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Edinburgh University Press
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In Defence of
Philosophical Behaviourism
Rowland Stout
The Inner Life of
a Rational Agent
A radical approach to the philosophy of mind, in
which states of mind are identified with dispositions to
behave in certain ways.
The approach taken by Rowland Stout is a
thoroughly up-to-date version of behaviourism,
although not a form of behaviourism that denies the
existence of consciousness, free will, rationality, etc.,
nor aims to reduce these to other sorts of things.
Properly understood, the idea of being disposed to
behave in a certain way is seen to be exactly as rich
and interesting as the idea of being in a certain state
of mind. The fact that our ways of behaving are
sensitive to practical rationality is taken to be an
essential aspect of our nature as conscious agents.
And in describing such a version of practical
rationality Stout claims we are describing the
mental state of someone whose behaviour is
sensitive to it.
His account of behaviourism rests on two central
notions – that of a causal disposition to behave and
that of sensitivity to practical rationality. He
explains and develops these notions in some detail,
and then uses them to construct powerful and
original accounts of belief, intention, knowledge,
perception and consciousness.
Rowland Stout
Cover illustration: Joanna Walsh
The Inner Life of a Rational Agent
Rowland Stout is a Lecturer in Philosophy at
University College Dublin. He is the author of
Things that Happen Because They Should
(Oxford University Press, 1996) and Action
(Acumen, 2005).
The Inner Life of
a Rational Agent
KEY FEATURES
• A systematic and completely original theoretical
approach to the philosophy of mind.
• A re-evaluation of the history of the philosophy
of mind based on a rejection of the generally
accepted arguments in the 1960s and 1970s used
by functionalists against behaviourists.
ISBN 0 7486 2343 4
Edinburgh
Rowland Stout
• A serious engagement with the intuitively
compelling issues concerning behaviourism.
The Inner Life of a Rational Agent
THE INNER LIFE OF A
RATIONAL AGENT
IN DEFENCE OF PHILOSOPHICAL BEHAVIOURISM
2
Rowland Stout
Edinburgh University Press
© Rowland Stout, 2006
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
Typeset in 11/13 pt Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-10 0 7486 2343 4 (hardback)
ISBN-13 978 0 7486 2343 3
The right of Rowland Stout
to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Part I
viii
Context
1
Introduction
I Behaviourism
II Zombies
III Super-spartans
IV Reductive and Non-reductive Behaviourism
V Outline of the Book
3
3
6
9
12
14
2
Behaviourism
I Psychological Behaviourism
II The Philosophical Roots of Behaviourism:
Positivism or Pragmatism
III Anti-realism about the Mind
IV Criterial versus Dispositional Behaviourism
21
21
Functionalism
I The Rise of Cognitivism and Functionalism
II Theories of Behaviour
III Normative Functionalism
IV An Argument against Normative Functionalism
V Theory Theory and Simulation Theory
VI Conclusion
37
37
42
45
48
52
54
3
Part II
4
25
29
33
What is a Disposition to Behave in a Certain Way?
Dispositions to Behave
I The Argument from Causation
II Ryle’s Dispositions
III Dispositions and Causal Explanation
61
61
65
69
Contents
vi
IV Mental States as Input Causes or Framework
Causes?
5
6
Ways of Behaving
I Introduction
II Internalist and Externalist Models of Teleological
Explanation
III Why aren’t all Dispositions Trivially Teleological?
IV The Need for Norms
V Norm-governed Behaviour
VI Conclusion
Rationality and Interpretation
I The Structure of Practical Rationality
II Psychological or Non-psychological Conceptions
of Practical Rationality
III The Holism of the Mental
IV The Dynamics of Interpretation
Part III
73
78
78
79
85
87
90
96
99
99
106
109
114
The Theory Applied
7
Beliefs
I Introduction
II Cambridge Behaviourists
III Belief as a State
IV Belief and Judgement
V Individuation of Beliefs
121
121
122
128
133
137
8
Intentions
I Intentions as States of Mind that Cause
Behaviour
II Intention and Belief
III Intention and Commitment
145
145
154
157
Knowledge
I Sensitivity to Facts
II Knowledge and Belief
III The Objects of Knowledge
IV Sensitivity to Evidence
V What is it for Something to be Evident?
