Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 50 of 138
Behaviorism smuggles desire back in
I said earlier that the behaviorists would analyze Jones’s belief that it is going to rain into sets of statements about his rain-avoidance behavior. But the difficulty with that is that we can only begin to make such a reduction on the assumption that Jones desires to stay dry. So the assumption that Jones will carry an umbrella if he believes that it is going to rain is only plausible if we suppose that Jones does not want to be rained on. But then if we are analyzing belief in terms of desire, it looks like there is a kind of circularity in the reduction. We did not really reduce the belief to behavior; we reduced it to behavior plus desire, which still leaves us with a mental state that needs to be analyzed.