Despite the fact that the concept of mind as an immaterial entity dates back at least to the twelfth century CE, it still occupies a central place as the subject matter of modern psychology. Consider only a few of the numerous recent books with the word “mind” in the title: How The Mind Works (by Steven Pinker), The Mind’s I and Kinds of Minds (by Daniel Dennett), The Maladapted Mind and Mindblindness (by Simon Baron-Cohen), Wild Minds (by Marc Hauser), and The Mating Mind (by Geoffrey Miller).

While the other sciences have moved well beyond their pre-scientific, philosophical origins, psychology has made much less progress. Continuing to focus on the mind as a primary subject matter keeps psychology mired in a philosophical quagmire and is its major obstacle to becoming a true natural science.

Minds, Brains and Metaphors

In 1996, I wrote a critique of evolutionary psychology in Skeptic (Vol. 4, No. 1) entitled “How The Human Got Its Spots,” a play on the title of one of the Just So Stories in which Rudyard Kipling offers a fanciful tale to explain how the leopard got its spots. The term “just so story” has since become a cliché for similarly fanciful explanations of natural phenomena which may fit the facts but which lack any empirical support.

In the present essay, I argue that the concept of mind is the most egregious just so story ever invented to explain human behavior. My central premise is simply that humans do not have minds. Most of us believe that the mind is self-evident and that humans are born with minds and have always had minds. Sometimes the term “mind” is used synonymously with the term “brain,” which causes confusion by having two words for the same thing. Most people who use “mind” and “brain” interchangeably assume that the brain is the physical basis of the mind. In my view, if one believes that mind and brain are the same, then the term “brain” should be used because it avoids all the metaphysical pitfalls associated with discussions about nonphysical entities. In essence, the brain can be studied scientifically; the mind cannot.

This essay is not about how humans got their brains. It is about how humans got the concept of mind. Make no mistake about it; there is no mind to be found among the physical structures of the brain. Some may protest that mind is not a physical structure in the body. But what is it then? One answer is that if the mind cannot be observed and measured with the methods of science, then we must describe it in other (usually metaphorical) terms. For the past few decades, the mind has been described in computer terms even though, as some have noted, the brain, which is said to be where the mind operates, is neither structurally nor functionally like a computer.1 In fact, the entire field of modern cognitive science is based on a metaphor, called information processing, of the mind as a computer. Nowadays it seems as if everyone talks about cognitive processing. For example, people diagnosed with dyslexia are said to have trouble processing words, as if that explains their reading problems. Most appeals to processing as explanations of behavior are circular. Why does Mary say “b” when she sees d? Because she has trouble processing letters. How do you know she has trouble processing letters? Because . . . well, you get the idea.

Over the millennia, many other metaphors have been used to describe the mind, as well as some of it specific functions, such as language. For example, a famous metaphor is Noam Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Of course, there is no real device in the brain that accounts for language acquisition, but the metaphor of one makes the inexplicable seem to be explained. Because the mind and its presumed properties (e.g., memories, representations, schemas, consciousness, etc.) are always unobserved, we are free to describe them using whatever terms we want, which is convenient because it means we never have to be scientifically accountable. This is also why theories of mind have come and gone for centuries, and will continue to come and go if we don’t abandon the mind as our subject matter.

The Figurative Mind: Person, Place or Thing?

If humans don’t have minds in the same way they have the physical structures of their bodies, then how did the human get its mind? The answer is that humans gave themselves minds. Although the practice of making up names to describe human behavior has probably gone on since the dawn of language, it was most likely formalized by those whom we call philosophers. In fact, what we were given by those philosophers was a name, and the name was “mind.” But it is not quite this straightforward, because names are usually of things. For example, at birth you were given a name. Now, when someone calls you by name, anyone else can check to see that it is indeed you. Likewise, we call things we sit on chairs, and if I say I see a chair, anyone can check to see if indeed there is a chair present.

