The Explanation of Behaviour

Charles Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000389647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

The Explanation of Behaviour was the first book written by the renowned philosopher Charles Taylor. A vitally important work of philosophical anthropology, it is a devastating criticism of the theory of behaviourism, a powerful explanatory approach in psychology and philosophy when Taylor's book was first published. However, Taylor has far more to offer than a simple critique of behaviourism. He argues that in order to properly understand human beings, we must grasp that they are embodied, minded creatures with purposes, plans and goals, something entirely lacking in reductionist, scientific explanations of human behaviour.

Taylor's book is also prescient in according a central place to non-human animals, which like human beings are subject to needs, desires and emotions. However, because human beings have the unique ability to interpret and reflect on their own actions and purposes and declare them to others, Taylor argues that human experience differs to that of other animals. Furthermore, the fact that human beings are often directed by their purposes has a fundamental bearing on how we understand the social and moral world.

Taylor's classic work is essential reading for those in philosophy and psychology as well as related areas such as sociology and religion.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author and a new Foreword by Alva Noë, setting the book in philosophical and historical context.

PART 1

Explanation by Purpose

1

Purpose and Teleology

It is often said that human behaviour, or for that matter the behaviour of animals or even living organisms in general, is in some way fundamentally different from the processes in nature which are studied by the natural sciences. This opposition is variously expressed. It is sometimes said that the behaviour of human beings and animals shows a purposiveness which is not found elsewhere in nature, or that it has an intrinsic ‘meaning’ which natural processes do not. Or it is said that the behaviour of animate organisms exhibits an order which cannot be accounted for by the ‘blind accident’ of processes in nature. Or again, to draw the circle somewhat narrower, it is said of human beings and some animals that they are conscious of and direct their behaviour in a way which finds no analogue in inanimate nature, or that, specifically in an account of human affairs, concepts like ‘significance’ and ‘value’ play a uniquely important part which is denied them in natural science.

Against this view stands the opinion of many others, in particular of many students of the sciences of human behaviour, that there is no difference in principle between the behaviour of animate organisms and any other processes in nature, that the former can be accounted for in the same way as the latter, by laws relating physical events, and that the introduction of such notions as ‘purpose’ and ‘mind’ can only serve to obscure and confuse. This is in particular the point of view of the widely spread school of thought in psychology known as ‘behaviourist’.

Now the issue between these two views is one of fundamental and perennial importance for what is often called philosophical anthropology, the study of the basic categories in which man and his behaviour is to be described and explained. That this question is central to any science of human behaviour—if such a science is possible—needs no showing. But this does not by any means exhaust its importance. For it is also central to ethics. Thus there is a type of ethical reflexion, exemplified for instance in the work of Aristotle, which attempts to discover what men should do and how they should behave by a study of human nature and its fundamental goals. This is the attempt to elaborate what is often called a ‘humanism’. The premiss underlying this reflexion, which is by no means confined to philosophers, is that there is a form of life which is higher or more properly human than others, and that the dim intuition of the ordinary man to this effect can be vindicated in its substance or else corrected in its content by a deeper understanding of human nature. But this premiss collapses once it is shown, if it ever is, that human behaviour cannot be accounted for in terms of goals or purposes but must be explained on mechanistic principles; for then the concept of fundamental human goals or of a way of life more consonant with the purposes of human nature—or even the existentialist notion that our basic goals are chosen by ourselves—will be shown to have no application.

A similar premiss, that a purpose or set of purposes which are intrinsically human can be identified, underlies all philosophical and other reflexion concerning the ‘meaning’ of human existence, and this, too, would collapse if the mechanistic thesis were shown to hold.

These brief remarks, which still do not exhaust the ramifications of this question, are enough to show why it has been of perennial interest to philosophers and laymen. And yet in spite of, or perhaps because of this, it still awaits resolution. We might try to explain this simply by pleading lack of evidence. In fact the sciences of man are in their infancy. But this cannot be the whole explanation. In fact, it seems simply to put us before the same question in another form. For we might just as truly say that the sciences of man, and particularly psychology, are in their infancy because this question remains unresolved. It is not enough, therefore, simply to invoke research. In fact the trouble is deeper: we have first to know where to look. And when we ask ourselves this question, we find ourselves well and truly at sea.

