Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

The counter-intuitive consequences of behaviorism, reductively interpreted, are illustrated by Malcolm’s polemic against much recent work by psychologists: Thus, it is the facts, the circumstances surrounding the behavior, that give it the property of expressing recognition. This property is not due to something that goes on inside. It seems to me that if this point were understood by philosophers and psychologists, they would no longer have a motive for constructing theories and models for recognition, memory, thinking, problem solving, understanding, and other “cognitive processes.”1 If we follow out this line of thought, we can decide that the whole empirical science of psychology is based on a mistake, and that there is no middle ground for research between common-sensical explanations of behavior on the one hand and neurophysiology on the other. The notion that there is a middle ground for psychology to investigate will, in this view, be a product of Malcolm’s “myth of cognitive processes and structures”—what Ryle called “Descartes’ Myth.” Malcolm seems inclined to take the matter to this point, for example, in his description of the Chomskyan notion of an “internalized system of rules” as typical of the root mistake of the “traditional theory of Ideas,” viz.: The assumption … that in speaking a person must be guided. There must be something at hand that shows him how to speak, how to put words together grammatically and with coherent sense…. What is being explained i...

November 30, 2020. Page 214.