Phil, your last sentence is correct but as for the rest… it’s as if you can’t believe that these people simply meant what they said (there is no such thing as meaning or mind). Questions about meaning and mind were not threatening to philosophical behaviorists because they feared cognitive reductionism; those questions were threatening because the obvious answers led towards dualism and religion.
Remember that you are the beneficiary of many decades’ worth of extra ideas and knowledge. OK, Kant talked about representation back in the 18th century, but Kant was seen in the English-speaking world as obtuse German metaphysics. Also, the localization of brain function was not seen in terms of representational function. The cognitive revolution of the 1970s, and the adoption within neuroscience of information processing concepts, were really big breakthroughs. It’s like biology before and after Darwin: Before the idea of natural selection, it was a rare person who could look at the intricacies of biology and not think in terms of design. Similarly, before the idea of neural computation, it was really hard to think about the mind in a materialistic way. For example, Chomsky couldn’t have written his critique without having the concept of a state machine.
As a result, materialist psychologists in the first half of the 20th century just didn’t have the option of cognitive reductionism. Though I think the psychologists were less extreme about behaviorism than the philosophers. It really was a methodological choice for the psychologists, but the philosophers turned it into an ideology, and provided the sophisticated rationales for propositions like: there are no mental states, only words about mental states; and, words don’t have meanings, they’re just sounds which are produced within certain behavioral contexts.
In a comment you write “even a scientific theory can be hijacked by what we want to believe”. This is quite true, but again, if I understand you correctly, what’s at work here is the opposite of crypto-religiosity—it is determined denial of anything which might give non-materialistic entities a chance to reenter the conversation. A scorched-earth policy for materialist ontology. I believe this outlook is still at work, by the way, regarding qualia, the self, and so on. They do not fit naturally within the physical ontology we have, therefore they can’t be real—so say some. These days there’s a lot more belief in the harmony of science and subjectivity, to the point that people espouse views (the qualia are the computational states) which suffer from a different problem, crypto-dualism. (See Bertrand Russell for a materialistic thinker who was nonetheless good enough to realize that there is a problem in just identifying material states and mental states—thus his adventures in “neutral monism” and in various forms of aspect dualism.) But there remains a chronic tendency for people who love their favorite scientific ontology to sacrifice any aspect of consciousness—the flow of time, for example—if it doesn’t fit.
This is one area where we are repeating the old mistake—of refusing to see what’s in front of us, for the sake of a higher truth—in a new way. It’s ontological tunnel vision: I have a private reductionism, at the level of my ontological categories—perhaps I reduce everything to computation, or to configurations—and can’t imagine new categories or see the need for them. Everything that people say gets translated into my existing ontological language, or rejected. It’s a very difficult barrier to overcome, because as with Darwin, and as with the cognitive revolution, the third way only becomes accessible to everyone after pioneers map it and domesticate it a little. Until that happens, talking about it is like trying to point into the fourth dimension.
I am puzzled that my post is at −3; and Mitchell’s comment here is at 12; and they say nearly the same thing. They only start to differ when suggesting what motivated behaviorists; and they don’t differ much even then—disappointment in religion vs. antagonism towards religion.
User:Mitchell_Porter’s post differs from User:PhilGoetz’s post in that the former does not heavily overextrapolate from the uncontroversial points which the two Users agree about.
This is quite true, but again, if I understand you correctly, what’s at work here is the opposite of crypto-religiosity—it is determined denial of anything which might give non-materialistic entities a chance to reenter the conversation. A scorched-earth policy for materialist ontology.
I like that theory even better. It should encompass a superset of the behaviorists encompassed by my “religious cynic” theory—many militant atheists are former faithful gone cynical. But some are not; some learn animosity to the doctrine of the soul only from observing its bad effects.
Phil, your last sentence is correct but as for the rest… it’s as if you can’t believe that these people simply meant what they said (there is no such thing as meaning or mind). Questions about meaning and mind were not threatening to philosophical behaviorists because they feared cognitive reductionism; those questions were threatening because the obvious answers led towards dualism and religion.
Remember that you are the beneficiary of many decades’ worth of extra ideas and knowledge. OK, Kant talked about representation back in the 18th century, but Kant was seen in the English-speaking world as obtuse German metaphysics. Also, the localization of brain function was not seen in terms of representational function. The cognitive revolution of the 1970s, and the adoption within neuroscience of information processing concepts, were really big breakthroughs. It’s like biology before and after Darwin: Before the idea of natural selection, it was a rare person who could look at the intricacies of biology and not think in terms of design. Similarly, before the idea of neural computation, it was really hard to think about the mind in a materialistic way. For example, Chomsky couldn’t have written his critique without having the concept of a state machine.
As a result, materialist psychologists in the first half of the 20th century just didn’t have the option of cognitive reductionism. Though I think the psychologists were less extreme about behaviorism than the philosophers. It really was a methodological choice for the psychologists, but the philosophers turned it into an ideology, and provided the sophisticated rationales for propositions like: there are no mental states, only words about mental states; and, words don’t have meanings, they’re just sounds which are produced within certain behavioral contexts.
In a comment you write “even a scientific theory can be hijacked by what we want to believe”. This is quite true, but again, if I understand you correctly, what’s at work here is the opposite of crypto-religiosity—it is determined denial of anything which might give non-materialistic entities a chance to reenter the conversation. A scorched-earth policy for materialist ontology. I believe this outlook is still at work, by the way, regarding qualia, the self, and so on. They do not fit naturally within the physical ontology we have, therefore they can’t be real—so say some. These days there’s a lot more belief in the harmony of science and subjectivity, to the point that people espouse views (the qualia are the computational states) which suffer from a different problem, crypto-dualism. (See Bertrand Russell for a materialistic thinker who was nonetheless good enough to realize that there is a problem in just identifying material states and mental states—thus his adventures in “neutral monism” and in various forms of aspect dualism.) But there remains a chronic tendency for people who love their favorite scientific ontology to sacrifice any aspect of consciousness—the flow of time, for example—if it doesn’t fit.
This is one area where we are repeating the old mistake—of refusing to see what’s in front of us, for the sake of a higher truth—in a new way. It’s ontological tunnel vision: I have a private reductionism, at the level of my ontological categories—perhaps I reduce everything to computation, or to configurations—and can’t imagine new categories or see the need for them. Everything that people say gets translated into my existing ontological language, or rejected. It’s a very difficult barrier to overcome, because as with Darwin, and as with the cognitive revolution, the third way only becomes accessible to everyone after pioneers map it and domesticate it a little. Until that happens, talking about it is like trying to point into the fourth dimension.
I am puzzled that my post is at −3; and Mitchell’s comment here is at 12; and they say nearly the same thing. They only start to differ when suggesting what motivated behaviorists; and they don’t differ much even then—disappointment in religion vs. antagonism towards religion.
User:Mitchell_Porter’s post differs from User:PhilGoetz’s post in that the former does not heavily overextrapolate from the uncontroversial points which the two Users agree about.
I like that theory even better. It should encompass a superset of the behaviorists encompassed by my “religious cynic” theory—many militant atheists are former faithful gone cynical. But some are not; some learn animosity to the doctrine of the soul only from observing its bad effects.