2. Language Origin
Behaviourist wars: Materialism vs. Epiphenomenalism vs. Reductionism
Materialism
In this view, only the physical body exists. Mind is a fiction and thus only body should be studied. Quotations from the works of the original behav- iourist psycologist Watson (1924) give a clear idea of what this philosophy is all about. For example:
Belief in the existence of consciousness goes back to the ancient days of super- stition and magic . . . Magic lives forever . . . These concepts – these heritages of a timid savage past – have made the emergence and growth of scientific psy- chology extremely difficult . . . No one has ever touched a soul [or a mind] or seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into relationship with it as he has with other objects of his daily existence.
(pp. 2, 3)
Thus, psychology was regarded as indistinguishable from physiology.
Epiphenomenalism
The essence of this view is that although both body and mind exist, the mind simply reflects what is happening in the body. Since the mind has no causative powers, the proper study of psychology is still, as Watson held, the body. Supporters of this view, for example, are Skinner and other psycholo- gists, and the language philosophers Ryle (1949, p. 199) and Quine (1960, pp. 34–5). Quine posited bodily dispositions and tendencies to behave. (A potential to behave in a certain way would indicate a certain meaning.) He scoffed at such Mentalistic notions as ‘meanings’ of words and said they should be relegated to museums.
According to Skinner, ‘The fact of privacy (non-objective subjective events) cannot of course, be questioned’ (1964, p. 2). However, while he allows mind to exist, which Watson did not, he gives mind no power over beha- viour. Thus, Skinner (1971) said, ‘It [Behaviourism] rejects explanations of human behavior in terms of feelings, states of mind, and mental processes, and seeks alternatives in genetic and environmental histories’ (p. 35). Psy- chology is thus the study of the physical.
The epiphenomenal Behaviourist philosopher Ryle (1949) similarly scoffed at what he terms Descartes’ ‘ghost in the machine’ concept, where Ryle uses ‘ghost’ pejoratively to signify mind and mental events and ‘machine’ to signify body. He and other epiphenomenal theorists would rather have us think that it is more reasonable to believe that machines can produce ‘ghosts’ but that these ‘ghosts’ can have no effect on our behaviour!
Reductionism
While mind, as well as body, is said to exist, proponents of reductionism also believe that mind can be reduced to the physical, i.e. body. For many of these theorists, body and mind are two aspects of a single reality, as the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Spinoza argued. (Spinoza’s view con- trasts with the epiphenomenal view which holds that body is the primary reality.) Since, by taking this dual-aspect position, one can learn all there is to know about mind by doing a thorough study of body, there is no need to study mind (Feigl, 1958; Smart, 1959; Armstrong, 1968). Thus, mind is reduced to body. Such being the case, mind can be studied entirely through body in relative metaphysical comfort.
Psychological proponents of this view such as Osgood (1980), Mowrer (1960), and Staats (1968, 1971) have posited that stimuli and responses occur in the body and brain and thus mediate between an overt stimulus and an overt response, where ‘overt’ represents events outside of the body. Overt stimuli could, for example, be a flash of light or someone asking a question while overt responses could be the blinking of the eyelid or the uttering of speech in answer to a question.
Objections to Behaviourism
Chomsky (1959) raised absolutely telling arguments against Behaviourism, arguments that brought him to a Mentalistic conception of the relationship of language and mind. A further three arguments in favour of Mentalism by the first author are presented in the following section.