Behaviourism, analytic

« 2 Influences and arguments A first, important influence on analytical behaviourism was the doctrine of verificationism.

According to one version of this view,the meanings of statements are given by the procedures used to find out if they are true.

This was supposed to eliminate meanings as occult entities, and put the subject on a scientific footing.

Anyone attracted by that view would have seen considerable merit in behaviourism. For we typically verify statements about other people's mental states by looking at their current behaviour (including verbal behaviour), or their behaviour over time, drawing conclusions about the dispositional patterns that emerge. A related influence was that of the success of methodological behaviourism (sometimes known as scientific behaviourism).

This somewhat weaker doctrine stipulates that for the purposes of psychology we use terms for mental states which are defined in terms of behaviour.

This was perhaps good advice in the early part of the century; in any case behavioural evidence was the only access then available to psychological information, and the advice yielded reasonable results.

The dominance of this idea left philosophers in a difficult position.

What scientific psychology talked about was defined in terms of behaviour. The denial of analytical behaviourism would therefore entail that ordinary discourse about the mind is simply not about the same things as scientific discourse - bad news, indeed, for scientifically-minded philosophers.

Rather than risk accepting that consequence, it seemed better to insist that everyone really was talking about the same thing, and thus that analytical behaviourism was true. Another approach to this problem can be found among the methodological behaviourists.

We might call it revisionary behaviourism - the view that, to the extent that ordinary talk is not about behaviour, it is defective and should be revised in line with scientific talk.

This was never popular amongst philosophers, perhaps because of its consequence that all ordinary talk about psychology before behaviourism was seen as deeply defective.

It is hard to believe that Aristotle was not saying something true when he attributed beliefs to Plato. A crucial influence, especially in the British tradition, was Wittgenstein 's scepticism about the possibility of private states contributing to the meaning of expressions in public language (see Private states and language ).

If you think that private states can have no role in fixing meaning, then behaviour is the only game in town. The most attractive thing about analytical behaviourism is that it undoubtedly got some things right.

While it might be strange to think that the meaning of mental language is exhausted by talk of behaviour, there surely is some kind of analytic link between behaviour and mental states.

If you don't know that someone who desires something will, other things being equal, behave so as to seek it out, then something is wrong with your concept of a desire.

If I believe that Janet truly does desire ice cream, and that her desire isn't overruled by another, then there is something deficient in my concept of desire if I am not remotely puzzled when she blithely ignores a convenient ice cream stall.. »