Teuton wrote:

Chrisw wrote:

Teuton wrote:
"[Naturalism is] the hypothesis that the world of space-time is all that there is."
(Armstrong, D. M. Truth and Truthmakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. p. 112)

But that also sounds like a definition of materialism or physicalism.

But it is not, since the next question is: what kinds of things, properties (powers, abilities), relations may the spatiotemporal world contain in order for it to be completely natural? For to say that there are no transcendent supernatural phenomena (e.g. God) is not also to say that there are no immanent supernatural phenomena, i.e. ones located in spacetime. For example, some philosophers hold that there are immaterial souls or spirits that occupy as zero-dimensional entities points of spacetime.

But I don't see how "immaterial souls or spirits that occupy as zero-dimensional entities points of spacetime" are compatible with the hypothesis that "the world of space-time is all that there is". These zero-dimensional entities presumably have some kind of causal power in the material world (otherwise we have no reason for claiming that they are located in the material world). But the functional mechanisms that account for this are not physical, they can't be as they occupy no space. We are implicitly positing some other (immaterial) realm where this supernatural cognition takes place. So these spirits or souls are essentially immaterial even if they have a precise physical location.

"The world of space-time is all that there is" seems to describe both materialism and naturalism.

For if there's one non-naturalistic belief in the world, it's the belief in immaterial consciousnesses/minds/souls/spirits as substances, i.e. as independent things.

Absolutely.

Chrisw wrote:

Teuton wrote:
For if there's one non-naturalistic belief in the world, it's the belief in immaterial consciousnesses/minds/souls/spirits as substances, i.e. as independent things.

Absolutely.

That's why UE tried to slip this one in:

UE wrote:We can't fix this by saying something like "consciousness IS brain activity", because this is just incoherent drivel - it either doesn't mean anything or it isn't materialism.

Without the assumption that our knowledge of our mind as not being in space/time is prima facie correct there is no crack in the bedrock of reason through which the spirits can seep.

The solidity of that knowledge of mind is what I will vigorously challenge. Pure emergent ass gas is what it is.

Krull wrote:
What about senses we don't share with animals, like electroreception?

Well I've received a bit of electricity in my time, being nearly electrocuted, touching battery contacts to my lips to see if the battery was live, one time I did that with too big a battery and everything went black and white. So I can detect electricity, I just don't want to.

Is there a limit to the kinds of possible sensory organs used to perceive things?

No. It might become useful for an organism to be able to identify any number of phenomena. There's a limit in that only things that exist can be detected, but an infinite number of new things can happen, or that's what I think anyway.

A lot of organisms respond to light though. I am amazed by Volvox, which is a spherical algal colony, which has eyespots and follows light. Light and heat are very fundamental. So some kinds of organs are much more likely in a given environment.

Anyway, I doubt we have any real way of distinguishing thought from perception, and even if we could, the fact that our scientific theories depend on thought suggests a different mode of thinking could lead to different theories about the world. If the way we think is as dependent on our bodies as it seems to be, we have no reason to think we could even communicate with another intelligent species. "If lions could talk, we would be unable to understand them".

I'm a bit suspicious about that observation. If they could talk, their minds would be different to the way they are now. And to say someone can talk is to say that what they are saying can be understood.

The way we talk frees our thoughts from our bodies. The way we talk shapes the way we think. Our language is open-ended. We can move segments of the universe around in our minds without moving them around physically, and our open-ended language allows us to make an infinitely layered model of the things that are outside our bodies.

I can distinguish thought from perception, for example I perceived the representation of your statement that we can't distinguish them, and I thought of this way of demonstrating that it is incorrect.

The world we refer to still depends on what we perceive. Trying to communicate with aliens that we don't share enough physically in common with might go nowhere because we don't share the same points of reference through our sensory organs.


ChrisW:
Just to clarify, I think it's a mistake to conflate the fact that we observe other minds as embodied, with behaviourism, for obvious reasons.

Krull wrote:The world we refer to still depends on what we perceive. Trying to communicate with aliens that we don't share enough physically in common with might go nowhere because we don't share the same points of reference through our sensory organs.


ChrisW:
Just to clarify, I think it's a mistake to conflate the fact that we observe other minds as embodied, with behaviourism, for obvious reasons.

I don't know much about embodied cognition (only what I could find on wiki and quick google searches), but what are the differences between it and behaviorism? The wiki page notes that the closely related biological version is enactivism which, from what I can tell, is simply behaviorism.