161
161
165
168
175
180
Consciousness
I Types of Consciousness
187
187
9
10
Contents
II
III
IV
V
Consciousness and Knowledge
Self-knowledge
Qualia
State of Play
Bibliography
Index
vii
193
199
206
211
213
219
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press for all her
help. The following people have read and commented on parts of
earlier drafts, and I am very grateful to them and also to the anonymous readers for their comments: Peter Hacker, Jim Lennox, Bill
Lyons, Jim O’Shea, Tim Williamson and Thomas Uebel. I have presented much of the material of this book in various forms in various
places and cannot remember all the people who have made useful
suggestions. But I can remember benefiting from discussions with
the audience of my Oxford postgraduate lecture series on New
Behaviourism, and with Bob Brandom, Bill Brewer, David Charles,
Bill Child, Tim Crane, Dorothy Edgington, Jennifer Hornsby, Bill
Pollard, Howard Rachlin, Paul Snowdon, Helen Steward and David
Wiggins. I am also grateful to the AHRB and the University of
Manchester for funding two semesters of research leave, during
which the bulk of the book was written.
I dedicate the book to my daughter Lara with thanks for providing so many examples.
PART I
Context
1
Introduction
I Behaviourism
In this book I want to present a new theory of the mind, but a theory
that has something in common with an old and discredited theory –
the theory of behaviourism. I want to defend the following behaviourist claim:
What it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in
a certain way.
When we describe and study somebody’s mind what we are describing
and studying is the way that person is disposed to behave. A person’s
mind does not exist behind the way that person is disposed to behave;
it is the way he or she is disposed to behave.
The great philosophical proponent of this sort of behaviourism
was Gilbert Ryle (1949). Ryle argued that behaviourist psychologists
had been right to reject the idea that minds existed hidden behind
the way people behaved, inhabiting a special inaccessible realm of
consciousness.
Novelists, dramatists and biographers had always been satisfied to exhibit
people’s motives, thoughts, perturbations and habits by describing their
doings, sayings, and imaginings, their grimaces, gestures and tones of
voice. Concentrating on what Jane Austen concentrated on, psychologists
began to find that these were, after all, the stuff and not the mere trappings of their subjects. (Ryle 1949: 328)
Now, as I will argue in Chapter 2, Ryle is being charitable to the
behaviourist psychologists in saying that they were concentrating on
what Jane Austen was concentrating on. Certainly imaginings are not
the stuff of behavioural psychology.1 But, despite the hyperbole of this
quotation from Ryle, I want to endorse the central thought that we
describe people’s minds by describing how they behave (and are disposed to behave).
4
The Inner Life of a Rational Agent
It is often supposed that behaviourism is committed to a denial of
consciousness, free will, individuality, and so on. But in defending the
claim that what it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed
to behave in a certain way I do not want to belittle the mind, let alone
eliminate it. I will argue that behaviourism, if properly formulated,
allows us to say truly all the things we feel we must say about the mind.
Anti-behaviourists argue that there is something else in addition to
a disposition to behave in a certain way – something that lies behind
that disposition – and that is the state of mind. When they see behaviourists deny this, they interpret behaviourists as denying the existence
of states of mind. But the behaviourist claim is not that states of mind
do not exist; it is that states of mind, rather than being behind the dispositions, are the dispositions. The idea of being disposed to behave
in a certain way is not a trivial one. It is not the same as the idea of
producing certain mechanical bits of behaviour. Properly understood,
the idea of being disposed to behave in a certain way is exactly as rich
and interesting as the idea of being in a certain state of mind.
