BETH PRESTON

BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM:

IS THERE A THIRD ALTERNATIVE?

ABSTRACT. Behaviorism and mentalism are commonly considered to be mutually

exclusive and conjunctively exhaustive options for the psychologicaI explanation of be-
havior. Behaviorism and mentalism do differ in their characterization of inner causes of
behavior. However, I argue that they are not mutually exclusive on the grounds that
they share important foundational assumptions, two of which are the notion of an inner-
outer split and the notion of control. I go on to argue that mentaIism and behaviorism
are not conjunctively exhaustive either, on the grounds that dropping these common
foundational assumptions results in a distinctively different framework for the explanation
of behavior. This third alternative, which is briefly described, is a version of non-individ-
ualism.

T h e resurgence o f mentaIism in the last few decades has been engine-

ered explicitly against the b a c k g r o u n d o f the demise o f behaviorism as
the reigning p a r a d i g m for psychological explanation. T o m e n t i o n only
one example, J e r r y F o d o r routinely dismantles s o m e version or aspect
of behaviorism as a p r e l u d e to the explication o f the mentalist position
he favors ( F o d o r , 1968, 1975, 1981). T h e assumption underlying the
a d o p t i o n o f this strategy seems to be that o n c e y o u see clearly w h a t is
w r o n g with behaviorism, y o u will also see immediately what is right
a b o u t the mentalist alternative.
This seems fairly innocuous, but there is a d e e p e r and potentially
m o r e controversial underlying assumption here, viz.: once you see fhat
b e h a v i o r i s m is wrong, you will see that mentalism is right. Mentalism
and behaviorism are taken to be mutually exclusive and conjunctively
exhaustive options for p s y c h o l o g y and philosophy of mind. In fact,
F o d o r once said so in so m a n y words.

IT]he distinction between mentatism and behaviorism is both excIusive and exhaustive.
You must be either a mentatist or a behaviorist... (Fodor, 1968, p. 55)

So, to use a familiar phrase, there are only two games in town; if y o u
are n o t playing one, then y o u must be playing the other. This point
of view appears to be tacitly and nearly universally accepted a m o n g
philosophers o f m i n d and psychology.

Synthese 100: 167-196, 1994.

1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
168 BETH PRESTON

One obvious effect of dividing the field into behaviorism and men-
talism in this way is that any third alternative is ruled out ab initio.
What happens in practice, then, is that attempts to articulate any such
alternative are assimilated forthwith to one or the other pole of the
dichotomy, as convenience and rhetorical effect dictate. The claim I
wish to defend in this paper is that a third alternative is indeed conceiv-
able. I will defend it by showing that behaviorism and mentalism are
not fundamentally exclusive. Once this has been established, it can be
shown that they are not exhaustive either. Finally, I hope to say some-
thing concrete, if preliminary, about the proposed third alternative.
To be more. specific, I do not deny the existence of differences
between the mentalist and the behaviorist approaches. What I do want
to claim is that behind the obvious differences lie some very basic
assumptions which are common to both. From the point of view of
these foundational assumptions, mentalism and behaviorism look more
like two versions of the s a m e position - like the same game with two
slightly different versions of the rules - than they do like mutually
exclusive positions. In other words, mentalism and behaviorism exclude
each other only superficially, and are actually continuous with one
another on a deeper level. Furthermore, they are only apparently
exhaustive. The foundation they share allows only certain sorts of
construction upon it, of which mentalism and behaviorism are the
archetypical extremes. So long as this foundation remains in place,
change can occur only as an alternation between these extremes. Hence
the appearance that mentatism and behaviorism exhaust t h e options;
they do exhaust the options permitted by the assumptions they share,
but they do not necessarily exhaust the options tout court.
This suggests an obvious and distressingly mechanical method for
generating a third alternative: simply replace the foundational assump-
tions common to mentalism and behaviorism with some other appropri-
ate assumptions. This leaves open the question as to why such a third
alternative would be desirable. I shall argue that the common assump-
tions underlying mentalism and behaviorism do not permit adequate
explanation of certain aspects of behavior, and that this constitutes
sufficient reason for discarding them, or at least relegating them to
some strictly secondary status in a substantially different framework.
To get things started, though, I would like to explain what I take to
be the major difference between mentalism and behaviorism, the real
bone of contention between them. This will establish a background
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 169

against which the assumptions they share will show up more readily.
More importantly, it will largely establish the contention that mentalism
and behaviorism are not mutually exclusive.

BEHAVIORISM VS. MENTALISM

It is sometimes said that the latest version of mentalism, cognitive

science, is a science of the mind, whereas behaviorism is a science of
behavior (Amsel, 1989; Gardner, 1985). It would be more accurate to
say that for mentalists the explanation of behavior follows from an
understanding of internal mental processes which, purportedly, gen-
erate it, whereas for behaviorists the explanation of behavior follows
from an understanding of the enviro_nmental variables which, purport-
edly, control it. So the behaviorist program ~ requires that behavior be
analyzed in terms of independently identifiable features of the environ-
ment; and this has historically led to a disparaging view of internal
processes. When they must be posited, it is done with as sparing a hand
as possible and much dragging of feet. The resulting picture is that of
an organism with a rich array of external connections with its environ-
ment and a Spartan interior.
In an article on B. F. Skinner, Daniel Dennett traces this rejection
of inner processes back to a perfectly respectable objection to some
early formulations of the mentalist position (Dennett, 1978a). These
formulations, which I shall refer to hereafter as paIeomentalisrn, did
not merely posit internal processes, they effectively posited an inner
person - the notorious homunculus - to carry them out. This explana-
tion of behavior (and here Dennett agrees with Skinner) is circular,
since in the person of the homunculus it presupposes rationality, intelli-
gence, and all the other phenomena it sets out to explain. But the
neomentalist formulations now in vogue are not subject to this objection,
Dennett claims. The homunculus has been exorcized by the compu-
tational model of mental processes, according to which complex pro-
cesses can be automated by building them up out of very simple pro-
cesses which can be implemented mechanically (Dennett, 1978a,
1978b).
But Dennett fails to emphasize - and consequently fails to counter
- another formulation of Skinner's charge of circularity in mentalist
explanation, which is independent of the homuncular presupposition.
Why was the unwary paleomentalist led to posit an homunculus in the
170 BETH PRESTON

first place? B e c a u s e she already subscribed to what Skinner calls the

C o p y T h e o r y , the t h e o r y that we have a picture of the world inside o u r
heads. A n d then, of course, an inside o b s e r v e r was n e e d e d to inspect
and interpret this picture, and so the h o m u n c u l u s was born. Philip A g r e
has recently coined the t e r m 'orbicuIus' (Latin: little world) to refer to
this internalized r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of the w o r l d ( A g r e , 1988).
Skinner saw n e o m e n t a l i s m , with its reliance on the i n f o r m a t i o n pro-
cessing m e t a p h o r , as m e r e l y positing a m o r e sophisticated version of
the orbiculus - a view with which m o s t neomentalists w o u l d agree.
A n d sometimes he does object to this internal representation of the
world on the g r o u n d s that a m o r e sophisticated version of the h o m u n c u -
lus m u s t necessarily be i m p o r t e d along with it (Skinner, 1963). But the
victory claimed by the n e o m e n t a l i s m r e p r e s e n t e d by D e n n e t t , F o d o r ,
and others is that the orbiculus has b e e n shown to be i n d e p e n d e n t of
the h o m u n c u l u s via the exorcism o f the h o m u n c u l u s . It bears emphasiz-
ing that its erstwhile h o m e , the orbiculus, continues to flourish.
T h e m o r e interesting charge of circularity a d v a n c e d by Skinner de-
pends o n the positing o f the orbiculus alone.