Analogously, what is named by “mind”? Consider the following example. If you ask me what 13 times 147 is and, after a few seconds, I say “1911,” you might say that I did multiplication in my mind; some call this “mental arithmetic.” But if by “mind” you don’t mean brain, then what exactly did I do and where did I do it? In fact, asking the question in that way presumes there is a place where the multiplication was done. So, we have given that place a name—mind. But if you ask most people to point to the place in their bodies where the mind is, they point to their head. Of course, there is nothing in the head but brain tissue. When we do so-called mental arithmetic, we report that we do it in our heads, but, as psychologists know only too well, reports of subjective experience are not only notoriously unreliable, but unlikely to be very accurate. The best psychologists can do is to say that mental arithmetic occurs in the brain, but this begs the question because the only thing that goes on in the brain is neuronal activity.

Still, everyone’s subjective experience is that whatever mind is, it is in the head. We seem to think in our heads, compounded, no doubt, by the presence of our two most dominant sensory systems, vision and hearing, which literally are in our heads. Thus, we report being able to “see” images (called imagining) and “hear” sounds “in our heads.” And evidence shows that certain kinds of brain injury can cause problems not only in seeing and hearing, but in thinking and remembering as well. Where do these things take place if not in the mind? (Damaging other places in the brain can cause problems in walking and moving ones’ arms, but we don’t argue that those abilities are in the mind.) Unfortunately, very few scientific alternatives to the notion that these things all take place in the mind have been offered.

Nevertheless, the concept of mind is pervasive. In Webster’s Third New International Unabridged Dictionary, there are almost two entire columns devoted to the word mind as a noun. Although the term is regularly used as if it refers to a thing or a place, it is often used synonymous with “person,” as B. F. Skinner noted. For example, instead of saying “I did the multiplication in my mind” simply saying “I did the multiplication” conveys the same meaning but with less metaphysical baggage. To say that the mind perceives or remembers adds nothing to the statement that it is the person who perceives and remembers. I call this personification of the mind the “mind-as-person metaphor.” The same can be said of the brain. Nowadays it is not uncommon to hear people say that the brain perceives, remembers or thinks. We could call this personification of the brain the “brain-as-person” metaphor. Even though the brain is a real thing and not a construct (See below.), it doesn’t behave. Of course, we are still left with the task of understanding what it means for a person to perceive. The verb “perceive” implies action, but of what kind? To answer this question, we would have to investigate the behaviors of individuals, whether overt or covert, and the contexts in which they occur when we use the term. Similar problems arise with many other terms in addition to “mind” that are used to describe so-called cognitive or mental activity.

In order to appreciate the difficulty in defining mind, consider that it is defined variously as: memory; that which reasons (presumably an organ); the sum total of the conscious states of an individual; inclination, intention, desire, and wish. Synonyms include intellect, soul, psyche, brain, and intelligence. To further clarify (or muddle), the dictionary tells us that, “Mind indicates the complex of man’s faculties involved in perceiving, remembering, considering, evaluating, and deciding,” although at least these terms (gerunds) are derived from verbs, which imply action on the part of the individual. In short, the concept of mind contains everything except the proverbial kitchen sink; it is everything we do.

A Brief History of Mind

My point in offering definitions is to try to persuade you that the term “mind” is only that—a word—and that it does not necessarily refer to a real thing. But if this is true, then what does the term refer to? And how did we get this name?

Animistic Pre-History. Humans have probably wanted and tried to understand their own behavior and the behavior of other living things since they began to talk. In that pre-scientific world, humans concocted the best explanations they could to try to understand the world around them. It could be said that these attempts to explain their world constituted the earliest philosophy, in the sense that humans used the best reason and logic their language afforded them.

Although we can’t be certain, many of the explanations hunter-gatherers and herders fabricated to understand their own behavior and that of other animals probably involved appealing to life forces residing within them.2 Even the word “animal,” derived from the Latin, anima, or soul, and animalis, to animate, reflects this. The view that all living things contain a life force, breath or soul has been called vitalism or animism. Animistic explanations can even be extended to inanimate objects. For example, a rock tumbles down a mountain because it “desires” to get to the bottom, or a tree falls because it is “tired.” Does this mean that rocks and trees have minds? Even though the concepts of life force, breath, or soul were commonly used among hunter-gatherers and herders to explain various events in nature, historians have found no evidence that these humans had a concept of mind or of psychophysical dualism, which is why this type of animism has been called naturalistic animism. 3

