Behaviorism

Behaviorism was a movement in psychology and philosophy that
emphasized the outward behavioral aspects of thought and dismissed the
inward experiential, and sometimes the inner procedural, aspects as
well; a movement harking back to the methodological proposals of John
B. Watson, who coined the name. Watson's 1912 manifesto proposed
abandoning Introspectionist attempts to make consciousness a subject
of experimental investigation to focus instead on behavioral
manifestations of intelligence. B. F. Skinner later hardened
behaviorist strictures to exclude inner physiological processes along
with inward experiences as items of legitimate psychological concern.
Consequently, the successful "cognitive revolution" of the nineteen
sixties styled itself a revolt against behaviorism even though the
computational processes cognitivism hypothesized would be public and
objective — not the sort of private subjective processes Watson
banned. Consequently (and ironically), would-be-scientific champions
of consciousness now indict cognitivism for its "behavioristic"
neglect of inward experience.

The enduring philosophical interest of behaviorism concerns this
methodological challenge to the scientific bona fides of consciousness
(on behalf of empiricism) and, connectedly (in accord with
materialism), its challenge to the supposed metaphysical inwardness,
or subjectivity, of thought. Although behaviorism as an avowed
movement may have few remaining advocates, various practices and
trends in psychology and philosophy may still usefully be styled
"behavioristic". As long as experimental rigor in psychology is held
to require "operationalization" of variables, behaviorism's
methodological mark remains. Recent attempts to revive doctrines of
"ontological subjectivity" (Searle 1992) in philosophy and bring
"consciousness research" under the aegis of Cognitive Science (see
Horgan 1994) point up the continuing relevance of behaviorism's
metaphysical and methodological challenges.

1. Behaviorists and Behaviorisms

Behaviorism, notoriously, came in various sorts and has been, also
notoriously, subject to variant sortings: "the variety of positions
that constitute behaviorism" might even be said to share no
common-distinctive property, but only "a loose family resemblance"
(Zuriff 1985: 1) . Views commonly styled "behavioristic" share various
of the following marks:

* allegiance to the "fundamental premise … that psychology is a
natural science" and, as such, is "to be empirically based and …
objective" (Zuriff 1985: 1);
* denial of the utility of introspection as a source of scientific data;
* theoretic-explanatory dismissal of inward experiences or states
of consciousness introspection supposedly reveals;
* specifically antidualistic opposition to the "Cartesian theater"
picture of the mind as essentially a realm of such inward experiences;
* more broadly antiessentialist opposition to physicalist or
cogntivist portrayals of thought as necessarily neurophysiological or
computational;
* theoretic-explanatory minimization of inner physiological or
computational processes intervening between environmental stimulus and
behavioral response;
* mistrust of the would-be scientific character of the concepts of
"folk psychology" generally, and of the would-be causal character of
its central "belief-desire" pattern of explanation in particular;
* positive characterization of the mental in terms of intelligent
"adaptive" behavioral dispositions or stimulus-response patterns.

Among these features, not even Zuriff's "fundamental premise" is
shared by all (and only) behaviorists. Notably, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, and followers in the "ordinary language" tradition of
analytic philosophy, while, for the most part, regarding behavioral
scientific hopes as vain, hold views that are, in other respects,
strongly behavioristic. Not surprisingly, these thinkers often
downplay the "behaviorist" label themselves to distinguish themselves
from their scientific behaviorist cousins. Nevertheless, in
philosophical discussions, they are commonly counted "behaviorists":
both emphasize the external behavioral aspects, deemphasize inward
experiential and inner procedural aspects, and offer broadly
behavioral-dispositional construals of thought.
a. Psychological Behaviorists
i. Precursors: Wilhelm Wundt, Ivan Pavlov

Wundt is often called "the father of experimental psychology." He
conceived the subject matter of psychology to be "experience in its
relations to the subject" (Wundt 1897: 3). The science of experience
he envisaged was supposed to be chemistry like: introspected
experiential data were to be analyzed; the basic constituents of
conscious experience thus identified; and the patterns and laws by
which these basic constituents combine to constitute more complex
conscious experiences (e.g., emotions) described. Data were to be
acquired and analyzed by trained introspective Observers. While the
analysis of experience was supposed to be a self-contained enterprise,
Wundt — originally trained as a physiologist — fully expected that the
structures and processes introspective analysis uncovered in
experience would parallel structures and processes physiological
investigation revealed in the central nervous system.
Introspectionism, as the approach was called, soon spread, and
laboratories sprang up in the United States and elsewhere, aiming "to
investigate the facts of consciousness, its combinations and
relations," so as to "ultimately discover the laws which govern these
relations and combinations" (Wundt 1912: 1). The approach failed
primarily due to the unreliability of introspective Observation.
Introspective "experimental" results were not reliably reproducible by
outside laboratories: Observers from different laboratories failed to
agree, for instance, in their Observation (or failure to Observe)
imageless thoughts (to cite one notorious controversy).

Pavlov's successful experimental discovery the laws of classical
conditioning (as they came to be called), by way of contrast, provided
positive inspiration for Watson's Behaviorist manifesto. Pavlov's
stimulus-response model of explanation is also paradigmatic to much
later behavioristic thought. In his famous experiments Pavlov paired
presentations to dogs of an unconditioned stimulus (food) with an
initially neutral stimulus (a ringing bell). After a number of such
joint presentations, the unconditional response to food (salivation)
becomes conditioned to the bell: salivation occurs upon the ringing of
the bell alone, in the absence of food. In accord with Pavlovian
theory, then, given an animal's conditioning history behavioral
responses (e.g., salivation) can be predicted to occur or not, and be
controlled (made to occur or not), on the basis of laws of
conditioning, answering to the stimulus-response pattern:

S -> R

Everything adverted to here is publicly observable, even measurable;
enabling Pavlov to experimentally investigate and formulate laws
concerning temporal sequencing and delay effects, stimulus intensity
effects, and stimulus generalization (opening doors to experimental
investigation of animal perception and discrimination).

