Behaviorism and Christianity

First edition Copy right © 1982 The Trinity Foundation

Second edition Copy right © 1992 The Trinity Foundation
Included in Modern Philosophy Copy right © 2008 John W. Robbins
This edition Copy right © 2012 Laura K. Juodaitis
Published by
The Trinity Foundation
Post Office Box 68
Unicoi, Tennessee 37692
www.trinity foundation.org
 Contents
1. John B. Watson
2. Edgar A. Singer, Jr.
3. Gilbert Ryle
4. B. F. Skinner
5. Philosophic Criticism
6. Donald M. MacKay
 1. John B. Watson
That secular and state-controlled universities propagate non-Christian and
Antichristian philosophies is what one expects. I spent forty y ears in such
institutions. But eight y ears in a Christian college some time ago and more
recently five or six y ears in another Christian college have provided an
opportunity to observe sub-Christian, non-Christian, and Antichristian tendencies
in Christian institutions as well. Conversations with professors in other Christian
colleges have brought corroboration. The points at issue in the early eighties are
different from those of the thirties. Today, in addition to other factors which are
worth consideration, the psy chology or philosophy of Behaviorism notably
undermines the Christian faith of the students. Therefore, the subject of this
monograph is Behaviorism.
The outline in its briefest form will be (1) the basic position of Behaviorism as
expounded by its secular proponents. Some objections will be interspersed, but a
more complete refutation will follow; and (2) the position of professedly Christian
psy chologists who include the same view; and (3) a Scriptural rebuttal.

Naturalism and Behaviorism

The most philosophic, that is to say, the most general statement of the theory
which in philosophy is often called naturalism, but which in its psy chological
application is called Behaviorism, can be found in the presidential address of
Ernest Nagel to the American Philosophic Association in 1954. It is essential that
this famous paragraph be kept in mind as one reads through the following
material in its entirety .
Dr. Nagel’s words are these:
The occurrence of events, qualities, and processes, and the characteristic
behavior of various individuals, are contingent on the organization of
spatiotemporally located bodies, whose internal and external relations
determine and limit the appearance and disappearance of every thing that
happens. That this is so, is one of the best-tested conclusions of experience….
There is no place for the operation of disembodied forces, no place for an
immaterial spirit directing the course of events, no place for the survival of
personality after the corruption of the body which exhibits it.
 This statement is remarkable for its clarity, and, in spite of omitting a line or
two, for its succinctness also. Implicit is a philosophy of science. More explicit is
the denial of God – no immaterial spirit directing the course of events – and very
clearly a forthright rejection of personal immortality. Each word is heavy with
meaning. The assertions and denials are sweeping and universal. Any one who
admires superb English sty le and philosophic precision must recognize its author’s
extraordinary competence.
The term naturalism is a more philosophical term; Behaviorism is its
psy chological subspecies. The theory also has its political and juridical
implications. But this monograph will deal mostly with Behaviorism as a
psy chological theory and with the epistemological problems it raises. First it is
necessary more specifically to document the psy chological form of the theory.
This too has subspecies. The particularities of the more recent forms may not be
completely explicated here. What is in view is the common core of all. To refute
Watson or Ry le on some point not acknowledged by other Behaviorists leaves
untouched these other ty pes of Behaviorism. The program here is to explain and
refute its very basis. The documentation aims to show that this basis is common to
all.
It might be hard to pinpoint the origin of Behaviorism, but William James’
e ssa y, Does Consciousness Exist? with its negative conclusion, is an early
statement. A decade or so later Edgar Arthur Singer, Jr. wrote a more
philosophical than psy chological volume on Mind as Behavior. The same y ear
(1924) John B. Watson published his Behaviorism, and among the psy chologists
this book is often regarded as having initiated the movement. Not long after, he
wrote Psychology from the Standpoint of the Behaviorist. To be sure, Watson
refers to William James and others who wrote before World War I; but it is not
too much to say that Watson popularized the theory among scholars and among
the laity as well. Even today, though most psy chologists no longer regard him as
an oracle, there remain a few who still follow him in considerable detail. It is
important, therefore, to reproduce some of his main ideas, in his own words so
far as is convenient.
Watson rejects the earlier method of introspection as utterly fruitless. He
repudiates the idea that “consciousness” is the subject matter of psy chology.
“Behaviorism claims that ‘consciousness’ is neither a definable nor a usable
concept; that it is merely another word for the ‘soul’ of more ancient times.” 1
“No one has ever touched a soul or has seen one in a test tube.” Test-tube
chemistry will play an important part in the following discussion; but note first
that the reference to touching and seeing presupposes that sensation is the test of
truth. All Behaviorism is philosophically empirical. This is a theme that will recur
many times in the following discussion. But to return to quotation:

When we have a sensation of red, a perception, a thought, when we will to

do something, or when we purpose to do something…we are being
conscious. All other introspectionists are equally illogical. In other words,
they do not tell us what consciousness is, but merely begin to put things into it
by assumption; and then when they come to analy ze consciousness,
naturally they find it just what they put into it [5].
On the same page, just below the quotation above, Watson rejects the method
of introspection: “How do we begin to work upon it? Not by analy zing it as we
would a chemical compound….” This remark shows that Behaviorists want to
analy ze “mind” as they would a chemical compound. In other words, a thought is
a chemical reaction. His earlier references to a test-tube confirm this.
Behaviorism reduces thinking to observable chemistry .
After mentioning radium, insulin, and thy roxin “and hundreds of others” as
examples of testable elements in a laboratory, Watson notes that the Behaviorist
“dropped from his scientific vocabulary all subjective terms such as sensation,
perception, image, purpose, and even thinking and emotion as they were
subjectively defined” (6). Of course Watson himself speaks of sense organs. On
page 117 he even describes a cat as “affectionately aggressive.” Above we saw
that Singer spoke of “mind.” What we must note is that Behaviorists have changed
the meanings of all such words. They still use the word mind, but their “mind” is
nothing like Plato’s nous. This causes confusion, because the employ ment of
common terms gives people the impression that the Behaviorists are talking about
commonly received meanings in conformity with good English usage. To
understand them aright, the ordinary reader should substitute the word chemistry
when he finds perception or thought in their writings.
To quote again: “Why don’t we make what we can observe the real field of
psy chology ?” This means, Why don’t we make one test-tube rather than another
the real field of psy chology ? On the Behaviorist theory, observation itself is
chemistry in a test-tube. But to continue the quotation: “Let us limit ourselves
[limiting is another chemical reaction] to things that can be observed…now what
can we observe? Well, we can observe behavior – what the organism does or
say s…say ing is doing [that is, moving the lary nx and tongue] – that is behaving.
Speaking overtly or to ourselves (thinking) is just as objective a ty pe of behavior
as baseball.”
Even though Watson enclosed it in a parenthesis, he here identifies thinking as
sub-vocal speech. Thinking is precisely a motion of the lary nx without a sound.
This is still further emphasized by his reference to “any change in the tissues
themselves due to the psy chological condition of the animal.”

Behaviorism and Ethics

Above, the comment was made that Behaviorism has political and juridical
implications. Watson acknowledges or boasts that Behaviorism will determine
what is moral:

I would like to point out here that some time we will have a behavioristic
ethics, experimental in ty pe, which will tell us whether it is advisable from
the standpoint of present and future adjustments of the individual to have one
wife or many wives; to have capital punishment or punishment of any kind;
…whether many of our other prescribed courses of conduct make for
adjustment of the individual or on the contrary, such for example as having
a family life or even knowing our own fathers and mothers [7].

Apparently “adjustment of the individual” indicates a ty pe of conduct that is

“advisable,” while “the contrary ” lack of adjustment is inadvisable. Just how
monogamy can be an adjustment of the individual and poly gamy not an
adjustment, or vice versa, whichever custom Behaviorism eventually approves,
is hard to see. But it is not hard to see that Behaviorism is a comprehensive
philosophy affecting every possible human interest.
Watson then begins to describe the visible reactions of infants, a subject which
fills a large part of his volume; and he notes that a small baby will not go through
the motions by which other persons infer he is experiencing fear, but that these
motions will occur if a steel bar held just behind his head is struck by a hammer.
Of course any one can observe such behavior; but it does not support the
inferences Watson then draws. Watson argues: “Our studies of conditioned
reflexes make it easy for us to account for a child’s fear of the dog [at whose
presence on several occasions the steel bar was struck] on a thoroughly natural
science basis without lugging in consciousness or any other so-called mental
process.” If this were true, why would not a tree, a stone, the apparatus in a
phy sics laboratory, or a corpse act in the same way ? What is the difference
between a live infant and a corpse that accounts for the reaction in the one case
and not in the other? Do y ou say that one is dead and the other alive? What is
death and what is life? How can the observations of the motions of a steel bar
followed by the observation of the motions of the baby warrant the inference that
they are not connected by consciousness or some other mental process? If no
mental process is needed, why cannot a corpse be conditioned? How is it that by
holding a child’s arms so that he cannot move them “brings out the original
unlearned response we call rage”? Conditioned reflexes do not make it easy ;
rather they make it hard to account for them “without lugging in consciousness.”
Watson himself asks similar question for his readers; but on page 10 he merely
states that the commonly received introspective psy chology has conditioned
these readers to think that way, and that later on in the book he will recondition
them to think, that is, to behave, in his way. In fact, he say s, “the Behaviorist…
wants to control man’s reactions as phy sical scientists want to control and
manipulate other natural phenomena. It is the business of Behavioristic
psy chology …to control human activity ” (11). Thus the aim of Behaviorism is
political totalitarianism more crushing of individuality than any ty rant has so far
achieved.
This last sentence is not extreme. On page 14 Watson say s that the Behaviorist
is interested in the whole man; “he watches him perform his daily round of
duties.” If the watched subject is a bricklay er, the Behaviorist will determine how
many bricks he can lay “without dropping from fatigue.” This is a more efficient
program than Pharoah and Hitler were ever able to impose on the Jews. But
Behaviorism is not just a methodology for controlling slaves. It claims to be the
final philosophical truth. On page 17 Watson claims that philosophy will disappear
and become the history of science; ethics will be experimental, “based entirely
[italics added] upon behavioristic methods; sociology will merge into
behavioristic social psy chology and economics; and religion will be replaced by
experimental ethics. The chapter concludes with his hope “to show y ou why
behavioristic formulations and methods are an adequate way of accounting for
all psy chological problems” (italics added).
Although various details of Watson’s views have been abandoned by later
Behaviorists, the first chapter, just now reviewed, stating basic aims and
principles, remains substantially the position of all Behaviorists. Some of his more
important details will now be canvassed, and afterward other authors will be
quoted so that comparisons may be made.

Instincts and Emotions

 The title of chapter six is, “Are There Any Human Instincts?” The final
paragraph of the preceding chapter reproduces an objection to Behaviorism that
Watson wishes to answer:
But y ou say , “That gives the whole argument away – y ou admit he does a
lot of things at birth which he is forced to do by his structure – that is just
what is meant by instinct.” My answer is that we must now go to the facts.
We can no longer postpone a visit to the nursery. I think y ou will find there,
in the study of the infant and child, little that will encourage y ou to keep
sacred James’ list of instincts [86].

Far be it from any one to keep James’ list sacred. Furthermore, the question of
instincts is not the crucial matter in rejecting Behaviorism. In fact, “unlearned
behavior” (75), as Watson calls it, provides better support for Behaviorism than
learned behavior.
If an animal has no tear glands, it cannot cry. If it has no lary nx or other
vibrating membrane, it cannot make a sound. Watson hardly needs all his
examples in Chapter VI to prove this much. Hy drochloric acid also exhibits
unlearned behavior, as do all chemicals. But this is not enough to establish
Behaviorism. Watson wants all this unlearned behavior, and learned behavior too,
to take place in human beings as it does in test-tubes – unconsciously. This was
Descartes’ theory for animals below the human level. Stick a knife into a dog’s
stomach and it will y elp; but it feels no pain. Pat him on the head and his tail
wags, but he feels no pleasure. Stick a knife into Watson’s stomach and by the
laws of chemistry he will go through certain motions, pretty much as sulphuric
acid fizzes when y ou pour water into it. But has H2SO4 or Dr. Watson the
equipment a real dog uses when y ou pat his head?
However, the plausibility lent to Behaviorism by unlearned behavior does no
more than disguise the fallacy of the argument. Chapter VI goes into great detail
about the behavior of small babies. He described intra-uterine behavior, then
sneezing and cry ing, early ey e, hand, and foot movements, and others on pages
87 through 104. Then he asks, “What has become of instincts? Are we not ready
to admit that the whole concept of instinct is thus academic and meaningless?”
Hardly : The argument does not imply the conclusion. When I pat one dog, and
another comes up to bump him aside in order to get his own head patted, does this
reduce jealousy to a chemical reaction? What is the chemistry that produces this
reaction? In one case, the other dog may be there when I do not pat him, and the
second dog shows no jealousy ; in another case the first is not there and the second
does not insist on being patted. Are the phy sico-chemical differences in these
three cases a sufficient explanation of the differences in behavior?
Watson spends the next chapter on “Emotions.” He begins with Lange’s
detailed description of the emotion of grief. Lange lists possibly fifty observable
bodily peculiarities of a grieving person. That many of these (weak voice, neck
bent, jaw open, contracted vascular muscles, sensitiveness to cold, bitter taste,
and copious tears) sometimes occur in grieving persons need not be disputed. The
question is, What can be validly inferred? Watson gives Darwin’s description of
fear (quick heartbeat, cold sweat, etc.), and Mantegazza’s description of hatred
(head drawn backward, elevation of the upper lip, spitting, hair standing on end).
Watson’s inference is that emotions are all chemistry and no consciousness.
The remainder of the chapter describes the varied reactions of small children
to contrived situations. What will a three y ear old do when a cat comes close?
What will a small boy do in a canoe when the water is a little rough? And so on.
The descriptions are all varied and the material is very interesting. But can one
accept the statement, “These reactions which we have agreed, then, to call fear,
rage, and love…?” (123). What was the argument that led to this agreement? I
am afraid both were missing.
For example, when a steel bar held behind a child’s head is struck without
warning with a hammer, he will jump. So would any adult, not excepting Watson
himself. But can one suppose that the air waves have sufficient force to lift 150
pounds a foot off the chair? Try it on a deaf man.

Behaviorism and Politics

The introductory paragraphs of the present study stated that Behaviorism, in
addition to its psy chology, had political and juridical implications. Watson’s
second chapter on emotions documents this point. His views on the subject begin
with opposition to punishing children for misbehavior. “Punishment is a word
which ought never to have crept into our language” (144). In fact, if the child
does any thing wrong, it is the parents’ fault. Should the parent be punished? “It is
our own fault, then, that individuals (other than defectors and psy chopaths) go
‘wrong’…. I mean the fault of the parent, the teacher, and every other member
of the group…. There is no excuse for whipping” (145). If there is any scientific
or observational basis for such normative judgments, it must be contained in the
sentence,
Conditioned responses are not built up by this unscientific procedure. The
idea that a child’s future bad behavior will be prevented by giving him a
 licking in the evening for something he did in the morning is ridiculous
[because an eight-y ear-old child cannot remember that long]. Equally
ridiculous, from the standpoint of preventing crime, is our legal and juridical
method of punishment administered a y ear or two later – if at all.
“If at all.” Our judicial sy stem is extremely lax in dealing with criminals. Too
many are never punished. But this should please Watson. Punishment is a word
that should never have entered the language. Further, we parole murderers, who
then commit more murders. If society is to blame, it is for paroling them. We
may then agree with Watson that a delay of a y ear or two is bad. But the
implication is that punishment should be swift, rather than that there should be no
punishment.
In the Dark Ages punishment was swift. But Watson does not favor swift
punishment either. “Present methods of punishment for crime are relics of the
Dark Ages.” In our more civilized times psy chopaths, if they cannot be cured in
asy lums, should be “etherized” (146). Only medieval religious mandates oppose
such enlightened executions. The socially untrained (not psy chopaths) should be
placed in chain gangs, at strenuous labor twelve hours a day, under the direction
of Behaviorists (147); only this is not called punishment – it is called social
education. “Naturally such a view does away completely with criminal law…
with the criminal lawy er…and with courts for the trial of criminals.” In their
place we shall have Behavioristic law, Behavioristic lawy ers, and Behavioristic
courts. Indeed, Watson’s penology widely controls criminal processes today .
Since Watson’s book is largely psy chological rather than political and juridical,
but since also Behaviorism admits these social implications, it seems proper at this
point to interpolate a paragraph ot two concerning John Dewey and William
Kilpatrick as further documentation.
That Dewey was a Behaviorist and therefore can be cited here as a
representative of that school can easily be shown; and it is well known that
Dewey called for “the directed reconstruction of economic, political, and
religious institutions.” 2 He calls private and personal ends “repulsive.” 3 He wants
science to control the desires of men, “techniques for dealing with human nature
as we now have them for phy sical nature.” 4
Dewey ’s statements are often very general; his colleague Kilpatrick can be
pointedly specific. He opposes as old-fashioned the Americanism that believed
the government had a duty to protect private property and maintain unalienable
rights. Most emphatically he opposed religious liberty. Not only would he prohibit
religious groups from maintaining schools and colleges,5 but he also believes it
“undemocratic” to allow parents to teach the doctrines of their religion to their
own children. Clearly he wants the government to invade the home to enforce
belief in humanistic secularism. Unfortunately, since the time he wrote this, the
burgeoning bureaucracies have started doing precisely this.
Now to return to Watson, his next paragraph seems to advocate suicide, but the
wording is too vague or guarded to nail the point down. One can only suspect that
Behaviorism can produce no experimental evidence by which to condemn self-
destruction. Should we collect statistics by interviewing people who have not and
people who have killed themselves?

