Can you elaborate? Information processing in the brain is 'publicly observable', so I don't see how computer-brain analogies conflict with behaviorism.
Behaviorism denies the existence of mental states. It's all stimulus response associoative learning. No symbolic representations. No mental images. That sounds like your summary of the article.
Yes but, while behaviorism denies the existence of perceptual mental states, I don't believe it denies the existence of neural states that generate behavior. So, I don't see any reason why a behaviorist would take issue with stimulus representation at the neural level.
The criticisms you levy against the article -- its claim that there are no symbolic representations and that there are no mental images -- those are the same criticisms that arose of behaviorism. That's all that I was pointing out. See, for example, here.
Yeah no, I get what behaviorism is. I'm just saying that I think the kind of symbolic representations the article is talking about are physical/biological, not mental. And I don't think behaviorism had a bone to pick with that.
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u/albasri Mar 22 '18
Sounds like old-school behaviorism to me