Edward Thorndike, in a similar methodological vein, proposed "that
psychology may be, at least in part, as independent of introspection
as physics" (Thorndike 1911: 5) and pursued experimental
investigations of animal intelligence. In experimental investigations
of puzzle-solving by cats and other animals, he established that speed
of solution increased gradually as a result of previous puzzle
exposure. Such results, he maintained, support the hypothesis that
learning is a result of habits formed through trial and error, and
Thorndike formulated "laws of behavior," describing habit formation
processes, based on these results. Most notable among Thorndike's laws
(presaging Skinnerian operant conditioning) is his Law of Effect:

Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are
accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will,
other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation,
so that, when it recurs, they will be more likely to recur; those
which are accompanied or closely followed by discomfort to the animal
will, other things being equal, have their connections with that
situation weakened, so that, when it recurs, they will be less likely
to occur. The greater the satisfaction or discomfort, the greater the
strengthening or weakening of the bond . (Thorndike 1911)

In short, rewarded responses tend to be reinforced and punished
responses eliminated. His methodological innovations (particularly his
"puzzle-box") facilitated objective quantitative data collection and
provided a paradigm for Behaviorist research methods to follow
(especially the "Skinner box").
ii. John B. Watson: Early Behaviorism

Watson coined the term "Behaviorism" as a name for his proposal to
revolutionize the study of human psychology in order to put it on a
firm experimental footing. In opposition to received philosophical
opinion, to the dominant Introspectionist approach in psychology, and
(many said) to common sense, Watson (1912) advocated a radically
different approach. Where received "wisdom" took conscious experience
to be the very stuff of minds and hence the (only) appropriate object
of psychological investigation, Watson advocated an approach that led,
scientifically, "to the ignoring of consciousness" and the
illegitimacy of "making consciousness a special object of
observation." He proposed, instead, that psychology should "take as a
starting point, first the observable fact that organisms, man and
animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment" and
"secondly, that certain stimuli lead the organisms to make responses."
Whereas Introspectionism had, in Watson's estimation, miserably failed
in its attempt to make experimental science out of subjective
experience, the laboratories of animal psychologists, such as Pavlov
and Thorndike, were already achieving reliably reproducible results
and discovering general explanatory principles. Consequently, Watson —
trained as an "animal man" himself — proposed, "making behavior, not
consciousness, the objective point of our attack" as the key to
putting the study of human psychology on a similar scientific footing.
Key it proved to be. Watson's revolution was a smashing success.
Introspectionism languished, behaviorism flourished, and considerable
areas of our understanding of human psychology (particularly with
regard to learning) came within the purview of experimental
investigation along broadly behavioristic lines. Notably, also, Watson
foreshadows Skinner's ban on appeals to inner (central nervous)
processes, seeming to share the Skinnerian sentiment "that because so
little is known about the central nervous system, it serves as the
last refuge of the soul in psychology" (Zuriff 1985: 80). Watson is,
consequently, loath to hypothesize central processes, going so far as
to speculate that thought occurs in the vocal tract, and is — quite
literally — subaudible talking to oneself (Watson 1920).
iii. Intermediaries: Edward Tolman and Clark Hull

Tolman and Hull were the two most noteworthy figures of the movement's
middle years. Although both accepted the S-R framework as basic,
Tolman and Hull were far more willing than Watson to hypothesize
internal mechanisms or "intervening variables" mediating the S-R
connection. In this regard their work may be considered precursory to
cognitivism, and each touches on important philosophical issues
besides. Tolman's purposive behaviorism attempts to explain
goal-directed or purposive behavior, focusing on large, intact,
meaningful behavior patterns or "molar" behavior (e.g., kicking a
ball) as opposed to simple muscle movements or "molecular" behavior
(e.g., various flexings of leg muscles); regarding the molecular level
as too far removed from our perceptual capacities and explanatory
purposes to provide suitable units for meaningful behavioral analysis.
For Tolman, stimuli play a cognitive role as signals to the organism,
leading to the formation of "cognitive maps" and to "latent learning"
in the absence of reinforcement. Overall,

The stimuli which are allowed in are not connected by just simple
one-to-one switches to the outgoing responses. Rather the incoming
impulses are usually worked over and elaborated in the central control
room into a tentative cognitive-like map of the environment. And it is
this tentative map, indicating routes and paths and environmental
relationships, which finally determines what responses, if any, the
animal will finally make. (Tolman 1948: 192)

Clark Hull undertook the ambitious program of formulating an
exhaustive theory of such mechanisms intervening between stimuli and
responses: the theory was to take the form of a hypothetical-deductive
system of basic laws or "postulates" enabling the prediction of
behavioral responses (as "output variables") on the basis of external
stimuli ("input variables") plus internal states of the organism
("intervening variables"). Including such organismic "intervening"
variables (O) in the predictive/explanatory laws results in the
following revised explanatory schema:

S & O -> R

The intervening O-variables Hull hypothesized included drive and habit
strength. Attributes of, and relations among, these variables are what
the postulates describe: further attributes and relationships were
derived as theorems and corollaries from the basic postulates. Hull's
student, Edward Spence, attempted to carry on with the program,
without lasting success. Expected gains in predictive-explanatory
scope and precision were not achieved and, with hindsight, it is easy
to see that such an elaborate theoretical superstructure, built on
such slight observational-experimental foundations, was bound to fall.
Hull's specific proposals are presently more historical curiosities
than live hypotheses. Nevertheless, currently prevalent cognitivist
approaches share Hull's general commitment to internal mechanisms.
iv. B. F. Skinner: Radical Behaviorism

Skinner's self-described "radical behaviorist" approach is radical in
its insistence on extending behaviorist strictures against inward
experiential processes to include inner physiological ones as well.
The scientific nub of the approach is a concept of operant
conditioning indebted to Thorndike's "Law of Effect." Operants (e.g.,
bar-presses or key-pecks) are units of behavior an organism (e.g., a
rat or pigeon) occasionally emits "spontaneously" prior to
conditioning. In operant conditioning, operants followed by
reinforcement (e.g., food or water) increase in frequency and come
under control of discriminative stimuli (e.g., lights or tones)
preceding the response. By increasingly judicious reinforcement of
increasingly close approximations, complex behavioral sequences are
shaped. On Skinner's view, high-level human behavior, such as speech,
is the end result of such shaping. Prolonged absence of reinforcement
leads to extinction of the response. Many original and important
Skinnerian findings — e.g., that constantly reinforced responses
extinguish more rapidly than intermittently reinforced responses —
concern the effects of differing schedules of reinforcement. Skinner
notes the similarity of operant behavioral conditioning to natural
evolutionary selection: in each case apparently forward-looking or
goal-directed developments are explained (away) by a preceding course
of environmental "selection" among randomly varying evolutionary
traits or, in the psychological case, behavioral tricks. The
purposiveness which Tolman's molar behavioral description assumes,
radical behaviorism thus claims to explain. Likewise, Skinner
questions the explanatory utility of would-be characterizations of
inner processes (such as Hull's): such processes, being behavior
themselves (though inner), are more in need of explanation themselves,
Skinner holds, than they are fit to explain outward behavior. By
"dismissing mental states and processes," Skinner maintains, radical
behaviorism "directs attention to the … history of the individual and
to the current environment where the real causes of behavior are to be
found" (Skinner 1987: 75). On this view, "if the proper attention is
paid to the variables controlling behavior and an appropriate
behavioral unit is chosen, orderliness appears directly in the
behavior and the postulated theoretical processes become superfluous"
(Zuriff: 88). Thus understood, Skinner's complaint about inner
processes "is not that they do not exist, but that they are not
relevant" (Skinner 1953) to the prediction, control, and experimental
analysis of behavior.

