Behaviourism - Topic Guide PDF

1 Philosophical Behaviourism—Topic Guide Contents What the Specification Says..................................................................... 1 What is Philosophical Behaviourism?........................................................... 2 What are the key arguments for behaviourism?............................................. 2 The verification principle...................................................................... 3 The Language-Learning Argument.......................................................... 6 Analytic and Ontological Reduction............................................................ 8 Hard vs. Soft Behaviourism.................................................................... 10 Hard behaviourist reduction................................................................. 10 Soft behaviourist reduction.................................................................. 11 Category Mistakes............................................................................... 12 What are the key arguments against behaviourism?....................................... 13 “Super Spartans” and perfect actors....................................................... 14 Perfect Actors............................................................................... 14 Super Spartans (and Super-Super-Spartans)........................................... 16 Issues with defining mental states in terms of behaviour............................... 17 The first issue with defining mental states: The multiple realisability problem.... 18 The second issue with defining mental states: the circularity problem............. 19 The asymmetry problem..................................................................... 21 The Problem of Mental Causation [Not in spec].......................................... 22 The four dualist arguments.................................................................. 24 Important Vocabulary........................................................................... 26 Useful Quotes.................................................................................... 27 Useful Sources................................................................................... 32 What the Specification Says Philosophical Behaviourism ‘Hard’ behaviourism: all propositions about mental states can be reduced without loss of meaning to propositions that exclusively use the language of physics to talk about bodily states/movements (including Carl Hempel) ‘Soft’ behaviourism: propositions about mental states are propositions about behavioural dispositions (ie propositions that use ordinary language) (including Gilbert Ryle) 2 Issues including: Dualist arguments applied to philosophical behaviourism The distinctness of mental states from behaviour (including Hilary Putnam’s ‘Super-Spartans’ and perfect actors) Issues defining mental states satisfactorily due to o (a) circularity o (b) the multiple realisability of mental states in behaviour The asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of other people’s mental states. What is Philosophical Behaviourism? Philosophical behaviourism (“behaviourism” for short) is a physicalist (or materialist) theory of mind. It argues that whenever we are talking about people’s mental states (e.g. talking about their thoughts, feelings, desires, qualia, etc.) we are actually just describing the physical state of their body (typically, their behaviours or their behavioural dispositions). Behaviourism is not just a metaphysical theory but also a linguistic one: Behaviourists make a metaphysical claim: Physicalism is true. We do not need to introduce the idea of non-physical “substances” or “properties” to explain human cognition. Every fact about humans, including how we think, feel and act, is a physical fact about physical things (made of matter, obeying the laws of physics, etc.). Cf. the discussion of ontological reduction below for more on this claim. Behaviourists make a linguistic claim (this is more radical!): Words like “thought,” “feeling,” and “desire” are just descriptions of how physical bodies are behaving. To say that someone is having a particular mental state is simply to say that their body is behaving (or is likely to behave) in a particular way. Behaviourists think that dualism is based on a misunderstanding of language— dualists took statements about behaviour and interpreted them as if they were statements about weird, “non-physical” things (mental states) in a kind of weird, “non-physical” space (the mind). Behaviourists often call this a “category mistake.” Cf. the discussions of category mistakes and analytic reduction below. What are the key arguments for behaviourism? You will never be asked to explain these, but they are useful to know (a) for 25-markers, and (b) in order to make sense of the odd claims that behaviourists make. Behaviourists take what is sometimes called the “linguistic approach” in philosophy. People who take this approach argue that philosophers need to pay more attention to how words (like “thought” or “feeling”) are used by non-philosophers in their ordinary ways of speaking. For example, rather than asking metaphysical questions like “what is a thought?”, they think philosophers should ask linguistic questions like “how is the word ‘thought’ used in particular sentences?” If philosophers lose sight of how language 3 normally works (outside philosophy classrooms), they will fall into error (or worse, nonsense). Oxford linguistic philosophers like this think that philosophical disagreements typically come from a misunderstanding of language. They make the following claims: 1. Philosophers ought to study words, not concepts. (E.g., to study goodness philosophers should study how the word “good”, and related words like “bad” and “right”, are used by actual people.) 2. A word gets its meaning from its context. For example, the meaning of the word “good” depends on the sentence it is being used in. (Consider the difference between “You’re a good person,” “Have a good day,” and “That’s a good spice mix for cooking lamb.”) 3. Philosophers have usually tried to analyse concepts by abstracting words away from their contexts. For example, when Socrates asked “what is goodness?” he explicitly rejected any attempt to understand goodness by studying particular good things. 1 If these claims are correct, then much philosophy is pure nonsense. Philosophers try to analyse concepts by separating them from their linguistic contexts. However, the context is precisely what gives a word (and, therefore, a concept) meaning. So it’s no wonder that philosophers can’t agree on anything! They have distanced themselves from anything that could ground their analysis. In a memorable turn of phrase, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” 2 There are two different schools of linguistic philosophy that could be used to defend behaviourism. The first school, the “logical positivists,” use the verification principle to argue for behaviourism. (These philosophers are typically hard behaviourists—a term I will explain later.) The second, the “ordinary language philosophers,” are not fans of the verification principle. They typically use the language learning argument. (These philosophers are typically soft behaviourists.) The verification principle Note: only some behaviourists use this argument—typically, “hard behaviourists” like Hempel. Context for the verification principle The first argument for behaviourism is one that you may remember from meta-ethics: the “verification principle” argument. Verificationists (philosophers who supported the verification principle) were concerned about the amount of “nonsense” in the world. “Nonsense” was language that appeared meaningful, but turned out not to describe anything at all. They were worried about this for two reasons: 1. Philosophy in the late 19th century was dominated by Hegel’s philosophical system of German idealism. To its critics, this was a baffling, abstract system that was utterly detached from any real-world concerns and built around the nonsensical notion of “the movement of the concept” (the idea that concepts themselves 1 Plato, Meno, 72b. 2 Philosophical Investigations, §38. 4 evolve through history into greater wholes that incorporate their opposites, e.g. Being is also Nothingness). 3 This kind of silly abstraction was also found in the work of many of the most famous and influential anti-Hegelian philosophers at the time—for example, Martin Heidegger’s celebrated Being an Nothingness which set out to analyse the “existential structures of determinate being.” Logical positivists loved to mock, in particular, Heidegger’s claim that “Das Nichts nichtet” (“The nothing nothings”) as a classic piece of pseudo-profound nonsense. The verificationists thought that this nonsensical approach was holding back both philosophy and academic research more broadly. 2. Outside philosophy, Europe was seeing a rise in totalitarianism. Both fascism and Soviet communism were ascendent. The logical positivists thought that pseudo- profound nonsense was being used as rhetoric to seduce people into supporting these political movements. For example, the phrase “Hitler is the self-assertion of the German nation” was, on their view, literally meaningless but psychologically powerful in recruiting people to Nazism. Notably, these two problems were interconnected. Marxism (the official ideology of the Soviet Union) was deeply inspired by Hegel, 4 and Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi party. To overcome these two problems, the verificationists needed a method for distinguishing between meaningful, useful language and meaningless, dangerous language. The verification principle itself Verificationists, then, needed a method for identifying and attacking nonsense. As we saw last year, they took inspiration from Hume’s Fork—an earlier philosophical attempt to separate meaningful beliefs from nonsensical ones. The verificationists took from Hume the Key term: the verification principle idea that meaningful language can only be about two things: the world, or language itself. All genuine propositions are either In other words, when we endorse a proposition, analytically true or empirically we are either communicating our beliefs about verifiable. the world, or we are talking about the definitions Analytically true: true by virtue of of words. Any “proposition” (descriptive meaning (tautologies and truths of sentence) that does neither of these things is a maths/logic) “pseudo-proposition” that has no meaning whatsoever. Empirically verifiable: one can specify which possible future The verificationists went a bit further sense-experiences would count as than Hume in formalising this idea. While Hume evidence for or against the claim had simply distinguished between “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact,” verificationists Anything that falls into neither of thought that the term “matters of fact” was too these categories is nonsense—it is vague. How can we distinguish genuine beliefs not a genuine proposition at all. 3 This characterisation is, needless to say, rejected by many Hegelians—and Hegel is now seeing a revival even in English-language linguistic philosophy. 