Behaviorism and Knowledge

Underneath all these matters from the start lie the problems of epistemology.
More fundamentally related to this than is jurisprudence is the question of
memory. Augustine centered the personal identity of a man during his earthly
life with himself in his life after death, in his memory. Watson, of course, has no
time for life after death, but neither has he any place for memory in this life.
“The behaviorist never uses the term ‘memory.’ He believes that it has no place
in an objective psy chology ” (177). This statement is at least more honest –
though I am not sure that the term ‘honesty ’ occurs in a Behavioristic vocabulary
either – than those who assign memory to computers.
To support his denial Watson appeals to a rat which, by trial and error, finally
got through a maze to his food in ten seconds – forty minutes on his first try – and
from then on “ran through the maze like a beautiful machine” (177). Watson then
records other experimental results, both with animals and children. But how does
any or all of this prove that there was no memory ? The Behaviorist may want to
ask and answer the question, “How accurately can James ride his bicy cle now
that he hasn’t touched it for five y ears?” But this question is irrelevant when the
main question is, Can any one remember any thing?
Since memory is one form of what ordinary people call thinking, Watson
immediately proceeds to “Talking and Thinking, which when rightly understood
go far in breaking down the fiction that there is any such thing as ‘mental’ life”
(extended title of chapter X).
Language, for Watson, is a complex manipulation of the lary nx. Some of his
critics have claimed that he defines thinking as sub-vocal speech, that is, such
small motions of the lary nx as not to produce sounds. This is not quite accurate. In
the note on page 180 he say s, “man both talks and thinks with his whole body [as
Dewey later agreed] just as he does every thing else with his whole body ” (191).
But at any rate, thinking as well as speaking is a complex of phy sical motions.
Next Watson describes the development of an infant’s vocabulary – all of
which is interesting and irrelevant. The real problem is how a sound, a baby ’s or
an adult’s, can designate an object. Can the chemistry inside a battery mean an
auto? Especially can the battery in this car designate the car down the street? We
cannot induce language responses in a battery ; nor even in animals, for Watson
acknowledges that language is one of the “learned activities which the brute
cannot even enter, much less compete in” (180).
Watson does indeed make an attempt to connect sounds with objects. The baby
naturally makes sounds. These sounds are “manual,” that is, phy sical activities.
By chance a baby produces a sound similar to that of an English word. Then we
try to tie that sound up to the object the adult means by it. “In the unlearned
sounds made by the infant we have all the units of responses which when later
brought together (by conditioning) are the words of our dictionaries” (185). But if
all this is merely “manual,” why cannot animals enter this field? Many of them
have bodily parts almost as complicated as ours, and their chemistry is equally
good. And what is meant by “try inig to tie that sound up to the object”? How did
the adult get the meaning from the sound in the first place? Who conditioned his
unconscious chemistry ? Indeed, how can chemistry be conditioned at all? Why is
it that Watson admits “I know how to make a frog croak by rubbing a certain spot
on its body. I can make a dog bark…. I do not know how to ‘press that button’ on
his body …which will make the baby say ‘da.’” One can as easily make a baby
cry as a dog bark – more easily . But can manual manipulation produce reference
and meaning? Even in the case of dogs, is inducing a bark something like inducing
a change of valence in a chemical?
Yet Watson holds that words – sounds, or more properly vibrations – produce
manual activity exactly as do the objects for which the words serve as substitutes
(187). Now, sounds can indeed produce manual activity : Air vibrations
presumably cause motions of the ear drums. These motions, however, are not
“exactly ” the same as the motions in the retina when the object presents itself to
the ey es. How can these two quite dissimilar motions represent the same thing?
How can either of them represent any thing? In answering the question, Watson
warns us not to appeal to “memory.”The world of thought, he say s, “we carry
around…as actual bodily organization in the muscular and glandular organization
of our throat, chest, etc.” (187). For the Behaviorist, then, meaning and thinking,
we conclude, are literally phy sical motions in space. And Watson’s description of
what other people call memory (189) is no more than this. His note on the next
page say s, “Almost wherever the introspectionist and so-called functionalist use
the term mental, we use the natural science term verbal.”
Watson explains away the resistance to Behaviorism as a relic of religious
training. Then too, “Thinking, on account of the concealed nature of the
musculature with which it is done, has alway s been inaccessible to unaided
observation” (191). If we had a good bronchoscope, no doubt, we could see the
lary ngeal vibrations, or other muscular motions, and recognize them as the
theory of relativity !
After several pages describing the motions of people who are “thinking” out a
problem, most of which motions are sub-vocal speech, Watson say s, “If then y ou
grant that you have the whole story of thinking when he thinks aloud, why make a
mystery out of it when he thinks to himself?” (198, his italics). The answer to this
question which we wish to give here is that we do not grant that phy sical motions
are “the whole story,” or even the most important part of thinking, or even a part
at all.
Of course Watson is aware – that is, he has chemical reactions – that critics
consider Behaviorism an inadequate account of meaning. He calls this an illogical
objection because Behaviorism must be judged on its own premises, and its
premises contain no propositions about meaning: “Meaning is just one way of
telling what the individual is doing. So the Behaviorist can turn the tables upon his
critics. They cannot give any explanation of meaning. He can; but he does not
believe the word is needed or that it is useful except as a literary expression”
(201).
Watson’s book then ends with a hope for the establishment of a Behavioristic
political utopia.

1. Behaviorism, 3.
2. Quest for Certainty, 259, 282.
3. Reconstruction in Philosophy, 157; see also Philosophy of Education, 354.
4. Problems of Men, 178-179.
5. Philosophy of Education, 354.
 2. Edgar A. Singer, Jr.
Edgar A. Singer, Jr., published his Mind as Behavior the same y ear that Watson
published his Behaviorism. Its first chapter, however, is a paper read before the
American Philosophic Association in 1910. The literary sty le of Singer’s writing
is too superb for condensation. But a few quotations will help document a
Behaviorism more philosophical and more profound than Watson’s. Criticize him
though I shall, every one ought to acknowledge that Singer sees the underly ing
problems much more clearly than nearly every one else.

Consciousness
After an entrancing analy sis of William James’ automatic sweetheart – the
soulless girl whose behavior is identical to that of a living girl – Singer descends to
a few lines of ordinary scholarly prose:
Consciousness is not something inferred from behavior; it is behavior. Or,
more accurately, our belief in consciousness is an expectation of probable
behavior based on observation of actual behavior, a belief to be confirmed
or refuted as any other belief in a fact is to be tried out [10].

Singer immediately acknowledges that he does not know, and does not expect
ever to know surely, what aspect of behavior leads us to call certain objects
conscious. He makes the same admission with respect to living objects. “But
though I don’t know what life means, nor what consciousness means, I feel that I
know how we may go to work to find out.” That how is empiricism. But it is an
empiricism that is not based on sense data.
To those who cannot rid themselves of reliance on sense data,
it is impossible that any analy sis of behavior I might undertake should prove
satisfactory . The whole idea of my thesis would be simply an absurdity …. It
is essential to my thesis that I regard my own mind as behavior, quite as
frankly as I take my fellow’s mind to be nothing else [12].

Thus Behaviorism begins in blind faith.

Now, some of Singer’s argument is directed against the building-block sort of
data propounded by Locke. “The beginning of our epistemological building is not
a datum which might be known by itself, not, e.g., the first sensation of a babe in
utero or of a Condillac statue…” (13). Singer’s argument on this score is no doubt
sound; but his success at this point gives no support to Behaviorism. Such
arguments would have pleased Plato too. The modern student, particularly if he
has had only one or two courses in philosophy, must avoid being deceived into
thinking that the refutation of theory X implies the truth of theory Y. In this case,
Singer’s disposal of Locke and Condillac leaves one free to proceed in either of
two opposite directions. And to repeat, the direction toward Behaviorism depends
on the acceptance of certain ethical motives with the rejection of others, as
Singer admits on page 14.
If, finally, the concluding pages of the first chapter permit one to summarize
the whole, it would be something like this:
The analogy that as my soul controls my body, so the similar motions of
another body require an unobservable soul, is an analogy based on a single
instance and therefore has no value. Second, I do not assume that any soul
produces my bodily motions. But there is another analogy based on many
instances. Heat was once explained as a body, caloric, that permeated another
body to make it hot. Now science has seen that heat is simply the behavior of the
hot body. There is no caloric. Similarly there is no “life” that must be added to a
body to make it alive. Life is just the body ’s behavior. “Consciousness is that trait
of the behavior of certain objects which makes me call them conscious…their
heat, that trait which makes me call them hot.”
At this point the critic raises two objections. The first is a subordinate objection
and may not command instant approval. The second is more important. First: The
critic complains that Singer fails to distinguish between consciousness, what
consciousness means, and the tokens by which one infers consciousness. For the
critic the question, What leads me to call a man conscious? and the question,
What does consciousness mean? are two different questions. Singer replies,
“They are to me the same. I confuse, I identify the [two questions]…. And I
detect the same lack of intellectual scruples in other situations. I am inclined to
confuse the question, What leads me to call this thing a triangle? with the question,
What does triangle mean?” (27). On this premise Behaviorism seems to follow.
Perhaps it does not follow. But at any rate the second and more important point is
that this empirical philosophy cannot stand the test of experience. Singer admitted
that he does not know and does not expect ever surely to know, what aspect of
behavior leads us to call certain objects conscious, or even living. But if the
empirical evidence is defective, then Behaviorism is not based on observation. It
is a subjective preference.
 The second chapter, “On Mind as an Observable Object,” mainly concerns an
objection that need not be pursued. But one or two incidental remarks corroborate
the main thesis. One is the acknowledgment that Behaviorism requires its
advocates to take a position on ethics. A more important point is Singer’s denial of
an immortal soul – not the immortality of Shakespeare’s play s, but the
immortality of Shakespeare himself as an individual. In answer to this suggestion
Singer replies, “Just now there faces me an issue more vital than the destiny of
souls after death – it has to do with the nature of souls during life” (35).
In this statement lies an ethical interest and a normative judgment contrary to
those found in other philosophies. Plato the pagan and Augustine the Christian
would say that there is no more vital question than the destiny of incorporeal souls
after death. No doubt both are interested in the nature of soul during this earthly
life. But Singer assumes that this latter can be known without knowing the former.
Now, no one can object to an analy st selecting the incarnate phase of the soul for
study. But to say that life after death is less important is to beg the question. One
might well say, on the contrary, that if the soul is not immortal, there is not much
gained by analy zing its present status.
After complaining that one of his critics “refuses to identify any sort of motion
of atoms with a thought, and this makes the whole thing try ing” (36), Singer
seems to fumble in describing the position of his opponents. In desperation, so to
speak, he exclaims, “Will any theory that substitutes a Ding an sich for
observable phenomena ever win to extinction?” (37, 38). This is not an error
when it is directed against theories that posit unknowables. A transcendental unity
of apperception, if it be a Ding an sich bey ond the reach of logical categories is
useless. Hegel once and for all disposed of Kant’s unknowable, but this did not
make Hegel an empirical Behaviorist. An attack on Kant does not refute
Augustine or Calvin, any more than it refutes Hegel. In these latter the soul or
mind is not a Ding an sich. If there be any Ding an sich around, they are more
likely to be the so-called observable objects. Singer may have disposed of Kant,
but he leaves Plato untouched. One thing is indubitable: Singer in his refutation
documents the Behavioristic thesis that thought is some kind of atomic motion.
It is true that Singer wishes to avoid over-simplification; he will not explain
thought as nothing but atomic motion. A merely mechanical description falls
short. Some combinations of mechanical motions can be described as
teleological, while simpler combinations cannot. Mind must be found in the more
complex combinations.
In reply to a hy pothetical opponent Singer say s, “Detail by detail these atomic
movements may be classed with other atomic movements whose class has no
common function” (48). In a footnote he adds, “The non-mechanical
classification of these [more complicated] events leads to a new order of
expectancy. This, their teleological, is also their psy chological interpretation.” An
example clarifies the statement. One can easily give a mechanical description of
every wheel: locomotive wheels with a certain diameter, airplane propellers,
bicy cle wheels of a different diameter, and wheels in watches. The sensitivities
of Behaviorists prevent us from including Ezekiel’s wheels. But from the
mechanical description of the others one could conclude only that wheels as a
class have nothing to do with chronometry (47, 48). However, in addition to their
mechanical description, the wheels in watches have the function of keeping time.
Thought is presupposed in this teleological classification.
Nevertheless the motions are mechanical: “I should begin by looking for such
movements of atoms as actually moved (too slightly for us to notice it) the organs
of expression: the tongue, principally , and the ey es” (48-49).
Singer is far more philosophical and profound than Watson. Instead of dabbling
in irrelevant experimentation, he recognizes that Behaviorism must define life,
sensation, and mind. There must be a consistent sy stem of definitions. Therefore,
Singer writes one chapter on “The Pulse of Life” and another “On Sensibility.”
At the beginning of the former he restates the basic presuppositions. “To assert
the existence or non-existence of any thing is meaningless unless we can verify
the assertion.” This sounds very much like Logical Positivism.1 “But experience
is the only means of verify ing assertions, and behavior the only aspect of the
beings we call living or conscious which is matter for experience” (53).

Materialism and Purpose

While Singer insists that all motions in the universe are mechanically
determined, that is to say, there are no exceptions whatever to the laws of
mechanics, he nevertheless wants to avoid the charge of being a materialist. A
theory of life must be consistent with the mechanical ideal of phy sics, but life
must not be mechanical, that is, defined in mechanical terms. Materialism, in his
terminology , is a theory that so defines life:
If every one is a materialist, who refuses to look upon the contours of a
living being as the boundary of a region in which the kind of predictability
that hold outside of it [differential equations] breaks down, then I am a
materialist along with Spinoza and Kant. If, on the other hand, a materialist is
 one who attempts to give a mechanical definition [italics added] of life, then,
unlike Democritus or La Mettrie, I am no materialist [56].

Singer’s grasp of the problem is so comprehensive that he leaves the purely

psy chological Behaviorists far behind. In general they do not see what is involved
and therefore cannot offer a consistent solution. Singer speaks of their confusion,
and of course the confusion of others as well.
“The confusion usually attended on this method of defining comes, I think,
from our failure to keep distinct the two classes into which a single individual may
fall, when one of these classes is defined without reference to purpose” (57). One
of his frequent examples is a pocket watch. This can be classed mechanically
with all other wheels. But it can also be classed with all other chronometers, even
though some have no wheels at all. This latter is a teleological, not a mechanical
classification. Similarly the human body can be classified chemically and
mechanically with an infinite number of other chemical phenomena; but it can
also be classed teleologically without reference to chemistry and phy sics. Life,
like chronometers, must be defined by its purpose:

Materialism is nothing but an attempt to define life in terms of

mechanism…. But there is nothing in the way of mechanism common to all
that is or might be called living, and the living world would never be put into
a single class were they not moments in a scheme of purpose: The class of
living-being has nothing but a certain purpose common to its members, and
only this purpose can be offered as the definition of life [59-60].

A Christian or a Platonist, or even a Hindu, upon reading this quickly, might

welcome the reference to teleology. It sounds encouraging to hear that living
beings have nothing in common except a certain purpose. But there are two
difficulties here, difficulties that a quick reading might miss. Singer has defined
purpose as a result that occurs twice, or more, with two or more bodies. If a bee
stings a man and a second bee stings a second, then the purpose of these two bees
is to sting people. Perhaps this is not fatal, for one can eke out a fuller purpose by
adding honey to the sting. But if one falling stone splashes into a lake and another
into another lake, shall we say that the purpose of stones is to splash? In other
words, a Christian or a Platonist will not be satisfied with Singer’s underly ing
definition of purpose.
There is, however, a second and more serious difficulty. Even on Singer’s own
principles it is not true that “the class living-being has nothing but a certain
purpose common to its members.” Nor can he maintain the position that “there is
nothing in the way of mechanism common to all that is or might be called living.”
On the contrary, there is common to all living beings the basic laws of phy sics
whatever they may be. Newton’s law of gravitation used to be thought common
to all bodies; today some Einsteinian law, or may be Schrödinger’s equations are
held to be universally applicable. Hence Singer has said more than his own
principles allow.
Indeed, Singer’s favorite example of watches and chronometers is decisive. It
may well be that not all chronometers have wheels. There is no single blueprint
that pictures them all. But every one of them individually is mechanical. Not a
single motion of any but that is determined by the laws of mechanics.
I do not suggest that Singer would have denied this. He takes pleasure in the
literary paradox that all chronometers, that is, the class of chronometers, are non-
mechanical, though each chronometer is mechanical. Later we shall see how a
professing Christian author makes use of Singer and Spinoza, without perhaps
realizing what he is doing.
Spinoza, Singer, and the other gentlemen want to preserve human freedom.
Freedom is a good word and ought to be preserved. But only a definition can tell
what is being preserved. Following Spinoza, Singer defines freedom as “the
invariance of purpose [as purpose has already been defined] in a variety of
mechanical situations.” He expressly rejects the notion that freedom is the
“possibility of doing different things under the same circumstances” (61).
The serious student is well advised to read Singer’s full account, but here
lengthy quotations must end and a hasty summary begin. Singer defines purpose
as the average common result of a number of processes. If three things, unlike
mechanically, sometimes produce the same result, those three things can be
classified teleologically with that result as their purpose. Sundial and wristwatch
are the examples. Their purpose or average common result is to keep time. The
purpose of life is self-preservation. If a number of objects (alway s more than
one) go through certain motions which result in their going through the same
motions again, those objects are alive. Thus Singer defines freedom, purpose, and
life.
But an irreverent soul might ask, Does not an internal combustion engine
explode a gas mixture from the carburetor in order to explode it again, and again,
until the engine finally dies?
Singer next writes a chapter “On Sensibility,” followed by one with the
mathematics for measuring the intensity of sensation. We shall skip the
mathematics, though a brief account of sensibility will round off his theory of
life.

Sense and Sensiblility

The necessity of study ing sensibility lies in the fact that a Behaviorist not only
wants to define life, he also wants to define mind. At least a philosophic
Behaviorist does, even if some psy chological Behaviorists fail to recognize the
sy stematic problem. Watson was an excellent example of unsy stematic disorder.
Singer reiterates his principles that an empirical definition must leave no doubt
“what experiments would inform us whether any thing corresponding to our
definition existed or no” (77). “The criterion of mind constitutes its definition”
(79).
To begin with, mind is a higher form of life than others because it denotes a
greater resourcefulness in self-preservation. To make the first step upward in the
degrees of resourcefulness, one must distinguish between plants and animals by
the phenomena of sensation. Singer was a master of literary grace, even in his
most technical paragraphs. Here he has the Sun rising on Austerlitz, with
inanimate matter reacting phy sically because of the heat, with infusoria and
animalcules in a pond stirring according to their several tropisms, but also with an
Emperor viewing the scene after the fashion of a Napoleon.
There are therefore ranks of mind above simple sensation, but simple sensation
must be explained first in order to begin the ascent. The Emperor’s gesture was
indeed conditioned on the Sun’s ray s; but whereas the infusoria reacted only to
the warmth, the stimulus in Napoleon’s action included all of Europe and even a
fair share of the world.
Nevertheless, the infusoria exhibit sensibility, which now leads to their
definition: “Any body that reacts with a purpose we call its own to a change of
mechanical conditions within its contours display s sensibility, or has sensation”
(84).
Since obviously there are degrees of sensibility, the problem is to measure
those intensities. As an approach to a solution of this problem, Singer considers the
intensities of light, Fechner’s work, the avoidance of Weber’s law, and an equation
that looks like

I e = a log.
plus a following chapter of other equations. He also describes an experiment on
paramecia to illustrate pure sensibility ; and he draws an inference to “man’s
chance of life at a given moment” (92).
The remainder of Singer’s Mind as Behavior is extremely interesting. He works
out his theory in many details. But to discuss them further is not essential to this
monograph. What has been said here accomplishes two things: It documents the
theory of Behaviorism and shows how superior Singer was to his contemporaries
of the ’teens and ’twenties.

1. See my monograph, Language and Theology.

 3. Gilbert Ryle
Next we come to Gilbert Ry le.1 Like Singer and unlike Watson, also unlike
Skinner, Ry le shows some philosophical competence. His sty le is his own. Singer
is very polite in referring to his opponents; the other two often beg the question.
Ry le is the happy warrior, delightfully brutal, “excessively polemical” as he puts
it (9), a man whom his enemies can admire.

