Logical/Methodological Behaviorism, Definitions Quote

In its crudest version, behaviorism says the mind just is the behavior of the body. There is nothing over and above the behavior of the body that is constitutive of the mental. Behaviorism comes in two flavors, “methodological behaviorism” and “logical behaviorism....”

Methodological Behaviorism

Methodological behaviorism was a movement in psychology. It attempted to put psychology on a respectable scientific footing, along with other natural sciences, by insisting that psychology should study only objectively observable behavior. The “laws” that such a discipline was supposed to discover were laws that would correlate the input stimulus to the organism with the output response behavior; and for this reason, behaviorist psychology was sometimes called “stimulus-response” psychology. The behaviorists were so influential that for a time they even succeeded in changing the definition of psychology. Psychology was no longer the “science of the mind” but the “science of human behavior.” This view was called “methodological behaviorism” because it proposed a method in psychology rather than a substantive claim about the existence or nonexistence of the mind. The real objection to dualism, the methodological behaviorists claimed, was not that it postulates nonexistent entities, but rather that it is scientifically irrelevant. Scientific claims have to be objectively testable, and the only objectively testable claims about the human mind are claims about human behavior....

Logical Behaviorism

Logical behaviorism was primarily a movement in philosophy, and it made a much stronger claim than methodological behaviorism. The methodological behaviorists said that Cartesian dualism was scientifically irrelevant, but the logical behaviorists said that Descartes was wrong as a matter of logic. A statement about a person’s mental state, such as the statement that a person believes that it is going to rain or is feeling a pain in his elbow just means the same as, it can be translated into, a set of statements about that person’s actual and possible behavior. It need not be translatable into statements about presently existing behavior, for a person might have a pain or a belief that he was not then and there manifesting in behavior, but then the statement has to be translatable into a set of hypothetical statements about behavior, what the agent would do or would say under such and such circumstances.

Searle, John R. (2004-11-01). Mind: A Brief Introduction (Fundamentals of Philosophy) (pp. 49-52). Oxford University Press - A. Kindle Edition.