Is Behaviourism scientifically respectable?

The central question in any philosophy of mind is that of free will and how, in a deterministic universe, is human consciousness able to exercise free will? Perhaps the first attempt in modern times to explain how consciousness sits in relation to a causal universe and is able to act on it was arrived at by Descartes. Descartes in his meditations proved or thought he had proved that the mind or consciousness is of a different order both metaphysically as well as physically from the world around us, a position that became known as Dualism. Whether we are talking about property dualism or substance dualism this position has one significant problem associated with it. How does an immaterial thing like the mind or consciousness affect a physical thing like the universe?

Descartes found himself in a dilemma. As a man of science he endorsed the mechanistic view of the universe popular at the time, but as a man of God he could not accept, as Hobbes had, the idea that human consciousness was a part of the physical universe and obeyed the same mechanistic laws. The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical according to Descartes. (Ryle 1949) Behaviourism was an attempt in the early and mid 20th century to rescue consciousness from the problem of casual interaction by rooting it firmly in the physical world.

Behaviourism is both a philosophy of mind and a school of psychology and while the two are linked it is worth distinguishing between them. Psychological behaviourism is the view that every thing that organisms do including thinking and feeling can and should be regarded as behaviour. It has been said that nothing predicts behaviour like behaviour and that “behave” is what organisms do (Bargh and Ferguson 2000). The school of psychology it represents maintains that behaviour can be scientifically described without worrying about internal cognitive events or hypothetical concepts such as the mind. As such it can be seen as a reaction to the psychotherapeutic method, with its emphasis on introspection, described by Freud in the early 19th century.

Philosophical behaviourism can be further divided into a number of different schools.
• Classical: The behaviourism of Watson; the objective study of behaviour, no metal life and no internal states exist.
• Radical: The behaviourism of Skinner who extended behavioural principles to mental states.
• Methodological: Underpins psychological behaviourism in that it holds that referring to an individuals beliefs and desires adds nothing to our understanding of behaviour
• Analytical or Logical: Mental states are a behavioural disposition or tendency to behave in a particular fashion. A belief or desire is what a person might or might not do in a particular situation or when subjected to certain environmental stimuli.

Perhaps Behaviourisms greatest claim to scientific respectability was its attempt to bring an objective and scientific rigour to the understanding of behaviour. To some extent Behaviourism has been successful in this, discovering causal laws governing the formation of associations, which help predict how behaviour will change as the environment changes.

One of the main goals of behaviourism was to unify psychology with natural science. As Watson wrote “Psychology as a Behaviourist views it is a purely an objective experimental branch of natural science. Its goal is prediction and control” he also wrote that the purpose of psychology was to “predict, given the stimulus, what the reaction will be or given the reaction state what the stimulus was.”

Behaviourism generated a robust form of therapy called Behaviour therapy, which is still in use today. Behaviour therapy is used for a number of psychiatric conditions including simple phobias and addictive behaviour. It has been used to develop behaviour management programs for autistic children and has been useful for understanding the behaviour of non-human animals. Behaviourism informs the practice of most animal training regimes. (George 2007)

However Behaviourism and in particular behaviour therapy has in recent years lost out to the cognitive revolution, with its functional approach to mental sates, which in contrast to Classical behaviourism places great emphasis on the mediating effect of those mental states. To a Functionalist behaviour without cognition appears blind. However Functionalism shares an important theme with Behaviourism. Functionalism defines a state of mind as something that plays a causal role in behaviour. Paul Churchland (1984) writes “The essential or defining feature of any type of mental state is the set of causal relations it bears to bodily behaviour”. It is the deterministic stance that Behaviourism shares with Functionalism and in particular with Cognitive science that offers behaviourism its best chance of regaining some of its scientific respectability and prominence.

The defining distinction between Functionalism and Behaviourism was the Behaviourists refusal to consider the importance of mediating internal mental states and processes (perception, interpretation, judgement evaluation and motivation) in explaining human behaviour whereas those same internal processes are the meat and potatoes of cognitive science. However in “Beyond Behaviourism: On the Automaticity of Higher Mental Processess” John Bargh and Melissa Ferguson (2000) describe a series of experiments in which the Stimulus Response model first described by Watson and Skinner affects and to a certain extent predicts higher order responses in human subjects. . However unlike Classical Behaviourists Bargh and Fergusson make full use of internal psychological processes as explanatory mechanisms in understanding the behaviour observed.

For example in one experiment two groups were individually given the same task, a word search. One group’s word search was primed with achievement related words while the other group had neutral words to find. Before the task could be completed both groups were ordered to stop working via an intercom while being observed by a hidden video camera. It was noted that a full 55% of those in the achievement primed group continued to work on the task after the command had been given compared with just 21% in the control group. The achievement primed participants consistently showed a heightened motivational state despite not having consciously chosen or guided their behaviour towards this goal. This and a whole series of other similar experiments showed how important the impact of environmental influences is on behaviour even when we are unaware of those influences.

Conscious processes are themselves casual agents of behaviour just as are non-conscious processes. The conscious and non-conscious processes according to Barg and Fergusson act in concert with each other and with external stimuli according to physical laws to determine behaviour giving an “illusion of control” allowing us to experience our behaviour as intentional even when it is not.

Recent Cognitive/ Behavioural theories on higher mental processes underlying social interactions are a continuation of two major schools of philosophical thought. The Behaviourists focus on the external, environmental causal factors and the Functionalists focus on the cognitive mechanisms mediating between those environmental factors and the individual’s behavioural response to the world around them. (Bargh and Ferguson 2000).

References:

1. Graham, George, “Behaviourism” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/), Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philospohy, 26th May 2007
2. Ryle Gilbert, 1949, The Concept of Mind, Hutchinson, pp 11-24
3. Churchland, P. 1984 Matter and Conciousness. Cambridge , MA.:MIT Press/ Bradford Books
4. Bargh, John. Ferguson, Melissa “Beyond Behaviourism: On the automaticity of Higher Mental Processes”, Philosophical Bulletin, Vol 126, No 6 (2000) pp 925 945