In fact there has never been agreement among philosophers or other students as to what is at stake here, that is, on the meaning of the claim that human behaviour is purposive, or, what is the same thing, on what the relevant evidence is which would decide it. As a matter of fact, it is not even generally agreed that it is a matter of finding evidence in the first place, for some thinkers hold that the issue is not in any sense an empirical one, but rather that it can be decided simply by logical argument.

This confusion might tempt us to say that the question is insoluble, or even that it is a pseudo-question. But this radical ‘solution’ would itself have to be established by some argument about the nature of the putative issue involved. Before finally turning our backs on the matter in this way, therefore, it is worth trying once more to define what is at stake. This is what will be attempted in the first part of this book.

1. Teleological Explanation

What, then, does it mean to say that human, or animal, behaviour is purposive? Central to this claim would seem to be the view that the order or pattern which is visible in animate behaviour is radically different from that visible elsewhere in nature in that it is in some sense self-imposed; the order is itself in some way a factor in its own production. This seems to be the force of the rejection of ‘blind accident’: the prevalence of order cannot be accounted for on principles which are only contingently or ‘accidentally’ connected with it, by laws whose operation only contingently results in it, but must be accounted for in terms of the order itself.

The point, then, could perhaps be put in this way: the events productive of order in animate beings are to be explained not in terms of other unconnected antecedent conditions, but in terms of the very order which they produce. These events are held to occur because of what results from them, or, to put it in a more traditional way, they occur ‘for the sake of’ the state of affairs which follows. And this of course is part of what is meant by the term ‘purpose’ when it is invoked in explanation. For to explain by purpose is to explain by the goal or result aimed at, ‘for the sake of’ which the event is said to occur.

Explanation which invokes the goal for the sake of which the explicandum occurs is generally called teleological explanation, and thus at least part of what we mean by saying that human or animal behaviour is purposive is that it is to be accounted for by a teleological form of explanation.¹

But does this take us any further ahead? What is meant by teleological explanation and how can we establish whether it holds or not of a given range of phenomena? The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to an attempt to answer this question, and to cut through the skein of confusions which usually makes it difficult to bring this question into focus.

2. An Empirical Question?

Now a first difficulty arises straight off with the objection that this question, whether or not a teleological explanation holds, is not an empirical one at all. In fact many theorists, and particularly students of what can roughly be called the behavioural sciences, would hold that the claim that animate behaviour must be explained teleologically or in terms of purpose is a meaningless one, empirically empty or ‘metaphysical’, that the whole question is a ‘pseudo-question’. This is especially true of many theorists in the field of experimental psychology, those of the behaviourist school, on which the discussion later in this book will mainly centre. These thinkers, extremely hostile to the claims of teleological explanation, make short work of it by purporting to expose, in summary fashion, its non-empirical character.

If this objection is a valid one, then our whole enquiry is stopped before it starts. But, as a matter of fact, it is not. In fact, it reposes on an interpretation of the notions of purpose and teleological explanation which is arbitrary and by no means imposed on us.

Thus the claim that we must explain the behaviour of a given system in terms of purpose is often taken to mean that we must explain it by laws of the form x = f(P), where ‘x’ is the behaviour and ‘P’ is the Purpose considered as a separate entity which is the cause or antecedent of x. Of course the view that an explanation in terms of purpose involves the postulating of a special entity is by no means confined to those who are hostile to the idea. Many who were on the ‘vitalist’ side of the controversy in biology made use of a hypothetical entity of this kind. (Cf. Driesch’s ‘entelechy’.) But there is no doubt that the end result of this is to create a handy Aunt Sally for the mechanists. For a theory of this kind can neither be confirmed nor add in any way to our power of predicting and controlling the phenomena.

This can be readily seen. In fact, the only empirical evidence for the operation of the purpose is the behaviour which its operation is used to explain. There is thus no conceivable evidence which could falsify a hypothesis of this kind because whenever the behaviour is emitted, the purpose responsible is ex hypothesi assumed to have been operating. And at the same time we would never be able to predict behaviour with the aid of such a hypothesis. For if x having a value of x₁ is due to P having the value P_1, and if the only evidence for P₁ is the occurrence of x_l, then we have no way of knowing beforehand what the value of x will be.

Now, of course, we might find some antecedent conditions for P, such that we could determine the value of P ex ante by means of a function such as P = f(a). But then we would be turning P into what is often called an ‘intervening variable’,² that is, a term useful in calculation which is nevertheless without empirical content, which is not itself an empirical descriptive term. For in this case the entire empirical content of the two functions P = f(a) and x = f(P) could be expressed in one more complex function linking a and x directly, x = F(a). What is meant by saying that ‘P’ is not an empirical descriptive term is that no single proposition about P is open to empirical confirmation or infirmation. Thus, in the case above, neither of these functions can be verified singly. We have seen above that this is true of x = f(P), but it is equally so of P = f(a). The proposition formed by the conjunction of both is open to empirical confirmation, but then the evidence for this is the same as the evidence for x = F(a) which makes no mention of P. That is, no empirical sense can be given to the supposition that x = F(a) be true and the conjunction of the two functions false. Thus the question whether or not the functions containing ‘P’ are to be accepted is not an empirical but purely a stipulative question, to be determined by the convenience in the calculation. ‘P’ is therefore not an empirical descriptive term.

Thus those who hold that ‘purpose’ is essential to the explanation of the behaviour of animate organisms are left with the unattractive choice either of making an unverifiable claim of no explanatory utility in science or of winning their point at the expense of making the laws true by stipulation. This view of the matter is very common among behaviour psychologists who are unsympathetic to this claim. Their view seems to be that their opponents adopt the first position, that of positing an unobservable entity, propositions about which cannot be verified. Thus Hebb in the first chapter of his The Organization of Behaviour speaks interchangeably of ‘animism’ (the view that animate behaviour must be explained in terms of ‘purpose’) and ‘interactionism’ (the view that behaviour is the result of the interaction of observable physical and unobservable ‘inner’ or mental processes) and of course ‘mysticism’ (which doesn’t seem to have a very clear sense in Hebb’s usage but which means something counter-empirical, unscientific and generally nasty). Similarly, Spence³ speaks of animistic theories as those in which the relation of the (unobservable) constructs to the empirical (observable) variables is left entirely unspecified (and hence they are unverifiable as in the first alternative above).

The upshot of this view, then, is that the claim that animate organisms have a special status is undecidable, or rather that even to make it is to say something which cannot be verified. If the question is not to be closed here we shall have to examine explanation by purpose more closely in order to determine whether it must involve the postulating of an unobservable entity which is the cause or the antecedent condition of behaviour.

Now, as we have said, explanation by purpose involves the use of a teleological form of explanation, of explanation in terms of the result for the sake of which the events concerned occur. Now when we say that an event occurs for the sake of an end, we are saying that it occurs because it is the type of event which brings about this end. This means that the condition of the event’s occurring is that a state of affairs obtain such that it will bring about the end in question, or such that this event is required to bring about that end.⁴ To offer a teleological explanation of some event or class of events, e.g., the behaviour of some being, is, then, to account for it by laws in terms of which an event’s occurring is held to be dependent on that event’s being required for some end.

To say that the behaviour of a given system should be explained in terms of purpose, then, is, in part, to make an assertion about the form of the laws, or the type of laws which hold of the system. But qua teleological these laws will not be of the kind which makes behaviour a function of the state of some unobservable entity; rather the behaviour is a function of the state of the system and (in the case of animate organisms) its environment; but the relevant feature of system and environment on which behaviour depends will be what the condition of both makes necessary if the end concerned is to be realized. Thus for instance, we can say that the conditions for a given action, say a predator stalking his prey, are (1) that the animal be hungry, and (2) that this be the ‘required’ action, i.e., the action in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition
• Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Explanation by Purpose
• Part 2: Theory and Fact
• Index