Skinner stressed prediction and control as his chief explanatory
desiderata, and on this score he boasts that "experimental analysis of
behaviour" on radical behaviorist lines "has led to an effective
technology, applicable to education, psychotherapy, and the design of
cultural practices in general" (Skinner 1987: 75). Even the most
strident critics of radical behaviorism, I believe, must accord it
some recognition in these connections. Behavior therapy (based on
operant principles) has proven effective in treating phobias and
addictions; operant shaping is widely and effectively used in animal
training; and behaviorist instructional methods have proven effective
— though they may have become less fashionable — in the field of
education. Skinnerian Behaviorism can further boast of significantly
advancing our understanding of stimulus generalization and other
important learning-and-perception related phenomena and effects.
Nevertheless, what was delivered was less than advertised. In
particular, Skinner's attempt to extend the approach to the
explanation of high-grade human behavior failed, making Noam Chomsky's
dismissive (1959) review of Skinner's book, Verbal Behavior, something
of a watershed. On Chomsky's diagnosis, not only had Skinner's attempt
at explaining verbal behavior failed, it had to fail given the
insufficiency of the explanatory devices Skinner allowed: linguistic
competence (in general) and language acquisition (in particular),
Chomsky argued, can only be explained as expressions of innate
mechanisms — presumably, computational mechanisms. For those in the
"behavioral sciences" already chaffing under the severe methodological
constraints Skinnerian orthodoxy imposed, the transition to "cognitive
science" was swift and welcome. By 1985 Zuriff would write, "the
received wisdom of today is that behaviorism has been refuted, its
methods have failed, and it has little to offer modern psychology"
(Zuriff 1985: 278). Subsequent developments, however, suggest that
matters are not that simple.
v. Post-Behaviorist and Neo-behavioristic Currents: Externalism and
Connectionism

Several recent developments inside and beside the mainstream of
"cognitive science" — though their proponents have not been keen to
style themselves "behaviorists" — appear to be rather behavioristic.
Semantic externalism is the view that "meanings ain't in the head"
(Putnam 1975: 227) but depend, rather, on environmental factors;
especially on sensory and behavioral intercourse with the referents of
the referring thoughts or expressions. If emphasis on the outward or
behavioral aspects of thought or intelligence — and attendant
de-emphasis of inward experiential or inner procedural aspects — is
the hallmark of behaviorism, semantic externalism is, on its face,
behavioristic (though this is seldom remarked). Emphasis (as by Burge
1979) on social (besides the indexical, or sensory-behavioral)
determinants of reference — on what Putnam called "the linguistic
division of labor" — lends this view a distinct Wittgensteinean flavor
besides. Such externalist "causal theories" of reference, although far
from unquestioned orthodoxy, are currently among the leading cognitive
scientific contenders. Less orthodox, but even more behavioristic, is
the procedural externalism advocated by Andy Clark (2001), inspired by
work in "Situated Cognition, Distributed and Decentralized Cognition,
Real-World Robotics, and Artificial Life" (Clark 2001: abstract);
identifying thought with "complex and iterated processes which
continually loop between brain, body, and technological environment";
according to which the "intelligent process just is the spatially and
temporally extended one which zig-zags between brain, body, and world"
(Clark 2001: 132). Perhaps most importantly, the influential
connectionist hypothesis that the brain does parallel processing of
distributed representations, rather than serial processing of
localized (language-like) representations, also waxes behavioristic.
In parallel systems, typically, initial programming (comparable to
innate mechanisms) is minimal and the systems are "trained-up" to
perform complex tasks over a series of trails, by a process somewhat
like operant shaping.
b. Philosophical Behaviorists

i. Precursors, Preceptors, & Fellow Travelers: William James, John
Dewey, Bertrand Russell

In opposition to the "Structuralist" philosophical underpinnings of
introspectionism, behaviorism grew out of a competing "Functionalist"
philosophy of psychology that counted Dewey and William James among
its leading advocates. Against structuralist reification of the
content of experience, Dewey urged that sensations be given a
functional characterization, and proposed to treat them as
functionally defined occupants of roles in the "reflex arc" which —
since it "represents both the unit of nerve structure and the type of
nerve function" — should supply the "unifying principle and
controlling working hypothesis in psychology" (Dewey 1896: 357);
though the arc, Dewey insisted, is misunderstood if not viewed in
broader organic-adaptive context. On another front — against
structuralist reification of the subject of experience — William James
famously maintained,

that 'consciousness,' when once it has evaporated to this estate
of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is
the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first
principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo,
the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of
philosophy.

James hastened to add, that he meant "only to deny that the word
[`consciousness'] stands for an entity, but to insist most
emphatically that it does stand for a function" (James 1912). The
James-Lange theory of emotions — which holds that "the bodily changes
follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our
feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion (James 1884:
189-190) — prefigures later behavioristic deflationary analyses of
other categories of presumed mentation.

Bertrand Russell was among the first philosophers to recognize the
philosophical significance of the behaviorist revolution Watson
proposed. Though never a card-carrying behaviorist himself — insisting
that the inwardness or "privacy" of "sense-data" "does not by itself
make [them] unamenable to scientific treatment" (Russell 1921: 119) —
Russell, nevertheless, asserted that behaviorism "contains much more
truth than people suppose" and regarded it "as desirable to develop
the behaviourist method to the fullest possible extent" (Russell 1927:
73), proposing a united front between behaviorism and science-friendly
analytic philosophy of mind. Such fronts soon emerged on both the
"formal language" and "ordinary language" sides of ongoing analytic
philosophical debate.
ii. Logical Behaviorism: Rudolf Carnap

