Functionalism versus Behaviorism

Hanover

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

I think functionalism attempts to specifically explain the mental state by defining it as what it does, even if there may be multiple ways it could have come to be. So, for instance, if a computer responds to data in a way similar to the way a human does, then, from a functionalist standpoint, the computer and the human had similar mental states. Note the attempt to explain what the mental state is: it is what it does.

A behaviorist doesn't deny the existence of mental states, but he explicitly refuses to consider what they may be. His position is that the inner workings of the brain are unobservable and therefore not subject to measurement and are therefore scientifically irrelevant. The behaviorist would observe your pain to be caused by the pin prick and identify that as the scientific cause. That is not to say the behaviorist denies a complex mental process between the pin prick and your scream, but only that he proclaims those mental processes are unknowable and therefore scientifically irrelevant. Note the lack of attempt to explain what the mental state is: what it is is irrelevant.

Any position that outright denies mental states seems untenable. I see behaviorism as an attempt to make the field of psychology more scientific, but not an attempt to make an overriding metaphysical claim.

Outlander

Behaviorism = Nurture vs. Nature? (nurture being more relevant- ie. a pitbull will be either as friendly or hostile as you raise it to be)

Functionalism = Pragmatism-esque view of psychology along the lines of form follows function? Without looking into either in any detail, seems to be a myopic philosophy of human psychology.with little effectual purpose. Kind of an anti-philosophy really. More suited for architecture or product design than something as complex as the human psyche if you ask me.

Jamal

This from the IEP entry on functionalism looks about right:

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

https://iep.utm.edu/functism/

But aside from these differences in ontology, I see the two as different primarily in their motivations and emphases. Functionalism was the basis for a lot of work in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, because computationalism is a kind of functionalism, or is based on it.

apokrisis

Behaviourism got folk excited as an effective technology for controlling or fixing humans. It positioned itself against Freudian type explorations of the psyche and pointed out that people are mostly a bundle of environmentally conditioned habits.

That is a view with a lot of truth. But the whole of Operant Conditioning could be taught in a half year class. It was so simple in terms of theory that there was very little more to learn.

Functionalism was a technological wet dream version of psychology. The shtick was that brain states were multirealisable because they were just “patterns of information”. So artificial intelligence was a DARPA research project with a 10 year payback. Sign my grant cheque please.

Cognitive science was great in its early days when computation was mostly a metaphor. Psychologist did real useful work in developing a more modular conception of how the brain could work. But then computer science took functionalism into fantasy land.

Yet cogsci still trumps behaviourism as it did create a rich landscape of thought. It branched in all directions as there is something right about understanding the mind as an informational process.

Pfhorrest

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

↪jamalrob

This is more or less what I was trying to get at with my post in the intro thread that spawned this one, which I assumed would be moved over here in the split:

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

Functionalism versus Behaviorism

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Categories

More Discussions