Matthew asked:

Does behaviour reveal the 'mind'?

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Can you think of anything else we have to rely on, given that we're not telepathic?

Steven Ravett Brown

In philosophy the view known as Behaviourism reduces the mind to behaviour. It doesn't say that
behaviour reveals the mind; it says the mind equals behaviour, in the sense that the meaning of any
mental state term (such as "fear" or "pain") is the public behaviour associated with that term. This
means that I do not have a special first-person access to my mental states. They are not internal
states that I "perceive" through introspection or subjective, direct experiences. In fact, you could
correct me when I say "I'm afraid of spiders" by pointing out that I never scream or run away when I
see one.

I think most people would agree that behaviourism goes too far. However, we might wish to maintain
that appropriate behaviour is relevant to the meaning of at least some mental states. An alternative
theory, Functionalism, retains behaviour as the output, when it defines the mind in terms of functional
descriptions. Both Behaviourism and Functionalism accept that there are internal processes involved
but they maintain that these are not relevant to the meaning of the terms.

One of the problems that gave rise to Behaviourism was the problem of how we could ever learn the
meaning, or the applicability, of mental state terms if they are purely private phenomena. This is a
problem associated with the later philosophy of Wittgenstein.

The most famous Behaviourist philosophy was Gilbert Ryle, a professor at Oxford university in the
1940s and 50s. In response to your question, Matthew, he would have said that you were making a
"category mistake": the mind is not the sort of thing that can be revealed. It's not the mechanism
behind the behaviour (the soul or the brain). But Ryle's theory, in my view, could not cope with the
kind of mental experience that seems to be most like private,internal perception, such as visualising
something in your "mind's eye". Nevertheless, his book The Concept of MIndis worth reading.

Graham Nutbrown

Unfortunately our concepts of behaviour and mind have suffered pretty severe damage by Skinnerism
and associated doctrines through the middle of the last century, and I would say we're not yet fully
recovered: your very question is proof of it. But inasmuch as a worm's behaviour reveals nothing we
would call 'mind', it is hard to maintain that human behaviour should. On the contrary, I'm inclined to
state, as dogmatically as any behaviourist, that most of our behaviour in day to day life is pretty much
the result of rote and habit and of semi-automatic navigation. When "exceptional" behaviour occurs,
such as premeditated murder, you might get a little closer to the mind, but only in consideration that
such an act requires a certain amount of planning.

Accordingly I would respond that the mind is revealed only in those departments of our behaviour
where we perform acts which go beyond our animal capacities: thinking and speaking; designing and
planning; making poetry and music; doing science and philosophy; and so on. But these are not what
we commonly mean when we speak of "behaviour" without any adjectival condition. And thus my
answer to your question is "no": for when you read a line of poetry, what you detect in there might be
the work of a mind, but certainly nothing that could be brought under the classification of "behaviour".

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney