Eliezer, it’s particularly important to make a distinction, as the SEP and Wikipedia articles do to an extent, between “behaviorism” as a methodological stance in the field of psychology (of which Skinner was an advocate), and “(logical) behaviorism” as a position in the philosophy of mind associated with the logical positivists such as Carnap.
Carnap’s thesis, as expressed in his 1932⁄33 article “Psychology in Physical Language”, was simply that psychology could (ultimately) be reduced to physics—a proposition I presume you accept, but which used to be controversial, and still is in some quarters. Because neuroscience was not as advanced in the 1930s as it is now, the examples that Carnap gave of “translations” (e.g. “Mr. A is excited” translates into various propositions about his physical behavior, such as jumping up and down yelling, high blood pressure, etc.) have mislead some later readers (such as Hilary Putnam) into thinking that Carnap was saying mental states just consist of observed macroscopic behavior. In truth, however, there is nothing in Carnap’s article to suggest that the “behavior” of which mental states are alleged to consist excludes the microscopic behavior of neurons.
Eliezer, it’s particularly important to make a distinction, as the SEP and Wikipedia articles do to an extent, between “behaviorism” as a methodological stance in the field of psychology (of which Skinner was an advocate), and “(logical) behaviorism” as a position in the philosophy of mind associated with the logical positivists such as Carnap.
Carnap’s thesis, as expressed in his 1932⁄33 article “Psychology in Physical Language”, was simply that psychology could (ultimately) be reduced to physics—a proposition I presume you accept, but which used to be controversial, and still is in some quarters. Because neuroscience was not as advanced in the 1930s as it is now, the examples that Carnap gave of “translations” (e.g. “Mr. A is excited” translates into various propositions about his physical behavior, such as jumping up and down yelling, high blood pressure, etc.) have mislead some later readers (such as Hilary Putnam) into thinking that Carnap was saying mental states just consist of observed macroscopic behavior. In truth, however, there is nothing in Carnap’s article to suggest that the “behavior” of which mental states are alleged to consist excludes the microscopic behavior of neurons.