The biggest difference between the two seems to be the degree of emphasis placed on the importance of the body - whilst behaviorists do argue that the organisation of the body alters our perception, they would also argue that there is an element of universality across biological forms due to the evolution of a common ancestor so they would argue that it is not as important as the embodied cognitivists suggest. But if they were to look at humans communicating with an alien (who had undergone an entirely different abiogensis and subsequent evolution) then behaviorists would probably view the situation in the same way as an embodied cognitivist.

Mr.Samsa wrote:

Krull wrote:The world we refer to still depends on what we perceive. Trying to communicate with aliens that we don't share enough physically in common with might go nowhere because we don't share the same points of reference through our sensory organs.


ChrisW:
Just to clarify, I think it's a mistake to conflate the fact that we observe other minds as embodied, with behaviourism, for obvious reasons.

I don't know much about embodied cognition (only what I could find on wiki and quick google searches), but what are the differences between it and behaviorism? The wiki page notes that the closely related biological version is enactivism which, from what I can tell, is simply behaviorism.

The biggest difference between the two seems to be the degree of emphasis placed on the importance of the body - whilst behaviorists do argue that the organisation of the body alters our perception, they would also argue that there is an element of universality across biological forms due to the evolution of a common ancestor so they would argue that it is not as important as the embodied cognitivists suggest. But if they were to look at humans communicating with an alien (who had undergone an entirely different abiogensis and subsequent evolution) then behaviorists would probably view the situation in the same way as an embodied cognitivist.

"Behaviorist" seems to be little more than a term of abuse in philosophy these days. I recently read an insultingly short review of Alva Noe's book by functionalist Ned Block where he simply accused Noe of behaviourism, as if that was all that needed to be said.

Philosophy of mind seems to have been built on the rejection of behaviorism, so discussions of behaviorism usually take the form "this is what we used to believe, see how obviously wrong it is!" So only strawman versions of behaviorism are presented.

If philosophers want to reserve the word "behaviorism" for a historical movement then obviously people working in the embodied cognition field are not going to call themselves behaviorists. But that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't some species of behaviorist, depending on how you define it.

Let's put it this way: I'm happy to accept that it's possible -though not necessarily conceivable - that qualia are an illusion. By this I mean that they are in some way less intrinsic than they seem, so that there are methods of understanding them that dispels their mysterious quality. Without qualia, consciousness would presumably consist in behaviour, and nothing else.

So why do I have a problem with behaviourism? It's because being conscious is about being a point of view on the world, and points of view don't figure anywhere in our descriptions of behaviour - except perhaps metaphorically. But we don't need to conceive of POVs as useful explanatory models, because they're about the only thing we can be sure of. There is no view from nowhere - there is no viewpoint on the world that isn't a POV. POVs are presupposed in our encounters with the world and our descriptions of it. But we don't actually encounter a point of view anywhere, any more than we experience causality. We might have to assume we do in order to get around from day to day, but that doesn't make it true.

Krull wrote:So why do I have a problem with behaviourism? It's because being conscious is about being a point of view on the world, and points of view don't figure anywhere in our descriptions of behaviour - except perhaps metaphorically.

The idea of a POV on the world presupposes a world that has properties independent of us. Points of view are plural, if there was only one possible POV it wouldn't be a mere POV at all it would just be reality. But to be a POV is to be a POV on something, something that is not itself a POV. It is the underlying reality that our POVs are POVs on. This is what links them together, what makes them POVs and not just disconnected experiences.

Consider the spatial metaphor in the POV concept. The example is a view (perhaps a 2D projection) of a 3D object from a single point in space. You have to first grasp the idea of a world of objects positioned in space to even talk in these terms. There are an infinity of points from which to view the object, an infinite number of POVs. But we don't need an infinite amount of information to describe objects. This is because we can describe them in a way that is POV independent. Even Descartes knew this - in fact he invented it with his Cartesian coordinates.

But we don't need to conceive of POVs as useful explanatory models, because they're about the only thing we can be sure of.

I think this is the fundamental Cartesian error. The argument goes: I may be wrong about how things are but it is meaningless to say that I could be wrong about how things seem to me. So here is certainty, our only certainty.

But it is not clear that this certainty, this incorrigibility really constitutes knowledge. Isn't this what Sellars calls the myth of the given? The "knowledge" we have here appears to be hopelessly tautological - "I know that I see red whenever I see red" (not "I know that I see red objects whenever I see red" - that would be useful empirical knowledge but we can't say that).

