5 - Behaviourist semantics

Summary

General attitudes

In this chapter we shall be concerned with behaviourist theories of meaning. Although behaviourism is nowadays less widely accepted than it was a decade or so ago, it was for a long time dominant in American psychology and it exercised a considerable influence upon the formulation and discussion of some of the basic issues in semantics, not only by psychologists, but also by certain linguists and philosophers.

It is perhaps useful to begin by distinguishing between behaviourism as a general attitude, on the one hand, and behaviourism as a fully developed psychological theory, on the other. In this section, we will discuss behaviourism in the more general sense, recognizing four characteristic principles or tendencies which give it its particular force or flavour.

First to be noted is a distrust of all mentalistic terms like ‘mind’, ‘concept’, ‘idea’, and so on, and the rejection of introspection as a means of obtaining valid data in psychology. The reason for the rejection of introspection is readily understood. Everyone's own personal thoughts and experience are private to him and what he will say about them to others is notoriously unreliable. Indeed, he is just as likely to deceive himself involuntarily as he is deliberately to mislead others about the beliefs and motives which inspire his conduct. Since this is so, the fact that there might be wide agreement among a number of persons reporting upon the results of their introspection is not a sufficient guarantee that these reports are trustworthy.