Philosophy 4610

Lecture Notes
February 7, 2006
Putnam: Brains and Behavior
Physicalist Approaches. Last week, we began considering the approach of logical
behaviorism. Logical behaviorism holds that all mental talk is really talk about the
behavior of bodies. Because it translates all talk about the mental into talk about the
behavior of bodies behavior that happens in the physical world, and is at least in
principle explainable in physical terms logical behaviorism is an example of
physicalism. Physicalism holds that all objects, events, and processes are ultimately
physical. This week and next, well consider two more physicalist positions: the Identity
Theory and Functionalism. Both the Identity Theory and Functionalism are attempts to
say how the mind how the phenomena that we think of as mental might be
explained in completely physical terms. Identity Theorists and Functionalists have
arguments against the logical behaviorists about how to explain the mind in physical
terms, but they share the basic physicalist picture. They will agree with logical
behaviorists that dualism is a bad idea, and that to understand the mind scientifically we
need to understand it in physical terms.
Is Pain just pain-behavior? Recall the basic argument of the logical behaviorist. The
logical behaviorist begins by asking herself: What does it mean to say Mr. A is in pain?
(or Mr. A is angry; Mr. A is excited, etc.) When I make the judgment that Mr. A is in
pain, I go by the observed evidence Mr. As face being contorted, his cries of agony
and make a conclusion about his actual state. According to the logical behaviorist, this is
much the same way I go about making judgments about the properties of things
throughout science: for instance, in judging that the support is firm, I go by the visual
and tactile properties I observe, and make a judgment about the unobserved properties of
the support.
If logical behaviorism is correct, then there is a translation from pain-talk into behaviortalk. I could replace statements like, He is in pain with sentences like He is crying out
in agony, etc. For the logical behaviorist, language about mental states is always
translatable, without remainder, into language about physical states of the body. It is
natural to feel that this suggestion is inadequate, that there is something inevitably lost
in translation. But it is difficult to say just what. After all, the way that we know that
someone is in pain, angry, etc. just is by the observed, behavioral signs. Theres no way
to get into someone elses mind or to get behind their behavior to find out what
theyre really thinking. So what is there to mental states, above and beyond these
physical manifestations? For the logical behaviorist, to have a pain just is to exhibit these
responses, or to be disposed to exhibit them. We can make sense of what it is to have a
pain wholly in terms of behavioral responses.

Putnam gives an argument that is designed to show that logical behaviorism is wrong.
For there is at least one kind of case in which someone could be in pain, without this
translation being possible. To see this, Putnam imagines the case of the super-spartans:
Imagine a community of super-spartans or super-stoics a community in which the
adults have the ability to successfully suppress all involuntary pain behavior. They may,
on occasion, admit that they feel pain, but always in pleasant, well-modulated voices
even if they are undergoing the agonies of the damned. They do not wince, scream,
flinch, sob, grit their teeth, clench their fists, exhibit beads of sweat, or otherwise act like
people in pain or people suppressing the unconditioned responses associated with pain.
However, they do feel pain, and they dislike it (just as we do). They even admit that it
takes a great effort of will to behave as they do. It is only that they have what they regard
as important ideological reasons for behaving as they do, and they have, through years of
training, learned to live up to their own exacting standards. (p. 49)
For the super-spartans, the usual logical behaviorist translation doesnt work. They dont
show any of the usual signs of pain, none of the usual behavior. So if logical behaviorism
were right, it would seem, we have to deny that they have pain. But clearly they do have
pain, as much as we do when we are injured or suffering.
At this point, the logical behaviorist will have a response. He will admit that the superspartans dont exhibit the normal symptoms of pain, though they are still in pain. But he
will try to handle their case, as we saw Carnap did with similar cases, by a translation
into dispositional language. Instead of saying that someone is in pain if and only if they
are exhibiting the right behavioral responses, the logical behaviorist can say that someone
is in pain if and only if they are disposed to behave in the right sort of way. That means:
if you put them in the right situation (if they werent pretending not to be in pain) they
would behave in the usual way. If they werent pretending, they would cry out, wince,
etc.
To show that this response doesnt save logical behaviorism, Putnam imagines another
case, the case of X-worlders:
In the X-world we have to deal with super-super-spartans. These have been superspartans for so long, that they have even begun to suppress talk of pain X-worlders do
not even admit to having pains. They pretend not to know either the word or the
phenomenon to which it refers (p. 50)
For the X-worlders, the dispositionalist reply doesnt work. Not only are they not
exhibiting the normal responses, but its not even true that if they were put in the right
situation, they would. In fact, theres no situation in which they would exhibit these
behaviors. They just dont do that: they are trained from birth not to. So according to the
logical behaviorist view, these people dont have pains at all.