Are there really facts of the matter as to what we experience at any given moment? It is commonplace to acknowledge that we regularly misremember our experiences and even unconsciously fabricate details about them due to our need to make sense of things. Memories are recreated on the fly whenever we recall them and our original experiences are fragmentary and gappy, very far from the kind of videocam-like images that we sometimes imagine them to be. But are we justified in saying that there are real facts about what we experienced that we recall to a greater or lesser degree of accuracy? For example, a circle looks oval from most angles and yet we recognise things as being (roughly) circular without having to be positioned perfectly to view them. So do we actually see circles or ovals? Isn't the question just ridiculous? The only way it can have a sensible answer is if we take it to mean "Is the objects we are looking at a circle or an oval?" Then we can answer the question very easily.

Our language for talking about our perceptions continually refers to an actual physical world, we define colours and shapes by pointing to objects. We start with encounters with real objects and only after gaining proficiency in navigating our way around this real world do we learn abstract concepts of colour and shape.

We can't make sense of the world starting from pure experience, because there is no such thing as pure experience (and Kantian categories are a shameless attempt solve the problem by fiat). If we want to be relativist and sceptical about something it should be the Cartesian subject and his private world. It can't form any kind of foundation for our knowledge of the world. We have to abandon what Dennett called the "mind first" approach.

But this lack of foundations needn't plunge us into scepticism or relativism. All supposed facts are justified solely by other supposed facts but within our vast Quinean Web of Belief there are some things that remain stubbornly immune to revision while everything around them changes (and that includes imaginary changes like "what if we were aliens with totally different senses"). These things we call "reality".

There is no view from nowhere - there is no viewpoint on the world that isn't a POV.

Oh there is. This is exactly what science is. Hence the central importance of symmetry in formulating laws of physics. Symmetry is just another word for point-of-view invariance.

Chrisw wrote:
"Behaviorist" seems to be little more than a term of abuse in philosophy these days. I recently read an insultingly short review of Alva Noe's book by functionalist Ned Block where he simply accused Noe of behaviourism, as if that was all that needed to be said.

Philosophy of mind seems to have been built on the rejection of behaviorism, so discussions of behaviorism usually take the form "this is what we used to believe, see how obviously wrong it is!" So only strawman versions of behaviorism are presented.

If philosophers want to reserve the word "behaviorism" for a historical movement then obviously people working in the embodied cognition field are not going to call themselves behaviorists. But that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't some species of behaviorist, depending on how you define it.

That's what I thought.

Krull wrote:Let's put it this way: I'm happy to accept that it's possible -though not necessarily conceivable - that qualia are an illusion. By this I mean that they are in some way less intrinsic than they seem, so that there are methods of understanding them that dispels their mysterious quality. Without qualia, consciousness would presumably consist in behaviour, and nothing else.

So why do I have a problem with behaviourism? It's because being conscious is about being a point of view on the world, and points of view don't figure anywhere in our descriptions of behaviour - except perhaps metaphorically. But we don't need to conceive of POVs as useful explanatory models, because they're about the only thing we can be sure of. There is no view from nowhere - there is no viewpoint on the world that isn't a POV. POVs are presupposed in our encounters with the world and our descriptions of it. But we don't actually encounter a point of view anywhere, any more than we experience causality. We might have to assume we do in order to get around from day to day, but that doesn't make it true.

Behaviorism doesn't reject qualia though. Unless you're talking about the philosophical version of behaviorism outlined by Chris above where we try to understand a person's mental states by observing their external behavior - which is obviously ridiculous. Out of interest, has anyone ever actually subscribed to that view?

Krull wrote:Let's put it this way: I'm happy to accept that it's possible -though not necessarily conceivable - that qualia are an illusion.

Qualia is a way of talking about experience. An illusion is itself a type of experience and contrasts with other types of experience. It doesn't seem logically coherent to me to describe all qualia as an illusion.

Why are you willing to accept something inconceivable?

wezentrommel wrote:Qualia is a way of talking about experience. An illusion is itself a type of experience and contrasts with other types of experience. It doesn't seem logically coherent to me to describe all qualia as an illusion.

Why are you willing to accept something inconceivable?

It's more a way of conceding to extreme scepticism than anything else. We can't actually prove even basic logic is true in the "real" world, which is why philosophers have tended to give up on trying to do metaphysics in the last 150 years or so. It's metaphysically possible that qualia are in illusion in some inconceivable sense, or in a sense that only makes sense to some people and not others. Strictly speaking, it's impossible to tell an eliminativist from a mystic, since they both make nonsensical claims from the POV of common sense. But in practice it doesn't actually matter if your views make sense so long as they hold pragmatic value, and I think this is why eliminativism has caught on the way it has, whereas mysticism hasn't. This, and the fact that consciousness can't be defined without a tautology, as Cito will no doubt remind you.

