Logical behaviorism
Explanation
In the first half of the twentieth century, an alliance between analytic philosophers and experimental psychologists proposed a radical solution to the mind-body problem: talking about internal mental states is a grammatical confusion. What we call mind is nothing happening inside the skull, but rather patterns of observable behaviour. To talk of John's pain is not to talk of an internal event of his, but of how he behaves and how he would behave.
Logical behaviourism, defended by philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind, 1949) and earlier by Carnap and the Vienna positivists, distinguishes its position from psychological behaviourism (Watson, Skinner). The latter denied the scientific usefulness of introspection; the former go further and deny that mental words refer to anything beyond behaviour. To be intelligent is to behave intelligently, not to possess an inner property.
Ryle's favourite criticism targeted the ghost in the machine myth: the Cartesian image of an inner self contemplating a theatre of mental representations while operating the body from outside. For Ryle, this commits a category mistake: it treats dispositional terms (like skilful or brave) as if they named internal things, when they really describe patterns of response to circumstances.
The dispositional analysis is elegant: sugar is soluble does not mean it has an internal substance called solubility, but that it tends to dissolve when placed in water. Analogously, believing it is raining would mean tending to take an umbrella, not to go out, to comment on the weather, and so on. Beliefs would be complex dispositions to behave, not mysterious states of the soul.
The major problem for logical behaviourism arises with qualia and subjective experience: can pain be reduced to pain-behaviour? Putnam proposed the super-Spartan: a person who, through stoic training, shows no behavioural sign of pain while feeling it. If logical behaviourism were correct, this possibility would be incoherent, but it seems perfectly conceivable.
Logical behaviourism declined in the 1960s and 70s with the rise of functionalism and the mind-brain identity theory, which reincorporated the mental as something real (internal states), without returning to dualism. Today its intuitions are partially preserved in functionalism and in a certain Wittgensteinian philosophy that continues to insist that the meaning of mental terms is anchored in public practices and shared behaviour.
Strengths
- Effective philosophical critique of Cartesian dualism.
- Anticipates later functionalism.
- Coherent with intersubjective methodologies in psychology.
- Clear, argumentative style accessible to rational debate.
Main critiques
- Hard to reduce all of the mental to behavioural dispositions without losing qualia.
- The super-actor argument: someone could behave 'as if' without having experiences.
- Insufficient to account for cognition not manifested in behaviour.
- Considered superseded by functionalism as a positive proposal.