While acknowledging that people—and many animals—do appear to act intelligently, eliminativists thought that they could account for this fact in nonmentalistic terms. For virtually the entire first half of the 20th century, they pursued a research program that culminated in B.F. Skinner’s (1904–90) doctrine of “radical behaviourism,” according to which apparently intelligent regularities in the behaviour of humans and many animals can be explained in purely physical terms—specifically, in terms of “conditioned” physical responses produced by patterns of physical stimulation and reinforcement (see also behaviourism; conditioning).
Radical behaviourism is now largely only of historical interest, partly because its main tenets were refuted by the behaviourists’ own wonderfully careful experiments. (Indeed, one of the most significant contributions of behaviourism was to raise the level of experimental rigour in psychology.) In the favoured experimental paradigm of a rigid maze, even lowly rats displayed a variety of navigational skills that defied explanation in terms of conditioning, requiring instead the postulation of entities such as “mental maps” and “curiosity drives.” The American psychologist Karl S. Lashley (1890–1958) pointed out that there were, in principle, limitations on the serially ordered behaviours that could be learned on behaviourist assumptions. And in a famously devastating critique published in 1957, the American linguist Noam Chomsky demonstrated the hopelessness of Skinner’s efforts to provide a behaviouristic account of human language learning and use.
Since the demise of radical behaviourism, eliminativist proposals have continued to surface from time to time. One form of eliminativism, developed in the 1980s and known as “radical connectionism,” was a kind of behaviourism “taken inside”: instead of thinking of conditioning in terms of external stimuli and responses, one thinks of it instead in terms of the firing of assemblages of neurons. Each neuron is connected to a multitude of other neurons, each of which has a specific probability of firing when it fires. Learning consists of the alteration of these firing probabilities over time in response to further sensory input.
Few theorists of this sort really adopted any thoroughgoing eliminativism, however. Rather, they tended to adopt positions somewhat intermediate between reductionism and eliminativism. These views can be roughly characterized as “irreferentialist.”
It has been noted how, in relation to introspection, Wittgenstein resisted the tendency of philosophers to view people’s inner mental lives on the familiar model of material objects. This is of a piece with his more general criticism of philosophical theories, which he believed tended to impose an overly referential conception of meaning on the complexities of ordinary language. He proposed instead that the meaning of a word be thought of as its use, or its role in the various “language games” of which ordinary talk consists. Once this is done, one will see that there is no reason to suppose, for example, that talk of mental images must refer to peculiar objects in a mysterious mental realm. Rather, terms like thought, sensation, and understanding should be understood on the model of an expression like the average American family, which of course does not refer to any actual family but to a ratio. This general approach to mental terms might be called irreferentialism. It does not deny that many ordinary mental claims are true; it simply denies that the terms in them refer to any real objects, states, or processes. As Wittgenstein put the point in his Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953; Philosophical Investigations), “If I speak of a fiction, it is of a grammatical fiction.”
Of course, in the case of the average American family, it is quite easy to paraphrase away the appearance of reference to some actual family. But how are the apparent references to mental phenomena to be paraphrased away? What is the literal truth underlying the richly reified façon de parler of mental talk?
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