PRIVATE EVENTS AND THE LANGUAGE OF THE MENTAL: COMMENTS ON MOORE

Abstract

Moore’s (2001) recent paper, “On Psychological Terms that Appeal to the Mental,” describes a number of important differences between philosophical or systematic positions identified with the term, behaviorism. Specifically, Moore (2001) emphasizes the differences between the radical behaviorism of the field of behavior analysis and some other varieties of behaviorism on the issue of private events. The purpose of this commentary is to look briefly at some of the issues and implications of Moore’s descriptions. A few brief comments about the term behaviorism may be in order. In the published writings and conference presentations of behavior analysts it appears to be increasingly common practice to describe behavior-analytic work as the product of “behaviorists,” or as “behaviorism.” Part of the problem with such characterizations is the ambiguity of the term. Many distinctive varieties of “behaviorism” have been identified over the years. A partial listing by name would include classical or Watsonian behaviorism, mediational neobehaviorism, methodological behaviorism, logical or philosophical behaviorism, and radical behaviorism (e.g., Day, 1983; Hergenhahn, 1997; Moore, 1995), as well as other varieties such as Kantor’s interbehavioral psychology and Staats’ scientific (or paradigmatic) behaviorism. To make matters even more complicated, there have been distinctive variations within such classes as mediational neobehaviorism, such as Tolman’s “purposive” behaviorism and Hull’s stimulus-response behavior theory (e.g., Hergenhahn, 1997). Further, some types of behaviorism span systematic developments, as when the strategic scientific practices of methodological behaviorism enabled the transformation of mediational neobehaviorism into cognitive psychology (e.g., Moore, 1995). A larger problem for behavior analysts identifying themselves as “behaviorists” is that for most psychologists and philosophers, the term is not ambiguous at all; it describes a systematic position with which they are quite familiar, and against which they stand with strong convictions and long list of battle-hardened arguments. As Moore’s (2001) paper indicates, most educated listeners or readers will take “the behaviorist” to be one who will attempt to cash out any and all ordinary-language talk of the “mental” entirely in terms of publicly-observable phenomena. That this is not how Skinner’s radical behaviorism has addressed appeals to the “mental” is a central theme of Moore’s

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.