Aristotle’s Souls. In his most famous work, De Anima (On the Soul), Aristotle said that souls are what distinguish living from non-living beings. In other words, things that are alive have souls that make them alive. Aristotle then made distinctions between different kinds of souls. For example, all life forms—plants, animals, and human beings—have nutritive souls, which enable them to find nourishment to grow and reproduce. Animals and humans have sensitive souls, which enable them to sense events in the environment. Only humans, however, have rational souls, which enable them to reason. According to one historian of psychology, although Aristotle’s view of soul appeared to be animistic, it was actually consistent with the view of naturalism, which states that all natural entities, including human beings, are to be understood in the same basic, naturalistic terms.4 Thus, Aristotle’s souls were really inseparable from the natural functions of the body, such as eating, sensing, and reasoning. However, with the decline of Athens as a great intellectual center and the ascendance of Christianity, Aristotle’s naturalistic souls were replaced with a spiritual soul that was not bound by the laws of nature. In the twelfth century, Christian scholars changed the word “mind” from the naturalistic meaning they had inherited from Aristotle “to mean a nonphysical counterpart to the body” and “a determining agent for human activity.” 5

Cartesian Dualism. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is remembered for having invented analytic geometry, for having developed a mechanistic physiology and a theory of reflexes, and for having crafted a philosophy of mind that is still very much a part of our modern philosophy of human nature. In a sense, Descartes condensed Aristotle’s three souls—nutritive, sensitive, and rational—into just two. The nutritive and sensitive souls were combined into all the functions of the body, which Descartes thought could be explained and understood completely naturally and mechanistically, that is, in terms of physical laws. Descartes argued, however, that human reason (and language used to express it) could not be understood in the same terms as the other bodily functions; he thus reserved the rational soul for that one function.

Descartes believed that the rational soul also explained the fact that humans, but not animals, had volition or will. Descartes considered animals to be mechanical automatons that were completely bound by reflexive, mechanistic principles and, thus, had no free will. Humans, by contrast, could go beyond reflexes to behave freely and consciously. Our own personal, subjective experience appears to confirm Descartes’ belief. For example, we seem to be able to do whatever we want, whenever we want. We can even override basic reflexes, as when, for example, we consciously prevent our eyes from blinking at the sudden approach of an oncoming object, or when we forcibly prevent ourselves from coughing or sneezing in a quiet public place. How do we do that without a mind? Descartes believed that voluntary behavior was distinctly human and could not be explained mechanistically. It required another level of explanation. For Descartes it was the rational soul.

The concept of free will is still very much associated with the mind, as evidenced in such phrases as “a mind of one’s own,” or “I have a mind to.” If we claim that there really is no mind, then we are forced to explain conscious action, as Aristotle might have done, in terms of natural laws of behavior. But reducing free will to natural, physical processes won’t please many people.

One implication of Descartes’ philosophy of mind was that the mechanistic body and the rational soul were made of different stuff. On the one hand, the body was physical and subject to natural laws. The mind, on the other hand, was not a physical entity and therefore could not be explained by natural laws. It could, however, influence the body, as in the example of consciously preventing a cough or sneeze. This interaction between the mind and body caused what has now become an age-old philosophical problem; namely, how could a non-material entity, the mind, affect a material entity, the body? Philosophers throughout the centuries have made various attempts to solve this problem, for obvious reasons without success. For the present purposes, the issue is that people believe that humans possess both a physical body and a non-physical mind (soul). This position is called mind-body or Cartesian (from Descartes) dualism. The study of the body belongs to biology, whereas the study of the mind belongs to psychology (from psyche, Greek for soul).

Modern Psychology. The discipline of psychology assumed the job— previously carried out by philosophers—of trying to understand the human mind. Beginning in the late 1800s with the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, by all accounts the founder of psychology as a formal discipline, psychologists have been interested in the mind, and more specifically, in conscious experience. Despite various attempts by behaviorists to move psychology in the direction of the other natural sciences by studying objective behavior in its own right (i.e., not as a reflection of mental events), the subject matter of psychology generally remains the mind. Some psychologists even claimed that in the 1960s a cognitive revolution took place, which overthrew behaviorism and returned the mind to its rightful place as the primary object of study in psychology.6,7 Ironically, an economist (Herbert Simon) and a linguist (Noam Chomsky), neither of whom are scientists, were “the chief architects of cognitive science.”8

Many textbooks now define psychology as the science of mind and behavior, a distinct nod to Cartesian dualism. But defining psychology as the science of mind is a contradiction, because science, as an enterprise distinct from philosophy, relies on observation to answer fundamental questions, and the mind is, by definition, not observable. This presents a conundrum for psychologists: carry out a successful program of scientific study of behavior as the behaviorists have done, or flounder in the philosophical trap of mind.

