1. How is this scenario like substance dualists?

2. Charades Sadness Anger Love Hungry Regret Pain Happiness Confused Hate
Sit in a position so one of you can see the board but your partner can’t. They must be able to see you… Try to get your partner to guess each of the words below without speaking. Swap after 5.
Sadness
Anger
Love
Hungry
Regret
Pain
Happiness
Confused
Hate
Embarrassed

3. Behaviourism
One possible version of physicalism is to deny that there is anything beyond the behaviour of others needed to understand mental terms. Essentially minds are what people just say and do.
What this means is that statements about emotions, sensations, beliefs and desires are not about hidden processes going on “inside” people, but are rather a shorthand way of talking about publically observable behaviour.

4. Logical Behaviourism
The view that all statements about mental states can be analytically reduced without loss of meaning to statements about behaviour.

5. Hard Behaviourism
Isabel has trodden on a nail. Rather uncharacteristically she is now swearing at the top of her lungs and jumping around on one leg making efforts to remove the nail from her foot. According to the behaviourist this behaviour is just what it means to say Isabel is in pain. The feeling is not a private experience causing Isabel’s behaviour. It is just the behaviour. Behaviourism – reducing the language of mental states to the language of behaviour.

6. Why Behaviourism? Any obvious issues?
If we consider the problems of dualism it is easy to see why behaviourism is an attractive prospect:
We no longer need to verify the existence of some non-physical mind in others, we can simply observe their behaviour and treat them accordingly.
We don’t have to worry about wishy-washy words that are hard to describe or confirm. Using behaviour we can check whether particular terms are correct, and have clear meanings in all cases.
There is no problem of interaction. If the mind is not some separate substance or non-physical property then there is no interaction to account for.
Any obvious issues?

7. Criticism 1 – Multiple Realisability
What mental states might these bodily movements represent?:
Your knees bend and your bottom rests on a rock
You raise a finger in the air
Your hand grips a glass and lifts it from the table
Your grip loosens on a pen so it falls to the floor
Air blows out of your mouth
Can you now come up with a second mental state each behaviour could represent?
Problem: Behaviours can represent more than one mental state

8. Criticism 1 – Multiple Realisability
For the analogy to work we must be able to reduce mental states to distinct bodily behaviours. There must be some difference between them. Otherwise the reduction cannot adequately account for the range of mental states we attribute to people. Crying is a good example to illustrate this, it may be due to happiness or sadness, and it’s often impossible to tell which.
Problem: Behaviours can represent more than one mental state

9. Criticism 1 – Multiple Realisability
How many different ways can you think of someone behaving if they are: Happy Sad Excited Scared Pick one and make a list
Problem: Mental states can have more than one behaviour.

10. Criticism 1 – Multiple Realisability
Since mental states can have more than one behaviour (and indeed different people may have different reactions to the same mental states) then it is hard to see how the reduction can be complete. Example: Fear may make someone run or it may make them freeze to the spot, for hard behaviourism to work then it has to be one or the other – otherwise we would not be able to complete the analytic reduction.
Problem: Mental states can have more than one behaviour.

11. Criticism 2 - Circularity
How would you reduce: “Mike needs a whisky” to behaviour?
What about if I was the designated driver?
Would this change my mental state and therefore my behavioural description? How?
Does it introduce more mental states?
Problem: Mental states cannot be fully reduced without introducing more mental states.

12. Criticism 2 - Circularity
Even if we could reduce simple mental states (happiness, sadness etc) to entirely physical descriptions it’s hard to see how we could do this for more complex ideas. “Mike needs a whisky” might only lead me to drink a whisky if I know I don’t need to drive later, but if our analysis of “needs a whisky” has to take this into account as well then it would also need to translate the state of “believes he doesn’t need to drive later” into behavioural language. This would then in turn introduce more mental states “does not wish to drive whilst drunk” and the cycle would continue. The reduction cannot be completed without circularity, reintroducing mental states at each stage of the analysis despite the fact we’re supposed to be ditching them.
Problem: Mental states cannot be fully reduced without introducing more mental states.

13. What now? – Enter Ryle!
Gilbert Ryle attempts a slightly different version of behaviourism – he doesn’t believe it’s possible to entirely reduce mental states to purely bodily movements. Instead he introduces the concept of dispositions – things X would do if Y criteria were met.
Ryle’s version of behaviourism is often referred to as “soft behaviourism” as he takes into account more than simple behaviours.