That is really the key point. If we think of a behavioural disposition as a disposition to produce certain scientifically specifiable bits
of behaviour in certain scientifically specifiable circumstances, then a
behavioural disposition falls very far short of being a state of mind.
But in Chapter 5 I will defend a much richer notion of a behavioural
disposition – one that cannot be specified except by appealing to the
notion of rationality. I will talk of the disposition to do what you
should do given a certain version of rationality. It is not possible to
spell this out without using normative, intentional and perhaps even
mental terms. So when we describe a state of mind as a disposition to
behave we are not moving from the language of the mind to some
other more scientific language.
This insistence on the role of rationality in characterising behavioural dispositions forces a clear separation of animal psychology
from human psychology, something the early behaviourists were
unwilling to allow. With this in view many philosophers would not
want to describe my account as behaviourist at all. While I want to
stress how far my approach is from the anti-mentalist extremes of
early behaviourists, I think it is still appropriate to use the term
‘behaviourism’ for reasons outlined in Chapter 2.
So I develop the behaviourist claim that I started with in the following way:
What it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a
way that is governed by a certain version of practical rationality.
Introduction
5
While there will be many aspects of Ryle’s approach that I will dispute
in this book, Ryle is certainly the starting point for much of the discussion of behaviourism. But, describing Ryle as a behaviourist is to
stick on him a label that he himself rejected. It is to ignore his scorn
for ‘isms’ generally, which he took to be signs of philosophical frailty.2
And it is to ignore his conception of the job of philosophy as that of
revealing how certain intellectual moves lead to nonsense rather than
as that of providing anything as scientific as an account of anything.
But Ryle’s main problem with the term ‘behaviourism’ was the risk of
guilt by association with earlier avowed behaviourists, who worked
with a ‘mechanical’ conception of behaviour, and therefore ended up
at best with a mechanical conception of the mind.
Ryle thought that these earlier behaviourists had made a mistake
about the status of our talk about minds which committed them to
one or other of the two ‘bogies’, materialism and dualism. The mistake
was to think that our talk of motives, thoughts, and so on delineates
a special realm – namely the mental – and that there is a special nonmental realm – namely the physical world – that can be fully described
not using mental language. On this view, human behaviour, which
belongs to the physical world, must be describable using completely
physical language. This is what I described as a mechanical conception
of behaviour.
The thought that there is a physical world – a world including
human behaviour – completely specifiable using physical language
leaves only three possibilities for the role of mental language. One is
that mental language describes another world than the physical
world. This is a form of dualism. The second is that it describes the
physical world. Given the original thought that the physical world
can be fully described using non-mental language, this means that
mental language description can be reduced to non-mental language
descriptions. This is reductive materialism. The third is that mental
language describes nothing at all. This possibility either commits one
to eliminative materialism or to the thought that mental language
serves some purpose other than description.3
Ryle’s denial that our talk of motives, thought and so on commits
us to the existence of a hidden Cartesian realm of the mental need not
be taken to be an endorsement of either materialism or anti-realism.
These two positions – that such talk describes a world that can be
described without such vocabulary or that such talk describes nothing
at all – do not exhaust the possibilities for someone who rejects the
dualist position. This is because Ryle may be taken to favour a third
The Inner Life of a Rational Agent
6
position, namely that such talk is talk of the ordinary material world
and is an ineliminable part of our talk of the material world.
Room can be made for this third alternative to dualism by rejecting the claim that there is some special realm – the physical world –
fully described by non-mental language. Mental language describes
the same world as non-mental language, the ordinary world of
people’s doings, sayings, imaginings and so on. Not only that, but it
serves a descriptive function that we have no reason to suppose can
be served without such language.4
To talk of a person’s mind is not to talk of a repository which is permitted to house objects that something called ‘the physical world’ is not permitted to house; it is to talk of the person’s abilities, liabilities and
inclinations to do and undergo certain sorts of things, and of the doing
and undergoing of these things in the ordinary world. (Ryle 1949: 199)
It has been surprisingly hard for critics to accept that there is a
genuine realist alternative here to materialism and dualism. This is a
testament to the persuasiveness of the thought that there is a natural
world that may be completely described in the language of physics.
