Logical and analytical behaviourism (Ryle and Hempel), the mind-brain type identity theory and its commitment to ontological reduction, eliminative materialism on folk psychology, and the objections including multiple realisability, circularity, the asymmetry of self-knowledge and the conceivability of disembodied minds.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain three physicalist theories, logical or analytical behaviourism, the mind-brain type identity theory, and eliminative materialism, and to evaluate them against objections such as the dualist arguments, multiple realisability, circularity, the asymmetry of self-knowledge, and the standing of folk psychology.

Behaviourism

The mind-brain type identity theory

The identity theory's great advantage over behaviourism is that it restores inner states and explains mental causation directly: if pain just is a brain state, then pain genuinely causes the wince, because the brain state does. It also avoids the dualist's interaction problem entirely, since there is only one substance. Smart further motivated the view by appeal to Ockham's razor: postulating irreducible non-physical correlates of brain states is an extravagance, so identity is the simpler hypothesis. The decisive pressure on it is not from dualism but from multiple realisability, which is why most physicalists moved on to functionalism while keeping the identity theory's commitment to a wholly physical mind.

Eliminative materialism

Objections

• Against type identity: multiple realisability (Putnam). The same mental state (pain) can be realised in very different physical systems (humans, octopuses, perhaps a silicon machine). If pain is identical to one specific brain state, these others could not be in pain, which is implausible. This motivates functionalism.
• Against behaviourism: circularity. Specifying the behaviour that a mental state disposes us to seems to require other mental states ("she will reach for water if she believes it is water and wants to drink"), so the analysis cannot eliminate the mental without circularity.
• Against behaviourism: the asymmetry of self-knowledge. I seem to know my own mental states directly, not by observing my behaviour, which behaviourism struggles to capture; the "perfect actor" or super-Spartan who feels pain without behaving so is a further counterexample.
• The dualist arguments. Conceivable zombies, the knowledge argument and the conceivability of disembodied minds press on every reductive physicalism by suggesting mental facts outrun physical facts.
• Against eliminativism: self-refutation and indispensability. To assert eliminativism is to express a belief, which the view says does not exist; and folk psychology is predictively indispensable, so calling it simply false looks too strong. The Churchlands reply that the self-refutation charge begs the question (it assumes the very folk-psychological framework under dispute) and that the predictive successes of folk psychology may be local and limited, like those of a superseded scientific theory.

A point that lifts an evaluation is to see the three theories as a progression. Behaviourism tried to analyse the mind away into public behaviour but lost the inner life; the identity theory restored inner states by locating them in the brain but tied them too tightly to one physical type; functionalism (the next dot point) keeps inner states and loosens the physical tie via realisable roles; and eliminativism, impatient with all reductive projects, proposes scrapping the folk categories rather than saving them. The standard objections track this story: behaviourism faces the perfect actor and circularity, identity faces multiple realisability, and eliminativism faces self-refutation. The general lesson is the trade-off between reductive ambition and fidelity to the phenomena: the more aggressively a theory reduces or eliminates the mental, the more it risks leaving out features such as qualia and self-knowledge that any account of mind ought to explain.