Science doesn't need to assume consciousness "exists" in describing what the human organism does; science also happens to be the best tool we have. So it's not surprising some people side with science, on the basis that human minds don't need to understand its results to do stuff with it. I couldn't even be typing this without quantum effects making microchips possible, but there's no reason to think having a metaphysics that makes sense of quantum will make putting it to work any easier, when dropping common sense intuitions about the behaviour of particles works just as well. Einstein spent the latter half of his life trying to make sense of quantum, while the rest of the world just got on and built stuff with it.

The flipside of anti-metaphysics though is that it trades off on the fact that we can't get outside our own heads. Everything we can know or say is true "for us", because nobody has demonstrated we have access to reality-in-itself. Which is another way of saying that a POV is presupposed in order to have (relative) knowledge, and it's why I prefer to talk about consciousness as a POV these days.

Mr. Samsa wrote:Behaviorism doesn't reject qualia though. Unless you're talking about the philosophical version of behaviorism outlined by Chris above where we try to understand a person's mental states by observing their external behavior - which is obviously ridiculous. Out of interest, has anyone ever actually subscribed to that view?

Would you rank brain processes as "external behaviour" if you cut someone's skull open?

chrisw wrote:

Krull wrote:There is no view from nowhere - there is no viewpoint on the world that isn't a POV.

Oh there is. This is exactly what science is. Hence the central importance of symmetry in formulating laws of physics. Symmetry is just another word for point-of-view invariance.

The fact that science would work just as well in an idealist or even a solipsist metaphysics shows it doesn't need to assume a "view from nowhere" in order to operate. Scientists might have less of a motive for doing their work if they thought they were just catalogueing their own experiences, but that's not the point. Even if we assume it is an intersubjective discipline, science only ever tends toward objectivity, it never actually gets there any more than parallel lines ever meet at infinity. This is a good thing, since from a perfectly 3rd person perspective the 1st and 2nd perspectives don't show up. Eliminativism follows naturally if you assume science is capable of perfectly abstracting away from our subjective experience, without remainder (i.e. heterophenomenology).

The idea of a POV on the world presupposes a world that has properties independent of us. Points of view are plural, if there was only one possible POV it wouldn't be a mere POV at all it would just be reality. But to be a POV is to be a POV on something, something that is not itself a POV. It is the underlying reality that our POVs are POVs on. This is what links them together, what makes them POVs and not just disconnected experiences.
...
Our language for talking about our perceptions continually refers to an actual physical world, we define colours and shapes by pointing to objects. We start with encounters with real objects and only after gaining proficiency in navigating our way around this real world do we learn abstract concepts of colour and shape.

I'm not so sure about that. There is obviously a difference between solipsism and eliminativism, yet they both get rid of points-of-view-on-a-world.

I'm happy to assume the world really is more or less the way we perceive it, and that consequently I am one POV among many. But this is just an assumption, the only reason I side with experience is because philosophy that doubted its accuracy never got any closer to yielding knowledge than if we'd just taken things at face value to begin with.

All supposed facts are justified solely by other supposed facts but within our vast Quinean Web of Belief there are some things that remain stubbornly immune to revision while everything around them changes (and that includes imaginary changes like "what if we were aliens with totally different senses"). These things we call "reality".

How could we know what would stay the same if we were totally different? How do we know we don't all have superpowers, but just don't know how to use them? I have no problem with pragmatic knowledge in which we tend to discount those kinds of questions as meaningless, but that's not the same as saying we can know what it is about "reality" that makes some beliefs more beneficial than others.

The argument goes: I may be wrong about how things are but it is meaningless to say that I could be wrong about how things seem to me. So here is certainty, our only certainty.

But it is not clear that this certainty, this incorrigibility really constitutes knowledge. Isn't this what Sellars calls the myth of the given? The "knowledge" we have here appears to be hopelessly tautological - "I know that I see red whenever I see red" (not "I know that I see red objects whenever I see red" - that would be useful empirical knowledge but we can't say that).

I can be wrong about all kinds of things I experience. I can even be wrong about how things "seem" - something red might appear green out of the corner of my eye, or a startlingly cold tap might feel too hot. But these mistakes can be corrected on further examination. It doesn't make sense that I could be systematically wrong about there being such a thing as experience in the first place. IOW, I need a POV in order for illusions to appear.