4 Marx is often described as an “inverted Hegelian,” who took Hegel’s method but applied it to material economic conditions rather than concepts. 5 about the world (e.g. “I will get paid on Thursday”) from meaningless ones (e.g. “The Absolute enters into, but does not itself undergo, evolution” 5)? The principle they proposed was as follows: The verification principle: All meaningful statements fall into one of the following categories: First category: Analytic truths: tautologies (sentences that say the same thing twice, e.g. “the fact is true”) or truths of logic. Examples of analytically true sentences include “1 + 1 = 2”, “This puppy is a young dog”, and “It is impossible for something to both exist and not exist in the same way at the same time.” You can tell that these are analytically true because if you denied them, you would be contradicting yourself. If you denied these (e.g. “1 + 1 is not 2” or “this fact is false”), you would be saying something absurd and self-contradictory. Second category: Empirically verifiable sentences (i.e., sentences we could show to be true with experience). The sentences (i) “Bigfoot exists” and (ii) “The earth is round” are verifiable, because I can say what possible observation would count as evidence for or against them—in other words, what sense experiences would make us more or less likely to believe them. (Actually seeing Bigfoot walking around would be evidence for (i); looking at a picture of Earth taken from space would be evidence for (ii).) Statements like “The Nothing nothings,” “The Absolute enters into evolution” and “Hitler is the self-expression of the German nation” are not tautologies, because you can deny them without contradicting yourself. The sentence “The Absolute does not enter into evolution” does not contain any grammatical or logical error. So they are not analytic truths. However, these sentences are not empirically verifiable either: Heidegger does not think that there are particular sense experiences which could count as evidence for or against the sentence “The Nothing nothings.” This means that, if the verification principle is correct, these three sentences are nonsense. Last year, we saw that Ayer, the most famous verificationist, thought that moral language was nonsense. 6 He also thought that aesthetic language (i.e. language about beauty and ugliness) and religious language (i.e. language about the nature of God) were nonsense, too. In the Metaphysics of Mind module, we look at the verificationist Carl Hempel. Hempel is a “hard behaviourist” (see below), and he thought that much of what philosophers have said about the mind, or mental states, is nonsense. The statement “we have private, non-physical mental states” is neither a tautology, nor is it empirically verifiable, so it is meaningless. It’s not empirically verifiable, because there is no empirical observation that could ever show us that other people are not P-zombies. (This was the reason that dualists face a “problem of other minds.”) It’s not a tautology, 5 A.J. Ayer mocks this claim—which he paraphrased from the Hegelian F.H. Bradley—as an example of philosophical nonsense. 6 Only some verificationists thought this—but they are the ones that we study in the A-level. So it is fine to say that “verificationists think this.” 6 because (even a dualist would admit!) there is no logical contradiction in the sentence “We do not have private, non-physical mental states.” However, Hempel did not think that talk of “feelings,” “thoughts,” “desires,” or many of the other terms we ordinarily use to talk about people’s mental lives were meaningless. Rather, Hempel thought that with sufficient scientific analysis, these terms could be made meaningful by providing verification conditions to sentences like “He is feeling pain right now.” (See the “Hard vs. Soft Behaviourism” section below for more detail on this.) In other words, Hempel thought that the way that philosophers talk about mental states is currently nonsense, but it would be better to redefine these concepts (into something empirically verifiable) rather than abandon them. The Language-Learning Argument Note: only some behaviourists make this argument—typically the “soft” behaviourists like Ryle. A generation after Hempel, the verification principle was less popular. 7 In general, logical positivism itself came to be seen as too abstract and formal by linguistic philosophers. “Ordinary Language” philosophers, inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein 8 argued that descriptive sentences are hugely diverse in their structure, function and usage. To divide meaningful language into just two categories was, they thought, a vast oversimplification. Nevertheless, they continued to be sceptical about Descartes, and indeed about all philosophers who tried to study the nature of “things” (e.g. minds and mental states) without studying the ways that ordinary people used the relevant words. It was a mistake, in their view, for Descartes to study the nature of “thought” rather than the ways in which ordinary people used the word “think” in phrases like “I think I’ll order the spaghetti” and “didn’t you think about how your actions were affecting me?”. The ordinary language philosophers had a simpler argument against dualism than the verificationists. Remember: behaviourists (both kinds) think that philosophers should stop analysing concepts, and start analysing the way that words are actually used in sentences. So, rather than asking “what is a mental state,” they would ask questions like: “What does the word ‘pain’ mean in the sentence ‘he is in pain’?” “What does the word ‘think’ mean in the sentence ‘I think it’s going to rain’?” “What does the word ‘imagine’ mean in the sentence ‘she is imagining a pink elephant’?” 7 One reason for this, which we studied last year, is that the verification principle appears to be self-refuting—in other words, the statement “all meaningful statements are either analytically true or empirically verifiable” seems to be neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable. 8 Wittgenstein was an important inspiration both for the logical positivists and for the ordinary language philosophers. Wittgenstein’s first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was a foundational text for the logical positivists, but later in his life Wittgenstein rejected his earlier work. His Philosophical Investigations, in turn, became a foundational text for ordinary language philosophy. It is common for scholars to treat “Early Wittgenstein” and “Late Wittgenstein” as if they were two separate philosophers. 7 To answer these questions, we must identify what it means to use these words correctly. To do that, we must identify what it means to use them incorrectly. One way to illustrate this idea would be to examine how we teach “mentalistic” words to young children. How do we work out if a young child has learned the word “angry,” for example? Well, when teaching it, either you point out someone else’s anger- behaviour (going red in the face, shouting, etc.), or you observe the child is exhibiting anger-behaviour themselves, and you tell them “That’s anger.” Then, to check if the child has learned it, you check if they can use it to correctly identify other people’s anger-behaviour. But you could never observe someone’s “non-physical states” directly, so you could never (a) point them out to the child, or (b) check if the child is pointing them out to you. Behaviourists take this to mean that if the word “anger” has any meaning, it cannot be the description of a private mental state—if it was, then it would be impossible to teach the word to others. Rather, the word “anger” must be a description of a set of observable behaviours. The function of the word “angry” is to identify these behaviours. The idea that anger is a non-physical, private state is (behaviourists argue) absurd, because it would be impossible for a private state to play any role in a public linguistic practice. 9 The idea that there are private mental states is a silly mistake that Descartes is to blame for—in other words, dualism comes from bad philosophy, not from common sense. (See the section on “category mistakes” below for more detail on this.) Practice questions: 1. State Ayer’s verification principle (3 marks) a. This question was asked in the 2024 A-level paper and the 2020 A-level paper. 2. How could a hard behaviourist use the verification principle to argue for behaviourism? (5 marks) 3. Why would a hard behaviourist say that the statement “Thoughts are non- physical states” is meaningless? (12 marks) 9 This is a simplified version of Wittgenstein’s “private language” argument, from the Philosophical Investigations. Cf. quote 4 below. 