ABSTRACT
Must behaviour affect the outer world and be publicly observable? Is silent thinking behaviour? Must behaviour described in one way (e.g. waving one’s arms) also be behaviour when described in another (accidentally breaking a vase)? Can the utterances of a parrot be called verbal behaviour? Should an uncontrollable reflex action, like a knee-jerk, be called behaviour of the knee but not of the person? See also ACTION. D.Davidson, ‘Psychology as philosophy’ in S.C.Brown (ed.), Philosophy of Psychology,
Macmillan and Barnes and Noble, 1974, with comments and replies, reprinted with replies but without comments in Davidson’s Essays on Action and Events, Oxford UP, 1980. (One view of behaviour, causation, and rationality.)
D.W.Hamlyn, ‘Behaviour’, Philosophy, 1953. (Revised on one point in his ‘Causality and human behaviour’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 1964.)
G.H.von Wright, Explanation and Understanding, RKP, 1971, p. 193, n. 8 (Knee-jerk.)
. Doctrine or policy of reducing mental concepts to publicly observable BEHAVIOUR. In psychology it involves an experimental, and often physicalist and operationalist approach (see POSITIVISM), which rejects introspection, and is concerned with prediction and control rather than understanding. Logical or analytic behaviourism defines mentalistic terms using only behavioural or physiological terms. Metaphysical or philosophical behaviourism refuses to see more than physical behaviour where claims for mentality are made. Methodological behaviourism insists on behavioural tests but is neutral on the philosophical implications. Radical behaviourism, is similar, but more rigorous; it rejects hypothetical constructs and intervening variables (see LOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONS). See also COGNITIVE, PSYCHOLOGISM. N.Block (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, Harvard UP and
Methuen, 1980. (Includes section on behaviourism.) G.Ryle, The Concept of Mind, Hutchinson, 1949. (Classic work, usually taken to support
analytical behaviourism.)
. Being seems at first to be a property of everything, or at least of everything there is, for how can anything have a property unless it is there to have it? Do unicorns have, say, the property of being vegetarian? Or is it only that they would have it if there were any unicorns? But if we accept this latter view, being cannot be a property after all, for anything which was to have it would have to have it already in order to do so, which is
absurd; to say that something exists is not to say something about it. This point, that being is not a property, or, as it is commonly expressed, that ‘exists’ is not a (logical as against grammatical) predicate, was insisted on by Kant who used it to attack the ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, though others have disagreed (see Strawson). It raised the question: what counts as being a property or (logical) predicate?