Are there really facts of the matter as to what we experience at any given moment? It is commonplace to acknowledge that we regularly misremember our experiences and even unconsciously fabricate details about them due to our need to make sense of things. Memories are recreated on the fly whenever we recall them and our original experiences are fragmentary and gappy, very far from the kind of videocam-like images that we sometimes imagine them to be. But are we justified in saying that there are real facts about what we experienced that we recall to a greater or lesser degree of accuracy? For example, a circle looks oval from most angles and yet we recognise things as being (roughly) circular without having to be positioned perfectly to view them. So do we actually see circles or ovals? Isn't the question just ridiculous? The only way it can have a sensible answer is if we take it to mean "Is the objects we are looking at a circle or an oval?" Then we can answer the question very easily.

Our language for talking about our perceptions continually refers to an actual physical world, we define colours and shapes by pointing to objects. We start with encounters with real objects and only after gaining proficiency in navigating our way around this real world do we learn abstract concepts of colour and shape.

If you read Ten Zen Questions by Susan Blackmore, there are plenty of cases in there where she fails to find an answer to what is being experienced in the absolute present. For some reason she concludes this means consciousness doesn't exist, whereas the obvious thing to conclude would be that an absolute present makes about as much sense as an infinitely thin object, i.e. nonsense. Experience, like the present, is ambiguous and murky. And this makes asking questions about what exactly we experience ridiculous much of the time, as you say. But I find it hard to believe you can conclude from this that I can be wrong about a POV being the one thing I can be most sure about.

Our language for talking about our perceptions continually refers to an actual physical world, we define colours and shapes by pointing to objects. We start with encounters with real objects and only after gaining proficiency in navigating our way around this real world do we learn abstract concepts of colour and shape.

We can't make sense of the world starting from pure experience, because there is no such thing as pure experience (and Kantian categories are a shameless attempt solve the problem by fiat). If we want to be relativist and sceptical about something it should be the Cartesian subject and his private world. It can't form any kind of foundation for our knowledge of the world. We have to abandon what Dennett called the "mind first" approach.

It's not just our language that refers to an actual physical world. With the possible exception of Husserl, you won't find a phenomenologist who doesn't say the same thing about experience. Phenomenology was the end of "mind first" philosophies, in the sense that it conceded that we can't get a view from nowhere, while pointing out that we experience things as being objective.

Recognising that there is no such thing as a "pure experience" that isn't ambiguous or intending toward something, doesn't mean abandoning the 1st person entirely. It doesn't mean that I can't be an authority at least some of the time, about what my experience consists of. Experience isn't completly private or objective, it's somewhere in between. Which is why if you're going to be a monist, you might as well be a neutral monist.

Krull wrote:

Mr. Samsa wrote:Behaviorism doesn't reject qualia though. Unless you're talking about the philosophical version of behaviorism outlined by Chris above where we try to understand a person's mental states by observing their external behavior - which is obviously ridiculous. Out of interest, has anyone ever actually subscribed to that view?

Would you rank brain processes as "external behaviour" if you cut someone's skull open?

Interesting question. I think it highlights the arbitrariness of the internal/external terminology which, traditionally, was used as a simple way of distinguishing "walking and talking" from "thinking and feeling". If we want to tinker with the term "external behavior" and include brain processes, then I think we have a much more coherent position. However, as far as I'm aware, the philosophical behaviorists tend to follow Watson's thinking where we claim that someone is in pain because they're hopping up and down on one foot yelling, "Ow my toe!" - this is the ridiculous position I was referring to, not current behaviorist neuroscience.

I don't think anyone has used the "external/internal" qualifier to "behavior" in quite a few decades though. Behavior is viewed as basically anything the organism does, and these 'things' are understandable through quantifiable laws. Whether it's pressing a lever, or feeling depressed, it's all just behavior which is understandable, predictable and modifiable.

Mr.Samsa wrote:

Krull wrote:

Mr. Samsa wrote:Behaviorism doesn't reject qualia though. Unless you're talking about the philosophical version of behaviorism outlined by Chris above where we try to understand a person's mental states by observing their external behavior - which is obviously ridiculous. Out of interest, has anyone ever actually subscribed to that view?

Would you rank brain processes as "external behaviour" if you cut someone's skull open?

