To appear in Dermot Moral, ed., Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy (London: Routledge)
The Philosophy of Psychology
卫星信号接收器Kelby Mason
Rutgers University
Chandra Sekhar Sripada
University of Michigan
Stephen Stich
Rutgers University
Introduction
The 20th century has been a tumultuous time in psychology – a century in which the discipline struggled with basic questions about its intellectual identity, but nonetheless managed to achieve spect
acular growth and maturation. It’s not surprising, then, that psychology has attracted sustained philosophical attention and stimulated rich philosophical debate. Some of this debate was aimed at understanding, and sometimes criticizing, the assumptions, concepts and explanatory strategies prevailing in the psychology of the time. But much philosophical work has also been devoted to exploring the implications of psychological findings and theories for broader philosophical questions like: Are humans really rational animals? How malleable is human nature? and Do we have any innate knowledge or innate ideas? One particularly noteworthy fact about philosophy of psychology in the 20th century is that, in the last quarter of the century, the distinction between psychology and the philosophy of psychology began to dissolve as philosophers played an increasingly active role in articulating and testing empirical theories about the mind and psychologists became increasingly interested in the philosophical underpinnings and implications of their work. Our survey is divided into five ctions, each focusing on an important theme in 20th century psychology which has been the focus of philosophical attention and has benefited from philosophical scrutiny.
Perhaps the two most important events in the history of psychology in the 20th century were the emergence of the behaviorist approach, which dominated psychology
for the first half of the century, and its displacement by cognitivism as the century drew to a clo. P
hilosophers have played an important role in both of the events, developing a philosophical companion to psychological behaviorism, and clarifying the nature and assumptions of the cognitivist approach to psychological theorizing. Our first ction will be devoted to the transition from behaviorism to cognitivism.
The linguist Noam Chomsky is widely considered one of the founders of the cognitivist approach in psychology; he was also the central figure in a cond major movement in contemporary psychology, nativism, which is the topic of our cond ction. Nativism and empiricism have traditionally been philosophical doctrines regarding the structure of the mind and the sources of the justification of belief. Contemporary cognitive psychology complements and extends traditional philosophical inquiry by providing a sophisticated methodology for investigating nativist structures in the mind. But nativism is a problematic notion, and in this ction we discuss philosophical attempts to clarify both what nativism claims and what it entails about human nature.
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Nativism is cloly related to, but importantly distinct from, another topic which has been center stage in both psychology and the philosophy of psychology for the last two decades – modularity. Jerry Fodor’s minal Modularity of the Mind (1983) suggested that an important structural principal in the organization of the mind is that at least some cognitive capacities are subrved by specialize
d, largely independent subsystems. Recent work in psychology has sought to delineate the modular structure of a number of important cognitive capacities, including language and mathematical cognition. Philosophy of psychology has contributed to this endeavor by helping to clarify the notion of a module. Philosophers have also debated whether modularity, if it is true, forces us to abandon traditional views about the transparency of the mental and to reconsider prevailing accounts of epistemic justification. The are some of the issues we’ll consider in ction 3.
A fourth theme which attracted a great deal of attention, during the 20th century, both in philosophy and in psychology, is rationality. Philosophers have traditionally debated the nature and the extent of both theoretical rationality, or the rationality of
belief, and practical rationality, or the rationality of action. During the last three decades of the 20th century psychologists became increasingly interested in the topics as well, and a large experimental literature emerged exploring the ways in which people actually reason and make decisions. Much of what they found was both surprising and troubling. In the fourth ction, we recount some of the more disquieting empirical findings in this tradition and consider how both philosophers and psychologists have attempted to come to grips with them.
The final topic we consider is intentionality. Cognitive psychology, as it is currently practiced, appears to be committed to the existence of intentional states, like beliefs, desires, plans, goals and fears, which are conceived of as being reprentational – they are about states of affairs in the world. Thus it would em that cognitive psychology must grapple with “Brentano’s Problem,” the problem of how to accommodate intentional notions within a naturalistic view of the world. In our final ction we discuss debates surrounding attempts by philosophers to “naturalize” the intentional. It may well be the ca that more philosophical ink has been spilled on the topic of naturalizing the intentional than on the preceding four topics combined. Despite this, we suspect that the question of how to naturalize the intentional is not well pod, and the importance of the answer is far from obvious. Perhaps a new century of philosophy of psychology will decide that the question, once made more preci, was not worth all the fuss.
