Abstract

A large body of current literature details significant recent advances in our understanding of the mind. This boom has partly been stimulated by the explosive growth of cognitive science dedicated to advancing scientific understanding. This paper focuses on the nature of philosophical theory of mind, and seeks to find ways of talking about mind. Central to my argument is developing a description of mind as action. Concessive behaviorism depicts the mind as presented in complexes of actions and tendencies to act. If a philosophical theory of the mind emphasizes waving over silent cogitations and brain events, then it is behaviorist. This position defines the eliminative behaviorism. The most powerful and straightforward kind of non-eliminative behaviorism is analytic behaviorism arising from the view that all statements containing mental vocabulary can be analyzed into statements containing just the vocabulary of physical behavior. But perhaps a better way to think of beliefs is to understand only what each of them does, which is at the heart of the view known as functionalism. Therefore, special attention is given to considering behaviorist and functionalist theories.