Logical Behaviorism And Dualism In The Philosophy Of Mind

Substance Dualism is a theory of mind that asserts the thesis that there exists the mind (nonphysical) and the body (physical) and that they are two distinct substances. Moreover, it identifies a being immediately with their mind and only secondarily with their body. Logical Behaviorism is branch of philosophical behaviorism. Behaviorism, essentially, is the thesis that mental states, if they exist, are identical to behavioral states. Logical Behaviorism posits that descriptions of mental states are reducible to descriptions of behavioral states. So for example, to say someone is in pain is to say they are exhibiting the behaviors usually associated with pain. Further, it posits that all that one needs to know about mental states can be observed through …show more content…
The problem of other minds and the mind body problem. Dualism has traditionally struggled to account for how an immaterial substance can interact with a material one. Behaviorism on the other hand is a physicalist theory and implicit in it is the idea that the mind arises out of the material physical world. What dualism fails to account for, Behaviorism solves simply by ascribing to a view of the purely material. The other is the problem of other minds- the objection to Dualism based on the undesired conclusion that if all we can be sure of is our own bodies, we can never know for certain that others even really exist. Dualism still struggles with this. However, Behaviorism dissolves this problem because again, in virtue of its physicalist foundation, it implicitly assumes a consistency among other humans that Substance dualism doubted. Because of this, minds are physically the same and only experientially different and so can be assumed to operate similarly to one another. Because of the physicalism of Behaviorism, it is able to dissolve two long existing problems of