Page 11 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

Visual Awareness 7

The other materialist position, called eliminative materialism,positsthatat
least some of our current concepts concerning mental states and events will
eventually be eliminated from scientific vocabulary because they will be found
to be simply invalid (e.g., Churchland, 1990). The scenario eliminative materi-
alists envision is thus more radical than the simple translation scheme we just
described for reductive materialism. Eliminative materialists believe that some
of our present concepts about mental entities (perhaps including perceptual
experiences as well as beliefs, hopes, desires, and so forth) are so fundamen-
tally flawed that they will someday be entirely replaced by a scientifically
accurate account that is expressed in terms of the underlying neural events.
An appropriate analogy here would be the elimination of the now-discredited
ideas of ‘‘vitalism’’ in biology: the view that what distinguishes living from
nonliving things is the presence of a mysterious and qualitatively distinct force
or substance that is present in living objects and absent in nonliving ones. The
discovery of the biochemical reactions that cause the replication of DNA by
completely normal physical means ultimately undercut any need for such mys-
tical concepts, and so they were banished from scientific discussion, never to be
seen again.
In the same spirit, eliminative materialists believe that some mental concepts,
such as perceiving, thinking, desiring, and believing, will eventually be sup-
planted by discussion of the precise neurological events that underlie them.
Scientists would then speakexclusively of the characteristic pattern of neural
firings in the appropriate nuclei of the lateral hypothalamus and leave all talk
about ‘‘being hungry’’ or ‘‘the desire to eat’’ to historians of science who study
archaic and discredited curiosities of yesteryear. Even the general public would
eventually come to thinkand talkin terms of these neuroscientific explanations
for experiences, much as modern popular culture has begun to assimilate cer-
tain notions about DNA replication, gene splicing, cloning, and related con-
cepts into movies, advertising, and language.
Behaviorism Another position on the mind-body problem is philosophical be-
haviorism: the view that the proper way to talkabout mental events is in terms
of the overt, observable movements (behaviors) in which an organism engages.
Because objective behaviors are measurable, quantifiable aspects of the physical
world, behaviorism is, strictly speaking, a kind of materialism. It provides such
a different perspective, however, that it is best thought of as a distinct view.
Behaviorists differ markedly from standard materialists in that they seek to
reduce mental events to behavioral events or dispositions rather than to neu-
rophysiological events. They shun neural explanations not because they dis-
believe in the causal efficacy of neural events, but because they believe that
behavior offers a higher and more appropriate level of analysis. The radical
behaviorist movement pressed for nothing less than redefining the scientific
study of mind as the scientific study of behavior. And for many years, they
succeeded in changing the agenda of psychology.
The behaviorist movement began with the writings of psychologist John
Watson (1913), who advocated a thoroughgoing purge of everything mental from
psychology. He reasoned that what made intellectual inquiries scientific rather
than humanistic or literary was that the empirical data and theoretical con-
structs on which they rest are objective. In the case of empirical observations,