Philosophical Behaviorism

             1. Philosophical behaviorism states that all facts about minds and mental states are facts about bodily behavior, and behavioral dispositions. Behaviorism is a form of materialism because behavioral facts are physical facts. A behaviorist would agree with the claim that "mental states are what cause people to behave in the way they do, and to be disposed to behave in certain ways under certain conditions." This is because the behaviorist believes that these mental states can in principal be translated into behavioral situations. The Linguistic Thesis of Behaviorism declares that statements about mental states are equivalent in meaning to statements about behavior and behavioral dispositions. This is the behaviorists attempt to attribute a mental state to a person. This however is only an attempt because there are two problems with that statement. Firstly, it evidently ignored, and even denied, the 'inner aspect' of our mental states. For example, to have a pain, is no!
             t just a matter of being inclined to moan and wince, say, "I have a headache," and so on. Pains also have an
             intrinsic qualitative nature that is revealed in introspection. There can not be a theory on mind that denies such qualia. The second problem with behaviorism came along when behaviorists tried to specify in detail the multi-tracked disposition that is part of any mental state. The list of controls necessary for the analysis "wants a European vacation", for example, was not just long, but could be infinite with no way of specifying the elements involved. And no term is well defined when defined by open-ended and unspecific like this situation. In addition, each conditional of the long analysis was suspect on its own. Suppose that Andrew wants to go on a European vacation, conditional (1) above will be true only if he isn't secretive about his plans; conditional (2) will be true only if he hasn&apos...

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Philosophical Behaviorism . (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 04:24, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/61510.html