Logical Behaviourism Flashcards
What is logical behaviourism?
Logical behaviourism is the materialist reductive view that what we refer to mental states, this can be reduced to behaviour.
It is called logical behaviourism to distinguish is from behaviourism in psychology.
It states that all statements about mental states can be translated without loss of meaning (analytically reduced)
How does behaviourism explain what mental concepts must refer to for them to be meaningful?
The verification principle makes it so that talk about other people’s minds as well as ones own is not meaningless. For a proposition to be meaningful is for there to be a way of testing its truth. The meaning of a proposition is it’s method of verification.
What a proposition means = what evidence we would allow as proof of it/the circumstances would verify its truth
If the term has a shared meaning (i.e. different people mean the same thing by the term) then these people must all, in principle, be able to verify it in the same way
All we can ever mean by mental states is external behaviour since it is the only thing that can verify its meaningfulness. That is all that language of the mind refers to.
How does behaviourism not capture what we mean by mental terms (i.e. consciousness)?
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Explain the statement ‘behaviour is not a necessary condition of having mental states’
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How does behaviourism avoid the problem of causation facing dualism?
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How is the logical behaviourist account of causation inadequate/absent?
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How does behaviourism avoid the problem of other minds facing dualism?
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How does logical behaviourism ignore the epistemological asymmetry that exists?
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What is the issue of diffuseness that faces behaviourism?
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What is the circularity issue that faces behaviourism?
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How does analysis in behaviourism always involve other mental states being mentioned?
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How do operational definitions help to explain behaviourism?
Analogy of a dispositional property being soluble - a sugar cube is soluble… so it dissolves. It is defined in terms of certain operations or tests that would reveal whether or not the term actually applies in the case to be tested.
A similar analysis holds for mental states, however unlike solubility, claims the behaviourist, most mental states are multi-tracked dispositions. But dispositions they remain.
