What then is the difference between behaviorism and functionalism? Since functionalism also looks only at behavior for data.
Maybe this conversation should be split into another thread so we don’t crowd this introduction thread. — Pfhorrest
https://iep.utm.edu/functism/That is, what makes something a mental state is more a matter of what it does, not what it is made of. This distinguishes functionalism from traditional mind-body dualism, such as that of René Descartes, according to which minds are made of a special kind of substance, the res cogitans (the thinking substance.) It also distinguishes functionalism from contemporary monisms such as J. J. C. Smart’s mind-brain identity theory. The identity theory says that mental states are particular kinds of biological states—namely, states of brains—and so presumably have to be made of certain kinds of stuff, namely, brain stuff. Mental states, according to the identity theory, are more like diamonds than like mouse traps.
Functionalism is also distinguished from B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism because it accepts the reality of internal mental states, rather than simply attributing psychological states to the whole organism. According to behaviorism, which mental states a creature has depends just on how it behaves (or is disposed to behave) in response to stimuli. In contrast functionalists typically believe that internal and psychological states can be distinguished with a “finer grain” than behavior—that is, distinct internal or psychological states could result in the same behaviors. So functionalists think that it is what the internal states do that makes them mental states, not just what is done by the creature of which they are parts. — IEP
Functionalism is also distinguished from B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism because it accepts the reality of internal mental states, rather than simply attributing psychological states to the whole organism. According to behaviorism, which mental states a creature has depends just on how it behaves (or is disposed to behave) in response to stimuli. In contrast functionalists typically believe that internal and psychological states can be distinguished with a “finer grain” than behavior — IEP
I still haven't figured out the difference between a materialist and a physicalist, or if there is a difference. And I'm not sure about identity theorists, functionalists, and behaviourists — Malcolm Lett
Sometimes materialist and physicalist mean the same thing. When they differ, it’s either just to explicitly expand the set of things believed in to physical stuff besides matter (like other forms of energy, spacetime, quantum fields, strings and branes, etc), or to affirm that general kind of stuff while denying the existence of “material substances” as in something above and beyond the empirically observable properties of things, some kind of transcendental stuff that those properties inhere in.
Behaviorists think that there is nothing more to mind than behavior; to be in a mental state just is to behave some way. Functionalists are very similar, except that they take mind to be a function, a map from input to output, where the output is behavior, and input is sense experience; to be in a mental state is more like to be disposed to behave a certain way in response to certain experiences. Both of these differ from any kind of identity theory because they imply multiple realizability: anything that does the same behavior or function is in the same mental state, no matter what kind of underlying stuff is instantiating that behavior or functionality (brains, circuits, vacuum tubes, etc), whereas identity theories say that a mental state is (either a type or a token of) a brain state specifically. — Pfhorrest
I'd argue a behaviorist admits there is a mind separate from behavior, but its inner workings are unknowable. The mind is not just behavior, but the behavior is the only thing that you can measure. In order to advance psychology into a scientific discipline, as opposed to the speculative theories of Freud, Skinner limited the relevant data to that which could objectively be observed and measured. So, I don't think you can say that behaviorism states that the mind is behavior, but it's more that the mind is a black box with inner workings that cannot be known, therefore making only the behavior relevant for analysis. — Hanover
What then is the difference between behaviorism and functionalism? Since functionalism also looks only at behavior for data. — Pfhorrest
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