What is sometimes called the "formalist" or "ideal language" line of
analytic philosophy seeks the logical and empirical regimentation of
(would-be) scientific language for the sake of its scientific
improvement. "Logical behaviorism" refers, most properly, to Carnap
and Hempel's proposed regimentation of psychological discourse on
behavioristic lines, calling for analyses of mental terms along lines
consonant with the Logical Empiricist doctrine of verificationism
(resembling the "operationism" of P.W. Bridgman 1927) they espoused.
According to verificationism, a theoretic attribution — say of
temperature — as in "it's 23.4º centigrade" "affirms nothing other
than" that certain "physical test sentences obtain": sentences
describing the would-be "coincidence between the level of the mercury
and the mark of the scale numbered 23.4″ on a mercury thermometer, and
"other coincidences," for other measuring instruments (Hempel 1949:
16-17). Similarly, it was proposed, that for scientific psychological
purposes, "the meaning of a psychological statement consists solely in
the function of abbreviating the description of certain modes of
physical response characteristic of the bodies of men and animals"
(Hempel 1949: 19), the modes of physical response by which we test the
truth of our psychological attributions. "Paul has a toothache" for
instance would abbreviate "Paul weeps and makes gestures of such and
such kinds"; "At the question `What is the matter?,' Paul utters the
words `I have a toothache'"; and so on (Hempel 1949: 17). As Carnap
and Hempel came to give up verificationism, they gave up logical
behaviorism, and came to hold, instead, that "the introduction and
application of psychological terms and hypotheses is logically and
methodologically analogous to the introduction and application of the
terms and hypotheses of a physical theory." Theoretical terms on this
newly emerging (and now prevalent) view need only be loosely tied to
observational tests in concert with other terms of the theory. They
needn't be fully characterized, each in terms of its own observations,
as on the "narrow translationist" (Hempel 1977: 14) doctrine of
logical behaviorism. As verificationism went, so went logical
behaviorism: liberalized requirements for the empirical grounding of
theoretical posits encouraged the taking of "cognitive scientific"
liberties (in practice) and (in theory) the growth of cognitivist
sympathies among analytic philosophers of mind. Still, despite having
been renounced by its champions as unfounded and having found no new
champions; and despite seeming, with hindsight, clearly false; logical
behaviorism continues to provoke philosophical discussion, perhaps due
to that very clarity. Appreciation of how logical behaviorism went
wrong (below) is widely regarded by cognitivists as the best
propaedeutic to their case for robust recourse to hypotheses about
internal computational mechanisms.
iii. Ordinary Language Behaviorists: Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein

The "ordinary language" movement waxed most strongly in the work of
Ryle and Wittgenstein around the middle of the twentieth century.
Their investigations are "meant to throw light on the facts of our
language" in its everyday employment (Wittgenstein 1953: §130). Where
the formalist seeks the logical and empirical regimentation of
would-be scientific language, including psychological terms, Ryle and
Wittgenstein regard our everyday use of mental terminology as
unimpeached by its scientific "defects" … which are not defects …
because such talk is not in the scientific line of business. To
misconstrue talk of people "as knowing, believing, or guessing
something, as hoping, dreading, intending or shirking something, as
designing this or being amused at that" (Ryle 1949: 15) on the model
of scientific hypotheses about inner mechanisms misconstrues the
"logical grammar" (Wittgenstein) of such talk, or makes a
"category-mistake" (Ryle). Philosophical puzzlements about knowledge
of other minds and mind-body interaction arise from such misconstrual:
for instance, attempts to solve the mind-body problem, Ryle claims,
"presuppose the legitimacy of the disjunction `Either there exist
minds or there exist bodies (but not both)'" which "would be like
saying, `Either she bought a left-hand and a right-hand glove or she
bought a pair of gloves (but not both)'" (Ryle 1949: 22-3). The most
basic misconstrual (Wittgenstein's and Ryle's diagnoses concur)
involves thinking — when we talk of "knowing, believing, or guessing,"
etc. — "that these verbs are supposed to denote the occurrence of
specific modifications" either mechanical (in brains) or
"paramechanical" (in streams of consciousness):

So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet
unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we have denied the mental
processes. And naturally we don't want to deny them." (Wittgenstein
1953: §308)

Not wanting to deny, e.g., "that anyone ever remembers anything"
(Wittgenstein 1953: §306) Wittgenstein and Ryle offer broadly
dispositional stories about how mentalistic talk does work, in place
of "the model of 'object and designation'" (Wittgenstein 1953: §293)
they reject.

According to Wittgenstein on the object-designation model — where the
object is supposed to be private or introspected — it "drops out of
consideration as irrelevant" (Wittgenstein 1953: §293): the "essential
thing about private experience" here is "not that each person
possesses his own exemplar" but "that nobody knows whether other
people also have this or something else" (§272). So, if "someone tells
me that he knows what pain is only from his own case" this would be as
if

everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a `beetle'. No
one can look in 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 suppose the
word `beetle' had a use in these people's language? — If so, it would
not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place
in 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. (§293)

Rather than referring to inner experiences, sensation words, according
to Wittgenstein, "are connected with the primitive, the natural,
expressions of the sensation and used in their place" (§246):
self-attributions of "pain" and other sensation terms are avowals not
descriptions: "A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults
talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They
teach the child new pain-behaviour." Here, Wittgenstein explains, he
is not "saying that the word `pain' really means crying": rather, "the
verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it"
(§244). Avowals join the "natural expressions" to supply the "outward
criteria" which logically (not just evidentially) constrain and enable
the uses sensation and other "`inner process'" words have in our
public language (§580). Furthermore, Wittgenstein famously argues, we
cannot even coherently imagine a private language "in which a person
could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences"
exclusively "for his private use" because the "private ostensive
definition" (§380) required to fix the reference of the would-be
sensation-denoting expression could not establish a rule for its use.
"To think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule" and in the case
of usage consequent on the envisaged private baptism "thinking one was
obeying a rule would be the same thing as … obeying" (§202).

For Ryle, when we employ the "verbs, nouns and adjectives, with which
in ordinary life we describe the wits, characters, and higher-grade
performances of people with whom we have do" (Ryle 1949: 15) "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" (25) or else to a "disposition, or a complex of
dispositions" (15) to such acts and utterances. "Dispositional words
like `know', `believe', `aspire', `clever', and `humorous"' signify
multi-track dispositions: "abilities, tendencies or pronenesses to do,
not things of one unique kind, but things of lots of different kinds"
(118): "to explain an action as done from a specified motive or
inclination is not to describe the action as the effect of a specified
cause": being dispositions, motives "are not happenings and are not
therefore of the right type to be causes" (113). Accordingly, "to
explain an act as done from a certain motive is not analogous to
saying that the glass broke, because a stone hit it, but to the quite
different type of statement that the glass broke, when the stone hit
it, because the glass was brittle" (87). The force of such explanation
is not "to correlate [the action explained] with some occult cause,
but to subsume it under a propensity or behavior trend" (110). The
explanation does not prescind from the act to its causal antecedents
but redescribes the act in broader context, telling "a more pregnant
story," as when we explain the bird's "flying south" as "migration";
yet, Ryle observes," the process of migrating is not a different
process from that of flying south; so it is not the cause of its
flying south" (142). Finally, the connection between disposition and
deed, as Ryle understands it, is a logical-criterial, not a
contingent-causal one: brave deeds are not caused by bravery, they
constitute it (as the "soporific virtue," or sleep-inducing power, of
opium doesn't cause it to induce sleep since tending to induce sleep
is this power or "virtue").
iv. Reasons , Causes, and the Scientific Imperative

