Seven Sins of Behaviourism

First, a cautionary tale. Once upon a time there were two hard-working tailors (never mind the quality, measure the width) who promised psychology a new set of clothes. In due course, the old clothes of mentalism and introspectionism were cast off and psychology congratulated itself on its new tough look. But there were murmurings. Then one of the tailors went too far and claimed that his new clothes covered everything. Even the Emperor's Verbal Behavior! At this point a young linguist cried out ‘Transformational Grammar!’ and everyone could see that the Emperor had no clothes at all. Everyone that is apart fiom the tailors.     

Bloor's bluff: Behaviourism and the strong programme

The accumulated case studies in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge have been taken to establish the Strong Programme's thesis that beliefs have social causes in contradistinction to psychological ones. This externalism is essentially a commitment to the stimulus control of behaviour which was the principal tenet of orthodox Skinnerian Behaviorism. Offered as ‘straight forward scientific hypotheses’ these claims of social determination are asserted to be ‘beyond dispute’.

However, the causes of beliefs and especially their contents has also been the subject of intense study in the quite different domain of cognitive science where internal states, images, rules, representations and schemas are postulated as explanatory constructs. Such explanations which postulate mental states are described by Bloor as infected by the ‘disease’ of ‘psychologism’ and Bloor has defined his Strong Programme in terms of its diametrical opposition to mentalistic theories. For example, Bloor has explicitly endorsed the Behaviourist rejection of mental representations such as images. Accordingly, a direct comparison of these radically divergent approaches to a common subject matter is of considerable interest.

The paper attempts to reveal the unnoticed enormity and recidivism of the sociological programme, and how its vulnerability is betrayed in Bloor's response to criticism on central issues.     

Grounding-based formulations of legal positivism

The goal of this paper is to provide an accurate grounding-based formulation of positivism in the philosophy of law. I start off by discussing some simple formulations, based on the ideas that social facts are always either full or partial grounds of legal facts. I then raise a number of objections against these definitions: the full grounding proposal rules out possibilities that are compatible with positivism; the partial grounding proposal fails, on its own, to vindicate the distinctive role that is played by social facts within positivist accounts of law. Then, I present a more adequate and insightful formulation capable of solving their problems, which crucially relies on a robust notion of a social enabler. Finally, I model inclusive and exclusive positivism on the resulting template, and set out the advantages of the ground-enablers proposal.

     

The scientific positivism of Michael Oakeshott

Seventeenth-century philosopher Margaret Cavendish wrote not only several philosophical treatises, but also many fictional works. I argue for taking the latter as serious objects of study for historians of philosophy, and sketch a method for doing so. Cavendish's fiction is full of conflicting viewpoints, and many authors have argued that this demonstrates that she did not intend her literary works to serve serious philosophical purpose. But if we consider philosophers more central to the canon, such as Plato or Kierkegaard, who sometimes used literary forms to do serious philosophy, we see that these arguments are unfounded. Like those philosophers, Cavendish had several philosophical motivations for pursuing value-theoretic issues through the flexible formats of literary genres. This suggests that Cavendish's literary corpus may be fruitful and largely unexplored ground for the history of philosophy.     

Behaviourism in Disguise: The Triviality of Ramsey Sentence Functionalism

Axiomathes - Functionalism has become one of the predominant theories in the philosophy of mind, with its many merits supposedly including its capacity for precise formulation. The most common...     

Minding the gap between positivism and hermeneutics in psychoanalytic research

Two quite different cultures are to be found within psychoanalysis, one more clinical in orientation, more focused on meaning and interpretation, and relying primarily on the traditional case study method, the other more research-oriented, focused on cause-and-effect relationships, and relying primarily on methods borrowed from the natural and social sciences. The history of this divide is reviewed and arguments, pro and con, about the potential contributions of specific types of empirical investigation are discussed. Increasingly, it seems, criticisms concerning the scientific status of psychoanalysis are being responded to by empirical research. This has contributed to a growing recognition within the scientific community of the credibility of aspects of psychoanalytic theories and of the effectiveness of psychodynamic treatment. However, some segments of the psychoanalytic community are concerned that this increase in the quantity and quality of empirical research on psychoanalytic concepts risks creating an empirical one-sidedness, while other segments are concerned that not engaging in systematic empirical research can lead to intellectual isolation, fragmentation, stagnation, and orthodoxy. To counter this polarizing tendency, a recommendation is made for methodological pluralism. Adopting this stance could contribute to an enriched understanding of the clinical process and to the development of new research methodologies to investigate complex psychodynamic hypotheses, thus bridging the gap between the two psychoanalytic cultures, as well as the gap between research and clinical practice.     

Darwinism and positivism as methodological influences on the development of psychology

The methodological significance of evolutionary theory for psychology may be distinguished from its substantive or theoretical significance. The methodological significance was that evolutionary theory broadened the current conceptions of scientific method and rendered them relatively independent of physics. It thereby made the application of the “scientific method” to psychology much more feasible than it had been previously, and thus established the possibility of a wide-ranging scientific psychology for the first time. The methodological eclecticism that made scientific psychology possible did not, however, remain a feature of psychology for very long. Psychology's methodology rapidly became restricted and codified through the influence of, and in imitation of, the rigorously positivistic orientation of physics around the turn of the twentieth century.     

Welcoming Robots into the Moral Circle: A Defence of Ethical Behaviourism

Science and Engineering Ethics - Can robots have significant moral status? This is an emerging topic of debate among roboticists and ethicists. This paper makes three contributions to this debate....