The Ghost in the Machine

His first chapter states the position he aims to destroy. “Descartes’ My th” is
painted boldly in vivid, repellent colors. The difficulty with dualism is starkly
focused. “Human bodies are in space and are subject to the mechanical laws
which govern all other bodies in space.2…But minds are not in space nor are their
operations subject to mechanical laws” (11). Since the mind is in no way spatial,
Ry le twits those who speak of it as being inside the body . But even when inner and
outer are taken metaphorically, the operation of a non-spatial mind on a body,
and of a spatial body on a mind, defies all explanation. Besides, it is not at all
clear how one mind can affect another mind. “Only through the medium of the
public phy sical world,” Ry le insists, “can the mind of one person make a
difference to the mind of another” (13).
After two or three pages describing the dualism, Ry le continues, “Such in
outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness,
as ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’” (13-14). This dogma is throughout a
“category -mistake.” He gives some examples: As a father and his y oung son
watch a military parade, the father points out a battalion, a battery, a squadron,
etc., and then the boy asks, But where is the army ? The boy here makes a
category mistake because he thinks the army is another unit similar to but partly
different from the units already seen. People make category mistakes because of
“their inability to use certain items [concepts] in the English vocabulary …. My
destructive purpose is to show that a family of radical category -mistakes is the
source of the double-life theory. The representation of a person as a ghost
my steriously ensconced in a machine derives from this argument” (17-18).
Now, it may be true that the dualistic scheme Ry le describes is as absurd as he
say s it is; y et this alone is not sufficient to establish Behaviorism. Ry le’s argument
here, and in the illustration of the military review, depends on an unacknowledged
presupposition. How can there be a ghost in the machine, if there is no machine?
Since Ry le uses the spooky phrase every so often in his book, let it be said here
that there is no necessity of considering the human body or the phy sical world as
a machine. Hume suggested that it might be a cabbage. The majority, or at least
many of the philosophers in the past have considered the universe to be a living
being, rather than considering the human body to be inanimate, non-souled
matter. This is not to deny that phy sicists formulate mathematical equations. But
the philosophy of Operationalism does not take these equations as descriptions of
an external world. Behaviorists, on the other hand, generally accept the
mechanical view of nature as (with a few modifications) described by the
nineteenth century disciples of Sir Isaac Newton. But the space that Ry le relies on
has now disappeared into a Black Hole, and matter has exploded into a
my sterious Energy. If the planet Earth were solid, it would be the size of a golf
ball, and gravitation is as impossible as Newton himself knew it was. The ever-
accelerating flux of phy sical theory may not necessarily refute some form of
Behaviorism. It does, however, refute many of the arguments contemporary
Behaviorists use. The fact that the little boy (more stupid than most) made a
category mistake does not guarantee that someone else did.
If, however, we refrain from pressing these more fundamental questions at the
moment, the Behavioristic position is clear: “When we describe people as
exercising qualities of mind, we are not referring to occult episodes of which their
overt acts and utterances are effects; we are referring to those overt acts and
utterances themselves” (25). Bobby Fischer’s genius consists in the motions of his
fingers as they pick up chess pieces and put them down on other squares. Ry le
should not object to my excessively polemical example, chosen with deliberate
abusiveness and destructive intent, for on the same page he states his aim to
examine such concepts as “clever,” “inventive,” “acute,” “witty,” “judicious,”
and so on. Indeed, within a few pages he himself uses the example of a chess
play er.

Anti-Intellectualism
In these pages Ry le wishes “to correct from the start the intellectualist doctrine
which tries to define intelligence in terms of apprehension of truths in terms of
intelligence” (27). The statement of this aim is not very clear. By what follows
we surmise that he wishes to deny the Platonic distinction between knack and
knowledge, between knowing how and knowing that. Chess seems to become
something like play ing the piano. The chess play er must train his fingers to pick
up the right piece. Touch move. The philosophy -play er might ask whether Ry le
knows that there is no important difference between how and that. He does indeed
say , however, in the same paragraph with the chess play er that “the intellectualist
legend is false and that when we describe a performance as intelligent, this does
not entail the double operation of considering and executing” (29-30). But the
remainder of the page is not what one would expect a chess play er to write.
Chess play ers do consider before they pick up a piece. Touch move.
The next dozen pages are presumably the main argument, not merely against
an impossible semi-Cartesian dualism, but against all forms of intellectualism;
and conversely the proof of Behaviorism. These pages are hard to summarize,
and the serious student should read them for himself. The omissions in the
following condensation are matters of judgment.
Ry le begins by noting that a witty person is obviously intelligent, though he
cannot state the intellectual rules that guarantee amusing remarks. The witty
person knows how, but does not know what. Men argued logically long before
Aristotle formulated the rules of logic. Practice, therefore, precedes theory.
Isaac Walton fished intelligently before he could teach the rules of angling.
Hence these intelligent operations did not require intellectual understanding.
From these acknowledged facts Ry le produces an argument to show that
intellectualism is logically absurd. This argument is first condensed into a short
paragraph:
The consideration of propositions is itself an operation the execution of
which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid. But if, for any
operation, to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation had first
to be performed intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for any one
ever to break into the circle [30].

The next paragraph expands the argument, and this expansion will be
considered. But first let us examine the shorter statement. It is an assertion that
intellectualism is vitiated by an infinite regress. Ry le’s argument, however, hides
a shift in reference, depends upon this ambiguity, and is therefore fallacious. His
words, as quoted, are, “If for any operation to be intelligently executed, a prior
theoretical operation had first to be performed intelligently, it would be a logical
impossibility for any one to ever break into the circle.” There are several
difficulties in these words. First of all, he should have said, “If any overt physical
operations are to be intelligently executed, a prior internal, theoretical, intellectual
operation would be necessary, and then another prior to that, and so on
backward.” By his omission of the words overt, physical, and intellectual, Ry le
achieves plausibility. But if an overt phy sical action requires a prior intellectual
act, it does not at all follow that a prior-prior intellectual act is needed. Ry le has
assumed that the sequence of intellectual acts necessitates the same conditions as
the sequence of corporeal acts. In particular, he assumes that the sequence
“intellectual-intellectual” is subject to the same conditions as “intellectual-
phy sical.” Unless he can prove his hidden assumption, his argument as stated is a
fallacy .
In the next place an intellectualist sees no way by which to prove that
assumption, for the term intelligent does not mean precisely the same thing when
attached to a phy sical motion as when attached to a process of thought. The
phy sical motion is intelligent only in the sense that it executes an intelligent
mental plan. But intelligent mental planning is intelligent in its own right. Motions
are intelligently performed only when mentally controlled; strictly it is not the
motion, but the man, the man’s mind, that is intelligent.
One may interpolate the ad hoc remark that Behaviorists should not object to
infinite regresses. On their theory every phy sical action requires a previous
phy sical action and, like the fleas on the dog, so on ad infinitum.
Ry le’s next paragraph, as was indicated, expands his argument; and it is only
fair to consider whether the expanded argument avoids the fallacy . To quote:
According to the legend [of intellectualism], whenever an agent does
any thing intelligently, his act is preceded and steered by another internal act
of considering a regulative proposition appropriate to his practical problem.
But what makes him consider the one maxim which is appropriate rather
than any of the thousands which are not? Why does not the hero find himself
calling to mind a cooking-recipe, or a rule of Formal Logic? Perhaps he
does, but then his intellectual process is silly and not sensible. Intelligently
reflecting how to act is, among other things, considering what is pertinent and
disregarding what is inappropriate. Must we then say that for the hero’s
reflections how to act to be intelligent he must first reflect on how best to
reflect on how to act? The endlessness of this implied regress shows that the
application of the criterion of appropriateness does not entail the occurrence
of a process of considering the criterion.

Since Ry le, not only on this page, but passim, considers this one of his main
arguments, if not the most fundamental of all, we cannot pass it by without
remark. There are several remarks to be made.
First, and least important, this argument in no way supports Behaviorism. If it
were valid, it might show that no one thinks intelligently, but it would not show that
no one thinks.
Second, and this may be considered as a single objection or as a series, there is
an ambiguity in Ry le’s use of the term intelligent. The one sentence on which his
argument depends, and which at the same time is so plausibly true, is “Perhaps
he does [call to mind a cooking recipe or a rule of Formal Logic], but then his
intellectual process is silly and not sensible.” There are, however, two vastly
different situations, in one of which such random thinking would be silly, in the
other of which it would be eminently intelligent. If a mechanic is familiar with
automobiles, and if a car swerves to the left when the brake is suddenly applied, it
would be silly of him to think about cleaning the air filter or filling the gas tank. He
does not go at it at random, but begins by taking off the wheel and inspecting the
brakes. This is because he already has a good knowledge of auto mechanics. But
when Edison tried to produce an electric bulb, he had no such extensive
knowledge. No doubt he guessed that an elephant tusk would not be a suitable
filament, but there were hundreds of things that would at least fit into the bulb. So
he tried one after the other pretty much at random. This was an intelligent
procedure. Or consider cancer research early in this century. With almost no
knowledge the medical researchers had to make random experiments. After
these experiments had been completed, the degree of randomness diminished;
and to have repeated some of the experiments, or to have tried snake oil again,
would have been silly . But whether random action is silly or intelligent varies with
the degree of knowledge. In still earlier situations a man may know that
something must be done to avoid a disaster without having the least idea of what is
suitable. In this primitive case he may indeed try a cooking recipe or a rule of
Formal Logic. He will perish if he does nothing; doing something is his only hope.
No matter how silly that something may appear y ears later, it was at the time an
intelligent action.
Even bey ond the primitive level the same considerations apply, no doubt, to
Py thagoras when he first tried to prove his famous theorem. Of course he
already knew some theorems of geometry. But not this new one. He knew also
that it would be silly to draw curved lines. But I suppose that after having drawn
his triangle, he tried drawing one straight line after another, until he saw how to
work it out. Being a genius he did not have to make so many false starts as I would
have had to make, but even a genius presumably considers one or two possibilities
before he hits upon the right answer. Today a mathematician knows that those
possible lines are silly . They were not silly in 500 BC.
 There is another and deeper flaw in Ry le’s argument. He has attempted to
refute rationalism on its own ground. He believes that the principles of rationalism
or intellectualism necessitate an impossible infinite regress. But in so arguing he
forgets an essential point. As an empiricist he naturally, or, by second nature,
automatically and habitually starts the learning process with a blank mind – or
should I say a blank body ? But rationalists do not. They start with innate Platonic
Ideas, a priori Kantian categories, or some other form of original intellectual
equipment. The intelligence is already there at the start. No infinite regress is
needed to find it. Let no one dismiss this criticism of Ry le by say ing that the
regress still is there, since the decision to act thus and so requires a prior
investigation of what intelligence requires, and so on back. It is the original
intellectual equipment, the equipment that makes a man human, in which the
criteria of intelligence are found. It operates, not automatically, not by second
nature, but by nature, the nature of the mind itself, by its structure, that is, by
innate logic and rationality. Of course, Ry le does not accept this intellectualist
position, but he cannot convict it of an inherent self-contradiction by ignoring one
of its basic principles.
There are people who underestimate the importance of basic principles and
who are greatly impressed with subsidiary details. These people will be happy
now to examine some of Ry le’s details. He tries to discover “The Motives of the
Intellectualist Legend” in processes called skillful, cunning, and humorous. The
intellectualist notes that a parrot can repeat a joke, but no one attributes
intelligence to him. But the fact that there is no audible difference between the
parrot’s sounds (at least no more than between the sounds two human beings
make – the words are understandable) and those of the witty person, does not
imply that the human being, say s Ry le, has performed some extra secret acts
(33). The skill of a clown is not an act. Skill cannot be photographed. But this is not
because skill is an occult or ghostly happening; it is not a happening at all. Just as
the habit of talking loudly is not itself loud, so skills are neither overt nor internal.
The intellectualist wants to explain habit and skill by previous and present thinking.
Ry le rejects the ghostly notion of mind by explaining these phenomena as the
unseen motions of internal bodily organs. Mental arithmetic, for example, is sub-
vocal speech (35). Though the sounds the parrot makes are sufficiently well
pronounced to be English words, the parrot’s phy siology is different from a
man’s.
Many Behaviorists – Singer is an example – insist that the qualities of a
complex are not usually the qualities of the elements. Thus they hope to preserve
“mind” from mechanistic laws. Nevertheless their “thinking” is the functioning of
phy sical parts. John Dewey somewhere compared thinking with digestion.
Digestion is not itself the stomach: It is not a material thing. It is the functioning of
a material thing. So too thinking or soul or mind is not a material, and much less
an immaterial, thing: It is the functioning of the body . Thus, however complicated
the chemistry may be, thoughts are the chemistry of phy sical bodies.
Ry le tries to uncover the intellectualist’s confusion in describing mental acts
done in one’s head. Of course an intellectualist does not hold that thinking is done
in one’s head. He sharply distinguishes between the brain and the mind. But at
any rate there is nothing I can see in the dozen pages of this chapter to contradict
the proposition that Behaviorism identifies thinking as phy sical motions. In fact
Ry le say s, “When people employ the idiom ‘in the mind’ they are usually
expressing over-sophisticatedly what we ordinarily express by the less
misleading metaphorical use of ‘in the head.’” This makes the Behaviorist’s
position clear enough, though, be it noted, that ordinarily I say “in my mind,”and
hardly ever, perhaps never say , “in my head.”
That much of what Ry le say s on these dozen pages is irrelevant to the
establishment of Behaviorism may be recognized when the intellectualist agrees
with what he say s. “The statement ‘the mind is its own place’…is not true, for the
mind is not even a metaphorical place” (51). The intellectualist agrees. “…the
chessboard, the platform, the scholar’s desk…are where people work.” True,
though not the whole truth. “‘Mind’ is not the name of another person, working or
frolicking behind an impenetrable screen.” Again the intellectualist agrees,
emphatically. “It is not the name of another place…another tool.” Of course. But
if the intellectualist agrees with these concluding statements, it must be because
Ry le’s arguments are largely irrelevant. No, the mind is the person, and the body
is in some sense the person’s tool.
Ry le, more loudly than Singer, explodes the analogy argument, namely, that I
know the connection between my mind and my body, and, therefore, when I see
another body with two legs, two arms, and a head going through motions similar
to mine, I infer that these motions result from a directing soul. This inference is
clearly fallacious. It deserves all that Ry le and Singer say against it. From this
undeniable analy sis Ry le presses on his opponents the accusation of skepticism.
Two replies to this accusation are possible. First, an argument may be utterly
fallacious, and y et its conclusion may be true. Ry le has destroy ed only the
argument. Second, if skepticism is indeed the result, does that prove Ry le’s
Behaviorism? That inference is also a fallacy. Furthermore, in the present
writer’s opinion, all empiricism results in skepticism. Ry le dogmatically asserts,
“Understanding a person’s deeds and words is not therefore any kind of
problematic divination of occult processes. For this divination does not and cannot
occur, whereas understanding does occur” (54). Einstein presumably would not
agree.3
After several more pages of objections to the analogy argument, Ry le makes a
statement that can be taken as a conclusion: “Overt intelligent performances are
not clues to the workings of the mind; they are those workings” (58). This
sentence documents the Behaviorist’s basic position that thinking is the motion of
phy sical bodies.

Volitions and Decisions

As was indicated earlier, some of Ry le’s sentences are quite acceptable to
intellectualists, and therefore do not advance his argument. Other sentences,
dogmatically asserted, seem obviously false.
One such concerns acts of will: “No one ever say s such things as that at 10
a.m. he was occupied in willing this or that, or that he performed five quick and
easy volitions and two slow and difficult volitions between midday and lunch
time” (64). Now, Ry le’s wording here is a bit pejorative, but frequently enough
one may say, “at 10 a.m. I decided to do so and so.” For example, in my
financial condition am I justified in buy ing a chess computer for $300? At ten
o’clock I may recklessly decide, Yes. Now, I may not write the check and mail
the letter until 3:00 p.m. But I willed to buy the computer in the morning. Thus the
truth of some of Ry le’s premises is not unquestionable and in fact implausible.
Ry le asks rhetorical questions he thinks unanswerable. Are they ?
At which moment was the boy going through a volition to take a high dive?
When he set foot on the ladder? When he took his first deep breath? When he
counted off, ‘One, two, three – Go’ but did not go? Very, very shortly before
he sprang? What would be the answers to those questions?

These questions are not unanswerable. If they appear to be, it must be because
different boy s would give different answers. But this ty pe of rhetorical question
does not contribute to the plausibility of Behaviorism. The sentence, “If ordinary
men never report the occurrence of these acts…” (65), surely presupposes that
they never do. But though I cannot now remember the date of that spring day in
1924, I distinctly remember making a very important decision at that time. I also
remember making a decision at a given moment about three weeks ago. Other
people report the same sort of thing. Ry le therefore bases at least some of his
arguments on false premises.
The use of false or at least implausible premises is somewhat frequent. Still
discussing volition Ry le say s,
Most voluntary actions do not issue out of conditions of indecision….
[Really ?] Moreover, it is notorious that a person may choose to do something
but fail…because some circumstance arises preventing the execution of the
act chosen. But the theory could not allow that volitions ever fail to result in
action [68].

This last statement is obviously false. Furthermore, in the case of a person who
has been suddenly but unconsciously incapacitated, the fact that he cannot
execute his will rather supports than refutes the intellectualist theory. It
emphasizes the distinction between the mental act of volition and the phy sical
motions of the arms and legs.
Some of Ry le’s conclusions are based on the ordinary usage of English; but
through the book there is vacillation. Although he tries to refute intellectualism by
ordinary usage, he finds himself also refuted. “I do not know the right idioms in
which to discuss these matters, but I hope that my discussion of them in the
official idioms may have at least some internal Fifth Column efficacy ” (201).
But Ry le cannot have it both way s. Either all his arguments against intellectualism
on the basis of ordinary language are fallacious, or Behaviorism is completely
refuted by that same language. Now, besides his questionable dependence on
ordinary language, Ry le sometimes fails to recognize what ordinary language is.
For example,
In their most ordinary employ ment ‘voluntary ’ and ‘involuntary ’ are used,
with a few minor elasticities [whatever this may mean], as adjectives
apply ing to actions which ought not to be done. We discuss whether
someone’s action was voluntary or not only when the action seems to have
been his fault.... In this ordinary use, then, it is absurd to discuss whether
satisfactory, correct, or admirable performances are voluntary or
involuntary. We neither…plead “guilty ” nor plead “not guilty ;” for we are
not accused [69].

