A more effective foundation for the study of behavior in itself

Abstract

Radical behaviorists and interbehaviorists share the thesis that behavior in itself is the proper subject matter of scientific psychology. This thesis has been founded on a rejection of Cartesian dualism and physiological causation. Both rejections, however, are ineffective the first rejection does not apply to property dualism, which is currently adopted by most philosophers of mind and allows for a non Cartesian foundation of congnitive psychology. The second rejection is problematic for the view of causation adopted by radical behaviorists and interbehaviorists themselves. According to this view, a causal relation is a functional relation whose independent variable is a cause and whose dependent variable is an effect. However, experiments in psycho physiology show ordered functional relations between physiological independent variables and behavioral dependent variables, relations that, under that view, demonstrate a physiological causation of behavior. This paper presents a more effective strategy that does not rely on a rejection of dualism or physiological causation. The strategy consists in asserting that the behavioral is ontologically independent of the mental and the physiological. This assertion can be elaborated in terms of a property-exemplification theory of behavior in itself can thus be characterized counterfactually as the study of the behavioral as if the mental and the physiological did not exist.