Interesting question. I think it highlights the arbitrariness of the internal/external terminology which, traditionally, was used as a simple way of distinguishing "walking and talking" from "thinking and feeling". If we want to tinker with the term "external behavior" and include brain processes, then I think we have a much more coherent position. However, as far as I'm aware, the philosophical behaviorists tend to follow Watson's thinking where we claim that someone is in pain because they're hopping up and down on one foot yelling, "Ow my toe!" - this is the ridiculous position I was referring to, not current behaviorist neuroscience.

I don't think anyone has used the "external/internal" qualifier to "behavior" in quite a few decades though. Behavior is viewed as basically anything the organism does, and these 'things' are understandable through quantifiable laws. Whether it's pressing a lever, or feeling depressed, it's all just behavior which is understandable, predictable and modifiable.

I don't think any critics of behaviourism would disagree with the definition about brain processes. The Chalmers paper that started a lot of this off talks about behaviourist methods of correlation and doesn't refer to behaviourism in the popular sense of how a subject behaves. The accusation of behaviourism used as a strawman is itself a bit of a strawman.

There's a nice discussion of the relevance of behaviourism to contemporary philosophy and cognitive science here:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/behavior/

Some quotes:

Behaviorism was a movement in psychology and philosophy that emphasized the outward behavioral aspects of thought and dismissed the inward experiential, and sometimes the inner procedural, aspects as well; a movement harking back to the methodological proposals of John B. Watson, who coined the name. Watson’s 1912 manifesto proposed abandoning Introspectionist attempts to make consciousness a subject of experimental investigation to focus instead on behavioral manifestations of intelligence. B. F. Skinner later hardened behaviorist strictures to exclude inner physiological processes along with inward experiences as items of legitimate psychological concern. Consequently, the successful “cognitive revolution” of the nineteen sixties styled itself a revolt against behaviorism even though the computational processes cognitivism hypothesized would be public and objective — not the sort of private subjective processes Watson banned. Consequently (and ironically), would-be-scientific champions of consciousness now indict cognitivism for its “behavioristic” neglect of inward experience.

...

Behaviorism, notoriously, came in various sorts and has been, also notoriously, subject to variant sortings: “the variety of positions that constitute behaviorism” might even be said to share no common-distinctive property, but only “a loose family resemblance”

...

Several recent developments inside and beside the mainstream of “cognitive science” — though their proponents have not been keen to style themselves “behaviorists” — appear to be rather behavioristic. Semantic externalism is the view that “meanings ain’t in the head” (Putnam 1975: 227) but depend, rather, on environmental factors; especially on sensory and behavioral intercourse with the referents of the referring thoughts or expressions. If emphasis on the outward or behavioral aspects of thought or intelligence — and attendant de-emphasis of inward experiential or inner procedural aspects — is the hallmark of behaviorism, semantic externalism is, on its face, behavioristic (though this is seldom remarked). Emphasis (as by Burge 1979) on social (besides the indexical, or sensory-behavioral) determinants of reference — on what Putnam called “the linguistic division of labor” — lends this view a distinct Wittgensteinean flavor besides. Such externalist “causal theories” of reference, although far from unquestioned orthodoxy, are currently among the leading cognitive scientific contenders. Less orthodox, but even more behavioristic, is the procedural externalism advocated by Andy Clark (2001), inspired by work in “Situated Cognition, Distributed and Decentralized Cognition, Real-World Robotics, and Artificial Life” (Clark 2001: abstract); identifying thought with “complex and iterated processes which continually loop between brain, body, and technological environment”; according to which the “intelligent process just is the spatially and temporally extended one which zig-zags between brain, body, and world” (Clark 2001: 132). Perhaps most importantly, the influential connectionist hypothesis that the brain does parallel processing of distributed representations, rather than serial processing of localized (language-like) representations, also waxes behavioristic. In parallel systems, typically, initial programming (comparable to innate mechanisms) is minimal and the systems are “trained-up” to perform complex tasks over a series of trails, by a process somewhat like operant shaping.

Ilovelucy wrote:
I don't think any critics of behaviourism would disagree with the definition about brain processes. The Chalmers paper that started a lot of this off talks about behaviourist methods of correlation and doesn't refer to behaviourism in the popular sense of how a subject behaves. The accusation of behaviourism used as a strawman is itself a bit of a strawman.

Can you link me to the Chalmers paper? From what I recall, wasn't it Chalmers who argued that the problem with behaviorism was that you can't infer a mental state from a behavior (that is, you can't say that someone is in pain by looking at how they're behaving)? If so, then this is a strawman. If not, then I'm mistaken and I need to read his paper. (And what are the "behaviorist methods of correlation"?)..

