ABSTRACT
This chapter explains what philosphers do under the banner of “philosophy of psychology.” Psychology groups together subject matters that but for historical accident might have ended up in different academic disciplines. Philosophy of psychology is similarly fragmented. Until the 1970s, philosophers who studied the mind worked on the metaphysical problem of mind, namely the mind-body problem, or else on analyses of individual mental concepts, e.g., pleasure or jealousy. There are two quite different kinds of behaviorism, “methodological behaviorism” and “logical behaviorism.” Methodological behaviorism is the doctrine that mental talk is illegitimate in scientific psychology except as shorthand for behavioral talk. Logical behaviorism is the view that mental terms can be analyzed in behavioral terms. The basic question of reductionism is whether social phenomena, mental phenomena, and the phenomena of life are anything over and above physico-chemical phenomena. Philosophers have produced an analysis of such questions in terms of two conditions: definability and derivability.