8 Analytic and Ontological Reduction Key term: Reduction Behaviourism is a reductionist theory. Reductive Reducing one thing to another materialists don’t just say that mental states are a means showing that, in reality, kind of physical state: they also try to show how we they are actually the same thing. can explain mental states in terms of physical For example, “we have reduced states. If a theory “reduces” mental states to water to H2O” means “water is just physical states, that means that it shows how the H2O.” Although we have two words we use to describe mental states (e.g. terms, they both refer to the same perceiving, remembering, desiring, imagining…) thing in reality. actually refer to some kind of physical state (e.g. a For more on this concept, see brain state or a set of behaviours). Student Question of the Day, 12/13/24 There are two kinds of reduction: ontological reduction and analytic reduction. Behaviourists (unlike some other theories we will study) are reductionists in both of these ways: Ontological reduction: An ontological reduction takes one kind of thing (e.g. a rainbow) and argues that, factually, it is really another kind of thing (e.g. light refracting through rain). For example, “Rainbows are refracted light”, “Water is H2O,” and “Pain is firing C-fibres” are ontological reductions. These are statements about reality (i.e., ontology). Some (but not all) ontological reductionists are also analytic reductionists. Analytic (or “semantic”) reduction: An analytic reduction takes one word (e.g. “puppy”) and explains its meaning in terms of other words (e.g. “young dog”). To analytically reduce one word (or set of words) to another means to fully translate it, without loss of meaning, into different words. For example, “A puppy is a young dog” is an analytic reduction. This is a statement about meaning (i.e., language). All analytic reductionists are ontological reductionists. (If, for example, “’Puppy’ means ‘young dog’” is true, then obviously all puppies will also be young dogs.) Importantly, reductionists don’t deny that the thing they have reduced exists! Reductionists would agree that rainbows, water, pain, puppies and anger all exist, but they would add that we can explain what they are in more detail if we look at the underlying science or the underlying language/conceptual scheme. (In other words, a reductionist about rainbows would say “Rainbows exist, and they are just refracted light.”) Behaviourists are analytic reductionists (which means that they are also ontological reductionists). In other words, behaviourists don’t claim that science has shown us what mental states are. Rather, they claim that mental-state terms like “thought,” “pain,” “feeling” and “desire” have always just been descriptions of behaviour. If we correctly understand how language works, we will realise that descriptions of behaviour and descriptions of mental states are the same thing. We will also look at some materialist theories that are not analytically reductionist: Mind-brain type identity theory is ontologically reductionist, but not analytically reductionist. 9 Eliminative materialism is not reductionist. (It doesn’t try to explain mental states in terms of physical states—it simply says we should stop talking about mental states because they don’t exist.) There are also (not in the course) versions of materialism that are neither reductionist nor eliminativist. These theories say that mental states are physical states, but our conceptual scheme is too limited to understand why or how. Thomas Nagel discusses a position like this in his paper ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ 10 Analytically Ontologically Theory Explanation reductionist? reductionist? Mental states are not identical to any physical Dualism No No state (they are a different thing) Mental-state-terms (e.g. “thought,” “feeling,” Behaviourism Yes Yes or “desire”) are just descriptions of behaviour Science has identified particular types of Mind-brain mental state (e.g. “pain”) with particular type identity No Yes types of brain state (e.g. “firing C-fibres”)— theory i.e., pain is firing C-fibres. Eliminative Mental states don’t exist. They are not No No materialism identical to anything that exists. Functionalists think that mental states are identical to functional states of the human Functionalism Depends Yes organism. Different functionalists have different views about whether this can be shown analytically. Practice questions: What is the difference between analytic reduction and ontological reduction? (5 marks) In what sense is behaviourism a reductionist theory? (5 marks) 10 You can read his paper here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183914. It is also reprinted in his book Mortal Questions, in the LRC. 10 Hard vs. Soft Behaviourism How AQA defines hard behaviourism: Hard behaviourist reduction “[Hard behaviourists believe that] all Although they agree that mental states can propositions about mental states can be be analytically reduced to states of the reduced without loss of meaning to body (and, in particular, bodily propositions that exclusively use the movements), behaviourists disagree about language of physics to talk about bodily how. In the A-level, we look at two kinds states or movements.” of behaviourism. In an exam, you could define hard “Hard behaviourists” (like Carl behaviourism simply by writing this Hempel) are verificationists. They want to sentence and giving an example of a “translate” sentences that use mental- hard behaviourist reduction (see the state terms (e.g. “Steve thinks it’s going “Tom is sad” example on this page or to rain”/”Robin wants to get some lunch”) the “Paul has a toothache” example in into sentences that are empirically quote 1. verifiable. In other words, they want to give these sentences precise verification conditions. This means identifying observations which would serve as evidence for or against the sentences being true. Hard behaviourists think that this work should be done by scientists. They reduce descriptions of mental states to descriptions of actual states and movements of the body. These are called “test sentences.” For example, consider the sentence “Tom is sad.” A behaviourist would say that this sentence is true if, upon observing Tom, you observe that a sufficient number of the following test sentences are true: Tom is crying Tom is saying ‘I am sad’ Tom’s blood shows elevated levels of such-and-such hormones Tom is not leaving his room Tom is listening to Sufjan Stevens again Etc. (There are a very large number of such sentences.) One important thing to note is that hard behaviourists don’t just reduce mental states to what we would call “behaviour.” Rather, they reduce mental states to any observable state of the body—including neurological states (e.g. what is going on in Tom’s brain/nervous system) and physiological states (e.g. Tom’s heart rate, blood pressure, involuntary movements, etc.). Ultimately, hard behaviourists think that, in order to be meaningful, these statements should be reducible to statements about physics—so, statements about crying could be further translated into statements about liquid coming from tear ducts. See quote 1 below for Hempel’s analysis of the statement “Paul has a toothache.” 11 Soft behaviourist reduction How AQA defines soft “Soft behaviourists” (like Gilbert Ryle) usually reject behaviourism: the verification principle. They are happy to accept vaguer, less “scientific” descriptions of behaviour, as “propositions about mental long as these are still descriptions of something that states are propositions is publicly observable (i.e. not about private, about behavioural unobservable inner experiences). Soft behaviourists dispositions (ie propositions are happy to accept that such a reduction may never that use ordinary language” be practically possible to complete—but they would add that, no matter how much detail we go into, we will never need to add the idea of private, nonphysical states to explain the meaning of mental-state terms. (Doing so would be a category mistake—see next section). There are three key ways in which soft behaviourists are different from hard behaviourists: Firstly (and most importantly) soft behaviourists reduce mental-state- language to behavioural dispositions, not to behaviours. A behavioural disposition is a description of how someone is likely to behave in particular circumstances. For example, “Ice has a melting-point of 0˚” means “Ice is disposed to melt at 0˚.” This is a true statement about the dispositions of ice, even if the ice isn’t currently melting. (The technical term for these statements is “subjunctive conditional.” A subjective conditional is a set of claims about what a person or thing would be likely to do in particular circumstances.) For example, “Tom is sad” means “Tom is likely to cry,” “If we asked him, Tom would be likely to say ‘I am sad’”, “If you passed him the aux cord, Tom would put on some Sufjan Stevens,” etc. Importantly, these statements are hypothetical—the last of these is true even if you never pass Tom the aux. Secondly, soft behaviourists reduce mental-state-talk to “ordinary language,” not to physics. In other words, it’s fine to reduce something like “Tom has a persecution complex” to something like “Tom will get defensive if criticised,” even though this is a bit vague. Soft behaviourists would claim that mental state terms are imprecise, but useful, descriptions of people’s behavioural dispositions. The reason that they are happy to be less precise here is that while hard behaviourists were trying to integrate mental-state talk into science, soft behaviourists are simply trying to clear up problems in philosophy that had been caused by people misinterpreting mentalistic language. Thirdly, soft behaviourists don’t think that we could ever practically reduce most mental state terms to behavioural dispositions, because they are so complex. (It would be like trying to offer a complete analysis of an adjective like “funny” or “charismatic,” which described every possible way it could be expressed in every possible situation.) Nevertheless, soft behaviourists think that in principle (with unlimited time) such a reduction could be performed. Hard behaviourists and soft behaviourists often view their philosophical project quite differently. Hard behaviourists like Hempel typically wanted to integrate psychology into the other sciences like biology and chemistry—in other words, their goal was to support science. Soft behaviourists, on the other hand, often saw their role as more “therapeutic”: they wanted to get rid of some bad metaphysics that had been leading 12 philosophy into dead ends. This is one reason that hard behaviourists care much more about precision than soft behaviourists. Practice questions: 1. What is a behavioural disposition? (3 marks) 2. What is hard behaviourism? (3 marks) a. This question was asked in 2020. 