It has generally been assumed that to explain behavior.., one must attribute it to events
taking place inside the organism. In the field of verbal behavior this practice was once
represented by the doctrine of the expression of ideas . . . . If the speaker had had a
different idea, he would have uttered different words . . . . If his utterance was unusual,
it was because of the novelty or originality of his ideas . . . . There is obviously something
suspicious in the ease with which we discover in a set of ideas precisely those properties
needed to account for the behavior which expresses them. We evidently construct the
ideas at will from the behavior to be explained. There is, of course, no real explanation.
(Skinner, 1957, pp. 5-6)

T o be precise, one discovers the salient characteristics of the inner

events by covert appeal to salient characteristics of the very b e h a v i o r
that these inner events are then s u p p o s e d to explain. 2
It is i m p o r t a n t to realize w h a t Skinner is objecting to here. H e is not
objecting to internal processes entering into the explanation of b e h a v i o r
at all u n d e r any conditions. R a t h e r , he is objecting to the characteriz-
ation of those internal processes in intentional terms - to the orbiculus
as a representation o r internal m o d e l o f the world.

A person is changed by the contingencies of reinforcement under which he behaves; he

does not store the contingencies. In particular, he does not store copies of the stimuli
which have played a part in the contingencies. There are no "iconic representations" in
his mind; there are no "data structures stored in his memory"; he has no "cognitive
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALiSM 171

map" of the worldin whichhe has lived. He has simplybeen changedin such a way that
stimuli now control particular kindsof perceptual behavior. (Skinner, 1974, p. 84)
So behaviorism does without the orbiculus by placing behavior under
the control of environmental stimuli. On the part of the organism, this
control is achieved through changes in the peripheral nervous system,
not through the mediation of central cognitive processes, and most
particularly not through the mediation of intentionally characterized
internal processes, i.e., the (computational) manipulation of internal
representations.
The fact that an organism may respond differently on different oc-
casions to what is nominally the same stimulus, or may respond in the
same way to what are nominally different stimuli (generalization), is
accounted for by explaining that the organism's history of reinforcement
has brought its behavior under the control of subtle properties of the
stimulus which we have not yet succeeded in characterizing precisely
(Skinner, 1957, p. 108). So the basic behaviorist strategy is to attribute
the organization of behavior to complex properties of the environment,
that in conjunction with the schedules of reinforcement to which the
organism is subject, fully determine behavior as the set of reinforced
responses to those properties.
The difficulties inherent in this notion of stimulus control are well
known, and have standardty underwritten mentatist critiques of behavi-
orism. The fundamental problem is that in all but the most simple and
artificial situations, the controlling property of the stimulus tends to be
inferred from the character of the response. This is painfully obvious
in Skinner's discussion of metaphor, for instance, where he asserts:
In The child is bright as a dollar we accountfor dollar by notingsomethingpossessedin
common by dollars and the child in question. This somethingis preciselythe stimulus
property responsible for bright. (Skinner, 1957, p. 93)
Numerous other amusing examples of this tendency are cited in the
literature (Chomsky, 1959; Dennett, 1978a). The point is that the whole
notion of stimulus control, and in particular the notion of stimulus
generalization, rests on the supposition that stimuli are objectively
similar to each other; for it is this alleged similarity among stimuli that
is supposed to explain similarity of response. So if in practice the
direction of explanation reliably runs the other way, the bankruptcy of
the notion of stimulus control would seem to be sufficiently manifest,
since the explanatory strategy employed is in fact circular. You cannot
172 BETH PRESTON

claim to be explaining behavior by appeal to controlling environmental

factors if those factors cannot be antecedently specified without prior
appeal to the characteristics of the behavior in question.
Neomentalists, of course, have a counterproposal ready and waiting.
The reason behaviorists cannot characterize the stimulus independently
of the response, they say, is because we do not respond directly to
properties of the stimulus, but rather to the stimulus as we represent
it to ourselves. These inner representations - beliefs, desires, and so
on - interact with each other independently of whatever is going on in
the environment, and the results of these interactions issue in behavior.
So the stimulus can be characterized only with reference to internal
representations and processes. Having ruled these out ab initio, behavi-
orist explanation inherently risks lapsing into circularity. But then, the
behaviorist replies, there is an inherent risk of circularity associated
with the intentional characterization of these inner events and pro-
cesses; they cannot be characterized independently of the description
of the behavior to be explained any more than features of the environ-
ment can.
So the mutual recriminations of behaviorists and neomentalists are
isomorphic, and the differences between these two competing para-
digms of psychological explanation appear to revolve around a single
issue. Behaviorists accuse mentalists of ignoring the role of the environ-
ment in the explanation of behavior and positing mental entities and
processes which assume what they are supposed to explain. Neomen-
talists accuse behaviorists of ignoring the role of mental processes and
positing properties of the environment which also assume what they are
supposed to explain. The bone of contention is whether the explanation
of behavior requires the postulation of internal representations, and
the problem is that whether you do or you do not, there is a risk
(although not a certainty) that your explanations will be circular.
Now if this is the right way to characterize the major difference
between neomentalism and behaviorism, one conclusion that must be
drawn is that it is a matter of degree. Behaviorists routinely posit
inner causes of behavior. Usually these are characterized as internal
extensions of stimulus-response chains. But there is a permanent possi-
bility of characterizing them, however carefully and selectively, as in-
ternal representations, and many card-carrying behaviorists, in fact, do.
Perhaps the most obvious and familiar example is Tolman's notion of
cognitive maps. Although a strict behaviorist in his early work, Tolman
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 173

eventually came to believe that even the behavior of rats in a maze

could not be adequately explained without positing an internal repre-
sentation, or "map", of the maze (Tolman, 1948). This has resulted in
his being regarded as barely respectable by some behaviorists, and as
quite respectable by some neomentalists.
Likewise, it is always possible for erstwhile confirmed mentalists to
limit appeals to inner causes in favor of appeals to features of the
environment, or to characterize inner causes in non-intentional ways.
A good example of the first ploy is Simon's parable of the ant, in which
he proposes a sort of computational behaviorism. Considering the best
way to explain the path of an ant across a beach, he suggests that the
local irregularity of the path is due to the interaction of two things:
some simple cognitive mechanisms for dealing with obstacles, and the
sequence of actual obstacles of different types encountered by the ant
on its journey (Simon, 1981). An example of the second ploy is found
in the work of Steven Stich (1983). He adduces the difficulty in assigning
intentional content to internal states in any systematic and scientifically
adequate manner as evidence that scientific psychology will eventually
be forced to forgo such characterisation altogether, and charactelise
internal states in a purely syntactic manner.
So either behaviorism or mentalism can be modified ad Iibitum in
the direction of the other, and such modifications are commonplace in
the history of psychology and philosophy in this century. Moreover,
the fact that extreme versions of either one of them are inherently
subject to charges of explanatory circularity indicates that such modifi-
cation is not only possible, but even necessary. If you want to avoid
merely projecting the features of the behavior to be explained into
either the environment or the organism, then you need to explain
behavior as the product of an interaction between the two. This means
attributing more of the complexity of the behavior to whichever side
you have a tendency to neglect. So behaviorism and neomentalism are
not monolithic positions divided by unbridgeable matters of principle,
but rather form a spectrum in the middle ranges of which behaviorist
and neomentalist positions shade off imperceptibly into each other. I
therefore conclude that behaviorism and mentalism are not mutually
exclusive. 3
But are they nevertheless conjunctively exhaustive? In order to show
that they are not, I shall have to say more about what they (uncontro-
versially) share. In what follows, I shall distinguish two assumptions
174 BETH PRESTON

which underlie both the neomentalist and the behaviorist explanatory

paradigm. I do not want to claim that this is an exhaustive list; there
may be other common assumptions or other perfectly adequate ways
of characterising them. 4 But these two appear to be the central and
interesting ones for my purposes. They are: (a) the notion of an inside-
outside split and (b) the notion of control.

