Philosophy, Politics and Public Discourse

ReichenbachGroup of philosophers and scientists who gathered round Hans Reichenbach in late 1920s. Among its members were H. Reichenbach, K. Grelling, C. G. Hempel, D. Hilbert, R. von Mises. Berlin Circle — its name was Die Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie (Society for empirical philosophy) — joined up with the Vienna Circle; together they published the journal Erkenntnis edited by Rudolf Carnap and H. Reichenbach, and organized several congresses on scientific philosophy, the first of which held in Prague in 1929.

Members of Berlin Circle were particularly active in analyzing contemporary physics, especially the theory of relativity, and in developing the frequency interpretation of the probability. After the rise of Nazism, several of them emigrated from Germany. Reichenbach moved to Turkey in 1933 and to USA in 1938; Hempel to Belgium in 1934 and to USA in 1939; Grelling was killed in a concentration camp. Hence the Berlin Circle was dispersed.

George Berkeley was one of the three most famous eighteenth century British Empiricists (see John Locke and David Hume). He is best known for his motto, esse is percipi, to be is to be perceived. He was an idealist: everything that exists is either a mind or depends for its existence upon a mind. He was an immaterialist: matter does not exist. He accepted the seemingly outrageous position that ordinary physical objects are composed solely of ideas, which are inherently mental. He wrote on vision, mathematics, Newtonian mechanics, economics, and medicine as well as philosophy. In his own time, his most often-read works concerned the medicinal value of tar-water. And in a curious sense, he was the first great American philosopher.

1. Life and Works

George Berkeley was born in or near Kilkenny, Ireland on 12 March 1685. He was raised in Dysart Castle. Although his father was English, Berkeley always considered himself Irish. In 1696, he entered Kilkenny College. He entered Trinity College, Dublin on 21 March 1700 and received his B.A. in 1704. He remained associated with Trinity College until 1724. In 1706 he competed for a College Fellowship which had become available and became a Junior Fellow on 9 June 1707. After completing his doctorate, he became a Senior Fellow in 1717. As was common practice for British academics at the time, Berkeley was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1710.

The works for which Berkeley is best known were written during his Trinity College period. In 1709, he published An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision. In 1710, he published A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I. In 1712, he published Passive Obedience, which focuses on moral and political philosophy. In 1713, he published Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. In 1721, he published De Motu. In addition, there is a set of notebooks, often called the Philosophical Commentaries (PC), that covers the period during which he developed his idealism and immaterialism. These were personal notebooks, and he never intended to publish them.

While Berkeley was associated with Trinity College until 1724, he was not continuously in residence. In 1713, he left for London, in part to arrange publication for the Three Dialogues. He befriended some of the intellectual lights of the time, including Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Alexander Pope. He contributed several articles against free-thinking (agnosticism) to Steele’s Guardian. Since the articles were unsigned, disagreement remains regarding which articles Berkeley wrote. He was the chaplain to Lord Peterborough during his 1713-1714 continental tour. There is some evidence that Berkeley met the French philosopher Nicholas Malebranche during that tour, although the popular myth that their conversation occasioned Malebranche’s death is false: Malebranche died in 1715. He was the chaperone of young St. George Ashe, son of the Trinity College provost, during his continental tour from 1716-21. It was during this tour that Berkeley later claimed to have lost the manuscript to the second part of the Principles (Works 2:282). He observed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1717 and sent a description of it to the Royal Society (Works 4:247-250). While in Lyon, France in 1720, Berkeley wrote De Motu, an essay on motion which reflects his scientific instrumentalism. The manuscript was Berkeley’s entry for a dissertation prize sponsored by the French Academy. It did not win.

In May 1724, Berkeley became Anglican dean of Londonderry and resigned his position at Trinity College. He was never a dean in residence. Between 1722 and 1728, Berkeley developed a plan to establish a seminary in Bermuda for the sons of colonists and Native Americans. He actively lobbied for his project. He obtained a charter for the college, private contributions, and a promise for a grant of £20,000 from the British Parliament. After marrying Anne Foster on August 1, 1728, he and his bride departed for America in September 1728. He settled near Newport, Rhode Island, waiting for the promised grant. He bought a farm and built a house named Whitehall, which is still standing. He was an active cleric during his stay in Rhode Island. He was in contact with some of the leading American intellectuals of the time, including Samuel Johnson, who became the first president of King’s College (now Columbia University). He wrote the bulk of Alciphron, his defense of Christianity against free-thinking, while in America. In early 1731, Edmund Gibson, the Bishop of London, informed Berkeley that Sir Robert Walpole had informed him that there was little likelihood that the promised grant would be paid. Berkeley returned to London in October 1731. Before leaving America he divided his library between the Harvard and Yale libraries, and he gave his farm to Yale.

After his return to London, Berkeley published A Sermon before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1732), Alciphron: or the Minute Philosopher (1732), The Theory of Vision, or Visual Language shewing the immediate Presence and Providence of A Deity, Vindicated and Explained (1733), The Analyst; or, a Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician (1734), A Defense of Free-Thinking in Mathematics (1735), Reasons for not Replying to Mr Walton’s Full Answer (1735), as well as revised editions of the Principles and the Dialogues (1734). The revisions of the Principles and Dialogues contain Berkeley’s scant remarks on the nature and one’s knowledge of mind (notions).

While the Bermuda Project was a practical failure, it increased Berkeley’s reputation as a religious leader. It is considered partially responsible for his appointment as Bishop of Cloyne in January 1734. In February 1734 he resigned as Dean of Londonderry. He was consecrated Bishop of Cloyne in St. Paul’s Church, Dublin, on 19 May 1734.

Berkeley was a good bishop. As bishop of an economically poor Anglican diocese in a predominantly Roman Catholic country, he was committed to the well-being of both Protestants and Catholics. He established a school to teach spinning, and he attempted to establish the manufacture of linen. His Querist (1735-1737) concerns economic and social issues germane to Ireland. Among other things, it contains a proposal for monetary reform. His Siris (1744) prefaces his philosophical discussions with an account of the medicinal value of tar water. The relationship of Siris to his early philosophy continues to be a matter of scholarly discussion.

Except for a trip to Dublin in 1737 to address the Irish House of Lords and a trip to Kilkenny in 1750 to visit family, he was continually in Cloyne until his retirement. In August 1752, Berkeley and his family left Cloyne for Oxford, ostensibly to oversee the education of his son George. While at Oxford, he arranged for the republication of his Alciphron and the publication of his Miscellany, a collection of essays on various subjects. He died on January 14, 1753 while his wife was reading him a sermon. In keeping with his will, his body was “kept five days above ground, … even till it grow offensive by the cadaverous smell” (Works 8:381), a provision that was intended to prevent premature burial. (This was the age in which some caskets were fitted with bells above ground so the “dead” could “ring up” if their beneficiaries had been a bit hasty.)
2. Essays on Vision

In 1709, Berkeley published An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (NTV). This is an empirical account of the perception of distance, magnitude, and figure. The New Theory of Vision does not presuppose immaterialism, and, although Berkeley held that it was connected with his later works, the degree of connection is hotly contested among scholars. Berkeley also discusses vision in Dialogue 4 of Alciphron (1732), and, in reply to a set of objections, in the Theory of Vision …Vindicated (TVV). He alludes to his account of vision in the Principles of Human Knowledge (PHK §§42-44) and the Three Dialogues (DHP1 201-203).

Berkeley’s objective in the New Theory of Vision was “to shew the manner wherein we perceive by sight the distance, magnitude, and situation of objects. Also to consider the difference there is betwixt the ideas of sight and touch, and whether there be any idea common to both senses” (NTV §1). Berkeley agrees with other writers on optics that distance is not immediately seen (NTV §2) and recounts the positions of earlier writers. Some held that we correlate our current perceptions with earlier perceptions and judge that the objects are distant because we had experienced the large size of intermediate objects, or because the objects which now appear small and faint had earlier appeared large and vigorous (NTV §3). Some, such as Descartes, held that distance is judged by a natural geometry based on the angles between the perceived object and the eyes or on the angles of the rays of light that fall upon the eye (NTV §§4 and 6, and Works 1:237-238; Descartes 1:170). Berkeley rejects those accounts.

When one perceives mediately, one perceives one idea by means of perceiving another (NTV §9), for example, one perceives that someone is frightened by perceiving the paleness of her face (NTV §10). Empirically, the geometrical account fails, since one perceives neither the requisite lines, nor angles, nor rays as such (NTV §§12-15), even though such mathematical computations can be useful in determining the apparent distance or magnitude of an object (NTV §§ 38, 78; TVV §58). So, what are the immediate ideas that mediate the perception of distance? First, there are the kinesthetic sensations associated with focusing the eyes when perceiving objects at various distances (NTV §16). Second, as objects are brought closer to the eye, their appearance becomes more confused (blurred or double, NTV §21). Third, as an object approaches the eyes, the degree of confusion can be mitigated by straining the eyes, which is recognized by kinesthetic sensations (NTV §27). In each case, there is no necessary connection between the ideas and distance; there is merely a customary connection between two types of ideas (NTV §§17, 26, 28). A necessary connection is a relation such as that found among numbers in true arithmetic equations. It is impossible for 7+3 to equal anything other than 10, and it is impossible to imagine it to be anything other than 10. A customary connection is a relation found in experience in which one type of idea is found with or followed by another, but which one could imagine the situation to be otherwise. David Hume’s famous example is that experience shows that whenever one billiard ball hits another, the second rolls away, but the fact that one could imagine anything happening shows that there is merely a customary connection between the actions of the billiard balls. It is in this sense that ideas of touch and sight are merely customarily, and not necessarily, connected. The absence of a necessary connection between these ideas is further illustrated by the fact that nearsighted (purblind) persons find that objects appear less, rather than more, confused as they approach to the eyes (NTV §37). Since one perceives distance by sight mediately through the correlation of visual ideas with nonvisual ideas, a person born blind and who came to see would have no notion of visual distance: even the most remote objects would “seem to be in his eye, or rather his mind (NTV §41) This is Berkeley’s first allusion to Molyneux’s man-born-blind-made-to-see (cf. Locke 2.9.8, pp. 145-146), which Berkeley regularly uses to show the consequences of his theory of vision (see also NTV §§79, 110, and 132-133; TVV §71). Molyneux’s contention was that if a person were born blind and had learned to distinguish a cube from a sphere by touch, he would not immediately be able to distinguish a visual cube from a sphere if he were given sight.

Like most philosophers of the period, Berkeley seems to assume that touch provides immediate access to the world. Visual ideas of an object, on the other hand, vary with one’s distance from the object. As one approaches a tower one judges to be about a mile away, “the appearance alters, and from being obscure, small, and faint, grows clear, large, and vigorous” (NTV §44). The tower is taken to be of a determinate size and shape, but the visual appearance continually changes. How can that be? Berkeley claims that visual ideas are merely signs of tactile ideas. There is no resemblance between visual and tactile ideas. Their relationship is like that between words and their meanings. If one hears a noun, one thinks of an object it denotes. Similarly, if one sees an object, one thinks of a corresponding idea of touch, which Berkeley deems the secondary (mediate) object of sight. In both cases, there are no necessary connections between the ideas. The associative connection is based on experience (NTV §51; cf. TVV §40, Alciphron, Dialogue 4).

His discussion of magnitude is analogous to his discussion of distance. Berkeley explores the relationships between the objects of sight and touch by introducing the notions of minimum visibles and tangibles, the smallest points one actually can perceive by sight and touch, points which must be taken to be indivisible. The apparent size of a visible object varies with distance, while the size of the corresponding tangible object is taken to be constant (NTV §55). The apparent size of the visual object, its confusion or distinctness, and its faintness or vigor play roles in judging the size of the tangible object. All things being equal, if it appears large, it is taken to be large. “But, be the idea immediately perceived by sight never so large, yet if it be withal confused, I judge the magnitude of the thing to be but small. If it be distinct and clear, I judge it greater. And if it be faint, I apprehend it to be yet greater” (NTV §56; see also §57). As in the case of distance, there are no necessary connections between the sensory elements of the visual and tangible object. The correlations are only known by consistent experience (NTV §§59, 62-64), and Berkeley argues that measurements (inches, feet, etc.) are applicable only to tangible size (NTV §61).

The arguments are repeated, mutates mutandis, regarding visual and tangible figure (NTV §§105ff).

Berkeley argues that the objects of sight and touch – indeed, the objects of each sensible modalities – are distinct and incommensurable. This is known as the heterogeneity thesis (see NTV §§108ff). The tower that visually appears to be small and round from a distance is perceived to be large and square by touch. So, one complex tactual object corresponds to the indefinitely large number of visual objects. Since there are no necessary connections between the objects of sight and touch, the objects must be distinct. Further, his discussion of “hearing the coach approach” shows that there is a similar distinction between the objects of hearing and touch (NTV §46). Given the hypothesis that the number of minimum visibles seen is constant and the same among individual humans and other creatures (NTV §§80-81), it follows that the objects seen when using a microscope are not the same as those seen by the naked eye (NTV §85; cf. NTV §105 and DHP3 245-246).

