Hard Behaviourism
Hard behaviourism is that form of behaviourism that attempts to reduce mentality to behaviour. According to this theory, to be in a particular mental state is nothing more than to behave in a certain way.
The main motivation for being a hard behaviourist is a sympathy for empiricism. Empiricism holds that all of our concepts are derived from experience; if we cannot experience something then we cannot conceive of it. Applying this idea to the philosophy of mind, the behaviourist insists that our concept of mind must be grounded in experience.
Carl Hempel, one of the better known hard behaviourists, supported his theory with an appeal to verificationism. The principle of verification holds that the meaning of a proposition is its verification conditions.
The principle of verification has an interesting consequence: statements that have no verification conditions are meaningless. This has been used to attack various views: religion is not based on empirical observation, and is therefore meaningless; morality concerns the way that things ought to be, rather than the way that they are, so cannot be confirmed by observation (which can only be of the way things are), so is meaningless. Hempel applied this to substance dualism: talk of immaterial minds or non-physical mental states cannot be confirmed through observation, and so is meaningless. To rescue our concept of mind, we must bring it back down to Earth.
The belief that it is raining is thus taken to be identical with a tendency to carry an umbrella when going outside, to collect washing from the line if any has been left there, etc, etc.
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