Matthew Haverly

Mind and body are not two realms

There is one kind of event: the behavior of an organism in an environment. Public and private differ in how accessible they are, not in what kind of thing they are - thoughts are covert verbal behavior, talking to yourself. "Mind" names no location; it is a construct, at best a metaphor for the organism's ongoing sensorimotor engagement with its surroundings. The everyday mental vocabulary is largely a false theory, but I will not claim neuroscience will replace it wholesale - I don't know that it can in its present state, which is not to say it never can.

A brain scan cannot tell you what someone is thinking; it redescribes the behavior at a neurological level. The physiological record is not a second route to a second kind of thing - it is the same event, described differently.

Mental events are activities, not entities

What fundamentally exists are processes, not things, and anything stable is a pattern in a process - behavior included, covert behavior included. The terms are verbs: behaving, remembering, attending. A skill is a rate, and a rate within a specific context, not a possession.

Where there is a process there are interconnected parts and functional relations, so an analysis of the relations is how you understand it. And if mental events were entities I could ask what they are made of, where they are located, what their shape, size, density and weight are - ego, id and superego have no answers. Naming a brain region is referencing the brain, not the entity.

There is no inner agent; the self is an illusion

There is no one in there. The self is a construct - at best a metaphor for a repertoire under particular stimulus control. What there is is a succession of experiences and a selection of behavior by consequences: the organism was changed by its history and no decider is required. There is no central controller anywhere in the system.

Nothing in the account needs a chooser. Contingencies of reinforcement select behavior out of a succession of experiences, and the unity people call a self is inferred, not found.

Faculties are repertoires with histories, not amounts a person has

We do not possess faculties in any amount. Drop the faculty vocabulary and measure what the person does under stated conditions; the construct adds nothing a measurement doesn't. What's there are repertoires with histories - "attention" is stimulus control, "executive function" is a set of self-management operants that can be trained. Competence is a fit between what an organism can do and what its environment affords.

Measurement under stated conditions yields information you can act on - it improves prediction and control of behavior; an amount of a faculty does not. I hold the affordance framing with some hesitation about the word "capacities."

The mind is not a place with contents

There is no stored content and no filing cabinet to rummage through. Remembering is present behavior under present conditions - a skilled re-enactment, supported by physical traces that are not copies. What content there is sits outside the organism, in notes, files and tools, with the person as the index to it; "storage" is the wrong word for it, but the location is right.

If memories were stored I could ask where, and how you'd measure who has more of them. A computer has megabytes; the brain is not a computer and is not processing information except as sensorimotor stimulation from the environment, to which the organism responds. And copies are a figment - Plato could not have observed whatever he says this world is a copy of.

There is no past and no future; talk of them is present verbal behavior

There is only now. When we talk about the future we are making predictions - the truest thing to say is that we are talking. When we refer to the past, recalling is present verbal behavior under present conditions: saying "yesterday I went to work" is something I do now, sitting in my chair at home, and its accuracy is checked against present evidence like a timestamp or a phone call, not against the past itself.

The only thing available to observe or measure is the organism behaving now. A past event is not available for inspection; what is available is a present report and present records of it.

The organism is always behaving

There is no state of doing nothing. Lying down is behavior; sleeping is behavior; short of being dead it is impossible for an organism to be doing nothing. Perceiving and acting are one unbroken cycle, and what varies is which behavior, under deprivation, satiation, schedule and stimulus control. Motivation is a rate question, not an energy question - there is no inner energizer that has to start the organism up.

Motivation is reified - we infer it from the rate or frequency at which a behavior is exhibited, then invoke the inference as the thing that produced the behavior. Working rather than Confident because I am new to behaviorism; I will debate anyone on it, but that is not the same as knowing that I know.

Nothing originates in the person

The causal chain does not begin inside the skin. The person is where phylogeny, personal history and current conditions converge; the causes run through rather than start there. And the causation is probabilistic: variables shift the probability of a response rather than determine the act, which keeps every observation and surrenders the metaphysics.

If action originated inside the person, exigent circumstances would have no bearing on what people do. Almost everyone grants that circumstances have some influence - which concedes that people are not entirely free, and turns the question into how free, a quantitative question rather than a metaphysical one.

Restore the first and third links

Environment then inner state then behavior, with the middle link carrying the explanation, drops the two links that do the work. Restore the first and third. The inner state is a collateral product - admissible as data, inadmissible as cause.

Mental "causes" are not causes. Mental "activity" is covert activity, and the question would remain: what caused it?

Mental causes are not a different kind of cause

A thought cannot move a muscle while being itself uncaused. I lean to one causal order - or at minimum, admit no cause that cannot in principle be manipulated. The live alternative I have not ruled out is that mental events are real but causally idle: produced by physical events, producing nothing.

How does the nonphysical move the physical? The claim has no mechanism. I cannot yet answer the best case for the causally-idle version, and token identity - each mental event just being a particular physical event - is a third option I want to look at.

History is the explanation; a stimulus is not a cause

History is the explanation - ontogeny and reinforcement history are where the causes are, not the present state. A stimulus is just a stimulus; it is not a cause. We do not emit behavior in response to a stimulus every time, and whether a behavior is emitted to a given stimulus is a fact about the organism's history. The account of how someone came to be as they are is the explanation, and the right question is what happened to you, not what is wrong with you.