Before turning to the discussions of Berkeley’s idealism and immaterialism, there are several points we should notice. First, there are various points in the New Theory of Vision where Berkeley writes as if ideas of touch are or are of external objects (cf. §§ 46, 64, 77, 78, 82, 88, 99, 117, 155). Since the Berkeley of the Principles and Dialogues contends that all ideas are mind-dependent and all physical objects are composed of ideas, some have questioned whether the position in the New Theory of Vision is consistent with the work that immediately follows. Some scholars suggest that either that the works on vision are scientific works which, as such, make no metaphysical commitments or that allusions to “external objects” are cases of speaking with the vulgar. Secondly, insofar as in his later works Berkeley claims that ordinary objects are composed of ideas, his discussion of the correlation of ideas of sight and touch tends to anticipate his later view by explaining how one “collects” the ideas of distinct senses to form one thing. Finally, the New Theory of Vision includes discussions of the primary/secondary qualities distinction (§§43, 48-49, 61, 109) and of abstraction (NTV §§122-127) that anticipate his later discussions of those topics.
3. Against Abstraction

In the Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley laments the doubt and uncertainty found in philosophical discussions (Intro. §§1-3), and he attempts to find those principles that drew philosophy away from common sense and intuition (PHK §4). He finds the source of skepticism in the theory of abstract ideas, which he criticizes.

Berkeley begins by giving a general overview of the doctrine:

It is agreed on all hands, that the qualities or modes of things do never really exist each of them apart by it self, and separated from all others, but are mixed, as it were, and blended together, several in the same object. But we are told, the mind being able to consider each quality singly, or abstracted from those other qualities with which it is united, does by that means frame to it self abstract ideas. … Not that it is possible for colour or motion to exist without extension: but only that the mind can frame to it self by abstraction the idea of colour exclusive of extension, and of motion exclusive of both colour and extension. (Intro, §7)

In §§8-9 he details the doctrine in terms of Locke’s account in the Essay concerning Human Understanding. Although theories of abstraction date back at least to Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book K, Chapter 3, 1061a29-1069b4), were prevalent among the medievals (cf. Intro, §17 and PC §779), and are found in the Cartesians (Descartes, 1:212-213; Arnauld and Nicole, pp. 37-38), there seem to be two reasons why Berkeley focused on Locke. First, Locke’s work was recent and familiar. Second, Berkeley seems to have considered Locke’s account the best available. As he wrote in his notebooks, “Wonderful in Locke that he could wn advanc’d in years see at all thro a mist yt had been so long a gathering & was consequently thick. This more to be admir’d than yt he didn’t see farther” (PC §567).

According to Locke, the doctrine of abstract ideas explains how knowledge can be communicated and how it can be increased. It explains how general terms obtain meaning (Locke, 3.3.1-20, pp. 409-420). A general term, such as ‘cat’ refers to an abstract general idea, which contains all and only those properties that one deems common to all cats, or, more properly, the ways in which all cats resemble each other. The connection between a general term and an abstract idea is arbitrary and conventional, and the relation between an abstract idea and the individual objects falling under it is a natural relation (resemblance). If Locke’s theory is sound, it provides a means by which one can account for the meaning of general terms without invoking general objects (universals).

Berkeley’s attack on the doctrine of abstract ideas follows three tracks. (1) There is the “I can’t do it” argument in Intro. §10. (2) There is the “We don’t need it” argument in Intro. §§11-12. And (3) there is the “The theory leads to inconsistencies” argument in Intro. §13, which Berkeley deemed the “killing blow” (PC §687). As we shall see, Berkeley uses a similar tripartite attack on doctrine of material substance (see PHK §§16-23).

Having outlined Locke’s account of abstraction in Introduction §§8-9, which allegedly results in the idea of a human which is colored but has no determinate color – that the idea includes a general idea of color, but not a specific color such as black or white or brown or yellow – which has a size but has no determinate size, and so forth, Berkeley argues in §10 that he can form no such idea. On the face of it, his argument is weak. At most it shows that insofar as he cannot form the idea, and assuming that all humans have similar psychological abilities, there is some evidence that no humans can form abstract ideas of the sort Locke described.

But there is a remark made in passing that suggests there is a much stronger argument implicit in the section. Berkeley writes:

To be plain, I own my self able to abstract in one sense, as when I consider some particular parts or qualities separated from others, with which though they are united in some object, yet, it is possible they may really exist without them. But I deny that I can abstract one from another, or conceive separately, those qualities which it is impossible should exist so separated; or that I can frame a general notion by abstracting from particulars in the manner aforesaid. Which two last are the proper acceptations of abstraction. (Intro. §10)

This three-fold distinction among types of abstraction is found in Arnauld and Nicole’s Logic or the Art of Thinking. The first type of abstraction concerns integral parts. The head, arms, torso, and legs are integral parts of a body: each can exist in separation from the body of which it is a part (Arnauld and Nicole, p. 37). The second kind of abstraction “arises when we consider a mode without paying attention to its substance, or two modes which are joined together in the same substance, taking each one separately” (Arnauld and Nicole, p. 37). The third concerns distinctions of reason, for example, conceiving of a triangle as equilateral without conceiving of it as equiangular (Arnauld and Nicole, p. 38). Berkeley grants that he can abstract in the first sense – “I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by it self abstracted or separated from the rest of the body” (Intro. §10) – but he denies that he can abstract in the latter two senses. The latter two cases represent impossible states of affairs. In §7 Berkeley noted that the abstractionists held that it is impossible for a mode to exist apart from a substance. Many abstractionists also accepted a conceivability criterion of possibility: If one can (clearly and distinctly) conceive of a state of affairs, then it is possible for that state of affairs to exist as conceived (cf. Descartes, 2:54). This principle entails that impossible states of affairs are inconceivable. So, granting it is impossible for a mode to exist apart from a substance (Intro. §7), it follows that it is impossible to conceive of a mode apart from a substance, that the second form abstraction is impossible. And if the second falls, the third falls as well, since the third requires that alternative descriptions of an object pick out no differences in reality. So, a traditional theory of modes and substances, the conceivability criterion of possibility, and abstraction are an inconsistent triad. The inconsistency can be resolved by dropping the doctrine of abstract ideas. Berkeley made this point explicitly in the first draft of the Introduction:

It is, I think, a receiv’d axiom that an impossibility cannot be conceiv’d. For what created intelligence will pretend to conceive, that which God cannot cause to be? Now it is on all hands agreed, that nothing abstract or general can be made really to exist, whence it should seem to follow, that it cannot have so much as an ideal existence in the understanding. (Works 2:125)

One of the marks of the modern period is an adherence to the principle of parsimony (Ockham’s Razor). The principle holds that the theoretically simpler of two explanations is more probably true. In the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, this was sometimes expressed as “God does nothing in vain” (cf. DHP2 214). So, if it is possible to construct a theory of meaning that does not introduce abstract ideas as a distinct kind of idea, that theory would be simpler and deemed more probably true. This is the strategy Berkeley adopts in Introduction §§11-12.

Granting Locke that all existents are particulars (Locke 3.3.6, p. 410), Berkeley remarks, “But it seems that a word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an abstract general idea but, of several particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind” (Intro. §11). Ideas remain particular, although a particular idea can function as a general idea. For example, when a geometer draws a line on a blackboard, it is taken to represent all lines, even though the line itself is particular and has determinate qualities. Similarly, a particular idea can represent all similar ideas. So, whether one takes Berkeley to mean that words apply immediately to objects or that meaning is mediated by paradigmatic ideas, the theory is simpler than the abstractionists’ insofar as all ideas are particular and determinate.

In Introduction §13, Berkeley turns to Locke’s abstract general idea of a triangle, an idea which “must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once. In effect, it is something imperfect that cannot exist, an idea wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together” (Locke 4.7.9, p. 596; quoted in Intro. §13, Berkeley’s emphasis). Upon quoting the passage, Berkeley merely asks his reader whether he or she can form the idea, but his point seems to be much stronger. The described idea is inconsistent, and therefore represents an impossible state of affairs, and it is therefore inconceivable, since whatever is impossible is inconceivable. This is explicit in a parallel passage in the New Theory of Vision. After quoting the triangle passage, Berkeley remarks, “But had he called to mind what he says in another place, to wit, ‘That ideas of mixed modes wherein any inconsistent ideas are put together cannot so much as exist in the mind, i.e. be conceived.’ vid. B. iii. C. 10. S. 33. ibid. I say, had this occurred to his thoughts, it is not improbable he would have owned it above all the pains and skill he was master of, to form the above-mentioned idea of a triangle, which is made up of manifest, staring contradictions” (NTV §125).

If abstract ideas are not needed for communication – Berkeley takes the fact that infants and poorly educated people communicate, while the formation of abstract ideas is said to be difficult, as a basis for doubting the difficulty thesis (Intro. §14) – he is able to give short shrift to the contention that abstract ideas are necessary for knowledge. The abstractionists maintain that abstract ideas are needed for geometrical proofs. Berkeley argues that only properties concerning, for example, a triangle as such are germane to a geometric proof. So, even if one’s idea of a triangle is wholly determinate (consider a diagram on a blackboard), none of the differentiating properties prevent one from constructing a proof, since a proof is not concerned solely with the idea (or drawing) with which one begins. He maintains that it is consistent with his theory of meaning to selectively attend to a single aspect of a complex, determinate idea (Intro. §16).

Berkeley concludes his discussion of abstraction by noting that not all general words are used to denote objects or kinds of objects. His discussion of the nondenotative uses of language is often taken to anticipate Ludwig Wittgenstein’s interest in meaning-as-use.
4. Idealism and Immaterialism

Berkeley’s famous principle is esse is percipi, to be is to be perceived. Berkeley was an idealist. He held that ordinary objects are only collections of ideas, which are mind-dependent. Berkeley was an immaterialist. He held that there are no material substances. There are only finite mental substances and an infinite mental substance, namely, God. On these points there is general agreement. There is less agreement on Berkeley’s argumentative approach to idealism and immaterialism and on the role of some of his specific arguments. His central arguments are often deemed weak.

The account developed here is based primarily on the opening thirty-three sections of the Principles of Human Knowledge. It assumes, contrary to some commentators, that Berkeley’s metaphysics rests on epistemological foundations. This approach is prima facie plausible insofar as it explains the appeal to knowledge in the title of the Principles (cf. Intro. §4), it is consistent with Berkeley’s epistemic concerns in other writings (cf. TVV §18), and it provides an explanatory role for abstract ideas. There will be occasional digressions concerning the problems perceived by those who claim that Berkeley’s approach was more straightforwardly metaphysical.

Berkeley begins his discussion as follows:

It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. (PHK §1).

This seems to say that ideas are the immediate objects of knowledge in a fundamental sense (acquaintance). Following Locke, there are ideas of sense, reflection, and imagination. So, ordinary objects, as known, are collections of ideas marked by a single name. Berkeley’s example is an apple.

If ideas are construed as objects of knowledge, then there must also be something that “knows or perceives them, and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them” (PHK §2; cf. §6). This Berkeley calls this ‘mind’ or ’spirit’. Minds (as knowers) are distinct from ideas (as things known). For an idea, to be is to be perceived (known). Since this holds for ideas in general, it holds for “sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense” in particular (§3).

Berkeley contends that the “opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a world all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from being perceived” is inconsistent, “a manifest contradiction” (PHK §4). If one construes ’sensible objects’ as ideas of sense, and ideas are objects of knowledge, then having a real existence distinct from being perceived would require that an object be known (as an idea) and unknown (as a thing distinct from being perceived), which is inconsistent. He explains the source of the error on the basis of the doctrine of abstract ideas (PHK §5), a discussion which parallels the discussion in Introduction §10.

Ordinary objects, as known, are nothing but collections of ideas. If, like Descartes, Berkeley holds that claims of existence are justified if and only if the existent can be known, then ordinary objects must be at least collections of ideas. As Berkeley put it, “all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known” (PHK §6). The only substance that can be known is a spirit or thinking substance (PHK §7). But notice what has not yet been shown. It has not been shown that ordinary objects are only collections of ideas, nor has it be shown that thinking substances are immaterial. Berkeley’s next move is to ask whether there are grounds for claiming ordinary objects are something more than ideas.

The above account is not the only interpretation of the first seven sections of the Principles. Many commentators take a more directly metaphysical approach. They assume that ideas are mental images (Pitcher, p.70; cf. Winkler, p. 13 and Muehlmann, p. 49), or objects of thought (Winker, p.6), or modes of a mental substance (Bracken, pp. 76ff), or immediate objects of perception (Pappas, pp. 21-22), or any of Berkeley’s other occasional characterizations of ideas, and proceed to show that, on the chosen account of ideas, Berkeley’s arguments fail. A. A. Luce tells us that Berkeley’s characterization of an apple in terms of ideas (PHK §1) is concerned with the apple itself, rather than a known apple (Luce 1963, p. 30; cf. Tipton, p. 70), which suggests that Berkeley begs the question of the analysis of body. Many commentators tell us that what seems to be an allusion to ideas of reflection in the first sentence of §1 cannot be such, since Berkeley claims one has no ideas of minds or mental states (PHK §§27, 89, 140, 142; DHP2 223, DHP3 231-233; cf. Works 2:42n1). They ignore his allusions to ideas of reflection (PHK §§13, 25, 35, 68, 74, 89) and the presumption that if there are such ideas, they are the effects of an active mind (cf. PHK §27). Many commentators suggest that the argument for esse is percipi is in §3 – ignoring the concluding words in §2 – and find the “manifest contradiction” in §4 puzzling at best. Most commentators assume that the case for idealism – the position that there are only minds and mind-dependent entities – is complete by §7 and lament that Berkeley has not established the ‘only’. The epistemic interpretation we have been developing seems to avoid these problems.