Chrisw wrote:There's a nice discussion of the relevance of behaviourism to contemporary philosophy and cognitive science here:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/behavior/

I don't know about "nice", it perpetuates a few common myths...

Behaviorism was a movement in psychology and philosophy that emphasized the outward behavioral aspects of thought and dismissed the inward experiential, and sometimes the inner procedural, aspects as well; a movement harking back to the methodological proposals of John B. Watson, who coined the name. Watson’s 1912 manifesto proposed abandoning Introspectionist attempts to make consciousness a subject of experimental investigation to focus instead on behavioral manifestations of intelligence. B. F. Skinner later hardened behaviorist strictures to exclude inner physiological processes along with inward experiences as items of legitimate psychological concern.

Uh.. No. Skinner came along and 'radicalised' behaviorism by including inward experiences and physiological processes. That's why his brand of behaviorism was labeled "radical". The only half truth there was that Skinner explicitly rejected speculation about possible physiological structures to explain behavior - if these structures can be discovered by science and demonstrated to have an impact on behavior, then he accepted them.

It's a common misconception though and even some people within scientific circles make the same mistake. It's the ambiguous labels that Skinner seemed to love, like "negative reinforcement" the "radical" label tends to be taken the wrong way as demonstrated by your article.

Consequently, the successful “cognitive revolution” of the nineteen sixties styled itself a revolt against behaviorism even though the computational processes cognitivism hypothesized would be public and objective — not the sort of private subjective processes Watson banned. Consequently (and ironically), would-be-scientific champions of consciousness now indict cognitivism for its “behavioristic” neglect of inward experience.

This is because the "cognitive revolution" didn't really add or change anything to the current behavioral model, except for changing the terminology. Cognitive psychologists and behavioral psychologists study the exact same things, using the exact same methods and reach the exact same conclusions. The only difference is the terminology and sometimes the journals they submit to.

Behaviorism, notoriously, came in various sorts and has been, also notoriously, subject to variant sortings: “the variety of positions that constitute behaviorism” might even be said to share no common-distinctive property, but only “a loose family resemblance”

That sounds about accurate. The only real form used in science, however, is a slightly modified radical behaviorism (all the key ideas remain, but obviously Skinner's word isn't taken as gospel).

Mr. Samsa wrote:However, as far as I'm aware, the philosophical behaviorists tend to follow Watson's thinking where we claim that someone is in pain because they're hopping up and down on one foot yelling, "Ow my toe!" - this is the ridiculous position I was referring to, not current behaviorist neuroscience.

I'm not sure I see what is so ridiculous about it...behaviour like that is all we have to go on. It isn't as if brain states are going to be any more informative to us unless we know what behaviour they support. How would we know c-fibers relate to pain without asking people whether they're in pain or not? (and isn't talking about pain just a more advanced method of expressing it than jumping up and down or whatever)

Krull wrote:
I'm not sure I see what is so ridiculous about it...behaviour like that is all we have to go on. It isn't as if brain states are going to be any more informative to us unless we know what behaviour they support. How would we know c-fibers relate to pain without asking people whether they're in pain or not? (and isn't talking about pain just a more advanced method of expressing it than jumping up and down or whatever)

I think you're confusing two different claims: one is saying that external behavior IS what a mental state is, and the other is saying that external behavior is a good indicator of the mental state. So if you're making the second claim, that external behavior can give us evidence or good reason to think that someone is in pain, then that's a reasonable claim. That's not usually what is levelled against the behaviorists though. What is usually argued against as the "behaviorist" position is the former claim, which is why you get criticisms that say things like "A perfect actor would disprove behaviorism", or "p-zombies show that behaviorism has to be wrong" etc. Both of those arguments obviously don't have any relevance to behaviorism. (And yes, 'talking about behavior' is simply another form of behavior that is subject to its own contingencies and constraints, and this is why people's reports of their own behavior and their behavior itself tend to differ quite substantially sometimes).