For formalists, the informality and imprecision of ordinary language
formulations invite criticism. Take Ryle's "migration" comparison:
either, it would seem, Ryle is saying that everyday psychological
explanations yield only vague interpretive understanding, having no
scope for scientific development; or else, it would seem, the "more
pregnant story" must be formalizable in terms of
predictive-explanatory laws (as of migration, in Ryle's example) with
logical-behaviorial-definition-like rigor (if not content). The point
of logical behaviorist analysis is to scientifically ground talk of
"belief," "desire," "sensation," and the rest, whose everyday use
seems empirically precarious. With this aim in mind, "explanatory"
procession from low-level matter-of-fact description ("flying south")
to more interpretive description ("migration"), such as Ryle
envisages, seems to move in the wrong direction … unless, again, the
"more pregnant story" is not just redescriptive but delivers
scientific theoretic gains in the form of more general and precise
explantory-predictive laws. A related debate raged fiercely through
the nineteen fifties and early sixties between defenders of the
(would-be) scientific status of "motive" or "belief-desire"
explanations (notably Hempel) and champions of the Rylean thesis that
"reasons aren't causes" (Elizabeth Anscombe and Stuart Hampshire,
among them). Donald Davidson's (1963) defense of "the ancient — and
commonsense — position that rationalization is a species of causal
explanation" is widely recognized as a watershed in this debate,
though it remains doubtful to what extent cognivists retain rights to
the water shed, since Davidson counts reasons to be causal in virtue
of noncognitive (low-level physical) properties. On the other hand,
philosophers in the ordinary language tradition (e.g., Hampshire 1950,
Geach 1957) raised daunting technical difficulties (below) for the
"narrow translationist" plans of logical behaviorism. Such criticisms
hastened the advent of cognitivism as an alternative to behaviorism of
any stripe among philosophers unwilling to abide the informality,
imprecision, and seeming scientific defeatism of the ordinary language
approach.
v. Later Day Saints: Willard van Orman Quine aand Alan Turing

Quine, considered by many to be the greatest Anglo-American
philosopher of the last half of the twentieth century, was a
self-avowed "behaviorist," and such tendencies are evident in several
areas of his thought, beginning with his enthusiasm for a linguistic
turn (as Bergmann 1964 styled it: see Rorty 1967) in the philosophy of
mind. "A theory of mind," Quine writes, "can gain clarity and
substance … from a better understanding of the workings of language,
whereas little understanding of the working of language is to be hoped
for in mentalistic terms" (Quine 1975: 84). Quine's "naturalized"
inquiries concerning knowledge and language attempt, further, to
incorporate empirical findings and methods from Skinnerian psychology.
In contrast to logical behaviorism (above), notably, Quine "never …
aspired to the ascetic adherence to operational definitions" and
always acknowledged — indeed insisted – that science "settles for
partial criteria and for partial explanations" of its theoretic posits
"in terms of other partially explained notions" (Quine 1990: 291).
Still, he is not keen — as his cognitivist contemporaries (e.g.,
Putnam) and followers (e.g., Fodor) are — about the prospects such
looser empiricist strictures offer for scientific deployment of
mentalistic vernacular terms like "belief," "desire," and "sensation".
To standard behaviorist concern about the empirical credentials of
alleged private entities and introspective reports, Quine adds the
consideration that talk of "belief", "desire", and other intentional
mental states is so logically ill-behaved as to be irreconcilable with
materialism and scientifically unredeemable. In the final analysis,
however, the behaviorism Quine proposes is methodological. His final
metaphysical word is physicalism: "having construed behavioral
dispositions in turn as physiological states, I end up with the so
called identity theory of mind: mental states are states of the body"
(Quine 1975: 94); yet, his antiessentialism here (as elsewhere) lends
his physicalism a behavioristic cast (see next section).

Alan Turing is transitional. Along with the digital age, his theory of
computation helped inspire the cognitivist revolution, making him, by
some lights the first cognitivist. On the other hand, the
methodological behaviorism of Turing's proposed Imitation Game test
for artificial intelligence (the "Turing test") has been widely
remarked and "the Turing test conception" of intelligence may be
considered a parade case of metaphysical behaviorism for purposes of
refutation (as by Block 1981) or illustration (as follows).
vi. The Turing Test Conception: Behaviorism as Metaphysical Null Hypothesis

The Imitation Game proposed by Turing (1950) was originally a game of
female impersonation: the aim of the game for the (male) querant is to
pass for (that is, be judged by the questioner to be) female. The
Turing test replaces the male querant with a computer whose aim is to
pass for human. This simplified setup (Turing's actual proposal
involves an additional complication, a third participant or foil
besides to the querant and questioner) can be used to explain the
metaphysical character of the dispute as a dispute about essence. In
the original (man-woman) Imitation Game, notice, however good the
impersonation, it doesn't make the querant female. Something else is
essential: it's the content of their chromosomes (not their
conversation) that makes the querant female or not. Different
proposals for what that essential something is in the case of thought,
then, represent different metaphysical takes on the nature of mind. In
the Turing test scenario these different [proposed essences] represent
further conditions necessary to promote intelligent-seeming behavior
into actual intelligence, and sufficing for intelligence, or
mentation, even in the absence of such behavior.

Dualistic Essentialism: S -> [(the right) conscious experiential
processes] -> R
Physicalistic Essentialism: S -> [(the right) physical processes] -> R
Cognitivistic Essentialism: S -> [(the right) computational processess] -> R
Behavioristic Inessentialism: S -> [whatever works] -> R

Dualistic theories propose a conscious experiential essence;
physicalistic (or "mind-brain identity") theories propose a physical
(specifically, neurophysiological) essence; and cognitivistic theories
a procedural or computational essence. Behaviorism, in contrast,
doesn't care what mediates the intelligent-seeming S -> R connection;
behavioristically speaking, intelligence is as intelligence does
regardless of the manner of the doing (experiential,
neurophysiological, computational, or otherwise). Behaviorism, thus
construed, "is not a metaphysical theory: it is the denial of a
metaphysical theory" and consequently "asserts nothing" (Ziff 1958:
136); at least, nothing positively metaphysical.
vii. Logical Behaviorism Metaphysically Construed