These quoted lines are so obviously false that one can hardly believe that even
a Behaviorist would write them. There are important and there are trivial
examples to the contrary. Just above I referred to a spring day in 1924 when I
made an important decision that affected the whole course of my life, and it was
a decision that most people would acknowledge to have been good, and surely not
something that ought not to have been done. No doubt every one sometimes
makes decisions that result in actions that should not have been done. But does no
one ever make a good decision? A trivial example also shows that it is not absurd
“to discuss whether satisfactory, correct, or admirable performances are
voluntary or involuntary.” One may carelessly and by accident say something
exceedingly witty. Now, it might not be polite, but it is not absurd, especially if
the person is not usually so witty, to ask, Did y ou intend that wit, or was it
accidental? Take the case of someone’s giving a large gift to a charitable
institution. This would seem to be a good act. Yet it is not completely absurd to
ask, Were y ou coerced, shaken down, threatened into making that donation? The
donor may reply, No, I was not threatened, I deliberately did this good deed.
Many times in ordinary life a person wants to judge of another person’s guilt; but
sometimes he wants to judge of the other person’s merit. Ry le actually admits
this possibility, but rules it out as non-ordinary. It is used only by philosophers in
an “unwitting extension of the ordinary sense.” As an example of such a
meritorious action Ry le chooses the very simple case of a boy getting the correct
answer in an arithmetic examination. Since we say a voluntary wrong act could
have been avoided, we ought to say a voluntary right act could have been
avoided. Could it? Ry le asks this question at least five times in four lines and
concludes, “In fact, however, no one could answer these questions” (70).
Nonsense! As a professor I give scores on a series of quizzes and determine the
letter grade at the end of the semester by (roughly ) the bell-shaped curve. This
allows the class more or less to establish a passing grade. Since thus a poor student
may pass because there are two or three worse, it follows that it is possible for a
student to make deliberate mistakes so that his friend has a better chance of
passing. This is unusual, but neither impossible nor absurd. The one who
deliberately fails – that is, deliberately avoids doing the right act – may so
choose, not only because he wants his friend to pass, but also because he has just
inherited a fortune and is no longer interested in a degree, or because he intends
to commit suicide that evening. Admittedly these two motivations are rather rare,
but they are not impossible. A more plausible instance is that of a student who has
already flunked so many courses that an extra F is meaningless. However, he
happens to know this course fairly well. But he deliberately avoids the right act,
puts down what he knows to be wrong, to help his friend get a C. This is not silly
nor impossible, and I suspect it has happened once or twice.
I submit that Ry le’s statements on page 70, especially the bottom half, are
false. Similarly in other sections too. For example, “‘unnoticed pain’ is an absurd
expression, where ‘unnoticed sensation’ has no absurdity ” (203). In any case an
empirical philosophy has no basis for asserting a universal proposition. No one by
statistics or induction can determine that it is impossible for a good math student to
put down the wrong answer involuntarily .
Realizing that his opponents are scared of “The Bogy of Mechanism” (76),
Ry le tries to show that “The fear that theoretically minded persons have felt lest
every thing should turn out to be explicable by mechanical law is a baseless fear”;
and he does this by an extended, over-extended, analy sis of chess. He notes that
without having read or heard the rules, an observer can determine that a bishop
alway s moves diagonally and must therefore come down on a square whose
color is the same as that of the square from which it started. “Knights alway s
make doglegged moves. And so on.” These rules are unbreakable. But the rules of
chess, Ry le emphatically notes, do not predict on what square the bishop stops, or
even whether a knight is moved rather than a bishop. “There is plenty of room for
us [the play ers] to display cleverness and stupidity and to exercise deliberation
and choice.” After a page of this he concludes, “What the illustration is meant to
bring out is the fact that there is no contradiction in say ing that one and the same
process, such as the move of a bishop, is in accordance with two principles of
completely different ty pes and such that neither is ‘reducible’ to the other, though
one of them presupposes the other” (78). He then elaborates the illustration of the
rules of grammar, which of course do not determine what subject y ou choose to
speak about.
But while his explicit conclusion is true enough, namely, that rules of chess do
not determine the precise square on which the play er will place his bishop, this is
not the conclusion required. For while the rules of chess do not determine the
precise motions, the rules of mechanics do. The Bogy of Mechanism is not
dispelled by the fact that the rules of chess cannot predict the course of the game:
In the philosophy of mechanism every move of every game has been
mechanically determined. That we are able to describe these moves with some
superficial non-mechanical terms does not at all save us from mechanical
determinism. Indeed the motions of our lary nx, producing the sounds called
“non-mechanical description” are themselves mechanically determined. This
egregious oversight on Ry le’s part is repeated in his illustration of billiards. He is
willing that the balls, once set in motion, follow the laws of mechanics; but he tries
to rescue the play er. This cannot be done. In a Behavioristic, mechanical sy stem,
the motions of the play er, as well as of the billiard balls, are predictable by
mathematical equations.
Yet it is difficult to disengage Ry le’s actual theory of nature. He asserts,
Men are not machines…. [There] are very few machines in Nature. The
only machines that we find are the machines that human beings make, such
as clocks, windmills, and turbines. There are a very few natural sy stems
which somewhat resemble such machines, namely, such things as solar
sy stems [81-82].

To these assertions we must put a question: Does Ry le really hold that some
phy sical motions are exceptions to or violations of the equations of phy sics; or is
he using the word machine in a very loose popular sense so that the Bogy may
have a closet to hide in?

Knowledge and Communication

In a monograph such as this, it is the deficiencies in the opponent’s argument
that are emphasized. This does not mean that the critic is unaware of some
excellencies. Ry le often appeals to common language usage, and this is
frequently a defect. At other times it points out common confusions. In opposition
to the idea of an immediate awareness of mental states Ry le say s,
It is nonsense to speak of knowing or not knowing this clap of thunder or
that twinge of pain, this colored surface or that act of drawing a conclusion
or seeing a joke; these are accusatives [except perhaps the joke] of the
wrong ty pe to follow the verb “to know.” To know and to be ignorant are to
know and not to know that something is the case, for example, that that
rumble is a clap of thunder or that colored surface is a cheese rind. And this
is just the point where the metaphor of light [internal illumination] is
unhelpful [161-162].

The metaphor of light is an ancient one. It seems to be implied in Parmenides

and Plato; Plotinus of course used it on a cosmic scale; and Bonaventura referred
to “global representations.” Hegel had much the same idea in substituting
concepts for propositions. But Ry le’s rejection of individuals, such as the
perception of y ellow, and his replacing them with propositions, such as “the
y ellow is a cheese rind,” hardly eases the path of Behaviorism. It rather enforces
intellectualism. If Behaviorism has trouble with the consciousness of y ellow and
pain, it has little hope of developing propositions from nervous wiggles.
Phy siology may perchance be able to explain the production of sounds, but it has
made no progress in explaining their meaning. There are two cases: The same
sounds may have different meanings; and different sounds may have the same
meaning. The words of one man’s profanity could be the words of devout
worship in another man’s mouth. Or, second, one man makes the sounds, “the dog
is clever”; other motions, no doubt of a similar lary nx but y et distinctly different
motions, will produce the sounds, “der Hund ist klug.” The motions are different;
but the meaning is the same.
When the sounds and their meaning do not express the thought of the person
who speaks, Behaviorism faces a still greater difficulty. Ry le notices it, discusses
it for two or three pages, but in the present writer’s opinion without much success.
Ry le notes that there are hy pocrites and charlatans (172ff). Their observable
behavior and speech conceal their mind and intention. Hence, concludes the
intellectualist, mind is not behavior.
Ry le tries to avoid this conclusion by say ing, “The menace of universal
shamming is an empty menace. We know what shamming is.” Well, we may
know what shamming is, but this does not enable us to know whether our
acquaintance is now shamming or is sincere. Not only at a given moment, but for
long periods of time, and even for one’s entire life, one may be deceived by the
hy pocrite. Or, a hy pocrite may be such for only a short time, in a particular
context; and after evading whatever trouble he was try ing to evade, he may
again talk and act sincerely. But how could there ever be any hy pocrisy at all
unless thought differed from speech? In any case, what has universal shamming
to do with the argument?
The aim of these comments, interspersed among paragraphs of
documentation, is to show that the case for Behaviorism, though it may have one
or two fundamental flaws, is also deficient in its subsidiary arguments.
Concerning “The Sense Data Theory ” which Ry le considers essential to his
opponents’ position, he say s, “I shall try to prove that this whole theory rests upon
a logical howler” (213). Perhaps the following comment may convince the
reader that Ry le’s refutation is the logical howler. But first, to avoid
misunderstanding, the reader must be aware that the present writer does not
accept the sense-datum theory. He denies that there is any such thing as a sense
datum. Yet, since this theory is destructive of Behaviorism, Ry le is obliged to
refute it. The point to be made in these comments is that Ry le’s logic needs
improvement.
He attacks the theory on the ground of its “assimilating the concept of sensation
to the concept of observation…. The theory say s that when a person has a visual
sensation…his having this sensation consists in finding or intuiting a sensum,
namely, a patchwork of colors.” Here Ry le does not reproduce the theory with
precision. The sensation is not a patchwork. It is one color. A patchwork is several
sensa. Then Ry le continues,

This means that having a glimpse of a horse race is explained in terms of

his having a glimpse of something else, the patchwork of colors. But if having
a glimpse of a horse race entails having at least one sensation, then having a
glimpse of color patches must again involve having at least one appropriate
sensation, which in its turn must be analy zed into the sensing of y et an earlier
sensum, and so on for ever.

Ry le uses this infinite regress in several places. Here the fallacy is obvious.
When chemists began to analy ze common compounds, they arrived at elements.
This process does not logically require the discovery of elements of elements ad
infinitum. Now, it may be that the nineteenth century did not correctly identify
atoms, that is, things that could not be split. But the fact that Einstein or his epigoni
split the “atom” is not a logical refutation of the theory that there are elements not
further analy zable. A cruder but perhaps clearer example is a jig-saw puzzle. It is
composed of a hundred bits of cardboard. But none of these bits is divided into
smaller pieces of the picture. It just is not true that bigger fleas have littler fleas to
bite ’em, and so on ad infinitum. Or to the main point, the glimpse of color patches
(note the plural) does not entail the possibility of analy zing a single patch into
several patches of different colors. So far as empirical evidence goes, no one
seems y et to have analy zed the putative simple sense-datum yellow into simpler
colors.
Furthermore, Ry le makes no effort to define his use of the term glimpse. A
glimpse of colors may not be a glimpse of a horse race at all. The observer sees
only color; he does not see a horse or a track. People every so often see a variety
of colors without recognizing a familiar object. The colors have to be focused and
arranged before an ordinary object is visible. Hence there is ambiguity in Ry le’s
sentence, “If having a glimpse of a horse race entails having at least one
sensation, then having a glimpse of color patches must again…” and so on to
infinity. The term glimpse and the inference to an infinite regress both damage
Ry le’s argument.
Now, it is true that Ry le tries to avoid the force of the replies a sense-datum
theorist might make. There are essentially two points. First, the sense-datum
theorist may deny infinite regress by refusing to “concede that, for a person to be
describable as hearing a sound, he must have y et a prior sensation” (215). Ry le’s
reply is virtually unintelligible. “Having a sensation,” he say s, “is merely a
vulgar way of reporting the simple intuiting of a special sensible object and to say
that a person intuits such an object does not entail his being in any way sensibly
affected.” In other words, having a sensation is not having a sensation. Ry le tries
to squeeze out of this obvious contradiction by supposing that angels can
contemplate colors, of any intensity, without having sensations. Just how a
Behaviorist can know what angels can and cannot do remains unexplained. As for
Christians, who believe in angels, they are not compelled to say that angels, any
more than God, have sensory experience. Just how any of this supports the thesis
that thinking is phy sical motion is not evident. If Ry le can appeal to angels, we
can appeal to God, who thinks though he is indisputably incorporeal.
Should any one suppose that this reply to Ry le is too cavalier – though it is not
more so than Ry le’s argument – we might note that his escape from sensation by
the use of the word intuit depends on a more intellectualist term than the word
sensation. What can he mean by intuit, if it is neither intellectual intuition nor
sensation?
Ry le’s second attempt to escape the force of his opponent’s replies concerns
the direct sensation of colors, but his argument fails because of a
misinterpretation of the theory. Using as one of his examples a round plate, tilted
somewhat so as to appear elliptical, he denies that the observer sees an elliptical
object. Throughout the argument Ry le assumes that the observer sees a round
plate, and he also seems to assume that the observer knows that it is a round plate.
He explicitly denies “that having a visual sensation is a sort of observation
describable as the sensing or intuiting of color patches” (218). But this line of
argument is not relevant to the sense-datum theory. It may be that the observer
has seen and touched the dishes in the china closet many times, and on this
occasion knows that the elliptical sensation will be replaced by a circular
sensation upon turning the plate a few degrees, and knows too that he will have a
sensation of hardness if he touches the plate. But all this, the sense-datum theory
explains by a series of color sensations, all of which have been integrated so as to
form the compound idea of a china plate. The alleged fact that the observer now
perceives a china plate has no bearing on the theory that this perception is the
result of prior sense data.
To this irrelevancy Ry le adds another unfounded assumption. “When I
describe a common object as green or bitter, I am not reporting a fact about my
present sensation, though I am say ing something about how it looks or tastes.”
Isn’t this say ing something about the present sensation? Isn’t he say ing that the
taste, the sensation, is bitter? But at any rate, “I am say ing that it [the common
object] would look or taste so and so to any one who was in a condition and
position to see and taste properly ” (220). If, now we omit the word properly, the
statement is clearly false. On one occasion my wife and I paid a courtesy call on
a y ounger instructor and his recent bride. They served Rollmops. Obviously the
taste they sensed was pleasant. But I was hard put to swallow the abominable
things politely. Even now, after fifty y ears, the sensation remains one of my
most unpleasant experiences. Ry le must hold that I was not (never had been, and
never later became) able to taste properly. When he uses this word, we ask, how
can Behaviorism evaluate one chemical reaction as proper and another as
improper? Every one is produced according to the same chemical laws.
Whatever happens in one test tube is as right and proper as what happens in
another.
It is amazing how Ry le can make so many assertions that are obviously false,
or if not false, would require lengthy supporting evidence. Speaking of water he
affirms that “We can say that ‘painfully hot’ alludes indirectly [?] and inter alia to
a state of mind. But it certainly does not follow that ‘the water is lukewarm’ and
‘the sky is blue’ allude even in this indirect way to states of mind. ‘Lukewarm’ and
‘blue’ are not adjectives of discomfort or gratification” (221). But why assume
that a state of mind or a sensation must be one either of discomfort or
gratification? Cannot “green” or “blue” be a sensation without causing pain? The
complete argument is plainly a fallacy. Since the following two chapters
“Imagination” and “Intellect” depend on the previous confusions, further
“deliberate abusiveness” would only increase the tedium.

The Split Brain in Man

Unlike Singer, a great many later psy chologists do not think of the philosophical
presuppositions or implications of their work. Some do not mention Behaviorism.
Many are disinterested in the relation between their theories and the allegations of
ethics and religion. They are even less interested in epistemology. No doubt they
think their conclusions from experimentation are true, but they do not consider
whether truth and its opposite, falsity, can be supported on a phy sico-chemical
basis. Nevertheless, their explicit assertions, sometimes clearly, sometimes less
so, necessarily impinge on these fundamental philosophical considerations. In all
that follows one must keep this point vividly in mind.
We shall now skip several decades and, to vary the degree of profundity,
summarize an article of lesser importance.
Under the title “The Split Brain in Man,” Michael S. Gazzaniga, wrote:
Some fifteen y ears ago Ronald E. My ers and R.W. Sperry …made a
surprising discovery : When this connection [that is, the corpus callosum]
between the two halves of the cerebrum was cut, each hemisphere
functioned independently as if it were a complete brain…. Was the corpus
callosum responsible for integration of the operations of the two cerebral
hemispheres in the intact brain? Did it serve to keep each hemisphere
informed about what was going on in the other?… To what extent were the
two half-brains actually independent when they were separated? Could they
have separate thoughts, even separate emotions?4
This language presupposes, though it does not explicitly assert, that the brain, the
squeezable moist gray stuff, can think and have emotions. Since the stuff is
phy sical, its activity must be phy sical motions and chemical changes. Hence the
implication is that thought and emotion are phy sical and chemical reactions,
fundamentally identical to what happens in any test tube. Thinking is a visible –
visible in principle – chemical operation. The motion is thought.
Dr. Gazzaniga continues:
The demonstration in experimental animals that sectioning the corpus
callosum did not seriously impair their mental faculties had encouraged
surgeons to resort to this operation for people afflicted with uncontrollable
epilepsy …. The operation proved to be remarkably successful; curiously
there is an almost total elimination of all attacks…. It is as if the intact
callosum had served in these patients to facilitate seizure activity .
From the beginning [of his investigations with Ronald E. My ers, R.W.
Sperry, and surgeons Vogel and Bogen] one of the most striking observations
was that the operation produced no notable change in the patients’
temperament, personality , or general intelligence.
There were some bodily changes, however. The patient seemed to favor the right
side of the body ; the left side, for a considerable time after the operation, rarely
showed spontaneous activity and seemed to be devoid of sensation. The results on
the sense of sight were surprising. The patients denied seeing lights flashed on the
left side of a visual screen; y et when asked to point the finger to the spots at which
the flashes occurred, they pointed to the left half of the screen as well as to the
right half. The author then describes other results of this sort.
On a slightly higher level there were surprising results also. When presented
with the letters of the alphabet printed on cardboard squares, the patient, using
only his left side, could upon command change them into a word. Yet he was
unable vocally to name the word he had just spelled.
I am not sure but that this article tells more against Behaviorism than for it. But
that the article is Behavioristic a further paragraph clearly shows.
Concerning the patients’ perception of red and green lights, their mistaken
identifications and fumblings, Gazzaniga writes,
What was happening was that the right hemisphere saw the red light and
heard the left hemisphere say “green.” Knowing that the answer was wrong,
the right hemisphere precipitated a frown and a shake of the head, which in
turn cued in the left hemisphere to the fact that the answer was wrong and
that it had better correct itself!

There is further similar language: “The right hemisphere has a very poorly
developed grammar.” And later, “This showed that the dominant left hemisphere
is capable of discriminating between correct and incorrect stimuli.”
Why, on this basis, cannot it be said that gold discriminates between mercury
and lead? Litmus paper discriminates between acid and alkali? This is ambiguous
language. Can any part of the brain see red or hear another part of the brain
speak? Can squishy ooze judge of grammar and conclude that an answer is false?
Or are Behaviorists people who think only with the right half of their brain? And
very basically, if thinking is just chemistry, how can the motions of one side of
the brain be “true” and the motions of the other side be “false”? In both cases the
chemistry is perfect.
This short article is an example of hundreds such. It was so chosen. There are
too many others to mention.

1. The Concept of Mind, 1949.

2. Of course this was not Descartes' position; but Ry le acknowledges that "the
official theory " does not come from Descartes alone.
3. See Gordon H. Clark, "The Limits and Uses of Science," in The Philosophy of
Science and Belief in God.
4. Scientific American, August 1967
 4. B. F. Skinner
For a major contribution one turns next to B.F. Skinner, who is undoubtedly the
most influential of all contemporary Behaviorists. From his many publications we
select for analy sis his more recent volume About Behaviorism.1
In the very first sentence of his Introduction Skinner acknowledges a point
which this monograph has already repeatedly emphasized: “Behaviorism is not
the science of human behavior; it is the philosophy of that science.” The reader
who wishes better to understand the present argument against Behaviorism might
well spend some time study ing the philosophy of science.
With commendable vigor Skinner jumps right in medias res by making twenty
specific denials.
Here, for example, are some of the things commonly said about
Behaviorism or the science of behavior. They are all, I believe, wrong:
1. It ignores consciousness, feeling, and states of mind.
2. It formulates behavior simply as a set of responses to stimuli, thus
representing a person as an automaton….
4. It does not attempt to account for cognitive processes.

Of course it makes the attempt. The pertinent question is, Does it succeed? But to
return to the list:
15. If its contentions are valid, they must apply to the behavioral scientist
himself, and what he say s is therefore only what he is conditioned to say and
cannot be true [4-5].
Skinner asserts that all twenty charges against Behaviorism are false. The fourth
may be, but I think the fifteenth is true.
Now, Skinner does not quite approve of Watson. “Early Behaviorists wasted a
good deal of time, and confused an important central issue, by attacking the
introspective study of mental life…. Watson made some rather extreme
claims…. In Watson’s aggressive program…it was especially damaging” (5-6).
Skinner disagrees with Pavlov also, particularly his use of “the phy siological
activity of the cerebral cortex.”

Mentalism
 In the history of psy chology the attempt to search out the causes of human
behavior has failed because a mentalistic approach is misguided. To refer
behavior to states of mind is to founder on the question, How can an immaterial
mind cause phy sical action? “A more explicit strategy is to…simply describe
what people do” (11). Anthropologists and statisticians have followed this
procedure.
This will make prediction possible if we assume that people are likely to do
again what they have often done before. Yet this “structuralism” is an
inadequate method, for it never explains why people follow customary
procedures or vote as they do. If such anthropologists and statisticians are
asked for explanations, they usually relapse into mentalism or shrug their
shoulders [13].

