Philosophical behaviorism: a review of things that happen because they should: a teleological approach to action, by Rowland Stout.
You can talk beliefs and desires and still be a behaviorist—treat them as long, payoff-shaped patterns of action.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Okouchi (1999) looked at a book that says actions happen because they should. The review asked if we can keep talking about beliefs and wants while staying inside behavior science.
It ends up saying yes. Define mind as long patterns of what the body does and the payoffs that follow.
What they found
The paper found a way to speak about purpose without ghosts in the machine. Beliefs and desires are just names for extended streams of behavior shaped by consequences.
This keeps mental words useful for clinicians and parents, yet keeps the science public and observable.
How this fits with other research
Staats (1994) warned against teleology, saying purpose is only past reinforcement history. Okouchi (1999) answers that a careful, molar brand of teleology is safe and helpful.
Rachlin (2013) later turned the same idea into easy fables, showing the 1999 stance can be taught with stories.
Rachlin (2018) seems to clash by claiming teleological behaviorism denies that private self-talk equals thinking. The gap is small: the 1999 review never spoke about thinking, only about desire-talk.
Why it matters
You can keep using everyday words like wants and plans in team meetings. Just tie them to visible behavior stretched over time and consequences. It keeps parents engaged without sneaking mentalism into your notes.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Mentalistic terms such as belief and desire have been rejected by behavior analysts because they are traditionally held to refer to unobservable events inside the organism. Behavior analysis has consequently been viewed by philosophers to be at best irrelevant to psychology, understood as a science of the mind. In this book, the philosopher Rowland Stout argues cogently that beliefs and desires (like operants such as rats' lever presses) are best understood in terms of an interaction over time between overt behavior and its overt consequences (a viewpoint called teleological behaviorism). This book is important because it identifies the science of the mind with the science of overt behavior and implies that the psychologists best equipped to study mental life are not those who purport to do so but those who focus on the experimental analysis of behavior.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1999 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1999.72-273