures on the foundtions of Any Mental or Social Science [1911] Max F. Meyer 264 pp Behaviour. An Introduction to Comparative Psychology [1914 edition] John B. Watson 482 pp. (shrink)