Obviously Skinner wants to avoid mentalism. Equally obvious is his desire to

identify causes and give explanations. To do so, he say s that a child eats because
h e feels hungry (13); he also defends his use of the words, “I have chosen…I
have in mind…I am aware…”(20). Whether or not he can use these mentalistic
terms unambiguously remains to be seen. Explicitly he say s, “Mentalistic
explanations allay curiosity and bring inquiry to a stop” (14).
Kant made a similar point. Somewhere in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft he
asserts that phy sics would come to a halt if the world were referred to God. But
there is ambiguity here. In one sense it is true; in another sense it is false. Aristotle
long ago avoided this ambiguity . In his argument for the First Mover he proves (to
his own satisfaction) that there is no first motion, and he also proves that the
circular motion of the heavens is the first motion. This paradox is explicable
because the word first and the word explanation both have two meanings and
references. There is no first motion in the temporal series of motions. The world
has alway s been as it now is. Plants grow and planets revolve. These motions
never started and will never cease. But there is another reference. Can motion be
logically explained? Can all these everlasting motions be explained? For Aristotle
they can. There is one motion, as everlasting as the temporal series, on which the
temporal series depends. Every subsidiary motion results from the influence or
power of the celestial revolution. They depend on it. It depends on no other
motion, but on the First and Unmoved Mover. Hence an appeal to God does not
put an end to scientific investigation, which concerns itself only with an infinite
series in past time. With this in mind, Kant and Skinner must answer whether they
mean that explanation proceeds to infinity, or whether there is a first cause. Take
a particular phenomenon. Its cause or explanation is x. This x is then explained by
y; and y by z. If now z has no further explanation, x is explained. But if z carries
us to infinite alphabets, the explanation of x is never finished. This infinite regress
may not disturb a scientist; he may simply shrug his shoulders. But for us, there is
now no reason for accepting x, y, and z.
The title of Skinner’s third chapter is “The World Within the Skin”; and the
phrase occurs in other chapters as well. It alerts the reader to Skinner’s
unquestioned phy sicalism. “We respond to our own body,” he say s, “with three
nervous sy stems.” This is the kind of language Behaviorists must use, though their
theory prevents its use. If the word body refers unambiguously to an assemblage
of arms, legs, and nerves, what is the “we” who responds to them? Is it not simply
some bits of three dimensional stuff referring to other bits of such stuff? And the
word respond can designate nothing other than a complex of chemical changes.
Why then say we, he, or she, rather than it?
To say that three nervous sy stems transmit certain motions from one place to
another is intelligible enough; but is it not false to say, “We use the word ‘feel’ in
describing our contact with these two kinds of stimulation”? Indeed, since none of
us has much knowledge of the little motions proceeding along the nerves, and
since most of us have no such knowledge at all, we can hardly use the verb feel to
designate what is unknown to us. Skinner has said and will say again that he has no
compunctions against using the ordinary mentalist language; but we, who are not
some phy sical compound, consider, in a way the contents of a test-tube never do
– we consider his usage to be a fundamental petitio principii.
That the usage is indeed a case of begging the question becomes clearer on a
later page. “Statements about future behavior often involve the word ‘feel.’
Perhaps ‘I feel like play ing cards’ may be translated as ‘I feel as I often feel
when I have started to play cards’” (28). Here the mentalistic word feel is
explained by the (what sort of a ?) word feel. On the same page he further say s,
“Consider the report ‘I am, was, or will be hungry.’ ‘I am hungry ’ may be
equivalent to ‘I have hunger pangs,’ and if the verbal community had some
means of observing the contractions of the stomach associated with pangs, it
could pin the response to these stimuli alone.”
Now, as the heart of a chicken can be kept beating for day s after it has been
removed from the chicken, and as many of the bodily functions of the human
being can be made to continue by medical machinery , it is probably the case that
the stomach can be made to contract without the comatose person’s feeling any
pangs. Or, conversely, if the stomach is removed from the body and is made to
go through the motions, Skinner would have to say that the stomach feels hungry .
The chapter ends with a most interesting paragraph:
Even those who insist upon the reality of mental life will usually agree that
little or no progress has been made since Plato’s day …. Modern psy chology
can claim to be far bey ond Plato in controlling the environments of which
people are said to be conscious, but it has not greatly improved their access
to consciousness itself, because it has not been able to improve the verbal
contingencies under which feelings and states of mind are described and
known [32].

Indeed, y es; and the modern effort to explain mental activity in terms of verbal
contingencies not only postpones the hope of progress, but renders it
impossible.What is needed to make Behaviorism commonly acceptable is the
discovery of a new set of lary ngeal motions. May it not rather be that the lack of
progress since Plato’s day is due to the fact that his view of mind has withstood all
criticism? If, however, mentalism is to be discarded, the lary ngeal motions can
be discovered and described only by a mind.
As was the case with Watson, so too Skinner includes many interesting details,
all of which are irrelevant to his main thesis. He talks about “operant reinforcers”;
he expresses a liking or disliking of Brahms in eight sy nony mous sentences; then
he does much the same thing for “Wants, Needs, Desires, and Wishes”; following
which is a section on “Purpose and Intention” (55ff). These paragraphs are full of
mentalistic language, and a Behaviorist cannot claim to have given a rational
defense of his use of that language simply by admitting he must use it. He may
think, that is, he may behave, that a proper language can later be invented, but
evidence comes only with the new language. Skinner does not want to say that
“The dog in the Pavlovian experiment salivates in anticipation of food because it
‘expects’ food” (69). But is the dog so far below the level of us who have learned
the meaning of the dinner bell? Skinner would gleefully say, No; neither one
expects. But the reason for the dog salivating and our more decorous anticipating
is that both of us expect.

Epistemology
Chapter five on “Perceiving” opens with the recognition that “Perhaps the most
difficult problem faced by behaviorism has been the treatment of conscious
content.” One may well omit the “Perhaps.” It is rather the whole problem. If
this be so, the chapter should contain analy ses of earlier theories of perception,
with their refutations, plus a very clear exposition of this modern theory. But with
a passing mention of “the Greeks” and a bare mention of Plato, the name
Empedocles, and eight lines from Theophrastus, Skinner’s knowledge of
epistemology seems limited to British empiricism. He does not discuss
Protagoras’ and Plato’s theory of perception, nor is there the slightest mention of
Plotinus and Augustine. If we may trust the index, Skinner mentions Hegel only
once, and then not on a matter of epistemology, while Kant seems to be
completely absent. For those who reject British empiricism as thoroughly as and
even more so than Skinner does, this difficulty is regrettable.
Unsy mpathetic with empiricism as the present writer is, there is one objection
often brought against it – and though Skinner does not put it in its usual form, it
seems to be embedded in what he say s – there is one objection that seems quite
mistaken. The objection is that simple sensations, such as green, sweet, loud, and
so on, cannot be the elements of knowledge because they are discovered only
when an already learned investigator of long experience analy zes them out.
Thus, it is said, these elements are the result of previous knowledge. But were not
the chemical elements discovered and identified as elements only after long
experience with compounds? Nobody objected to nineteenth-century chemistry
on the ground that what took long to find could not be an element. Now,
nineteenth-century chemistry and British empiricism may at this date be both
discredited; but not by this argument.
Granted that Skinner did not use the argument explicitly , y et there is a suspicion
that he has it tacitly in mind. In any case, his argument is hard to identify . Though
he say s that the discussion of perception “calls for a certain amount of technical
detail, and I shall treat it in some depth,” he can hardly be said to have kept his
promise. If his conclusions are somewhat clear, his premises are obscure and his
logical development from them is uncertain.
He begins with a contrast between the traditional view and the view “common,
I believe, to all versions of Behaviorism” (73). The former considers perception
an active process; the latter “is that the initiating action is taken by the
environment rather than by the perceiver.”
This contrast covers over complexities that a rapid reader is almost sure to
miss, and in so doing he may unwittingly accept positions that should have been
questioned before going further. In the first place one is left to guess whose view
is traditional. Previously in this book Locke’s view seems to be treated as
traditional, but for Locke and the British empiricists perception or sensation is
completely passive. Even Kant catalogued it as receptivity. On the other hand, it
was Augustine who considered perception as a voluntary act of attention. But
surely Skinner is not engaged either in attacking Augustine as traditional nor in
praising him for his (dare we call it) activist anticipation of Behaviorism. In the
second place, when Skinner say s that the initiating act of perception is taken by
the environment, he may be stating a hy pothesis to be proven later. It was unwise
for him, however, to delay giving his reasons because the statement seems so
obviously false.
It may be that thunder and lightning initiate involuntary perceptions; but for
many other more ordinary perceptions, voluntary attention is necessary. Most of
the time people pay no attention to ninety percent of their field of vision. Even
large objects go unnoticed. On a more delicate scale artists realize that there are
shadows within shadows. They look for them and see them. Non-artists can
hardly see them at all, even when they are told to try. Then there are those
pictures entirely made up of sporadic blots of ink. Some people shortly see a face
in them. When the pattern is deliberately pointed out to other people, try as they
might they fail to see the face – even when they have 20/20 vision. In bodily,
phy sical, or chemical action, the result is uniform and instantaneous. Perception
is quite different.
Much of the Behavioristic language is hard to interpret. Whether or not we
agree with Berkeley ’s subjective idealism, we understand well enough that for
him the world consists of combinations of sensations. The world is in the mind.
For Skinner, as for the non-technical public, “A person could not, of course,
capture and possess the real world” (72). Presumably this means that a phy sical
tree cannot transplant itself from the lawn into our heads. Yet he continues to say
on the next page, “A part of the environment entered the body, was transformed
there, perhaps stored, and eventually emerged as a response.”
There are difficulties here. Of course what he say s is true of food. It gets inside
our bodies and produces a response. This may not be true of taste. Still more
doubtful is the case of sight. In the first place, phy sicists do not know what light is.
They used to think it was a wave motion in the presupposed ether. On this basis
the waving ether would be stopped by the ey eball so that none of the environment
would enter the body. If light is now corpuscular, perhaps bits of corpuscles enter
the aperture and make their way to the brain. A corpuscle or two then becomes
the tree in the brain.
But there is difficulty in understanding Skinner’s paragraph. In its first sentence
he asserts that the view to be expressed is common to all previous Behaviorism,
therefore to his own.2 Yet the concluding paragraph of three lines say s, “in an
operant analy sis and in the radical behaviorism built into it, the environment stays
where it is and where it has always been – outside the body” (his italics). What
then is perception? It is fairly clear that Skinner disowns mental pictures of
phy sical reality . How then does he perceive a tree?
Hurry ing on through reinforced responses, Skinner appeals to “a process called
generalization” and to “environmental history ” (74). One would think that this
should be most carefully explained. But he gives no hint even how the most
complex chemistry can generalize. In a phy sicalistic Behaviorism, as much as in
subjectivism, or more so, only individual realities are knowable. There are no
abstract ideas. Even if Berkeley wanted some general words, his theory did not
permit their invention. Behaviorism has an even more difficult time of it. And if
generalization comes early in the learning process, as Skinner seems to say, all
the more does it stand in need of explanation and justification. It is vain to appeal
to “environmental history.” We would like to know how this history could have
begun. To say that Py thagoras took a long time to figure out his famous theorem
is no explanation of the proof.
One of the persuasive elements in Skinner’s literary methodology, which for
this very reason constitutes a difficulty in criticizing him, is his attack on a theory
which the critic himself rejects as mistaken. The reader is likely to think: Theory
X is plainly wrong; Skinner’s objections are therefore well-founded; and,
obviously to the untutored mind, his presuppositions on this account must be true.
Now, Skinner vigorously attacks the copy theory of perception (80 ff.). He
acknowledges that photographs and paintings lend plausibility to the copy theory :
It is much less convincing to say that we do not hear the sounds made by
an orchestra but rather some inner reproduction…. The argument is wholly
unconvincing in the field of taste and odor, where it is not easy to imagine
copies distinguishable from the real thing…. When we feel the texture of a
sheet of paper, we feel the paper, not some internal representation.
Then he quotes Theophrastus:
with regard to hearing it is strange of him [Empedocles] to imagine that he
has really explained how creatures hear, when he has ascribed the process
to internal sounds and assumed that the ear produces a sound within, like a
bell. By means of this internal sound we might hear sounds without, but how
should we hear this internal sound itself?

Then Skinner adds, “Similarly, as a modern authority has pointed out, it is as

difficult to explain how we see a picture in the occipital cortex of the brain as to
explain how we see the outside world” (81).
This whole line of argument has some force against the copy theory, the
representational theory, of knowledge; but it supplies no force in support of
Behaviorism.
Some people, even most people, have visual imagery, and this provides some
plausibility to the copy theory. But instead of being less convincing, the example
of music is more convincing. The violin strings make no sound at all: they cause
the air to vibrate. At least such was a recent scientific theory of sound.
Theophrastus jumped the track when he assumed that the ear produces a sound
within. The ear simply vibrates phy sically. To assume that the ear produces a
sound which the person then hears leads to an infinite regress, as Theophrastus
presumably understood. The modern authority too is correct in rejecting a
picture in the occipital cortex of the brain. But the difficulty arises because these
objections all take perception to be a phy sical process. If we start with a mind, we
may be puzzled as to how to arrive at a body, but we have no such difficulties
with perception and thought. May we not suppose that Einsteinian phy sics makes
space and body much more enigmatic than mind and thought are?

Verbal Behavior
A common trait among most if not all Behaviorists is to substitute “verbal
behavior” for thought. This is persuasive for the careless reader, who mentally
understands the language to designate thinking, when the Behavioristic theory
requires no more than motions as truly motions as those that occur on a billiard
table or in a test-tube. In chapter six, “Verbal Behavior,” Skinner writes,
The words and sentences of which language is composed are said to be
tools used to express meanings, thoughts…desires and many other things in
or on the speaker’s mind. A much more productive view is that verbal
behavior is behavior [sic]. It has a special character only because it is
reinforced by its effects on people…. As a result, it is free of the spatial,
temporal, and mechanical relations which prevail between operant behavior
and non-social consequences [88-89].
And through these pages Skinner frequently uses that word “contingencies.”
Now, if Skinner, by his phrase “which prevail between operant behavior and
non-social consequences,” means to modify the previous “spatial, temporal, and
mechanical relations,” so that the sentence refers only to such noises as the
gurgling of some acid as it is being poured through a funnel, which noises have
few – they surely can have some – social consequences, he still cannot conclude
that the other noises, that is, words and language, are free from spatial, temporal,
and mechanical relations. Surely on his own view the motions of the lary nx not
only occupy space and take time, they are determined fundamentally by the
differential equations of phy sics. Hence the phrase, “the contingencies are
different” (89), if true is irrelevant, and if relevant is false.
How Skinner tries to avoid intellectualist or mentalistic objections becomes still
clearer in the subsection on “Meaning and Reference” (90-94). The objection,
not so much of the structuralism Skinner explicitly mentions, but more pointedly
of the mentalist, is that Behaviorism ignores meaning. Skinner’s answer is that
meaning is to be found, not so much in the current phy sical setting, as in
“antecedent history,” the “history of exposure to contingencies”; “it depends on
past contingencies, and nothing is gained by internalizing them” (91).
This appeal to unspecified contingencies in remote history does not explain
how air waves, several centuries ago, represent the square root of minus one. Let
Skinner complicate the chemistry all he wants, and use as many differential
equations as a phy sicist can give him, y et if he cannot show how a motion in
space at the present time designates the concept of beauty, courage, or even
hy drogen or velocity, he can never show how the one designated the other many
y ears ago.
Skinner’s own example of abstraction is not beauty or velocity, but simply of
the color red. One example is as good as another. What then does Skinner say
about “red”? The discussion comes under the tertiary title “Abstraction.” Hence,
even if no one expects to arrive at Platonic Ideas, we expect an explanation of
how individual sensations can be developed into universal concepts. Without
universals, such as courage, liliaceae, and even red, the contents of the mind, if
there be a mind at all, do not merit the name of knowledge. Without subjects and
predicates there is no truth, and every predicate is a universal.3
Skinner, however, wants to reduce abstraction to verbal behavior:
A characteristic feature of verbal behavior directly attributable to special
contingencies of reinforcement, is abstraction. It is the listener, not the
speaker, who takes practical action with respect to stimuli controlling a verbal
response…. A person learns to react to red things under the non-social
contingencies of the environment, but he does so only by emitting a practical
response for each red thing. The contingencies cannot bring a single
 response under control of the property of redness alone. But a single
property may be important to the listener who takes many kinds of practical
action on many different occasions because of it and who therefore
reinforces appropriately when a given object is called red [93-94].
It may alleviate the tedium of this long quotation to interpolate a remark or two.
One notes again the vacuity of the term contingency. One also notes the definition
o f abstraction. This is not what Aristotle meant by abstraction, and one must
consider whether this new thing can account for what abstraction formerly did.
When Skinner pronounces the sy llabic sound abstraction, and when a Catholic
Thomist makes the same noise, their verbal behaviors are identical – as identical
as any two instances of a similar sound can be. But the meanings are totally
different. Whether Skinner uses the English language properly is one question; but
the more important question is, Can Skinner’s process, by whatever name it may
be called, account for the “property of redness”? Now, back to the quotation:
The referent for red can never be identified in any one setting. If we show
a person a red pencil and say, “What is that?” and he say s “Red,” we cannot
tell what property evoked his response, but if we show him many red objects
and he alway s say s “Red,” we can do so – and with increasing accuracy as
we multiply cases. The speaker is alway s responding to a phy sical object,
not to “redness” as an abstract entity, and he responds “red” not because he
possesses a concept of redness but because special contingencies have
brought that response under the control of that property of stimuli.

Now, note carefully the following paragraph:

There is no point in asking how a person can “know” the abstract entity
called “redness.” The contingencies explain the behavior, and we need not
be disturbed because it is impossible to discover the referent in any single
instance. We need not, with William of Occam and the Nominalists, deny
that abstract entities exist and insist that such responses are merely words.
What exist are contingencies which bring behavior under the control of
properties or of classes of objects defined by properties. We can determine
that a single response is under the control of one property by naming it. For
example, if we show a person a pencil and say, “What color is this?” he will
then respond to the property specified as color – provided he has been
subject to an appropriate history of reinforcement [93-94].
This passage may be taken as crucial, because a Behaviorist has no hope of
arriving at the abstractions of mathematics and phy sics, not to mention ethics and
politics, if he cannot arrive at the concept of red. In this subsection the difficulty is
partially obscured by Skinner’s decision to occupy the position of an observer
rather than the position of a percipient: “it is the listener, not the speaker.” Yet if
the Behaviorist is to listen to something more than sound vibrations, he must
perceive their meaning, and before that the speaker must have somehow
developed an abstract concept which he designates by the sound red.
Skinner of course denies that the speaker has any concept of red at all. “The
speaker is alway s responding to a phy sical object, not to ‘redness’ as an entity.”
Such is Skinner’s assertion. But the proof is wanting. What evidence there is rather
opposes Skinner’s assertion. When a person say s “red,” he is classify ing the
immediate pencil with other red pencils, red squares on a chess board, and red
apples. He recognizes a similarity, and similarity is not red. In fact, Skinner gives
himself away when toward the end of the quotation he asks, “What color is this?”
(his italics). Here he falls into a difficulty that even Berkeley with all his
subjective mentalism could not handle. People see red and blue. They do not see
color. Yet they classify red, blue, green under the concept of color. Now, if the
similarity among reds cannot be reduced to or evoked from phy sical motions,
much less the concept of color, and the concept of similarity. Words such as
contingencies and reinforcement are good Behavioristic vibrations in the air. They
explain nothing.
We reject the pontifical pronouncement that “There is no point in asking how a
person can know the abstract entity called redness.” This precisely is the point.
William of Occam at least had perceptions, if not abstractions. Skinner say s, “We
need not…deny that abstract entities exist and insist that such responses are
merely words.” But, first, he has denied the existence of the abstractions which
Occam also denied. The only abstractions Skinner allows himself is something
Occam had never heard of: a feature of verbal behavior directly attributable to
special contingencies of reinforcement. Yet if abstraction in this sentence is a
feature of verbal behavior, how can Skinner claim that unlike Occam he will not
reduce abstractions to mere words? He should not have restricted his definition on
the previous page to verbal behavior. The better word is the sound empty of
meaning: contingencies.
If any one object to the assertion that the term contingencies is empty of
meaning, the reply can be made that in mentalistic terminology it refers to
unspecified phy sical motions in time and space. As such, it provides no
meaningful explanation. The contingencies should be specified. This should be
clear from one further sentence: “A concept is simply a feature of a set of
contingencies which exist in the world, and it is discovered simply in the sense
that the contingencies bring behavior under its control” (94-95). Would not this be
more clearly expressed by say ing that a number of bodies bump a number of
bodies and so they are set in motion? This no more explains perception,
abstractions, and pain than it does the difference between hy drochloric acid and
lead oxide.

