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IT]he distinction between mentatism and behaviorism is both excIusive and exhaustive.
You must be either a mentatist or a behaviorist... (Fodor, 1968, p. 55)
So, to use a familiar phrase, there are only two games in town; if y o u
are n o t playing one, then y o u must be playing the other. This point
of view appears to be tacitly and nearly universally accepted a m o n g
philosophers o f m i n d and psychology.
One obvious effect of dividing the field into behaviorism and men-
talism in this way is that any third alternative is ruled out ab initio.
What happens in practice, then, is that attempts to articulate any such
alternative are assimilated forthwith to one or the other pole of the
dichotomy, as convenience and rhetorical effect dictate. The claim I
wish to defend in this paper is that a third alternative is indeed conceiv-
able. I will defend it by showing that behaviorism and mentalism are
not fundamentally exclusive. Once this has been established, it can be
shown that they are not exhaustive either. Finally, I hope to say some-
thing concrete, if preliminary, about the proposed third alternative.
To be more. specific, I do not deny the existence of differences
between the mentalist and the behaviorist approaches. What I do want
to claim is that behind the obvious differences lie some very basic
assumptions which are common to both. From the point of view of
these foundational assumptions, mentalism and behaviorism look more
like two versions of the s a m e position - like the same game with two
slightly different versions of the rules - than they do like mutually
exclusive positions. In other words, mentalism and behaviorism exclude
each other only superficially, and are actually continuous with one
another on a deeper level. Furthermore, they are only apparently
exhaustive. The foundation they share allows only certain sorts of
construction upon it, of which mentalism and behaviorism are the
archetypical extremes. So long as this foundation remains in place,
change can occur only as an alternation between these extremes. Hence
the appearance that mentatism and behaviorism exhaust t h e options;
they do exhaust the options permitted by the assumptions they share,
but they do not necessarily exhaust the options tout court.
This suggests an obvious and distressingly mechanical method for
generating a third alternative: simply replace the foundational assump-
tions common to mentalism and behaviorism with some other appropri-
ate assumptions. This leaves open the question as to why such a third
alternative would be desirable. I shall argue that the common assump-
tions underlying mentalism and behaviorism do not permit adequate
explanation of certain aspects of behavior, and that this constitutes
sufficient reason for discarding them, or at least relegating them to
some strictly secondary status in a substantially different framework.
To get things started, though, I would like to explain what I take to
be the major difference between mentalism and behaviorism, the real
bone of contention between them. This will establish a background
BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 169
against which the assumptions they share will show up more readily.
More importantly, it will largely establish the contention that mentalism
and behaviorism are not mutually exclusive.
It has generally been assumed that to explain behavior.., one must attribute it to events
taking place inside the organism. In the field of verbal behavior this practice was once
represented by the doctrine of the expression of ideas . . . . If the speaker had had a
different idea, he would have uttered different words . . . . If his utterance was unusual,
it was because of the novelty or originality of his ideas . . . . There is obviously something
suspicious in the ease with which we discover in a set of ideas precisely those properties
needed to account for the behavior which expresses them. We evidently construct the
ideas at will from the behavior to be explained. There is, of course, no real explanation.
(Skinner, 1957, pp. 5-6)
map" of the worldin whichhe has lived. He has simplybeen changedin such a way that
stimuli now control particular kindsof perceptual behavior. (Skinner, 1974, p. 84)
So behaviorism does without the orbiculus by placing behavior under
the control of environmental stimuli. On the part of the organism, this
control is achieved through changes in the peripheral nervous system,
not through the mediation of central cognitive processes, and most
particularly not through the mediation of intentionally characterized
internal processes, i.e., the (computational) manipulation of internal
representations.
The fact that an organism may respond differently on different oc-
casions to what is nominally the same stimulus, or may respond in the
same way to what are nominally different stimuli (generalization), is
accounted for by explaining that the organism's history of reinforcement
has brought its behavior under the control of subtle properties of the
stimulus which we have not yet succeeded in characterizing precisely
(Skinner, 1957, p. 108). So the basic behaviorist strategy is to attribute
the organization of behavior to complex properties of the environment,
that in conjunction with the schedules of reinforcement to which the
organism is subject, fully determine behavior as the set of reinforced
responses to those properties.
