Introduction

I have been presenting a behaviourist account of the mind that takes off from the claim discussed in Chapter 5 that a rational agent is disposed to behave in a way that is sensitive to practical rationality. In Chapter 6 I argued that practical rationality is open-ended and dynamic. This means that at any one time, in being sensitive to practical rationality, an agent's behaviour is governed by a particular version of practical rationality, but that this version, as part of its very nature, is subject to revision.

Given this notion of what it is to be a rational agent the behaviourist claim at the very beginning of the book may be amplified a bit. The original claim was this:

The amplified version is this:

To describe the particular version of rationality that someone's way of behaving is governed by at any one time is to describe the person's mind at that time. In this chapter I spell out that claim with respect to beliefs, and in the next with respect to intentions.

In the next section I introduce Richard Braithwaite's account of belief developed in the 1930s. The core of his theory is that believing a proposition is being disposed to act as if that proposition were true.

Psychological Behaviourism

Philosophical behaviourism is a view about the nature of the mind, the concept of mind and mental predicates. It may remain neutral about how the science of the mind should be pursued. Psychological behaviourism on the other hand is committed to the methodological claim that the scientific study of animal psychology should be limited to the scientific study of animal behaviour. So it has been common for philosophers to make a complete separation between the two kinds of behaviourism.

This has partly been in an attempt to dissociate behaviourism from the deeply unpopular views of hard-line psychological behaviourists like B. F. Skinner. Skinner has become a kind of Dr Frankenstein in the popular imagination. This image is exemplified by his use of the Skinner Box for imprisoning pigeons and experimenting on them. Lights flash, bells ring, and the birds peck levers and get pellets of food delivered in reward. Sometimes they get electric shocks instead. By observing how the pigeons' behaviour developed in these boxes, Skinner thought he had come to understand the basic process of all animal learning, including human learning – that of conditioning.

Although philosophical behaviourism makes no such claim about the role of conditioning, philosophical and psychological behaviourism cannot be entirely separated. For although psychological behaviourism may ostensibly be about the science of psychology, its fundamental premise is that claims about minds (or at any rate claims that purport to be about minds) are really claims about behaviour. This is the fundamental assumption of philosophical behaviourism too.

Sensitivity to Facts

In this chapter I am going to argue that the concept of knowledge simply falls out of the behaviourist model of the mind that I have outlined so far. I think that this is a big selling point. The traditional approach to the philosophy of knowledge has been to construct the concept of knowledge out of other, apparently better understood, elements like belief and justification. In this traditional approach, the philosophy of mind is relevant only in providing an account of belief. Then epistemology is supposed to be concerned with outlining the special relationship that belief must have with the objects of knowledge in order to count as knowledge.

One trouble with the traditional approach is that it gives us no understanding of why we should turn out to have a concept of knowledge that corresponds to one such construction rather than to any other. The philosophical accounts are constructed in response to counterexamples that appeal to our actual internalised conception of what counts as knowledge, but they do not explain the fundamental role of our concept of knowledge.

As a result, the accounts that emerge from the traditional approach have a degree of complexity that fails to reflect the apparent simplicity of our actual grasp of the concept of knowledge. The complexity by itself is perhaps not a problem; but there should at least be some indication in the traditional account of how it is that we can grasp the idea of knowledge so easily.

Introduction

I argued in the previous chapter that a disposition to behave in a certain way is a real state of an organism or person which entitles one to make inferences about its behaviour. These inferences are characterised by conditional statements or laws. The disposition amounts to the embodiment by that organism or person of a mechanism whose working is described by that law. The law need not be universally true, but describes what results in certain specified circumstances when the disposition is operational and not interfered with.

I also argued that mental states should be identified with these dispositional states rather than with inputs to them. The task now is to say something about the laws that characterise the behavioural dispositions that constitute mental states.

On the view that I am defending a genuine agent is ipso facto a subject with mental states. So by understanding agency and in particular how an agent's behaviour is causally explained, we will understand behavioural dispositions and hence the nature of the agent's mental states.