Ethics and Politics

The subject with which to conclude the exposition of Skinner’s philosophy will
be his ethics. More than once the present treatise has shown that Behaviorism
aims to alter morality. Every philosophy does. One therefore wants to know the
direction such a change will take, the justification of that direction, and, in the
case of Behaviorism, the consistency or lack of consistency between the
fundamental principles and the derivative ethics. This matter of consistency can
be highlighted by bringing together the first few words of chapter twelve, “The
Question of Control” (189) and the last sentence of the final chapter:
A scientific analy sis of behavior must, I believe, assume that a person’s
behavior is controlled by his genetic and environmental histories rather than
by the person himself as an initiatory, creative agent [189]. In the
Behavioristic view man can now control his own destiny because he knows
what must be done and how to do it [251].
These two sentences, at first sight, seem to be in stark contradiction. Can the
intermediate material show that they are not?
Although an individual person does not initiate his own behavior, one must not
“overlook the fact that human behavior is also a form of control” (198).
Naturally ; for if water is dripped on iron, not only does the water rust the iron,
that is, oxidize it, but at the same time the iron ferrizes some of the water.
Similarly, if my environmental history, including the cold, wet, foggy weather,
produces motions in my body, called depression, my conduct will cause similar
motions in my friends and pet dog. I am their environmental history. This is
called control, and “we can no more stop controlling nature than we can stop
breathing or digesting food.”
Now, from this more or less scientific observation, Skinner skips to “organized
agencies or institutions, such as governments, religions, and economic sy stems,
and to a lesser extent educators and psy chotherapists who exert a powerful and
often troublesome control” (190). Troublesome? Does the water trouble the iron?
The next page has a subhead, “Ethics and Compassion.” How does compassion
get into genetic and environmental histories? And benevolence? Before referring
such evidently mental qualities to phy sical “counter-control,” an author surely
would have given several paragraphs to a persuasive preliminary argument.
Skinner asserts that “We refrain from hurting others, not because we ‘know
how it feels to be hurt,’ but (1) because hurting other members of the species
reduces the chances that the species will survive, and (2) when we have hurt
others, we ourselves have been hurt” (192). Yet Hitler murdered the Jews in
order to ensure the survival of a better human species. Mao massacred thirty
million Chinese, and instead of hurting himself thereby , increased the food rations
for the survivors. Furthermore, even if certain conduct decreases the species’
chance of survival, what is that to me? After all, evolution will guarantee the
survival of the fittest, so that it is no concern of mine what species survives.
Indeed, the human race has shown itself to be a natural disaster. Why ought it
survive?
We sometimes say that we acted in a given way because it was right or
felt that it was right; but what we feel when we behave morally or ethically
depends on the contingencies responsible for our behavior…. [One does not
act] because he knows or feels that his behavior is right; he acts because of
the contingencies which have shaped his behavior and created the conditions
he feels [193].

Hence there is no right or wrong, no obligation, no morality, no praise, no blame.

One does not praise or blame nitric acid for burning one’s finger. It is just a
natural contingency. So also the murder of innocent babies, the mass murder of
the Jim Jones sect, and the murders by the Mafia’s enforcers. Just natural
contingencies.
In considering the evils of the present day, Skinner repudiates a book that saw
hope in “a growing awareness of each man for his fellows; an increasing respect
for the rights of others.” “But what is needed,” Skinner objects, “is a restoration of
social environments in which people behave in way s called moral” (195-196).
Further down the page he notes that what some societies call moral, other
societies call immoral. Remember, however, that what Poly carp called moral,
his society thought worthy of capital punishment. Can Skinner justify an
individual’s rejection of his society ’s norms? Can Skinner justify the norms of one
society as opposed to those of another? Can Skinner justify any norms whatever?
 Skinner clearly believes that some social arrangements are good and others are
bad. For example, individualism brings “the brutal prospect of overpopulation,
pollution, and the exhaustion of resources” (201). But if a society calls
individualism moral, as America did in 1776, how can Skinner object to it? Any
theory that makes social opinion normative has no basis for choosing between two
opposing societies.
One must not be deceived by Skinner’s use of mentalistic terms. He cannot
write his book without them, for he must talk about matters for which his theory
allows no room.“No special kind of mind stuff is assumed. A physical world
generates both physical actions and the physical conditions within the body to
which a person responds when a verbal community arranges the necessary
contingencies” (220). Skinner not only admits, he enthusiastically asserts that
human beings generalize, discriminate, respond to abstractions and concepts,
classify, analy ze, derive new rules from old; but “what [Behaviorism] rejects is
the assumption that comparable activities take place in the my sterious world of
the mind” (223). These enumerated activities are all phy sical motions in space.
Of course Skinner cannot identify these motions because
The great achievements of artists, composers, writers, mathematicians,
and scientists are no doubt still bey ond reach (in part, as I have pointed out,
because leaders in these fields have been misled by mentalism into giving
useless reports of their activities) [223-224].

In other words, there is no empirical evidence that thinking is a bodily motion.

Both in ethics and in scientific experimentation Skinner relies on “effective
action.” “A proposition is ‘true’ to the extent that with its help the listener responds
effectively to the situation it describes” (235). This, however, is a meaningless
distinction, for every chemical or phy sical action is effective. The chemical
reaction may not be what the scientist mentalistically desires – he may have
carelessly spilled some acid – but so far as mechanistic science is concerned
every motion produces its determinate effect. Complicate the situation so as to
include human morals and social customs, and every action still produces its
effect. There is nothing ineffective.
Skinner tries to gain plausibility for his Behaviorism by deny ing that it reduces
feelings to bodily states. “It does not reduce thought processes to behavior” (241).
Of course it doesn’t. The trick is in the word reduce. There was never any thing to
reduce. It has alway s been bodily behavior. Behaviorism “simply analy zes the
behavior previously explained by the invention of thought processes.”
 In the concluding pages Skinner faces the objection that a Behaviorist cannot
account for his own behavior: He treats other people as machines, but he is an
observer. Though the others have no mind or consciousness, he must have in
order to write his book. Part of Skinner’s reply to this objection is consistent: He
writes his book because evolution has thus constructed his computerized behavior.
He can also legitimately use popular language when technical terminology would
confuse the lay reader. His example is that of a phy sician who tells his patient he
has a cold, instead of a virus. But this is permissible only when cold and virus can
be intelligibly defined. The phy sician is not permitted to say, You have a
contingency. A theory also fails if it disallows its own truth. To use the term
memory in a theory that prevents one from having the same thought twice is not
only bad English, it is self-contradiction. Such use of ordinary language confuses
the patient more than the technical language would. More of this in a moment.
To be sure, Skinner explicitly mentions this objection: “I may seem to have
abandoned the very basis of Behaviorism” (248). He gives his answer in four
paragraphs. The first is not so much an answer as it is a reassertion of his theory.
The second does little more: “What we have learned from experimental analy sis
of behavior suggests that the environment performs the functions previously
assigned to feelings and introspectively observed inner states of the organism.” In
other words, the environment experiments, remembers, and formulates
differential equations. “The phy siologist will someday give us all the details”
(249). But this hope for the future nullifies the suggestion that “we have learned
from experimental analy sis.” The fourth paragraph say s no more. Hence it
appears that Skinner has not met the objection.
Skinner indeed, both here and in his conclusion and throughout the book as well,
admits without embarrassment that Behaviorism is in its infancy and has solved
very few problems. He hopes for the future. But his commendable modesty
falsifies his final assertion: “In the Behavioristic view, man can now control his
own destiny because he knows what must be done and how to do it.” As of 1979
neither President Carter nor the Congress knows what to do or how to do it.

1. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.

2. If Skinner transgressed with too little warning the limits of what is common to
all versions of Behaviorism, he escapes the charge of contradicting himself.
However, the main objection remains.
3. The present writer does not accept the Aristotelian theory of abstraction.
 5. Philosophic Criticism
Though Behaviorism has zoomed to heights of popularity in the twentieth
century, it is not a new theory. Plato discusses a form of it in the Phaedo. Leibniz
used the illustration of a grist mill to refute it. Suppose, he said, the brain were
enlarged to the size of a mill so that we might enter and walk through it. We would
see its wheels and pulley s working on one another, but we would see no thought. I
wish to bring this illustration up to date and enlarge upon its applications.

Baseball and Behaviorism

Yankee Stadium is the scene of a baseball game. The first pitch is an inside
curve. This represents a particular thought in the brain field, for Behaviorism
makes every thought a motion. Now, a given motion is a dated event and cannot
occur twice. It may be that a pitch in the third inning is also an inside curve, but it
is not the identical pitch. It has come fifteen minutes later. Then, too, its speed is
not precisely the same, and the curve breaks about half-an-inch higher. That is to
say, the same thought can never occur twice. If I think thought X at 2:30 P.M., I
cannot have the same thought at 3:00 p.m., or ever after. In other words,
memory is impossible.
Perhaps a Behaviorist would say that although we might never have precisely
the same thought twice, nonetheless we can have a similar thought. The curve in
the third inning is for all practical purposes similar enough to the first one. This
reply complicates the situation. The thought that the curve in the third inning is
similar to the curve in the first inning is itself a new motion. This new motion will
be the knuckle ball in the fourth inning. But this requires the Behaviorist to explain
how a motion in the fourth inning can connect the first and third inning motions,
when neither of these any longer exists. Each of these “thoughts” had a life span
of less than a second. Each is a dated event. The two were separated by fifteen
minutes. How can something ten minutes later connect them? Behaviorism
therefore cannot discover that two motions are similar.
There is a further complication. It is all the more obvious that neither of these
pitches, nor any other in Yankee Stadium, is the motion of a different ball in San
Diego. As Yankee Stadium represents one mind and the pitches are its thoughts,
so the San Diego diamond is a different mind. Since obviously a single pitch can
never occur in two cities, it follows that two minds can never have the same
thought. That is why no one else can have the least idea of what Skinner and Ry le
mean. And as the previous paragraph has shown, they themselves have no idea
what they wrote, now that the writing is finished.

Empiricism
The comments, interspersed among the paragraphs of exposition, sufficiently
point out the basic empiricism of Behavioristic philosophy. They briefly indicate
objections to that sort of epistemology. Though some may think it out of place to
argue about basic philosophy in a psy chological monograph such as this,
nevertheless a refutation of empiricism would refute Behaviorism ab initio. If the
sense-data theory is unsatisfactory, as, for example, Ry le insists, then one of two
directions must be taken. Either the author, philosopher or psy chologist, must pin
his hopes on Behaviorism, or he must take the Kantian road to the transcendental
unity of apperception; that is, he must acknowledge a unitary soul or mind in
order to escape the chaos of Hume’s “impressions.” Since there are these two
possibilities, for the moment locating Hegel further along the Kantian road,
Behaviorism is obligated to refute the need of a unify ing mind. But Ry le mentions
Kant only once, merely to dismiss him without argument, and Hegel’s account of
sensation in the Phenomenology, he mentions not at all. The intellectualist
therefore concludes that the argument for Behaviorism is distinctly deficient.
Irrefragable as this conclusion is, some readers may still think it is too cavalier.
For them a subsidiary though pertinent detail may have some weight. With all its
scientific and experimental claims, Behaviorism is singularly deficient in that sort
of support. Einstein could appeal to the visible position of Mercury. If it were
observed in one position at a certain time, his theory could be regarded as
probable; but if at that time Mercury appeared somewhere else, Einstein’s theory
would have been rejected. This then is one challenge that can be directed against
Behaviorists: What, experimentally, are the precise chemical reactions that y ou
identify as the idea of the square root of minus one, and what different reactions
are thoughts on gravitation or baseball? A good electrician can describe the
differences between a circuit that flashes an electric sign advertising chocolate
meunier and another advertising creme eclipse. What then is the empirical
evidence that differentiates the chemistry of mathematics from the chemistry
that is called the idea of geology ?
At the same time I am not willing to minimize the arguments against
empiricism. Even with what mind they may have had, Hume and his followers
have never been able to justify a universal proposition. They cannot validly
establish any law of science. Experience is alway s finite and induction is alway s
a fallacy .

Ethics
This mention of universal propositions leads to one ty pe that is singularly
embarrassing to Behaviorism and should be embarrassing to every Behaviorist.
These propositions are the norms of ethics. In fact, Behaviorism not only is
unable to say that a certain ty pe of conduct is alway s good, it cannot conclude
that any conduct is ever good or any where wicked.
In more than one place the exposition has shown that Behaviorists aim to alter
the behavior of human beings. If so, they must have in mind (?) certain ideas of
what is preferable to present activities. The methods necessary to produce these
alterations are one matter for consideration; the more important matter is
whether they have any reason to choose one ideal rather than its opposite. How,
for example, can Kilpatrick prove that a government should prohibit parents from
teaching religion to their children? How can Behaviorists justify their processes of
altering other people? More simply and more fundamentally can the
Behavioristic theory validly establish any ethical norm whatever?
Since the documentation and the interspersed comments barely touched on the
subject of ethics, it will be necessary now to do a little more quoting. We shall
therefore return to B.F.Skinner.1
According to Skinner,

the prescientific view [held that] a person’s behavior is at least to some

extent his own achievement…. In the scientific view…a person’s behavior is
determined by a genetic endowment traceable to the evolutionary history to
which as an individual he is exposed. Neither view can be proved…as we
learn more about the effects of the environment, we have less reason to
attribute any part of human behavior to an autonomous controlling agent….
But the environment can be changed and we are learning how to change it.
The measures we use are those of phy sical and biological technology …
[101].

In the following paragraph Skinner acknowledges that this raises questions: For
whose benefit is this control to be used? Who is to use it, and to what end? On what
grounds can one practice be judged better than another? But the fact that he asks
these questions does not mean that his answers are acceptable.
The beginning of the answer is, “There are things which almost every one calls
good.” This is not a very good beginning. It subjects the Behaviorist to the
unscientific opinions of a large majority, and Behaviorists take pride in being
scientific. Since, too, majority opinion might accept several things as good, this
principle prevents the Behaviorist from choosing one of these things and rejecting
another. Is such subservience good? Probably the majority would say, Yes.
There is here a fundamental difficulty .
However, for the sake of proceeding, let the Behaviorist choose two or three of
these popular opinions. These good actions are “reinforcing.” Does this alleged
fact recommend them? It seems so, for Skinner say s, “To make a value
judgment by calling something good or bad is to classify it in terms of its
reinforcing effects” (105). But Skinner or at least some Behaviorists might not like
to be reminded that Lenin’s and Stalin’s early purges reinforced them to commit
extensive massacres. Their success reinforced Mao and Idi Amin to do better, for
is it not better to kill more enemies than fewer? While Skinner does not mention
the extermination of the Tibetans, he at least say s, “the strong threaten phy sical
harm…the phy sically attractive reinforce sexuality ” (109). He may not say so,
but his theory implies that massacre and prostitution are good. Of course, “There
is a right and a wrong way of driving a car”; so must we not conclude that there is
a right and a wrong way to engage in prostitution? How he comes to mention
fairness and justice, how he can distinguish between wise and unwise
reinforcement – except in the sense of efficiently accomplishing one’s aim – how
he can say, You ought to tell the truth (112), remain unclear. His most pertinent
assertion is, “The value is to be found in the social contingencies maintained for
the purpose of control. It is an ethical or moral judgment in the sense that ethos
and mores refer to the customary practices of a group” (112-113). Thus it was
ethical, right, good, reinforcing for the ancient worshipers of Moloch to burn their
newborn babies in a hot oven. Emancipated Americans kill their babies now at an
earlier age.
Skinner seems to think it is enough for Behaviorists to distinguish between facts
and how people feel about them. “Once we have identified the contingencies that
control the behavior called good or bad and right or wrong, the distinction
between facts and how people feel about them is clear” (113). Perhaps it is, but
this is irrelevant. Aside from the fact that how people feel about facts is itself a
fact, Skinner should give a reason why a person should feel or decide that one line
of action is right or better than another. Social contingencies do not satisfy this
need. Russian dissidents fight against social control. The early Christians and the
Protestant marty rs repudiated the customary norms. It is most enlightening to see
how Skinner faces this objection.
He does indeed face it. In fact he quotes a strong statement of this objection as
given by Karl Popper:
In face of the sociological fact that most people adopt the norm, “Thou
shalt not steal,” it is still possible to decide to adopt either this norm or its
opposite; and it is possible to encourage those who have adopted the norm to
hold fast to it, or to discourage them, and to persuade them to adopt another
norm. It is impossible to derive a sentence stating a norm or decision from a
sentence stating a fact….

Note now Skinner’s reply : “The conclusion would be valid only if it is ‘possible
to adopt a norm or its opposite.’” Apparently he thinks this is impossible; but
Russian dissidents and Christian marty rs contradict him. Both adopted their anti-
social norms. Indeed the American Congress and the British Parliament
constantly contradict Skinner, for they are alway s enacting laws to alter previous
norms. So far as I can see, Skinner never shows how such changes can be
reasonably justified or reasonably opposed. From what did Skinner derive his
anti-social political programs? All his factual data and social contingencies are
irrelevant. One need do no better 2 than to repeat Popper: No factual statement
validly implies a normative conclusion.
This ends what may be called the philosophical argument. Next comes a
theological discussion.

1. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 1971.

2. No better, but more at length, the point is made in my Christian View of Men
and Things, Chapter IV.
 6. Donald M. MacKay
Whether a secularist rejects the preceding refutation and accepts Behaviorism,
or whether he rejects Behaviorism in favor of some idealistic or intellectualistic
theory other than Christianity, he certainly ought to admit that Christianity cannot
tolerate Behaviorism. John Calvin stated the position with such clarity that even an
Arminian is forced to agree. In his Institutes (I, xv, 2) he say s,
That man consists of soul and body ought not to be controverted. By the
“soul” I understand an immortal y et created essence, which is the nobler
part of him…. Christ commending his spirit to the Father and Stephen his to
Christ, intend no other than that, when the soul is liberated from the prison of
the flesh, God is its perpetual keeper. Those who imagine that the soul is
called a spirit because it is a breath or faculty divinely infused with the body ,
but destitute of any essence [that is, a bodily function, not an independent
reality ] are proved to be in gross error…. How could an affection or
emotion, without any essence, penetrate to the tribunal of God?… For the
body is not affected by the fear of spiritual punishment…. Unless the soul
survived after its liberation from the prison of the body, it was absurd for
Christ to represent the soul of Lazarus as enjoy ing happiness in the bosom of
Abraham, and the soul of the rich man as condemned to dreadful torment.
Paul confirms the same point by informing us that when absent from the
body we are present with the Lord.

Since believers and unbelievers alike realize this to be the Christian position, it is
surprising to see a professing Christian attempting to convert Christians to
Behaviorism, even to undermining the passage from Paul quoted in the last
sentence above.

