What is behaviorism about the mind?

Authors

  • Filipe Lazzeri Faculdade de Filosofia - Universidade Federal de Goiás (Federal University of Goias)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2019v23n2p249

Abstract

It is common to find depictions of behaviorist approaches to the mind as approaches according to which mental (or psychological) events are “dispositions for behavior.” Moreover, it is sometimes said that for these approaches the dispositions are for publicly observable (external) behaviors, or even “purely physical movements,” thereby excluding from being constitutive of mental events any internal (e.g., physiological) bodily happening, besides any movement not taken as “purely physical.” In this paper I aim to (i) pinpoint problems in such widespread depictions of behaviorism about the mind, by arguing that they turn out to be too restrictive or too broad, as the case may be. In addition, (ii) I put forward an alternative, more balanced characterization, which wards off such problems. Based upon this alternative characterization, I attempt to (iii) classify some of the embodied mind theories as behavioral, non-behavioral, or borderline cases between behavioral and non-behavioral perspectives.

Author Biography

Filipe Lazzeri, Faculdade de Filosofia - Universidade Federal de Goiás (Federal University of Goias)

Professor da UFG

References

AIZAWA, K. 2015. What is this cognition that is supposed to be embodied? Philosophical Psychology 28: 755-775.

ARMSTRONG, D. M. 1968. A materialist theory of the mind. London: Routledge.

BARRETT, L. 2015. A better kind of continuity. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 53: 28-49.

BARRETT, L. 2019. Enactivism, pragmatism… behaviorism? Philosophical Studies 176: 807-818.

BAUM, W. M. 2002. From molecular to molar: A paradigm shift in behavior analysis. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 78: 95-116.

BAUM, W. M.; HEATH, J. L. 1992. Behavioral explanations and intentional explanations in psychology. American Psychologist 47: 1312-1317.

BENNETT, M. R., and HACKER, P. M. 2003. Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell.

BLOCK, N. 1978. Troubles with functionalism. In C. W. Savage (Ed.), Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science: Vol. 9 (pp. 261-325). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

BRADDON-MITCHELL, D.; JACKSON, F. 2007. Philosophy of mind and cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

CARNAP, R. 1959/1932. Psychology in physical language. In A. J. Ayer (Ed.), Logical positivism (pp. 165-198). Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

CARNAP, R. 1962. Logical foundations of probability (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

CHALMERS, D. J. 1996. The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHARLES, E. P. (2011). Seeing minds in behavior: Descriptive mentalism. Review of General Psychology 15: 267-276.

CHEMERO, A. 2009. Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CHOMSKY, N. 1957. Syntactic structures. Berlin: Mouton.

CHURCHLAND, P. M. 1981. Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy 78: 67-90.

CLARK, A. 2008. Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. New York: Oxford University Press.

CLARK, A.; CHALMERS, D. J. 1998. The extended mind. Analysis 58: 7-19.

DAMASIO, A. R. 1994. Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Putnam Publishing.

DENNETT, D. C. 1969. Content and consciousness. London: Routledge.

DERR, P.; THOMPSON, N. S. 1992. Reconstructing Hempelian motivational explanations. Behavior and Philosophy 20: 37-45.

DESCOMBES, V. 2005. A conversation with Sergio Benvenuto. European Journal of Psychoanalysis 20(1): http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number20/descombes.htm

DONAHOE, J. W. 2012. Origins of the molar-molecular divide. European Journal of Behavior Analysis 13: 195-200.

DUTRA, L. H. de A. 2003. Propositional attitudes, intentionality, and lawful behaviors. Principia 7: 93-114.

DUTRA, L. H. de A. 2015. Emergência sem níveis. Scientiae Studia 13: 841-865.

FoDor, J. A. 1968. Psychological explanation: An introduction to the philosophy of psychology. New York: Random House.

FODOR, J. A. 1975. The language of thought. New York: Crowell.

FODOR, J. A. 1981. The mind-body problem. Scientific American, 244(1): 114-123.

GALLAGHER, S. 2017. Enactivist interventions: Rethinking the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

GALLAGHER, S. 2019. Replies to Barrett, Corris and Chemero, and Hutto. Philosophical Studies 176: 839-851.

GALLAGHER, S.; ZAHAVI, D. 2008. The phenomenological mind: An introduction to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. New York: Routledge.

GIBSON, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.

GRAHAM, G. 1982. Spartans and behaviorists. Behaviorism 10: 137-149.

HACKER, P. M. S. 1990. Wittgenstein: Meaning and mind. Oxford: Blackwell.

HEMPEL, C. G. 1980/1935. The logical analysis of psychology (W. Sellars, Trans.). In N. Block (Ed.), Readings in philosophy of psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 14-23). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

HINELINE, P. N. (1980). The language of behavior analysis: Its community, its functions, and its limitations. Behaviorism 8(1): 67-86.

HINELINE, P. N. (1984). Can a statement in cognitive terms be a behavior-analytic interpretation? The Behavior Analyst 7: 97-100.