Berkeley holds that ordinary objects are at least collections of ideas. Are they something more? In §§8-24 Berkeley examines the prime contenders for this “something more,” namely, theories of material substance. He prefaces his discussion with his likeness principle, the principle that nothing but an idea can resemble an idea. “If we look but ever so little into our thoughts, we shall find it impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between our ideas” (PHK §8). Why is this? A claim that two objects resemble each other can be justified only by a comparison of the objects (cf. PC §377, ##16-18). So, if only ideas are immediately perceived, only ideas can be compared. So, there can be no justification for a claim that an idea resembles anything but an idea. If claims of existence rest on epistemically justified principles, the likeness principle blocks both grounds for claiming that there are mediately perceived material objects and Locke’s claim that the primary qualities of objects resemble one’s ideas of them (Locke, 1.8.15, p. 137).

One of the marks of the modern period is the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities. Although it was anticipated by Descartes, Malebranche, and others, the terms themselves were introduced in Robert Boyle’s “Of the Origins of Forms and Qualities” (1666) and Locke’s Essay. Primary qualities are the properties of objects as such. The primary qualities are solidity, extension, figure, number, and mobility (Locke 2.8.9, p. 135; cf. 2.8.10, p. 135). Secondary qualities are either the those arrangements of corpuscles containing only primary qualities that cause one to have ideas of color, sound, taste, heat, cold, and smell (Locke 2.8.8, p. 135; 2.8.10, p. 135) or, on some accounts, the ideas themselves. If the distinction can be maintained, there would be grounds for claiming that ordinary objects are something more than ideas. It is this theory of matter Berkeley considers first.

After giving a sketch of Locke’s account of the primary/secondary quality distinction (PHK §9), his initial salvo focuses on his previous conclusions and the likeness principle. “By matter therefore we are to understand an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion, do actually subsist” (PHK §9). Such a view is inconsistent with his earlier conclusions that extension, figure, and motion are ideas. The likeness principle blocks any attempt to go beyond ideas on the basis of resemblance. Combining the previous conclusions with the standard account of primary qualities requires that primary qualities both exist apart from the mind and only in the mind. So, Berkeley concludes that “what is called matter or corporeal substance, involves a contradiction in it” (PHK §9). He then turns to the individual qualities.

If there is a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, there must be a ground for the distinction. Indeed, given the common contention that an efficient cause must be numerically distinct from its effect (see Arnauld and Nicole, p. 186; Arnauld in Descartes, 2:147; Locke 2.26.1-2, pp. 324-325), if one cannot show that primary and secondary qualities are distinct, there are grounds for questioning the causal hypothesis. Berkeley argues that there is no ground for the distinction. Appealing to what one knows – ideas as they are conceived – Berkeley argues that one cannot conceive of a primary quality such as extension without some secondary quality as well: one cannot “frame an idea of a body extended and moved, but I must withal give it some colour or other sensible quality which is acknowledged to exist only in the mind” (PHK §10). If such sensible qualities as color exist only in the mind, and extension and motion cannot be known without some sensible quality, there is no ground for claiming extension exists apart from the mind. The primary/secondary quality distinction collapses. The source of the philosophical error is cited as the doctrine of abstract ideas. His arguments in Principles §§11-15 show that no evidence can be found that any of the other so-called primary qualities can exist apart from the mind.

After disposing of the primary/secondary quality distinction, Berkeley turns to an older theory of material substance, a substratum theory. At least since Aristotle, philosophers had held that qualities of material objects depend on and exist in a substance which has those qualities. This supposed substance allegedly remains the same through change. But if one claims there are material substances, one must have reasons to support that claim. In Principles §§16-24 Berkeley develops a series of arguments to the effect that (1) one cannot form an idea of a substratum, (2) the theory of material substance plays no explanatory role, and (3) it is impossible to produce evidence for the mere possibility of such an entity.

Can one form an idea a substratum? No. At least one cannot form a positive idea of a material substratum itself – something like an image of the thing itself – a point that was granted by its most fervent supporters (see Descartes 1:210; Locke 2.23.3, p. 295). The most one can do is form “An obscure and relative Idea of Substance in general” (Locke 2.23.3, p. 296), “though you know not what it is, yet you must be supposed to know what relation it bears to accidents, and what is meant by its supporting them” (PHK §16). Berkeley argues that one cannot make good on the notion of ’support’ – “It is evident support cannot here be taken in its usual or literal sense, as when we say that pillars support a building: in what sense therefore must it be taken?” (PHK §16) – so one does not even have a relative idea of material substratum. Without a clear notion of the alleged relation, one cannot single out a material substance on the basis of a relation to something perceived (PHK §17).

If an idea of a material substratum cannot be derived from sense experience, claims of its existence might be justified if it is necessary to provide an explanation of a phenomenon. But no such explanation is forthcoming. As Berkeley notes: “But what reason can induce us to believe the existence of bodies without the mind, from what we perceive, since the very patrons of matter themselves do not pretend, there is any necessary connexion betwixt them and our ideas? I say it is granted on all hands (and what happens in dreams, phrensies, and the like, puts it beyond dispute) that it is possible we might be affected with all the ideas we have now, though no bodies existed without, resembling them” (PHK 18). Since material substance is not necessary to provide an explanation of mental phenomena, reason cannot provide grounds for claiming the existence of a material substance.

Berkeley’s final move against material substance is sometimes called the “Master Argument.” It takes the form of a challenge, one on which Berkeley is willing to rest his entire case. “It is but looking into your own thoughts, and so trying whether you can conceive it possible for a sound, or figure, or motion, or colour, to exist without the mind, or unperceived. This easy trial may make you see, that what you contend for, is a downright contradiction” (PHK §22). Berkeley seems to argue that in any case one might consider – books in the back of a closet, plants deep in a wood with no one about, footprints on the far side of the moon – the objects are related to the mind conceiving of them. So, it is contradictory to claim that those objects have no relation to a mind (PHK, §§22-23; cf. DHP1 199-201). This is generally not considered Berkeley at his best, since many commentators argue that it is possible to distinguish between the object conceived and the conceiving of it. George Pappas has provided a more sympathetic interpretation of the passage. He contends that Berkeley is calling for an “impossible performance” (Pappas, pp. 141-144). Conceivability is the ground for claiming that an object is possible. If one conceives of an object, then that object is related to some mind, namely, the mind that conceives it. So, the problem is that it is not possible to fulfill the conditions necessary to show that it would be possible for an object to exist apart from a relation to a mind.

Thus, Berkeley concludes, there are no grounds for claiming that an ordinary object is more than a collection of ideas. The arguments in §§1-7 showed that ordinary objects are at least collections of ideas of sense. The arguments in §§8-24 provide grounds for claiming that ordinary objects are nothing more than ideas. So, Berkeley is justified in claiming that they are only ideas of sense. Berkeley’s argument for immaterialism is complete, although he has not yet provided criteria for distinguishing ideas of sense from ideas of memory and imagination. This is his task in §§29-33. Before turning to this, Berkeley introduces several remarks on mind.

Berkeley claims that an inspection of our ideas shows that they are causally inert (PHK §25). Since there is a continual succession of ideas in our minds, there must be some cause of it. Since this cause can be neither an idea nor a material substance, it must be a spiritual substance (PHK §26). This sets the stage for Berkeley’s argument for the existence of God and the distinction between real things and imaginary things.

One knows that one causes some of one’s own ideas (PHK §28). Since the mind is passive in perception, there are ideas which one’s own mind does not cause. Only a mind or spirit can be a cause. “There is therefore some other will or spirit that produces them” (PHK §29). As such, this is not an argument for the existence of God (see PHK §§146-149), although Berkeley’s further discussion assumes that at least one mind is the divine mind.

He is now in a position to distinguish ideas of sense from ideas of the imagination: “The ideas of sense are more strong, lively, and distinct than those of the imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order, and coherence, and are not excited at random, as those which are the effects of human wills often are” (PHK §30). This provides the basis for both the distinction between ideas of sense and ideas of imagination and for the distinction between real things and imaginary things (PHK §33). Real things are composed solely of ideas of sense. Ideas of sense occur with predictable regularity; they form coherent wholes that themselves can be expected to “behave” in predictable ways. Ideas of sense follow (divinely established) laws of nature (PHK §§30. 34, 36, 62, 104).

So, Berkeley has given an account of ordinary objects without matter. Ordinary objects are nothing but lawfully arranged collections of ideas of sense.
5. Notions

If one reads the Principles and Dialogues, one discovers that Berkeley has little to say regarding our knowledge of minds, and most of what is found was added in the 1734 editions of those works. The reason is Berkeley originally intended the Principles to consist of at least three parts (cf. PC §583). The second was to examine issues germane to mind, God, morality, and freedom (PC §§508, 807). He told Samuel Johnson, his American correspondent, that the manuscript for the second part was lost during his travels in Italy in about 1716 (Works 2:282). In the 1734 editions of the Principles and Dialogues, Berkeley included brief discussions of our notions of minds.

Berkeley claims we do not have ideas of minds, since minds are active and ideas are passive (PHK §27; cf. §89, 140, 142). Nonetheless, “we have some notion of soul, spirit, and the operations of the mind, such as willing, loving, hating, in as much as we know or understand the meaning of those words” (PHK §27, 1734 edition). Given Berkeley’s theory of meaning, this seems to imply that so long as one able to pick out (distinguish) minds from other things one can have a notion of mind. Since Berkeley remarks, “Such is the nature of spirit or that which acts, that it cannot be of it self perceived, but only by the effects which it produceth” (PHK §27, all editions), one might come to believe that Berkeley knows minds in much the same way as Locke knows them. Locke claims one has a relative idea of substance in general (Locke 2.23.3, p. 296): one is able to pick out a substance as such on the basis of its relation to a directly perceived idea or quality. While nominally distinct from Lockean relative ideas, Berkeley could claim that notions pick out an individual mind as the thing that perceives some determinate idea (one’s own mind) or which causes some determinate idea (God or, perhaps, some other spirit). Since Berkeley held that causal and perceptual relations are necessary connections, this seems to avoid the problems with ’support’ discussed in Principles §16. Such a position seems to be consistent with everything said in the Principles and much of what is said in the Dialogues (DHP2 2:223; DHP3 2:232-233). However, there are two passages in the Third Dialogue which suggest that one’s own mind is known directly, rather than relatively. Philonous says:

I own I have properly no idea, either of God or any other spirit; for these being active, cannot be represented by things perfectly inert, as our ideas are. I do nevertheless know, that I who am a spirit or thinking substance, exist as certainly, as I know my ideas exist. Farther, I know what I mean by the terms I and myself; and I know this immediately, or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a colour, or a sound. (DHP3 2:231, all editions)

How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of [my emphasis] my own being; and that I my self am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas. (DHP3 233, 1734 edition)

If you know yourself immediately “by a reflex act” (DHP3 232, all editions), and if this is independent of any relation to an idea, then it would seem that notions of oneself are nothing more than that unique way in which the mind knows itself. Nothing more can be said of them. Such a position seems to make notions an ad hoc addition to Berkeley’s philosophy.

But, perhaps, we need to draw a distinction between knowing that there is a mind and knowing what a mind is. Perhaps one might know directly that one has a mind, but one can know what a mind is only relative to ideas: a mind is that which causes or perceives ideas. One should not be surprised if this is Berkeley’s position. Such a relative understanding of the mind as knower and ideas as the known is already found in the opening sections of the Principles.
6. Concluding Remarks

According to Berkeley, the world consists of nothing but minds and ideas. Ordinary objects are collections of ideas. Already in his discussion of vision, he argued that one learns to coordinate ideas of sight and touch to judge distance, magnitude, and figure, properties which are immediately perceived only by touch. The ideas of one sense become signs of ideas of the other senses. In his philosophical writings, this coordination of regularly occurring ideas becomes the way the world is known and the way humans construct real things. If there are only minds and ideas, there is no place for some scientific constructs. Newtonian absolute space and time disappear. Time becomes nothing but the succession of ideas in individual minds (PHK §98). Motion is entirely object-relative (PHK §§112-117). Science becomes nothing more than a system of natural signs. With the banishing of abstraction, mathematics is reduced to a system of signs in which words or numerals signify other words or numerals (PHK §122). Space is reduced to sensible extension, and since one cannot actually divide a piece of extension into an infinite number of sensible parts, various geometrical paradoxes dissolve. As Berkeley understands them, science and Christian theology become compatible.