THE INSIDE--OUTSIDE SPLIT

The idea of an inside-outside split is the idea that there is a distinct

and definite boundary between the subject and the world, such that the
mind lies entirely inside this boundary, the world lies entirely outside
it, and the boundary itself functions as a sort of interface between
them. This idea has its roots in the Cartesian doctrine that the mind
and the body are separate substances interfacing, however implausibly,
through the pineal gland~ Such ontological dualism has been forcefully
rejected in favor of a thoroughgoing materialism in psychology, of
course, although some of the epistemological aporiae to which it gave
rise, such as the problems of the existence of other minds, are still
floating around in philosophy. Nevertheless, the suggestion that a ver-
sion of the Cartesian inside-outside split is still very much with us is
supported by the popularity of the locution 'mind/brain'. Here the
inner realm has simply been identified with a distinct physical organ;
an organ safely ensconced inside the skull, and regarded as interfacing
with the world across a physical boundary roughly identified with the
sensory apparatus.
In neomentalist circles, there is a definite tendency to ignore the
outer realm for the purposes of doing psychology. Fodor's notion of
methodological solipsism is probably the most notorious instance of
this (Fodor, 1980). Fodor suggests that in order to progress at all,
neomentalist psychology must confine its attention to the inner realm
(which for Fodor is the intentionally characterized realm of proposi-
tional attitudes) and proceed without adverting to structures and pro-
cesses in the world at all. Regardless of whether the program of metho-
dological solipsism is either desirable or possible (and there are good
reasons for thinking it is neither), the fact that it was taken seriously,
even momentarily, is significant. One aspect of its significance is that
it explicitly embodies the neomentalist faith that the organization of
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM i75

behavior is overwhelmingly derived from the organization of the inner

realm, and hence that an adequate explanation of behavior can be
obtained from a description of inner structures and processes alone.
More importantly for my purposes, it embodies the implicit claim that
the inner and outer realms are distinct and separate. The explicit claim
only makes sense as a possibility against the background of this implicit
claim of an inside-outside split, since only under this assumption is it
conceivable that the basis of psychological explanation could lie wholly
in one realm as opposed to the other.
There is an equally strong tendency in behaviorism to ignore the inner
realm for the purposes of psychology. The most extreme expression
of this tendency is usually referred to as methodological behaviorism
(Skinner, 1974; Zuriff, 1985), although ~methodological environmen-
talism' might be more descriptive. Methodological behaviorists hold
that psychological laws explain observable behavior directly in terms
of observable environmental events and processes, bypassing all in-
ternal states of the organism, whether characterized intentionally or
physiologically. So methodological behaviorism is the exact inverse of
methodological solipsism. It embodies the behaviorist faith that the
structure of behavior is overwhelmingly derived from the structure of
environmental events and processes and can therefore be adequately
explained terms of them, Consequently, the methodological behaviorist
claims that it is both possible and desirable to do psychology without
adverting to things inside the head at all. But here again, the sepa-
rateness of the inner and outer realms is upheld. The methodological
behaviorist simply claims for psychology everything that lies outside the
boundary and ignores everything inside it, whereas the methodological
solipsist does the opposite.
Like methodological solipsism, methodological behaviorism is not a
viable position - even Skinner rejects it. But methodological behavior-
ism expresses a real tendency of behaviorism in general, just as metho-
dological solipsism expresses a real tendency of neomentalism. These
tendencies are diametrically opposed to each other, as everybody
knows, but they can be diametrically opposed only because both sides
in the debate antecedently accept the same underlying framework.
Neither position could be entertained at all except under the prior
assumption of an inner-outer split with its correlative notion of a
boundary or interface between the inner and outer realms that keeps
176 BETH PRESTON

them from contaminating each other, as it were, and so hcences the

supposition that one rather than the other can be conceived as providing
the exclusive basis for psychological explanation.
It would be appropriate at this point to say something about the
boundary itself. The popular notion of an input-output device is pre-
cisely the notion that there is some sort of interface between the inside
and the outside, some boundary which has to be crossed. Things are
put 'in' and taken 'out' for all the world as if the inner realm were a
container, walled off from the outside. A more sophisticated way to
talk about input is in terms of transducers and transduction. Here
again, the underlying metaphor is one of 'leading across' a boundary.
Moreover, the usual sense of the word 'transducer' implies the conver-
sion of something (e.g., energy) from one form to another, as a tele-
phone converts electrical energy to acoustic energy, for example. So if
something is to be transferred from one realm to the other, it must be
converted into the appropriate form; and the boundary is drawn at
the point of conversion. The neomentalist construal of this conversion
process is, roughly, that at the boundary, the world is converted into
a representation of the world - the orbiculus - and then representations
(e.g., plans) are converted back into observable behavior on the output
side. More technically, for neomentalists of a computational stripe,
transduction occurs at the point where physically describable events
impinging on the organism are first plausibly describable as compu-
tationally relevant symbols.
The notion of a transducer is not unproblematic. Is the input to the
transducer to be characterized in the vocabulary of physics or in a
perceptual vocabulary, for instance? Are transduction processes cogni-
tively penetrable, and if so, to what extent? In addition, it is not clear
how we are to identify transducers. Although it is popularly supposed
that the sense organs are the transducers, this cannot be the case in
a@ straightforward sense. A great deal of cognitive processing goes on
between light striking the retina and the visual output to which we have
conscious access, for instance. What we see are ordinary objects like
tables and chairs, not even the purported primitive objects of early
vision, like lines and edges. It is very difficult to design psychophysical
experiments that would identify the point at which physically measur-
able quantities first are transmuted into computationally relevant sym-
bols of some kind. 5
These difficulties underline the fact that transducers are theoretical
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 177

constructs, not pre-theoretical, independently identifiable structures.

