Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 51 of 138
To be a behaviorist you have to feign anesthesia
The real difficulty with behaviorism, though, is that its sheer implausibility became more and more embarrassing. We do have thoughts and feelings and pains and tickles and itches, but it does not seem reasonable to suppose that these are identical with our behavior or even with our dispositions to behavior. The feeling of pain is one thing, pain behavior is something else. Behaviorism is so intuitively implausible that unsympathetic commentators often made fun of it. As early as the 1920s, I. A. Richards pointed out that to be a behaviorist you have to “feign anesthesia.”9 And university lecturers have a stock repertoire of bad jokes about behaviorism. A typical joke: a behaviorist couple just after making love, he says to her “It was great for you. How was it for me?”