Intentional Behaviorism

Gordon R. Foxall

Chapter 9 in Understanding Consumer Choice, 2005, pp 173-198 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Intentional behaviorism is a philosophy of psychology that derives from and extends Dennett’s (1969) attempted resolution of the problem of accommodating the mental within a materialist framework of conceptualization and analysis (Foxall, 2004a). It retains Dennett’s argument that the mental inheres in the necessity of describing some behavioral phenomena in intentional language, the language of propositional attitudes, which exhibits referential opacity and which are not reducible to the referentially transparent sentences that are usually employed in the natural sciences. The ascription of intentionality is appropriate at the personal level of explanation. The problem arises of using intentional idioms in a disciplined way that both avoids the tendency to proliferate mentalistic language in order to account (usually in a circular fashion) for whatever behavior is observed, and links the use of intentional language with physical reality.

Keywords: Personal Level; Behavior Analyst; Binocular Rivalry; Folk Psychology; Intentional Content (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
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DOI: 10.1057/9780230510029_9

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