Logical Behaviorism

Sandra LaFave
West Valley College

Behaviorism held sway in psychology until the 1960’s. The more

extreme forms of behaviorism were philosophically on shaky
ground from the start. For example, some behaviorists denied the
existence of mental events altogether. Philosophers generally
found that position a little extreme: it seems obvious that even if I
can’t be sure anybody else has mental events, I do, and so I can’t
deny that mental events exist. (Maybe I’m the only one who has
them, but that’s a different problem. Maybe there’s no continuous
me to have them, but that’s yet another problem.) Besides, the
behaviorists often didn’t really eliminate intentional language at
all; they simply substituted less intentional sounding words, e.g.,
"drive" for "instinct," "food-seeking behavior" for "hunger," "flight
behavior" for "fear," etc.

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), a British philosopher of the "ordinary

language" school, tried to remedy these problems. Like the
behaviorists, Ryle opposed the Cartesian view. But Ryle, like
Aristotle, opted for metaphysical pluralism. Ryle thought there
were many ways to be, and that it was silly to claim that
something had simply to be either "mental" on the one hand or
"physical" on the other with no merging and no in-between. Ryle
saw that if you limited yourself to the Cartesian categories, you
ended up making category mistakes (like saying, if you’re a
materialist, that intentions can’t exist because they’re "mental"; or
if you’re a dualist, that intentional behavior can’t be observed
because the intention is "mental"). The root problem is the
Cartesian notion of the "mental" as opposed to the "physical."
Ryle came up with a new form of behaviorism, which he called
logical or philosophical behaviorism. Logical behaviorism was
opposed to methodological behaviorism, which was behaviorist
psychology’s policy never to use mental events in its "scientific"
explanations of behavior.

So Ryle did not try to deny the existence of mental events or

intentionality; on the contrary, Ryle (following Brentano) said you
must use intentional language to understand the behavior of
people and higher animals. But according to Ryle, you can take
any claim about "the mental" and systematically reformulate it as
a set of "if … then" statements (conditionals), where all
components (the antecedents and consequents) are observable
behaviors. This way you can accept and use mentalistic and
intentional language without committing yourself to all the
Cartesian spook baggage. Everything that is is publicly; there is
one world, for epistemological purposes. But there are many ways
to be in that world (metaphysical pluralism).

Logical behaviorism and non-intentional states (e.g.,

sensation)

Let’s look at how Ryle’s logical behaviorism would reformulate a

statement about a non-intentional "mental" state such as
sensation. Let’s consider the sensation of pain. According to
logical behaviorism, the statement "John is in pain" MEANS the
entire set of true conditional statements such as the following:

THEN
IF
You ask John "Are you in pain?" John replies "Yes."
You measure John’s blood pressure You find it is elevated.
You stimulate John’s C fibers John winces, cries, says
"OW!"
You see a bone sticking through John winces, cries, says
John’s skin "OW!"
And so on ...
The clever idea here is that if our list of conditionals is exhaustive
enough, we’ll know exactly what it MEANS to say "John is in pain"
without having to acknowledge any spooky invisible feelings, since
in all these restatements, the referents of both the "if" clause (the
antecedent) and the "then" clause (the consequent) are public and
observable.

Logical behaviorism and intentional states (e.g., belief)

Next let’s consider how Ryle would reformulate intentional

statements such as "Jill believes it is going to rain". For Ryle
statements about belief are statements about dispositions to
behave. Those dispositions to behave are just the true conditional
statements such as the following:

THEN
IF
Jill leaves home Jill takes her umbrella.
Jill’s windows are open Jill closes the windows.
Jill’s garden tools are Jill puts the tools in the shed.
out
Jill is wearing her good Jill changes her shoes.
shoes
Jill drives her car Jill makes sure her windshield wipers
are working.
And so on ...
Again, the clever idea here is that in all these restatements, the
referents of both the "if" clause (the antecedent) and the "then"
clause (the consequent) are public and observable, so we know
what it MEANS for Jill to believe it’s going to rain without ever
bringing in mysterious subjective private mental events called
 beliefs.

PROBLEMS:

1. While logical behaviorism is philosophically an

improvement over classic behaviorism, there seems no
room in logical behaviorism’s ontology for "raw feels" (aka
qualia). And without qualia, logical behaviorism can’t
answer the Superactor objection: what if someone were
such a perfect actor that she could simulate pain behavior
in absolutely all respects but felt nothing? Conversely, what
if someone were such a perfect Spartan that he could feel
terrible pain without displaying any behavioral signs?
Logical behaviorism would have to say the SuperActor was
in pain and that SuperSpartan wasn’t, and both conclusions
would be false. Thus, there’s more to the sensation of pain
than a set of conditionals.
2. You need to know everything about someone’s worldview
and projects in order to predict that person’s beliefs. In
order to formulate the conditionals, you need complete
information about everything that stands for everything
else within a person’s world view — what someone sees
things as. And there’s just too much of that stuff. For
examples, see separate notes on Davidson.
3. If all we mean by dispositions are these conditionals, and
these conditionals make no claims about causality, then
dispositions have no causal power. Logical behaviorism is
nominalistic, in the medieval sense: there are only specific
conditional linkages, and nothing more. Since the theory
makes no causal claims, it is useless for science.

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/Logical_Behaviorism.html

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”).

http://www.iep.utm.edu/behavior/#SSH1b.ii