Mr.Samsa wrote:

Krull wrote:
I'm not sure I see what is so ridiculous about it...behaviour like that is all we have to go on. It isn't as if brain states are going to be any more informative to us unless we know what behaviour they support. How would we know c-fibers relate to pain without asking people whether they're in pain or not? (and isn't talking about pain just a more advanced method of expressing it than jumping up and down or whatever)

I think you're confusing two different claims: one is saying that external behavior IS what a mental state is, and the other is saying that external behavior is a good indicator of the mental state. So if you're making the second claim, that external behavior can give us evidence or good reason to think that someone is in pain, then that's a reasonable claim. That's not usually what is levelled against the behaviorists though. What is usually argued against as the "behaviorist" position is the former claim, which is why you get criticisms that say things like "A perfect actor would disprove behaviorism", or "p-zombies show that behaviorism has to be wrong" etc. Both of those arguments obviously don't have any relevance to behaviorism. (And yes, 'talking about behavior' is simply another form of behavior that is subject to its own contingencies and constraints, and this is why people's reports of their own behavior and their behavior itself tend to differ quite substantially sometimes).

But saying that "external behavior is a good indicator of the mental state" is just a kind of methodological behaviourism. Philosophical behaviourists, like Ryle, went further than this. They wanted behaviouristic analyses to tell us something about what mental states were (or weren't). I think Ryle essentially did believe mental states were ultimately reducible to outward behaviour.

But I don't think that is obviously wrong, not if we can (as Ryle did) talk of dispositions to behave. So your mental state consist of not only your current behaviour but your dispositions to behave in certain ways if circumstances were different. So you might be angry but not show it for fear of offending, but we can imagine circumstances in which this disposition to overtly react angrily would be expressed. Actors have a disposition to stop acting when the director shouts "Cut!". A pretence that was maintained in all conceivable circumstances would not be a pretence at all.

What is important for Ryle is that all talk of inner episodes can be reduced to talk of outward behaviour (albeit sometimes hypothetical) not that what we call the inner simply is the outer at every moment.

Now as far as I can see this talk of dispositions takes us into functionalism - a disposition is part of a functional description of how you behave. But functionalism is presented as a counter to behaviourism. Putnam intended his Machine State Functionalism to be distinct from behaviourism, but all it says is at any moment your behaviour is determined by a combination of external stimuli and inner states and that part of that behaviour can consist of making changes to those inner states (engineers and computer scientists would call this arrangement a "state machine"). But that is surely compatible with any non-strawman version of philosophical behaviourism. Your "state" is just the sum total of your current dispositions.

Chrisw wrote:
But saying that "external behavior is a good indicator of the mental state" is just a kind of methodological behaviourism.

Do you mean 'methodological behaviorism' as in the actual position held by Watson, or do you mean just the general methodology put forth by behaviorist thinking? If the latter then I agree, but the former would argue that mental states are completely irrelevant, so whether external behavior relates to it or not is not something that is even worth considering.

Chrisw wrote:Philosophical behaviourists, like Ryle, went further than this. They wanted behaviouristic analyses to tell us something about what mental states were (or weren't). I think Ryle essentially did believe mental states were ultimately reducible to outward behaviour.

But I don't think that is obviously wrong, not if we can (as Ryle did) talk of dispositions to behave. So your mental state consist of not only your current behaviour but your dispositions to behave in certain ways if circumstances were different. So you might be angry but not show it for fear of offending, but we can imagine circumstances in which this disposition to overtly react angrily would be expressed. Actors have a disposition to stop acting when the director shouts "Cut!". A pretence that was maintained in all conceivable circumstances would not be a pretence at all.

Was that Ryle's position? I haven't read enough of his stuff, I've only read parts but I found him fairly intelligent on the topic. The "dispositions" thing sounds a little odd - I suppose if he's discussing context, in that the actor has different contingencies operating on his behavior in some circumstances compared to other situations, then I would definitely agree and this is empirically demonstrable.

Chrisw wrote:What is important for Ryle is that all talk of inner episodes can be reduced to talk of outward behaviour (albeit sometimes hypothetical) not that what we call the inner simply is the outer at every moment.

I thought that one of Ryle's main contributions to this topic was the identification of the fact that we confuse observations sometimes through category errors, and at times we think we are "explaining" an observation when in reality we are just trying to include the category label as an example of the category.

Chrisw wrote:Now as far as I can see this talk of dispositions takes us into functionalism - a disposition is part of a functional description of how you behave. But functionalism is presented as a counter to behaviourism. Putnam intended his Machine State Functionalism to be distinct from behaviourism, but all it says is at any moment your behaviour is determined by a combination of external stimuli and inner states and that part of that behaviour can consist of making changes to those inner states (engineers and computer scientists would call this arrangement a "state machine"). But that is surely compatible with any non-strawman version of philosophical behaviourism. Your "state" is just the sum total of your current dispositions.

Indeed, there is absolutely nothing that I can see that would make Machine State Functionalism incompatible with behaviorism.