The central claim of this chapter is that practical rationality is essential to agency. I start with the claim that action is essentially goal-directed and develop the claim that action is essentially norm-governed. By employing the distinction between framework causes and input causes established in the previous chapter, I can show that it is the framework cause of behaviour that must be characterised in terms of goals and in terms of norms.

The Rise of Cognitivism and Functionalism

Psychological behaviourism, having swept aside the prevailing orthodoxy of introspectionism early in the twentieth century, was then itself replaced by a new paradigm in psychology – cognitivism. While accepting a broadly behaviourist denial of introspection, cognitive psychology rejected the behaviourist claim that the subject matter of psychology is just patterns of behaviour. Cognitive psychology looked for mechanisms behind these patterns and found them by positing internal representations as causally explanatory entities.

These internal representations do not have to be conceived of as inhabiting a special mental realm. They are to be conceived of as being implemented in the hardware of the brain, just as data in a computer is implemented in the hardware of the computer. So, with the development of computer technology in the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of Chomskian linguistics came the thought that by applying the way we think about computers to people we can discover the hidden mechanisms that govern our behaviour.

Still, the assumption that representations are identifiable entities within the functioning of the cognitive mechanism looks like a throwback to the theory of ideas propounded by the British empiricists, which the associationist introspectionists were trying to implement in their psychology. The key assumption there was that subjects represent something in their thought or speech by having an entity in their mind that represents that thing. The work of representation is passed by this assumption from the subject to an idea in a subject's mind.

Types of Consciousness

One of the apparent difficulties with behaviourism is that it treats the mind in a dispositional way, while not everything in the mind is dispositional. In particular, mental occurrences are not states at all and so cannot be dispositions to behave. For example, having a thought, noticing something, having a pang of regret, calculating a sum in one's head, silently reciting a poem can none of them be dispositions to behave.

Descartes' conception of the mind starts with occurrent processes of thought like the process of thinking that one is thinking or the process of doubting whether one is thinking. It is with such thoughts and processes of thought that the strongest temptation arises to use spatial metaphors about the mind. These thoughts ‘pass through’ one's mind. They occur ‘within’ one's mind. And so on. Such metaphors cannot be taken literally, since there is no space in which these thoughts do actually move around. But, according to what Ryle (1949: Chapter 1) ridicules as the Cartesian myth of the ghost in the machine, they move around in something other than space – a mental realm. This is a sort of quasi-space – a world within.

These non-spatial motions are described disparagingly by Ryle (1949: 19) as ‘para-mechanical’. His approach, as we have seen, is to recast our talk of the mind in a dispositional idiom, thus avoiding the temptation to use spatial metaphors. But the very phenomenon that gives rise to this temptation most strongly – namely occurrent thought – is something that Ryle himself never felt he dealt with adequately in The Concept of Mind.

The Structure of Practical Rationality

A way of behaving is a way to behave. It is a system of deriving recommendations of the form: ‘Such-and-such is the thing to do,’ from descriptions of the circumstances. So a way of behaving must be characterised normatively. For example, one of the rules characterising someone's way of behaving might be: ‘If you are in a supermarket doing the shopping and you need milk then the thing to do is to pick a carton of milk from the shelf.’ An input into such a system might be the fact that you are in a supermarket doing the shopping and needing milk, and the output would be the recommendation that picking a carton of milk from the shelf is the thing to do.

This looks like a rather illiberal conception of a way of behaving. It might be argued that a way of behaving should be characterised instead by recommendations of the form: ‘Such-and-such is a thing that may be done.’ For example, when choosing a carton of milk in a shop and faced with fifty similar cartons, the recommendation might be: ‘You may pick a carton which is third from the left in the shelf.’

Anthony Kenny has defended something like this idea, arguing that a system of practical recommendations characterising a way of behaving should be thought of as providing several alternative (and incompatible) recommendations in any situation. He argues that in a particular kind of situation there may be more than one response recommended, and that a way of behaving may be indifferent between these different responses.

