Answering objections to philosophical behaviorism

In this post, I will defend philosophical behaviorism from objections to it. The objections will be lifted from Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, second edition, by J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, 2017. This book was chosen because I happened to be reading it at the moment. I will quote the book’s entire section on philosophical behaviorism and add my commentary and headings in between, and I will assume that this is “fair use”, since I have to show someone’s argument in order to answer it. (So I have not asked for permission from the copyright holders, but if they object to this, they can ask me to shut it down.)

• 1. How philosophical behaviorism differs from behaviorism as it exists in academic psychology
• 2. The motivation for philosophical behaviorism
• 3. Movements versus behaviors
• 4. Alleged uncoextensiveness of external signs
• 5. Pain is what causes movement
• 6. Pain hurts
• 7. Infinity of conditionals
• 8. Introspective awareness
• 9. Free will
• 10. Unified self
• 11. Appendix: Neil Sinhababu

1. How philosophical behaviorism differs from behaviorism as it exists in academic psychology

This is accurately explained by Craig & Moreland:

Behaviorism is a term usually associated with the psychologists J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Currently, there are two main forms of behaviorism: methodological behaviorism and philosophical behaviorism. Methodological behaviorism is the view that in doing psychology from an empirical standpoint, one should describe, report, and explain mental states in terms of publicly observable behaviors and not in terms of private, first-person, inner conscious states. As a research strategy in psychology, methodological behaviorism implies that psychologists should limit their focus to the stimulus inputs and behavioral outputs of organisms and make no reference to introspective private mental states. Methodological behaviorism makes no commitment either way about the existence of the mental.

Philosophical behaviorism does make such a commitment: mental states are identified with overt bodily movements or tendencies to certain movements, given certain stimulus inputs.

2. The motivation for philosophical behaviorism

The motivation and main argument for philosophical behaviorism is also accurately described by the authors:

Actually, philosophical behaviorism places greater emphasis on the nature of mental terms than on the corresponding mental states themselves. Mental terms are given operational definitions (definitions of something solely in terms of what can be empirically tested or measured by certain tests or operations) such that mental terms mean public body movements or dispositions to such movement. On this view, when we say that salt is soluble, we do not attribute some occult, unobservable entity, solubility, to salt. Rather, we simply mean that if salt were put in water it would dissolve, and this statement refers only to publicly observable behaviors of salt. Similarly, to say that Jones is in pain is simply to say that, given certain inputs (e.g., being stuck with a pin), Jones has the tendency to wince and shout “Ouch!” To say that Jones wants to go to Europe is to say merely that Jones is disposed to browse brochures about Europe, to talk about European cathedrals, to google European airfares, and so on.

Indeed, I think theories are simply meaningless without operational definitions, definitions in terms of where in practice you could possibly encounter a reason to say the word.

Note that “given certain inputs” is redundant to the “Jones is in pain” example. We say that Jones is in pain to mean that he has those tendencies, and the assumption that those tendencies come from the inputs in his environment is quite reasonable, but not necessary to philosophical behaviorism, which, as C&M say, is only concerned with the meaning of mental terms, not with what causes them to become applicable.

3. Movements versus behaviors

Craig & Moreland raise an objection to the explanatory power of behaviorism, although they frame it as a preliminary distinction which comes before the actual objections. This distinction was not present in the first edition of the book, which did simply say behaviorism was about behaviors, and mentioned “behaviors” where “movements” are now mentioned.

It is important to keep in mind that philosophical behaviorism has to focus on bodily movements and not bodily behaviors. Why? Consider a question Wittgenstein asked years ago: What is the difference between my arm going up and me raising my arm? The answer is that the former may be just a bodily movement, perhaps an unconscious response to some physical stimulus. But the latter is an intentional action, say, voting, that is done for a purpose. Body movements are purely physical: moving one’s hands, typing on a keyboard, and so on. But behaviors like writing a thank-you note or voting by raising your hand are not purely physical. In fact, what gives them their identity is their mental nature—the intent or purpose for the movement. Thus, to be a behavior, something must already involve an inner mental state. So philosophical behaviorists must limit themselves to bodily movements (or to internal physiological changes like an increase in heart rate or blood pressure).

This is inaccurate. To be a behavior does mean that we claim that there is an inner mental state involved, but that claim can only be meaningful if it “cashes out in”, i.e., can be explained in terms of, external behaviors.

For instance, take the example of “John raised his arm”, and think once again of operational definitions: in experience, when we tell the difference between behaviors and movements, how do we do it? Do we read minds, to make sure that John’s inner mental state matched his external appearance? Of course not, we can’t read minds. What we do is we look for signs in experience that, to our understanding, indicate someone’s raising his arm rather than having it raised, such as his facial expression, or his speech.

If, in a voting context, someone merely has a cramp and raises his arm involuntarily, or has his arm raised by a strong gust of wind, then he can be expected to immediately indicate this by saying so aloud, to make sure his vote is not counted. We can expect him to be embarrassed by the situation, and to later act consistently with not having wanted to vote at the time. Using various external behaviors, we conclude that he intentionally raised his arm, rather than his arm merely rising as an involuntary movement. Philosophical behaviorism is just the claim that there is nothing more to those claims about minds than the presence of those external behaviors that we associate with them. There is no mysterious unknowable “John’s mind” apart from how John turns out to act.