3. What is soft behaviourism? (3 marks) 4. Explain the difference between hard and soft behaviourism. (5 marks) Category Mistakes Gilbert Ryle (a soft behaviourist) famously accused dualist philosophers of making a category mistake. A category mistake is a kind of linguistic or logical error, in which we place a word or concept in the wrong logical category. Ryle’s most famous example of this is the university example. A tourist visits Oxford, and in shown around the city by one of the university lecturers. The lecturer shows him the university library, the university museum, the different colleges and student dorms, the administrative buildings, the philosophy department, etc. The tourist then says “Thank you very much, but could you please show me the university now?” Obviously, the tourist has made a mistake. He has been shown the university— all of the buildings he has seen are part of the university. However, he seems to think that the university is an additional building, in addition to the ones he has seen. As Ryle puts it, he has made a category mistake: the tourist thought that, if you listed the buildings in Oxford, it would look something like: Tourist’s view: Category: buildings in Oxford. Bodleian Library, Trinity College, Ashmolean Museum, and Oxford University… But “Oxford University” is not the same kind of thing as these other buildings—in fact, it is not a building at all. It does not belong in the same logical category as them. Rather, it is a way of describing how all these buildings relate to each other. (To illustrate this point, imagine that Oxford University went bankrupt tomorrow and ceased to exist. All the buildings would still be there! But Oxford University would not.) Correct view: Category: buildings in Oxford. Bodleian Library, Trinity College, Ashmolean Museum… Category: institutions in Oxford. Oxford University… Category mistakes occur when confusing grammar leads us to make logical mistakes. For example, Ryle uses the joke “She was in a flood of tears and a sedan chair.” This sentence implies that “a flood of tears” and “a sedan chair” are the same kind of thing (i.e. they fit in the same logical category), because they are both things that a person 13 can be “in.” But in fact, the word “in” means very different things in “in a flood of tears” and “in a sedan chair.” In the first phrase, it describes a state; in the second phrase, it describes a location. This is why it would be a mistake to ask: “what was she in? A flood of tears, or a sedan chair?” Ryle thinks that philosophers have made the same kind of mistake with “the mind.” Because minds and mental states are nouns, it is tempting to treat them as a kind of non-physical object. It is a category mistake to say that Tom has… A heart, a stomach, a brain, two lungs, two kidneys, and a mind …or… A heart, a stomach, a brain, two lungs, two kidneys, a visual perception of his laptop screen, a feeling of hunger, a desire to order some pizza… …because the mind (or the mental states) are not things in the same way that a heart or lung is a thing. Rather, the underlined words above are descriptions of the ways that Tom’s body is acting, or is likely to act. All that “Tom’s desire to order pizza” is is a description of what Tom is likely to do in the future (i.e., he is likely to order some pizza if the opportunity arises). Grammatically, it makes sense to talk about “Tom’s brain” and “Tom’s mind.” But Ryle argues that we should not be fooled by the similar grammar—we should not interpret these as falling in the same logical category (“parts of Tom”). According to Ryle, the question: “Is that a state of Tom’s body or Tom’s mind?” is as ridiculous as the question “Which was she in? A flood of tears or a sedan chair?”. To see Ryle’s account of category mistakes, cf. quote 2, as well as the Jeffrey Kaplan video on the topic here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA-2Gc3PztI&t=1s Practice questions: 1. Explain Ryle’s claim that substance dualism makes a ‘category mistake’. (5 marks) This question was asked in 2019. What are the key arguments against behaviourism? The specification includes four types of argument against behaviourism: “Dualist arguments against behaviourism” o The zombie argument o The knowledge argument o The conceivability argument o The indivisibility argument “The distinctness of mental states from behaviour” o The Super-Spartans argument (Hilary Putnam) o The perfect actors argument “Issues defining mental states satisfactorily” o The circularity problem 14 o The multiple realisability problem The asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of other people’s mental states. There is one further argument, which we will discuss in class. This is one of the most significant arguments against behaviourism, even though it is not explicitly mentioned in the specification: The problem of mental causation “Super Spartans” and perfect actors Behaviourists are committed to the following view: Key claim of behaviourism: All descriptions of someone’s mental states are really just descriptions of their behaviour (or their behavioural dispositions). This key claim implies two controversial other claims… Implication 1: if two individuals are behaving [or are disposed to behave] in exactly the same way, then they have the same mental states. Implication 2: if someone is not exhibiting [and is not disposed to exhibit] any relevant behaviours, then they do not have the associated mental state. However, there are a pair of thought experiments that attack the key claim above by showing that the implications are false. These are the perfect actors criticism, which rejects implication 1, and the Super Spartans criticism, which rejects implication 2. Perfect Actors This criticism is fairly weak, and most philosophers agree that the Super Spartans criticism (below) is more threatening to behaviourism. As seen above, behaviourism seems to imply that if two people are behaving in exactly the same way, then they have the same mental states. However, we can imagine a number of situations where people act as if they have a mental state without actually having it: A footballer “diving” (faking an injury) in order to get the referee to punish the other team. (The footballer is exhibiting pain-behaviour without actually having the mental state of pain.) A defendant in a trial pretending to be insane in order to receive a more lenient sentence. (The defendant is exhibiting delusion-behaviour without actually having the mental state of paranoid delusions.) An actor in a film pretending to be grieving without Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who won an Oscar last year for her genuinely experiencing the mental state of grief. (The performance as a grieving actor is exhibiting grief-behaviour without actually mother in The Holdovers. having the mental state of grief.) 15 If behaviourism was true (this criticism goes), the footballer must actually be in pain; the defendant must actually be experiencing paranoid delusions, and the actor must actually be experiencing grief. But this is absurd. We can reconstruct the criticism as follows: P1: If behaviourism was true, then if someone exhibits a sufficient number of the relevant behaviours, then that person must be experiencing the associated mental state. P2: It is possible for people to exhibit the relevant behaviours without experiencing the associated mental state (e.g. when they are acting). C: Therefore, behaviourism is not true. How a behaviourist could respond [You will never be required to explain any of these, but it is useful to learn at least one for the essay]: Option 1 (only available to hard behaviourists): Perfect actors do not have all of the associated physiological states (reject P2). Hard behaviourists define “behaviour” as any observable state of the body—including states of the blood and central nervous system (including the brain). However, no actor is able to actually control all of their brain states or hormone levels. This means that there are at least some behavioural differences between people actually experiencing a mental state on the one hand, and actors imitating it on the other. (Conversely, if actors could genuinely control their brain states—e.g. a footballer causing her C-fibres to fire—then we would have to accept that they now have the associated mental state as well. Option 2 (only available to soft behaviourists): Perfect actors do not have the associated behavioural dispositions. Soft behaviourists say that mental states are behavioural dispositions (how a person is likely to act in future situations) not the behaviours themselves. This means that a soft behaviourist could deal with the above examples as follows: o A footballer who is genuinely injured is disposed to continue exhibiting pain-behaviour after the referee has made their call; a footballer who “dived” will stop. o Someone who is actually experiencing paranoid delusions is disposed to continue expressing these delusions after sentencing; someone who is faking insanity is not disposed to do this. o A grieving person will not change their behaviour if someone shouts “cut”; an actor is disposed to only exhibit grief behaviour when the camera is rolling (and in rehearsals, etc.). Da’Vine Joy Randolph, no longer exhibiting grief- behaviour. 