Revisiting Sellars. Behaviorism and the Myth of Jones

The myth of Jones, the thought experiment that Sellars narrates in the last part of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956), is usually considered as an attempt to show that one should reject both the Cartesian picture (according to which the mind is a set of mental objects immediately accessible to the subject who has them), and its behaviouristic alternative (according to which mental episodes do not take place, in a relevant sense, inside the person who has them). However, the paper illustrates the manifold forms of behaviourism, which the myth of Jones depends on, and evaluates the consequences of such dependence. On the one hand, in the philosophy of language Sellars presupposes a behaviouristic account of language acquisition, which is incoherent with other Sellarsian claims but does not make Sellars’s thought-experiment, considered as an argument in narrative form, invalid. On the other hand, in the philosophy of mind Sellars provides a behaviouristic account of self-knowledge, which makes the myth of Jones invalid.