Logical behaviorism may be seen, in the light of the preceding, as
attempting to stipulate nominal essences (Locke 1690: IIiii15) where
dualism, physicalism, and cognitivism propose to discover real ones.
Further, although the motives of its founders (Carnap and Hempel) were
chiefly epistemic or "methodological," logical behaviorism seemed to
many to invite metaphysical exploitation. Because the definitions
Carnap and Hempel proposed sought to specify observationally necessary
and sufficient conditions for true attributions of the mental terms in
what they called "the physical thing language," the successful
completion of this program, it seemed, would reduce the mental to the
physical. Mentalistic descriptions of people as "expecting pain" or
"having toothaches" would be completely replaceable, in principle and
without cognitive loss, by talk of bodily transitions; thoughts and
experiences would thus be shown to be nothing above and beyond such
bodily transitions; vindicating materialism. As the the methodological
emphasis of early analytic philosophy receded and was replaced by more
frankly metaphysical concerns among formalist analytic philosophers of
mind, it was chiefly this would-be metaphysical application of logical
behaviorism that came increasingly under philosophical scrutiny.
2. Objections & Discussion

a. Technical Difficulties
i. Action v. Movement

Ordinary language philosophers were among the first to raise daunting
difficulties for the strict translationist program which, they argued,
was guilty of a category mistake — or at least of wildly
underestimating the impracticability of what they were proposing — in
conflating the concepts of action and movement under the heading of
"behavior." As D. W. Hamlyn puts this complaint, "where activity is
exhibited, it is not necessarily inappropriate to talk of movements,
but it will be so to do so in the same context, in the same universe
of discourse":

With movements we are concerned with physical phenomena, the laws
concerning which are in principle derivable from the laws of physics.
But the behaviour which we call "posting a letter" or "kicking a ball"
involves a very complex series of movements, and the same movements
will not be exhibited on all occasions on which we should describe the
behavior in the same way. No fixed criteria can be laid down which
will enable us to decide what series of movements shall constitute
"posting a letter." Rather we have learnt to interpret a varying range
of movements as coming up to the rough standard which we observe in
acknowledging a correct description of such behaviour as posting a
letter. (Hamlyn 1953: 134-135)

The task of defining mentalistic predications such as "wanting to
score a goal" in terms of outward acts — or dispositions to acts —
like kicking a ball (Tolman's "molar behavior") seems daunting enough;
the task of casting the definition in terms of movements or "molecular
behavior" — "colorless movements and mere receptor impulses" (Watson),
"motions and noises" (Ryle) — seems beyond daunting.
ii. From Paralytics to Perfect Actors

If the mental were completely definable in outwardly behavioral terms
— as logical behaviorism proposes — then outward behavioral capacities
or dispositions would be necessary for thought or experience. But a
complete paralytic, it seems, might still think thoughts (e.g., I
can't move), harbor desires (e.g., to move) and experience (e.g.,
despairing) sensations. Such possibilities are, on their face,
contrary to logical behaviorism. From the logical behaviorist
perspective, while such cases may complicate the description of the
mental in behavioral terms, they do not seem fatal. It may be replied,
e.g., that wanting to move is being disposed to move if able and,
since the various possible causes of the disability (severed spinal
cords, curare poisoning, etc.) are physically specifiable, this
envisaged complication is wholly consistent with behaviorist
strictures and reductionist hopes. Hilary Putnam's imagined
super-super-spartans ("X-worlders") are less easily countered.
X-worlders (as Putnam called them) "suppress all … pain behavior" by
"a great effort of will" for "what they regard as important
ideological reasons" (Putnam 1963: 332-334). Like paralytics, these
super-super-spartans "lack the behavioral dispositions envisioned by
the behaviorists to be associated with pain, even though they do in
fact have pain" (Block 1981: 12); but, unlike paralytics, they lack
these dispositions for psychological reasons: efforts of will
undertaken for ideological reasons — unlike severed spinal cords and
doses of curare — would not be physically specifiable and any
envisaged complications of the behavioral definitions attempting to
build exceptions for these causes would be inconsistent with
behaviorist strictures and reductionist hopes. And contrary to the
sufficiency of behavior for pain that logical behaviorist definitions
would imply, "an exactly analogous example of perfect pain-pretenders
shows that no behavioral disposition is sufficient for pain either"
(Block 1981: 12: emphasis added).
iii. The Intentional Circle

Among the technical arguments against logical behaviorism, the most
influential has been the "intentional circle" argument harking back to
Chisholm (1957, ch. 11) and Geach (1957, p. 8): indeed the perfect
actor line of counterexamples "flows out of the Chisholm-Geach point"
as Block (1981:12) notes. A desire to stay dry, for instance, will
dispose you to carry an umbrella only on the condition that you
believe it might rain; and, conversely, the belief it might rain will
dispose you to carry an umbrella only on the condition that you desire
to stay dry. Such Geach-Chisholm type examples show that "which
behavioral dispositions a desire issues in depends on other states of
the desirer. And similar points apply to behaviorist analyses of
belief and other mental states" (Block 1981: 12). While this point is
most plain with respect to intentional mental states such as belief
and desire, perfect actor examples seem to show it to extend to
sensations, such as pain, as well: "a disposition to pain behavior is
not a sufficient condition of having pain, since the behavioral
disposition could be produced by a number of different combinations of
mental states, e.g., [pain + a normal preference function] or by [no
pain + an overwhelming desire to appear to have pain]" (Block 1981:
15); and, conversely, the dispositions are not a necessary condition
since unpained-behavior dispositions might be produced by, e.g. [no
pain + a normal preference function] or by [pain + an overwhelming
desire to appear not to have pain]. "Conclusion: one cannot define the
conditions under which a given mental state will issue in a given
behavioral disposition" as logical behaviorism proposes "without
adverting to other mental states" (Block 1981: 12), which logical
behaviorism precludes. Such arguments are widely "regarded as decisive
refutations of behaviorist analyses of many mental states, such as
belief, desire, and pain" (Block 1981: 13). The "functionalist"
doctrine that a mental state is "definable in terms of its causal
relations to inputs, outputs, and other mental states" (Block 1980:
257), not to inputs and outputs alone (a la logical behaviorism), also
flows directly from the Geach-Chisholm point.

In truth, as Putnam himself notes, whether refutation of the
"admittedly oversimplified position" of logical behaviorism refutes
behaviorism tout court depends on the extent to which "the defects
which this position exhibits are also exhibited by the more complex
and sophisticated positions which are actually held" (Putnam 1957:
95). Notably, perfect actor and other would-be thought experimental
counterexamples to behaviorism would counterexemplify metaphysical
construals which those who have actually held "the more complex and
sophisticated positions" at issue, for the most part, explicitly
disavow. Also, notably, Ryle's characterization of intentional mental
states (in particular) as multi-track "dispositions the exercises of
which are indefinitely heterogenous" (Ryle 1949: 44) seems already to
allow for intentional "circularity": Tolman and Hull-style behaviorism
even explicitly embraces it. For refutation of behaviorism tout court
to be claimed, cognitivism would be have to be so simply identified
with the view that a mental state is "definable in terms of its causal
relations to inputs, outputs, and other mental states" that Tolman,
Hull, and Ryle, count as cognitivists. That's too simple. One may
agree "that the logically necessary and sufficient conditions for the
ascription of a mental state" would have to "refer not just to
environmental variables but to other mental states of the organism"
(Fodor 1975: 7 n.7) — that mental attributions have to be reduced all
together (or holistically) not one by one (atomistically) — yet
behavioristically refuse the call for further computational (or
physical or phenomenological) constraints on what count as mental
states. The "faith that … one will surely get to pure behavioral
ascriptions" — motions and noises — "if only one pursues the analysis
far enough" (Fodor 1975: 7 n.7) is also behavioristically dispensable.
Notably these two tacks have their costs: the first abandons hope for
essential scientific characterization of the mental. The second
abandons hope for reductionist exploitation of behaviorist ideas on
behalf of materialism. So chastened, behaviorism, while defensible,
seems, to many, too boring to merit further philosophical bother.
iv. Methodological Complaints

