Chapter 5: Mind and BodyThe Rejection of Dualism

Introducing Philosophy, 10th editionRobert C. Solomon, Kathleen Higgins,

and Clancy Martin

Behaviorism

• A rejection of dualism is called behaviorism; B. F. Skinner is the best-known behaviorist

• Behaviorism refuses to consider any events that cannot be publicly witnessed, thus excluding mental events; many behaviorists go further and claim that there can be no mental events

• John Watson believed that belief in consciousness goes back to the ancient days of superstition and magic

John Watson (1878-1958)

• American psychologist generally recognized as the founder of behaviorism

• Attacked the notion of “consciousness” as a remnant of the religious belief in the “soul” and urged that we give up such “magical” nonsense in favor of a purely scientific view that allows us to talk sensibly about only observables; in other words, human behavior rather than the human “mind”

• Author of Behaviorism (1924)

• Gilbert Ryle formed logical behaviorism in response to Watson’s theory

• Ryle discusses category mistakes: to mistake one type of thing for another

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1978)

• Oxford “ordinary-language” philosopher whose book The Concept of Mind (1949) set the stage for several decades of debate over his quasi-behavioristic resolution of the mind-body problem

• Main thesis is that the distinction between mind and body rests on what he calls a “category mistake,” that is, wrongly believing something to be one kind of thing when it is really another

• In particular, it has been thought that mental events are events on a par with, but wholly different from, bodily events

• Ryle argues: to talk about mind is to talk about behavioral dispositions and abilities (to say that a person wants to do something is to say that he would do that if given the opportunity)

• It is a mistake to think that “the mind” and its events are some strange and mysteriously private sort of thing behind our behavior when, in fact, mind is the pattern of our behavior and not “behind” behavior at all

• Dispositions: a tendency for something to happen given certain conditions; everything mental is really a disposition to behave in certain ways

• The causal interaction between mind and body is reformulated as the causal connection between a physical state, a disposition to behave in certain ways, and the actual consequent behavior

Objection

• Behaviorism, in all forms, becomes nonsense in one’s own case when one is trying to understand and talk about one’s own mental states

• When I say “I am in pain,” I am not predicting my behavior

Other Responses to Dualism

• The identity theory states that mind and body or, more accurately, mental events and certain bodily events are identical

• J. J. C. Smart argues that the identity theory is true because it is compatible with modern science

J. J. C. Smart (1920-)

• Australian philosopher lately of the Australian National University in Canberra

• Classic defender of the mind-body “identity theory”

Jerome Shaffer (1929-)

• American philosopher, presently teaching at the University of Connecticut

• One of the best-known critics of the now-influential “identity theory” of mind and body

• Because the two languages that we use to describe mental/neurological events are so different, the thing(s) that they refer to must be different as well

• If two things are identical, then they must share all of the same properties. But no amount of research could possibly show that brain processes and thought have the same properties

• Eliminative materialism proposes to defend materialism without claiming an identity between what we call mental states and the workings of the brain

• Increasing knowledge of the workings of the brain will make our “folk-psychology” talk about the mind outmoded, and we will all learn to talk the language of neurology

Paul Churchland (1942-)

• Paul Churchland believes that with our increasing knowledge of neurology, our ordinary language will be seriously revised

• American philosopher at the University of California, San Diego

• Specialist in cognitive science and the interplay among philosophy, computer science, and neurology

Functionalism

• Inspired by developments in computer science

• Minds are produced by relations between physical parts

• “Optimistic”–computers will one day be built with minds

• “Less optimistic”–minds are a function of patterns of neural activity in the brain

John Searle (1932-)

• American philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley

• The best-known proponent of “speech-act theory” in the philosophy of language and the author of many controversial books and articles, including a series of attacks on the ambitions of cognitive science and computer models of the mind

• Connectionists complain that functionalists start with behavior, either human behavior or computer behavior, and claim that understanding human consciousness is just a matter of finding the right “program” for that behavior

• Connectionists claim that the mechanical and physical interactions that occur in the brain determine the kinds of behavior that computers are capable of processing