16 Super Spartans (and Super-Super-Spartans) Super Spartan: A being Putnam asks us to imagine a group of (extremely macho who can feel pain, but and stoic) humans who have trained themselves not to never exhibits any pain- show when they are in pain. They are able to completely behaviour whatsoever. suppress their pain-behaviour, so there is no behavioural sign at all that they are in pain. They don’t cry, they don’t Super-Super Spartan: A wince, they don’t say ouch, etc. They still know they are super Spartan who also in pain, but they don’t act like it. never even reports that they are in pain. Sometimes people discuss the even more extreme example of “Super-Super Spartans”, who never even say that they are in pain. Super (super) Spartans causes a problem for behaviourists because such beings seemingly experience pain but they do not show any pain behaviour. This directly contradicts implication 2, above. Super (super) Spartans do not exhibit pain behaviour, and they are not even disposed to show pain behaviour. But if this is true, then surely pain can’t be the same as pain-behaviour! So the key claim above is also false. We could reconstruct this criticism as follows: Against hard behaviourism Against soft behaviourism P1: If hard behaviourism was true, it P1: If soft behaviourism was true, it would be inconceivable for any being to would be inconceivable for any being to experience a mental state without experience a mental state without having exhibiting any associated behaviours. any associated behavioural dispositions. P2: Super-Spartans experience the P2: Super-Spartans experience the mental state of pain without exhibiting mental state of pain without being any pain-behaviour. disposed to exhibit pain-behaviour. P3: Super-Spartans are conceivable. P3: Super-Spartans are conceivable. C: Therefore, hard behaviourism is not C: Therefore, soft behaviourism is not true. true. Note: this is my reconstruction—you may find it set out in different ways elsewhere. How a behaviourist could reply [You will never be required to explain any of these, but it is useful to learn at least one for the essay] Option 1 (available to all behaviourists): Super Spartans are inconceivable (reject P3). A behaviourist could deny that it is conceivable that someone could experience pain without showing it or being disposed to show it. Perhaps, a behaviourist could say, someone who suppressed their pain as effectively as the Super Spartans would simply not experience pain at all! Or, alternatively, perhaps they would still show it in some way (e.g. by ever-so-slightly tensing 17 their muscles, or by admitting in ten years that, yes, having their arms chopped off was painful). Option 2 (only available to soft behaviourists): Super Spartans are still disposed to exhibit pain-behaviour (reject P2 or P3). A soft behaviourist could say that even if they always suppress it, a Super Spartan would still have a disposition to express their pain. In other words, they would be expressing their pain if only they weren’t in such a macho culture. Often dispositions are never expressed— for example, a piece of coal is flammable (it has the disposition to catch fire) even if it never encounters a flame. Similarly, a Super Spartan may experience pain (have the disposition to cry, say “ouch,” etc.) even if they never encounter a society where that is acceptable. Option 3 (only available to hard behaviourists): Super Spartans would still have observable physiological states associated with pain (reject P2 or P3). A hard behaviourist like Carl Hempel could point out that, by “behaviour,” hard behaviourists mean any observable state of the body. This includes things like the state of the blood and nervous system. This would mean that, to truly suppress their pain behaviour, the Super Spartans would have to prevent their C-fibres from firing or their pituitary glands from secreting cortisol. It seems obvious that if someone could do this, they really could stop themselves from feeling pain. Practice questions: 1. Explain the issue ‘Super-Spartans’ pose for ‘hard’ behaviourism. (5 marks) This question was asked in 2023. 2. Outline the “perfect actors” criticism of ‘hard’ behaviourism. (5 marks) 3. Explain the theory of soft behaviourism and how that theory is challenged by Putnam’s ‘Super-Spartans’ thought experiment. (12 marks) Issues with defining mental states in terms of behaviour Carl Hempel (a hard behaviourist) argued that, in principle, we could entirely replace mentalistic language with descriptions of the physical movements of the body. As the AQA specification puts it, he thought that “all propositions about mental states can be reduced without loss of meaning to propositions that exclusively use the language of physics to talk about bodily states/movements.” For example, words and phrases like “pain,” “anxiety,” “remembering the taste of a biscuit,” “wanting a cupcake,” “thinking about the philosophy of mind” could be rewritten without loss of meaning as descriptions of the behaviour of the human body. (Cf. Hempel’s toothache example below, in quote 1.) While Ryle is not as extreme as this, he still thinks that mental-state-terms are nothing more than descriptions of someone’s behavioural dispositions. For example, “She is angry” just means “She is disposed to anger-behaviour.” If we could list every single behaviour included under the term “anger-behaviour,” we would no longer need the term “anger.” 18 Although some of the most famous reductions, such as Hempel’s toothache example, seem to be successful on these grounds, this method becomes problematic when we look at more complex mental states (e.g. “desire for a cupcake”). There are two fundamental issues that arise here: The multiple realisability problem: it is impossible to fully reduce mental state terms to behaviouristic ones, because each mental state is associated with different behaviours in different people (or in the same person at different times). The circularity problem: it is impossible to fully reduce mental state terms to behaviouristic ones, because if we get rid of all mental state terms it will be impossible to explain why particular behaviours belong together (as examples of the same mental state) and when they should be counted as examples of that mental state. The first issue with defining mental states: The multiple realisability problem Multiple realisability is a major problem for all of the reductionist theories we examine (not just behaviourism). Reductionist theories all agree that particular kinds of mental states are identical to particular kinds of physical states. (“Identical to” means “the same thing as”—see “Identity” in the glossary for more detail.) For example, identity theorists (who we will look at in a few weeks) will say that pain is firing c-fibres (i.e., pain is identical to firing c-fibres). Behaviourists argue that mental states are identical to behavioural states or behavioural dispositions. Because they are analytic reductionists (see the section on “analytic and ontological reduction” above), behaviourists even think that the concept of a mental state is nothing more than the concept of the associated behaviours. However, there is a problem with this approach. Many mental states are expressed in extremely different behaviours from person to person. For example, consider hunger. Here are some ways that different people act when they feel hungry: Crying (if you are a baby) Sucking on your thumb (if you are a baby) Turning on the oven Grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl Going to a café Eating some minty chewing gum Opening the Deliveroo app on your phone Ringing the bell to summon your butler Doing nothing (if, e.g., you are fasting, or on hunger Chasing a bird with a strike, or if you have just eaten a much-too-small meal knife and fork but don’t want to insult your host) Saying “I’m hungry” Moving your dominant hand in a circular motion over your belly (the sign for “I’m hungry” in British sign language) Saying “I could murder a hot dog right now” Saying “I’m not hungry” (if, e.g., you want to reassure someone) Texting “cheeky nandos? ” to your group chat Drooling 19 Grimacing Tossing and turning in bed because you can’t sleep Zoning out Getting irritable In other words, the mental state of “being hungry” is multiply realisable in behaviour. If “being hungry” is nothing but a set of behaviours, there seem to be multiple behaviours that realise it (i.e. multiple behaviours that “make it real”). Or, to say the same thing, “feeling hungry” can be expressed in a very wide range of behaviours. Does this mean that “drooling” expresses a different mental state to “grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl”? (Perhaps we could call these hunger1 and hunger2.) Or does this mean that hunger is a disposition to cry or suck your thumb or turn on the oven or grab a banana or...? Either approach seems unsatisfying, especially when we consider the ways in which the list of associated behaviours would differ from person to person. For example, the full list of hunger-behaviours is very different for a vegan and a meat-eater—but it seems ridiculous to say that this means hunger is a different feeling depending on whether you are a vegan or a meat-eater. Caution: mistake in textbook The multiple realisability problem: Behaviourists claim that mental states are The Cardinal textbook includes an just sets of behaviours. But different people important mistake on the topic of multiple have different sets of behaviours associated realisability. The correct way to understand with the same mental state (and the same multiple realisability is that one mental person might have a different set of state can be realised by many behaviours. behaviours associated with it at different However, the textbook incorrectly says that times). This implies, absurdly, that different one behaviour realising many mental states people cannot experience the same mental (e.g. crying expressing happiness or state unless they also act in the same way. sadness) would be an example of multiple realisability too. The problem of specific circularity: if we get rid of a mental-state concept (e.g. hunger), it becomes unclear why a particular group of behaviours (e.g. hunger-behaviours) The second issue with defining mental belong in the same category. So the states: the circularity problem mental-state concept of “hunger” possesses You may have noticed another problem additional explanatory power, which we lose with the example above: It seems like we if we just talk about behaviour. need the idea of the mental state of The problem of general circularity: if we are “feeling hungry” in order to explain why trying to explain why a particular set of these behaviours are all examples of it. If behaviours counts as an expression of a we didn’t already have the concept of particular mental state, we need to talk hunger, it would be unclear what eating about how that mental state is interacting some minty chewing gum, ringing the bell with other mental states. But this means to summon your butler, and tossing and that it is impossible to reduce all mental states to behaviours at the same time. turning in bed have in common. But if this is true, then behaviourists could never Note: you only need to learn one of the claim to have fully reduced the circularity problems—you can choose which (psychological) term “feeling hungry” to one. these observable behaviours. 