So from the very beginning Ryle’s behaviourism was identified with a
species of materialism. Hampshire (1950: 238) advertised Ryle’s
message as ‘Not Two-Worlds but One World; not a Ghost, but a
Body.’ If you start off with two worlds and eliminate one of them –
the ghostly one – you end up with one world, the world of the body.
But Ryle was trying to stop us from thinking of two worlds in the first
place. If you start off with one world, it is the world of the person –
not just her body.
II Zombies
Some anti-behaviourist philosophers have argued that even if actual
philosophical behaviourists like Ryle have not acknowledged their
commitment to denying the reality of free will, consciousness and
so on, their position nevertheless commits them to that denial. This is
because we can imagine a creature that behaves (and is disposed to
behave) in exactly the same way that we do, but has no conscious
mind. It is argued that behaviourists, by only considering how we are
disposed to behave, put us on a par with such a creature, and so must
in all consistency deny the reality of our conscious minds.
The technical term for such a creature is a zombie. Zombies are traditionally understood to be corpses revitalised by witchcraft. Although
Introduction
7
they are not conscious they move about as though they were. This is
the crucial feature of zombies that philosophers pick up on. The witchcraft, the dead eyes, and the jerky movements are all features of folk
zombies that are not found in philosophers’ zombies. A philosophers’
zombie behaves exactly like we do, with an alert face, smooth movements and socially respectable behaviour. The only respect in which
philosophers’ zombies are different from us is that they have no conscious minds.5
This anti-behaviourist argument from the possibility of zombies is
a good example of the familiar logical fallacy of begging the question.
In this fallacy you implicitly assume the thing you are arguing for as a
premise in your argument, and so argue in a circle. The behaviourists
claim that having a conscious mind is a matter of being disposed
to behave in a certain way. So the behaviourists deny that it is possible to be disposed to behave in exactly the same way as someone with
a conscious mind and yet not have a conscious mind. The anti-behaviourist argument that assumes the logical possibility of zombies illegitimately assumes the falsity of behaviourism at the very beginning of
the argument.
But an anti-behaviourist may think that there is independent plausibility in the idea that zombies are logically possible. They may say
that we can tell consistent, worked-out stories in which zombies
figure. These stories, they say, can be developed to any level of detail
and no contradiction will emerge.
So let us consider these stories a bit. One of them is the sciencefiction story of androids – robots made out of flesh-like material that
are programmed to function just like humans. But most people who
like to think about androids think of them as having conscious minds.
An android might, as in the film Blade Runner, be unaware that
he/she/it is an android and be horrified to discover it. These are not
the states and responses of something without a conscious mind. It is
very difficult to think of an effective android where all is ‘silent and
dark within’.6 When you talk to them, play with them, make them
laugh, or fall in love with them, you cannot help but see them as conscious beings.
Perhaps a better scenario for the anti-behaviourist is that told in
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Here we have a story where
people are killed by aliens who then take over exact replicas of their
bodies.7 The aliens put up a very good pretence of being those people,
behaving in almost all ways just like them. As it happens, the aliens
are not very good at faking emotional responses, but this just confuses
8
The Inner Life of a Rational Agent
the story for our purposes. We can suppose that they are such good
actors that they cannot be found out unless they want to be.
But the whole point about these zombies is that they are pretending. Pretending is the exercise of a conscious faculty of the mind. Body
snatchers may lack normal human emotions, and in this respect be
like human psychopaths. But they have conscious goals and they are
conscious of their environment. And, although they lack normal
human emotions, they do not lack emotions of every sort. After all
they are desperately keen to take over the world. And, of course, they
are not disposed to behave in exactly the way we are. They only
behave like us in our company when they are putting on the pretence.
