ABSTRACT
If the more virulent strains of behaviorism had proved to be viable, then our common sense world view, the “manifest image” of what we are like, would be in serious trouble. For Watson and others, the mental states postulated by common sense—beliefs among them —are the superstitious posits of our savage past. In the sober light of science we can see that there are no such things, just as there are no gods to throw thunderbolts, nor witches to poison wells. Now, though the ghost still rattles its chains here and there, virulent behaviorism is a dead issue in psychology. It was done in by the cognitivist revolution whose partisans currently dominate the scientific study of mental states and processes. But if I am right in my contention that contemporary cognitivism makes no use of the folk psychological notion of belief and its intentional kin, then the status of the manifest image of mind is once again a live issue. For if the best science of the mind we now have does not mention the contentful states of folk psychology, is that not ample reason to conclude that the states posited by common sense do not exist and that statements of the form ‘S believes that p’ are uniformly false? Have we not perhaps shown that the behaviorists were right about the status of common sense psychological posits, albeit for the wrong reason?
