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Full Idea
Functionalism is a new incarnation of behaviourism, replacing sensory inputs with sensory inputs plus mental states, and replacing dispositions to act with dispositions plus certain mental states.
Gist of Idea
Functionalism is behaviourism, but with mental states as intermediaries
Source
Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 69)
Book Ref
'The Philosophy of Mind', ed/tr. Beakley,B /Ludlow P [MIT 1992], p.69
A Reaction
I think of functionalism as behaviourism which extends inside the 'black box' between stimulus and response. It proposes internal stimuli and responses. Consequently functionalism inherits some behaviourist problems.
| 2574 | Behaviour requires knowledge as well as dispositions [Block] |
| 2576 | In functionalism, desires are internal states with causal relations [Block] |
| 2575 | Functionalism is behaviourism, but with mental states as intermediaries [Block] |
| 2578 | Could a creature without a brain be in the right functional state for pain? [Block] |
| 2577 | Simple machine-functionalism says mind just is a Turing machine [Block] |
| 2580 | A Turing machine, given a state and input, specifies an output and the next state [Block] |
| 2579 | Physicalism is prejudiced in favour of our neurology, when other systems might have minds [Block] |
| 2581 | Intuition may say that a complex sentence is ungrammatical, but linguistics can show that it is not [Block] |
| 2582 | A brain looks no more likely than anything else to cause qualia [Block] |
| 2583 | You might invert colours, but you can't invert beliefs [Block] |
| 2584 | Lobotomised patients can cease to care about a pain [Block] |
| 2585 | Not just any old functional network will have mental states [Block] |
| 2586 | In functionalism, what are the special inputs and outputs of conscious creatures? [Block] |