Many psychologists think they’ve solved this problem by recasting the issue of mind in terms of cognitive events and processes. However, the cognitive processes are the very same as those that make up the mind; namely, memory, imagining, thinking, reasoning, consciousness, and problem solving. Most cognitive psychologists do not think of themselves as Cartesian dualists, however, and they believe that cognitive processes are physical processes of the brain. Nevertheless, some cognitive scientists belie this position. For example one cognitive neuroscientist claims to be searching for a “grand unified mind and brain theory.” Another has asked, “How does the nonmaterial mind influence the brain, and vice versa?” If we assume that cognitive processes are physical, then we may ask in what form they exist. The strategy nowadays is to turn to neuroscience.

Chasing Cognitive Ghosts with Geiger Counters

It would be easy to say that cognitive processes are synonymous with functions of the brain, but that would negate the need for psychologists and a general theory of behavior. Nowadays, however, psychologists, lacking any other direct evidence of cognitive processes, point to neuroimaging techniques to provide proof of their existence. It has become very popular to produce images of the brain using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) while individuals are supposedly engaging in mental or cognitive processing. But one doesn’t have to look too closely at such studies to see that what the subjects are really doing is engaging in various behaviors, such as answering questions, solving math problems, recalling words, etc.

Calling these actions “cognitive,” if by that we mean anything more than the behaviors are sometimes not observed, is unnecessary and misleading. Because postulating inferred mental constructs such as volition and central executive do not clarify understanding of empirical brain-behavior relationships, using brain-imaging technologies to look for such constructs is simply chasing cognitive ghosts with Geiger counters9 and in many ways may lead to a new phrenology.10

Mind as Behavior

When people perceive, they are acting; when they remember, they are acting; when they reason, they are acting; even when they are being conscious, they are acting. Thus, we can still use words like “perceiving,” “remembering,” and “reasoning” if we view these terms as labels for what people actually do, that is, their behavior. But believing that such terms refer to mental processes reflects psychologists’ and neuroscientists’ inability to move beyond the pre-scientific language of early Christian theologians and philosophers. It is to confuse constructs with events (or things). As historian of psychology Noel W. Smith notes,

A construct is something constructed rather than an original event. It is a representation of a thing or event and takes such forms as a verbal statement, a mathematical expression, a diagram, a symbol, or even a gesture that signifies something specific. Any good construct has a specifiable referent; and we find these in descriptions, scientific laws, and diagrams of relationships.11

Behaviors are events. They can be observed even if only by the person who is behaving. The concept of mind is a construct – “an invention, an abstraction, a contrivance.”12 In fact, along with consciousness, it is the big construct in psychology. Both mind and consciousness are unsatisfactory constructs in that they have no specifiable referents. In other words, there are no real events that comprise them and, thus, no agreement about what they are and how they operate. As Smith puts it, “They are only tangles of words because they consist of no more than words.” 13

To understand the difference between constructs and events, consider a more parsimonious explanation of the example of mental arithmetic discussed previously. Asking how such a skill is learned in the first place can give us a clue as to what it really is. Presumably, children are initially taught to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and carry-over operations by writing and simultaneously talking out loud, which, of course, are behaviors or events. Teachers model, prompt, and then reinforce the behaviors until they become both accurate and fluent; that is, until the correct responses occur quickly and correctly. Once teachers are confident that students can behave (i.e., solve numerical problems) accurately out loud, they encourage the students to do the same activities “quietly, to yourself,” or “in your head.” (Parents adopt the same strategy when they teach their language-learning children to name things. When the parents are confident that the children know the names of most things by hearing them say the names out loud, the parents encourage the children to say it to themselves.) The evidence for the continued accurate behavior is the fact that the students produce the same correct answer, which they then say out loud or write down. Thus, what we do when we carry out so-called mental arithmetic is to engage in specific verbal behaviors that then become covert or private. So-called mental arithmetic starts out as public behavior and ends up as private. It can become overt again under certain circumstances. For example, if the person solving the problem is left alone she may continue talking through the solution aloud, but may revert to covert talk if someone reenters the room. We would also predict that at least some of the neural pathways associated with the covert self-talk are the same as those that occur when the same behaviors are performed out loud. Describing such activity as mental is to move from the realm of events (i.e., behaviors) to constructs (i.e., mental processes) without referents.