The Clock-Work Image

There is no such thing as Christian Behaviorism for the same reason that there
is no such thing as Arminian Calvinism or Augustinian Pelagianism. But the
Intervarsity Christian Fellowship published and reprinted (1977) a small volume
designed to persuade Christian students of the truth of this un-Biblical theory .1
An argument of 111 pages necessarily has minor as well as major contentions.
Some of the former may be unsound without fatally damaging the whole. But if
too many inadequacies appear along the line, there is at least a presumption that
the main contention is not well founded. Besides this, some apparently minor
detail may in its own way be strictly fundamental.
Dr. MacKay opens his Preface by noting that the scientific advances of
modern times have caused many deep-rooted superstitions to wither. Those who
see little difference between such superstitions and the Biblical religion expect
Christianity to wither also. Conversely, Christians are tempted to view science
with suspicion and retreat into a private, anti-intellectual faith. Then Dr. MacKay
notes, presumably to alleviate the dilemma in which good Christians find
themselves, “It is never too easy to distinguish hard scientific data from the
philosophical extrapolations from them which are put about in the name of
science.”
If I am not mistaken, this statement seems to be an attempt to alleviate the
difficulty by assuring Christians that scientists make use of philosophical
extrapolations, with the result that their attack on Christianity as superstition has no
scientific basis. At the same time MacKay seems to defend science against the
suspicions of Christians when they retreat into a private anti-intellectual world. He
implies, does he not, that there are in fact hard scientific data free from
philosophical and non-observational presuppositions. The sentence quoted
therefore puts before us a rather complicated situation. The present writer wishes
to deny that there are any hard scientific data at all. Contrary to common
opinion, there are no data, no givens, no brute facts. Every thing in any one’s mind
is already intellectually interpreted.2
Here is one fundamental point of disagreement. It concerns the nature of
science itself. It is so fundamental that many readers will consider its discussion
actually irrelevant to a critique of MacKay. If the present writer should base his
rejection of “Christian Behaviorism” on this one point, many would accuse him
of evading the supporting details. I shall not evade or avoid these details.
Nevertheless, there is an impassable chasm between say ing that “it is never too
easy to distinguish hard scientific from philosophical extrapolations,” and say ing
that it is alway s impossible to do so. Dr. MacKay thinks there are data, hard,
given facts, uncontaminated by intellectual interpretations. Along with the
Christian Augustine and the Antichristian Hegel, this is what I deny. For once,
most remarkably, I agree with John Dewey on the point that there are no givens
in science, only takens. While it is possible to examine Behavioristic details in an
ad hominem sort of way, there is alway s the underly ing rejection of empiricist
epistemology . Therefore, here at the beginning, I repudiate the basis on which the
MacKay book is written, expressed in its Preface in these words: “the Christian
gospel itself invites the test of daily experience in essentially the same spirit [my
italics] of openness to evidence that animates the enquiring scientist” (10). The
Scriptural reasons for this repudiation will form the concluding section of this
monograph. But for the moment let me emphatically state that Christianity is not
based on empirical observation, but on the propositional revelation of divine truth.
Tell me, sir, what laboratory observations imply the doctrine of Trinity ?
Schleiermacher at the beginning of the nineteenth century tried the empirical
approach by attempting to derive Christian doctrine from an analy sis of the
feeling of absolute dependence. In so doing he abolished theology, the study of
God, and initiated the psy chology of religious experience. This became the
Modernism of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. We want none of
it.
Now, first, the documentation will show that Dr. MacKay ’s empiricism is one
of mechanistic Behaviorism. He does indeed refer to it as a “working
hy pothesis.” This wording may mean that he believes it to be true, but cannot y et
quite prove it so. Or it may mean that it is the most recent of a long series of
hy potheses, each to be rejected by the following generation. This is uniformly
the fate of scientific hy potheses. But MacKay does not speak as if he thinks it
simply the present commonly accepted falsehood. On the contrary, he
immediately continues: “In order to maintain human behavior, chains of cause
and effect can legitimately [my italics] be sought and found in terms of
phy sics….(12). Then he disclaims “machine-mindedness” with its “deterministic
and depersonalizing” implications; but we much wait to see how or if he can
escape phy sical determinism while asserting the chain of causes and effects
legitimately found in phy sics.
Like Spinoza, Singer, and most of the secularists, MacKay will depend on the
principle of cross-classification. That is to say, certain phy sical processes will
happen to produce works of art, others economic sy stems, and no doubt also
something called human decisions. These results of various mechanical causes
and effects can be classified teleologically. But individually, the paint of the
canvas, the regulatory operations of the bureaucrats, and the motions of a human
being walking toward the dinner table are all fixed by the laws of phy sics. The
latter motions may have as their more immediate causes certain chemical
reactions in the brain; but the positions and velocities of every part of the brain
cells, as well as the feet and legs, are determined by mathematical equations.
Cross-classification does not remove mechanical determinism.
 For such reasons as these MacKay ’s attempt to separate two forms of
determinism must be considered a failure. One meaning of the term determinism,
according to MacKay, is that “all phy sical events have phy sical causes” (13). It
would be more accurate to say that all phy sical events are describable by
differential equations. The difference between these two expressions depends on
the fact that scientists have long ago given up the concept of cause. To return to it
indicates a misunderstanding of modern science, and as such constitutes a defect
in MacKay ’s argument. The laws of phy sics are today most frequently
understood as describing the motions of particles; what causes a body to fall when
it is dropped is never answered. What is answered is the rate of fall: It falls with
an acceleration of thirty two-feet per second per second (with some technical
modifications).
After say ing that “all phy sical events have phy sical causes,” MacKay
continues, “Even if it were true….” It is strange that he uses the subjunctive
mood, for he surely holds that every phy sical event has a phy sical cause. This
has been seen already, and will be evident later on in his example of the electric
signboard. But, “Even if it were true, it would not of itself say any thing for or
against human freedom and morality.” This statement is surely false, unless
freedom and morality are consistent with basic mechanism; and one must say
that at least this is extremely doubtful.
The first meaning then was, all phy sical events have phy sical causes. If x is the
cause of y, and if x occurs, y is inevitable, or x would not have been a cause.
MacKay also gives a second meaning to determinism. In this second meaning,
unlike the first, freedom, morality, and human choice would be illusory. This
second meaning is, “the philosophical belief that the future is inevitable” (13).
One must ask, Is there any difference between the two meanings? Or, more
exactly, if the first be true, can the second be false? Apparently MacKay thinks
so; but how can the future escape inevitability when differential equations
describe every action?
MacKay promises to say more on this subject in chapter eight. But in the
present context, after referring to the mechanistic redefinition of guilt, love, and
such words, he writes, “note that I am far from suggesting that a mechanistic
description of this sort is necessarily untrue” (19). This hardly qualifies as a
rejection of mechanism and inevitability. It sounds more like an assertion than a
rejection.
A further preliminary detail, though one that leads directly to something
fundamental, comes in the sentence, “Finally, if we can establish without
obscurantism the fact that man is truly free, then we must ask the question, ‘Free
for what?’” Freedom, of course, is MacKay ’s more fundamental problem; but
here he asks the wrong question. No doubt there is a place to ask, “Free for what?”
Birds are free to migrate. A grain of wheat is free to grow – if planted. All this
Spinoza said or implied long ago. But however proper, this is a subsidiary
question. The main question is, Free from what?

Freedom
It is hard to restrict criticism to subsidiary details when the question of freedom
keeps poking its nose in at every opportunity. Hence it may be permitted to say a
little about freedom even at this point.
Among the numerous flaws in Dr. MacKay ’s book there is a gap, one might
say a chasm or a void, that runs through it from the beginning on to the last two
pages. The author seems anxious to show that his view does not destroy human
freedom. But he nowhere defines freedom explicitly. He leaves his readers
without a clear idea of what he has in mind. This is a serious omission because in
the history of philosophy and theology distinctly different meanings have been
attached to the word. For example, Hegel had a very clear conception of what he
meant; other people, both politicians and theologians, explicitly reject Hegel’s
view. One would like to know whether Dr. MacKay means what Hegel meant or
whether perhaps he means what Epicurus, Arminius, or Patrick Henry meant.
Discussing universal history Hegel asserts that in the ancient nations only one
person was free; in Greece and Rome some were free; but in the ideal state all
men, man as man, will be free. The final cause of the world at large is the
consciousness of its own freedom. But the term freedom, say s Hegel, is indefinite
and ambiguous, liable to an infinity of misunderstandings. The essential nature of
freedom involves absolute necessity. The nature of God’s will, that is, his nature
himself, is the Idea of Freedom.3 And to summarize later pages, freedom is the
condition of each man who performs his specific function in a totalitarian
monarchy .
It is fairly clear that Dr. MacKay is not talking about that sense of the term
freedom; but what sense he is talking about is not clear. The hints that he gives
here and there as to what his meaning might be will be noted as we proceed. He
ought to have given his definition at its first mention.

Science
 It is worth a parenthetical paragraph to point out MacKay ’s unfortunate views
on the history of science and philosophy.They are indicative of his untenable
empiricism. “The modern scientific approach…was not so much an invention as
a discovery” [his italics]. Contrasted with this modern view is “Plato’s disregard
for the material world” (23-24). MacKay has some reason for disliking Plato, for
Plato held that science is alway s tentative, whereas a discovery is a discovery of
unchangeable truth. But in his dislike for Plato MacKay shows his historical
ignorance. Far from disregarding the material world, Plato taught that matter was
one of three eternal and independent principles. He observed the planets and
constructed at least two orreries. He calculated the relative distances between
Earth and the planets. Admittedly his calculations were far off our modern
calculations, but they refute the charge that he disregarded the material world.
These calculations were based on the assumption that the distances were
proportional to the distances between the musical notes of the scale; and here
again, this time with an accuracy that modern scientists must admire, he defined
a whole tone and with it produced the eight-note scale. Furthermore, he had
theories about the construction of the phy sical elements, plus an amount of
phy siology. In his illustration of the Cave, he admonishes philosophers to return to
the darkness of this world, understanding it better after their ascent to the Ideas.
Any one who has ever read Plato knows quite well that Plato did not “disregard”
the material world. In Sy racuse he even risked his life for his political ideas.
This misreading, or, better, this misrepresentation – for there was no reading –
of the history of science is used to lend a certain amount of plausibility to
MacKay ’s argument that it does not deserve. The same page, in fact the same
sentence, refers to “the scholastic preference for arguing in an armchair from
first principles.” In a sense this accusation is true; nevertheless the later
Scholastics were empiricists – their fault was that they depended on Aristotle’s
observations and the theories he based on his empirical material. This is the same
mistake most nineteenth century scientists made: They accepted Newton’s
observations (most of them) and the theoretical formulations based on them.
Ernst Mach, Max Planck, and others had to destroy the nineteenth-century
sy nthesis. But as for “armchair” science, Einstein did his famous work in an
armchair. We now await the genius of the twenty -first century to put our present
armchair in the attic. Science is alway s invention, never discovery .
Someone may wish to reply that MacKay explicitly recognizes the
tentativeness of science (27). Hy potheses are not proved; they merely escape
disproof (28). But I doubt that he considers mechanism as a merely tentative
hy pothesis. The situation is confused. On the one hand he denies that a scientific
law is a commandment issued by God, but it is rather our description of the
pattern God normally follows (32). Now, this implies that God somehow
“follows” laws he did not himself establish. He follows them, but only normally.
This word requires exceptions to the equations of phy sics. For example, nearly
alway s the product of the distance and force on one side of a fulcrum equals the
other product. But sometimes it does not. This is of course a rejection of
mechanism. Therefore the laws of phy sics are false because laws of phy sics
according to modern theory have no exceptions. The present writer happens to
hold that the laws of phy sics are indeed false, that is, they do not describe natural
phenomena. But while MacKay seems to agree on this page, as we have seen, he
has insisted that these laws are not inventions, but discoveries. More specifically
phy sicists of this ty pe claim that they have discovered that these laws have no
exceptions.
MacKay ’s main argument seems to require an unbroken mechanism. His main
illustration of the brain-mind is that of an electric sign. The circuits are fixed
mechanically. But by a cross-classification there is an advertisement which the
circuits do not (explicitly ) describe. More will be said of this. At the moment,
however, his acceptance of the mechanical ideal, and the notion that science is
discovery, seem to be indicated by the relation he draws between Newton’s law
of gravitation and Einstein’s relativity. His words are, “if an hy pothesis has run
the gauntlet for a reasonable length of time, then any thing that replaces it is likely
to include it as a special case – in the way Einstein’s theory of gravitation includes
Newton’s.” (28).
To this I reply, first, Newton’s formula is not a special case of Einstein’s. It is
mathematically impossible to deduce Newton’s equation for the addition of
velocities from Einstein’s equation. MacKay ’s willingness to use poor
mathematics to defend the truth of Newtonianism is evidence of his acceptance
of the mechanistic philosophy .
This now brings us to the illustration of the electric sign. The scientist, he say s
(34) would like to describe the world as it is. Since the scientist himself is a part of
the world, he would like to describe himself too. But then how can he maintain
scientific detachment? This, MacKay considers “something of a paradox.” To
solve it he resorts to a device reminiscent of the medieval theory of a two-fold
truth:
Scientific knowledge is knowledge from the outside – a spectator’s
knowledge. The scientist does not – or at least has no scientific reason to –
 deny that there are whole worlds of knowledge of a different sort to be
gained by allowing oneself to get personally involved – in relationships
between people or in artistic or religious commitment for example – so long
as we distinguish it from scientific knowledge [35].

One regrets that MacKay paid no attention to what he called “something of a

paradox.” It might have shaken his confidence in “scientific detachment.” Even
among non-Christians there are practicing scientists who base their theories on
artistic, religious, or moral foundations. And surely this is the Calvinistic view of
science. But let us return to the idea of a two-fold truth.
MacKay holds that there is no scientific reason to deny whole worlds of
knowledge of a different sort. He should have given his reasons, for many
scientists disagree. Karl Pearson said,
The goal of science is clear – it is nothing short of a complete
interpretation of the universe. Science does much more than demand that it
shall be left in undisturbed possession of what the theologian and
metaphy sician please to call its legitimate field. It claims that the whole
range of phenomena, mental as well as phy sical – the entire universe – is its
field. It asserts that the scientific method is the sole gateway to the whole
region of knowledge.4

One could also quote the later authors A.J. Carlson, Hans Reichenbach, and
Ernest Nagel. Can MacKay answer these scientists? There is no answer in The
Clock-Work Image. In particular, the Behaviorists, whom he wishes to follow, and
all those discussed in the earlier part of this monograph deny his assertion.
Philosopher John Dewey very vigorously denied it.5 It is clear therefore that
MacKay has a different view of what science is. Or, perhaps, he oscillates
between two views. Regardless of science, however, there are absolute reasons
for rejecting every theory of two-fold truth. There are indeed different areas of
truth. One may speak of botanical truth or astronomical truth. Within any single
science there are a thousand objects to be known. But an epistemology must
justify all truth on the basis of a single sy stem under pain of suicidal
schizophrenia. On this point the exponents of Unified Science are correct – there
is just one “sort” of truth, though it is not what Unified Science has.

The Mind Electric

 MacKay now illustrates his two sorts of truth by the illustration of the electric
sign; and the illustration depends on the principle of cross- classification. First, “no
part of this world of observable events is outside the boundary of scientific study ”
(36). Hence, contrary to the implications of page 32, mechanical law describes
or determines all motions without exception. Even human action is mechanical,
subject to the laws of phy sics and chemistry. This is the language of Karl
Pearson. The electric sign in Picadilly Circus is completely described by its
circuits, “so complete[ly ] that we understand just why and how [my italics] each
lamp is flashing” (37).
Actually, however, this is not the case. MacKay has sufficiently described the
circuits; that is, he indicates that the arrangements of the wires can be set down on
paper. But he nowhere indicates how he understands the why. Nor has he
explained any kind of connection between the two. This is a rather serious
omission.
“Now suppose,” MacKay continues,
that some argumentative person complains that this painstaking description is
still incomplete, on the ground that it has failed to mention the
advertisement…. Well, in a sense, of course, he is right. There are words on
the board and the electrician indeed has not mentioned them. But does this
mean…that there were some parts of the board that were “outside his
boundaries”? Of course not.

Note again the presupposition of inviolable mechanism. “The electrician…has in

one sense accounted for every object and event on the board…. What he has not
accounted for is the thing as a whole.” This is essentially Singer’s theory of
average common result, and one must note that the actual circuit determines
what words appear. “To me this is a helpful picture of the kind of connection
there is between the scientific description of the universe and the Christian
description” (38).
Though the eminent gentleman thinks his illustration helpful, he has neglected to
show that mechanism and Behaviorism can produce any intellectual meaning at
all. How can he develop mental or spiritual reality out of electric circuits? His
illustration presupposes a rational engineer who, outside the electric circuits,
planned and uses them to convey significance. But Behaviorism allows no one to
be outside. Now, MacKay ’s view would not be so thoroughly Antichristian if the
engineer is regarded as the soul of man. Man has nerves, feet, organs, and the
soul directs their actions. Has MacKay undermined Behaviorism by smuggling in
this engineer? No, I do not think so. This would be such an inconsistency that it is
hard to believe that it is the correct interpretation. There is another way of taking
the illustration, and it seems to be what MacKay intended.
Although one may be inclined to take the electrician himself as the figurative
representative of the soul or mind of man, MacKay might reply that man has no
soul and that the electrician represents God, who made men like electric circuits.
The sign itself is totally soulless and totally mechanistic. If this is the case, we
may note that the sign itself, that is, the human person, has no voice or decision in
what the sign advertises. Then also we may ask how one electric sign can convey
its message to another electric sign across the street. Electric circuits have no
understanding. It takes intelligence to read signs. How can the Bovril sign get its
message across to the Schwepps sign? MacKay does not clearly answer this
question. In fact, I would say he does not answer it at all.
Furthermore, the electric sign cannot provide the freedom MacKay wishes to
base on it. To modify this statement, one must express doubts as to what sort of
freedom MacKay has in mind. He surely cannot defend freedom from
mechanistic law. We may have to conclude that he satisfactorily arrives at
Spinozistic freedom but not at Christian freedom.
He begins his defense of freedom with a chapter on “Nothing Buttery ” and
reductionism. Once again he asserts that mechanism is inviolable: “No advertiser
in his senses would imagine that he must deny the completeness of the
electrician’s account in order to defend the real presence of his message” (44).
We ask, Is this “real presence” Romish or Reformed? Of course the advertiser
does not deny the completeness of the electrician’s account of the circuits; but an
ordinary advertiser would deny that this account explains the virtues of his
product. It was the advertiser, not the electrician, who first wrote out the message.
And this writing took thought, not electric circuits. But in Behaviorism the thinking
of the advertiser and all the moral choices of human beings are phy sical motions
in accord with the equations of phy sics. To disguise this, MacKay states, “The
pattern of lamp flashes could not have been the same, if the moral choices had
been different.” Of course they could not have been different, for in Behaviorism
the flashes are themselves the moral choices. There is no soul, there are only
circuits. For Behaviorism the circuits not only make the message, they are the
message. The quoted sentence therefore is misleading. It is Behavioristically true,
for the flashes and the choices are the same thing; but the language suggests to the
Christian, who does not automatically think in Behavioristic terms, that the moral
choices determine the construction of the circuits.
 Accordingly, MacKay ’s sentence does not help his defense of freedom. Since
for him phy sical laws are discoveries, not inventions, since they are without
exceptions, they could not be regarded as possibly different. Hence, given the
circuit, the message could not be otherwise than it is. No moral choice can alter
the mechanism that has produced it. MacKay ’s moral choices are mechanically
necessitated.

