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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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.
page 119 note 1 ‘Some Implications of Analytical Behaviourism’, in Proc. Arist. Soc. (1948–1949) 4.Google Scholar
page 119 note 2 Ibid., pp. 2 and 4.
page 119 note 3 Behaviourism, p. 6.Google Scholar
page 120 note 1 ‘Psychology As The Behaviourist Views It’, in Psychological Review, xx. (Hereafter referred to as ‘PBV’.)Google Scholar
page 120 note 2 Behaviourism, p. 180.Google Scholar
page 120 note 3 ‘PBV’, p. 166.Google Scholar
page 120 note 3 Behaviourism, p. 6Google Scholar; cf. p. 193.
page 121 note 1 See Behaviourism, p. 213.Google Scholar
page 121 note 2 ‘PBV’, p. 174Google Scholar; cf. Behaviourism, pp. 191 ff.Google Scholar
page 121 note 3 ‘PBV’, p. 174.Google Scholar
page 122 note 1 ‘Experience’, in Mind (1950).Google Scholar
page 122 note 2 See Penfield, and Roberts, , Speech and Brain Mechanism (1959).Google Scholar
page 122 note 3 See e.g. Behaviourism, p. 15.Google Scholar
page 122 note 4 Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviourist (1919) p. 15.Google Scholar
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.)
page 122 note 6 Behaviourism, p. 6.Google Scholar
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.
page 124 note 1 Language, Truth and Logic (1946) p. 20Google Scholar. (Hereafter referred to as LTL: references are to the revised edition.)
page 124 note 2 ‘Psychology in Physical Language’ (1932)Google Scholar; reprinted in Logical Positivism, ed. Ayer, p. 174.Google Scholar
page 125 note 1 ‘Unverifiability by Me’, in Analysis, IV.Google Scholar
page 125 note 2 The Problem of Knowledge, pp. 199, 238–9 and 246.Google Scholar
page 125 note 3 Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940) p. 169.Google Scholar
page 125 note 4 PI, § 109.Google Scholar
page 125 note 5 C of M, pp. 22–3.Google Scholar
page 125 note 6 For example, he makes up rules for distinguishing ‘achievement verbs’, and deduces from them that we cannot say ‘he hit the target successfully’ or ‘he saw the nest rapidly’ (p. 151), and that inferring something cannot be described as a slow or quick process (p. 301).
page 128 note 1 See PI §§ 109, 116, 124, 126–8 and 654–5.Google Scholar
page 128 note 2 See PI § 246 and p. 222.Google Scholar
page 129 note 1 My potted polemic concerning Wittgenstein is much in need of elaboration, and qualifications.
page 129 note 2 ‘Professor Malcolm on Dreams’, in J. of Phil. (1961).Google Scholar
page 129 note 3 ‘Professor Ayer on Dreaming’, in J. of Phil. (1961).Google Scholar
page 130 note 1 See C of M, pp. 327–8.Google Scholar
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