Viewing behavior in this manner renders it unnecessary to infer mental and cognitive processes as causes of the behaviors in question, and it locates the study of behavior squarely in the realm of a natural science.14 In addition, focusing on behavior instead of mind is a much more optimistic tactic because it opens the door for the development of useful practical action, for example, in the form of effective therapies or teaching methods, advances not likely to result from speculating about or studying the mind. As Skinner observed in 1974, “The major problems facing the world today can be solved only if we improve our understanding of human behavior.”15

Interpreting mental events as behaviors, albeit private, that function like observable behaviors is not likely to be a popular position among psychologists or laypeople. Current notions of mind are appealing and reassuring, like the belief in ghosts, angels, and spirits, partly because they keep something of ourselves that we hold dear out of the reach of science, thus preserving some mystery.

Nevertheless, just as new findings and theories in the hard sciences have changed dramatically the ways in which we think about nature—in many instances forcing us to abandon long-held beliefs about nature, for example, a geocentric universe, a flat earth, and creationism—perhaps a similar change is in store for psychology with regard to how we view mind. I suspect, however, that the day when the concept of mind will be eliminated from our psychological vocabulary is still a long way off. Until then the only mind humans will have is the figurative one we’ve given ourselves, as nothing more than a name for the causes of all of our behaviors that we are unable to explain more scientifically.



References

1. Dreyfuss, Hubert L. 1984. What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artifical Intelligence. New York: Harper.

2. Smith, Noel W. 2001. Current Systems in Psychology: History, Theory, Research, and Applications. Belmost, CA: Wadsworth.

3. Ibid.

4. Bolles, Robert. C. 1993. The Story of Psychology: A Thematic History Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.

5. Smith, 2001.

6. Baars, Bernard. 1986. The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology. New York: Guilford.

7. Gardner, Howard. 1985. The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution. New York: Basic Books.

8. Leahey, Thomas H. 2004. A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological Thought (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice-Hall.

9. Faux, Steven F. 2002. “Cognitive Neuroscience From a Behavioral Perspective: A Critique of Chasing Ghosts with Geiger Counters.” The Behavior Analyst, 25, 161-173.

10. Uttal, William R. 2001. The New Phrenology: The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Functions in the Brain. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

11. Smith, Noel. 1997. Consciousness: Event or construct? In Investigations

in Behavioral Epistemology. Edited by Linda J.Hayes & Patrick M. Ghezzi. Reno,

NV: Context Press, p. 152.

12. Smith, 2001, p. 48.

13. Smith, 1997, p.

14. Schlinger, Henry D. 1993. “Learned Expectancies Are Not Adequate Scientific Explanations.” American Psychologist, 48, 1155-156.

15. Skinner, B. F. 1974. About Behaviorism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 8



Author Notes

I am grateful to Julie Riggott and Stuart Vyse for their helpful comments on this essay. Correspondence may be addressed to the author, Department of Psychology, California State University, Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA, 91330 8255. Email hschling@csun.edu.

Correspondence may be addressed to the author, Department of Psychology, Department of Psychology,California State University, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90032-8277. E-mail: hschlin@calstatela.edu.



Dr. Schlinger received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Western Michigan University where he also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in behavioral pharmacology. He has authored three books, Psychology: A Behavioral Overview, A Behavior-Analytic View of Child Development, and Introduction to Scientific Psychology. In addition to behavioral pharmacology, he has published experimental research on basic learning processes in humans and non-humans. More recently he has published critiques of cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology and has written on conceptual issues in psychology, including verbal behavior, intelligence, and behavioral development.

Reprinted with permission from Skeptic magazine, www.skeptic.com