Psychologism and Behaviorism

Abstract

... This paper makes two claims: first, psychologism is true, and thus a natural behaviorist analysis of intelligence that is incompatible with psychologism is false. Second, the standard arguments against behaviorism are inadequate to defeat this natural behaviorist analysis of intelligence or to establish psychologism. While psychologism is of course anathema to behaviorists, it also seems wrong-headed to many philosophers who would not classify themselves as behaviorists. For example, Michael Dummett says: If a Martian could learn to speak a human language, or a robot be devised to behave in just the ways that are essential to a language speaker, an implicit knowledge of the correct theory of meaning for the language could be attributed to the Martian or the robot with as much right as to a human speaker, even though their internal mechanisms were entirely different. (Dummett, 1976) Dummett's view seems to be that what is relevant to the possession of a certain mental state is a matter of actual and potential behavior, and that internal processing is not relevant except to the extent that internal processing affects actual and potential behavior. I think that this Dummettian claim contains an important grain of truth, a grain that many philosophers wrongly take to be incompatible with psychologism. This grain of truth can be elucidated as follows. Suppose we meet Martians, and find them to be behaviorally indistinguishable from humans. We learn their languages and they learn ours, and we develop deep commercial and cultural relations with them. We contribute to their journals and enjoy their movies, and vice versa. Then Martian and human psychologists compare notes, only to find that in underlying psychological mechanisms the Martians are very different from us. The M...