Behaviorism

Behaviorism

Traditional notions of the mind have tended to treat mental states as "private" and "subjective," not accessible to the public and objective methods of science. With the failure of an "introspectionist" psychology in the early twentieth century, the only recourse seemed to be either to deny that mental states had any role to play in any serious science, or to try to find a way to understand talk of mental states that was entirely objective. The first option is called the "eliminativist" strategy, and Radical behaviorism was a monumental effort to realize it. The eliminativist strategy proposed to explain all human and animal behavior in terms of physically specified stimuli, responses, and reinforcements. It is to be distinguished from the second, "reductionist" strategy, which attempts not to eliminate mental phenomena, but rather to save mental phenomena by identifying them with some or other existing physical phenomena. Analytical behaviorism was the specific reductionist view that mental phenomena could be identified in one way or another with dispositions to overt behavior. Both Radical behaviorism and Analytical behaviorism dominated Anglo-American philosophy, and especially psychology, from roughly 1920 through 1970.

Although the two views are similarly motivated, they are independent. As will be seen in section one, Radical behaviorism is a specific scientific hypothesis, to be assessed according to the usual scientific criteria of how well it predicts and explains its intended range of phenomena.

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