Criminology and Behaviorism

Faith, Fact, and Behaviorism.

David Hume argued that ought cannot be derived from is. That is, no set of facts, no amount of scientific knowledge, is by itself sufficient to urge us to action. Yet generations of well-meaning scientists (more and more as secular influences grow in the West) seem to have forgotten Hume's words of wisdom. All motivated action depends ultimately on beliefs that cannot be proved by the methods o...

Psychologism and Behaviorism

Let psychologism be the doctrine that whether behavior is intelligent behavior depends on the character of the internal information processing that produces it. More specifically, I mean psychologism to involve the doctrine that two systems could have actual and potential behavior typical of familiar intelligent beings, that the two systems could be exactly alike in their actual and potential b...

Mentalism and Behaviorism: Merging?

The Reflexive-Intentional Model of the Subject (RIMS) connects the subject’s bipolar probabilistic behavior with its mental domain. We demonstrate that the Matching Law is a formal consequence of this tie. RIMS allows us also to deduce theoretically the main patterns of animal behavior in the experiments with two alternatives where the Matching Law reveals itself. This finding inclines us to pu...

Psychiatry and Criminology

Physicalism, Behaviorism and Incompleteness

The content of this paper contains four parts. (1) First, physicalism gives the enlightenments to behaviorism: mind-body identity, objectivity like physics and completeness of reduction. (2) Secondly, there are difficulties which behaviorist could not overcome—both the reduction of the theory and the terms are unreliable, and the strict distinction between introspective method and inter-subject...