Fodor's summation of the complaint against against methodological
behaviorism is succinct: by it, he maintains, "[p]sychology is …
deprived of its theoretical terms" meaning "psychologists can provide
methodologically reputable accounts only of such aspects of behavior
as are the effects of environmental variables"; but "the spontaneity
and freedom from local environmental control that behavior often
exhibits" makes "this sort of methodology intolerably restrictive"
(Fodor 1975: 1-2). Furthermore, "there would seem to be nothing in the
project of explaining behavior by reference to mental processes which
requires a commitment to [their] epistemological privacy in the
traditional sense" of conscious subjectivity. "Indeed," Fodor
continues, "for better or worse, a materialist cannot accept such a
commitment since his view is that mental events are a species of
physical events, and physical events are publicly observable, at least
in principle" (Fodor 1975: 4): the commitment is to inner
computational not inward experiential processes. However, while Fodor
1975 adduces, "failure of behavioristic psychology to provide even a
first approximation to a plausible theory of cognition" (Fodor 1975:
8) in support of cognitivist alternatives, Fodor 2000 confesses "that
the most interesting — certainly the hardest — problems about thinking
are unlikely to be much illuminated by any kind of computational
theory we are now able to imagine" (Fodor 2000: 1). As for more
isolated or "modular" processes (e.g., syntactic processing) where the
"Computational Theory of Mind" by Fodor's lights remains "by far the
best theory of cognition that we've got; indeed, the only one we've
got that's worth the bother" (Fodor 2000: 1) … here, where, in Fodor's
judgment, behaviorism failed "to provide even a first approximation of
a plausible theory," cognitivism may be faulted with producing too
many: elaborate theoretical superstructures built on slight
observational-experimental foundations reminiscent of Hull's. Notably,
since Chomsky's watershed "Review of Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner"
Chomsky himself has held at least four distinct syntactic theories,
and his currently fashionable "Minimalist Theory" presently competes
with at least five distinct others. (Chomsky's four theories (in
chronological order) have been Transformational Grammar (1965),
Extended Standard Theory (1975), Government and Binding (1984), and
Minimalism (1995). Competing theories include, notably, Lexical
Function Grammar (Bresnan), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Sag,
Pollard), Functionalism (see Newmeyer), Categorial Grammar (Steedman),
and Stratificational Grammar (Lamb).)
b. The Ur-Objection: Consciousness Denied

Behaviorism's disregard for consciousness struck many from the first,
and continues to strike many today, as contrary to plain
self-experience and plain common-sense; not to mention all that makes
life precious and meaningful. In this vein behaviorism has been
"likened to `Hamlet' without the Prince of Denmark" (Ryle 1949: 328)
and behaviorists accused of "affecting general anesthesia" (Ogden &
Richards 1926: 23) and made the butt of jokes in the vein of the
following (see Ziff 1958):

Q: What does one behaviorist say to another when they meet on the street?
A: You're fine. How am I?
Q: What does one behaviorist say to another after sex?
A: That was great for you. How was it for me?

In the same vein as John Searle still complains "the behaviorist seems
to leave out the mental phenomena in question," (Searle 1992: 34), E.
B. Titchener complained, at the movement's outset, of behaviorism's
"irrelevance to psychology as psychology is ordinarily understood"
(Titchener 1914: 6). On the other hand Titchener's prediction — that,
due to this irrelevance, introspective psychology would continue to
flourish alongside behaviorism — with hindsight, seems a bit laughable
itself. As Ryle puts it, "the extruded hero," consciousness, for
scientific purposes, "soon came to seem so bloodless and spineless a
being that even the opponents of these [behaviorist] theories began to
feel shy of imposing heavy burdens upon his spectral shoulders" (Ryle
1949: 328). Ryle's countercomplaint still rings true today despite
recent attempts to revive consciousness as a subject of serious
scientific inquiry; or, more to the point especially, in light of such
attempts, which all, in one way or another, seek to revive the
Wundtian program of correlating introspected experiential with
observed neurophysiological events. While it may be urged that the
hero was never wholly extruded but has been lurking all along in the
caves of psychophysics (e.g., in correlations of physical stimulus
variations with noticed differences in sensation), recent attempts to
extend this psychology-as-psychophysics approach beyond psychophysics
remain nascent at best.

"Imagery from Galton on has been the inner stronghold of a psychology
based on introspection" (Watson 1913: 421) and here, with regard to
direct sensory presentations (e.g., afterimages) and sensations (e.g.,
pain) — so-called qualia – the "neglect of consciousness" complaint
against behaviorism is most acutely felt; and here it must be
confessed that behaviorist replies have been mostly halting and
evasive. Watson, confessing, "I may have to grant a few sporadic cases
of imagery to him who will not be otherwise convinced" would
marginalize the phenomena, insisting, "that the images of such a one
are as sporadic and as unnecessary to his well-being and well-thinking
as a few hairs more or less on his head" (Watson 1913: 423n.3) — a
verdict Ryle deems confirmed. Scientifically, the "extruded hero," it
seems, can neither explanans nor explanandum be. Inward experience
seems, scientifically, as nonexplanatory (of intentionality,
intelligence, or other features of mind we should like to explain) as
it seems itself scientifically inexplicable. Nevertheless, Ryle
frankly confesses that "there is something seriously amiss" with his
own treatment of sensations (Ryle 1949: 240) and, even, "not to know
the right idioms to discuss these matters" in behavioristic good
conscience; only hoping, his "discussion of them in the official
idioms may have at least some internal Fifth Column efficacy" (Ryle
1949: 201). Still, inward experiences seem just as unaccountable on
inner computational grounds as on outward behavioral ones — Kossyln's
1980 data structural analysis of images as two dimensional data
arrays, e.g., leaves their qualia still unaccounted for. Behavioristic
losses on the count of qualia are, by no means, cognitivistic gains.
Cognitivism itself "has been plagued by two `qualia' centered
objections" in particular: the Inverted Qualia Objection that,
possibly, e.g., "though you and I have exactly the same functional
organization, the sensation that you have when you look at red things
is phenomenally the same as the sensation that I have when I look at
green things" (Block 1980: 257); and the Absent Qualia Objection "that
it is possible that a mental state of a person x be functionally
identical to a state of y, even though x's state has qualitative
character while y's state lacks qualitative character altogether"
(Block 1980: 258).