God and Creation

It is at about this stage that MacKay begins to discuss the relation between the
world and God. His view of creation is not clear:“Chance in the sense of chaos is
indeed recognized (Genesis 1:2), but only as something banished from the world
by God’s creative word” (49). This seems to say that there was a phy sical world
of chaos before God created the cosmos. This is similar to the work of Plato’s
demiurge. Yet two pages later he say s, “God has conceived and made our world
out of nothing.” Then later he say s, “Creation…is not just a single datable event
which happened at a particular time; it is rather a continuing relationship of
dependence between us and God” (69). How does this fit in with “Let there be
light, and there was light”? How also does a continuing relationship between God
and man fit in with “And on the seventh day God ended his work…and rested…
from all his work which he had made”? Has not MacKay again contradicted
himself? That the world is now upheld by the power of God is undeniable; but
creation out of nothing must be instantaneous. It must therefore have a date,
though we have no idea what the date is.
In the chapter on “Creation, law and miracle” MacKay defends God’s control
of all events. He does this to avoid the defense of theism that depends on a few
odd events that science cannot as y et explain. “If God is active in any part of the
phy sical world, he is in all. If the divine activity means any thing, then all the
events of what we call the phy sical world are dependent on that activity ” (57).
Well and good; it deserves emphasis. But it is irrelevant to the present issue. There
are two difficulties here. First, why cannot God have created souls as well as
bodies? Why cannot there be minds as well as circuits? Does not Christianity
assert the existence of spirits? God himself is a spirit and has not a body like men.
How can Behaviorism accommodate God at all? Then, second, does God control
all events by mechanical laws? The present writer wholeheartedly accepts divine
teleological determinism. As the Shorter Catechism say s, “God’s works of
providence are, his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all
his creatures and all their actions.” But it does not follow that all his creatures are
totally corporeal and mechanical. It is mechanism that this monograph opposes,
not divine sovereignty. MacKay insists on Behavioristic mechanism. Only two
pages later he argues that the divine artist creates “a chain-mesh which
scientifically -minded observers can discern in the pattern of events.” They
discover mathematical laws. “In other words, any event in the created scene
should be ‘causally explicable’ in terms of earlier events” (59). The idea of
discovery, which guarantees that the processes of nature are mechanical, recurs
at the bottom of the following page also.
Yet MacKay oscillates. He uses the phrase “normally according to the [divine]
pattern of today ” (63). This suggests exceptions to the causal chain-mesh that
binds all events. Then again, “The fears expressed by some believers that to
accept the possibility of miracle in the biblical sense would make nonsense of the
whole scientific enterprise, are fundamentally groundless” (65). Now, it is not
clear what MacKay thinks the Biblical concept of miracle is; I should suppose that
unbelievers consider it to be an exception to the normal laws; and this indeed
makes nonsense of the whole scientific enterprise as defined by naturalism and
Behaviorism. A chain-mesh that includes every event has no missing links.
Though MacKay throws such exceptional crumbs to believers, his main
concept is mechanistic. He speaks of the “mechanisms of the brain” (67), and of
“what science has achieved so far in its mechanistic understanding of man.” He
claims, and I believe falsely, that these achievements “in principle leave
untouched the validity of what the Bible has to say about him.” I shall substantiate
my charge of falsity in a concluding section. Here I am only supporting my
contention that MacKay is basically a mechanist. Just below the previous
quotation he writes, “By ‘the scientific enterprise’ I want to denote all attempts to
understand man as a phenomenon in causal terms: in terms of phy sical
chemistry at one level, phy siology at another….” This of course is what Skinner
depends on to manipulate all of us to favor his political and social totalitarianism.
The basic mechanism appears again in MacKay ’s interpretation of a Biblical
passage:

The early passages in the Bible say that “man became a living soul.”…A
living soul…is something we become…. There are no grounds for the notion
that the Bible teaches that man’s body is like a kind of chariot, or a motor car
with controls which must be “open ended” for something non-phy sical to
influence them. If we start with that sort of presupposition I think we get into
trouble not only with mechanistic phy siology, but also with Scripture itself
[70].
 In the first place, it is clear that MacKay does not want to get into trouble with
mechanistic phy siology. For him man is a machine. Presumably he does not
want to get into trouble with Scripture; but here he fails. If we ignore the rather
unfortunate reference to chariots and motor cars, we may note that the Bible
teaches the precise opposite of MacKay ’s theory. The Bible very explicitly say s
that God fashioned man’s body out of the earth. He formed a clay statue, so to
speak. Then God breathed his spirit into the clay statue, and the combination of
clay and spirit is called soul. MacKay picks up the Hebrew word nephesh, but he
totally ignores the Hebrew word ruach. As he say s, nephesh can perhaps be
translated organism, or perhaps “mind-body.” But he say s nothing about the mind
alone. The Bible very definitely say s that the mind or spirit was introduced into
the body after the body had been sculpted out of earth. God had formed the
body ’s nostrils, and lungs, into which he breathed his spirit, and by God’s breath
man became a mind-body. It is the last ditch stand of a Behaviorist who wants to
be a Christian to ignore this part of a passage he quotes.
After a few more pages on “nothing-buttery,” MacKay returns to his
computer or electric sign. His concluding paragraph begins, “If, then, our human
personality is related to our bodies in any thing like the way that a message or
computer program is related to its embodiment, it is clear that brain science has
absolutely nothing to say against the possibility of eternal life” (73).
There is a further point in his concluding paragraph that we should not ignore;
but let us consider this much now. In contradiction to his statement that
Behavioristic brain science has nothing to say, or imply, about eternal life, one
may point out that if the electric signboard is destroy ed by some catastrophe, no
message remains. At death the message passes out of existence; no life is left at
all. To avoid this refutation MacKay offers an allegedly Scriptural explanation,
but it is an explanation in which the most pointed Scriptural material is passed
over in silence.

Freedom and Responsiblity

We must now descend into the laby rinths of freedom. Is there a place for
freedom and responsibility if thinking is a phy sico-chemical function of the brain?
MacKay does not really define freedom. In a certain place he describes one
characteristic of freedom, but it is hardly a formal definition. In any case that
place will be considered. What comes closer to being a definition is paragraph 14
on page 110:
 14…. What I want to point out is that by calling a man “free” we might
mean one of two quite different things: (a) We might mean that his action
was unpredictable by anyone. This I would call the freedom of caprice; or
(b) we may mean that the outcome of his decision is up to him, in the sense
that unless he makes the decision it will not be made, that he is in a position to
make it, and that no fully -determinate specification of the outcome already
exists, which he would be correct to accept as inevitable, and would be
unable to falsify , if only he knew it [110].

To this MacKay adds a reply to a possible objector:

15. “Does not y our theory contradict the Bible’s teaching that God alway s
knows how people will respond to his communications to them?” – Nothing in
what I have said denies that God-our-creator knows, and is sovereign over,
every detail of our past, present, and future. What I do argue is that this
divine foreknowledge is not something that we could be correct to believe if
only we knew it – since for us (unlike God) this would involve a self-
contradiction.

This fourteenth paragraph calls for analy sis. In meaning (b) the phrase “unless
he makes the decision it will not be made” is a superfluous tautology. That the
man is in a position to make it is equally such. The important point is that God has
no omniscience, no knowledge of a future event, that the man would be correct to
accept as inevitable. But if God knows an event is inevitable, then ipso facto it
would be correct for any man to believe it. How can a belief that is true be
incorrect when a man believes it? Is a correct belief ever a false or incorrect
belief? Perhaps MacKay means that it would be improper or sinful for this man
to believe the truth. But how can believing the truth be sinful? Believing
unrevealed truths may be impossible, or possible only by accident, but this does
not seem to advance MacKay ’s argument.
It follows, presumably, that the final phrase of the definition is the important
one: “and would be unable to falsify, if only he knew it.” The condensed
definition for freedom therefore becomes, God can have no foreknowledge that a
man would be unable to falsify, if only he knew it. This means that a man is free
only if he could falsify God’s knowledge by knowing it. That is to say, a man, to
be free, must be able to avoid the inevitable by knowing that it is inevitable. Is not
this nonsense? At any rate, in a moment we shall consider MacKay ’s earlier
explanation.
 Here, however, paragraph 15 claims that man’s hy pothetical knowledge of an
inevitable event is a self-contradiction. Paragraph 16 cites an opponent’s reply
that Christ knew his death to be inevitable: You destroy this temple and in three
day s I shall raise it again. But MacKay say s, “Christ indeed recognized…the will
of the Father for him…but this did not mean that…he would have been correct to
regard the outcome as already fixed and inevitable.” This means that Christ did
not know that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world, that he did not
consciously come to give his life a ransom for many, and that he could have
prevented the crucifixion, had he known it was inevitable.
MacKay argues that Christ could not have known the prophecy, for knowing it
would have involved a self-contradiction. The explanation of this remarkable
situation comes in an earlier section (78-87). The account is very confusing.6
MacKay begins by stating an objection: “If our brains were as mechanical as
cash registers, then surely before we made any choice the outcome would be
already fixed and inevitable, if only we knew it?… I believe that it contains a
logical fallacy .”
Two points at first attract one’s attention. Since MacKay say s that the argument
is a fallacy, he presumably means that he accepts the premises and denies only
the inference. Therefore this documents his position that thinking is a mechanical
motion of the brain. Second, the phrase, “If we only knew it,” does not seem to
fit. If our brains were mechanical, and if the motions of our brains were thinking,
the resulting choice would be inevitable, whether we knew it or not. Why he
ended the sentence with a question mark is unclear. But we shall see a most
peculiar twist, for MacKay will base his argument for freedom on the difference
between knowing and not knowing the coming event. By this he hopes to produce
a self-contradiction in the notion of inevitablility .
Accordingly he begins by considering the possibility that someone (God)
“could successfully predict secretly the outcome of a decision we have not y et
made.” It is strange that he speaks of the outcome of a decision. The important
thing is the decision itself. In the matter of Behaviorism the interest centers on
thinking or mental action, not on phy sical motions. Of course Behaviorists deny
the distinction, and we may well admit that the inevitability of the phy sical
motions that result from mental decisions is germane and important. At any rate,
MacKay asks, “Would this predictive knowledge of his [God’s omniscience]
prove that the outcome was all along inevitable for us, if only we had known it?”
Note again: “if only we had known it.” Note again also that this is irrelevant. A
predestined act or decision is inevitable whether we know or do not know what the
action is ahead of time.
“Oddly enough, it would not,” MacKay oddly continues. God’s prediction, if
we did not know what the prediction was, would have been “inevitable from the
standpoint of the detached observer. But before he could claim that it was
inevitable for y ou, he would have to show that this is also the outcome y ou would
have been correct to accept as inevitable, if only y ou had known it” (79).
Here MacKay has begun to shift his meaning of inevitability. In fact he is no
longer talking about inevitability. He is talking about two persons, God and man,
knowing or not knowing that an event is inevitable. This completely misses the
force of the objection. One must note the ambiguity of the word “for.” MacKay
wants to say that if an event is not inevitable for someone, the event is not
inevitable. Here to be inevitable or avoidable for someone simply means that the
person knows or does not know. In the absolute sense it was inevitable for Judas,
and for every body, that Judas would betray Christ. But a y ear before the event
Judas did not know it was inevitable. He probably had not formed any such plan
at that time. Now, if one say that therefore the event was not inevitable for Judas,
one means nothing else than that Judas did not know what he was going to do. But
this is only a matter of Judas’ mind. It has nothing to do with inevitability.
Whether Judas knew it or not, it was still inevitable. The word for is simply
obfuscation. It had better be dropped. An event is inevitable or not. Only in one
peculiar circumstance does it make any difference who knows it or who does not
know it.
MacKay ’s argument now becomes even more confused, if that were possible.
He wishes to prove that “y our immediate future is not inevitable for y ou.” The
half page that precedes this conclusion is as follows:
The basic point is that (according to mechanistic brain theory itself) what
y ou believe, accept as inevitable, etc., is represented in some precise sense
by the state of y our brain. Thus no completely detailed description of the
present or immediately future state of y our brain could be equally adequate
whether or not y ou believe it. If it were accurate before y ou believed it, then
when y ou believed it y our brain-state must change in some respect, so that
the description must be out of date and y ou would be in error to believe it.
In short, the present and immediately future state of y our brain, however
predictable by a detached observer, has no completely determinate
specification that you would be unconditionally correct to accept, and in
error to reject, if only y ou knew it. In that sense, y our immediate future is
not inevitable for y ou. To put it otherwise, no completely detailed
 specification of y our immediate future can exist, upon which both y ou and
all observers would be correct to agree, until after the event. The observer’s
data, even if he shared them with y ou afterward, would only confirm this
peculiar logical fact about the situation at the time y ou made y our choice,
the fact that it was “logically indeterminate” [79].

Perhaps an example from the kitchen may clarify this confused argument.
God has predestined me to burn my hand as I fry an egg. The natural sequence
of events, or combination of causes, is that I take an egg out of the refrigerator,
put it in the pan, and turn on the gas or electricity. These three conditions, which
we may designate sy mbolically as (p, q, r), are not the total cause. In addition
there is the condition (k), namely, that I do not know the stove has become
defective and that there will be a flash when I turn it on. Of course, if I knew this,
the usual thing would be not to turn on the stove. Then the inevitable event, which
God foreordained, would not take place. There are several things wrong with
MacKay ’s construction at this point.
First, in the ordinary course of events (k, p, q, r) must result in my burning my
hand. But if (k) is replaced with (k') the result does not occur. However, this does
not abolish inevitability. It abolishes the inevitability that I burn my hand; but it
establishes the inevitability that I do not burn my hand. Naturally two different
sets of causes do not produce the same result. When ignorance is one of the
factors, it is no surprise that knowledge will alter the result. But it must be
remembered that God had not only determined that I burn my hand, but also that
ignorance would be a necessary contributing factor.
Second, underly ing this kitchen example is not only the uselessness of the
phrase “inevitable for me,” but also the fact that the contradiction MacKay
attributes to his critics applies actually to himself. A logical analy sis of his
argument on page 110 and earlier shows it to be a form of fallacy that makes
logic textbooks interesting. Two examples will more than suffice.
A silly argument against God’s omnipotence lies in the question, Can God
create a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it? If he cannot create this stone, his
power is limited, for here is something he has not the power to do. But if he can
create this stone, and cannot lift it, he is not omnipotent, for here is something he
cannot do. Therefore God is not omnipotent. This is similar to Bertrand Russell’s
famous barber, who shaves all those and only those who do not shave themselves.
The question then is, Does the barber shave himself? If he does not shave himself,
he must shave himself, for he shaves all those who do not shave themselves. On
the other hand, if the barber does shave himself, he cannot shave himself, for he
shaves only those who do not shave themselves. In both examples, the stone and
the barber, the premises contradict one another. Since the positing of a
contradiction makes nonsense, neither of these examples sets any problem. They
state a logically impossible situation and there is no problem to solve.
This is also the case with MacKay ’s argument. His premises are incompatible.
No situation can combine God’s predetermining my ignorance, my having the
knowledge God refused to give me, my burning my hand, and my not burning
my hand. In other cases, where God does not use ignorance as a condition,
knowledge and ignorance have no bearing on inevitability .
Coming closer to Scripture, a Christian knows by revelation that Christ will
return; in the absence of revelation he does not know the date. But the event of the
return and the precise time are equally inevitable. Only if God had made our
ignorance a determining cause of the date, could our knowledge of the date make
the date false. But since God predetermined our ignorance, the supposition that
we might know the date is contrary both to fact and to Scripture.
There is a Scriptural example of this. God had determined to destroy Absalom
by making him believe false advice. Had he believed Ahithophel instead of
believing Hushai, presumably he would have destroy ed David. But believing
Ahithophel was not a possible condition, “for the Lord had determined to defeat
the good counsel of Ahithophel, to the intent that the Lord might bring evil upon
Absalom” (2 Samuel 17:14).

Scripture versus Behaviorism

The preceding arguments claim to expose Dr. MacKay ’s fallacies. What now
follows claims that Scripture teaches the falsity of Behaviorism.
Scripture asserts the existence of God, angels, Satan, and demons. None of
these has a body. None has brains. Nothing about them can be described by
mathematical laws. Yet they all think. Of course secular Behaviorists do not
believe in God or demons. This is now immaterial (!) because the present
argument aims only to show that Christianity and Behaviorism cannot be
harmonized. May be a Christian (?) Behaviorist would claim that he has been
thinking only of human beings. But if he has been thinking of thinking, his theory
of thinking should apply to all beings who think. Obviously it does not.
Without any diminution of the conclusive force of this consideration, there are
other Scriptural themes that completely refute Behaviorism. One bears repetition,
namely , in Genesis God fashioned a phy sical body which could not think, then he
breathed his spirit into the clay, and the combination made a living man. But
before receiving the spirit the phy sical brain could not think.
There are also two other themes in Scripture that show Behaviorism to be
incompatible with Christianity. Presumably all Christians remember the second
and chronologically later event; the prior event is not so prominent in our minds.
Yet every Christian remembers that Moses was not permitted to enter the
promised land because of a sin he had committed. “He went up from the plains
of Moab…to the top of Pisgah…. So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in
the land of Moab…and he [the Lord] buried him…but no man knows of his
sepulchre unto this day ” (Deuteronomy 34:1-6). In the course of a century or so
his brain decomposed, and after fifteen centuries or thereabouts there could have
been very little left of his body. Nevertheless, Moses kept on thinking without
brains or body, for on the Mount of Transfiguration Moses held a theological
conversation concerning the doctrine of the atonement with a refulgent Jesus,
who may not have been using his brains either (Luke 9:29-31).
The second example is that of Jesus and the thief on the cross. Jesus said,
“Today y ou shall be with me in Paradise.” By sunset the bodies of Jesus and the
thief had been buried. They were dead. Their brains were inoperative. Yet the
two persons were enjoy ing Paradise. No doubt the thief was praising God for his
unanticipated salvation. That is to say, he was thinking, but not with his
decomposing brains. Thinking is not a function of brains.
Now, finally, like the thief on the cross and like Moses, some of our friends
have died; we too shall die, unless Christ returns within a y ear or two; then being
dead, our brains and body being buried, we also shall engage in theological
discussions with Christ and those who preceded us there. Theology does not
require brains; it requires a mind or spirit; and Behaviorism is a denial of the
Gospel.

1. Donald M. MacKay , The Clock Work Image, 1974.

2. To include even closely related side issues in this monograph would extend it
immeasurably, but that there are such may be indicated by a reference to Otto
Neurath and Logical Positivism. In his "Protocol Sentences" (Logical Positivism,
edited by A. J. Ay er, 1932, 199) Neurath believes he can achieve a phy sicalistic
language free from metaphy sics, though it can be used only for parts of the
special sciences. He seems disappointed that "there is no way of taking
conclusively established pure protocol sentences as the starting point of the
sciences." We can eliminate metaphy sics, but vague linguistic conglomerations
alway s remain. On the contrary, it is my opinion that metaphy sics and theology
can never be eliminated. It would be interesting to know to what extent MacKay
has been influenced by Logical Positivism.
3. Partially verbatim; Selections by Loewenberg, 362-363.
4. Grammar of Science, 1911, 14, 24.
5. The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God and Dewey.
6. See William Hasker, "MacKay on Being a Responsible Mechanism"; and
Hasker, "Reply to Donald MacKay ," between which is MacKay 's rejoinder; all in
Christian Scholars Review, VIII, 2, 1978.
 Table of Contents
Contents
1. John B. Watson
2. Edgar A. Singer, Jr.
3. Gilbert Ry le
4. B. F. Skinner
5. Philosophic Criticism
6. Donald M. MacKay