Ryle and Behaviorisms

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Ryle's The Concept of Mind

• Published in 1949, this book is a classic of analysis, and of philosophical behaviorism.
• The Official Doctrine is the received Cartesian dualism
• Ryle ridicules this as the idea of the Ghost in the machine.
• The Official Doctrine rests on a category mistake: it confuses physical objects and processes (one category or kind of thing) with behaviors (another category or kind of thing).
• Ryle claims that our ordinary behavioral language for mental activities describes not objects but behaviors:

  ....when we describe people as exercising qualities of mind, we are not referring to occult episodes of which their overt acts and utterances are effects; we are referring to those overt acts and utterances themselves. (1949: 25)

• This position is Philosophical Behaviorism: mental state talk describes behaviors or increased probabilities of behaviors. Here are some possible examples (which I made up -- they are not Ryles!):
  • x fears y: x is more likely to flee y
  • x believes that P: x is more likely to assert P and to assent to P and to act as if P is true
• Note some important things:
  • There is no thing that is a mind, but ordinary language about mental activity is correct and can be retained
  • There is no other apparent commitment to method or ontology

Psychological Behaviorism

• Behaviorism in psychology is instead a methodology coupled with some ontological presuppositions.
• At its simplest, the method was
  • to expunge as much as possible reference to internal states and replace these with only reference to measurable behavior or with references to conditioning and reflexes;
  • use the notion of reflex and conditioning as the basic explanatory tool for learning and behavior as often as practically possible.
• This was a much needed reaction to rampant "introspectionism."
• This is then a combination of eliminativism and something like philosophical behaviorism (but psychological behaviorism came first -- I don't mean to say there was an influence).
• Eliminativism about x: x is a fiction and can and should be eliminated from our theories and discourse.
• Thus, in psychological behaviorism, some mental state talk is superstition and should be eliminated, and some will be retranslated and revised to refer to behaviors or increased likelihoods for behaviors.
• It is very unclear whether anyone was a simple behaviorist. Behaviorism is often characterized in this way, but the behaviorists in practice did often refer to other forms of explanation, like evolution and evolved traits for kinds of bheavior; and sometimes they just refered to internal events that are not conditioning. For example, Skinner argued thinking was talking to oneself, and so allowed for a kind of "internal behavior." This is why I characterize psychological behaviorism as just requiring a primacy for behavior and conditioning in explanation.

Criticisms of Behaviorism

• The simplistic version of psychological behaviorism is easily crushed. We need to refer to internal states to explain most behavior; and reflexes and conditioning are not sufficient to explain most behavior (especially language).
• The cognitive revolution has wholly displaced behaviorism. However, it is little recognized that cognitive psychology looks far more like psychological behaviorism than like introspectionism.
• Criticisms of philosophical behaviorism have included
  • The behaviorist translations are not what we mean.
  • Putnam's super-spartan.
  • Scientific realism about mental states and capabilities.