14. Read 2.11 on page 351 then page 296 (middle two paragraphs)
What now? – Enter Ryle!
Before we look at Ryle’s version of behaviourism in more detail, it’s worth understanding why Ryle comes up with this idea to start with. It revolves around his criticism of Substance Dualism – particularly the view that it makes a category mistake.
Read 2.11 on page 351 then page 296 (middle two paragraphs)
What is a category mistake?
What example does Ryle give to illustrate it?
Why does he think Dualism is guilty of making this mistake?

15. The Category Mistake
A category mistake is an error in which things that belong to a particular category are presented as belonging to a different one. Or a property is assigned to something that could not possibly have that property.
Ryle uses the example of a man finding out about the sport of cricket, observing the batsman, wicket keeper and umpire then asking who is responsible for the team spirit – he is wrongly assuming that the role of “Team spirit” is a job in the team (the jobs category), rather than the way they play together.
Ryle believes dualism makes this mistake because he wrongly assumes that mental states are part of a “thing” the mind – in the same way actions are part of the physical body. In actual fact mental states just describe dispositions to behave.

16. The Category Mistake
If we can understand how talk about the mind can be made sense of in terms of human behaviour we will be freed from the spell cast on our thinking by “Descartes’ Myth”.

17. Remember this?

19. Soft Behaviourism - Dispositions
The analysis of mental terms is not conducted in terms of current behaviour, but in terms of dispositions to behave.
A dispositional property of something is it’s liability or proneness to act or react in a certain way.
So “Smoker” would be a dispositional property as it means that in the right circumstances that person would smoke NOT that they are currently smoking.
Explain why “soluble” is a dispositional property. Using the information on page 298

20. Dispositions Vs Occurrences
Occurrences are processes and events that are actually happening – hard behaviourism focuses purely on these.
Dispositions are a tendency or proneness to behave in a certain way under certain conditions – soft behaviourism takes these into account as well.
It is through the repetition of the first (occurrences) that we can make statements about the second (dispositions).
“When a man is said to be a cigarette-smoker it is not being said that the man is smoking a cigarette now. To be a cigarette-smoker is to be in the habit of smoking cigarettes. The habit of cigarette-smoking could not exist unless there were such occurrences or episodes as smoking cigarettes. ‘He is smoking a cigarette now’ (occurrence) does not say the same sort of thing as ‘he is a cigarette-smoker’ (disposition) but unless statements like the first were sometimes true statements like the second could not be true.”

21. How does this link to our mental states?
Page 298 – 299: How does Ryle explain our mental states as dispositions?
A similar analysis to that of the smoker or solubility also applies to mental states:
“Mike wants a whisky” is to say I have the dispositions of:
Buying one if I’m in a position to.
Accepting one if someone offers.
If I’m not driving I will drink a whisky.
If given a choice between whisky and gin I will take the whisky.
Saving enough money to buy whisky if I am not in a position to buy it currently.
And so on to any number of potential behaviours.

22. How does this link to our mental states?
Mental states are dispositions to behave in certain ways, in the same way referring to someone as a smoker means they are disposed to smoke in certain circumstances.
These dispositions sum up past behaviour in law-like ways and predict future behaviour based on these summaries.
So when we refer to someone's mental states we are actually referring to how they would behave were certain conditions met – given what we know about them from the past.
These statements are always hypothetical. Given we might not fully understand someone's dispositions or the relevant conditions, we can only go off what we know.
The list of dispositions for each mental state must remain “open” – you can’t ever finish the list. Ryle always ends them with …

23. Soft Behaviourism in Practice
In pairs choose one each of the following mental states and list all the possible dispositions you can think of that would be connected to it:
Belief that football is the greatest sport.
Belief that family is important.
Wish to travel the world one day.
Desire to marry someone famous.
Dislike of dance music.
Now swap whiteboards, have they missed anything you could add?

25. Dispositions
How would Ryle break down the mental state “Believes in God”?
Does Ryle successfully avoid any of the criticisms we’ve mentioned so far?
Does he struggle with any of them?
What about any new criticisms?
Is Soft Behaviourism a good theory of mind?