Feelings, Moods, and Introspection Bruce Aune Mind, New Series, Vol. 72, No. 286. (Apr., 1963), pp. 187-208. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-4423%28196304%292%3A72%3A286%3C187%3AFMAI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Mind is currently published by Oxford University Press.
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111.-FEELINGS, MOODS, A N D
INTROSPECTION
AN often remarked feature of traditional empiricism is its tendency toward solipsism. Hume is generally credited with making this tendency particularly clear, and those who have followed him have found it painfully difficult to construct an inhabited universe from the disorderly fragments of their private experience. Recently, however, this egocentric bias has become the target of spirited attack, and it now appears that a new, equally troublesome bias is beginning to supplant the old one. For in place of the Humean claim that private experience is the foundation of all empirical knowledge, we now hear it argued that the entire notion of private experience is radically confused and that statements about experiences are really statements about complicated patterns of behaviour. This sort of argumentation suggests that the historic tendency toward solipsism is being replaced by a curious tendency toward logical, or philosophical, behaviourism. What I propose to do in this essay is to consider some puzzling, apparently behaviouristic features of several theses that have been fairly well established in recent discussion of the problem of Other llinds.2 These theses, which I shall not try to defend here, might be stated as follows. (1)The traditional assumption that we must make a weakly-justified ontological leap when, on the basis of a person's observed behaviour, we conclude that he is having a certain feeling or sensation is completely erroneous. The truth of the matter is rather this : the things we call " psychological states " are so intimately connected with certain patterns of observable behaviour that the occurrence of the latter provide us with criteria which are logically adequate for determining the presence of the former. (2) In order to have a complete grasp of the concept of a headache, for example, a person must normally be able to tell both when he has a headache and when someone else has one. (3) Sentential functions like " x has a This essay was produced with the aid of a fellowship in the Minnesota Centre for Philosophy of Science. Special thanks are due t o Professors H. Feigl, TV. Sellars, and C. Rollins for their very helpful comments. See the important discussion in JTTittgenstein,§S 256 f ; Strawson, Ind., Chap. I V ; Malcolm, and Sellars. (These references are given in full a t the end of this essay.) 13 187
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headache " and " x is depressed " do not change in meaning when different names, pronouns, and descriptive phrases are used in I n general the problematic features of these place of " x theses concern: the exact character of the relation that holds between various psychological states and the behaviour that serves as criteria for them ; the d s c u l t y of making room for the notion of introspection and of accounting for the special status that is given to a man's reports about his current feelings ; and, finally, the many apparent exceptions to (3) as it is stated above.
".
In his book Irzdividuals P. P. Strawson gives a careful defence of (3) : he says, for example, that ascribing phrases of the form