Different cognitive theories may place different restrictions on what is
to count as a transducer, and will therefore locate the boundary between
inside and outside differently. Nevertheless, the point still stands that
all of these theories assume that there is such a boundary, and that it
is to be drawn at the level of the transducers, whatever and wherever
those may turn out to be.
The construal of the boundary in behaviorism is fundamentally very
similar to the notion of transduction, although described in somewhat
different terms. In About Behaviorism, for instance, Skinner speaks
frequently about "the world within the skin" and about the skin itself
as a "boundary" (Skinner, 1974, p. 21, et passim). 6 This construa! of
the boundary is best understood by looking at the structure of the reflex
arc, which may be given as stimulus-receptor-connector-
effector-response. Here the stimulus and the response are publicly
observable events in the world, the receptor and effector are the boun-
dary, and the connector is some mediating mechanism inside the or-
ganism. So we have the same pattern of an inner realm, an outer realm,
and a boundary at which they interface. The same problem arises here
as in the case of transducers with regard to the precise identification of
the receptors/effectors, of course, and Skinner's characterization of the
skin as the boundary is metaphorical at best. But jtlst as with the
neomentalist notion of a transducer, this is not a question that needs
to be settled before the behaviorist pattern of psychological explanation
can be determined.
For the behaviorist, what happens at the boundary is not a conversion
to computationatly relevant symbols, of course. Skinner and other be-
haviorists are willing, if not precisely eager, to talk about what goes on
inside the skin in terms of state variables and intervening variables,
which, ideally, must be operationally defined and non*intentionally
described. They also prefer to limit the discussion to events in the
peripheral nervous system and tend to regard the brain and central
nervous system as anathema in the absence of a substantially complete
neuroscience. Eventually, it is hoped, neuroscience will provide a com-
plete description of inner events and processes in its own ineluctably
non-intentional terms. Until then, what goes on inside the skin is treated
as just more behavior - covert responses to stimuli that may themselves
be covert. So it seems that for a behaviorist, what happens at the
boundary is in the first instance a conversion from overt to covert
178 BETH PRESTON

behavior. More specifically, it is a conversion from events described in

physical object terms to events described in neuro-prose. So at the
point where a stimulus-response chain crosses the boundary, it simply
becomes implemented in a different (and unfortunately less accessible)
physical medium requiring a different descriptive vocabulary.
The important thing to realize is that, at a general level of specifi-
cation, the behaviorist and the neomentalist both subscribe to the same
framework for psychological explanation - a framework organized
around the notion of the behaving organism as an input-output device.
Events in the immediate environment impinge on the organism in
various ways. These impingements are transmuted at the boundary of
the organism so as to give rise to inner events, that enter into and
interact with other internal processes already underway. (Even for a
behaviorist, input is never into a quiescent system.) The results of these
processes and interactions are again transmuted at the boundary of the
organism, so as to give rise to outer events in the form of observable
behavior on the part of the organism. You give a psychological explana-
tion when you make sense of the organism's behavior by appealing to
some judicious combination of environmental impingements and in-
ternal processes.
The main difference between behaviorists and neomentalists on this
score is the starting point of the explanation. Behaviorists start with
the environmental impingements on the grounds that any scientifically
sound characterization of inner structures and events must be anchored
there. Neomentalists start with the inner structures and events on the
grounds that environmental impingements can ultimately only be
characterized in terms of them. But neither view diverges from the
picture of the behaving organism as an input-output device whose
output is to be explained in terms of its input plus its inner workings.

CONTROL

The other shared assumption revolves around the notion of control.

The bare notion of an input-output device is not sufficient to explain
the generation and ordering of behavior through time, and control is
the further notion required. At first blush, it seems that behaviorism
and neomentalism have quite different conceptions of control, but we
shall see that, on a very fundamental level, they amount to the same
thing.
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 179

The behaviorist notion of control has a postively sinister reputation,

bound up as it is with behaviorist denials of agency and free will.
Stripped of these moralistic overtones, it reduces to the claim that the
ultimate causes of behavior are to be found in the environment of the
behaving organism. In the heyday of the reflex arc paradigm, environ-
mental stimuli were thought to simply elicit behavioral responses. On
this view, the control of behavior by the environment is very direct,
and it is originary, in that the initiative always lies in something outside
the organism. This paradigm proved to be much too simple, of course,
and was soon replaced by the Skinnerian notion of operant condition-
ing. On this view, the stimulus does not elicit a response, but acquires
control over behavior in virtue of having certain serendipitously emitted
responses reinforced in its presence. This makes environmental control
indirect: in the first place because it is no longer a simple function of
the current environment, but is mediated by the temporally extended
environment embodied in the history of contingencies of reinforcement;
and in the second place because the presence of the stimulus does not
guarantee the response, but only increases its probability. Moreover,
the initiative, to some degree, has been handed over to the organism,
in that the normal progression in operant behavior is R-S rather than
S-R. Nevertheless, as Skinner often notes, this picture still presents
behavior as under the control of the historically extended environment
(Skinner, 1974, p. 74).
There is one important complication having to do with the rather
obvious fact that organisms act on their environment rather than always
being acted upon by it. So it seems that control goes both ways, and
that the organism could just as well be described as controlling its
own behavior in virtue of controlling (i.e., changing) its environment.
Accordingly, Skinner does talk about control and countercontroI. In
point of fact, for the behaviorist, the flow of control always passes
alternately through the organism and the environment. So the notion
of stimulus control begins to look like a mere methodological predilec-
tion for explaining behavior in terms of external causes rather than
internal causes, all the while admitting the existence of the latter.
This predilection might be modified to any desired degree as new and
scientifically respectable methods of investigating internal causes of
behavior become available (Zuriff, 1985, pp. 199-200).
Control in neomentalism revolves around the question of how control
is passed from one internal process to another. The locus classicus for
180 BETH PRESTON

the raising of this issue is Lashley's paper on the problem of serial

order in behavior (Lashley, 1951). He argues that order in behavior
cannot be understood in terms of the stimulus-response mechanism of
the reflex arc. The problem then becomes one of explaining the order
of behavior as a reflection of stimulus-independent order in internal
processes. The serial order of words in a sentence, for instance, is not
plausibly under the control of a series of external stimuli. In current
cognitive psychology (and in computational circles in general), this issue
is discussed under the heading of control structure.
Perhaps the most familiar type of control structure is one in which
control is delegated hierarchically from the top. One process passes
control to a second process with instructions to return control to the
first process on completion of its task. This structure can be nested
(i.e., the second process can pass control to a third), and so on, thus
generating a hierarchical framework, with control being delegated in
turn to any desired number of levels and eventually returned to the
top. Another popular type of control structure, in contrast, might be
called 'egalitarian'. An example is blackboard architecture. In this type
of system, the task to be accomplished is posted in a central database
(the 'blackboard') to which all the processes in the system have access.
When a process sees something it can do on the blackboard, it volun-
teers. (It 'captures' control, in contrast to having control delegated
from above.) On completion of its task, or when it needs something
done by some other process, it can relinquish control by posting a
message to the blackboard itself.
This neomentalist notion of control seems at first blush to be address-
ing a different issue than the behaviorist notion of stimulus control,
since behaviorists talk about the control of behavior while neomentalists
talk about the control of internal processes. But again, this difference
is only apparent; the neomentalist notion of control is in fact ultimately
intended to explain the generation and organization of behavior. As
Pylyshyn points out:

The commitment to construction of a model that actually generates behaviors forces one
to confront the problem of how, and under what conditions, internal representations and
rules are pressed into service as actions are generated. These are questions that concern
control of the process. (Pylysbyn, 1984, p. 78)

