Natalie Angier has another href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/science/21angier.html?sq=behavior%20what%20animals%20do&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print">interesting
article in the NYT.  In the article, she discusses the meaning
of the word behavior.  Apparently, this all came from the
realization that even standard works on the subject did not contain a
“point-by-point definition.” 

The realization came to href="http://dlevitis.org/dlevitis/Research.html">Dan Levitis, a
grad student in zoology at Berkeley.  Levitis happens to have a
Blogspot blog: Blog of
Science; he’s also href="http://blogofscience.blogspot.com/2009/07/ego-boost-of-science.html">posted
about the NYT article.  He decided to study the question. 
This led to the publication of an article in Animal Behaviour:

href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W9W-4WF8SBN-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=1d0603046d4a3271d7729e4c00489534">Behavioural
biologists do not agree on what constitutes behaviour
Daniel A. Levitis, William Z. Lidicker Jr., and Glenn Freunda
Animal Behaviour
Volume 78, Issue 1, July 2009, Pages 103-110

Behavioural biology is a major discipline within biology,
centred on the key concept of ‘behaviour’. But how is ‘behaviour’
defined, and how should it be defined? We outline what characteristics
we believe a scientific definition should have, and why we think it is
important that a definition have these traits. We then examine the
range of available published definitions for behaviour. Finding no
consensus, we present survey responses from 174 members of three
behaviour-focused scientific societies as to their understanding of the
term. Here again, we find surprisingly widespread disagreement as to
what qualifies as behaviour. Respondents contradict themselves, each
other and published definitions, indicating that they are using
individually variable intuitive, rather than codified, meanings of
‘behaviour’. We offer a new definition, based largely on survey
responses: behaviour is the internally coordinated responses (actions
or inactions) of whole living organisms (individuals or groups) to
internal and/or external stimuli, excluding responses more easily
understood as developmental changes. Finally, we discuss the usage,
meanings and limitations of this definition.

The definition is good.  However, it probably will do little
little to settle various questions.  Levitis is a biologist,
mostly studying non-human behavior.  The definition suits him just
fine.  However, when it comes to human-only behavior, the
definition is going to be tougher to nail down.

The definition, as Levitis et. al. put forth, would suit a behavioral
psychologist fine, even one who just deals with humans.  In a
clinical realm, however, the problem is going to arise between the
behaviorists and the cognitive folks.  (The analytic folks
probably won’t bother to address this.)

Behaviorists tend to think of thought as a subset of behavior. 
This puts behaviorists in a superior position, in that it means that
their theories encompass the theories of the cognitive folks; from this
point of view, cognitive therapy always will be based upon an
incomplete model.

Devotees of cognitive therapy, on the other hand, tend to see
behavioral therapy as being suited only to a few, uninteresting
clinical problems.  An example would be a simple phobia, where a
simple exposure therapy with response prevention (ETRP) protocol would
be appropriate.  Any problem that is more complex surely will
require devoted attention to cognition, in their view.  And, by
the way, thoughts are not behaviors.

This complication in refining the definition of behavior arises for two
reasons.  One is that the two schools of thought have different
traditions.  So they use the language differently.  The other
is that we have access to human thought, whereas we can only infer the
thoughts of nonhuman animals. 

Levitis et. al. decided to exclude thought from their definition of
behavior.  As href="http://differ.raysend.com/what-am-i-studying-what-the-hell-are-you-stud">pointed
out elsewhere:

While behaviours necessarily rely upon internal information
processing by the individual (e.g. cognition and endocrine signalling),
we do not consider the processing alone to be a response, and therefore
do not include it as behaviour. Shettleworth (1998, page 5) defines
cognition as ‘the mechanisms by which animals acquire, process, store
and act on information from the environment’. In behaviour, we include
the action, but deem the processing as necessary but not sufficient.
While this runs counter to the views of 80% of our respondents, we
think it is illogical to include cognitive processing while excluding
other forms of internal information processing such as genetic
expression cascades or endocrine feedback. Information processing may
be a necessary substrate for behaviour, but we do not consider it a
behaviour by itself.

There are problems with that.  I do not see a clear dividing line
between pure processing of information, and any other kind of
activity.  That is because processing of information is done over
time, with continuous feedback between thoughts, feelings, behaviors,
and perceptions.  Behaviors that are outwardly observable do have
an impact on what is going on inside the brain.  It is not
possible to separate the two processes. 

And by the way, the act sitting perfectly still is a form of
behavior.  There never is a time when an organism is not
performing some behavior. 

The way I see it, human (and animal) activity can be divided into four
domains: thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and actions.  But this
division is one of convenience.  I organize my approach to
clinical interviewing, as well as my approach to clinical
interventions, using those four domains.  It is how I organize my
mental model of clinical problems. 

I use that model because it is helpful, not because it reflects any
fundamental truth. 

The truth is that your brain does not care if particular neural
impulses result in — or result from — movement, thought, perception,
or emotion.  Neural impulses are neutral impulses.  One one
level, they are all the same.  We classify them into different
domains, based upon various traditions.  Those traditions reflect
truth, only to the extent that the truth arises by definition. 
Choose different definitions, you get a different truth.  But the
underlying reality (if there is one; I’m still not convinced) has not
changed.  As Neuroskeptic pointed out href="http://neurodojo.blogspot.com/2009/06/nobody-knows-what-behaviour-is.html">here,
“It’s surprisingly difficult to define most words.”

Levitis et. al. are proposing a change in how the word behavior
is defined.  If their definition becomes the one that is embraced
by tradition, then it becomes the truth.  But there are many
different disciplines that study behavior.  They study it in
different ways, for different purposes.  It is unlikely that they
ever will come to any sort of universal agreement about how to define
it.  In saying this, I do not mean to disparage Levitis et. al.,
because what they’ve done is important.  They have laid down a
marker, that can serve as a helpful point of reference to the various
disciplines.