Behaviorists and Behaviorisms

Behaviorism, notoriously, came in various sorts and has been, also notoriously, subject to variant sortings: "the variety of positions that constitute behaviorism" might even be said to share no common-distinctive property, but only "a loose family resemblance" (Zuriff 1985: 1) . Views commonly styled "behavioristic" share various of the following marks:

allegiance to the "fundamental premise ... that psychology is a natural science" and, as such, is "to be empirically based and ... objective" (Zuriff 1985: 1);

denial of the utility of introspection as a source of scientific data;

theoretic-explanatory dismissal of inward experiences or states of consciousness introspection supposedly reveals;

specifically antidualistic opposition to the "Cartesian theater" picture of the mind as essentially a realm of such inward experiences;

more broadly antiessentialist opposition to physicalist or cogntivist portrayals of thought as necessarily neurophysiological or computational;

theoretic-explanatory minimization of inner physiological or computational processes intervening between environmental stimulus and behavioral response;

mistrust of the would-be scientific character of the concepts of "folk psychology" generally, and of the would-be causal character of its central "belief-desire" pattern of explanation in particular;

positive characterization of the mental in terms of intelligent "adaptive" behavioral dispositions or stimulus-response patterns.

Among these features, not even Zuriff's "fundamental premise" is shared by all (and only) behaviorists. Notably, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and followers in the "ordinary language" tradition of analytic philosophy, while, for the most part, regarding behavioral scientific hopes as vain, hold views that are, in other respects, strongly behavioristic. Not surprisingly, these thinkers often downplay the "behaviorist" label themselves to distinguish themselves from their scientific behaviorist cousins. Nevertheless, in philosophical discussions, they are commonly counted "behaviorists": both emphasize the external behavioral aspects, deemphasize inward experiential and inner procedural aspects, and offer broadly behavioral-dispositional construals of thought.