20 The problem that I have just described is sometimes called the problem of specific circularity. We could also put it in another, broader way. Think back to the vegan and the meat-eater. Let’s imagine that they are both hungry, but they are at a barbecue where only meat is being served. Why will their behaviours (or behavioural dispositions) be different? The obvious answer is that the vegan believes that it is wrong to eat meat. In other words, the vegan has different hunger-behaviours because their mental state of hunger is interacting with their other mental states (their beliefs about what is right/wrong). So, the mental state of hunger could be reduced to “eating meat if it’s the only thing on the menu, but only if you think it’s morally okay to do so.” However, this is a non-starter for behaviourists, because in order to reduce hunger to behaviour, the behaviourist has had to introduce other mental-state concepts to explain which behaviours count in which situations. This is called the problem of general circularity. How hard behaviourists can respond to the multiple realisability and circularity problems [You will never be required to explain any of these, but it is useful to learn at least one for the essay] Option 1: include physiological observations as part of the reduction. Remember, hard behaviourists reduce mental states to any observable state of the body— not just what we conventionally call “behaviours.” This means that they don’t just reduce things like hunger to sets of actions (e.g. ordering a takeout). They would also say that hunger is a set of neural signals from the gastrointestinal tract, elevated levels of neuropeptide Y, etc. These are likely to be the same across all hungry people, regardless of their other behaviours. Option 2 [can be taken at the same time as option 1]: mental state terms are “cluster concepts.” Take another look at Hempel’s reduction of “Paul has a toothache” (Quote 1). Hempel is not saying that all of these need to be true— only that several of them have to be true. The same could be said of our list a couple of pages ago. Hunger is not identical to any of these behaviours individually—but the greater the number of them someone is exhibiting, the more confident we can be in saying that they are hungry. How soft behaviourists can respond to the multiple realisability and circularity problems. [You will never be required to explain any of these, but it is useful to learn at least one for the essay] Soft behaviourists have a much easier time dealing with these issues, since soft behaviourists never claimed that it is practically possible to reduce mental state terms to all of their associated behavioural dispositions. There are an infinite number of possible situations, and a full reduction of a mental state term to a set of behavioural dispositions would have to specify how any possible person would act in any one of these possible situations. This is obviously absurd. Whereas the hard behaviourists made the positive claim that mental state terms can be fully translated into descriptions of observable behaviour, soft behaviourists only make the negative claim that no matter how much reducing we do, we will never need 21 to introduce the idea of private, non-physical properties/substances to identify what state someone is in. The reason that we have mental state terms is that they serve as a useful shorthand for “this disposition, that disposition, and so on and so on”—it is not that they refer to something extra beyond all the dispositions. Soft behaviourists can deal with the multiple realisability and circularity problems by saying that ordinary language is vague and fuzzy, and any attempt to list all of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the proper application of a particular term is likely to end in failure. This is no more problematic when it comes to reducing mental states to behavioural terms than it is when it comes to any other part of language. Practice questions: 1. Explain the view that ‘hard’ behaviourists cannot satisfactorily define mental states due to the multiple realisability of mental states in behaviour. (5 marks) This question was asked in 2021. 2. Explain the view that soft behaviourists cannot satisfactorily define mental states in a non-circular way. (5 marks) The asymmetry problem This is a problem about behaviourists’ ability to account for introspective self- knowledge. For behaviourists, mental states are behaviours (hard behaviourism) or behavioural dispositions (soft behaviourism). This means that we know about them in the way we know about behaviour—through observation of what other people’s bodies (including their face, vocal cords, etc.) are doing. However, this leads to quite a counterintuitive place. For a behaviourist, the way someone finds out that they are, e.g., sad is by observing that they are crying or that their own voice is quivering. The way someone finds out that they are imagining a pink elephant is by observing that they are exhibiting “imagining-a-pink-elephant” behaviour (e.g., they are doing things like saying “I am imagining a pink elephant”). Fundamentally, for behaviourists, we learn about our own mental states in the same way that we learn about other people’s: by observing behaviour. Behaviourists, then, deny a common assumption about our mental lives: that each person knows their own mental states in a different (“asymmetrical”) way to how they know about other people’s mental states. Most of us would say that I can only learn about other people’s mental states by observing their behaviour, but when it comes to my own mental states, I can directly observe them through introspection. Most of us would say that I can discover whether other people are imagining pink elephants by observing their behaviour, but if I am imagining pink elephants, I “just know” it. The technical way of putting this point is to say that behaviourists deny that we have direct access to our own mental states (sometimes called privileged access). In other words, they deny that each of us has a special way of observing our own mental 22 states: they deny that I observe my mental states directly, whereas I can only discover other people’s indirectly, by making inferences from their behaviour. But this is obviously ridiculous. How a behaviourist could respond Behaviourists can respond to this by saying that I know my behaviour so well that, although I am using the same kinds of reasoning to discover my own behaviour as I use to discover other people’s, I am so much better at observing my own behaviours that it seems like there is something different going on. My knowledge of my own mental states is different from my knowledge of other people’s mental states, but this is a difference in degree (I am simply much more familiar with my own behaviour than other people’s), not a difference in kind (I don’t have a different, better kind of access to my own mental states). Practice questions: 1. Explain why the asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of other people’s mental states is problematic for philosophical behaviourism. (5 marks) This question was asked in 2022. The Problem of Mental Causation [Not in spec] Behaviourists claim that mental states are nothing more than behaviours (hard) or dispositions to behave (soft). However, if this is true then behaviourists have to reject the idea that mental states cause behaviour. A thing cannot cause itself. 11 For example, how would a behaviourist reduce the sentence “She shouted at them because she was angry” into a set of descriptions of behaviour? Hard behaviourism: She shouted because she was exhibiting anger-behaviour (i.e., she shouted because she was shouting) Soft behaviourism: She shouted because she had a disposition to exhibit anger- behaviour (i.e., she shouted because she had a disposition to shout) These reductions deprive us of a lot of explanatory power. If we reduce mental states to behaviours, then we lose the ability to explain why someone was exhibiting those behaviours (e.g. what caused them). Behaviourists lose the ability to distinguish between: She shouted at them because she was angry at them She shouted at them because the room was very noisy She shouted at them because she was excited She shouted at them because she thought they had poor hearing Interactionist dualist theories of mind (and, as we will see, some other physicalist ones) offer genuine causal explanations of behaviour. Interactionists will argue, for example, 11 With the possible exception of God—as you have seen in the cosmological argument topic. 23 that “She shouted because her feeling of anger made her want to shout.” Here, we have (what seems to be) a genuine “X caused Y” explanation—the kind of thing that behaviourism lacks. The problem of mental causation, then, relies on two key claims: 1. It is important that a theory of mind explains what causes particular behaviours. (At the very least, it should explain the causes of behaviour as well as ordinary language does.) 2. Behaviourism makes it impossible to have genuinely informative explanations of what caused particular behaviours. Both of the explanations above seem to reject the intuitive idea that mental states (e.g. anger) can cause behaviour. The only kind of mental causation that behaviourists accept is the actualisation of a disposition—the kind of causation that appears in sentences like “the glass broke because it was fragile” or “the paper caught fire because it was flammable.” (For more on this, see quote 6.) However, this is a very minimal kind of causation, and will be unsatisfactory to many people. How a behaviourist could respond Behaviourists have a couple of ways of responding to this problem. Firstly, hard behaviourists could argue that by stripping mentalistic language of its bad Cartesian metaphysical implications, we can integrate it into physical science. For example, although we may no longer be able to say that someone’s anger caused their anger- behaviour, if we can turn mentalistic language into something verifiable we can see what other kinds of phenomena cause anger-behaviour. For example, we may become able to say “She shouted because her cortisol levels were high and her neurones were in such-and-such a state.” Soft behaviourists have an easier time. Ryle doesn’t want to eliminate or “translate” mentalistic language, and he thinks that we will never practically be able to identify all of the behaviours that are associated with anger. Rather, he is simply making the more moderate point that, when we are talking about someone’s mental states, we are actually talking about their (likely) behaviours. Mentalistic language is essentially a useful shorthand for the highly complex phenomenon of human behaviour, which we developed over thousands of years. This means that we can happily go on using mentalistic concepts to say things “X causes Y” (e.g. “she shouted at them because she was angry”)—so long as it doesn’t lead us into bad metaphysics. Nevertheless, Ryle would have to accept that anger doesn’t genuinely cause anger-behaviour, even if (by virtue of its use as a shorthand) it is useful in explaining anger-behaviour. 