Introduction: The Behaviorist Background

Throughout most of its history analytic philosophy has exhibited a curious prejudice against the mental. Many, perhaps most, analytic philosophers have felt that there was something especially puzzling about mental processes, states, and events, and that we would be better off if they could be analyzed away or explained in terms of something else or somehow eliminated. One sees this attitude, for example, in the persistent use of pejorative adjectives, such as “mysterious” and “occult,” that analytic philosophers from Ryle to Rorty use to characterize mental phenomena naively construed.

I first became aware of the pervasiveness of this attitude when I tried to extend my analysis of speech acts to intentional states. No one doubts the existence of promises, statements, apologies, and commands, but when the analysis is extended to beliefs, fears, hopes, desires, and visual experiences, suddenly philosophers raise a host of “ontological” doubts. I think that thinking and other mental processes and events, like linguistic processes and events, are biologically based and are as real as digestion, conversation, lactation, or any other of the familiar biologically based processes. This seems to me so obviously true as to be hardly worth arguing, but I am assured that it is a minority opinion in contemporary philosophy.

During the positivist and verificationist phase of analytic philosophy the reason for the urge to eliminate the mental was not difficult to see: if the meaning of a statement is its method of verification and if the only method of verification of statements about the mental is in the observations of behavior, at least where “other minds” are concerned, then it would appear that some sort of behaviorism is an immediate logical consequence of verificationism.