The difficulties inherent in this notion of stimulus control are well
known, and have standardty underwritten mentatist critiques of behavi-
orism. The fundamental problem is that in all but the most simple and
artificial situations, the controlling property of the stimulus tends to be
inferred from the character of the response. This is painfully obvious
in Skinner's discussion of metaphor, for instance, where he asserts:
In The child is bright as a dollar we accountfor dollar by notingsomethingpossessedin
common by dollars and the child in question. This somethingis preciselythe stimulus
property responsible for bright. (Skinner, 1957, p. 93)
Numerous other amusing examples of this tendency are cited in the
literature (Chomsky, 1959; Dennett, 1978a). The point is that the whole
notion of stimulus control, and in particular the notion of stimulus
generalization, rests on the supposition that stimuli are objectively
similar to each other; for it is this alleged similarity among stimuli that
is supposed to explain similarity of response. So if in practice the
direction of explanation reliably runs the other way, the bankruptcy of
the notion of stimulus control would seem to be sufficiently manifest,
since the explanatory strategy employed is in fact circular. You cannot
172 BETH PRESTON
CONTROL
The commitment to construction of a model that actually generates behaviors forces one
to confront the problem of how, and under what conditions, internal representations and
rules are pressed into service as actions are generated. These are questions that concern
control of the process. (Pylysbyn, 1984, p. 78)
AN A L T E R N A T I V E TO B E H A V I O R I S M / M E N T A L I S M ' . ~
of the purrer (Morris, 1988). The reason cats purr when patted or fed,
is to indicate that they are not about to bite the hand that feeds or
pats. Under stressful circumstances they purr to indicate submissiveness
and so discourage aggression on the part of their interlocutor. So purr-
ing has a very important and diversified social function, which is ulti-
mately (and in all its details, which I will spare you here) understandable
only in terms of the structure of feline social relations as a whole. 8
Explaining why a particular cat is purring on a particular occasion
will thus essentially involve reference to the nature and history of feline
social mores in general, rather than just the nature and history of this
particular cat's interactions with its immediate environment. This is
especially true in the case of deviant behavior, that could not even be
recognized as such except with reference to 'how cats usually behave'.
Most importantly, the explanans - the feline social structure - is not
available, as whole and as such in the environment, so it cannot be
reasonably characterized as a stimulus. Nor is it likely to be represented
as a whole and as such by the participant so that it could reasonably
be characterized as a set of beliefs. So this aspect of the explanation
of behavior does not depend on taking the psychological subject as an
individual input-output device, but rather, on taking it as a participant
in a supra-individual structure in terms of which its behavior makes
sense. Consequently, this aspect of the explanation of behavior does
not recognize the assumption of an inside-outside split, since there is
no obvious sense in which the social structure is either inside or outside
the individual member thereof. 9
A similar re-evaluation can be made with regard to the notion of
control, which embodies the assumption that you have explained be-
havior when you have explained how it is (causally) generated over
time as a function of input and internal processing. On this view,
behavior is transparent; the structure it has is the structure imposed on
it by the generative process, that is what it means to say it is controlled.
An alternative would be to regard the structure of behavior as opaque
and emergent with regard to the process by which it is generated.
Suites of behavior instantiate functional roles, and owe their sequenc-
ing to the structure of the role. Suppose, for example, you are trying
to explain the unfolding sequence of events in a confrontation between
two cats over (say) access to the back porch. Such confiontations
are exceedingly complex pieces of behavior, involving changes in ear
position, tail position, overall body posture, and eye contact, plus a
BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 185
whole range of vocalizations. I will not describe one in detail, but see
Morris (1987, p. 55ff.). The point is that there are highly typical patterns
according to which such confrontations unfold. Moreover, the contribu-
tion of each participant is highly typical - even stereotypical - and
differentiated from the contribution of the other participant, largely in
terms of relative dominance or submissiveness. Who gets to play which
role in the end is, of course, something that may be decided or revised
during the course of the confrontation. But when this happens it is
precisely a switching of roles that the observer sees. This is because a
typical dominance role is instantiated in the behavior of each individual
cat, just as a typical gender ro~e may be instantiated in your own
behavior.
The identification of such roles is an important tool in the explanation
of behavior. To begin with, since the role involves typical patterns in
complex and temporally extended segments of behavior, it has predic-
tive value. Having identified the more dominant cat at the beginning
of the confrontation, you can say with some confidence what it will do
next and how the other cat will respond. Moreover, these roles are
functional, they are typical patterns of behavior evolved by the species
for purposes of survival, reproduction, etc. The order and sequencing of
the behavior displayed by the individual organism can then be explained
functionally as the instantiation of such a role, and idiosyncracies or
abnormalities in the working out of the role can be seen as such pre-
cisely with reference to the typical sequence.
But where or what is the role itself? And how is it related to the
behavior in which it is said to be instantiated? If the organism is
regarded as merely an input-output device, the obvious temptation is
to regard the role as the mechanism for the causal generation of the
behavior. So if you are a behaviorist, you will construe it, crudely, as
a set of stimuli in the immediate environment to which the organism is
responding. If you are a mentalist you wilt construe it, crudely, as a
set of mental representations, in this case something on the order of a
theory of dominance roles entertained and applied by the cat to its own
situation. Instantiation of a role will then amount to the control of the
organism's behavior from moment to moment by either a suite of
environmental stimuli or a suite of internal representations. But both
of these construals of the nature and explanatory function of roles
should be resisted, and for exactly the same reason.
