I will focus on the theories of B. F. Skinner, since his “Radical Behaviorism” is the about the purest Behaviorist perspective around, and also since he is one of the few authors whose work I own that support its tenets. Therefore, when I refer to Behaviorism or Behaviorists from here on, it means of the

“Radical Behaviorist” stance. Working upon the Stimulus-Response theory as proposed by Pavlov, Behaviorism applies this method of experimentation and direct observation of human response to gain information. It proposes that all human activity is based upon response from environmental stimuli. The primary argument for rejecting the introspective methods is simply that they cannot be

Putnam attacked Behaviorism first using a linguistic approach, hinging upon the notion that language and thought are entirely translatable into each other, but that talk about mental states is not translatable into “overt behavior talk”. The major portion of her paper focuses on the pain example. She proposes the “super-spartan” argument: that a hypothetical group of people has suppressed all pain behavior, but that still feels pain. This example demonstrates the problems with another portion of Behaviorism of which I was skeptical: the fact that to gain information about the psyche (I use this term from a layman’s perspective, since I do not know its precise philosophical definition) behavior must be present and be able to be observed. My position was that it would be nearly impossible to set up a controlled environment that would be strict enough to monitor behavior in the fashion needed to draw inferences such as those drawn in the hypothetical controlled environments of Skinners arguments. Putnam’s super-spartans show that Behaviorism falls short when no behavior is directly observable. According to behaviorist methods, we have no way of gaining information about pain if that behavior is never expressed. All behaviorist responses stemming from this hypothetical situation appear to be nit-picking.

The major objection which Putnam deals with is that the super-spartan’s pain behavior exists, it manifested if only as the verbal description one would ascribe to the feeling of pain (or what they endure when their

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