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Philosophical Behaviourism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
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.
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- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 3: Knowledge and Necessity , March 1969 , pp. 119 - 131
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1969
References
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page 119 note 2 Ibid., pp. 2 and 4.
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page 122 note 5 ‘We should mean by response the total striped and unstriped muscular and glandular changes which follow upon a given stimulus.’ (Ibid., p. 14.)
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page 123 note 1 Watson and others, by attaching instruments to their subjects' throats, tried, unsuccessfully, to confirm that thinking is always accompanied by musclemovements. But this enterprise presupposed that the experimenters had an independent way of knowing when (and what) their subjects were thinking, i.e. their introspective reports!
page 123 note 2 Op. cit, pp. 8–9.
page 123 note 3 See Science and Human Behaviour, ch. III.
page 123 note 4 I think not, in view of what he says about ‘psychic inner causes’; ibid., pp.29–31.
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page 130 note 2 This statement is unclear, for ‘explained in terms of’ is here ambiguous. I do not wish to question the thesis that the meanings of mind-predicates must be taught by reference to overt behaviour, but to question the inference that statements containing such predicates must be analysed solely in terms of overt behaviour.
page 131 note 1 Problems of Philosophy (Home University Library) pp. 91–2; (Oxford Paperback) p. 32.Google Scholar