1 - Introduction
from Part I - Context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
Behaviourism
In this book I want to present a new theory of the mind, but a theory that has something in common with an old and discredited theory – the theory of behaviourism. I want to defend the following behaviourist claim:
What it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way.
When we describe and study somebody's mind what we are describing and studying is the way that person is disposed to behave. A person's mind does not exist behind the way that person is disposed to behave; it is the way he or she is disposed to behave.
The great philosophical proponent of this sort of behaviourism was Gilbert Ryle (1949). Ryle argued that behaviourist psychologists had been right to reject the idea that minds existed hidden behind the way people behaved, inhabiting a special inaccessible realm of consciousness.
Novelists, dramatists and biographers had always been satisfied to exhibit people's motives, thoughts, perturbations and habits by describing their doings, sayings, and imaginings, their grimaces, gestures and tones of voice. Concentrating on what Jane Austen concentrated on, psychologists began to find that these were, after all, the stuff and not the mere trappings of their subjects. (Ryle 1949: 328)
Now, as I will argue in Chapter 2, Ryle is being charitable to the behaviourist psychologists in saying that they were concentrating on what Jane Austen was concentrating on.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Inner Life of a Rational AgentIn Defence of Philosophical Behaviourism, pp. 3 - 20Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006