As this passage suggests, control of the process is conceived as issuing

fairly straightforwardly in the control of behavior, thus illustrating in
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM t81

addition the neomentalist tendency to regard the organization of be-

havior as derived from the organization of internal processes rather
than that of environmental stimuli.
But there is a complicating factor here, just as in the behaviorist
case. Although the neomentalist tendency is to minimize the role of
the environment in the control of behavior, any proposed control struc-
ture must make provision for the environment to intervene on occasion.
In the hierarchical control structure suggested in Miller et al. (1960),
for example, the nesting units of the hierarchy are TOTE (test-operate-
test-exit) units. The 'test' phase may check for the presence of various
environmental conditions, whose presence or absence determines the
next phase ('operate' or 'exit'). The outcome of such a 'test' is ultimately
dependent on the output of transducers, and this means that essentially
control is delegated temporarily to the environment. On the other
hand~ the environment may simply 'interrupt'. This is perhaps most
easily understood with reference to blackboard architecture, where
messages posted on the blackboard may come from the environment
(again via transduction) rather than from elsewhere in the system. Since
what is posted on the blackboard affects what happens next in the
system, the environment can capture control.
So in neomentalism, just as in behaviorism, the flow of control passes
alternately through the environment and the organism The overalt
responsibility for control is, of course, unevenly apportioned - neomen-
talism granting the lion's share to internal processes organized in terms
of control structures, and behaviorism granting it to externaI environ-
mental processes organized in terms of schedules of reinforcement. But
any plausible version of either position accords an explanatory role to
both the environment and internal processes with regard to the ordering
and organization of behavior. So the common assumption is that the
organization of behavior is to be explained by appeal to the organization
and history of the individual organism's interactions with its immediate
environment, as underwritten not only by features of the environment,
but also by internal features of the organism itself.
lit is important to notice that, under this assumption, the organization
of behavior is a derived organization. In other words, the ordering of
behavior is supposed to be fully understandable in terms of the ordering
of environmental impingements on the organism, or in terms of the
ordering of internal processes, or (more plausibly) in terms of some
judiciously inter-related ordering of both, Of course, this should not
182 :BETH PRESTON

be taken to suggest a simple one-to-one correspondence between in-

ternal or environmental events and behavioral events; rather, the point
is that the ordering of behavior is to be understood as the direct result
of some internal or environmental ordering. That is the force of the
term 'control'. Another way of putting this is to say that, for both
neomentalists and behaviorists, the explanation of behavior is basically
conceived as an explanation of how it is generated in an ongoing and
causal sort of way.

AN A L T E R N A T I V E TO B E H A V I O R I S M / M E N T A L I S M ' . ~

It is now possible to see why behaviorism and mentalism appear to be

conjunctively exhaustive of the options for explaining behavior. They
share two assumptions:
,, That the behaving organism essentially is an input-output device,
where the output is the behavior to be explained, and
That the output is explained when an account is given of how it is
(causally) generated in terms of the input and the internal workings
of the organism.
This framework allows for some latitude in two particular areas. If the
organism is an input-output device, an important issue is the proper
characterization of the internal processes that mediate between input
and output. The most general aspect of this issue is whether they are
to be characterized intentionally. But whichever stand you take, you
will be pushed in the other direction: behaviorists who obstinately
refuse to allow for internal representation find that they cannot produce
adequate explanations of some behaviors; neomentalists find that posit-
ing internal representations does not necessarily result in simple or
workable explanations of behavior. (Think of the frame problem, for
example, or the ongoing difficulties with computational complexity.)
Similarly, if you think of the explanation of behavior as an explana-
tion of how it is causally generated, an important issue concerns the
locus of control of the serial ordering of behavior. The assumption of
the inside-outside split allows two options: either it is under the control
of features of the environment that causally impinge on the organism,
or it is under the control of internal causally connected features of the
organism itself. And again, if you take a radical stand, you will rapidly
be pushed in the opposite direction. Behaviorists find that adequate
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 183

explanations of the ordering of even rather simple behaviors are not

forthcoming on the assumption that the immediate, current environ-
ment of the organism is in direct control of the output. Neomentalists
find that adequate explanations of the ordering of behavior, and, in
particular, the adaptiveness of that ordering to changing environmental
conditions, are forthcoming only on the assumption that the immediate,
current environment can either take control or have control delegated
to it on a regular and frequent basis.
I have already argued that this means behaviorism and mentalism are
not mutually exclusive, since these differences between them represent
relative emphases modifiable to any desired degree, rather than un-
bridgeable differences of principle. The question I would like to raise
is whether they are conjunctively exhaustive. In other words, the ques-
tion is whether the two assumptions outlined above simply are the
only possible assumptions under which the psychological explanation of
behavior can proceed. If so, then mentalism and behaviorism would
seem to conjunctively exhaust the options in virtue of exhausting the
degrees of latitude available under these assumptions. If not, then
mentatism and behaviorism are not necessarily conjunctively exhaus-
tive. t would like to present a case for this latter possibility. I shall do
so by presenting some examples of behavior to be explained and show-
ing that there are some aspects of an adequate explanation which
cannot be captured by the standard behaviorist/mentalist framework as
outlined above.
Consider the following case. You take your very ill cat to the veterin-
arian, and while he is being examined he starts to purr. 7 How do you
explain this behavior? You could say that the cat has been reinforced
in the past for purring under relevantly similar conditions. But then
you are left wondering what could be relevantly similar about a veterin-
arian's examining table and a warm lap. You could say that it represents
this situation as one in which (as a quick bit of means-ends analysis has
no doubt revealed to it) purring is the surest way to achieve its goals.
But then you are left wondering under what non-arbitrary representa-
tion of this situation purring would appear as an appropriate means to
an end. In fact, what you want to know in order to explain this behavior
is: What is the function of purring in general, such that its production
in this situation makes sense?
Now there are answers to this question. Morris suggests that the
general function of purring is to signal non-hostile intent on the part
184 BETH PRESTON

of the purrer (Morris, 1988). The reason cats purr when patted or fed,
is to indicate that they are not about to bite the hand that feeds or
pats. Under stressful circumstances they purr to indicate submissiveness
and so discourage aggression on the part of their interlocutor. So purr-
ing has a very important and diversified social function, which is ulti-
mately (and in all its details, which I will spare you here) understandable
only in terms of the structure of feline social relations as a whole. 8
Explaining why a particular cat is purring on a particular occasion
will thus essentially involve reference to the nature and history of feline
social mores in general, rather than just the nature and history of this
particular cat's interactions with its immediate environment. This is
especially true in the case of deviant behavior, that could not even be
recognized as such except with reference to 'how cats usually behave'.
Most importantly, the explanans - the feline social structure - is not
available, as whole and as such in the environment, so it cannot be
reasonably characterized as a stimulus. Nor is it likely to be represented
as a whole and as such by the participant so that it could reasonably
be characterized as a set of beliefs. So this aspect of the explanation
of behavior does not depend on taking the psychological subject as an
individual input-output device, but rather, on taking it as a participant
in a supra-individual structure in terms of which its behavior makes
sense. Consequently, this aspect of the explanation of behavior does
not recognize the assumption of an inside-outside split, since there is
no obvious sense in which the social structure is either inside or outside
the individual member thereof. 9
A similar re-evaluation can be made with regard to the notion of
control, which embodies the assumption that you have explained be-
havior when you have explained how it is (causally) generated over
time as a function of input and internal processing. On this view,
behavior is transparent; the structure it has is the structure imposed on
it by the generative process, that is what it means to say it is controlled.
An alternative would be to regard the structure of behavior as opaque
and emergent with regard to the process by which it is generated.
Suites of behavior instantiate functional roles, and owe their sequenc-
ing to the structure of the role. Suppose, for example, you are trying
to explain the unfolding sequence of events in a confrontation between
two cats over (say) access to the back porch. Such confiontations
are exceedingly complex pieces of behavior, involving changes in ear
position, tail position, overall body posture, and eye contact, plus a
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 185

