ABSTRACT
I am attacking here a very general notion which is by now deep-rooted among people who want their psychology to be scientific. It is the notion that motives must not be examined and explained as motives, but always reduced to something else. Those who choose, as their explanatory something else, movements in the brain and nerves are physicalists. Those who choose outward body-movements are behaviorists. The two fail for the same reason. They distort what they are supposed to be explaining. Their analyses can seem plausible only where they rely covertly on concepts that they officially claim to explode. I have said a little about the way this happens with Wilson’s physicalist suggestions. I must now expose the similar worm in the behaviorist bud, and show how alike is the fate of the two doctrines. What I say here about behaviorism is intended to supplement my earlier criticisms. Like them, it is aimed at the more extreme and dogmatic forms of the view; subtler versions designed to meet such arguments may escape it. But Wilson, like many other people devoted to the idea of science, drifts into behaviorism quite as often as physicalism, and when he does so, he uses it in a crude and unregenerate form, as I shall show.