4. Alleged uncoextensiveness of external signs

Today, philosophical behaviorism has fallen on hard times because of the strength of the objections that have been raised against it. First, a mental state like being in pain cannot be identical to certain bodily movements or tendencies to move because one can be in pain without wincing, shouting, or engaging in any bodily movement, and one can exemplify such movement and fake being in pain even though such a mental state is not present. Since you can have pain without pain movement or tendencies to move and vice versa, the two cannot be identical. Thus the term pain cannot be defined in terms of body movements.

This argument assumes a very naïve interpretation of behaviors, which is not necessary to behaviorism.

Again, when do we say that someone was in pain but failed to act like it? Do we read his mind to find that out? No, we don’t, we do this on account of other external behaviors, after the fact, that are consistent with having been in pain at that time in the past. Someone will say, for example, “My leg was hurting heavily, but I swallowed the pain so I could keep giving my speech.” This may, in turn, be corroborated by confirmation of there having been actual injury to his leg, which is something we do consider painful, in the sense of tendencies to behaviors.

When do we say that someone acted like they were in pain but were not in pain? If we say that they were pretending, it’s because they revealed the act, wittingly or unwittingly, by one of their other behaviors – they may have confessed the act to someone privately, or alternatively they may have acted inconsistently with it later on, such as by having an unbelievably speedy recovery. If we say that they were not pretending, then we probably say this because we believe them to have some sort of mental illness, or muscular tic, or to have been in unusual circumstances. Either way, this stuff is all external. Knowledge of an inner mind is not involved in making these conclusions, and therefore the inner mind does not play any theoretical role in accounting for our day-to-day life.

5. Pain is what causes movement

A closely related objection is this. By identifying pain, for example, with pain movements, philosophical behaviorists leave out the fact that pain is what causes such movement and thus cannot be identical to that movement.

Sure, granted. But the entirety of the explanatory role of pain is its association with the movements. There is no pain without some associated movements, and there are no appropriately-constituted pain movements without some associated pain. The point of making the “identification” is not really to give you a strict guide to formalizing psychology in terms of your preferred symbolic logic, but just to rule out mysterious ideas about an inner mind. It is true that, in our everyday language games, we say that pain “causes” the situations rather than “being” the situations. The difference is merely verbal. If you think that it’s not merely verbal, you should have actual arguments against behaviorism to support this.

6. Pain hurts

Third, pain is essentially characterized by a certain type of hurtful feeling that can be directly known by acquaintance with our own inner, private, first-person subjective states of sentience, but bodily movements do not have this feature, so they cannot be the same thing. In short, pains hurt, but pain movement doesn’t.

This isn’t an argument, it’s just an assertion that behaviorism is false. If you can account for all instances of pain without “characterizing” it by means of some unknowable private entity, then pain is not “essentially characterized” by that. In experience, what does it mean to say something hurts? Etc.

7. Infinity of conditionals

Fourth, definitions of mental states in terms of a set of conditionals become unruly and indefinitely long such that they could never be learned. For example, according to philosophical behaviorism “Jones wants to go to Europe” means that “If Jones gets travel brochures, he will get European ones, if Jones gets the money, he will buy an airplane ticket to Europe and not a new horse, and so on.” It should be obvious that there is a potentially infinite set of further conditionals that could be added to this list.

Yeah, so what?

Moreover, the conditionals that make up the behaviorist definition make sense only if we fill them out by adding terms that make reference to inner mental states. For example, Jones will get a travel brochure only if he believes that such a brochure will inform him about Europe. He will buy a ticket and not a horse only if he thinks that he cannot buy both and he desires to travel more than to have a horse. Thus behaviorist definitions of mental terms are circular since, in order to be complete, they must implicitly utilize other mental terms. Thus, strictly speaking, philosophical behaviorism is not about intentional behavior at all—for example, writing an invitation, greeting someone at work, making a promise. As noted above, all of these get their identity from the mental intention of the act. No, philosophical behaviorism must cash out mental terms or states with respect to (1) overt body movements (e.g., hand movements involving scribbling on a sheet of paper) or (2) changes in measureable physiological features (e.g., increased blood pressure, sweating).

Besides the point about intentional behavior noted earlier, I think you really can cash it all out in terms of movements and measurable changes. Jones’s “beliefs” about brochures, for instance, can all be cashed out in terms of other tendencies to behaviors, such as the fact that Jones will use the brochure to seek information from it, rather than to fuel his fireplace, or some other purpose. Of course it all comes down to behavior. Again, do you read minds?

8. Introspective awareness

Sixth, if one’s thinking something merely consists in being disposed to move in certain ways given certain sensory inputs, then one would have no idea what it was he was thinking about until the movement disposition was manifested through his body. But surely one knows what she is thinking about before she acts and she knows her own thoughts, not by observing her own bodily actions, but through direct introspective awareness of her own states of consciousness.