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and political radical. He is primarily known today for his moral philosophy, especially his principle of utilitarianism, which evaluates actions based upon their consequences. The relevant consequences, in particular, are the overall happiness created for everyone affected by the action. Influenced by many enlightenment thinkers, especially empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume, Bentham developed an ethical theory grounded in a largely empiricist account of human nature. He famously held a hedonistic account of both motivation and value according to which what is fundamentally valuable and what ultimately motivates us is pleasure and pain. Happiness, according to Bentham, is thus a matter of experiencing pleasure and lack of pain.

Although he never practiced law, Bentham did write a great deal of philosophy of law, spending most of his life critiquing the existing law and strongly advocating legal reform. Throughout his work, he critiques various natural accounts of law which claim, for example, that liberty, rights, and so on exist independent of government. In this way, Bentham arguably developed an early form of what is now often called “legal positivism.” Beyond such critiques, he ultimately maintained that putting his moral theory into consistent practice would yield results in legal theory by providing justification for social, political, and legal institutions.

Bentham’s influence was minor during his life. But his impact was greater in later years as his ideas were carried on by followers such as John Stuart Mill, John Austin, and other consequentialists.

1. Life

A leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law and one of the founders of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham was born in Houndsditch, London on February 15, 1748. He was the son and grandson of attorneys, and his early family life was colored by a mix of pious superstition (on his mother’s side) and Enlightenment rationalism (from his father). Bentham lived during a time of major social, political and economic change. The Industrial Revolution (with the massive economic and social shifts that it brought in its wake), the rise of the middle class, and revolutions in France and America all were reflected in Bentham’s reflections on existing institutions. In 1760, Bentham entered Queen’s College, Oxford and, upon graduation in 1764, studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. Though qualified to practice law, he never did so. Instead, he devoted most of his life to writing on matters of legal reform—though, curiously, he made little effort to publish much of what he wrote.

Bentham spent his time in intense study, often writing some eight to twelve hours a day. While most of his best known work deals with theoretical questions in law, Bentham was an active polemicist and was engaged for some time in developing projects that proposed various practical ideas for the reform of social institutions. Although his work came to have an important influence on political philosophy, Bentham did not write any single text giving the essential principles of his views on this topic. His most important theoretical work is the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), in which much of his moral theory—which he said reflected “the greatest happiness principle”—is described and developed.

In 1781, Bentham became associated with the Earl of Shelburne and, through him, came into contact with a number of the leading Whig politicians and lawyers. Although his work was admired by some at the time, Bentham’s ideas were still largely unappreciated. In 1785, he briefly joined his brother Samuel in Russia, where he pursued his writing with even more than his usual intensity, and he devised a plan for the now infamous “Panopticon”—a model prison where all prisoners would be observable by (unseen) guards at all times—a project which he had hoped would interest the Czarina Catherine the Great. After his return to England in 1788, and for some 20 years thereafter, Bentham pursued—fruitlessly and at great expense—the idea of the panopticon. Fortunately, an inheritance received in 1796 provided him with financial stability. By the late 1790s, Bentham’s theoretical work came to have a more significant place in political reform. Still, his influence was, arguably, still greater on the continent. (Bentham was made an honorary citizen of the fledgling French Republic in 1792, and his The Theory of Legislation was published first, in French, by his Swiss disciple, Etienne Dumont, in 1802.)

The precise extent of Bentham’s influence in British politics has been a matter of some debate. While he attacked both Tory and Whig policies, both the Reform Bill of 1832 (promoted by Bentham’s disciple, Lord Henry Brougham) and later reforms in the century (such as the secret ballot, advocated by Bentham’s friend, George Grote, who was elected to parliament in 1832) reflected Benthamite concerns. The impact of Bentham’s ideas goes further still. Contemporary philosophical and economic vocabulary (for example, “international,” “maximize,” “minimize,” and “codification”) is indebted to Bentham’s proclivity for inventing terms, and among his other disciples were James Mill and his son, John (who was responsible for an early edition of some of Bentham’s manuscripts), as well as the legal theorist, John Austin.

At his death in London, on June 6, 1832, Bentham left literally tens of thousands of manuscript pages—some of which was work only sketched out, but all of which he hoped would be prepared for publication. He also left a large estate, which was used to finance the newly-established University College, London (for those individuals excluded from university education—that is, non-conformists, Catholics and Jews), and his cadaver, per his instructions, was dissected, embalmed, dressed, and placed in a chair, and to this day resides in a cabinet in a corridor of the main building of University College. The Bentham Project, set up in the early 1960s at University College, has as its aim the publishing of a definitive, scholarly edition of Bentham’s works and correspondence.
2. Method

Influenced by the philosophes of the Enlightenment (such as Beccaria, Helvétius, Diderot, D’Alembert, and Voltaire) and also by Locke and Hume, Bentham’s work combined an empiricist approach with a rationalism that emphasized conceptual clarity and deductive argument. Locke’s influence was primarily as the author of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and Bentham saw in him a model of one who emphasized the importance of reason over custom and tradition and who insisted on precision in the use of terms. Hume’s influence was not so much on Bentham’s method as on his account of the underlying principles of psychological associationism and on his articulation of the principle of utility, which was then still often annexed to theological views.

Bentham’s analytical and empirical method is especially obvious when one looks at some of his main criticisms of the law and of moral and political discourse in general. His principal target was the presence of “fictions”—in particular, legal fictions. On his view, to consider any part or aspect of a thing in abstraction from that thing is to run the risk of confusion or to cause positive deceit. While, in some cases, such “fictional” terms as “relation,” “right,” “power,” and “possession” were of some use, in many cases their original warrant had been forgotten, so that they survived as the product of either prejudice or inattention. In those cases where the terms could be “cashed out” in terms of the properties of real things, they could continue to be used, but otherwise they were to be abandoned. Still, Bentham hoped to eliminate legal fictions as far as possible from the law, including the legal fiction that there was some original contract that explained why there was any law at all. He thought that, at the very least, clarifications and justifications could be given that avoided the use of such terms.
3. Human Nature

For Bentham, morals and legislation can be described scientifically, but such a description requires an account of human nature. Just as nature is explained through reference to the laws of physics, so human behavior can be explained by reference to the two primary motives of pleasure and pain; this is the theory of psychological hedonism.

There is, Bentham admits, no direct proof of such an analysis of human motivation—though he holds that it is clear that, in acting, all people implicitly refer to it. At the beginning of the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham writes:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. (Ch. 1)

From this we see that, for Bentham, pleasure and pain serve not only as explanations for action, but they also define one’s good. It is, in short, on the basis of pleasures and pains, which can exist only in individuals, that Bentham thought one could construct a calculus of value.

Related to this fundamental hedonism is a view of the individual as exhibiting a natural, rational self-interest—a psychological egoism. In his “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy” (1833), Mill cites Bentham’s The Book of Fallacies (London: Hunt, 1824, pp. 392-3) that “[i]n every human breast… self-regarding interest is predominant over social interest; each person’s own individual interest over the interests of all other persons taken together.” Fundamental to the nature and activity of individuals, then, is their own well-being, and reason—as a natural capability of the person—is considered to be subservient to this end.

Bentham believed that the nature of the human person can be adequately described without mention of social relationships. To begin with, the idea of “relation” is but a “fictitious entity,” though necessary for “convenience of discourse.” And, more specifically, he remarks that “the community is a fictitious body,” and it is but “the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.” Thus, the extension of the term “individual” is, in the main, no greater and no less than the biological entity. Bentham’s view, then, is that the individual—the basic unit of the social sphere—is an “atom” and there is no “self” or “individual” greater than the human individual. A person’s relations with others—even if important—are not essential and describe nothing that is, strictly speaking, necessary to its being what it is.

Finally, the picture of the human person presented by Bentham is based on a psychological associationism indebted to David Hartley and Hume; Bentham’s analysis of “habit” (which is essential to his understanding of society and especially political society) particularly reflects associationist presuppositions. On this view, pleasure and pain are objective states and can be measured in terms of their intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, fecundity and purity. This allows both for an objective determination of an activity or state and for a comparison with others.

Bentham’s understanding of human nature reveals, in short, a psychological, ontological, and also moral individualism where, to extend the critique of utilitarianism made by Graeme Duncan and John Gray (1979), “the individual human being is conceived as the source of values and as himself the supreme value.”
4. Moral Philosophy

As Elie Halévy (1904) notes, there are three principal characteristics of which constitute the basis of Bentham’s moral and political philosophy: (i) the greatest happiness principle, (ii) universal egoism and (iii) the artificial identification of one’s interests with those of others. Though these characteristics are present throughout his work, they are particularly evident in the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, where Bentham is concerned with articulating rational principles that would provide a basis and guide for legal, social and moral reform.

To begin with, Bentham’s moral philosophy reflects what he calls at different times “the greatest happiness principle” or “the principle of utility”—a term which he borrows from Hume. In adverting to this principle, however, he was not referring to just the usefulness of things or actions, but to the extent to which these things or actions promote the general happiness. Specifically, then, what is morally obligatory is that which produces the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, happiness being determined by reference to the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain. Thus, Bentham writes, “By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness.” And Bentham emphasizes that this applies to “every action whatsoever” (Ch. 1). That which does not maximize the greatest happiness (such as an act of pure ascetic sacrifice) is, therefore, morally wrong. (Unlike some of the previous attempts at articulating a universal hedonism, Bentham’s approach is thoroughly naturalistic.)

Bentham’s moral philosophy, then, clearly reflects his psychological view that the primary motivators in human beings are pleasure and pain. Bentham admits that his version of the principle of utility is something that does not admit of direct proof, but he notes that this is not a problem as some explanatory principles do not admit of any such proof and all explanation must start somewhere. But this, by itself, does not explain why another’s happiness—or the general happiness—should count. And, in fact, he provides a number of suggestions that could serve as answers to the question of why we should be concerned with the happiness of others.

First, Bentham says, the principle of utility is something to which individuals, in acting, refer either explicitly or implicitly, and this is something that can be ascertained and confirmed by simple observation. Indeed, Bentham held that all existing systems of morality can be “reduced to the principles of sympathy and antipathy,” which is precisely that which defines utility. A second argument found in Bentham is that, if pleasure is the good, then it is good irrespective of whose pleasure it is. Thus, a moral injunction to pursue or maximize pleasure has force independently of the specific interests of the person acting. Bentham also suggests that individuals would reasonably seek the general happiness simply because the interests of others are inextricably bound up with their own, though he recognized that this is something that is easy for individuals to ignore. Nevertheless, Bentham envisages a solution to this as well. Specifically, he proposes that making this identification of interests obvious and, when necessary, bringing diverse interests together would be the responsibility of the legislator.

Finally, Bentham held that there are advantages to a moral philosophy based on a principle of utility. To begin with, the principle of utility is clear (compared to other moral principles), allows for objective and disinterested public discussion, and enables decisions to be made where there seem to be conflicts of (prima facie) legitimate interests. Moreover, in calculating the pleasures and pains involved in carrying out a course of action (the “hedonic calculus”), there is a fundamental commitment to human equality. The principle of utility presupposes that “one man is worth just the same as another man” and so there is a guarantee that in calculating the greatest happiness “each person is to count for one and no one for more than one.”

For Bentham, then, there is no inconsistency between the greatest happiness principle and his psychological hedonism and egoism. Thus, he writes that moral philosophy or ethics can be simply described as “the art of directing men’s action to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness, on the part of those whose interest is in view.”
5. Political Philosophy

Bentham was regarded as the central figure of a group of intellectuals called, by Elie Halévy (1904), “the philosophic radicals,” of which both Mill and Herbert Spencer can be counted among the “spiritual descendants.” While it would be too strong to claim that the ideas of the philosophic radicals reflected a common political theory, it is nevertheless correct to say that they agreed that many of the social problems of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England were due to an antiquated legal system and to the control of the economy by a hereditary landed gentry opposed to modern capitalist institutions. As discussed in the preceding section, for Bentham, the principles that govern morals also govern politics and law, and political reform requires a clear understanding of human nature. While he develops a number of principles already present in Anglo-Saxon political philosophy, he breaks with that tradition in significant ways.

In his earliest work, A Fragment on Government (1776), which is an excerpt from a longer work published only in 1928 as Comment on Blackstone’s Commentaries, Bentham attacked the legal theory of Sir William Blackstone. Bentham’s target was, primarily, Blackstone’s defense of tradition in law. Bentham advocated the rational revision of the legal system, a restructuring of the process of determining responsibility and of punishment, and a more extensive freedom of contract. This, he believed, would favor not only the development of the community, but the personal development of the individual.

