This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Minds, Brains and Science, given by John Sell, was originally

broadcast in 1984.

We feel perfectly confident in saying things like Basil voted for the Tories because he liked

Mrs. Thatcher's handling of the Falklands affair.

But we have no idea how to go about saying things like,

Basil voted for the Tories because of a condition of his hypothalamus.

That is, we have common-sense explanations of people's behavior in mental terms,

in terms of their desires, wishes,

fears, hopes, and so on. And we suppose that there must also be a neurophysiological sort of

explanation of people's behavior in terms of processes in their brains. The trouble is that

the first of these sorts of explanation works well enough in practice

but is not scientific, whereas the second is certainly scientific, but we have no idea how

to make it work in practice. Now, that leaves us apparently with a gap, a gap between the

brain and the mind. And some of the greatest intellectual efforts of the 20th century have been attempts

to fill this gap, to get a science of human behavior, which was not just common-sense grandmother

psychology, but was not scientific neurophysiology either. Up to the present time, without exception,

the gap-filling efforts have been failures.

Behaviorism was the most spectacular failure, but in my lifetime, I have lived through

exaggerated claims made on behalf of and eventually disappointed by games theory, cybernetics,

information theory, structuralism, sociobiology, and a bunch of others.

To anticipate a bit, I'm going to claim that all the gap-filling efforts fail because there isn't any gap to fill.

...