whole range of vocalizations. I will not describe one in detail, but see
Morris (1987, p. 55ff.). The point is that there are highly typical patterns
according to which such confrontations unfold. Moreover, the contribu-
tion of each participant is highly typical - even stereotypical - and
differentiated from the contribution of the other participant, largely in
terms of relative dominance or submissiveness. Who gets to play which
role in the end is, of course, something that may be decided or revised
during the course of the confrontation. But when this happens it is
precisely a switching of roles that the observer sees. This is because a
typical dominance role is instantiated in the behavior of each individual
cat, just as a typical gender ro~e may be instantiated in your own
behavior.
The identification of such roles is an important tool in the explanation
of behavior. To begin with, since the role involves typical patterns in
complex and temporally extended segments of behavior, it has predic-
tive value. Having identified the more dominant cat at the beginning
of the confrontation, you can say with some confidence what it will do
next and how the other cat will respond. Moreover, these roles are
functional, they are typical patterns of behavior evolved by the species
for purposes of survival, reproduction, etc. The order and sequencing of
the behavior displayed by the individual organism can then be explained
functionally as the instantiation of such a role, and idiosyncracies or
abnormalities in the working out of the role can be seen as such pre-
cisely with reference to the typical sequence.
But where or what is the role itself? And how is it related to the
behavior in which it is said to be instantiated? If the organism is
regarded as merely an input-output device, the obvious temptation is
to regard the role as the mechanism for the causal generation of the
behavior. So if you are a behaviorist, you will construe it, crudely, as
a set of stimuli in the immediate environment to which the organism is
responding. If you are a mentalist you wilt construe it, crudely, as a
set of mental representations, in this case something on the order of a
theory of dominance roles entertained and applied by the cat to its own
situation. Instantiation of a role will then amount to the control of the
organism's behavior from moment to moment by either a suite of
environmental stimuli or a suite of internal representations. But both
of these construals of the nature and explanatory function of roles
should be resisted, and for exactly the same reason.
Of course, it is perfectly plausible that the cat is exploiting some
186 BETH PRESTON

internal representations, and/or some cues provided by the immediate

environment in order to produce the behavior it exhibits. But there is
no real reason to believe that the role instantiated in its behavior, as
represented by an observer for the purposes of explaining that behavior,
must be represented as such by the organism; nor that it must be, in
effect, encoded in the environment. In constructing a description of a
role, the observer normally draws upon a much wider variety of infor-
mation than is available to the organism. Suppose, for example, a social
scientist wants to explain my behavior in terms of my gender role. In
order to specify this role, she will have to bring to bear information
about the gender structure of my social unit to which I do not have
access, e.g., ways men behave in social situations where no women are
present. She will also have to introduce theoretical concepts, e.g., the
matriarchy/patriarchy distinction, of which ! will be entirely ignorant,
unless I am myself a social scientist (and quite possibly one of a parti-
cular persuasion to boot). Similarly, the ethologist will appeal to a wide
base of information about feline (and possibly non-feline as well) social
behavior, and to a theoretical framework abstracted from it; e.g., in
the case under consideration, the dominant/submissive distinction.
So the role cannot be simply a series of stimuli, since its description
adverts to a much wider context than just the immediate environment
of the individual under consideration. Nor can it be an internally repre-
sented 'theory' of gender or dominance corresponding point for point
with that of the observer, since for this very same reason the individual
organism is not in a position to construct just this theory. In the case
of the cat, attributing a human concept like 'dominance' to it is a dicey
business anyway. In short, as pointed out long ago, caution is required
when moving from a useful and explanatory description of the behavior
of a cognitive system to the attribution of internal representations
(Dennett, 1978c; see note 2 above). And one of the main reasons for
caution is that explanatory strategies regularly advert to supra-individ-
ual structures, either social or environmental, as the basis for explana-
tion.
So a role cannot be said to impose a structure on behavior; rather
the structure of the behavior is revealed by interpreting it in light of
the role. The story about how the behavior is causally generated is only
a partial explanation of behavior. It explains how a role is implemented
by an individual organism under particular circumstances, but it does
not explain which role is being instantiated in the first place (for that
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 187

you have to know something about supra-individual structures available

to you as an observer, but not necessarily - or even usually - to the
organism itself). It is in this sense that the structure of the behavior -
its role structure - is an emergent structure with regard to the account
of the causal generation of behavior from m o m e n t tO moment.
These examples are intended to illustrate in a concrete and intuitive
way some aspects of the explanation of behavior that do not fall under
the behaviorist/mentalist assumptions of the inner-outer split and con-
trol; to the extent that they do not so fall, they indicate that mentalism
and behaviorism are not conjunctively exhaustive. Since there are some
features of the explanation of behavior, as intuitively understood, which
are not captured by the behaviorist/mentalist framework, there is in
principle an alternative account of the explanation of behavior possible
- an account which would take just those features as basic. More
specifically, these examples suggest that the explanation of behavior is
non-individualistic, in the sense that its explanatory force and content
derives from an appeal to features of the environment of the individual
organism, where (and this is important) the environment is not con-
ceived as limited to the immediate physical environment with which
the individual directly interacts. 1 This notion is, of course, not original
with me. Non-individualistic explanation in psychology has been de-
fended by Burge (1986) and Millikan (1993) in particular. Both of
them have argued, on somewhat different grounds and with somewhat
different emphases, that, for the purposes of studying psychology, nei-
ther the individuation of internal intentional states nor the individuation
of external behavior is, or can be, individualistic. H e r e I will add
only that the same kinds of arguments apply, mutatis mutandis, to the
individuation of stimuli. I will say more about this in a moment.
The non-individualistic point is that you cannot so much as say what
is to count as a behavior (or intentional state, or stimulus) of a definite
type without appealing to the environment, widely conceived. Conse-
quently, without such an appeal, the explanation of behavior cannot
even get off the ground, since none of the relevant categories can be
specified. I take the examples I have given above to support this view.
For instance, in the case of purring, it is the non-individualistic assess-
ment of the function of purring in feline social relations as a signal
of non-hostile intent which allows you to explain how both stressful
circumstances and pleasant ones might be represented by the cat in
relevantly similar ways, thus leading to similar behavior in both cases.
188 BETH P R E S T O N

In other words, the initial non-individualistic assessment allows you to

attribute content to posited mental representations; and, as we are
told often enough, internal intentional states are individuated by their
content. Similarly, the non-individualistic identification of dominance
roles allows you to group the movements made by the individual cat
into specific types and patterns of temporally extended behaviors that
are then subject as such to further explanatory analysis (e.g., in terms
of how they are implemented).
However, I depart from Burge and Millikan in my interpretation of
the status and significance of non-individualistic explanation of be-
havior. Both of them seem to regard it as simply the right way of
prosecuting the neomentalist program in psychology. This is perhaps
most evident in Burge's case, since his main point is precisely that
mental states are non-individualistically attributed (Burge, p. 3-4). But,
in fact non-individualistic explanation is neutral between behaviorism
and neomentalism - or between the behaviorist and the neomentalist
relative emphases, if my claim that there is no distinction of principle
here is accepted.
With regard to the individuation of behavior, this can be easily
granted, since it is a matter that naturally concerns everybody interested
in the explanation of behavior, regardless of theoretical persuasion.
However, environmental stimuli are equally good candidates for indivi-
duation under non-individualistic assumptions. Take the case of the
purring cat in the veterinarian's office, for instance. We left the behavi-
orist in that story wondering what could possibly be similar about
the stimuli involved in a comfortable lap on the one hand and the
veterinarian's examining table on the other. However, in light of the
analysis of purring as a signal of non-hostility, and the information that
submissive or injured cats typically purr when approached by a more
dominant animal, the relevant stimuli are more easily identified. For
the veterinarian will typically be behaving in ways which, to the cat,
signal dominance and even aggression, e.g., holding the cat down,
staring at it intently, etc. In this way, non-individualistic assessment
can yield individuation of stimuli as well as of internal states and
outward behaviors. In fact, it is likely to yield individuation of all three,
pari passu, in any situation in which it is applied.
This squares with my earlier claim that non-individualism is neither
inherently mentalistic nor inherently behavioristic, since it departs from
basic assumptions common to both of them. So explanation in the non-
individualist vein might sometimes look rather mentalistic and some-
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 189

