Philosophical Behaviorism: Authors And Theoretical Principles
In the middle of the 20th century, philosophical behaviorism emerged, a movement whose main objective was to denounce the errors of philosophy and psychology derived from the construct “mind”, to which a veracity not supported by scientific analyzes is attributed. The two fundamental authors in this development were Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In this article we will describe The historical origin and main approaches of philosophical behaviorism. We will especially stop at describing two of the key contributions of these authors: the criticism of the concepts of “mind” and “private language”, which oppose many of the mentalist ideas current at the time and today.
Behaviorism is a set of approaches to the analysis of the behavior of humans and other animals that focuses on observable behavior. This is understood as the result of the interaction between the organism, including its individual history, and the relevant stimuli in a given situation.
From this orientation a more important role is given to the environment than to heredity in the genesis of behavior. Particularly noteworthy is the role of reinforcement and punishment processes, which increase or decrease the probability that a specific behavior will be performed again under circumstances similar to those of the learning situation.
Among the authors who key influenced this orientation we find Edward Thorndike, Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson and Burrhus F. Skinner. His contributions are framed in a historical context in which psychoanalysis dominated our discipline; behaviorism was above all a reaction to the runaway mentalism of the psychology of the time.
Currently the most relevant branch of behaviorism is applied behavior analysis, which is part of the Skinnerian paradigm of radical behaviorism. From this perspective, mental processes are conceived as phenomena equivalent to other behaviors and are studied as such; On the other hand, in methodological behaviorism they were ignored.
Origin and approaches of philosophical behaviorism
In the middle of the 20th century, a philosophical movement emerged focused on a conception of language different from that defended by the empirical and rationalist traditions. The two main authors in this current, which is sometimes called “ordinary language movement”, were Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle.
Classical approaches to philosophy tend to focus on language and the artificial constructs that are derived from it. However, according to the ordinary language movement, such objects of study are erroneous because it is not possible to take words as credible models of reality; Therefore, trying to do so is a methodological failure.
Many of the topics that philosophy and psychology have studied require that they be conceived as correct concepts such as “knowledge”, “intention” or “idea”. Something similar happens with classic dichotomies such as the distinction between body and mind. Presuming from the outset that these types of approaches are legitimate leads to analyzing them from the wrong basis.
The fallacy of private language
Although Wittgenstein, Ryle, and the authors who followed them do not deny the existence of mental processes, they did assert that we cannot know the psychological experience of other people. We use words to refer to abstract internal experiences so we never transmit them faithfully or completely.
According to Ryle, when we express our mental contents we are actually referring to the very act of externalizing them. Likewise, we talk about causes systematically to describe the same phenomenon as the supposed consequence; This happens, for example, when saying that someone behaves in a kind way because he is kind.
The very concept of “private language” is problematic for philosophical behaviorism. Those contents that we refer to with words like “thought” are, in reality, a series of sensations and internal processes that cannot be translated into words, but rather have a much broader and more dynamic character.
For these reasons, and given the difficulty in extrapolating the psychological constructs managed by a person to the rest of human beings, from this perspective the usefulness of the analysis of one’s own self is denied, which includes introspective analysis methods. The “private language”, if accessible, would only be accessible to the individual themselves.
The problem of mind-body dualism
Gilbert Ryle stated that the conception of mental phenomena and observable behavior as independent processes involves a categorical error. This means that the debate is presented as if one functioned without the intervention of the other and as if it were possible to separate its biological basis, when In reality this dichotomy is nothing more than a fallacy.
From this approach is derived the understanding of the mind as lacking true consciousness. For Ryle, the term “mind” refers to a very broad set of phenomena, mainly of two types: behaviors observable from the outside and unobservable behavioral predispositions, generated through conditioning.
According to this author, therefore, the mind would be just a philosophical illusion that we have inherited from the philosophy of René Descartes. However, from a logical point of view this is a wrong concept; Consequently, so would the contributions of the so-called “philosophy of mind”, which would encompass a large number of psychological proposals.
