Re: the liver and the brain

From: Allan C Cybulskie (allan.c.cybulskie_at_yahoo.ca)
Date: 09/08/04 

Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 18:00:22 -0400

I think this post actually explains a few things about your view -- and my
disagreement with it ...

"David Longley" <David@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:4LO1tgYDOlPBFwRE@longley.demon.co.uk...
> In article <nPr%c.50183$3l3.6227@attbi_s03>, patty
> <pattyNO@SPAMicyberspace.net> writes
> >David Longley wrote:
> The term was used by Dagfinn Follesdal to describe Quine's behaviourism
> (p.98 of chapter 7, "Indeterminacy and Mental States", a response to
> Searle) in the book "Perspectives on Quine" edited by Robert Barrett and
> Roger Gibson, Blackwell, 1990. I think others such as Gibson might not
> object to the term. If what I've said here over the years doesn't
> suffice (I've always said one should start with "Two Dogmas of
> Empiricism"), I suggest you read Quine's "Pursuit of Truth" (1992) or
> his "From Stimulus to Science" (1995). I've said quite a lot in the past
> in an effort to make it clear what this (aka enlightened empiricism)
> refers to. In brief, it's a philosophy of science which can be said to
> be pretty much parallel to Skinner's radical behaviourism.

There is a problem with you considering evidential behaviourism to be a
philosophy of SCIENCE, since behaviourism is supposed to be creating a
philosophy of MIND. What I think you really mean, however, is that Quine's
philosophy of science is what you are using to form the methods that you are
using to determine your philosophy of mind. And since you are attempting to
formulate your philosophy of mind using Quine's method and a method
compatible with science you are going to come up with a behaviouristic
approach. I have already commented to Wolf that if you want this thing to
be scientific, then you are doing to lean towards a behaviouristic approach
(although current cognitive scientists focusing on neurology will disagree).

However, I agree with Thomas Nagel (I can dig up the reference if you want)
in claiming that science -- by Quine or by anyone else -- cannot adequately
handle anything that is subjective, and that in the philosophy of mind the
subjective plays a critical and very interesting part. And so I insist that
not all of the correct or interesting things in philosophy of mind will be
studyable by science. Therefore, behaviourism will never be the WHOLE story
in philosophy of mind because it won't ever be able to explain the
subjective -- simply because nothing scientific can do that.

In fact, the way you and Glen view the matter highlights my point. You have
to have something in your systems to account for and accept the subjective,
so the notion of "private behaviour" is introduced. However, you have to
downplay the importance of the subjective since you cannot adequately study
it scientifically. So you require it to be the case that you can explain
everything extensionally, and so private behaviour cannot play a critical
role, or at least more critically than simply as a public report through
verbal behaviour. However, as I have said, I believe -- and the evidence
does seem to support -- that the subjective is important to intelligent
behaviour and mostly to philosophy of mind, and so I want to focus on it.
And since functionally it has to be your system anyway, it becomes all a
matter of focus and language -- hardly critical distinctions.

> Whilst
> behaviour analysis/science is not all there is to science, it turns out
> to be pretty much the method of *naturalised* epistemology.

Ahem. No. Naturalised epsistemology is simply a naturalistic approach to
determining what we can and cannot know. What you MEAN is that behaviour
analysis/science is a naturalised method for philosophy of mind, as per
Quine's outline for naturalism.

Here might be a good time to report how I viewed traditional versus
naturalised epistemology. There is a huge debate in epistemology over
whether traditional "armchair" epistemology or naturalised epistemology was
the way to go. I argued that they are BOTH the way to go because they are
asking different questions. Traditional epistemology is asking questions
for which we have to be able to draw the conclusion that humans are just not
actually capable of knowing, while naturalised epistemology starts with the
assumption that not only CAN we know, we DO know. Both are interesting and
viable, and may add greatly to our practical knowledge, but they are not
competitors.

I feel somewhat the same way here, although not as strongly. This is
because I feel that the explanation of subjective experience is much more
critical than anything else in explaining mind. You have argued that you
don't need to explain mind, but then my reply is that you should stop
presenting yourself as an opponent to folk psychology since if you aren't
trying to explain mind, you are not a philosophy of mind -- and folk
psychology is clearly a philosophy of mind.

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