1. From Behaviorism to Cognitivism
A great deal of contemporary psychological rearch and theorizing is unabashedly mentalistic.Psychological theories explain outward behavior by positing internal psychological states and structures such as beliefs, desires, perceptions, memories and various and sundry other kinds of mental states. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, a very different ethos prevailed.
Psychological theorizing was dominated by behaviorist thinking in which the positing of unobrvable mental entities was explicitly shunned. Perhaps the most important event in the history of psychology in the 20th century was the demi of the behaviorism and the ri of
搞笑的评论cognitivism – a thoroughly mentalistic approach to mind. We’ll begin our survey of key issues in 20th century philosophy of psychology by discussing this transition.
1.1 Logical Behaviorism
There are actually two quite distinct versions of behaviorism that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, one primarily in philosophy and the other primarily in psychology. Logical behaviorism, which prevailed primarily in philosophical circles, is a thesis about the meaning of mental state concepts. According to logical behaviorists, mental state concepts such as belief or desire don’t refer to hidden, and potentially mysterious, internal states of a person. Rather, talk of mental states is actually talk about dispositions to behave in certain ways under certain circumstances. For example, consider the claim that Paul has a headache. Superficially, this claim appears to refer to some inner state of Paul, perhaps some “achy” subjective nsation. But according to logical behaviorists, this appearance is mistaken. Talk of Paul’s headache actually refer雪的谚语有哪些
s to a complex t of dispositions – for example the disposition to groan, wince, avoid bright lights, reach for the aspirin, say “Ouch” when he moves his head too quickly, and so on. (See Ryle 1949 for the classic exposition of logical behaviorism).
吉林大学研究生招生薏米芡实One of the main attractions of logical behaviorism is that it provides an account of the reference of mental state concepts without positing anything metaphysically spooky or mysterious, such as a Cartesian res cogitans. If mental state concepts are about behavior, then their materialistic bona fides cannot be denied. A cond attraction of logical behaviorism is epistemological. People routinely attribute states such as beliefs and desires to others. If beliefs and desires are understood as hidden inner states of a person, then is hard to e how we might come to have knowledge of the states in others, and the potential for skepticism regarding other minds looms large. On the other hand, if mental states are understood as dispositions to behave in certain ways, as logical behaviorists contend, then our knowledge of the states is readily explained and skepticism about other minds is dispelled.
Despite its attractions, logical behaviorism ultimately foundered. A key stumbling block for the program is that there appears to be no straightforward connection
between mental states and dispositions to engage in certain behaviors in the way that logical behaviorism appears to require. Rather, connections between mental states and behavior invariably appear to be mediated by a number of factors, most notably by other mental states. Let us return to the example of Paul who has a headache. The logical behaviorist says that Paul’s having a headache means that Paul is dispod to engage in a host of behaviors, including, among others, reaching for the aspirin. But it ems that whether Paul does in fact reach for the aspirin depends critically on Paul’s other mental states, including his other beliefs, desires, preferences, etc. For example, suppo that Paul believes that aspirin will upt his stomach, or that Paul dislikes medicines and prefers natural remedies, such as a massage. In each of the cas, Paul will not reach for an aspirin.
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朋友网登录The lesson for logical behaviorism, as philosophers such as Davidson and Fodor have emphasized, is that beliefs, desires and other mental states are embedded in a den network of other mental states, and the states invariably act only in concert in the production of behavior (Davidson 1963; Fodor 1968). The systematic causal interdependency of mental states in the production of behavior makes it impossible to assign to each mental state its own unique t of behavioral ramifications in the way that logical behaviorists envision.
1.2 Psychological Behaviorism
Even if one rejects logical behaviorism’s claims about the centrality of behavior in the meaning of mental state concepts, one might still insist on the centrality of behavior in the formulation of psychological explanations.This latter view is at the core of the position often called psychological behaviorism or methodological behaviorism. According to psychological behaviorism, psychologists should restrict themlves to describing relationships between obrvable external features of the organism, for example relationships between histories of stimuli impinging on the organism and behavioral respons, without invoking hidden internal states of the organism. Psychological behaviorism is independent of logical behaviorism, since one can be a psychological behaviorist and still maintain that mental states such and beliefs and
