Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1976

Keywords

Human behavior, Human information processing, Cybernetics

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

J. Aronson

Second Advisor

T. Mischel

Third Advisor

A. Preus

Abstract

The mechanistic approach to the explanation of human behavior is as old as western philosophy itself, dating back to the materialistic theories of mind of the pre-Socratics. Despite its antiquity, however, mechanism has never gained undisputed ascendancy as a psychological model. The “mental” side of behavior, viz., sensations, cognitions, intentions, and so forth, have proven to be particularly resistant to mechanistic analysis. At each stage in the development of mechanism there has been a renewed effort to maintain a privileged autonomy for explanations dealing with the activities of the mind. This effort has manifested itself in arguments which range from religious accounts of the potency of the human soul to semantic accounts of the unanalysability of intentionality.

Despite the objections offered, mechanists have continued to press their position on the basis of its epistemological strengths. The chief virtue of the physico-mechanical mode of analysis is that it is lucid; even in those areas where determinate quantification is ruled out, it remains generally coherent and consistent. If it lacks completeness, with respect to certain mental phenomena, it may yet be modified to overcome this weakness. The perennial task of the mechanist has been to seek new ways of characterizing mental phenomena and/or new ways to augment the mechanistic paradigm, with the ultimate aim of rendering the "mental" accessible to a more precise form of study.

Philosophers who have accepted this task include, most notably, logical behaviorists and psycho-neural identity theorists. The former seek to identify the constituent activities of mind with observable (in principle) molar behavioral episodes; the latter seek a similar identification to the neural states and processes of the central nervous system. As experimental methodologies, neither approach is especially objectionable. Difficulty arises, however, when we seek to use this type of coarse materialism as a conceptual foundation for our explanation of complex human behavior and experience. Neither logical behaviorism nor psycho-neural identity theory provide us with sufficient theoretical structure to make sense out of the numerous distinctions which are intrinsic to linguistic behavior. The difference between, e.g., voluntary and involuntary behavior, which is crucial to our social and legal systems, vanishes with this sort of materialism. Needless to say, we are reluctant to sacrifice distinctions such as these for the sake of mechanistic clarity.

....

The central thesis that I am interested in defending may be stated as follows: By appropriately modifying the conceptual structure of the mechanist position we can generate a model which will be capable of unifying both mentalistic and physicalistic formats of explanation for human behavior. The type of behavior we are primarily concerned with is that involved in human action and cognition. There are at least three preliminary clarifications which must be made with regard to this formulation, namely: i) the use of the term ‘mechanistic’; ii) the use of the term ‘model’; and iii) the philosophical domain of problems which the explanation of action and cognition covers.

i) To characterize the position which I seek to investigate and defend as ‘mechanistic’ is necessary and yet, unfortunately, somewhat misleading. What makes it necessary is the fact that it inherits certain essential presuppositions from the traditional mechanistic position, chief among these being a commitment to the beliefs that: a) the analysis of human behavior requires no appeal to incorporeal substances such as the soul; b) the rules which govern human behavior both compatible and coherent with the laws governing physical activities; and c) the third-person mode of analysis is logically, as well as methodologically, sufficient to capture the nuances in the explanation of cognition and intentional action.

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