But the pretence is embedded in a way of life that is not at all like ours,
involving as it does dedication to the goals of nurturing their pods,
killing humans and taking over their environment.
A pretence is only a pretence if it is embedded in a non-pretending
way of behaving that gives the pretence its point. When you are pretending you are still doing one thing genuinely – namely the pretending. You are not merely pretending to pretend. For the zombie story
to work properly the pretence must be total, and this is a contradiction in terms. A total pretence would not be a pretence at all, but a
way of life in its own right.8
David Chalmers, in his book The Conscious Mind, writes that the
logical possibility of zombies is obvious to him. ‘A zombie is just
something physically identical to me, but which has no conscious
experience – all is dark inside’ (1996: 96). We must not forget that
this zombie would have just written a 414-page book on consciousness. It couldn’t have been easy doing that, all being dark inside.
To be fair to Chalmers, his zombies are supposed to be conscious
in one sense. They are aware of their environment. Chalmers calls
this ‘psychological consciousness’. What makes them zombies for
Chalmers is that there is nothing it is like to be them. They do not
have what Chalmers in common with Block (1995) and others calls
‘phenomenal consciousness’.
There are various ways appealed to by Chalmers of characterising
phenomenal consciousness. It is the subjective quality of experience.
It is the internal aspect of mental life. It is what it feels like to be a
cognitive agent. It is that part of our mental life that is not going on
in the dark, but is lit up inside.9
A zombie in Chalmers’ sense has psychological consciousness but
no phenomenal consciousness. This is a very difficult idea to get one’s
head around. Chalmers’ zombie is aware of everything that we are
Introduction
9
aware of, but all is darkness inside. They have dark awareness. While
the possibility of such a thing may seem obvious to Chalmers it seems
very far from obvious to me. Each of Chalmers’ ways of characterising phenomenal consciousness is conceptually quite complex and
unpacking them all is a real philosophical task. It is not good enough
simply to appeal to intuition to say it is obvious that zombies are possible when it is far from clear that one understands what zombies are
supposed to be.
III Super-spartans
The opposite of a zombie is a creature that does have a properly rich
mental life but does not manifest this in its behaviour. Behaviourism
is committed to saying that people who do not respond behaviourally
to pain for example do not feel pain. But if creatures that were able
to feel pain but never expressing it could exist, they would appear to
constitute a counterexample to behaviourism.
The argument is illustrated by Hilary Putnam in his paper ‘Brains
and Behaviour’ (1975: Chapter 16) with the science-fiction example
of the super-spartans, who have a profound pride about suffering
pain uncomplainingly. They do not squirm or scream or even move
away from the pain source except in a deliberate attempt to avoid
their body suffering damage. In the end they drop any talk of pain
from their language. According to Putnam, the super-spartans still
feel pain even though there is no associated behavioural disposition.
But behaviourism only requires that to be in a state of mind – for
example, feeling pain – is to be disposed to behave in certain ways.
You may be disposed to behave in certain ways even when you do not
behave in these ways in the actual circumstances. For example, I may
keep my feelings to myself, but would express them in the right circumstances. If it were completely all right to express my feelings
I would be screaming and writhing, but as it is I am still and silent.
I am disposed to behave in certain ways even though I do not produce
any of the bits of behaviour that go with these ways of behaving.
The point about the super-spartans is that they have a reason to
repress their pain behaviour. If that reason were reversed, then presumably they would express their feelings of pain. That is all that is
required for the behaviourist.
Perhaps we do not have to go to science fiction to find examples
of pain without any associated behavioural dispositions. There is a
troubling possibility when you have an operation involving general
10
The Inner Life of a Rational Agent
‘anaesthetic’ that you are awake and in agony during the operation,
but paralysed and so unable to warn the anaesthetist or surgeon.
