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<The following is a portion of Larrys Text; further wikification is encouraged> |
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The following is a portion of Larrys Text; further wikification is encouraged |
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I'm going to present an objection to neural type physicalism. But first I'm going to present another kind of physicalism; I'm going to discuss it very quickly, because mainly I want to use it to make quite clear how neural type physicalism is only one kind of physicalism. In the middle of this century, it was very fashionable to try to reduce mental events to behavior. This view is called analytical behaviorism, because the idea is that we can ultimately analyze, or reduce, talk of mental events and processes in terms of things that humans say, express, and do. In other words, analytical behaviorism says that what a mental event is, is a propensity, a tendency, to display a certain set of behaviors -- words, facial expressions, bodily postures, and actions. If you want to see whether someone believes that God exists, you look at what he says, how he reacts when you say "God exists," whether he goes to church, and so on. And his belief is constituted by those behaviors; in other words, there isn't any more to his belief that God exists than those behaviors. Or to take another example, the good old example of pain. Analytical behaviorism would say that pain is nothing more than the tendency to wince, to grimace, to pull back quickly from the source of something causing bodily damage, to say "ouch" and "that hurts," and similar behaviors. That's all there is to pain! |
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I'm going to present an objection to neural type physicalism. But first I'm going to present another kind of physicalism; I'm going to discuss it very quickly, because mainly I want to use it to make quite clear how neural type physicalism is only one kind of physicalism. In the middle of this century, it was very fashionable to try to reduce mental events to behavior. This view is called [analytical behaviorism]?, because the idea is that we can ultimately analyze, or reduce, talk of mental events and processes in terms of things that humans say, express, and do. In other words, analytical behaviorism says that what a mental event is, is a propensity, a tendency, to display a certain set of behaviors -- words, facial expressions, bodily postures, and actions. If you want to see whether someone believes that God exists, you look at what he says, how he reacts when you say "God exists," whether he goes to church, and so on. And his belief is constituted by those behaviors; in other words, there isn't any more to his belief that God exists than those behaviors. Or to take another example, the good old example of pain. Analytical behaviorism would say that pain is nothing more than the tendency to wince, to grimace, to pull back quickly from the source of something causing bodily damage, to say "ouch" and "that hurts," and similar behaviors. That's all there is to pain! |
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