times rather behavioristic, depending on where the individuative effort

is directed. Moreover, it differs from both mentalism and behaviorism
in that part of the explanatory burden is borne neither by posited
mental entities nor by posited stimulus-response chains, but by supra-
individual structures in the social, cultural or physical environment.
Thus every particular of the description of the behavior does not have
to be traced back to some internal (mental) feature of the organism or
to some feature of its immediate environment, or even to some judicious
combination of the two. For example, you might begin to explain the
purring of a particular cat on a particular occasion (e.g., its human is
standing in the kitchen with a can of cat food in one hand and a can
opener in the other) as follows: "It is trying to encourage its human to
feed it. Newborn kittens purr, and this behavior helps cement the
mother-infant relationship in general, and stimulates the mother to
nurse the kittens in particular, and human-feline social relationships
are close analogues of the mother-kitten relationship." However, from
a non-individualist point of view, the problem that evolution had to
solve - getting the mother to care for her infants - is not the problem
the individual cat has to solve. So you do not have to assume that the
cat represents its relationships in anything like the complexity this
description of its behavior embodies. In fact, in this case you might
easily get away with reinforced responses to features of the environment
represented as food, or as events regularly followed by food. So for
both these reasons, the effect of non-individualistic modes of explana-
tion may very well be to limit the appeal to mental representations in
psychological explanation, not simply to continue it under different
auspices.
Because non-individualism rejects fundamental assumptions of men-
talism and behaviorism, and because it is otherwise uncommitted with_
regard to the relative emphasis or de-emphasis of intentionally-charac-
terized inner states, it cannot accurateiy be regarded as a supplement to
existing accounts of the nature of the explanation of behavior. Rather, it
should be regarded as an alternative account of how, and under what
assumptions, such explanation proceeds.

CONCLUSION

I would like to conclude with a brief discussion of art objection to

this claim. If non-individualistic explanation is an alternative to the
individualistic mode of explanation presupposed by mentalism and be-
 190 BETH PRESTON

haviorism - i.e., if it is supposed to replace rather than supplement the

latter as an account of how psychological explanation in general works
- it appears that psychology does not have a subject matter that is
really distinct from the subject matter of other disciplines studying the
behavior of organisms, e.g., ethology, sociology, or anthropology. In
other words, the explanatory enterprise of psychology cannot be rig-
orously distinguished from the explanatory enterprises of these other
disciplines; and the study of the behavior of individual organisms cannot
be rigorously distinguished from the study of their collective behavior
or its genesis.
The objection, then, is that this picture fails to take into account
the different kinds of questions you can ask about behavior, and the
corresponding differences in the explanatory strategies required to ans-
wer these questions. In particular, you can ask on the one hand how
the cognitive system in front of you works, and you can ask on the
other hand why it works that way. Furthermore, the objection con-
tinues, these questions and their answers are essentially independent
of each other. Even if progress towards answering one of them contri-
butes to your being in a better position to answer the other one, this
does not by itself legitimate a conflation of the explanatory strategies
involved, or a claim that one is dependent upon the other in some way.
Now if psychology is oriented exclusively towards the first question, it
is virtually by definition devoted to the explanation of individual be-
havior on an individualistic basis. There may well be some aspects of
behavior which its explanations do not capture, or some legitimate
descriptions of behavior under which it cannot be explained individ-
ualistically. But there are other disciplines such as sociology and ethol-
ogy that ask the relevant sorts of questions, and they may very well
exploit non-individualistic modes of explanation in answering them.
In short, non-individualistic explanation of behavior is a legitimate
enterprise - it is just not the enterprise of psychology.
In responding to this objection, I am going to begin with some rather
general and fundamental claims which I will not be able to fully support
here, but which are important in locating the real source of the resis-
tance to the non-individualist position in general and my version of it
in particular. At first I was disposed to attribute this to a disciplinary
territorial imperative of some sort, and was therefore disposed to point
out that the boundaries between currently constituted academic disci-
plines are not sacred. But it is actually the other way around: people
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 191

are disposed to respect current disciplinary boundaries because they

see these as following roughly the allegedly natural divisions of explana-
tory labor just described. 11 So then the question becomes: Why do just
these divisions seem natural and unavoidable? And are they in fact
natural and unavoidable, or do they just seem that way for some
reason?
The underlying dismay felt by a lot of people seems to revolve around
the idea that psychology might not be independent and foundational
with regard to the other disciplines involved in the study of the behavior
of organisms. This gets back to a long-standing debate in the human
sciences between individualism and holism. Roughly, the question is
whether the metaphysics and epistemology are such that the individual
is the basic metaphysical unit and can be understood independently (in
which case you must start with the individual and understand social
structures as collections or configurations of these elementary individ-
uals); or whether, on the other hand, the metaphysics and epistemology
are such that social structures are metaphysically basic and individuals
can only be understood relationally (in which case you must start with
the social structures and understand individuals as essentially embedded
components thereof). In my view, non-individualism with regard to
psychological explanation is fundamentally committed to a relational
metaphysics and a holistic epistemology. Unfortunately, this is a very
hard row to hoe, since metaphysical individualism (as I will call it,
bearing in mind that it has an epistemological aspect as well) is so
thoroughly entrenched in the Western tradition that it functions as an
unquestioned assumption, and, when challenged, often enough, is sim-
ply held up as unquestionable. It is, in short, the ideology of the West.
Why this should be so, and why it is so hard to shake, has been explored
in an excellent article by Scheman (1983).
However, in this context, ! only want to make two points. The
general point is that entrenchment is no argument for correctness. The
main point is that if metaphysical individualism is not obviously correct,
then the allegedly natural division of explanatory labor, upon which
the objection under consideration relies, obviously, is not what it is
made out to be. In particular, only under the assumption of metaphys-
ical individualism are the two questions: 'How does this work?' and
'Why does it work this way?' in principle independent of each other.
The 'why' question is basically a relational one, asking about the embed-
dedness of an individual in an environment other than its immediate
192 BETH PRESTON