Anaesthetists, for entirely good reasons, usually try to give patients
the lowest dose of anaesthetic they can get away with. In some operations it may be that insufficient anaesthetic is given, but because the
drugs that are given by the anaesthetist paralyse the patient, the
medical staff are unaware that the patient is in pain.
For the patient this would result in anything from the ability to
remember aspects of the operation under hypnosis to recovering from
the paralysis screaming that they were wide awake all the time they
were being operated on. This sort of report might be regarded as providing good evidence that the patient was conscious during the operation, although the possibility of a vivid nightmare during the
operation should not be ruled out especially given the anxiety that
anyone would feel about it.
But the anaesthetist’s drugs may also have another effect; they may
result in the patient losing his or her memory of the event. If the
amnesic effects of the anaesthetist’s drugs are good enough there
should be no reports of pain, and there may not even be the so-called
‘implicit memory’ that hypnosis would uncover. There may be no
post-operative stress at all. But does that mean the patient was not
really in pain or shock? If that patient had not been paralysed but
had only had the amnesic effects of his or her drugs, we would say
that he or she had been in pain but forgotten about it. We would be
forced to say this by the evidence of that patient’s screams during the
operation.
Paralysis by itself does not eliminate pain, just some of the symptoms of pain. Amnesia by itself does not eliminate pain, just some
other symptoms. Both together may eliminate all the symptoms, but,
since the pain itself is untouched by either component, why should it
be eliminated by them both together? Would you undergo an operation knowing that the anaesthetist was only using a very effective
paralysing agent combined with a very effective amnesic agent?
The behaviourist may respond by saying that in such a situation
you are still in pain because you are disposed to behave in a characteristically pained way if you are physically capable of doing so. The
paralysed patient’s pain may be characterised by the fact that were
that person able to move he or she would scream. Perhaps we might
say that, as in the case of the super-spartans, there is still a disposition
to behave in a pained way, even though the realisation of that disposition is being blocked.
Introduction
11
The real problem for behaviourism would arise if it were possible
to be in a state of pain and yet to have no disposition at all to behave
in a characteristically pained way.10 This is how Putnam develops his
story of the super-spartans. No matter what the circumstances, these
super-super spartans would not express their pain behaviourally.
But at this point in the story I think the behaviourist should cast
some doubt on the reality of the pain. Think of how we describe
pain. For example I might say that my pain is unbearably bad. This
means that I cannot bear it stoically. Not being able to bear a pain
is a fact about how I am disposed to behave. So it makes no sense
to say of super-super-spartans who have no disposition at all to
behave in a pained way that their pain is unbearable. Extending this
argument, we can say that it makes no sense to say that they have a
pain as such at all, since pain just is that state which in extreme
forms is unbearable.
Galen Strawson (1994) develops the Putnam-style example to consider creatures who have sensations, emotions, beliefs, and desires at
the same time as being ‘constitutionally incapable of any sort of
behaviour, as this is ordinarily understood’ (1994: 151). He calls them
Weather Watchers since their abiding interest in life is the weather.
Once in their youth they moved about, and the behaviourist would
have no problem in attributing to young Weather Watchers a mental
life. But as they get older they become more rooted (literally) and
passive, until they stop altogether.
Since we can imagine ourselves sitting quite still, passively watching the weather and having feelings, emotions and beliefs about it,
why can’t we imagine the Weather Watchers, who have fallen into this
passive state as their only possible way of life?
I suppose that this book is an attempt to answer that rhetorical
question. Strawson accepts that his anti-behaviourist examples are
question-begging, but that they serve to articulate the discussion. The
behaviourist is given a challenge by such stories. The challenge is to
show that a proper understanding of what it is to feel pain and emotions, to have beliefs and intentions, and to see, hear and feel things
involves realising that these are all aspects of behavioural dispositions.11 It may not be intuitively clear at the outset whether the
Weather Watchers are genuinely intelligible. The behaviourist must
show that they are not intelligible by providing an intuitively compelling behaviourist account of the mind.