In the light of the foregoing, it is appropriate to comment briefly on a curious phenomenon in modern psychology:
the doctrine of behaviorism.
The Revolt Against Consciousness
In order, allegedly, to establish psychology as a "genuine science," on a part with the physical sciences,
behaviorism proposes the following program: to dispense with the concept of consciousness, to abandon all concern
with "mythical" mental states, and to study exclusively an organism's behavior—i.e., to restrict psychology to the
study of physical motions. For this reason, a writer on the history of psychology aptly entitled his chapter on
behaviorism, "Psychology out of its Mind."^5
Sometimes a distinction is made between "radical behaviorism" and "methodological behaviorism." Radical
behaviorism is explicit reductive materialism; it holds that mind is a series of bodily responses, such as muscular
and glandular reactions. The gross untenability of this doctrine has already been noted. The advocates of
methodological behaviorism frequently repudiate this doctrine as "unsophisticated" and ''philosophical." Their form
of behaviorism, they insist, makes no metaphysical commitment whatever, i.e., no commitment about the
fundamental nature of man or of mind; it is entirely procedural; it merely holds that consciousness—whatever that
might be—is not an object of scientific study; and that scientific psychology must confine itself to an analysis of
observed behavior without reference to mentalistic data and without recourse to any concepts derived by means of
introspection.
A methodology, however, to be valid, must be appropriate to its subject. Therefore, it necessarily entails a view of
the nature of its subject. Methodological behaviorism implies that the organisms which psychology studies are such
that their behavior can be understood without reference to consciousness. And this, clearly, is a metaphysical
position.
Methodological behaviorists may wish to deny that they are reductive materialists. But then, as a minimum, their
doctrine entails a belief in another, no more promising version of materialism: epiphenomenalism—the doctrine
that consciousness is merely an incidental by-product of physical processes (as smoke is a by-