Antidualism and Antimentalism in Radical Behaviorism
This paper is a criticism of an aspect of Skinnerian or radical behaviorism (RB) I will use elements from academic philosophy of mind, but constructively: If correct, my criticism will suggest ways to strengthen that aspect. More precisely, the aspect in question is the rejection of dualism and mentalism, or, for short, "antidualism" and "antimentalism," respectively. Both rejections have been central to formulations of RB1:The radical behaviorist's objection to mentalism is really an objection to dualism, the idea that two sorts of existence, material and nonmaterial, or two sorts of terms, referring to the material and the nonmaterial, are necessary to understand behavior fully. All the sciences, not just behavior analysis, reject dualism because it is confusing and uneconomical (Baum, 2005, p. 43);Rachlin parts with methodological behaviorism and aligns himself with radical behaviorism on two grounds: antidualism and pragmatism. Like any radical behaviorist, he denies the existence of mental fictions, and especially mental causes of behavior (ibid. p. 51) radical behaviorism rejects any form of dualism, including subjectiveobjective or inner outer dualism (Baum, 2011a, p. 185) in comparison with antidualism, the role of private events in radical behaviorism is peripheral and inessential (ibid. p. 186) a strength of radical behaviorism is its denial of dualism, its assertion of "one world" only. and, indeed, if the science is to be a natural science, it must deny dualism, for the good reason that it renders cogent explanation impossible (Baum, 2011b, p. 122) [a] major error attributes historical influence to Descartes and implies that radical behaviorism accepts Cartesian mind/body duality (Chiesa, 1994, p. 16) radical behaviorism dispensed with dualism at an early stage of its development..Because radical behaviorism does not assume that behaviour counts as evidence of something else, the person is a unity rather than a duality (Chiesa, 1998, p. 357);Radical behaviorism is a materialistic philosophy: the universe is physical, and Cartesian notions of a mind body duality are rejected (Foxall, 2010, p. 52) the basic principles of radical behaviorism may be expressed as follows (Moore, 1999, p. 46) Anti mentalism. Radical behaviorism is also staunchly anti mentalistic. Dualism, in which the mind (or some phenomenon in the nonphysical, nonmaterial dimension) is presumed to cause behavior (which is in the physical, material dimension) is probably the most common form of mentalism. mentalism also brings with it an implicit commitment to a bifurcation of the world into physical and mental realms or domains (ibid. p. 48);It is usually held that one does not see the physical world at all, but only a nonphysical copy of it Sensations, images, and their congeries are characteristically regarded as psychic or mental events, occurring in a special world of "consciousness" where they occupy no space We cannot now say with any certainty why this troublesome distinction was first made (Skinner, 1953, p. 276);But where are these feelings and states of mind? Of what stuff are they made? The traditional answer is that they are located in a world of nonphysical dimensions called the mind and that they are mental. But another question arises: How can a mental event cause or be caused by a physical one? (Skinner, 1974, p. 10).RB is defined by other theses, like pragmatism (e.g. see second quotation above) but antidualism and antimentalism seem to be equally defining2 Antidualism per se, of course, is fine. In fact, I will provide an argument for it later. As for antimentalism, I have misgivings about how radical behaviorists have formulated it, and therein lies my criticism. The quotations above indicate that radical behaviorists formulate their antimentalism in terms of antidualism, by depicting mentalism as dualistic.