CIUDAD REGIÓN

all forms of behaviourism identify mental states with behaviours or behavioural dispositions. thus it might be that the desire to eat ice cream is identified with ice-cream-eating behaviour, or a disposition to eat ice cream. the basic distinction between varieties of behaviourism is over what domain this identification is made, or on what basis.

Varieties of behaviourism

Methodological behaviourism is the doctrine that was most prevalent in empirical psychology. It is the idea that for the purposes of doing scientific psychology, one ought to study only behaviours or behavioural dispositions, rather than attempting to study internal states or via phenomenological introspection. thus one studies colour blindness, not by asking subjects to introspect about their colour experience, but rather by testing the behaviours which revealed capacities to discriminate colour. this view quite likely transformed psychology for the better in the first half of the twentieth century, but also arguably outlived its usefulness as better methods of studying internal states led to cognitivism as a methodological practice. In any case, what is distinctive about the methodological version of behaviourism is that it is silent on whether there are mental states or properties other than those identified for scientific purposes. the doctrine had enormous impact on research practices in psychology, but less impact in the philosophy of psychology.

Eliminative behaviourism is the doctrine that there are no mental states. mental language should be retained, however, because it does not refer to nonexistent mental states, but instead refers to behaviours or tendencies to behave. the difference between this view and revisionary behaviourism is more verbal than real. on both ways of describing behaviourism it is agreed that (a) mental states are not inner, categorical states of persons; and (b) what makes psychological claims true are subjects’

behavioural dispositions. they disagree about whether some analysis in terms of behaviours and behavioural dispositions does justice to the preexisting psychological concepts.

Revisionary behaviourism is a name that might be used for another doctrine that is often mistaken for methodological behaviourism. the revisionary behaviourist

accepts that there can be no successful analysis of mental states as behaviours, given the meanings of existing language, but rather advocates terminological and conceptual reform so as to henceforth use mental language to refer only to behav-iours or behavioural dispositions. Perhaps the revisionary behaviourist advocates this because she would be attracted to eliminativism were the language to be unreformed.

a revisionary behaviourist might often be a methodological behaviourist who thinks that in reality there is nothing of interest about the mind other than what she is studying qua behaviourist, and so we would all be best to use the operationalizations of scientific psychology in every day life. Perhaps skinner (1974) and Watson (1925) are the paradigms of this view. It too has had little influence in the philosophy of psychology, and this article will concentrate on the third variety of behaviourism, analytical behaviourism, according to which it is a matter of philosophical analysis that mental states are behaviours or dispositions to behave. many of the arguments for and against analytical behaviourism, however, apply equally to these two other varieties.

The appeal of analytical behaviourism

according to analytical behaviourism, careful analysis of mental language reveals that mental state terms must refer to behaviours or behavioural dispositions. although their views were in many ways different ryle (1949), Hempel (1949) and Wittgenstein (1953) and perhaps Quine (1960) were very influential in making analytical behav-iourism a widespread view.

the initial appeal of behaviourism depends on what appear to be conceptual connexions between claims about psychological states and behaviours. suppose John claims that he wants to marry mary. He says it is what he all things considered wants, and he has no special phobias or disabilities. mary is more than willing, the budget is flush with money, time is on their hands, the relatives of all parties want the union to go ahead, and both John and mary enjoy pleasing their relatives. yet somehow John never does marry mary. It seems that he can’t really want to marry her. He was lying, or misunderstood his own desires. and this discovery seems to be based on a kind of conceptual truth: if there is an action that you all things considered desire to perform, and there is no impediment to performing it and no competing desire, then you do perform it. the tension is even more obvious in the case of intention. someone who says “I intend to eat ice cream, but I won’t” seems to be saying something absurd (unless this is because they expect to be prevented from carrying out their intention).

Perception is in the same boat: the connexion between poor vision and poor capac-ities to perform behavioural discriminations is not accidental.

the person who desires to eat ice cream will, or course, only succeed in exhibiting behaviours that would be rational attempts to eat ice cream if their beliefs are true.

thus the would be ice cream eater who believes that ice cream is available only at gelato massi in their local area is likely to exhibit the behaviour of heading in the direction of that shop, regardless of the truth of their belief. this is an example of a principle of belief-desire psychology: the idea that it is a conceptual truth that people

will behave in ways that will satisfy their desires if their beliefs are true. this principle seems to tell us that it is an essential feature of mental states that they must be displayed in behaviour. someone in pain tries to relieve the pain, intelligent people perform certain tasks better than others, those who desire food greatly eat lots of it. a good chess player is likely to beat a bad chess player on average. these are not mere empirical generalizations, the thought goes, rather they reveal essential features of psychological states. someone who does not grasp these claims doesn’t understand the concepts of the relevant psychological states.