Of course, it is perfectly plausible that the cat is exploiting some
186 BETH PRESTON
CONCLUSION
The objector might try to escape this conclusion by insisting that the
psychologist could individuate behavior purely physiologically, describ-
ing it entirely in terms of sheer bodily movement. This was, of course,
the ideal at which some behaviorists aimed, in hopes of eliminating
even the slightest seductive suggestion of intentionality. But it was in
part precisely this restriction which was responsible for the stagnation
and eventual fall from favor of the behaviorist paradigm; and, in any
case, psychologists in general do not now adhere to it in practice.
Moreover, if they did adhere to it, a different problem would arise;
for it is not at all clear whether sheer bodily movement is properly
characterized as behavior at all. The psychologically relevant notion of
behavior is most closely allied with notions like action or activity. It is
in this sense that behavior is interesting, something which calls for
investigation by a group of sciences or disciplines separate from physiol-
ogy. We want to know how and why animals do what they do. But it
is not clear that you can get from bodily movement to action, because
the individuation of movements underdetermines the individuation of
actions. You may strike your forehead with your hand in exactly the
same way whether you are squashing a mosquito or suddenly remem-
bering something important. To put it another way, the supervenience
of actions on bodily movements may not be very strong at all - quite
possibly not even token-token. If so, explaining the latter would not
shed any interesting or explanatory light on the former. So it might be
possible to construct individualistic explanations of bodily movement,
but they would not necessarily count as explanations of behavior, at
least not in any sense relevant to the going concern of psychology. In
short, attempts to force psychological explanation into the individualis-
tic mold bid fair to be destructive of its aims and accomplishments
rather than otherwise.
I hope I have indicated clearly how the argument against this objec-
tion to the claims of non-individualism in psychological explanation is
supposed to go, even if I have not been able to present it in full detail.
Of course, staving off this one objection does not by itself prove that
non-individualism is the right account of psychological explanation. In
any case, in this paper my aim has been more to show that it is a
possible account, and to situate it and examine its status with respect
to more standard accounts. So I will have accomplished my purpose if
I have convinced you that the mutual recriminations of behaviorists
194 BETH PRESTON
and neomentalists are a tempest in a teapot and that deeper and more
interesting issues in philosophy of psychology revolve around the ques-
tion of non-individualism.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
[S]uppose hamsters are interpretable as good Bayesians when it comes to the de-
cisions they make. Must we in principle be able to find some saliencies in the
hamsters' controls that are interpretable as tokens of formulae in some Bayesian
calculus? If that is Fodor's c o n c l u s i o n . . . I confess to disbelieving it utterly.
(Dennett, t978c, p. 107)
This point ought not to be controversial, but it is routinely obscured by the rhetoric
on both sides and was therefore worth making.
Indeed, there is one other obvious point of agreement: both mentalists and behaviorists
subscribe to a materialist theory of the mind, and are aiming at a scientific psychology.
B E H A V I O R I S M AND M E N T A L I S M 195
I have not listed this assumption because it is one which is also shared by the third
alternative I will be describing later.
s For an excellent discussion of these and other problems regarding transduction, see
Pylyshyn (1984), especially Chapter 6.
6 Skinner sometimes construes this boundary in terms of the public-private distinction.
What goes on inside the skin is private, and this privacy not only poses a problem for
the scientist desiring intersubjectively verifiable data, but antecedently poses a problem
for the community which cannot, for more or less Wittgensteinian reasons, count on
success in teaching its members to identify their private states so as to communicate them
to others (Skinner, 1974, p. 22ff.). But this way of construing the skin as the boundary
is essentially epistemological rather than psychological, so I will ignore it tor the purposes
of this paper.
7 This exampte has its basis in fact; cats do purr regularly under stressful conditions and
when sick or injured. Most eat owners are not aware of this, and moreover they tend to
discount the behavior as arbitrary when it occurs, since the received (and untrue) view
is that cats purr when happy and content.
8 There is the additional complication of understanding the integration of purring into
the social relationships between humans and cats. Morris perceptively notes that the
feline purr has very much the same range of function as the haman smile, which might
help explain why this integration has been so successful,
9 Ruth Mitlikan makes essentially this same point with reference to her notion of proper
function (Millikan, 1993, especially Chapter 7). While I do not subscribe to all the details
and consequences of that notion, I agree with her that behavior, in order to be explained,
is most appropriately described in functional terms, and that, consequently, the explana-
tion of behavior cannot depend on a rigorous distinction between inside and outside.
~0 From this point of view 'context' would probably be a more appropriate term than
'environment', but the latter is more common in the literature so 1 have retained it.
~ I owe this particular point to an anonymous referee for Synthese.
REFERENCES