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Cover design: RIVER DESIGN, Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.eup.ed.ac.uk 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.