Rachlin, H. (1999).
Philosophical behaviorism: A review of
<i>Things that happen because they should:
A teleological approach to action,</i> by Rowland Stout.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,
72, 273-277.
Mentalistic terms such as belief and desire have
been rejected by behavior analysts because they are traditionally
held to refer to unobservable events inside the organism.
Behavior analysis has consequently been viewed by philosophers to
be at best irrelevant to psychology, understood as a science of
the mind. In this book, the philosopher Rowland Stout argues
cogently that beliefs and desires (like operants such as rats'
lever presses) are best understood in terms of an interaction
over time between overt behavior and its overt consequences (a
viewpoint called teleological behaviorism). This book is
important because it identifies the science of the mind with the
science of overt behavior and implies that the psychologists best
equipped to study mental life are not those who purport to do so
but those who focus on the experimental analysis of behavior.
Key words: behaviorism, belief, causation, cognitivism,
dispositions, intentional act, operant, teleology