Abstract
Despite its short historical moment in the sun, behaviorism has become something akin to a theoria non grata, a position that dare not be explicitly endorsed. The reasons for this are complex, of course, and they include sociological factors which we cannot consider here, but to put it briefly: many have doubted the ambition to establish law-like relationships between mental states and behavior that dispense with any sort of mentalistic or intentional idiom, judging that explanations of intelligent behavior require reference to qualia and/or mental events. Today, when behaviorism is discussed at all, it is usually in a negative manner, either as an attempt to discredit an opponent’s view via a reductio, or by enabling a position to distinguish its identity and positive claims by reference to what it is (allegedly) not. In this paper, however, we argue that the ghost of behaviorism is present in influential, contemporary work in the field of embodied and enactive cognition, and even in aspects of the phenomenological tradition that these theorists draw on. Rather than take this to be a problem for these views as some have (e.g. Block, J Philos 102:259–272, 2005; Jacob, Rev Philos Psychol 2(3):519–540, 2011; O’Brien and Opie, Philos 43:723–729, 2015), we argue that once the behaviorist dimensions are clarified and distinguished from the straw-man version of the view, it is in fact an asset, one which will help with task of setting forth a scientifically reputable version of enactivism and/or philosophical behaviorism that is nonetheless not brain-centric but behavior-centric. While this is a bit like “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy, as Shaun Gallagher notes (in Philos Stud 176(3):839–8512019), with the shared enemy of behaviorism and enactivism being classical Cartesian views and/or orthodox cognitivism in its various guises, the task of this paper is to render this alliance philosophically plausible.
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Notes
We are not arguing that early behaviorism wholly succeeded in understanding animals and that the only problem left for it was explaining distinctively human skills and abilities. On the contrary, it is arguable that contemporary enactivist work delivers better on the behaviorist promise regarding understanding the continuity between human and animal behavior, showing that both cases require a major role being given to perspectival indexicality. In addition, enactivism can enrich behaviorism’s understanding of the reciprocal causal relations between an organism and its milieu, but making that case is another paper.
Fully explicating this is beyond us here, but see Reynolds (2019) for an account of how phenomena like mind, mentality, and morality might be understood in relation to animal behavior.
A book seemingly dedicated to the topic, entitled Behaviorism and Phenomenology (ed. Wann 1964), refers to phenomenology as being related to the psychological investigation of the phenomenal, rather than the more accepted interpretation of phenomenology we are using in this paper.
We acknowledge that this account lacks an explanation for the phenomenal character of pain, but this is not different from other naturalist accounts such as functionalist ones (see Jackson and Pettit 1988, for a critique see Block 1978). Along similar lines it could be argued that the super-super-Spartans case once again dismisses the behaviorist moves we are making. However, this would lead to a genuine worry that the notion of pain has been bracketed away to the realm of the purely mental. If there is no trace of pain beyond the pure sensation, that is, no trace would be detectable in an agent’s physiology or within a larger historical context, the concept of pain seems to operate in a mind/body dichotomy in which the mind leaves no trace on the body.
Two quotes from Shaun Gallagher’s recent book, Enactivist Interventions, are also suggestive of behaviorist commitments:
mental skills such as reflection, problem solving, decision making, and so on, (are) enactive non-representational forms of embodied coping that are emergent from a pre-predicative perceptual ordering of differentiations and similarities (Gallagher 2017, p. 202).
and
with respect to PC models, enactivist views that emphasise a more holistic system of brain-body-environment would clearly favor a move away from internalist and intellectualist vocabularies (and conceptions of) ‘hypotheses’, ‘inference’ and ‘representation’ in favor of more embodied terms like ‘adjustment’, ‘attunement’ and ‘affordance’ (Gallagher 2017, p. 21).
These terms are not only more embodied, but they also have a behaviorist dimension that is apparent even by attending to the words alone: the organism adjusts, attunes, and finds this or that affordance available. And the appeal to holism that characterizes Gallagher’s work is also part of a certain behaviorist tradition, rather than antithetical to it, as we have seen.
There is something paradoxical about the idea of a behaviorist zombie, whatever bracketing of the mental, the intentional, etc., might be attempted by some versions of behaviorism. The very idea of zombies derives from functionalist criticisms of behaviorism (e.g. in Chalmers), rather than from behaviorism itself. They depend on the idea of “mere” or meaningless physical behavior, but neither behaviorism, nor phenomenology, nor enactivist biology, give these thought experiments and their insights into possibility much credence.
We might also have chosen to look at the enactivist view of perception and cognition, which has been criticized by Block for its behaviorism (2005). Block criticizes Noë’s (2004) enactive account of action in perception, complaining that the view is behaviorist due to having no account of internal processes mediating between sensory inputs and outputs, but we agree with the enactivist-cum-behaviorist insight that it is not clear that explanatory priority should be accorded to the internal processes.
Kirchhoff (2015) shows that the objection depends on a particular metaphysical picture for its coherence (e.g. a picture of synchronic rather than diachronic emergence).
Perhaps Varga effectively admits something like this in other work when he comes to embrace “embodied situationism” (see Varga 2018).
A reviewer of this paper has noted that although it is often maintained that psychopaths are highly intelligent and expert manipulators, if we look at specific cases they are often quite crude in their machinations and may well betray themselves behaviorally, their colleagues and community often allow them to get away with it because they stick to certain conventions and norms. In other words, the deceived play as much of a role in the deception as the deceiver.
Indeed, while many contemporary phenomenologists (or enactivists drawing on phenomenology) have insisted that they are not advocating behaviorism (e.g. Romano 2016, p. 340; Gallagher 2017, pp. 69–70; Morris 2010; Thompson 2007, p. 50; Noë 2004, pp. 32–33), they clearly perceive sufficient proximity to behaviorism such that they are motivated to (attempt to) establish the distance. In addition, we think the contrast they draw with behaviorism often depends on a straw-man version of the view. The precise behaviorist target is often difficult to identify, and it rarely countenances the sort of holistic position we have traced from Ryle, and both radical and molar behaviorism.
Others have recognized that the work of Mead (Rosenthal and Bourgeois 1991) and Ryle (Jackson 2011; Evans 1983) is aligned with Merleau-Ponty. They have done so by downplaying Mead and Ryle’s respective commitments to behaviorism. We agree with the connections they have forged, but think that they should embrace non-reductive behaviorism. Edward Tolman’s work is also important here, as Merleau-Ponty himself recognizes.
Ryle sometimes himself recognized this, both early in his career when he drew on Heidegger’s treatment of the ready-to-hand/present-at-hand distinction in his own accounts of know-how and knowledge-that, and later in his career when two pages of his 15 page autobiographical essay are devoted to phenomenology (cf. Thomasson 2002; Chase and Reynolds 2017).
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We would like to acknowledge the seminar audiences at Deakin, Melbourne, and Monash universities, for their helpful feedback on this paper. In addition, we are appreciative of some insightful suggestions for improvement from the reviewers.
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Alksnis, N., Reynolds, J. Revaluing the behaviorist ghost in enactivism and embodied cognition. Synthese 198, 5785–5807 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02432-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02432-1