Acta Psychologica, 1955

2017

Behaviorism, both as a psychological research program and a philosophical doctrine, was once a very popular and promising theory, the extension of which had a great impact on various fields such as socio-political theory and education. Both behaviorist movements actually shared something in common, which is to bring the downfall of the Cartesian metaphysics, in which the mental is understood as something essentially private and subjective. In this work, first I will briefly go over the general circumstances before the rise of behaviorism and the challenge of behaviorism to the Cartesian metaphysics. Later on, I will provide some of the technical details of philosophical behaviorism. In the last section, I will summarize some of the famous criticisms of behaviorism. I will argue for the claim that despite what Putnam and others thought, behaviorism does not seem to be a weak theory at all. On the contrary, I think that Putnam's criticisms could only show how badly behaviorism is misunderstood and caricaturized. Finally, I will talk about possible theoretical responses to Putnam's criticisms, responses that could easily be launched from a Rylean or Wittgensteinian perspective.

The Philosophical Review, 1981

Let psychologism be the doctrine that whether behavior is intelligent behavior depends on the character of the internal information processing that produces it. More specifically, I mean psychologism to involve the doctrine that two systems could have actual and potential behavior typical of familiar intelligent beings, that the two systems could be exactly alike in their actual and potential behavior, and in their behavioral dispositions and capacities and counterfactual behavioral properties (i.e., what behaviors, behavioral dispositions, and behavioral capacities they would have exhibited had their stimuli differed)-the two systems could be alike in all these ways, yet there could be a difference in the information processing that mediates their stimuli and responses that determines that one is not at all intelligent while the other is fully intelligent. This paper makes two claims: first, psychologism is true, and thus a natural behaviorist analysis of intelligence that is incompatible with psychologism is false. Second, the standard arguments against behaviorism are inadequate to defeat this natural behaviorist analysis of intelligence or to establish psychologism. When I speak of the ``standard objections to behaviorism'' in what follows, I shall have these three types of objection in mind: the Chisholm-Geach objection, the perfect actor objection, and the objection based on paralytics and the like. 4 About this document ...

2007

This paper attempts to discuss behaviorism and the construction of knowledge. This review investigates whether behaviorism methodology has any advantages in learning a language in our classroom. This assessment also observes the critics of behaviorism and its weaknesses in a learning environment. This inquiry concentrates on the view point of B.F Skinner, one of the most outspoken behaviorism psychologist and his experimentations about animals. The notion of antimentalism of behaviorism also discussed in the process. The perception of reward and punishment and the function of human mind regarding learning are also discussed. This study further takes a closer look on external and internal factors as preconditions of behaviorist methodology for an effective learning. Moreover, this study examines how behaviorist views man, mind, conscious, the world and the animals. In addition, this investigation summarizes the important concept of behaviorist paradigm such as objectives, teaching methods, theory and how they perceive learners in the classroom.

Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1994

1999

W. O'Donohue and R.F. Kitchener, Introduction: The Behaviorisms. E.K. Morris and J.T. Todd, Watsonian Behaviorism. L.J. Hays and D.W. Fredericks, Interbehaviorism and Interbehavioral Psychology. N.K. Innis, Edward C. Tolman's Purposive Behaviorism. M.E. Rashotte and A. Amsel, Clark L. Hull's Behaviorism. J. Ringen, Radical Behaviorism: B.F. Skinner's Philosophy of Science. S.W. Bijou, Empirical Behaviorism. H. Rachlin, Teleological Behaviorism. J.E.R. Staddon, Theoretical Behaviorism. W. Timberlake, Biological Behaviorism. E.V. Gifford and S.C. Hayes, Functional Contextualism: A Pragmatic Philosophy for Behavioral Science. D. Bloor, Wittgenstein's Behaviorism. U.T. Place, Ryle's Behaviorism. R.F. Kitchener, Logical Behaviorism. R.E. Gibson, Quine's Behaviorism. Subject Index.

Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 2017

In the introduction to the special volume, Gilbert Ryle: Intelligence, Practice and Skill, Julia Tanney introduces the contributions of Michael Kremer, Stina Bäckström and Martin Gustafsson, and Will Small, each of which indicates concern about the appropriation of Ryle’s distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that in seminal work in contemporary epistemology. Expressing agreement with the authors that something has gone awry in these borrowings from Ryle, Tanney takes this criticism to a deeper level. She argues that the very notion of content-bearing, causally-efficacious mental states, let alone representational states of knowledge-that or knowledge-how, embodies the very presuppositions that Ryle calls into question in his rejection of classical theories of meaning and his related warning of the type-errors involved in conflating rational and mechanistic explanation. That these mental posits are presupposed, unchallenged, in today’s debates make his arguments against intell...

Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2000

Behaviorists have struggled and continue to struggle with basic questions about behavior, such as how to define behavior, how to talk about behavior in relation to environment, and what constitutes an adequate explanation of behavior. Skinner made huge progress on these questions, because of his emphasis on the generic character of stimuli and responses, his advocacy of rate as a datum, his introduction of stimulus control, and his reliance on selection by consequences as a mode of explanation. By no means, however, did he provide final answers. In particular, Skinner fell short because he never escaped from the limitations imposed by thinking in terms of contiguity and discrete events and because he never specified a useful role for theory. The 14 chapters in this book offer varying degrees of clarity on the ways in which behaviorists and behaviorally oriented philosophers dealt with basic questions in the past and are dealing with them in the present, post-Skinner. They are reviewed individually, because they are uneven in quality. Overall, the book is a useful tool for gaining historical and philosophical background to behaviorism and for getting some idea of behaviorists' current directions. DESCRIPTORS: behaviorism, history of behaviorism, philosophical behaviorism, psychological behaviorism

The comprehension of the so called mental functions, defined as internal states have been one of the greatest goals of Psychology and Philosophy and, nowadays, of the Neural Science. This essay intends to, from an epistemological approach, present and to discuss some theoretical and methodological difficulties and limitations which come from the influence of some epistemological and ontological positions about internal states and that influenced the construction of a behavior science. Among those positions it will be highlightened the conceptions of the positivism, logical empiricism, which is characteristic from the Vienna Circle and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thought in relation to the private language.