Well, regarding our emotions, to some extent it does seem that we are not directly aware of them, and can be wrong about what we ourselves feel. But sure, regarding thoughts, it is true that I knew my beliefs before I wrote them down. This is cashed out in terms of behaviors, such as the fact that I was not surprised to see those words, and identified them as being my own opinions when I saw them. So what about it?

9. Free will

Finally, two further criticisms have been raised against philosophical behaviorism. Since many philosophers believe that these criticisms apply equally to all forms of physicalism, they will be mentioned here and not repeated in detail later. But you should remember that, if successful, they apply to the other forms of physicalism listed below. For one thing, philosophical behaviorism seems to imply some form of determinism and a denial of libertarian freedom of the will. We will probe questions of freedom and determinism in chapter fifteen, but for those who think that libertarian freedom is true and determinism is false, this will count against philosophical behaviorism. And employing an ontological interpretation of quantum physics (the quantum world really is indeterministic) may get rid of the determinism problem, but it seems to be the cure that kills the patient. Why? Because a strictly random indeterminate event—say one’s arm randomly and in an indeterminate way just jerks up and hits someone in the face—is not one that results from an act of libertarian free will. By the way, don’t confuse the inadequacy of quantum indeterminism in giving us libertarian freedom because it rules out determinism with the attempt to use quantum indeterminism to show how libertarian actions could occur without violating deterministic laws of nature. The latter is a legitimate research program, but the former is a dead end.

Here I think C&M are confusing philosophical behaviorism with the methodological behaviorism of academic psychology, where it implies the whole theory of classical conditioning invented by Skinner. This confusion seems to have been responsible for their earlier emphasis on mental terms cashing out in terms of behaviors “given certain inputs”. I think philosophical behaviorism does not require determinism, although I think that there is nothing wrong with determinism, either.

10. Unified self

Second, philosophical behaviorism (along with other versions of physicalism) seems to imply a denial of a unified self at a point in time and an enduring self that remains literally the same through change. This point will be developed more fully in chapter thirteen, but for now it should be noted that if physicalism does, in fact, imply a denial of a unified and enduring self and if there is good reason to believe in such a self, then this raises a difficulty for physicalism in any form. These last two points illustrate the fact that many philosophers have seen an intimate connection between philosophy of mind and the dualist-physicalist debate, on the one hand, and issues in freedom and determinism and in personal identity, on the other.

Well, I don’t think it implies that, as long as “being a unified self” can be cashed out in terms of behaviors – and if it can’t be so cashed out, then it’s meaningless. Do you read minds, or do you not?

11. Appendix: Neil Sinhababu

Academic philosopher Neil Sinhababu, author of Possible Girls and Humean Nature, happened to be in a group chat where I linked this blog post. What follows are his messages and my replies, both of which were informal.

Neil Sinhababu: Interesting! That certainly is a defense of a classic and influential philosophical behaviorist view.

I think my biggest problem with the view is that its epistemology is too narrow and throws out introspective data. These are important data.

Thiago Coelho: Well, whatever behavior is “introspective” should remain introspective, since our language refers to it as introspective. But we don’t get to talk about introspection without any associated behavior, it’s just language, like, whereof you can’t operationalize it, thereof you’re not really saying anything. To my mind this doesn’t change anything practical, but does question some abstruse Twitter arguments I’ve seen over whether LLMs are suffering. (I think either they never suffer, or they do when they act like they’re suffering, like, by generating the text “I’m suffering”, I guess.)

Neil Sinhababu: Is having pain-experience itself a behavior on this view?

Thiago Coelho: Right, no, I do just mean that whatever leads us to assert pain-experience should continue leading us to, since it’s all external or, in the case of ourselves, there isn’t really a difference between having some internal mind-state and consistently pretending to (and never breaking the act throughout the whole of your life).

Neil Sinhababu: Okay good. It seems to me that there is a pretty clear difference between my being in pain all my life and my feigning being in pain all my life to gain advantage from others. Even if I fool everyone else, the difference will be clear to me.

Thiago Coelho: Yeah, I mean, language just can’t express the difference and has to be silent about it, or at least, the difference is more in the speaker’s attitude. I think that’s more of a weakness of language than of behaviorism. Fwiw, it’s a fun fact of human psychology that after lying for so long the difference would be less clear to you as well over time, and maybe you’d actually feel something eventually.

The difference between reality and pretense is in language because most (all?) acts do break, like, we could expect you to eventually reveal what you’re doing to someone you were close to and really trusted. But if that expectation never cashes out and it’s a “perfect act”, then that’s something we can’t really deal with in language without mindreading.

I think I’ll append these messages to the post, I hope it’s OK if I name you. Thanks for engaging.

Neil Sinhababu: Cool, feel free to name me. Btw this is connected to a book I’m writing this year. I think behaviorism was the biggest problem with 20th century naturalism. Empiricism without introspection is like empiricism without auditory perception. You’re throwing out a source of good data for bad philosophical reasons.

Thiago Coelho: Sure, well, if you’ve found a rigorous way to refer to the data then that would be perfect. Looking forward to it.