'Mental states are behavioural dispositions'. Discuss!

University Degree Historical and Philosophical studies

Word count: 1378

‘Mental states are behavioural dispositions’. Discuss!

Behaviourism is a philosophical doctrine of the mind which asserts that mental states are behavioural dispositions. In other words, behavioural dispositions are tendencies to react with a certain type of behaviour to corresponding stimuli. For example, pain would be described as the tendency to wince or cry when having broken one’s bone or burned one’s skin. But the behavioural dispositions associated with pain are not limited to just wincing and crying. There are lots of things people might do in pain such as screeching or wallowing and so on and so forth. Likewise the list of stimuli which cause pain is not exhausted by merely breaking one’s bone or burning one’s skin. Behaviourism is categorised under physicalism. That means that mental states are physical externalities that can be shared with other people. This is because behavioural dispositions which take place within the physical realm, according to behaviourism, are mental states. This is opposed to substance dualism which asserts that the mind is a non-physical object. Most modern philosophers are ‘physicalists’.

Philosophical behaviourism bears close resemblence to verificationism, although the former is a theory of the mind whereas the latter is of linguistics. Verificationism is the theory of meaning. It asserts that the meaning of a statement is its method of verification. For example, if we take the phrase ‘Ben is sad’, then we would observe that Ben’s sadness consists of his behavioural dispositions. The interchange from verificationism to behaviourism would have been a smooth one and thus this is the reason for its relative popularity.

However, there are arguments against credibility of behaviourism. One such argument that has been pitted against it is that of the robotic dog. Consider a theoretical robot which simulates a dog. When presented with dog food, the robot responds to the stimulus with actual dog-like behaviour. It displays behavioural dispositions such as drooling through its mechanism. According to the conventions of behaviourism, that would mean the robotic dog was hungry. However, being a robot, this is clearly not the case. Hence the robotic dog could be said to be the ‘perfect pretender’. Thus the critic would argue that mental states cannot just be behavioural dispositions, as it is possible to have behavioural tendencies without having mental states, as is the case with the robotic dog.

It is also possible to criticise philosophical behaviourism by considering that mental states may be able to exist without behavioural dispositions. Headaches are often associated with the behavioural tendencies of rubbing one’s forehead, or resting one’s head. Yet you can have a headache without the aforementioned behavioural dispositions. Hence, this highlights that mental states are not always behavioural dispositions, and vice versa. The behaviourist would argue that the ‘headache’ is a label for a set of dispositions. That could, however, allow one to believe that not corresponding to certain dispositions would invalidate their headache. But the behaviourist believes that ...

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Another example which further illustrates this point would be that of the super stoic. These are a group of people who have lost their disposition to react instinctively to external stimuli. That is, they do not show pain, yet they can obviously feel it. The stoics strive for ‘apatheia’, which is to free the mind from disturbances and passions. For instance, take the example of the Buddhist monks who set themselves alight without flinching during the Vietnam War. This highlights the point that you can be in pain without being disposed to produce the kind of behaviour that is typically associated with pain.

When taken together, the super stoic and perfect pretender examples show that being disposed to produce behavioural dispositions associated with pain is not necessary for pain itself. It is therefore possible to conclude that pain is not a behavioural disposition. Philosophical behaviourism presupposes that for every mental state there are a corresponding set of behavioural dispositions. But suppose two people are confronted by a bear and both of them feel fear. One of them may run away in terror as an instinctive reaction. The other might attempt to ignore the bear and walk away casually due to their superior knowledge of wildlife. It is also possible that one may throw their life away in that situation. These examples provide theoretical evidence which contradicts the thesis of behaviourism because they help illustrate the point that our behaviour to certain circumstances may depend on our beliefs and desires.

An alternative form of physicalism to behaviourism is the philosophy of computationalism. It asserts that thought is a form of computation and that the human mind can be conceived as an information processing system. Computers, as we know them today, man made machines recognise and manipulate information purely based on their syntactic properties. That is, they do not understand the meaning behind the information they are processing. For example, you can program a computer to answer ‘four’ ‘plus’ ‘four’ with ‘seven’. Nonetheless, computers can be programmed in such a way that they respect the semantic properties of those symbols. Relating this to the human mind, we can say that thoughts are complex processes which have syntactic and semantic properties. According to the computational theory of the mind, the process of thinking is the recognition and manipulation of these thought’s syntactic properties. This is an entirely plausible, because as has already been stated, computers can be made to respect semantic properties. Thus the computational theory of the mind is possible.

However, the computational theory of the mind has suffered from criticism. The most compelling of these would be the ‘Chinese room’ problem put forward by John Searle. Computation implies that anything that performs the right sort of computations had a mind. So consider an operator in a room who only speaks and understands English. He is sent Chinese writing via an inbox and has a dataset of other Chinese symbols which he uses to match to the Chinese writing he is being sent with the help of his English manual. He then posts this Chinese writing that he has created, following the instructions of his English manual, through an outbox. To the person receiving the operator’s messages, it would appear that he understands Chinese, when this is not the case. Hence the ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment shows that a machine can simulate an intelligent conversation when it does not necessarily understand. Searle concludes that ‘programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.’ However, those in who support computational theory of the mind argue that the ‘Chinese room’ which John Searle devised is just a part of the greater sum. In other words, Searle’s room is just one of many processes which constitute mental states.

Overall, the arguments presented in this essay render the claim that ‘mental states are behavioural dispositions’ as seemingly flawed. The criticisms put against it, which included the perfect pretender and the super stoic. It failed to come up with a strong counter argument. Ultimately, behaviourism does not cope well with the complex relationship the mental states and behaviour have. It is rare that a behavioural disposition is determined by a single mental state. Rather, it is the consequence of a complex of mental states. The computational theory of the mind would provide a seemingly viable alternative for those of the physicalist orientation. However, despite the fact that the computational theory of the mind is an apparently rational argument which is supported by the existence of computers, it suffers from logical gaps such as the problem of the ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment. Nonetheless, it was still able to explain the ‘incompleteness’ in a manner which salvaged its legitimacy as being a viable philosophy of the mind. The computational theory of the mind, as the ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment showed, has a problem with consciousness. But there exists a powerful alternative known as Connectionism. A connectionist network is made up of a large number of units organised into layers. According to connectionism, the mind is a connectionist network. It might be possible to conclude that behaviourism must defeat its demons before it enter the limelight again, and in order to do so, it must evolve its thesis.