Bentham’s attack on Blackstone targeted more than the latter’s use of tradition however. Against Blackstone and a number of earlier thinkers (including Locke), Bentham repudiated many of the concepts underlying their political philosophies, such as natural right, state of nature, and social contract. Bentham then attempted to outline positive alternatives to the preceding “traditionalisms.” Not only did he work to reform and restructure existing institutions, but he promoted broader suffrage and self (that is, representative) government.
a. Law, Liberty and Government

The notion of liberty present in Bentham’s account is what is now generally referred to as “negative” liberty—freedom from external restraint or compulsion. Bentham says that “[l]iberty is the absence of restraint” and so, to the extent that one is not hindered by others, one has liberty and is “free.” Bentham denies that liberty is “natural” (in the sense of existing “prior to” social life and thereby imposing limits on the state) or that there is an a priori sphere of liberty in which the individual is sovereign. In fact, Bentham holds that people have always lived in society, and so there can be no state of nature (though he does distinguish between political society and “natural society”) and no “social contract” (a notion which he held was not only unhistorical but pernicious). Nevertheless, he does note that there is an important distinction between one’s public and private life that has morally significant consequences, and he holds that liberty is a good—that, even though it is not something that is a fundamental value, it reflects the greatest happiness principle.

Correlative with this account of liberty, Bentham (as Thomas Hobbes before him) viewed law as “negative.” Given that pleasure and pain are fundamental to—indeed, provide—the standard of value for Bentham, liberty is a good (because it is “pleasant”) and the restriction of liberty is an evil (because it is “painful”). Law, which is by its very nature a restriction of liberty and painful to those whose freedom is restricted, is a prima facie evil. It is only so far as control by the state is limited that the individual is free. Law is, Bentham recognized, necessary to social order and good laws are clearly essential to good government. Indeed, perhaps more than Locke, Bentham saw the positive role to be played by law and government, particularly in achieving community well-being. To the extent that law advances and protects one’s economic and personal goods and that what government exists is self-government, law reflects the interests of the individual.

Unlike many earlier thinkers, Bentham held that law is not rooted in a “natural law” but is simply a command expressing the will of the sovereign. (This account of law, later developed by Austin, is characteristic of legal positivism.) Thus, a law that commands morally questionable or morally evil actions, or that is not based on consent, is still law.
b. Rights

Bentham’s views on rights are, perhaps, best known through the attacks on the concept of “natural rights” that appear throughout his work. These criticisms are especially developed in his Anarchical Fallacies (a polemical attack on the declarations of rights issued in France during the French Revolution), written between 1791 and 1795 but not published until 1816, in French. Bentham’s criticisms here are rooted in his understanding of the nature of law. Rights are created by the law, and law is simply a command of the sovereign. The existence of law and rights, therefore, requires government. Rights are also usually (though not necessarily) correlative with duties determined by the law and, as in Hobbes, are either those which the law explicitly gives us or those within a legal system where the law is silent. The view that there could be rights not based on sovereign command and which pre-exist the establishment of government is rejected.

According to Bentham, then, the term “natural right” is a “perversion of language.” It is “ambiguous,” “sentimental” and “figurative” and it has anarchical consequences. At best, such a “right” may tell us what we ought to do; it cannot serve as a legal restriction on what we can or cannot do. The term “natural right” is ambiguous, Bentham says, because it suggests that there are general rights—that is, rights over no specific object—so that one would have a claim on whatever one chooses. The effect of exercising such a universal, natural “right” would be to extinguish the right altogether, since “what is every man’s right is no man’s right.” No legal system could function with such a broad conception of rights. Thus, there cannot be any general rights in the sense suggested by the French declarations.

Moreover, the notion of natural rights is figurative. Properly speaking, there are no rights anterior to government. The assumption of the existence of such rights, Bentham says, seems to be derived from the theory of the social contract. Here, individuals form a society and choose a government through the alienation of certain of their rights. But such a doctrine is not only unhistorical, according to Bentham, it does not even serve as a useful fiction to explain the origin of political authority. Governments arise by habit or by force, and for contracts (and, specifically, some original contract) to bind, there must already be a government in place to enforce them.

Finally, the idea of a natural right is “anarchical.” Such a right, Bentham claims, entails a freedom from all restraint and, in particular, from all legal restraint. Since a natural right would be anterior to law, it could not be limited by law, and (since human beings are motivated by self-interest) if everyone had such freedom, the result would be pure anarchy. To have a right in any meaningful sense entails that others cannot legitimately interfere with one’s rights, and this implies that rights must be capable of enforcement. Such restriction, as noted earlier, is the province of the law.

Bentham concludes, therefore, that the term “natural rights” is “simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts.” Rights—what Bentham calls “real” rights—are fundamentally legal rights. All rights must be legal and specific (that is, having both a specific object and subject). They ought to be made because of their conduciveness to “the general mass of felicity,” and correlatively, when their abolition would be to the advantage of society, rights ought to be abolished. So far as rights exist in law, they are protected; outside of law, they are at best “reasons for wishing there were such things as rights.” While Bentham’s essays against natural rights are largely polemical, many of his objections continue to be influential in contemporary political philosophy.

Nevertheless, Bentham did not dismiss talk of rights altogether. There are some services that are essential to the happiness of human beings and that cannot be left to others to fulfill as they see fit, and so these individuals must be compelled, on pain of punishment, to fulfill them. They must, in other words, respect the rights of others. Thus, although Bentham was generally suspicious of the concept of rights, he does allow that the term is useful, and in such work as A General View of a Complete Code of Laws, he enumerates a large number of rights. While the meaning he assigns to these rights is largely stipulative rather than descriptive, they clearly reflect principles defended throughout his work.

There has been some debate over the extent to which the rights that Bentham defends are based on or reducible to duties or obligations, whether he can consistently maintain that such duties or obligations are based on the principle of utility, and whether the existence of what Bentham calls “permissive rights”—rights one has where the law is silent—is consistent with his general utilitarian view. This latter point has been discussed at length by H.L.A. Hart (1973) and David Lyons (1969).
6. References and Further Reading
a. Bentham’s Works

Behaviorism was a movement in psychology and philosophy that emphasized the outward behavioral aspects of thought and dismissed the inward experiential, and sometimes the inner procedural, aspects as well; a movement harking back to the methodological proposals of John B. Watson, who coined the name. Watson’s 1912 manifesto proposed abandoning Introspectionist attempts to make consciousness a subject of experimental investigation to focus instead on behavioral manifestations of intelligence. B. F. Skinner later hardened behaviorist strictures to exclude inner physiological processes along with inward experiences as items of legitimate psychological concern. Consequently, the successful “cognitive revolution” of the nineteen sixties styled itself a revolt against behaviorism even though the computational processes cognitivism hypothesized would be public and objective — not the sort of private subjective processes Watson banned. Consequently (and ironically), would-be-scientific champions of consciousness now indict cognitivism for its “behavioristic” neglect of inward experience.

The enduring philosophical interest of behaviorism concerns this methodological challenge to the scientific bona fides of consciousness (on behalf of empiricism) and, connectedly (in accord with materialism), its challenge to the supposed metaphysical inwardness, or subjectivity, of thought. Although behaviorism as an avowed movement may have few remaining advocates, various practices and trends in psychology and philosophy may still usefully be styled “behavioristic”. As long as experimental rigor in psychology is held to require “operationalization” of variables, behaviorism’s methodological mark remains. Recent attempts to revive doctrines of “ontological subjectivity” (Searle 1992) in philosophy and bring “consciousness research” under the aegis of Cognitive Science (see Horgan 1994) point up the continuing relevance of behaviorism’s metaphysical and methodological challenges.

1. Behaviorists and Behaviorisms

Behaviorism, notoriously, came in various sorts and has been, also notoriously, subject to variant sortings: “the variety of positions that constitute behaviorism” might even be said to share no common-distinctive property, but only “a loose family resemblance” (Zuriff 1985: 1) . Views commonly styled “behavioristic” share various of the following marks:

* allegiance to the “fundamental premise … that psychology is a natural science” and, as such, is “to be empirically based and … objective” (Zuriff 1985: 1);
* denial of the utility of introspection as a source of scientific data;
* theoretic-explanatory dismissal of inward experiences or states of consciousness introspection supposedly reveals;
* specifically antidualistic opposition to the “Cartesian theater” picture of the mind as essentially a realm of such inward experiences;
* more broadly antiessentialist opposition to physicalist or cogntivist portrayals of thought as necessarily neurophysiological or computational;
* theoretic-explanatory minimization of inner physiological or computational processes intervening between environmental stimulus and behavioral response;
* mistrust of the would-be scientific character of the concepts of “folk psychology” generally, and of the would-be causal character of its central “belief-desire” pattern of explanation in particular;
* positive characterization of the mental in terms of intelligent “adaptive” behavioral dispositions or stimulus-response patterns.

Among these features, not even Zuriff’s “fundamental premise” is shared by all (and only) behaviorists. Notably, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and followers in the “ordinary language” tradition of analytic philosophy, while, for the most part, regarding behavioral scientific hopes as vain, hold views that are, in other respects, strongly behavioristic. Not surprisingly, these thinkers often downplay the “behaviorist” label themselves to distinguish themselves from their scientific behaviorist cousins. Nevertheless, in philosophical discussions, they are commonly counted “behaviorists”: both emphasize the external behavioral aspects, deemphasize inward experiential and inner procedural aspects, and offer broadly behavioral-dispositional construals of thought.
a. Psychological Behaviorists
i. Precursors: Wilhelm Wundt, Ivan Pavlov

Wundt is often called “the father of experimental psychology.” He conceived the subject matter of psychology to be “experience in its relations to the subject” (Wundt 1897: 3). The science of experience he envisaged was supposed to be chemistry like: introspected experiential data were to be analyzed; the basic constituents of conscious experience thus identified; and the patterns and laws by which these basic constituents combine to constitute more complex conscious experiences (e.g., emotions) described. Data were to be acquired and analyzed by trained introspective Observers. While the analysis of experience was supposed to be a self-contained enterprise, Wundt — originally trained as a physiologist — fully expected that the structures and processes introspective analysis uncovered in experience would parallel structures and processes physiological investigation revealed in the central nervous system. Introspectionism, as the approach was called, soon spread, and laboratories sprang up in the United States and elsewhere, aiming “to investigate the facts of consciousness, its combinations and relations,” so as to “ultimately discover the laws which govern these relations and combinations” (Wundt 1912: 1). The approach failed primarily due to the unreliability of introspective Observation. Introspective “experimental” results were not reliably reproducible by outside laboratories: Observers from different laboratories failed to agree, for instance, in their Observation (or failure to Observe) imageless thoughts (to cite one notorious controversy).

Pavlov’s successful experimental discovery the laws of classical conditioning (as they came to be called), by way of contrast, provided positive inspiration for Watson’s Behaviorist manifesto. Pavlov’s stimulus-response model of explanation is also paradigmatic to much later behavioristic thought. In his famous experiments Pavlov paired presentations to dogs of an unconditioned stimulus (food) with an initially neutral stimulus (a ringing bell). After a number of such joint presentations, the unconditional response to food (salivation) becomes conditioned to the bell: salivation occurs upon the ringing of the bell alone, in the absence of food. In accord with Pavlovian theory, then, given an animal’s conditioning history behavioral responses (e.g., salivation) can be predicted to occur or not, and be controlled (made to occur or not), on the basis of laws of conditioning, answering to the stimulus-response pattern:

S -> R

Everything adverted to here is publicly observable, even measurable; enabling Pavlov to experimentally investigate and formulate laws concerning temporal sequencing and delay effects, stimulus intensity effects, and stimulus generalization (opening doors to experimental investigation of animal perception and discrimination).

