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Analysis and Subsumption in the Behaviorism of Hull

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Robert Cummins
Robert Cummins*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy The University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee
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Abstract

The background hypothesis of this essay is that psychological phenomena are typically explained, not by subsuming them under psychological laws, but by functional analysis. Causal subsumption is an appropriate strategy for explaining changes of state, but not for explaining capacities, and it is capacities that are the central explananda of psychology. The contrast between functional analysis and causal subsumption is illustrated, and the background hypothesis supported, by a critical reassessment of the motivational psychology of Clark Hull. I argue that Hull's work makes little sense construed along the subsumptivist lines he advocated himself, but emerges as both interersting and methodologically sound when construed as an exercise in the sort of functional analysis featured in contemporary cognitive science.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , March 1983 , pp. 96 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

This work was supported in part by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, a grant from the National Science Foundation, and a stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I should also like to acknowledge the generous support of the Institute of Cognitive Science, The University of Colorado.

References

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