behaviorism

Psychology

The program, dominant in American psychology from about 1913 to the 1950s, that restricted scientific psychology to observable behavior and its relations to stimuli and reinforcement, rejecting introspectionintrospection, n.: Looking inward to observe your own thoughts and feelings. For AI, the question is whether a model can accurately report what is actually happening inside it, rather than guessing or making it up. and talk of inner mental states. John B. Watson founded it, and B. F. Skinner developed radical behaviorism around operant conditioning, whose ideas of reward and punishment fed into reinforcement learningreinforcement learning, n.: A way of teaching a computer program by trial and error: it tries actions, earns points for good results and penalties for bad ones, and gradually learns which choices pay off over time.. The cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, out of which cognitive sciencecognitive science, n.: The scientific study of how minds work — how we reason, use language, remember and see — combining psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and artificial intelligence. grew, displaced it by showing the need to posit internal representations and processes.

Philosophy

Logical or analytical behaviorism: the thesis that statements about mental states mean, or can be translated into, statements about actual and possible behavior, so that to be in pain is to be disposed to wince, cry out and seek relief. Associated with Gilbert Ryle and Carl Hempel, it was largely abandoned in favor of functionalismfunctionalism, n.: The view that minds are defined by how they work, not what they are made of: pain, for example, is whatever inner state plays pain's part, linking injury, other thoughts and behavior., because mental states seem to cause behavior and to depend on one another. Its spirit survives in debates over whether behavioral tests such as the Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out. can establish intelligence, which arguments such as BlockheadBlockhead, n.: An imagined machine that passes any conversation test by looking up prewritten replies in an unimaginably huge table. Most people judge it unintelligent, which suggests that behavior alone does not prove intelligence. and the Chinese roomChinese room, n.: A thought experiment: a person who knows no Chinese follows a rulebook to answer Chinese messages so well that outsiders think they understand. If the person doesn't understand, does a computer running a program? dispute.

Judging the model only by its answers is a kind of behaviorism, and Blockhead shows why that may not be enough.