Edward Thorndike, in a similar methodological vein, proposed “that psychology may be, at least in part, as independent of introspection as physics” (Thorndike 1911: 5) and pursued experimental investigations of animal intelligence. In experimental investigations of puzzle-solving by cats and other animals, he established that speed of solution increased gradually as a result of previous puzzle exposure. Such results, he maintained, support the hypothesis that learning is a result of habits formed through trial and error, and Thorndike formulated “laws of behavior,” describing habit formation processes, based on these results. Most notable among Thorndike’s laws (presaging Skinnerian operant conditioning) is his Law of Effect:

Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation, so that, when it recurs, they will be more likely to recur; those which are accompanied or closely followed by discomfort to the animal will, other things being equal, have their connections with that situation weakened, so that, when it recurs, they will be less likely to occur. The greater the satisfaction or discomfort, the greater the strengthening or weakening of the bond . (Thorndike 1911)

In short, rewarded responses tend to be reinforced and punished responses eliminated. His methodological innovations (particularly his “puzzle-box”) facilitated objective quantitative data collection and provided a paradigm for Behaviorist research methods to follow (especially the “Skinner box”).
ii. John B. Watson: Early Behaviorism

Watson coined the term “Behaviorism” as a name for his proposal to revolutionize the study of human psychology in order to put it on a firm experimental footing. In opposition to received philosophical opinion, to the dominant Introspectionist approach in psychology, and (many said) to common sense, Watson (1912) advocated a radically different approach. Where received “wisdom” took conscious experience to be the very stuff of minds and hence the (only) appropriate object of psychological investigation, Watson advocated an approach that led, scientifically, “to the ignoring of consciousness” and the illegitimacy of “making consciousness a special object of observation.” He proposed, instead, that psychology should “take as a starting point, first the observable fact that organisms, man and animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment” and “secondly, that certain stimuli lead the organisms to make responses.” Whereas Introspectionism had, in Watson’s estimation, miserably failed in its attempt to make experimental science out of subjective experience, the laboratories of animal psychologists, such as Pavlov and Thorndike, were already achieving reliably reproducible results and discovering general explanatory principles. Consequently, Watson — trained as an “animal man” himself — proposed, “making behavior, not consciousness, the objective point of our attack” as the key to putting the study of human psychology on a similar scientific footing. Key it proved to be. Watson’s revolution was a smashing success. Introspectionism languished, behaviorism flourished, and considerable areas of our understanding of human psychology (particularly with regard to learning) came within the purview of experimental investigation along broadly behavioristic lines. Notably, also, Watson foreshadows Skinner’s ban on appeals to inner (central nervous) processes, seeming to share the Skinnerian sentiment “that because so little is known about the central nervous system, it serves as the last refuge of the soul in psychology” (Zuriff 1985: 80). Watson is, consequently, loath to hypothesize central processes, going so far as to speculate that thought occurs in the vocal tract, and is — quite literally — subaudible talking to oneself (Watson 1920).
iii. Intermediaries: Edward Tolman and Clark Hull

Tolman and Hull were the two most noteworthy figures of the movement’s middle years. Although both accepted the S-R framework as basic, Tolman and Hull were far more willing than Watson to hypothesize internal mechanisms or “intervening variables” mediating the S-R connection. In this regard their work may be considered precursory to cognitivism, and each touches on important philosophical issues besides. Tolman’s purposive behaviorism attempts to explain goal-directed or purposive behavior, focusing on large, intact, meaningful behavior patterns or “molar” behavior (e.g., kicking a ball) as opposed to simple muscle movements or “molecular” behavior (e.g., various flexings of leg muscles); regarding the molecular level as too far removed from our perceptual capacities and explanatory purposes to provide suitable units for meaningful behavioral analysis. For Tolman, stimuli play a cognitive role as signals to the organism, leading to the formation of “cognitive maps” and to “latent learning” in the absence of reinforcement. Overall,

The stimuli which are allowed in are not connected by just simple one-to-one switches to the outgoing responses. Rather the incoming impulses are usually worked over and elaborated in the central control room into a tentative cognitive-like map of the environment. And it is this tentative map, indicating routes and paths and environmental relationships, which finally determines what responses, if any, the animal will finally make. (Tolman 1948: 192)

Clark Hull undertook the ambitious program of formulating an exhaustive theory of such mechanisms intervening between stimuli and responses: the theory was to take the form of a hypothetical-deductive system of basic laws or “postulates” enabling the prediction of behavioral responses (as “output variables”) on the basis of external stimuli (“input variables”) plus internal states of the organism (“intervening variables”). Including such organismic “intervening” variables (O) in the predictive/explanatory laws results in the following revised explanatory schema:

S & O -> R

The intervening O-variables Hull hypothesized included drive and habit strength. Attributes of, and relations among, these variables are what the postulates describe: further attributes and relationships were derived as theorems and corollaries from the basic postulates. Hull’s student, Edward Spence, attempted to carry on with the program, without lasting success. Expected gains in predictive-explanatory scope and precision were not achieved and, with hindsight, it is easy to see that such an elaborate theoretical superstructure, built on such slight observational-experimental foundations, was bound to fall. Hull’s specific proposals are presently more historical curiosities than live hypotheses. Nevertheless, currently prevalent cognitivist approaches share Hull’s general commitment to internal mechanisms.
iv. B. F. Skinner: Radical Behaviorism

Skinner’s self-described “radical behaviorist” approach is radical in its insistence on extending behaviorist strictures against inward experiential processes to include inner physiological ones as well. The scientific nub of the approach is a concept of operant conditioning indebted to Thorndike’s “Law of Effect.” Operants (e.g., bar-presses or key-pecks) are units of behavior an organism (e.g., a rat or pigeon) occasionally emits “spontaneously” prior to conditioning. In operant conditioning, operants followed by reinforcement (e.g., food or water) increase in frequency and come under control of discriminative stimuli (e.g., lights or tones) preceding the response. By increasingly judicious reinforcement of increasingly close approximations, complex behavioral sequences are shaped. On Skinner’s view, high-level human behavior, such as speech, is the end result of such shaping. Prolonged absence of reinforcement leads to extinction of the response. Many original and important Skinnerian findings — e.g., that constantly reinforced responses extinguish more rapidly than intermittently reinforced responses — concern the effects of differing schedules of reinforcement. Skinner notes the similarity of operant behavioral conditioning to natural evolutionary selection: in each case apparently forward-looking or goal-directed developments are explained (away) by a preceding course of environmental “selection” among randomly varying evolutionary traits or, in the psychological case, behavioral tricks. The purposiveness which Tolman’s molar behavioral description assumes, radical behaviorism thus claims to explain. Likewise, Skinner questions the explanatory utility of would-be characterizations of inner processes (such as Hull’s): such processes, being behavior themselves (though inner), are more in need of explanation themselves, Skinner holds, than they are fit to explain outward behavior. By “dismissing mental states and processes,” Skinner maintains, radical behaviorism “directs attention to the … history of the individual and to the current environment where the real causes of behavior are to be found” (Skinner 1987: 75). On this view, “if the proper attention is paid to the variables controlling behavior and an appropriate behavioral unit is chosen, orderliness appears directly in the behavior and the postulated theoretical processes become superfluous” (Zuriff: 88). Thus understood, Skinner’s complaint about inner processes “is not that they do not exist, but that they are not relevant” (Skinner 1953) to the prediction, control, and experimental analysis of behavior.

Skinner stressed prediction and control as his chief explanatory desiderata, and on this score he boasts that “experimental analysis of behaviour” on radical behaviorist lines “has led to an effective technology, applicable to education, psychotherapy, and the design of cultural practices in general” (Skinner 1987: 75). Even the most strident critics of radical behaviorism, I believe, must accord it some recognition in these connections. Behavior therapy (based on operant principles) has proven effective in treating phobias and addictions; operant shaping is widely and effectively used in animal training; and behaviorist instructional methods have proven effective — though they may have become less fashionable — in the field of education. Skinnerian Behaviorism can further boast of significantly advancing our understanding of stimulus generalization and other important learning-and-perception related phenomena and effects. Nevertheless, what was delivered was less than advertised. In particular, Skinner’s attempt to extend the approach to the explanation of high-grade human behavior failed, making Noam Chomsky’s dismissive (1959) review of Skinner’s book, Verbal Behavior, something of a watershed. On Chomsky’s diagnosis, not only had Skinner’s attempt at explaining verbal behavior failed, it had to fail given the insufficiency of the explanatory devices Skinner allowed: linguistic competence (in general) and language acquisition (in particular), Chomsky argued, can only be explained as expressions of innate mechanisms — presumably, computational mechanisms. For those in the “behavioral sciences” already chaffing under the severe methodological constraints Skinnerian orthodoxy imposed, the transition to “cognitive science” was swift and welcome. By 1985 Zuriff would write, “the received wisdom of today is that behaviorism has been refuted, its methods have failed, and it has little to offer modern psychology” (Zuriff 1985: 278). Subsequent developments, however, suggest that matters are not that simple.
v. Post-Behaviorist and Neo-behavioristic Currents: Externalism and Connectionism

Several recent developments inside and beside the mainstream of “cognitive science” — though their proponents have not been keen to style themselves “behaviorists” — appear to be rather behavioristic. Semantic externalism is the view that “meanings ain’t in the head” (Putnam 1975: 227) but depend, rather, on environmental factors; especially on sensory and behavioral intercourse with the referents of the referring thoughts or expressions. If emphasis on the outward or behavioral aspects of thought or intelligence — and attendant de-emphasis of inward experiential or inner procedural aspects — is the hallmark of behaviorism, semantic externalism is, on its face, behavioristic (though this is seldom remarked). Emphasis (as by Burge 1979) on social (besides the indexical, or sensory-behavioral) determinants of reference — on what Putnam called “the linguistic division of labor” — lends this view a distinct Wittgensteinean flavor besides. Such externalist “causal theories” of reference, although far from unquestioned orthodoxy, are currently among the leading cognitive scientific contenders. Less orthodox, but even more behavioristic, is the procedural externalism advocated by Andy Clark (2001), inspired by work in “Situated Cognition, Distributed and Decentralized Cognition, Real-World Robotics, and Artificial Life” (Clark 2001: abstract); identifying thought with “complex and iterated processes which continually loop between brain, body, and technological environment”; according to which the “intelligent process just is the spatially and temporally extended one which zig-zags between brain, body, and world” (Clark 2001: 132). Perhaps most importantly, the influential connectionist hypothesis that the brain does parallel processing of distributed representations, rather than serial processing of localized (language-like) representations, also waxes behavioristic. In parallel systems, typically, initial programming (comparable to innate mechanisms) is minimal and the systems are “trained-up” to perform complex tasks over a series of trails, by a process somewhat like operant shaping.
b. Philosophical Behaviorists

i. Precursors, Preceptors, & Fellow Travelers: William James, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell

In opposition to the “Structuralist” philosophical underpinnings of introspectionism, behaviorism grew out of a competing “Functionalist” philosophy of psychology that counted Dewey and William James among its leading advocates. Against structuralist reification of the content of experience, Dewey urged that sensations be given a functional characterization, and proposed to treat them as functionally defined occupants of roles in the “reflex arc” which — since it “represents both the unit of nerve structure and the type of nerve function” — should supply the “unifying principle and controlling working hypothesis in psychology” (Dewey 1896: 357); though the arc, Dewey insisted, is misunderstood if not viewed in broader organic-adaptive context. On another front — against structuralist reification of the subject of experience — William James famously maintained,

that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ’soul’ upon the air of philosophy.

James hastened to add, that he meant “only to deny that the word [`consciousness'] stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function” (James 1912). The James-Lange theory of emotions — which holds that “the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion (James 1884: 189-190) — prefigures later behavioristic deflationary analyses of other categories of presumed mentation.

Bertrand Russell was among the first philosophers to recognize the philosophical significance of the behaviorist revolution Watson proposed. Though never a card-carrying behaviorist himself — insisting that the inwardness or “privacy” of “sense-data” “does not by itself make [them] unamenable to scientific treatment” (Russell 1921: 119) — Russell, nevertheless, asserted that behaviorism “contains much more truth than people suppose” and regarded it “as desirable to develop the behaviourist method to the fullest possible extent” (Russell 1927: 73), proposing a united front between behaviorism and science-friendly analytic philosophy of mind. Such fronts soon emerged on both the “formal language” and “ordinary language” sides of ongoing analytic philosophical debate.
ii. Logical Behaviorism: Rudolf Carnap

What is sometimes called the “formalist” or “ideal language” line of analytic philosophy seeks the logical and empirical regimentation of (would-be) scientific language for the sake of its scientific improvement. “Logical behaviorism” refers, most properly, to Carnap and Hempel’s proposed regimentation of psychological discourse on behavioristic lines, calling for analyses of mental terms along lines consonant with the Logical Empiricist doctrine of verificationism (resembling the “operationism” of P.W. Bridgman 1927) they espoused. According to verificationism, a theoretic attribution — say of temperature — as in “it’s 23.4º centigrade” “affirms nothing other than” that certain “physical test sentences obtain”: sentences describing the would-be “coincidence between the level of the mercury and the mark of the scale numbered 23.4″ on a mercury thermometer, and “other coincidences,” for other measuring instruments (Hempel 1949: 16-17). Similarly, it was proposed, that for scientific psychological purposes, “the meaning of a psychological statement consists solely in the function of abbreviating the description of certain modes of physical response characteristic of the bodies of men and animals” (Hempel 1949: 19), the modes of physical response by which we test the truth of our psychological attributions. “Paul has a toothache” for instance would abbreviate “Paul weeps and makes gestures of such and such kinds”; “At the question `What is the matter?,’ Paul utters the words `I have a toothache’”; and so on (Hempel 1949: 17). As Carnap and Hempel came to give up verificationism, they gave up logical behaviorism, and came to hold, instead, that “the introduction and application of psychological terms and hypotheses is logically and methodologically analogous to the introduction and application of the terms and hypotheses of a physical theory.” Theoretical terms on this newly emerging (and now prevalent) view need only be loosely tied to observational tests in concert with other terms of the theory. They needn’t be fully characterized, each in terms of its own observations, as on the “narrow translationist” (Hempel 1977: 14) doctrine of logical behaviorism. As verificationism went, so went logical behaviorism: liberalized requirements for the empirical grounding of theoretical posits encouraged the taking of “cognitive scientific” liberties (in practice) and (in theory) the growth of cognitivist sympathies among analytic philosophers of mind. Still, despite having been renounced by its champions as unfounded and having found no new champions; and despite seeming, with hindsight, clearly false; logical behaviorism continues to provoke philosophical discussion, perhaps due to that very clarity. Appreciation of how logical behaviorism went wrong (below) is widely regarded by cognitivists as the best propaedeutic to their case for robust recourse to hypotheses about internal computational mechanisms.
iii. Ordinary Language Behaviorists: Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein

