Mind and Behavior

Mind and Behavior

Philosophical behaviorism has a curious reputation: on the one hand, it can seem eminently reasonable, on the other, completely wrong. Thus it is natural to be uncomfortably ambivalent about it, veering from acceptance to rejection as the mood strikes. On the side of rejection we have the inverted spectrum, behaving zombies, paralyzed conscious subjects, and basic repugnance at the idea that phenomenology could be reducible to bodily movement. On the side of acceptance we have clear connections between mind and behavior, the problem of other minds, the functional necessity for bodily deeds, and the evident plausibility of functional definitions. Behaviorism doesn’t strike us as just completely wrongheaded: mind and behavior are intimately related. Watson, Carnap, Ryle and Wittgenstein don’t seem to be barking preposterously up the wrong tree. Isn’t it simply true that pain is a state that mediates between harmful stimuli and adaptive responses? Isn’t belief precisely a state that is typically caused by perceptual stimuli and leads to utterance and other action? Isn’t desire what inclines organisms to behave in certain ways, as when an organism drinks when thirsty? Isn’t bravery a trait that leads to courageous action? Maybe it is true that we can envisage color inversion combined with behavioral equivalence, but surely it is not true that mental states can be freely combined with just any behavioral profile—you can’t have pains that are functionally equivalent to beliefs, or beliefs that function just like desires. It seems to be part of the essence of a given mental state that it operates in a certain way; the connection is not just contingent and adventitious. Mental states can’t just swap functional roles ad libitum. Mind and body are not stuck arbitrarily together; they are made for each other. Isn’t behavior the point of having a mind? Isn’t behavior how we know what someone else thinks and feels?

            So we have conflicting intuitions: viewed from the inside, it can seem that behavior is just a dispensable extra; viewed from the outside, behavior looks like the whole story. We seem to be forced either into accepting that phenomenology and behavior are completely separable or that the former reduces to the latter. Neither alternative is attractive. Both sides in the debate seem to have a point, but pain (say) can’t be both behavioral and non-behavioral—behaviorism can’t be both true and false! Or can it? Aren’t we making an assumption here, namely that the ontology of the mental is essentially simple? That is, we are assuming that pain is a simple property, a one-dimensional state, a unitary phenomenon. But what about the idea that pain is actually a composite state, a combination of two (or more) components? What if mental states have a dual nature? They are combinations of a felt quality (a phenomenology) and a behavioral disposition (a bodily expression). When we respond to the first component we see the point of asserting the non-behavioral character of the mind; when we focus on the second component we respect the evident link to bodily behavior. Pain really is behavioral—partially; and it is also non-behavioral—partially. Pain isn’t a simple one-dimensional affair; it is a kind of compound or assembly. Compare meaning: we have grown accustomed to thinking of meaning multi-dimensionally (sense, reference, force, tone); and now we are pondering whether the same might be true of the mind generally. Is the ontology of the mind inherently plural, composite, and componential? Every mental state is really a complex of constitutive elements—a construction from distinct components.  [1] To put it simply, pain is made of a phenomenological component and a behavioral component. Thus we are given space to accept that mental states are partially behavioral: behaviorism is partially true. It is completely true of part of the mind. But the part it is true of doesn’t exhaust the whole nature of the mind; there is a part of the mind that is not behaviorally definable. So philosophical behaviorism is both true and false—but not of the same simple unanalyzable property. It is true of one component of the mind, but false of another component. The components can be pulled apart, at least to some extent–as with the inverted spectrum, zombies, and paralysis–but that only shows how compound mental states are: it doesn’t show that the mind is wholly non-behavioral. This is why these kinds of thought experiment affect us strangely: we are invited to detach a component from our ordinary concept while leaving the other component intact, but we find ourselves unsure whether we have enough left to ground that concept–hence the ambivalence. It’s like detaching reference and leaving sense, or detaching sense and leaving reference: sure, something semantic is left, but it seems to fall short of the genuine article—as if meaning has been dismantled and dismembered. The solution to these quandaries is to recognize that mental states are a congeries, a juxtaposition of elements, a duality. Accordingly, it is possible to be a behaviorist about one aspect of the mind—that is, to accept that an aspect of the mind is essentially and intrinsically bound up with behavior. Pain really is (in part) a disposition or tendency to respond in a certain way (viz. avoidance) to harmful stimuli, as belief really is a state that prompts certain kinds of behavior. Or perhaps we do better to say that functionalism is partly true—allowing that functionalism improves on classical behaviorism in familiar ways. Mental states essentially interact with other mental states in concert with external inputs to generate behavioral outputs. But they also have qualities that transcend such functional features, being hybrid entities. There is nothing materialist about this conception of the mind; there is no such metaphysical agenda. We are simply seeking descriptive adequacy. We are trying to do justice to the range of intuitions that cluster around this topic. We are explaining how it is possible to be a card-carrying behaviorist (functionalist) without eliminating the essential nature of the mind. The mind is a phenomenological-behavioral compound. The mistake was to presuppose an ontology of simple properties capable of only a single analysis—the analogue of pre-Fregean views of meaning. We need to acknowledge a more fine-grained and variegated ontological structure to the mind.  [2]

            Having distinguished the two components of mental states we can ask which component preponderates in a given case. It seems intuitively correct to report that sensations have a larger phenomenological component than beliefs (and certainly traits of character): thus we can envisage inverted spectrum cases with relative ease, but we can’t easily envisage exchanging beliefs and preserving functional role. So we should leave open the possibility that some types of mental state are more behavioral than others: some are more a matter of qualia (e.g. color sensations) and some more a matter of abilities to act, dispositions to behave, and competences to perform (e.g. belief, linguistic understanding, and character traits). You can in principle be very behaviorist about some things and only slightly behaviorist about others, according to the magnitude of the behavioral component. Why there should be such variations of magnitude is no doubt an interesting question, and one that could profitably engage the attentions of a researcher who has seen the merits of the dual component conception. I rather think it has to do with the fact that experience is low on the behavioral component but knowledge is high on it: in knowing the deed dominates, but in experiencing the feeling does. In the beginning was the deed, as some like to say, but the deed is only part of the story; the feeling is also a leading character, sometimes eclipsing the deed. At any rate, the mind is a feeling-deed combo.  [3]

  [1] I leave aside the question of whether there is a third component corresponding to the neural correlates of the mental state, but this possibility is certainly worth exploring: see my “A Triple Aspect Theory”.

  [2] Motto: things are often more complicated than we initially suppose (duh).

  [3] As to the problem of other minds, we can venture the following: given that mental states are partly constituted by behavioral facts, we are in a good position to know that other people (and animals) have part of a mental state—for example, we can know that an organism has one component of pain (the part that consists in behavioral facts). Thus we have partial knowledge of other minds even if we don’t have full knowledge. This might explain our sense that the mind is not quite as elusive as some philosophers suppose—those that identify the mind exclusively with the inner phenomenological component. There is something to Wittgenstein’s insistence that the mind is visible in behavior, even though it is not plausible to think that all of mind is so visible. The mind is not entirely private, but it is not entirely public either: it has a foot in both camps. The concept of mind is the concept of a pairing of elements, neither exclusively inner nor exclusively outer. By rough analogy, it is like the concept of knowledge—a pairing of both belief and truth; or wide content and narrow content, or character and content, or connotation and denotation—all cases of duality within apparent unity.