Methodologically, then, the matter of consciousness remains about
where Watson left it, as scientifically intractable as it seems
morally crucial and common-sensically inescapable. Unless there is
more scientific gold in those psychophysical hills than recently
renewed attempts to mine them by Crick (1994) Edelman (1989) and
others (see Horgan 1994) suggest, this is apt to be where matters
remain for the foreseeable future. Notice, metaphysical dualism
(identifying mental events with private, subjective, nonphysical,
"modes" of conscious experience) may be held consistently with
methodological behavioristic commitment to the explanatory superfluity
of such factors by disallowing such events their apparent causal roles
in the generation of behavior. Epiphenomenalism denies their causal
efficacy altogether. Parallelism just denies their "downward"
(mental-to-physical) causal efficacy. It is due, largely, to their
reluctance to embrace such drastic expedients as parallelism and
epiphenomenalism that, despite recently renewed would-be scientific
interest in consciousness, most cognitive scientists and allied
analytic philosophers continue to reject metaphysical dualism —
remaining true to their metaphysical, along with their methodological,
behavioral roots.

The enduring cogency of behaviorism's challenge to the scientific bona
fides of consciousness means that methodologically, at least, there
seems no viable alternative to "practically everybody in cognitive
science" remaining — if not "a behaviorist of one sort or another"
(Fodor 2001: 13-14) — at least, behavioristic in some manner.
Cognitive Science killed Behaviorism, they say. Still, Cognitive
Science seems entitled to its last name only on condition that it
retain a good measure of behavioristic conscience.
3. References and Further Reading

* Anscombe, G. E. M. Intention. Oxford: Blackwell, 1957.
* Bergmann, Gustav. Logic and Reality. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1964.
* Bergmann, Gustav, and Kenneth Spence. "Operationism and Theory
in Psychology." Psychological Review 48 (1964): 1-14.
* Block, Ned. "Troubles with Functionalism." First appeared in
Perception and Cognition: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of
Science, Vol. IX. Ed. P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979. Reprinted in
Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology. Ed. N. Block. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1980: 268-305.
* Block, Ned. "Are Absent Qualia Impossible?" The Philosophical
Review 89 (1980): 257-274.
* Block, Ned. "Psychologism and Behaviorism." The Philosophical
Review 90 (1981): 5-43.
* Bresnan, Joan. Lexical-Functional Syntax. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.
* Bridgman, P. W. The Logic of Modern Physics. New York: Macmillan, 1927.
* Burge, Tyler. "Individualism and the Mental." Studies in
Metaphysics: Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 4. Ed. P. French, T.
Uehling, and H. Wettstein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1979: 73-121.
* Carnap, Rudolf. 1932/33. "Psychology in Physical Language."
Erkenntnis 3. Reprinted (in translation by George Schick) in Logical
Positivism. Ed. A. J. Ayer. New York: The Free Press, 1959: 165-98.
* Chalmers, David. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental
Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
* Chihara, C. S., and Fodor, J. A. "Operationalism and Ordinary
Language: A critique of Wittgenstein." American Philosophical
Quarterly 2 (1965): 281-295.
* Chisholm Roderick. Perceiving: a Philosophical Study. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1957.
* Chomsky, Noam. "Review of Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner."
Language 35 (1959): 26-58.
* Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge MA:
MIT Press, 1965.
* Chomsky, Noam. "Conditions on Transformations." A Festschrift
for Morris Halle. Ed. Stephen R. Anderson and Paul Kiparsky. New

York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973. 232-286.
* Chomsky, Noam. Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa
Lectures. Dordrecht Holland: Foris Publications, 1984.
* Chomsky, Noam. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
* Clark, Andy. "Reasons, Robots and the Extended Mind." Mind &
Language 16 (2001): 121-145.
* Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific
Search for the Soul. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
* Davidson, Donald. "Actions, Reasons, and Causes." Essays on
Actions and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1980): 3-19.
* Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. John
Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch. In The philosophical
writings of Descartes, Vol. II. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1984: 1-62. First appeared 1642.
* Dewey, John. "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology."
Psychological Review, 3 (1896): 357-370.
* Edelman, G.M. The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of
Consciousness. New York: Basic Books, 1989
* Fodor, Jerry A. The Mind Doesn't Work that Way. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2000.
* Fodor, Jerry A. "Language, Thought, and Compositionality." Mind
and Language 16 (2001): 1-15.
* Geach, P. Mental Acts: Their Content and Their Objects. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul: 1957.
* Hamlyn, D. W. "Behaviour." Philosophy 28 (1953): 132-145.
* Hampshire, Stuart. "Critical Notice of Ryle, The Concept of
Mind." Mind 59 (1950): 234: .
* Hampshire, Stuart. Thought and Action. London: Chatto & Windus, 1959.
* Hempel, Karl. "The Logical Analysis of Psychology." Readings in
the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1. Ed. N. Block. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1980. 15-23. First appeared 1949.
* Hempel, Carl. "Author's Prefatory Note, 1977." Readings in the
Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1. Ed. N. Block. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1980. 14-15.
* Horgan, John. "Can Science Explain Consciousness?" Scientific
American, 271.1 (1994): 88-94.
* Hull, Clark. Principles of Behavior. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1943.
* Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Online:
http://www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/hume/treat.html.
Originally appeared 1739.
* James, William. "What is an Emotion?" Mind 9 (1884): 188-205.
Online: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/emotion.htm.
* James, William. "Does `Consciousness' Exist?" Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 1 (1912) : 477-491.
Online: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/consciousness.htm.
* Kossyln, S. M. Image and Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1980.
* Lamb, Sidney. Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of
Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999.
* Lewis, David. "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications."
Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50 (1972): 207-215.
* Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Online:
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appeared 1690.
* Newmeyer, Frederich J. "The Prague School and North American
Functionalist Approach to Syntax." Journal of Linguistics 37 (2001):
101-126.
* O'Donohue, William and Richard Kitchener, eds. 1999. Handbook of
Behaviorism. San Diego: Academic Press.
* Ogden, C. K., and I. A. Richards, eds. The Meaning of Meaning.
London: Harcourt, Brace, & Co, 1926.
* Pavlov, I. P. Conditioned Reflexes. London: Oxford, 1927.
* Place, Ullin T. "Ryle's Behaviorism." Handbook of Behaviorism.
Ed. William O'Donohue and Richard Kitchener. San Diego: Academic
Press, 1999.
* Pollard, Carl, and Ivan Sag. Head-Driven Phrase Structure
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