The “ordinary language” movement waxed most strongly in the work of Ryle and Wittgenstein around the middle of the twentieth century. Their investigations are “meant to throw light on the facts of our language” in its everyday employment (Wittgenstein 1953: §130). Where the formalist seeks the logical and empirical regimentation of would-be scientific language, including psychological terms, Ryle and Wittgenstein regard our everyday use of mental terminology as unimpeached by its scientific “defects” … which are not defects … because such talk is not in the scientific line of business. To misconstrue talk of people “as knowing, believing, or guessing something, as hoping, dreading, intending or shirking something, as designing this or being amused at that” (Ryle 1949: 15) on the model of scientific hypotheses about inner mechanisms misconstrues the “logical grammar” (Wittgenstein) of such talk, or makes a “category-mistake” (Ryle). Philosophical puzzlements about knowledge of other minds and mind-body interaction arise from such misconstrual: for instance, attempts to solve the mind-body problem, Ryle claims, “presuppose the legitimacy of the disjunction `Either there exist minds or there exist bodies (but not both)’” which “would be like saying, `Either she bought a left-hand and a right-hand glove or she bought a pair of gloves (but not both)’” (Ryle 1949: 22-3). The most basic misconstrual (Wittgenstein’s and Ryle’s diagnoses concur) involves thinking — when we talk of “knowing, believing, or guessing,” etc. — “that these verbs are supposed to denote the occurrence of specific modifications” either mechanical (in brains) or “paramechanical” (in streams of consciousness):

So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we have denied the mental processes. And naturally we don’t want to deny them.” (Wittgenstein 1953: §308)

Not wanting to deny, e.g., “that anyone ever remembers anything” (Wittgenstein 1953: §306) Wittgenstein and Ryle offer broadly dispositional stories about how mentalistic talk does work, in place of “the model of ‘object and designation’” (Wittgenstein 1953: §293) they reject.

According to Wittgenstein on the object-designation model — where the object is supposed to be private or introspected — it “drops out of consideration as irrelevant” (Wittgenstein 1953: §293): the “essential thing about private experience” here is “not that each person possesses his own exemplar” but “that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else” (§272). So, if “someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case” this would be as if

everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a `beetle’. No one can look in anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. — Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. — But suppose the word `beetle’ had a use in these people’s language? — If so, it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. — No, one can `divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. (§293)

Rather than referring to inner experiences, sensation words, according to Wittgenstein, “are connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of the sensation and used in their place” (§246): self-attributions of “pain” and other sensation terms are avowals not descriptions: “A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour.” Here, Wittgenstein explains, he is not “saying that the word `pain’ really means crying”: rather, “the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it” (§244). Avowals join the “natural expressions” to supply the “outward criteria” which logically (not just evidentially) constrain and enable the uses sensation and other “`inner process’” words have in our public language (§580). Furthermore, Wittgenstein famously argues, we cannot even coherently imagine a private language “in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences” exclusively “for his private use” because the “private ostensive definition” (§380) required to fix the reference of the would-be sensation-denoting expression could not establish a rule for its use. “To think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule” and in the case of usage consequent on the envisaged private baptism “thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as … obeying” (§202).

For Ryle, when we employ the “verbs, nouns and adjectives, with which in ordinary life we describe the wits, characters, and higher-grade performances of people with whom we have do” (Ryle 1949: 15) “we are not referring to occult episodes of which their overt acts and utterances are effects; we are referring to those overt acts and utterances themselves” (25) or else to a “disposition, or a complex of dispositions” (15) to such acts and utterances. “Dispositional words like `know’, `believe’, `aspire’, `clever’, and `humorous”’ signify multi-track dispositions: “abilities, tendencies or pronenesses to do, not things of one unique kind, but things of lots of different kinds” (118): “to explain an action as done from a specified motive or inclination is not to describe the action as the effect of a specified cause”: being dispositions, motives “are not happenings and are not therefore of the right type to be causes” (113). Accordingly, “to explain an act as done from a certain motive is not analogous to saying that the glass broke, because a stone hit it, but to the quite different type of statement that the glass broke, when the stone hit it, because the glass was brittle” (87). The force of such explanation is not “to correlate [the action explained] with some occult cause, but to subsume it under a propensity or behavior trend” (110). The explanation does not prescind from the act to its causal antecedents but redescribes the act in broader context, telling “a more pregnant story,” as when we explain the bird’s “flying south” as “migration”; yet, Ryle observes,” the process of migrating is not a different process from that of flying south; so it is not the cause of its flying south” (142). Finally, the connection between disposition and deed, as Ryle understands it, is a logical-criterial, not a contingent-causal one: brave deeds are not caused by bravery, they constitute it (as the “soporific virtue,” or sleep-inducing power, of opium doesn’t cause it to induce sleep since tending to induce sleep is this power or “virtue”).
iv. Reasons , Causes, and the Scientific Imperative

For formalists, the informality and imprecision of ordinary language formulations invite criticism. Take Ryle’s “migration” comparison: either, it would seem, Ryle is saying that everyday psychological explanations yield only vague interpretive understanding, having no scope for scientific development; or else, it would seem, the “more pregnant story” must be formalizable in terms of predictive-explanatory laws (as of migration, in Ryle’s example) with logical-behaviorial-definition-like rigor (if not content). The point of logical behaviorist analysis is to scientifically ground talk of “belief,” “desire,” “sensation,” and the rest, whose everyday use seems empirically precarious. With this aim in mind, “explanatory” procession from low-level matter-of-fact description (“flying south”) to more interpretive description (“migration”), such as Ryle envisages, seems to move in the wrong direction … unless, again, the “more pregnant story” is not just redescriptive but delivers scientific theoretic gains in the form of more general and precise explantory-predictive laws. A related debate raged fiercely through the nineteen fifties and early sixties between defenders of the (would-be) scientific status of “motive” or “belief-desire” explanations (notably Hempel) and champions of the Rylean thesis that “reasons aren’t causes” (Elizabeth Anscombe and Stuart Hampshire, among them). Donald Davidson’s (1963) defense of “the ancient — and commonsense — position that rationalization is a species of causal explanation” is widely recognized as a watershed in this debate, though it remains doubtful to what extent cognivists retain rights to the water shed, since Davidson counts reasons to be causal in virtue of noncognitive (low-level physical) properties. On the other hand, philosophers in the ordinary language tradition (e.g., Hampshire 1950, Geach 1957) raised daunting technical difficulties (below) for the “narrow translationist” plans of logical behaviorism. Such criticisms hastened the advent of cognitivism as an alternative to behaviorism of any stripe among philosophers unwilling to abide the informality, imprecision, and seeming scientific defeatism of the ordinary language approach.
v. Later Day Saints: Willard van Orman Quine aand Alan Turing

Quine, considered by many to be the greatest Anglo-American philosopher of the last half of the twentieth century, was a self-avowed “behaviorist,” and such tendencies are evident in several areas of his thought, beginning with his enthusiasm for a linguistic turn (as Bergmann 1964 styled it: see Rorty 1967) in the philosophy of mind. “A theory of mind,” Quine writes, “can gain clarity and substance … from a better understanding of the workings of language, whereas little understanding of the working of language is to be hoped for in mentalistic terms” (Quine 1975: 84). Quine’s “naturalized” inquiries concerning knowledge and language attempt, further, to incorporate empirical findings and methods from Skinnerian psychology. In contrast to logical behaviorism (above), notably, Quine “never … aspired to the ascetic adherence to operational definitions” and always acknowledged — indeed insisted – that science “settles for partial criteria and for partial explanations” of its theoretic posits “in terms of other partially explained notions” (Quine 1990: 291). Still, he is not keen — as his cognitivist contemporaries (e.g., Putnam) and followers (e.g., Fodor) are — about the prospects such looser empiricist strictures offer for scientific deployment of mentalistic vernacular terms like “belief,” “desire,” and “sensation”. To standard behaviorist concern about the empirical credentials of alleged private entities and introspective reports, Quine adds the consideration that talk of “belief”, “desire”, and other intentional mental states is so logically ill-behaved as to be irreconcilable with materialism and scientifically unredeemable. In the final analysis, however, the behaviorism Quine proposes is methodological. His final metaphysical word is physicalism: “having construed behavioral dispositions in turn as physiological states, I end up with the so called identity theory of mind: mental states are states of the body” (Quine 1975: 94); yet, his antiessentialism here (as elsewhere) lends his physicalism a behavioristic cast (see next section).

Alan Turing is transitional. Along with the digital age, his theory of computation helped inspire the cognitivist revolution, making him, by some lights the first cognitivist. On the other hand, the methodological behaviorism of Turing’s proposed Imitation Game test for artificial intelligence (the “Turing test”) has been widely remarked and “the Turing test conception” of intelligence may be considered a parade case of metaphysical behaviorism for purposes of refutation (as by Block 1981) or illustration (as follows).
vi. The Turing Test Conception: Behaviorism as Metaphysical Null Hypothesis

The Imitation Game proposed by Turing (1950) was originally a game of female impersonation: the aim of the game for the (male) querant is to pass for (that is, be judged by the questioner to be) female. The Turing test replaces the male querant with a computer whose aim is to pass for human. This simplified setup (Turing’s actual proposal involves an additional complication, a third participant or foil besides to the querant and questioner) can be used to explain the metaphysical character of the dispute as a dispute about essence. In the original (man-woman) Imitation Game, notice, however good the impersonation, it doesn’t make the querant female. Something else is essential: it’s the content of their chromosomes (not their conversation) that makes the querant female or not. Different proposals for what that essential something is in the case of thought, then, represent different metaphysical takes on the nature of mind. In the Turing test scenario these different [proposed essences] represent further conditions necessary to promote intelligent-seeming behavior into actual intelligence, and sufficing for intelligence, or mentation, even in the absence of such behavior.

Dualistic Essentialism: S -> [(the right) conscious experiential processes] -> R
Physicalistic Essentialism: S -> [(the right) physical processes] -> R
Cognitivistic Essentialism: S -> [(the right) computational processess] -> R
Behavioristic Inessentialism: S -> [whatever works] -> R

Dualistic theories propose a conscious experiential essence; physicalistic (or “mind-brain identity”) theories propose a physical (specifically, neurophysiological) essence; and cognitivistic theories a procedural or computational essence. Behaviorism, in contrast, doesn’t care what mediates the intelligent-seeming S -> R connection; behavioristically speaking, intelligence is as intelligence does regardless of the manner of the doing (experiential, neurophysiological, computational, or otherwise). Behaviorism, thus construed, “is not a metaphysical theory: it is the denial of a metaphysical theory” and consequently “asserts nothing” (Ziff 1958: 136); at least, nothing positively metaphysical.
vii. Logical Behaviorism Metaphysically Construed

Logical behaviorism may be seen, in the light of the preceding, as attempting to stipulate nominal essences (Locke 1690: IIiii15) where dualism, physicalism, and cognitivism propose to discover real ones. Further, although the motives of its founders (Carnap and Hempel) were chiefly epistemic or “methodological,” logical behaviorism seemed to many to invite metaphysical exploitation. Because the definitions Carnap and Hempel proposed sought to specify observationally necessary and sufficient conditions for true attributions of the mental terms in what they called “the physical thing language,” the successful completion of this program, it seemed, would reduce the mental to the physical. Mentalistic descriptions of people as “expecting pain” or “having toothaches” would be completely replaceable, in principle and without cognitive loss, by talk of bodily transitions; thoughts and experiences would thus be shown to be nothing above and beyond such bodily transitions; vindicating materialism. As the the methodological emphasis of early analytic philosophy receded and was replaced by more frankly metaphysical concerns among formalist analytic philosophers of mind, it was chiefly this would-be metaphysical application of logical behaviorism that came increasingly under philosophical scrutiny.
2. Objections & Discussion

a. Technical Difficulties
i. Action v. Movement

Ordinary language philosophers were among the first to raise daunting difficulties for the strict translationist program which, they argued, was guilty of a category mistake — or at least of wildly underestimating the impracticability of what they were proposing — in conflating the concepts of action and movement under the heading of “behavior.” As D. W. Hamlyn puts this complaint, “where activity is exhibited, it is not necessarily inappropriate to talk of movements, but it will be so to do so in the same context, in the same universe of discourse”:

With movements we are concerned with physical phenomena, the laws concerning which are in principle derivable from the laws of physics. But the behaviour which we call “posting a letter” or “kicking a ball” involves a very complex series of movements, and the same movements will not be exhibited on all occasions on which we should describe the behavior in the same way. No fixed criteria can be laid down which will enable us to decide what series of movements shall constitute “posting a letter.” Rather we have learnt to interpret a varying range of movements as coming up to the rough standard which we observe in acknowledging a correct description of such behaviour as posting a letter. (Hamlyn 1953: 134-135)