the most straightforward way to explain how this is a conceptual truth, is to claim that the concept of a certain mental state just is the concept of a certain kind of behaviour or behavioural disposition. thus just as it is no empirical discovery that fragile things often break if dropped – that fragility just is the disposition to break if dropped is an analytical truth – it is equally no empirical discovery that those that desire ice cream eat it when it is available. It too will be an analytical truth, which is why this kind of behaviourism is known as analytical behaviourism.

the point can be made in terms of a supervenience claim. If the examples we have discussed generalize, then difference in psychological state implies difference in behavioural disposition. but then sameness in behavioural dispositions implies sameness in psychological state. this of course is equivalent to saying that mental states supervene on behavioural dispositions. If the supervenience claim is right, then what makes psychological claims about an agent true is the behavioural dispositions.

this alone is a kind of behaviourism, and it seems to have been obtained only from conceptual resources – so it is analytical behaviourism.

Behaviourism and positivism

another source of behaviourism lies in verificationism and other positivist doctrines.

the positivists of the early twentieth century were notoriously hostile to unobservable entities in science. that alone made them loath to quantify over internal states that could not (at that time) be directly observed. this distaste certainly may have influ-enced the identification of mental states with the observable behaviours that might otherwise have been thought to be mere evidence for mental states. but more than that, their views about meaning led them to behaviourism. the logical positivists were concerned that there were large chunks of discourse that was neither true nor false, because they were meaningless. much of nineteenth-century philosophy was thought to literally mean nothing. but this required a criterion of meaningfulness. When faced with sentences like “the apple weighs 100 g” and “being is present for itself” they wanted a way to mark them out as either meaningful or not. one intuition, shared in part by the current author, is that it has something to do with the thought that one has a direct or indirect grasp of what you would have to find out to tell if either of them is true. taking direct grasp very literally, you might think that what you needed to know is what observation would confirm each claim. It’s easy to list observations that confirm the first claim. It’s very unclear what observations would confirm the second. If for a sentence to have a meaning to a language user is for the user to know

what observations would confirm it, the first sentence in meaningful and the second (plausibly) not.

so far we have a criterion of meaningfulness. We can go further and ask what the meanings of sentences are. If grasping the observational conditions that would confirm a sentence is what it takes to grasp its meaning, then it would be very neat to claim that its meaning just is the states that we would observe and which would confirm it – the sentence’s verification conditions. What are the observations that confirm mental state sentences? Well, at least in the early twentieth century these observa-tions were observaobserva-tions of behaviour. telepathy does not work, and Pet scans had not been invented (though no doubt hard line behaviourists would have doubted their relevance). so if the meaning of mental state talk is the states that we would observe to verify it, what does “Jane desires gelato” mean? It means “Jane walks to the gelato shop, pays her money, and eats it,” etc. If that’s what “Jane desires gelato” means, then what is this desire for gelato? It is the very behaviours or dispositions that give the sentence its meaning.

Behaviourism and physicalism

It was surely part of the appeal of behaviourism that it is consistent with physicalism. If behaviours and tendencies to behave just are complicated physical states, then mental states are physical states. but it should be noted that while behaviourism is compatible with physicalism, it does not entail it. thus behaviourists could be physicalists, but need not be a priori physicalists – it all comes down to whether the behaviours and dispositions to behave were physical states. this has the advantage that a behaviourist could say what the psychological states are in worlds that contain non-physical ghosts, or ectoplasmic minds or any other beings of the sort we might imagine. Just so long as the non-physical beings exhibited behaviour of the right sort, they count as having mental states.

Problems for behaviourism Failure of supervenience

one of the earliest lines of objection to behaviourism was that not all mental states do show up in behaviour. Perhaps the most well-known version of this objection is Putnam (1963). It is certainly possible to imagine someone who greatly values keeping their beliefs and desires unknown. Putnam’s example is of a society in which everyone is suffused by pain but never exhibits its behaviour. thus they have mental features – the pain – but there is no behavioural correlate. What this line of objection illustrates is that a crude behaviourism that concentrates on individual mental states and actual behaviours is not even going to get off the ground. In fact such an example simply shows that the strongest desire (the desire to be stoical in this case) is the one that is manifested in behaviour. but then of course we need behavioural criteria for the existence of desires that are trumped by stronger ones. this is where behavioural

dispositions are essential. the actual behaviour may be one that exhibits no pain behaviour, but the behaviourist will insist that there are nonetheless behavioural dispositions that make true the claims about the agent’s pain. the agent will be disposed to pain behaviour if they were to lose their desire to be stoical, for example.

It might be hard to see why this objection seemed to have so much force, but the explanation is simple: counterfactual conditionals have only fairly recently (perhaps since lewis) been rehabilitated as acceptable parts of austere philosophy.

