The public of others perspective supports our understanding of, and dealing with, overt behavior while the public of one perspective supports our understanding and interpretation of covert behavior.
Consider the covert verbal behavior that constitutes the common kind of purely neural behavior that we call thinking. This opens the path to seeing consciousness combine brain processes and behavior chaining. We often use the term thinking to describe this kind of covert neural verbal behavior, but we recognize that thinking need not be verbal, and happens in other sense modes as well. Ever find some piece of music playing “inside your head?”
The development of the natural science of behavior, including the rise of its philosophy of science that we call behavioral naturalism, led to an increasing interest in answering long–standing human questions like those surrounding consciousness. Scientists began dealing with some of the difficulties in dealing with notions like “awareness” and “self awareness” scientifically.
Consider the term “consciousness” as but one example of labels that natural sciences, like behaviorology, clarify and can then use. Words with connotations similar to this traditional term occur early in many languages across human history and geography.
