ABSTRACT
The most influential twentieth-century attempt to circumvent the difficulties that the mind-body problem raises for social science was behaviorism. This chapter traces the important motivations for this research program, which influenced all the social sciences. Neuroscience is not about to replace the established social and behavioral sciences, because it is not more useful than they are in application to their domains. In Aristotle's physics, his biology, and his explanation of human behavior, the crucial notion is that of purpose or goal. Operant behaviorism has been an outstanding success in the laboratory: though it has serious limitations, its powers to predict and control behavior in the stereotyped conditions of the experimental analysis of animal behavior are undeniable. In fact, behavioral psychologists were eventually able to combine with cognitive neuroscience, the discipline that seeks to identify the brain processes that thinking, feeling and sensation— the causes of behavior— consist in.