Failure of analysis

the reply to the failure of supervenience objection, however, leads us straight to a stronger one. behaviourism simply failed in its analytical task – the promised analyses were never delivered, even for a single mental state. the mature version of behaviourism that can cope with the failure-of-supervenience objection holds that psychological claims can be analysed in terms of behavioural dispositions. the obvious models are the ones that concerned the positivists: things like solubility and fragility.

to be soluble in water is to have the dispositions to dissolve in water (in a range of temperatures and pressures). to be fragile is to be disposed to break if dropped (in a range of gravitational fields, from a certain height and so on).

We do seem to have acceptable though rough analyses of these properties, though even in these cases the qualifications in brackets need to be spelt out in rather more detail. In the case of psychological claims, though, the brackets do all of the work.

consider the case of the desire for ice cream we mentioned earlier. What behaviour is it identical with? that depends entirely on the other desires and beliefs of the agent. If the agent desires to be thin more than he desires ice cream, it may lead to ice-cream-avoiding behaviour (thinking that temptation must be avoided at all costs). If the agent desires other things that require his money more than ice cream, there may be no discernible behaviour. It also depends crucially on beliefs. If the agent believes ice cream can be found only in florence, she may take a flight to Italy. If the agent believes ice cream is contaminated locally, she may either travel far or else exhibit no ice-cream-related behaviour, or perhaps she will start to lobby for clean ice-cream standards. thus the behavioural dispositions involved are immensely complicated and exhibit a wide range of behaviours (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to see how all possible behaviours can be made to be the appropriate ones for the desire for ice cream when suitably combined with other beliefs and desires). crucially, they need to mention the complete belief and desire state of the agent. so to spell out the analysis we would need to list each possible belief-desire profile, and for each one add the behaviour appropriate if we add the desire for ice cream. this is of course an impos-sible task.

Causal impotence

a powerful objection to all forms of behaviourism with the possible exception of eliminative behaviourism is that it denies that mental states actually cause behaviour.

If there is one intuition that seems to be central to taking psychology seriously, it’s that desires cause behaviours. our desire for ice cream causes our bodies to move towards it in certain conditions. our pains cause us to flinch. to deny all of that is to eliminate psychology – which is why perhaps eliminative behaviourism could live with this consequence.

truisms of this kind abound. my scratching is caused by my itch; mary’s cleverness causes her to be good at Philosophy exams. my belief that it never rains in sydney is what causes me to never carry an umbrella, and thus get soaked from time to time.

but the behaviourist must deny all of this. for according to her, my itch is my scratching; mary’s cleverness is the fact that she is good at exams (inter alia); and my belief that it never rains in sydney is my umbrella carrying behaviour. nothing causes itself, so these psychological states do not cause behaviour.

the retreat to dispositions doesn’t help either. my disposition to scratch is simply the fact that I do scratch from time to time. so that can hardly be the cause of the scratching. my disposition to not carry umbrellas unless it is actually pouring is not what causes me to go out unprotected into a gloomy day: it is simply the fact that that’s what I tend to do. It is important not to confuse the disposition to behave in a certain way, with the categorical state inside an agent that is responsible for the dispo-sition. the disposition to break if dropped is just the fact that something will break if dropped – the categorical state in the glass is the structural state responsible for the disposition obtaining, and will vary from one fragile thing to the other. behaviourists who retreated to dispositions never intended to retreat to categorical states. to do so would be to give up on behaviourism and identify psychological states with internal states of the very kind that they wanted to avoid.

Conceptual connexions and causal connexions

at this point the reader may be wondering how behaviourists talked themselves into denying something so central as the idea that psychological states cause behaviour.

In fact there was what seemed like a very plausible argument – and seeing how this argument can be defeated helps explain the connexion between behaviourism and contemporary views in the philosophy of psychology that have a behaviourist element without actually being behaviourism.

one way of putting the idea was that, as we have seen, it may seem as though there is a conceptual connexion between psychological states and behaviours. but the causes of behaviour, whatever they are, are surely physical states of a certain kind. but there is no conceptual connexion between these physical states and behaviour. the connexion is, at best, a nomological one, and at worst contingent in every way. thus, by leibniz law, psychological states cannot be mental states.

a way of trying to make clear what this argument was supposed to be is to see it as drawing our attention to an apparently inconsistent triad of independently very plausible principles.

1 causal connections are essentially contingent.

2 Psychological states cause behaviour.

3 there is a conceptual connection between being in a psychological state and behaviour.

each of these is plausible enough. causal connexions are surely contingent. that a certain match lit the fire is a contingent fact; it may not have. Had things been different it may not even have had the capacity to do so, despite being intrinsically exactly the same. the best case that can be made for necessity is that if all of the physical facts within the light cone are kept the same, then the match might have to cause the fire: though even that might be wrong given indeterminacy. but even if it is

each of these is plausible enough. causal connexions are surely contingent. that a certain match lit the fire is a contingent fact; it may not have. Had things been different it may not even have had the capacity to do so, despite being intrinsically exactly the same. the best case that can be made for necessity is that if all of the physical facts within the light cone are kept the same, then the match might have to cause the fire: though even that might be wrong given indeterminacy. but even if it is