The task of defining mentalistic predications such as “wanting to score a goal” in terms of outward acts — or dispositions to acts — like kicking a ball (Tolman’s “molar behavior”) seems daunting enough; the task of casting the definition in terms of movements or “molecular behavior” — “colorless movements and mere receptor impulses” (Watson), “motions and noises” (Ryle) — seems beyond daunting.
ii. From Paralytics to Perfect Actors

If the mental were completely definable in outwardly behavioral terms — as logical behaviorism proposes — then outward behavioral capacities or dispositions would be necessary for thought or experience. But a complete paralytic, it seems, might still think thoughts (e.g., I can’t move), harbor desires (e.g., to move) and experience (e.g., despairing) sensations. Such possibilities are, on their face, contrary to logical behaviorism. From the logical behaviorist perspective, while such cases may complicate the description of the mental in behavioral terms, they do not seem fatal. It may be replied, e.g., that wanting to move is being disposed to move if able and, since the various possible causes of the disability (severed spinal cords, curare poisoning, etc.) are physically specifiable, this envisaged complication is wholly consistent with behaviorist strictures and reductionist hopes. Hilary Putnam’s imagined super-super-spartans (“X-worlders“) are less easily countered. X-worlders (as Putnam called them) “suppress all … pain behavior” by “a great effort of will” for “what they regard as important ideological reasons” (Putnam 1963: 332-334). Like paralytics, these super-super-spartans “lack the behavioral dispositions envisioned by the behaviorists to be associated with pain, even though they do in fact have pain” (Block 1981: 12); but, unlike paralytics, they lack these dispositions for psychological reasons: efforts of will undertaken for ideological reasons — unlike severed spinal cords and doses of curare — would not be physically specifiable and any envisaged complications of the behavioral definitions attempting to build exceptions for these causes would be inconsistent with behaviorist strictures and reductionist hopes. And contrary to the sufficiency of behavior for pain that logical behaviorist definitions would imply, “an exactly analogous example of perfect pain-pretenders shows that no behavioral disposition is sufficient for pain either” (Block 1981: 12: emphasis added).
iii. The Intentional Circle

Among the technical arguments against logical behaviorism, the most influential has been the “intentional circle” argument harking back to Chisholm (1957, ch. 11) and Geach (1957, p. 8): indeed the perfect actor line of counterexamples “flows out of the Chisholm-Geach point” as Block (1981:12) notes. A desire to stay dry, for instance, will dispose you to carry an umbrella only on the condition that you believe it might rain; and, conversely, the belief it might rain will dispose you to carry an umbrella only on the condition that you desire to stay dry. Such Geach-Chisholm type examples show that “which behavioral dispositions a desire issues in depends on other states of the desirer. And similar points apply to behaviorist analyses of belief and other mental states” (Block 1981: 12). While this point is most plain with respect to intentional mental states such as belief and desire, perfect actor examples seem to show it to extend to sensations, such as pain, as well: “a disposition to pain behavior is not a sufficient condition of having pain, since the behavioral disposition could be produced by a number of different combinations of mental states, e.g., [pain + a normal preference function] or by [no pain + an overwhelming desire to appear to have pain]” (Block 1981: 15); and, conversely, the dispositions are not a necessary condition since unpained-behavior dispositions might be produced by, e.g. [no pain + a normal preference function] or by [pain + an overwhelming desire to appear not to have pain]. “Conclusion: one cannot define the conditions under which a given mental state will issue in a given behavioral disposition” as logical behaviorism proposes “without adverting to other mental states” (Block 1981: 12), which logical behaviorism precludes. Such arguments are widely “regarded as decisive refutations of behaviorist analyses of many mental states, such as belief, desire, and pain” (Block 1981: 13). The “functionalist” doctrine that a mental state is “definable in terms of its causal relations to inputs, outputs, and other mental states” (Block 1980: 257), not to inputs and outputs alone (a la logical behaviorism), also flows directly from the Geach-Chisholm point.

In truth, as Putnam himself notes, whether refutation of the “admittedly oversimplified position” of logical behaviorism refutes behaviorism tout court depends on the extent to which “the defects which this position exhibits are also exhibited by the more complex and sophisticated positions which are actually held” (Putnam 1957: 95). Notably, perfect actor and other would-be thought experimental counterexamples to behaviorism would counterexemplify metaphysical construals which those who have actually held “the more complex and sophisticated positions” at issue, for the most part, explicitly disavow. Also, notably, Ryle’s characterization of intentional mental states (in particular) as multi-track “dispositions the exercises of which are indefinitely heterogenous” (Ryle 1949: 44) seems already to allow for intentional “circularity”: Tolman and Hull-style behaviorism even explicitly embraces it. For refutation of behaviorism tout court to be claimed, cognitivism would be have to be so simply identified with the view that a mental state is “definable in terms of its causal relations to inputs, outputs, and other mental states” that Tolman, Hull, and Ryle, count as cognitivists. That’s too simple. One may agree “that the logically necessary and sufficient conditions for the ascription of a mental state” would have to “refer not just to environmental variables but to other mental states of the organism” (Fodor 1975: 7 n.7) — that mental attributions have to be reduced all together (or holistically) not one by one (atomistically) — yet behavioristically refuse the call for further computational (or physical or phenomenological) constraints on what count as mental states. The “faith that … one will surely get to pure behavioral ascriptions” — motions and noises — “if only one pursues the analysis far enough” (Fodor 1975: 7 n.7) is also behavioristically dispensable. Notably these two tacks have their costs: the first abandons hope for essential scientific characterization of the mental. The second abandons hope for reductionist exploitation of behaviorist ideas on behalf of materialism. So chastened, behaviorism, while defensible, seems, to many, too boring to merit further philosophical bother.
iv. Methodological Complaints

Fodor’s summation of the complaint against against methodological behaviorism is succinct: by it, he maintains, “[p]sychology is … deprived of its theoretical terms” meaning “psychologists can provide methodologically reputable accounts only of such aspects of behavior as are the effects of environmental variables”; but “the spontaneity and freedom from local environmental control that behavior often exhibits” makes “this sort of methodology intolerably restrictive” (Fodor 1975: 1-2). Furthermore, “there would seem to be nothing in the project of explaining behavior by reference to mental processes which requires a commitment to [their] epistemological privacy in the traditional sense” of conscious subjectivity. “Indeed,” Fodor continues, “for better or worse, a materialist cannot accept such a commitment since his view is that mental events are a species of physical events, and physical events are publicly observable, at least in principle” (Fodor 1975: 4): the commitment is to inner computational not inward experiential processes. However, while Fodor 1975 adduces, “failure of behavioristic psychology to provide even a first approximation to a plausible theory of cognition” (Fodor 1975: 8) in support of cognitivist alternatives, Fodor 2000 confesses “that the most interesting — certainly the hardest — problems about thinking are unlikely to be much illuminated by any kind of computational theory we are now able to imagine” (Fodor 2000: 1). As for more isolated or “modular” processes (e.g., syntactic processing) where the “Computational Theory of Mind” by Fodor’s lights remains “by far the best theory of cognition that we’ve got; indeed, the only one we’ve got that’s worth the bother” (Fodor 2000: 1) … here, where, in Fodor’s judgment, behaviorism failed “to provide even a first approximation of a plausible theory,” cognitivism may be faulted with producing too many: elaborate theoretical superstructures built on slight observational-experimental foundations reminiscent of Hull’s. Notably, since Chomsky’s watershed “Review of Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner” Chomsky himself has held at least four distinct syntactic theories, and his currently fashionable “Minimalist Theory” presently competes with at least five distinct others. (Chomsky’s four theories (in chronological order) have been Transformational Grammar (1965), Extended Standard Theory (1975), Government and Binding (1984), and Minimalism (1995). Competing theories include, notably, Lexical Function Grammar (Bresnan), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Sag, Pollard), Functionalism (see Newmeyer), Categorial Grammar (Steedman), and Stratificational Grammar (Lamb).)
b. The Ur-Objection: Consciousness Denied

Behaviorism’s disregard for consciousness struck many from the first, and continues to strike many today, as contrary to plain self-experience and plain common-sense; not to mention all that makes life precious and meaningful. In this vein behaviorism has been “likened to `Hamlet’ without the Prince of Denmark” (Ryle 1949: 328) and behaviorists accused of “affecting general anesthesia” (Ogden & Richards 1926: 23) and made the butt of jokes in the vein of the following (see Ziff 1958):

Q: What does one behaviorist say to another when they meet on the street?
A: You’re fine. How am I?
Q: What does one behaviorist say to another after sex?
A: That was great for you. How was it for me?

In the same vein as John Searle still complains “the behaviorist seems to leave out the mental phenomena in question,” (Searle 1992: 34), E. B. Titchener complained, at the movement’s outset, of behaviorism’s “irrelevance to psychology as psychology is ordinarily understood” (Titchener 1914: 6). On the other hand Titchener’s prediction — that, due to this irrelevance, introspective psychology would continue to flourish alongside behaviorism — with hindsight, seems a bit laughable itself. As Ryle puts it, “the extruded hero,” consciousness, for scientific purposes, “soon came to seem so bloodless and spineless a being that even the opponents of these [behaviorist] theories began to feel shy of imposing heavy burdens upon his spectral shoulders” (Ryle 1949: 328). Ryle’s countercomplaint still rings true today despite recent attempts to revive consciousness as a subject of serious scientific inquiry; or, more to the point especially, in light of such attempts, which all, in one way or another, seek to revive the Wundtian program of correlating introspected experiential with observed neurophysiological events. While it may be urged that the hero was never wholly extruded but has been lurking all along in the caves of psychophysics (e.g., in correlations of physical stimulus variations with noticed differences in sensation), recent attempts to extend this psychology-as-psychophysics approach beyond psychophysics remain nascent at best.

“Imagery from Galton on has been the inner stronghold of a psychology based on introspection” (Watson 1913: 421) and here, with regard to direct sensory presentations (e.g., afterimages) and sensations (e.g., pain) — so-called qualia – the “neglect of consciousness” complaint against behaviorism is most acutely felt; and here it must be confessed that behaviorist replies have been mostly halting and evasive. Watson, confessing, “I may have to grant a few sporadic cases of imagery to him who will not be otherwise convinced” would marginalize the phenomena, insisting, “that the images of such a one are as sporadic and as unnecessary to his well-being and well-thinking as a few hairs more or less on his head” (Watson 1913: 423n.3) — a verdict Ryle deems confirmed. Scientifically, the “extruded hero,” it seems, can neither explanans nor explanandum be. Inward experience seems, scientifically, as nonexplanatory (of intentionality, intelligence, or other features of mind we should like to explain) as it seems itself scientifically inexplicable. Nevertheless, Ryle frankly confesses that “there is something seriously amiss” with his own treatment of sensations (Ryle 1949: 240) and, even, “not to know the right idioms to discuss these matters” in behavioristic good conscience; only hoping, his “discussion of them in the official idioms may have at least some internal Fifth Column efficacy” (Ryle 1949: 201). Still, inward experiences seem just as unaccountable on inner computational grounds as on outward behavioral ones — Kossyln’s 1980 data structural analysis of images as two dimensional data arrays, e.g., leaves their qualia still unaccounted for. Behavioristic losses on the count of qualia are, by no means, cognitivistic gains. Cognitivism itself “has been plagued by two `qualia’ centered objections” in particular: the Inverted Qualia Objection that, possibly, e.g., “though you and I have exactly the same functional organization, the sensation that you have when you look at red things is phenomenally the same as the sensation that I have when I look at green things” (Block 1980: 257); and the Absent Qualia Objection “that it is possible that a mental state of a person x be functionally identical to a state of y, even though x’s state has qualitative character while y’s state lacks qualitative character altogether” (Block 1980: 258).

Methodologically, then, the matter of consciousness remains about where Watson left it, as scientifically intractable as it seems morally crucial and common-sensically inescapable. Unless there is more scientific gold in those psychophysical hills than recently renewed attempts to mine them by Crick (1994) Edelman (1989) and others (see Horgan 1994) suggest, this is apt to be where matters remain for the foreseeable future. Notice, metaphysical dualism (identifying mental events with private, subjective, nonphysical, “modes” of conscious experience) may be held consistently with methodological behavioristic commitment to the explanatory superfluity of such factors by disallowing such events their apparent causal roles in the generation of behavior. Epiphenomenalism denies their causal efficacy altogether. Parallelism just denies their “downward” (mental-to-physical) causal efficacy. It is due, largely, to their reluctance to embrace such drastic expedients as parallelism and epiphenomenalism that, despite recently renewed would-be scientific interest in consciousness, most cognitive scientists and allied analytic philosophers continue to reject metaphysical dualism — remaining true to their metaphysical, along with their methodological, behavioral roots.

The enduring cogency of behaviorism’s challenge to the scientific bona fides of consciousness means that methodologically, at least, there seems no viable alternative to “practically everybody in cognitive science” remaining — if not “a behaviorist of one sort or another” (Fodor 2001: 13-14) — at least, behavioristic in some manner. Cognitive Science killed Behaviorism, they say. Still, Cognitive Science seems entitled to its last name only on condition that it retain a good measure of behavioristic conscience.