one (e.g., its evolutionary history, its role in an ecology or a society,

etc.). The 'how' question apparently asks about the individual in iso-
lation (e.g., about what internal mechanisms account for its observable
movements, etc.). But only if the individual taken in isolation is the
basic metaphysical unit can the 'how' question be in principle answer-
able independently of the 'why' question. If the metaphysics is actually
relational, for instance, any attempt to answer the 'how' question will
have to appeal explicitly or implicitly to some antecedent notion of how
the individual is embedded in supra-individual structures, since it is, on
this view, only in virtue of this embeddedness, that the individual is
identifiable as such and specifiable as the particular individual it is.
What this means in terms of the question of individualistic explanation
in psychology is that there is actually an underlying asymmetrical depen-
dence of individualistic modes of explanation upon non-individualistic
considerations.
I think I have already indicated basically what form this dependence
takes and how it is established in terms of the claims of the non-
individualist position, but perhaps the present context will clarify the
issue. The general point is that the claims of non-individualism revolve
centrally around how entities of interest to psychology are individuated.
Since this operation of individuation establishes the basic elements of
both the explanandum and the explanans, it is the foundation of the
explanatory enterprise as a whole. So if this individuation is necessarily
non-individualistic, any further explanatory enterprise erected on this
foundation will be fundamentally (in the literal sense) non-individualis-
tic, even if it appears on the surface and henceforth to concern itself
only with the individual organism. So, for example, Millikan argues
that the behavior to be explained by psychology must be individuated
non-individualistically in terms of proper function. Similarly, Burge
argues that the individuation of mental representations invoked to ex-
plain this behavior is essentially non-individualistic. I have suggested
that the individuation of stimuli invoked in the explanation of behavior
is also non-individualistic. If this is right, if the basic elements of the
the explanandum (behavior) as well as the explanans (mental represen-
tations, stimuli) turn out to be identifiable in the first place only non-
individualistically, then it looks like you cannot even ask the question
'How does this work?' without bringing in non-individualistic consider-
ations, because you will not be able to specify the reference of 'this'.
 BEHAVIORISM AND MENTALISM 193

The objector might try to escape this conclusion by insisting that the
psychologist could individuate behavior purely physiologically, describ-
ing it entirely in terms of sheer bodily movement. This was, of course,
the ideal at which some behaviorists aimed, in hopes of eliminating
even the slightest seductive suggestion of intentionality. But it was in
part precisely this restriction which was responsible for the stagnation
and eventual fall from favor of the behaviorist paradigm; and, in any
case, psychologists in general do not now adhere to it in practice.
Moreover, if they did adhere to it, a different problem would arise;
for it is not at all clear whether sheer bodily movement is properly
characterized as behavior at all. The psychologically relevant notion of
behavior is most closely allied with notions like action or activity. It is
in this sense that behavior is interesting, something which calls for
investigation by a group of sciences or disciplines separate from physiol-
ogy. We want to know how and why animals do what they do. But it
is not clear that you can get from bodily movement to action, because
the individuation of movements underdetermines the individuation of
actions. You may strike your forehead with your hand in exactly the
same way whether you are squashing a mosquito or suddenly remem-
bering something important. To put it another way, the supervenience
of actions on bodily movements may not be very strong at all - quite
possibly not even token-token. If so, explaining the latter would not
shed any interesting or explanatory light on the former. So it might be
possible to construct individualistic explanations of bodily movement,
but they would not necessarily count as explanations of behavior, at
least not in any sense relevant to the going concern of psychology. In
short, attempts to force psychological explanation into the individualis-
tic mold bid fair to be destructive of its aims and accomplishments
rather than otherwise.
I hope I have indicated clearly how the argument against this objec-
tion to the claims of non-individualism in psychological explanation is
supposed to go, even if I have not been able to present it in full detail.
Of course, staving off this one objection does not by itself prove that
non-individualism is the right account of psychological explanation. In
any case, in this paper my aim has been more to show that it is a
possible account, and to situate it and examine its status with respect
to more standard accounts. So I will have accomplished my purpose if
I have convinced you that the mutual recriminations of behaviorists
194 BETH PRESTON

and neomentalists are a tempest in a teapot and that deeper and more
interesting issues in philosophy of psychology revolve around the ques-
tion of non-individualism.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper was conceived during a postdoctoral year at the University

of Pittsburgh, where I held concurrent appointments as a Mellon Post-
doctoral Fellow and a Visiting Fellow in the Center for the Philosophy
of Science. This support is gratefully acknowledged. I would like to
thank David Chapman, Tim van Gelder, and an anonymous Synthese
referee for constructive criticism of earlier drafts, and Tony Dardis for
enlightening conversations on the issues involved. Versions of this paper
were delivered to the Georgia Philosophical Society and the American
Philosophical Association; I would also like to thank these audiences
for their questions and-criticisms. Last but not least, I would like to
thank Ruth Millikan, both for comments on an earlier draft of this
paper, and for providing me with draft versions of relevant work of her
own.

NOTES

1 In what follows, I will be referring to this program largely as articulated by B. F.

Skinner. This is hardly ecumenical, since Skinnerians are probably more accurately
described as a radical fringe than as representative of the behaviorist approach at large.
However, Skinneffs radical behaviorism provides the sharpest possible contrast with
mentalism. In addition, those who have read any of the behaviorist literature are most
likely to have read Skinner, so I can hope to rely on at least some antecedent familiarity.
2 Incipient objections of this sort have been raised occasionally within the neomentalist
community itself. Dennett suggests it with regard to Fodor's discussion of the language
of thought, for instance:

[S]uppose hamsters are interpretable as good Bayesians when it comes to the de-
cisions they make. Must we in principle be able to find some saliencies in the
hamsters' controls that are interpretable as tokens of formulae in some Bayesian
calculus? If that is Fodor's c o n c l u s i o n . . . I confess to disbelieving it utterly.
(Dennett, t978c, p. 107)

This point ought not to be controversial, but it is routinely obscured by the rhetoric
on both sides and was therefore worth making.
Indeed, there is one other obvious point of agreement: both mentalists and behaviorists
subscribe to a materialist theory of the mind, and are aiming at a scientific psychology.
 B E H A V I O R I S M AND M E N T A L I S M 195

I have not listed this assumption because it is one which is also shared by the third
alternative I will be describing later.
s For an excellent discussion of these and other problems regarding transduction, see
Pylyshyn (1984), especially Chapter 6.
6 Skinner sometimes construes this boundary in terms of the public-private distinction.
What goes on inside the skin is private, and this privacy not only poses a problem for
the scientist desiring intersubjectively verifiable data, but antecedently poses a problem
for the community which cannot, for more or less Wittgensteinian reasons, count on
success in teaching its members to identify their private states so as to communicate them
to others (Skinner, 1974, p. 22ff.). But this way of construing the skin as the boundary
is essentially epistemological rather than psychological, so I will ignore it tor the purposes
of this paper.
7 This exampte has its basis in fact; cats do purr regularly under stressful conditions and
when sick or injured. Most eat owners are not aware of this, and moreover they tend to
discount the behavior as arbitrary when it occurs, since the received (and untrue) view
is that cats purr when happy and content.
8 There is the additional complication of understanding the integration of purring into
the social relationships between humans and cats. Morris perceptively notes that the
feline purr has very much the same range of function as the haman smile, which might
help explain why this integration has been so successful,
9 Ruth Mitlikan makes essentially this same point with reference to her notion of proper
function (Millikan, 1993, especially Chapter 7). While I do not subscribe to all the details
and consequences of that notion, I agree with her that behavior, in order to be explained,
is most appropriately described in functional terms, and that, consequently, the explana-
tion of behavior cannot depend on a rigorous distinction between inside and outside.
~0 From this point of view 'context' would probably be a more appropriate term than
'environment', but the latter is more common in the literature so 1 have retained it.
~ I owe this particular point to an anonymous referee for Synthese.

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Department of Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence Programs

University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602-1627
U.S.A.