24 The four dualist arguments For these four arguments, it is important to remember that “behaviour” or “behavioural dispositions” are physical states of the body. They are descriptions of how the body (or a part of it) is moving, or how it is likely to move. The conceivability argument 12 P1: It is conceivable for my mental states to exist without any physical states of my body (including any of its behavioural ones). o I.e., I can imagine my mind existing without a body (e.g. as a ghost or in the afterlife) P2: If it is conceivable for one thing to exist without another, then it is metaphysically possible for one to exist without the other. C1: It is metaphysically possible for my mental states to exist without any physical states of my body. P3: If it is metaphysically possible for one thing to exist without another, then they are not identical C2: Therefore, my mental states are not identical with any physical states of my body (including any of its behavioural ones). We have examined criticisms of P1, P2 and P3. Behaviourists attack P1. This is because behaviourists think that a mental states term (like “pain” or “perception of a tree outside the window”) is just a description of the observable states of a person’s body. So, if that person didn’t have a body, behaviourists would say that it doesn’t make sense to imagine them having any mental states either. Consider the section on the “Language- Learning Argument”, above. If we learn what anger is by observing anger-behaviour, can we really imagine someone who is angry, but who doesn’t have a body that is exhibiting anger behaviour? A behaviourist would argue that we cannot. The indivisibility argument P1: All physical things are divisible P2: The mind is not divisible [P3: Leibniz’s law: if two things have different properties, they are not the same thing] 13 C: Therefore, the mind is not a physical thing. We have examined criticisms of P1 and P2. Behaviourists would actually agree with this argument (as I’ve put it above)! They would say that it is valid and sound. However, they wouldn’t say it doesn’t really prove dualism. This is because behaviourists would say that the mind isn’t a thing at all. Rather, the mind (or, more accurately, mental states) is just a way of describing how a body is behaving. To use the indivisibility argument to prove dualism, you have to add an extra premise and conclusion: P4: The mind exists. 12 I have adapted this to make it clear how it can be used against behaviourism in particular 13 In the exam, it is fine not to include this premise, since it is usually left implicit. 25 C2: Therefore, a non-physical thing exists. Behaviourists would disagree with P4. The zombie argument P1: Philosophical zombies are conceivable. o I can conceive of my physical body existing, behaving exactly as it does now, with no phenomenal consciousness. P2: If philosophical zombies are conceivable, they are metaphysically possible. o If I can conceive of my physical body existing, behaving exactly as it does now, with no phenomenal consciousness, then it is metaphysically possible for a body that is behaviourally identical to my own to exist with no phenomenal consciousness. P3: If philosophical zombies are metaphysically possible, then phenomenal consciousness is not reducible to one’s behavioural states. o If it is metaphysically possible for a body that is behaviourally identical to my own to exist with no phenomenal consciousness, then phenomenal consciousness is not reducible to one’s behavioural states. C: Therefore, phenomenal consciousness not reducible to one’s behavioural states. We have examined criticisms of P1, P2 and P3. Behaviourists would reject P1, for the same reason they rejected it in the case of the conceivability argument. The knowledge/”Mary” argument P1: Mary knows all the physical facts (including all the behavioural facts) about colour perception P2: When she leaves the room, Mary learns a new fact about colour perception C1: Therefore, before she left the room, Mary did not know all the facts C2: Therefore, there are non-physical (and non-behavioural) facts about colour perception P3: If there are non-physical (and non-behavioural) facts about colour perception, some features of colour perception are non-physical (and non- behavioural) C3: Therefore, some features of colour perception are non-physical (and non- behavioural) All of the criticisms we have examined attack P2. Any of the criticisms we have examined would work for a behaviourist—but the “ability knowledge” response is particularly compatible with behaviourism. 26 Important Vocabulary In the Glossary on Teams (Philosophy Course team -> Files -> Metaphysics of Mind -> GLOSSARY - every key term in the metaphysics of mind.docx) you can ﬁnd relevant entries for: Asymmetry Problem Introspection Reduction Behavioural disposition Materialism Reduction, analytic Behaviourism Materialism, reductive Reduction, ontological Behaviourism, Hard Mental causation, Ryle, Gilbert problem of Behaviourism, Soft Super Spartan Multiple realisability Category Mistake Super Stoic Multiple realisability Circularity Problem Super-super-Spartan problem Cricket example Test sentence Ockham’s Razor Direct access Toothache example Perfect actor Explanatory power University example Physicalism Folk psychology Veriﬁcation Principle Privacy Hempel, Carl Veriﬁcationism Public Identical [Advanced] X-worlder Putnam, Hilary If a term is in bold, you may be required to define/explain/evaluate it in the exam. 27 Useful Quotes Quote 1: Hempel’s explanation of the verification principle and his “Toothache” example ‘The Logical Analysis of Psychology’ p. 17-18 the meaning of a statement is established by the conditions of its verification. In particular, two differently formulated statements have the same meaning or the same effective content when, and only when, they are both true or both false in the same conditions. Furthermore, a statement for which one can indicate absolutely no conditions which would verify it, which is in principle incapable of confrontation with test conditions, is wholly devoid of content and without meaning. In such a case we have to do, not with a statement properly speaking, but with a “pseudo-statement,” that is to say, a sequence of words correctly constructed from the point of view of grammar, but without content. In view of these considerations, our problem reduces to one concerning the difference between the circumstances which verify psychological statements and those which verify the statements of physics. Let us therefore examine a statement which involves a psychological concept, for example: “Paul has a toothache.” What is the specific content of this statement, that is to say, what are the circumstances in which it would be verified? It will be sufficient to indicate some test sentences which describe these circumstances. a. Paul weeps and makes gestures of such and such kinds. b. At the question “What is the matter?,” Paul utters the words “I have a toothache.” c. Closer examination reveals a decayed tooth with exposed pulp. d. Paul’s blood pressure, digestive processes, the speed of his reactions, show such and such changes. e. Such and such processes occur in Paul’s central nervous system. This list could be expanded considerably, but it is already sufficient to bring out the fundamental and essential point, namely, that all the circumstances which verify this psychological statement are expressed by physical test sentences. (This is true even of test condition b, which merely expresses the fact that in specified physical circumstances (the propagation of vibrations produced in the air by the enunciation of the words, “What is the matter?”) there occurs in the body of the subject a certain physical process (speech behaviour of such and such a kind).) The statement in question, which is about someone’s “pain,” […] can be retranslated without loss of content into a statement which no longer contains the term “pain,” but only physical concepts. Our analysis has consequently established that a certain statement belonging to psychology has the same content as a statement belonging to physics; a result which is in direct contradiction to the thesis that there is an impassable gulf between the statements of psychology and those of physics. 28 The above reasoning can be applied to any psychological statement, even to those which concern, as is said, “deeper psychological strata” than our example. Quote 2: Ryle on category mistakes Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 6-7 I shall often speak of [dualism], with deliberate abusiveness, as ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’. I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category- mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another. The dogma is therefore a philosopher’s myth. […] I must first indicate what is meant by the phrase ‘Category-mistake’. This I do in a series of illustrations. A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks ‘But where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.’ It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is understood, the University has been seen. His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if ‘the University’ stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong. […] One more illustration. A foreigner watching his first game of cricket learns what are the functions of the bowlers, the batsmen, the fielders, the umpires and the scorers. He then says ‘But there is no one left on the field to contribute the famous element of team-spirit. I see who does the bowling, the batting and the wicket-keeping; but I do not see whose role it is to exercise esprit de corps.’ Once more, it would have to be explained that he was looking for the wrong type of thing. Team-spirit is not another cricketing operation supplementary to all of the other special tasks. It is, roughly, the keenness with which each of the special tasks is performed, and performing a task keenly is not performing two tasks. Certainly exhibiting team-spirit is not the same thing as bowling or catching, but nor is it a third thing such that we can say that the bowler first bowls and then 29 exhibits team-spirit or that a fielder is at a given moment either catching or displaying esprit de corps. These illustrations of category-mistakes have a common feature, which must be noticed. The mistakes were made by people who did not know how to wield the concepts University […] and team-spirit. Their puzzle arose from inability to use certain items in the English vocabulary. Quote 3: Ryle on category mistakes, minds and bodies Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 12 It is perfectly proper to say, in one logical tone of voice, that there exist minds and to say, in another logical tone of voice, that there exist bodies. But these expressions do not indicate two different species of existence, for existence is not a generic word like ‘coloured’ or ‘sexed’. They indicate two different senses [meanings] of ‘exist’, somewhat as ‘rising’ has different senses in ‘the tide is rising,’ ‘hopes are rising’, and ‘the average age of death is rising’. A man would be thought to be making a poor joke who said that three things are now rising, namely the tide, hopes and the average age of death. It would be just as good or bad a joke to say that there exist prime numbers and Wednesdays and public opinions and navies; or that there exist both minds and bodies. Quote 4: Putnam’s ‘Super-Spartans’ example Putnam, ‘Brains and Behavior’, 102-104 [This is an argument against behaviourism. Hilary Putnam uses the following example to show that we can imagine pain without pain-behaviour, and so pain cannot be analytically reduced to pain-behaviour] Imagine a community of ‘super-spartans’ or ‘super-stoics’—a community in which the adults have the ability to successfully suppress all involuntary pain behavior. They may, on occasion, admit that they feel pain, but always in pleasant well-modulated voices—even if they are undergoing the agonies of the damned. They do not wince, scream, flinch, sob, grit their teeth, clench their fists, exhibit beads of sweat, or otherwise act like people in pain or people suppressing the unconditioned responses associated with pain. However, they do feel pain, and they dislike it (just as we do). It is only that they have what they regard as important ideological reasons for behaving as they do, and they have, through years of training, learned to live up to their own exacting standards. […] [Someone might reply that even saying you are in pain is a kind of pain- behaviour. Putnam responds like this:] 30 […] let us undertake the task of trying to imagine a world in which there are not even pain reports. I will call this the ‘X-world’. In the X-world we have to deal with ‘super-super-spartans’. These have been super-spartans for so long, that they have begun to suppress even talk of pain. Of course, each individual X- worlder may have his private way of thinking about pain. He may even have the word ‘pain’ […]. He may think to himself: ‘This pain is intolerable. If it goes on one minute longer I shall scream. Oh No! I mustn’t do that! That would disgrace my whole family...’ But X-worlders do not even admit to having pains. They pretend not to know either the word or the phenomenon to which it refers. In short, if pains are ‘logical constructs out of behavior’ [as behaviourists think they are], then our X-worlders behave so as not to have pains!—Only, of course, they do have pains, and they know perfectly well that they have pains. If this last fantasy is not, in some disguised way, self-contradictory, then logical behaviourism is simply a mistake. Quote 5: Wittgenstein’s “Beetle-in-a-box” example Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §293 If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word “pain” means – must I not say that of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly? Well, everyone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case!—Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle”. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless? – If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty. – No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. Quote 6: Fodor’s outline of the problem of mental causation Fodor, ‘The Mind-Body Problem,’ 171-172 The way the [soft] logical behaviorist has interpreted a mental term such as thirsty is modeled after the way many philosophers have interpreted a physical disposition such as fragility. The physical disposition ‘The glass is fragile’ is often taken to mean something like ‘If the glass were struck, then it would break.’ By the same token the [soft] logical behviorist’s analysis of mental causation is similar to the received analysis of one kind of physical causation. The causal statement ‘The glass broke because it was fragile’ is taken to mean something like ‘If the glass were struck, then it would break, and the glass was struck.’ 31 By equating mental terms with behavioral disposition the [soft] logical behaviorist has put mental terms on a par with the nonbehavioral dispositions of the physical sciences. That is a promising move, because the analysis of nonbehavioral dispositions is on relatively solid philosophical ground. An explanation attributing the breaking of a glass to its fragility is surely something even the staunchest materialist can accept. By arguing that mental terms are synonymous with dispositional terms, the logical [soft] behaviorist has provided something the [hard] radical behaviorist could not: a materialist account of mental causation. Nevertheless, the analogy between mental causation as construed by the logical behaviorist and physical causation goes only so far. The logical behaviorist treats the manifestation of a disposition as the sole form of mental causation, whereas the physical sciences recognize additional kinds of causation. There is the kind of causation where one physical event causes another, as when the breaking of a glass is attributed to its having been struck. In fact, explanations that involve event-event causation are presumably more basic than dispositional explanations, because the manifestation of a disposition (the breaking of a fragile glass) always involves event-event causation and not vice versa. In the realm of the mental many examples of event-event causation involve one mental state’s causing another, and for this kind of causation logical behaviorism provides no analysis. As a result the logical behaviorist is committed to the tacit and implausible notion than the physical sciences require. Event-event causation actually seems to be quite common in the realm of the mental. Mental causes typically give rise to behavioral effects by virtue of their interaction with other mental causes. For example, having a headache causes a disposition to take aspirin only if one also has the desire to get rid of the headache, the belief that aspirin exists, the belief that taking aspirin reduces headaches and so on. Since mental states interact in generating behavior, it will be necessary to provide a construal of psychological explanations that posits [that] mental processes [exist]: causal sequences of mental events. It is this construal that logical behaviorism fails to provide. Quote 7: Hempel’s Response to the “Perfect Actors” criticism Hempel, ‘The Logical Analysis of Psychology’, p. 19 The further objection will perhaps be raised that men can feign. Thus, though a criminal at the bar may show physical symptoms of mental disorder, one would nevertheless be justified in wondering whether his mental confusion was “real” or only simulated. One must note that in the case of the simulator, only some of the conditions are fulfilled which would verify the statement “This man is mentally unbalanced,” those, namely, which are most accessible to direct observation. A more penetrating examination—which should in principle take into account events occurring in the central nervous system—would give a decisive answer; and this answer would in turn clearly rest on a physicalistic basis. If, at this point, one wished to push the objection to the point of admitting that a man 32 could show all the “symptoms” of a mental disease without being “really” ill, we reply that it would be absurd to characterize such a man as “really normal”; for it is obvious that by the very nature of the hypothesis we should possess no criterion in terms of which to distinguish this man from another who, while exhibiting the same bodily behaviour down to the last detail, would “in addition” be “really ill.” Useful Sources From the “Set texts” list Chalmers, David The Conscious Mind: In Search Chalmers provides some historical context to of a Fundamental Theory, ch. 1 behaviourism in this chapter, and criticises it. Hempel, Carl ‘The Logical Analysis of Hempel’s “hard” behaviourism. Good on the Psychology’ verification principle Ryle, Gilbert The Concept of Mind, chs. 1, 2, (Soft) philosophical behaviourism 5 and 6 Ch. 1: Category mistakes Ch. 2: Behaviourism Ch. 5: Behavioural dispositions Ch. 6: Response to the asymmetry problem Other useful sources Cardinal, Philosophy for A Level Year 2, 262-273 Behaviourism: whole topic overview Jones, and Hayward Fodor, Jerry ‘The Mind-Body Problem’ Includes a clear functionalist overview of what behaviourism is, as well as an explanation of the problem of mental causation In Our Time ‘Ordinary Language Philosophy’ An overview of the school of “ordinary (podcast) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b language philosophy,” a movement 03ggc19 associated with soft behaviourism Kaplan, ‘The Mind-Body Problem’ (lecture Category mistakes; behaviourism; Putnam’s Jeffrey series on YouTube), eps. 3, 5 and 6 “super Spartans” Lacewing, Philosophy for A Level, 239-267 Behaviourism: whole topic overview Michael Philosophy ‘Liam Bright on Verificationism’ An excellent overview of the logical Bites https://philosophybites.com/2020/09/li positivists – a movement closely associated (podcast) am-bright-on-verificationism.html with hard behaviourism Putnam, ‘Brains and Behaviour’ The origin of the ‘Super Spartans’ example Hilary

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