Someone recently asked me, as a sort of rhetorical exercise, if I could make the best possible case for behavorism. By behaviorism my friend and I both understood the same thing, the view that mind is only a name for the collection of predictable behaviors exhibited by certain physical organisms, and that it is confused or just meaningless to speak of a mind as some sort of entity inside of or transcending that organism, and directing its actions.
To be clear, my friend and I both reject behaviorism so understood, but the challenge was to make the best case I could for it anyway.
As someone who once trained in the art of advocacy, I found the challenge irresistable.
I answered that I would in that case make three points:
1. Behaviorists are the knights of Ockham's razor. They want to eliminate entities that are unnecessary and non-explanatory from scientific discussion. Suppose we see a boy standing in front of a strawberry bush. He plucks and eats a strawberry. I say to you, "He must have believed that the strawberry would be tasty." In such a case, you might well suspect that I haven't really reached any conclusion from the boy's behavior at all. I have simply re-stated the physical fact in other words. We can shave off this reference to "belief" with our razor.
2. Behaviorism is a natural tendency of those who oppose innatism. The "innatist" view is that much about our human behavior was determined before we are born, perhaps by the genetic luggage bestowed at the moment of conception. Perhaps even (if you believe in reincarnation) by events prior to that. Behaviorism on the contrary directs our psychologizing focus away from any early luggage and towards the interaction of boy and strawberries, dog and meat and bell, born organism and world. Thus, it is the most heartily anti-innatist view available. This is why Chomsky, a thorough innatist on the specific issue of language, wrote such a scathing review of Skinner's book on "verbal behaviour."
3. Behaviorism is consistent with and is encouraged by a certain picture of society and of social or political progress, the vision expounded in Skinner's book WALDEN TWO. The good life consists of a list of good things that are true of some lives and, alas, untrue of others: health, a minimum of unpleasant labor, satisfying personal contacts, and so forth. A society that has more people who enjoy these good things is always better than a society that has fewer of them. Further (implicit in any utopian view) the good things are consistent with one another. You don't have to sacrifice any of them for the benefit of the others.
If this is your vision of society and the good life, then you may well draw the inference that an elite of scientifically informed people can direct a broader population accordingly.
In that case, you'll naturally look for the sort of science they can use in that endeavor, and you will find it in behavioralism. Notice that the spelling of behavioralism (which I'm using as the scientific term) is a little different from the spelling of behaviorism (the philosophical term). Nonetheless, they are natural concomitants. In my capacity as an advocate, I would say that any view of the mind-body problem that exceeds or contradicts behaviorism is in danger of undermining the good that the behavioralist scientists, as an elite, could otherwise do.
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