If pains arent behaviors, what are they? The logical behaviorist thinks that pains are
identical with behaviors and dispositions to behave, because he realizes that this is how
we know about other peoples pains: through the behavioral evidence. But Putnam
argues that we can agree with this in general, without thinking that pains are behaviors or
dispositions to behave. To show this, he uses the example of a disease like polio. To
begin with, we might have identified having polio with having the symptoms of
polio: a fever, sweats, muscle pains, etc. But later on, it was discovered that there is a
virus that causes these symptoms. After this discovery, we will say that someone has
polio if, and only if, they have that virus. You can have the virus, and not have any of the
symptoms. Or, you can have many of the symptoms and not have the virus (in which
case we will now say you have a different disease):
statements about multiple sclerosis are not translatable into statements about the
symptoms of multiple sclerosis, not because disease talk is systematically ambiguous
and symptom talk is specific, but because causes are not logical constructions out of
their effects. (p. 47)
According to Putnam, then, the relationship between pain-behavior and pains might be
like the relationship between the symptoms of a disease and the disease itself. It might
not be a relationship of logical construction, but rather a relationship of normal cause
and effect. The pain causes the pain-behavior, just as the underlying virus causes the
disease-symptoms. If this is right, then even though at a certain point we talk about the
symptoms and the disease as the same thing, we have to realize that we might be able to
talk about the disease being there even if none of the normal symptoms are. We might be
able to talk about someone having pain, even if they have none of the behavioral signs.
Pains and the brain. Return to the case of the X-worlders. Remember, they dont ever
show any of the behavioral symptoms of pain, and they dont talk about pain either. But
if Putnam is right, it must make sense to say that they nevertheless are in pain. Even if
we cant tell by behavioral evidence, there must be some way to tell. Otherwise if
theres no way to tell theyre in pain, even in principle, Putnam too will agree that they
arent.
Notice that this rules out dualism as a possible approach. For the dualist, if the Xworlders dont show any of the symptoms of pain, theres actually no way to know that
they have pain at all. For the dualist, after all, we cant know what is going on in the
private, hidden, non-physical mind. The only way we an know is from the behavioral
manifestations; and if these arent there, we have to say that as far as we can possibly
tell theres no pain at all.
As a physicalist, though, Putnam does think there must be a physical way of telling if
there is a pain, even if there is no behavior that manifests it. Where would we naturally
look? It would seem natural to look in the X-worlders brains:
What is true by hypothesis is that we couldnt distinguish X-worlders from people who
really didnt know what pain is on the basis of overt behavior alone. But that still leaves

many other ways in which we might determine what is going on inside the X-worlders
in both the figurative and literal sense of inside. For example, we might examine their
brains. It is a fact that when pain impulses are received in the brain, suitable electrical
detecting instruments record a characteristic spike pattern. Let us express this briefly
(and too simply) by saying that brain spikes are one-to-one correlated with experiences of
pain. If our X-worlders belong to the human species, then we can verify that they do feel
pains, notwithstanding their claims that they dont have any idea what pain is, by
applying our electrical instruments and detecting the tell-tale brain spikes (p. 51)
In other words, if we found out the normal cause of pain in human beings, and saw this
cause in other human beings, we might well be justified in concluding that they are in
pain, even if they dont show the normal behaviors. This suggestion about brain-spikes
is, as Putnam admits, too simple. For how do we know that what explains pain normally
for us is also what explains for the X-worlders? But Putnam suggests that a hypothesis
along these lines could work. In particular, if we figure out how to translate brain states
into mental states in a comprehensive and systematic way, we might find out that mental
states just are brain states, that they just are identical with the states of the brain. Well
examine this suggestion the so-called identity theory in more detail next time.