Chapter 3 Kim

Question 1

What is behaviorism

Answer 1

The doctrine on the nature and methodology of psychology.

Question 2

What is psychology? (according to James)

Answer 2

the scientific study of mental phenomena with the study of conscious mental processes as its core task.

Question 3

What did Watson turn psychology into?

Answer 3

purely objective experimental branch of natural science whose theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior (held till the 60s)

Question 4

What does philosophical behaviorism take behavior has?

Answer 4

Constituive of mentality: Having a mind just is a matter of exhibiting, or having a propensity or capacity to exhibit, appropriate patterns of behavior.

Question 5

What is the idea of the Cartesian theater

Answer 5

Derives from Descarte; the mind is a private inner stage for an audience of one: one and only one person has a view. Nothing that appears can escape the viewer. Outsiders must depend on what this person says to know whats happening in that stage.

Question 6

What is Behaviorism a response to?

Answer 6

Unacceptable consequences of the Cartesian concept of the mind.

Question 7

What are 4 examples of things that Humans and other behaving organisms do?

Answer 7

i. Physiological reactions and responses, ii. bodily movements, iii. actions involving bodily motions (greeting, writing, attending), iv. actions not involving overt bodily motions (judging, reasoning, guessing, deciding).

Question 8

What are actions not involving overt bodily motions also known as?

Answer 8

Mental acts.

Question 9

Which 4 examples meet behaviorist requirements?

Answer 9

i. and ii.

Question 10

What is behavior taken to be?

Answer 10

Bodily events and conditions that are publicly accessible to all competent observers.

Question 11

What is called logical behaviorism?

Answer 11

the meaning of a psychological statement consists soley in the function of abbreviating the description of certain modes of physical response characteristic of the bodies of men and animals; based on the supposed close logical connections b/w psychological expressions and expressions referring to behavior.

Question 12

What is logical behaviorism also known as?

Answer 12

analytical behaviorism or philosophical behavorism

Question 13

What is the first claim of Logical Behaviorism?

Answer 13

Any meaningful psychological (describes mental phenomenon) can be translated, without loss of content into a cluster of statements solely about behavioral and physical phenomena.

Question 14

What is the second claim of Logical Behaviorism?

Answer 14

Every meaningful psychological expression can be defined solely in terms of behavioral and physical expressions.

Question 15

What is the verifiability criterion of learning?

Answer 15

The meaning of a sentence is given by the conditions that must be verified to obtain if the sentence is true.

Question 16

What can be summarized about psychological expressions having interpersonal meanings?

Answer 16

They must be definable in terms of behavioral and physical expressions.

Question 17

What is the idea of verbal behavior?

Answer 17

The disposition to produce appropriate verbal responses when prompted in certain ways.

Question 18

What is a dispositional property?

Answer 18

behavior of an appropriate sort under specified conditions; material being soluble, material being magnetic.

Question 19

What is the difficulty with the proposed definition of belief in behaviorism?

Answer 19

It presupposes that the person in question understands the question.

Question 20

What is the 2nd difficulty?

Answer 20

The subject will only tell the truth if it wants to.

Question 21

What is the desire-belief principle?

Answer 21

If a person desires that p and believes that doing A is an optimal way to secure that p, she will do A.

Question 22

What is practical reasoning?

Answer 22

the means-end reasoning that issues in action

Question 23

What does it mean to rationalize actions?

Answer 23

give reasons that explain why people do what they do.

Question 24

What is DBA fundamental to?

Answer 24

rational action

Question 25

What is the moral of the defeasibility of mental-behavioral entailments?

Answer 25

Mind-to-behavior connections are always defeasible - and defeasible by the occurrence of a further mental states.

Question 26

What does the entailment thesis say?

Answer 26

It is an analytic, conceptual truth that anyone in pain has a propensity to wince or groan; not excepted because: assumes organisms without vocal chords cannot be in pain, which is absurd.

Question 27

What is the Weak Behavior Entailment Thesis?

Answer 27

For any pain capable species there is a certain behavior type B such that, for that species, beings in pain entails a propensity to emit behavior of type B.

Question 28

What might a radical behaviorist claim?

Answer 28

That there are no mental facts over and adobe actual and possible behavioral facts, and that inner mental events do not exist, and that if they did, they are of no consequence.

Question 29

What is ontological behaviorism?

Answer 29

Existentially, our mentality consists solely in behaviors and behavioral dispositions, there is nothing more.

Question 30

Ontological behaviorism is a form of psychological eliminativism - which is the view of what?

Answer 30

That mentality as ordinarily conceived is as misguided and defunct as past false scientific claims (the earth is round)

Question 31

What do Churchland and Stich argue?

Answer 31

That beliefs, desires, and other intentional states as conceived in “folk” psychology will go the way of phlogiston and entelechies as systematic, scientific psychology makes progress.

Question 32

What starts to replace the movement of behaviorism during the latter half of the 20th century?

Answer 32

Cognitivism and Mentalism.

Question 33

What is the first way behaviorism in science can be viewed?

Answer 33

as a precept on how psychology should be conducted as a science; provides guidance to questions like what its proper domain should be, what conditions should be placed on admissible evidence, what its theories are supposed to be accomplished, etc.

Question 34

What is the second way behaviorism (especially radical) in science can be viewed?

Answer 34

a specific behaviorist research paradigm seeking to construct psychological theories conforming to a fairly explicit and precisely formulated pattern.

Question 35

What is Methodological Behaviorism?

Answer 35

The only admissible evidence for the science of psychology is observable behavior data - data concerning the observable physical behavior of organisms.

Question 36

What is introspective data?

Answer 36

data obtained by a subject by inwardly inspecting her own Cartesian theater

Question 37

Does consciousness fit inside the province of psychological explanation (for the behaviorist?)

Answer 37

No. - it needs to be observable behavior.

Question 38

What is the stronger, or more extreme, version of methodological behaviorism?

Answer 38

Psychological theories must not invoke the internal states of psychological subjects; that is, psychological explanations must not appeal to internal states of organisms, nor should references to such states occur in deriving predictions about behavior.

Question 39

What is the Skinnerian answer about how we can explain behavioral differences elicited by the same stimulus condition w/o invoking differences in their internal states?

Answer 39

Such behavioral differences can be explained by reference to the differences in the history of reinforcement for the two organisms.

Question 40

What is Mnemic causation?

Answer 40

causal influence that leaps over temporal gap with no intermediate links bridging cause and effect.

Question 41

What is a further version of behaviorism as a rule of psychological methodology?

Answer 41

Psychological theories must make no reference to inner mental states in formulating psychological explanations

Question 42

What does that principle allow?

Answer 42

the introductions of internal biological physical states, including states of the central neverous system, into psychological theories and explanations, prohibiting only reference to inner mental states.

Question 43

What is the driving force for the entire behaviorist methodology

Answer 43

The insistence on the objective testability of theories and public assess to sharable data.

Question 44

What is biological reality?

Answer 44

must entities and states be realized or implemented in the biological-physical structures and processes of the organism

Question 45

What are the three main players on the scene in discussions of mentality?

Answer 45

Mind, Brain, Behavior

Question 46

What existentially underlies, and supports, our mental life?

Answer 46

The brain.