The Argument from Causation

One of the standard arguments against philosophical behaviourism is the argument from causation. According to behaviourism, describing someone's state of mind is describing how that person is disposed to behave. But, according to this standard argument, in describing someone's state of mind you are really describing what makes that person disposed to act in the way he or she does, not simply that that person is disposed to act that way. So, by this argument, behaviourism misrepresents the causal role of the mind.

According to behaviourism the relation represented by the bottom left arrow in Figure 4.1 is that of identity – mental states just are dispositions to behave. Behaviourists differ as to how to construe the relation represented by the bottom right arrow. But I shall argue that it is one of causation.

The argument from causation has two separate versions corresponding to these two arrows. In one version it is claimed that the left-hand arrow should represent the relation of causation, whereas behaviourism takes it to represent identity. It is claimed that states of mind themselves causally explain dispositions to behave and so cannot themselves simply be dispositions to behave.

The other version claims that the right-hand arrow should not represent the relation of causation. It is argued that whereas a state of mind can cause behaviour, a disposition to behave cannot; it is not properly separate from the behaviour, as a cause should be from its effect.

Behaviourism

In this book I want to present a new theory of the mind, but a theory that has something in common with an old and discredited theory – the theory of behaviourism. I want to defend the following behaviourist claim:

When we describe and study somebody's mind what we are describing and studying is the way that person is disposed to behave. A person's mind does not exist behind the way that person is disposed to behave; it is the way he or she is disposed to behave.

The great philosophical proponent of this sort of behaviourism was Gilbert Ryle (1949). Ryle argued that behaviourist psychologists had been right to reject the idea that minds existed hidden behind the way people behaved, inhabiting a special inaccessible realm of consciousness.

Now, as I will argue in Chapter 2, Ryle is being charitable to the behaviourist psychologists in saying that they were concentrating on what Jane Austen was concentrating on.

Intentions as States of Mind that Cause Behaviour

According to the behaviourist model I have been developing, to describe someone's state of mind is to describe the version of practical rationality that the person's way of behaving is governed by. So the idea of my intending to achieve goal G, and therefore of my behaviour being directed to G, may be spelt out by saying that I am disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that unconditionally recommends that G is to be achieved.

Suppose that your way of behaving is characterised by a version of practical rationality that recommends that going for a walk is the thing to do if the sun is shining. This version of practical rationality is variable with respect to the answer to the question of whether the sun is shining. The recommendation to go for a walk is a conditional one. And suppose the sun is shining and your way of behaving has properly adapted to this. Then your way of behaving may be characterised for the time being by another more restrictive version of practical rationality – one that unconditionally recommends that going for a walk is the thing to do.

If your behaviour is governed by such a version of practical rationality then going for a walk is your goal. Your way of behaving is directed to this goal. What is the best way of achieving that goal in the circumstances (according to your version of practical rationality) will be recommended. This is what it means to say that you intend to go for a walk.

This is a rather well-known quotation by Goethe, who used it about two hundred years ago when contact with other languages or knowing other languages was not a common experience for the majority of the population in many parts of the world. Nowadays, due to increased mobility and globalization, the use of more than two languages has become a normal part of daily life for most human beings. This fact has increased scholarly interest in the phenomenon of multilingualism. From the discussion in this book it will become clear that Goethe's assumption presents a very valid reflection on metalinguistic knowledge and the awareness of that knowledge in multilinguals.

With multilingualism growing in our society, research concerning the cognitive aspects of multilingual proficiency has increased over recent years. The assumption that bilinguals are better language learners than monolinguals has been discussed in studies on the linguistic and cognitive effects of bilingualism on third language learning. This area of research has recently started to emerge by pointing out that third language acquisition differs from second language acquisition in various respects. The cognitive advantages of bi- and multilinguals over monolinguals are often related to an increased level of metalinguistic awareness, which is assigned a crucial role in holistic approaches to multilingualism (e.g. Cook 1991; Grosjean 1985; Herdina and Jessner 2002).