Perception by Howard Robinson

Author:Howard Robinson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Humanities
Published: 2011-05-06T20:38:56.700187+00:00

The behaviouristic approach

It has proved correct to say that the behaviourist-cum-functionalist approach to experience is the only one open to the reductive physicalist.

A behaviourist-cum-functionalist (henceforward, just

‘behaviouristic’) approach to the PME faces many problems. It faces, a fortiori, all the general objections to such theories. The most famous of these in connection with their ability to accommodate perceptual experience is the ‘ qualia problem’—that is, the problem raised by the fact that such theories seem to omit the qualitative content, or ‘raw feel’

of experience. More directly concerned with the PME is the following difficulty.

The PME both has a general appeal, based on the fact that without it nothing would count as an empirical interpretation of our concepts, and a first-personal appeal. When I, as a subject, think of my understanding of empirical notions, the fact that certain concepts can be matched with certain kinds of experience plays a vital role in my own sense of what I mean by my language. This sense comes from putting together word and object of experience, not from putting together word and nexus of behavioural responses. If I want to understand ‘red’, for example, I fix my mind on an appropriate phenomenal object of experience; I do not try to concentrate on how I am disposed to react to it. Someone else, however, who was teaching me the idea or trying to test my knowledge of it, would concentrate on my reactions. The behavioural understanding of empirical interpretation is essentially third-personal.

It is a common intuitive objection to behaviouristic theories that they are viciously third-personal; that is, that they present a third-personal perspective on something which is essentially first-personal, namely, the viewpoint of the conscious subject. As with many fundamental disagreements—especially in the philosophy of mind—there is great difficulty in turning what appears to be a clear intuition into a demonstrative argument—that is, into an argument that does not rest on a premise which is more or less equivalent to, and just as contentious as, the initial intuition. I am going to try to turn the intuition that behaviouristic theories are viciously third-personal into an argument by showing that such theories cannot be applied to the first-personal perspective without a vicious circularity.

The problem can be brought out by considering the sort of situation that is the classic context for behaviourist interpretation: animal behaviour. It seems fairly natural to interpret the understanding of the world possessed by a rat in a maze as being no more than its ability to react to the barriers it encounters: one need not think of anything else inside the rat constituting its understanding other than those dispositions. But we can only make sense of the rat’s understanding in these reduced terms by interpreting those dispositions against a background picture of how the world around the rat really is: we have a non-reductive grasp on how the world really is and how the rat actually behaves, and against this background we can see the rat’s grasp on the world as no more than its dispositions to move in certain ways.

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