Readings in Philosophy of Psychology Volume 1 Edited by Ned Block Harvarp University Press Cambridge, MassachusettsIntroduction: Behaviorism Harris Savin N FIRST READING, the behavior- ist conclusions of Carl G. Hempel and of B.F. Skinner, who exemplify the two main currents of behaviorist thought, have utterly different bases. Hempel’s is an epistemological thesis, purporting to show that, insofar as psychological sentences are intelligible, they describe “physical behavior.” For Hempel, that is to say, there is nothing psychology could be about except behavior. Skinner, on the contrary, has not an epistemological the- sis but advice about the most expedient way to do psychology. He assumes with- out argument that the only interesting objective for psychology is the prediction of behavior, and he argues that it is fruit- less, if that is one’s objective, to consider mental states or mental processes: “The objection to inner states is not that they do not exist but that they are not relevant to a functional analysis.” Note that neither position entails the other. On the one hand, Skinner, unlike Hempel, is open to the possibility that there are psychological sentences that are not translatable into physical language. He insists only that he does not need them for his science of behavior, Hempel, on the other hand, has no quarrel with such psychological notions as purposes and beliefs, nor does he deny that there may be psychological laws whose most illumi- nating formulation will refer to such psy- chological entities. His only claim is that it is always possible in principle, even if far too tedious for the everyday purposes of scientific psychology, to translate such laws into physical language. In short, Hempel's thesis about the ultimate foun- dations of psychology has no obvious bearing on the day-to-day activity of psy- chologists, while Skinner's advice about how psychologists can best spend their time has no obvious epistemological con- tent. Hempel is most vulnerable to attack when he claims that “the meaning of a proposition is established by its condi- tions of verification.” “Conditions of veri- fication,” he supposes, must be physical conditions; any psychological sentence, therefore, must have the same meaning as some physical sentence. In reply, one might try (as Hilary Putnam does in chap- ter 2) to show that, however closely men- tal events and behavioral events may, as a matter of empirical fact, be correlated with one another, mind statements can- not, in general, be translated by behavior statements. There are two obvious ways to chal-R Harris Savin lenge Skinner: by questioning his assump- tion that the only interesting goal for psy- chology is the prediction of behavior, and by showing that, even for the prediction of behavior, it is expedient on occasion to consider mental states. Skinner notwith- standing, it surely needs no argument to establish that some of us look to psychol- ogy for descriptions of mental states and for knowledge about how to modify those states. As for Skinner's lack of interest in such topics, it is a mere idiosyncrasy, warranting no discussion here. More in- teresting is the question whether or not consideration of mental states may help in the prediction of behavior. Skinner says not, and gives the following argument. Either we know what a person's mental state is by virtue of what we know of his history of stimulation and behavior (knowing he is hungry, for example, be- cause we know he has not eaten today), or else we do not have such evidence for his mental state. In the former case, we may as well forget about the mental state and relate subsequent behavior directly to history (predicting, for example, that the subject of our experiment will eat on the basis not of his inferred hunger but of his observed history of deprivation. If, on the contrary, we have not inferred our sub- ject’s mental state from his prior history, then (ignoring such far-fetched possibili- ties as telepathy) we do not know what his mental state is and therefore can make No predictive use of any putative law re- lating behavior to mental states, The latter half of this argument is sound enough, but Skinner's dismissal of mental states that are inferred from a sub- ject's history is unconvincing. Consider, for amoment, the variety of mental states that, on different occasions, might figure in explanations of eating: we may eat be- cause we are hungry, because we do not want to offend our hostess, because the doctor has ordered us to eat, because we think it imprudent to drink on an empty stomach, or for any number of other rea- sons. Such distinctions among states of mind are obviously crucial for predicting subsequent behavior—for predicting, for example, whether we will stop eating when the hostess leaves the room, when the doctor pronounces us cured, or when we learn there is no whiskey in the house. Skinner would urge that we can nonethe- less dispense with these motives for eating and relate the differences in behavior di- rectly to differences in previous history. It takes only a moment's reflection to see that such a program for psychology is only plausible to the extent that discover- able principles relate past history to future behavior. There are, obviously, far too many significantly different human histo- ries for anyone to propose that a Practica- ble psychological theory could consist of an exhaustive enumeration of histories, each one paired with a prediction of subsequent behavior. Skinner, of course, recognizes this need for principles and, indeed, claims to have discovered the necessary principles in his work on oper- ant conditioning. How widely these prin- ciples of operant conditioning apply out- side the laboratory remains a matter of controversy among psychologists. It suf- fices for the purposes of the present dis- cussion to note that Skinner believes, as does everyone else, that we need princi- ples if we want to predict behavior from past history, yet his argument omits to consider the possibility that mental states will occur as theoretical constructs in some such successful system of principles. Notwithstanding the differences be. tween Skinner's thesis and Hempel's, their two behaviorisms evidence a shared con- viction that people are in no important respect different from inanimate aggre- gates of matter. Now, what is important depends on one's interests and one's point of view. From certain limited but perfect- ly valid points of view, a man may use- fully be regarded as a mass of matter con- centrated at a single point. For other pur- Poses, his description may consist of whatPart One Introduction 13 he does in a factory, an army, or an art- ist’s studio. I do not wish to quarrel with the decision to study man from any of these special points of view, nor with any- ‘one who chooses to see to what extent it is possible to carry out Hempel’s program, ‘or Skinner's. But it is a remarkable and distressing fact that, for much of the pres- ent century, the scientific study of man has been so largely in the hands of those who wished to study him from one or the ‘other of these two points of view and that the human sciences have taken so little serious interest in man as artist, as lover, as moral or political theorist, or, indeed, as creator of scientific knowledge. Even more remarkable and more distressing, most of those who have developed the behaviorist point of view in the human sciences have believed that their particular point of view was not the result of a large- ly arbitrary choice. On the contrary, they have supposed, for reasons such as those discussed here, that behaviorism was the only possible basis for the scientific study of man. ‘One need not impugn the motives of the founders of behaviorism to note the compatibility between their view of the proper study of man and the interests of those—generals, politicians, advertisers, and so forth—whose business it is to pre- dict or control the behavior of masses of anonymous humanity. Of late, behavior- ist fervor has greatly diminished, owing in part perhaps to growing disenchantment with these nonacademic purposes and in part also to the examples of Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, who, in their rather different ways, have made striking ad- vances in the scientific study of the nature ‘of human knowledge—advances that, moreover, cannot plausibly be construed as advances in the study of human be- havior.