The Behaviourist Analysis On Human Mind: A Philosophical Dissection (Published)
Behaviourism occupies a distinctive place in the history of the philosophy of mind, for it sought to resolve the perennial mind-body problem not by explaining mental phenomena but by explaining them away, reducing thought, sensation, and emotion to observable patterns of stimulus and response. The background to this study lies in the mid-twentieth century ascendancy of behaviourism as the dominant scientific and philosophical account of mental life, an ascendancy that promised objectivity but arguably purchased that objectivity at the cost of the very phenomena the philosophy of mind exists to explain. The problem addressed is that behaviourism, in both its psychological and logical variants, faces persistent philosophical difficulties in accounting for the first-person, qualitative, and intentional character of mental states, difficulties its proponents have never fully resolved. The thesis defended is that behaviourism, while methodologically valuable as a corrective against uncritical introspectionism and Cartesian dualism, is philosophically inadequate as a complete theory of mind, since it cannot accommodate the subjective dimension of consciousness without covertly reintroducing the mentalistic categories it set out to eliminate. The study adopts the method of critical philosophical analysis, combining conceptual clarification, comparative exposition, and argumentative evaluation of primary and secondary sources drawn from both Western and African philosophical traditions. The finding is that behaviourism, though historically instrumental in disciplining psychological inquiry, ultimately proves inadequate when confronted with counterexamples drawn from linguistic creativity, private experience, and qualia. The study concludes that an adequate philosophy of mind must retain behaviourism’s empirical discipline while restoring the ineliminable reality of inner mental life.
Keywords: Category Mistake, Consciousness., Logical Behaviourism, Mind-Body Problem, Philosophy of Mind, behaviourism