I first read the history claim as incomplete because it seemed to leave out present contingencies, then saw that present stimuli do not do the explaining on their own - their function comes from the history that gave them one.

A setting fixes what is available; history fixes what is likely

A setting has its own bell curve of behaviors - a distribution of what gets emitted there - and the setting does part of the selecting before any history comes into it. Of all possible behaviors, the setting deselects some outright: with no food present, eating cannot be emitted, and what remains is waiting, or behavior that pursues and acquires food. The person's reinforcement history deselects more - behaviors not in that person's repertoire. Among the behaviors still standing, the ones with the highest probability of occurring are those that have been reinforced in the past. Not predeterministic: a degree of preselection by the setting, with the distribution across what remains set by history.

Describing the setting predicts a lot, but not who does what - the thing that accounts for the spread is each person's history. The setting fixes what is available; the history fixes what is likely.

Goals are predictions, not pullers

Purposes and goals do not pull behavior from the future; the future does not exist. A statement of a goal is a veiled prediction - saying "my goal is to lose ten pounds" is verbally predicting that I will behave in the manner required to produce that outcome. Behavior looks purposive because consequences selected it from the past: ordinary efficient causes, with "purpose" as shorthand for the selecting process.

The future is a non-existent referent, so nothing in it can act on anything. What is available is present verbal behavior that happens to be predictive, and a history of consequences that did the selecting.

A belief is covert verbal behavior that functions as a rule

A belief is verbal behavior. More specifically it is a tact, and when that tact is self-emitted - covertly, with speaker and listener the same person - it functions as a rule that governs the behavior that follows. That is the best account of what a belief is that I can give right now.

It puts beliefs where they can be observed and manipulated: as behavior with conditions of occurrence, with rule-governed effects that depend on a history that made rule-following reinforcing. I cannot yet answer the best case against it.

Meaning is use; content is not an inner item that pushes anything

The definition of a word depends on how it is used. Content is not an inner item that could push anything, and what a belief is about is fixed by the person's relations to their environment rather than by something inside them. What matters is the role a claim plays in a practice - what it licenses someone to infer and to do - which is to say how the person behaves, not only what they verbally report.

A verbal report is itself behavior, and people often verbally behave so as to present themselves as consistent - though not always, and a report may well be accurate and the person genuinely consistent. Either way the test is the practice, not the report.

Behavior is the subject matter, not a sign of something else

Behavior is the subject matter. The organism's activity in its environment is the topic, and there is nothing behind the activity that the activity stands for - the environment belongs in the statement, because the contingencies are part of what has to be accounted for. The brain is a legitimate subject in its own right, not the hiding place of an inferred construct.

If measurement of the thing behind behavior is forever indirect, then that thing cannot be measured; if it cannot be measured, it cannot be observed; and if it cannot be observed, there is no basis for claiming the real subject matter is the unobservable thing rather than the observable one. A preposterous claim.

Introspection is trained discrimination, and fails where training cannot reach

Introspection is the discrimination of one's own body, trained by a verbal community, and therefore unreliable exactly where the community had no access to train it. Accurate self-report can be trained through its public components - "when you clench your jaw, furrow your brow and ball up your fists, that's usually anger" - and an overt misreport can be corrected. A wholly private report has no correction channel at all. So treat reports as data about what a person says, not as observations of what is happening inside them.

A report of a wholly private event could never have been taught or corrected, so there is no standard for using the words rightly. The public components are the only place the training can get a grip.

freedom

Freedom is a process, not a state or quality. It is not a static thing. Freedom is produced when one tends not to escape or counterattack. Thus, freedom is the absence of counter-control.

Freedom is produced when one tends not to escape or counterattack.

Behaviorism and Christianity

Christianity and behaviorism are not entirely compatible, certainly not on a theological front. But behaviorism can help a Christian be a better Christian, because it can help with the mechanics of sanctification.

Most, if not all, theology cannot be empirically proven. Christianity offers little on how behavior changes, beyond God's kindness leading to repentance. Behaviorism says change the contingencies and the behavior changes, and kindness is typically a positive reinforcer, not an aversive one. That fits kindness as the antecedent to change, and fits 1 John's link between fear and punishment, with Skinner's distaste for punishment and insistence on positive reinforcement.

knowledge

Knowledge belongs in the metaphysical/abstraction category - it is a vestige of the "abstractions" stage in Auguste Comte's law of three stages (theological, metaphysical/abstractions, scientific/law-like regularities).

Knowledge is an abstraction. Confidence in Comte's three-stage framework itself is only Leaning: others criticize the neatness and distinctness of the stages, arguing all three can be found in any given period - but that aside, knowledge belongs in the metaphysical abstraction category.

knowing how

"Do you know how to X?" is better translated as "Have you ever X'd?"

It follows from knowledge being a vestige of the abstractions stage: the observable referent is whether the behavior has occurred.

mentalism in everyday language

Mentalistic talk - not just about knowledge - should be dropped from everyday language, period, not only from scientific language. It muddies and obfuscates things and makes them unclear, imprecise and inaccurate, and is therefore confusing.

"Mentalistic talk about knowledge usually creates confusion" is one of the pragmatic arguments against mentalism. Still sitting with the counterclaim that mentalistic language is useful in everyday speech, just not for scientific purposes.