HOCUTT, M. 1985. Spartans, strawmen, and symptoms. Behaviorism 13: 87-97.

HORNSBY, J. 2006/1986. Physicalist thinking and conceptions of behaviour. In J. Bermúdez (Ed.), Philosophy of psychology: Contemporary readings (pp. 31-47). London: Routledge.

HULL, C. L. 1943. Principles of behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

HUTTO, D. D.; MYIN, E. 2013. Radicalizing enactivism. New York: MIT Press.

KANTOR, J. R.; SMITH, N. W. 1975. The science of psychology: An interbehavioral survey. Chicago, IL: Principia Press.

KIM, J. 1996. Philosophy of mind. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

KITCHENER, R. F. 1977. Behavior and behaviorism. Behaviorism 5(2): 11-71.

LAKOFF, G.; JOHNSON, M. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

LAUDAN, L. 1977. Progress and its problems: Towards a theory of scientific growth. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

LEVIN, J. 2018. Materialism. In R. J. Gennaro (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of consciousness (pp. 38-50). New York: Routledge.

LEWIS, D. K. 1966. An argument for the identity theory. Journal of Philosophy 61: 17-25.

MÄÄTTÄNEN, P. 2015. Mind in action: Experience and embodied cognition in pragmatism. Cham: Springer.

MASLIN, K. T. 2001. An introduction to the philosophy of mind. Oxford: Polity.

MUMFORD, S. 1998. Dispositions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

NEWELL, A.; SIMON, H. A. 1961. Computer simulation of human thinking. Science 134: 2011-2017.

NOË, A. 2004. Action in perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

NOË, A. 2009. Out of our heads: Why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang.

O’REGAN, J. K.; NOË, A. 2001. A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24: 939-973.

PESSOA JR., O. (2013). Emergência e redução: Uma introdução histórica e filosófica. Ciência e Cultura 65(4): 22-26.

PUTNAM, H. 1975. Mind, language, and reality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

RACHLIN, H. 1994. Behavior and mind: The roots of modern psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

RACHLIN, H. 2014. The escape of the mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

ROCKWELL, W. T. 2005. Neither brain nor ghost: A nondualist alternative to the mind-brain identity theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

RORTY, R. 1965. Mind-body identity, privacy, and categories. Review of Metaphysics 19: 24-54.

ROWLANDS, M. 1999. The body in mind: Understanding cognitive processes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

ROWLANDS, M. 2003. Externalism: Putting mind and world back together again. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press.

Rowlands, M. 2010. The new science of the mind: From extended mind to embodied phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

RUPERT, R. 2004. Challenges to the hypothesis of extended cognition. Journal of Philosophy 101: 389-428.

RYLE, G. 1949. The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson.

SHAPIRO, L. 2011. Embodied cognition. New York: Routledge.

SKINNER, B. F. 1953. Science and human behavior. New York: Macmillan.

SKINNER, B. F. 1969. Contingencies of reinforcement: A theoretical analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

SKINNER, B. F. 1971. Beyond freedom and dignity. New York: Knopf.

SKINNER, B. F. 1976/1974. About behaviorism. New York: Vintage Books.

SKINNER, B. F. 1989. The origins of cognitive thought. American Psychologist, 44: 13-18.

STADDON, J. 2001. The new behaviorism: Mind, mechanism, and society. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

THOMPSON, N. S. 1994. The many perils of ejective anthropomorphism. Behavior and Philosophy 22: 59-70.

TOLMAN, E. C. 1932. Purposive behavior in animals and men. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

TOLMAN, E. C. 1951a/1923. A behaviorisic account of the emotions. In Behavior and psychological man: Essays in motivation and learning (pp. 23-31). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

TOLMAN, E. C. 1951b/1925. Behaviorism and purpose. In Behavior and psychological man: Essays in motivation and learning (pp. 32-37). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

VARELA, F. J.; THOMPSON, E.; ROSCH, E. 1991. The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

WATSON, J. B. 1913. Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review 20: 158-177.

WHEELER, M. 2010. In defense of extended functionalism. In R. Menary (Ed.), The extended mind (pp. 245-270). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

WHEELER, M. 2011. Embodied cognition and the extended mind. In J. Garvey (Ed.), The Continuum companion to philosophy of mind (pp. 220-238). London: Continuum.

WILSON, R. A.; FOGLIA, L. 2015. Embodied cognition. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

WITTGENSTEIN, L. 1953. Philosophical investigations (G. E. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN, L. 2008/1980. Observações sobre a filosofia da psicologia (R. H. P. Machado, Trad.). Aparecida, SP: Ideias & Letras.

ZAHAVI, D. 2007. Expression and empathy. In HUTTO, D. D.; RATCLIFFE, M. (Eds.), Folk psychology re-assessed (pp. 25-40). Dordrecht: Springer.

ZILIO, D. 2010. A natureza comportamental da mente. São Paulo: Cultura Acadêmica.

Published

2019-08-16

Issue

Section

Articles