Philosophy of Mind

Matthew Soteriou

Lecture PlanWeek 1: An Introduction to Physicalism and Mind-Body Problems Week 2: Identity Theories of Mind Week 3: Davidson’s Anomalous Monism Week 4: Functionalism Week 5: Modal Arguments for Dualism Week 7: The Phenomenology of Experience and the Appeal to Introspection Week 8: The Content of Experience Week 9: Other Minds and the Metaphysics of Mind

Week 10: The Epistemological Problem of Other Minds

ReadingIntroductory Books • Heil, J. Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction (3rd ed.)• McGinn, C. 1991. The Character of Mind: an Introduction to the Philosophy of

Mind, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Originally published 1982.)• Kim, J. 2006. The Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Westview Press. (2nd ed.)

Anthologies• Chalmers, D. Philosophy of Mind: Clasical and Contemporary Readings• Rosenthal, D., ed. 1991. The Nature of Mind. New York: Oxford University

Press.• Lycan, W. ed. 1990. Mind and Cognition: a Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.• Guttenplan, S., ed. 1994. A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford:

Blackwell Reference.

Week 1

Physicalism and the Mind-Body Problem

What is the Mind-Body Problem?

Various questions we might raise and which we might think of as falling under that general heading:

• What is the relation between mind and body?• What is the relation between mind and brain?• What is the relation between the mental and

the physical?

Mind-Body Problems?

It’s not obvious that these questions are equivalent. It may be that there are a number of related but different puzzles about that can be raised about the relations between ‘mind’ and ‘body’.

A solution to one may not automatically us with a solution to the others.

Mind-body problems

Suppose we hold a materialist view according to which mind and matter are identical. There is just one kind of substance – material substance.

A question we can then ask is what makes it the case that certain bits of matter count as having minds. What is it to have a mind?

Mind-body problems

Suppose we hold that mind and matter are distinct substances that causally interact with one another.

Does this claim in itself account for a phenomenon that Descartes noted: I am not in my body like a pilot in a ship?

Methodological Questions

Philosophy of Mind and the Empirical Science of Psychology:

Are these questions about the relation between mind and body the kinds of questions to which empirical science can provide us with answers?

Are there distinctively philosophical puzzles here?

Varieties of Dualism

Cartesian Dualism

Descartes was concerned to argue for a certain kind of metaphysical dualism: Substance dualism.

Mind and matter are distinct substances.

Cartesian Dualism

In Descartes’ discussion we find considered the conceivability and metaphysical possibility of disembodied existence.

He attempts to protect the coherence of the notion of disembodied existence by arguing that conscious thinking is an activity that the disembodied agent can engage in.

He argues that it is metaphysically possible for us to continue to exist as purely mental disembodied subjects, and if this is true, then we can’t be essentially material things.

Cartesian Dualism

So for Descartes, it is the fact that we can engage in conscious thinking that presents a difficulty for the materialist view – according to which there is only one kind of substance – material substance.

(And note that the kind of ‘conscious thinking’ he is concerned with is, arguably, the kind of conscious activity that only a self-conscious subject can engage in.)

Other varieties of dualism

The sort of mind-body problems that now receive most attention in the philosophy of mind are no longer framed in terms of questions about the distinctions between, and relations between, substances.

Mind-body problems are now more often framed in terms of an attempt to understand how the workings of the mind relate to workings of the body – that is, in terms of questions concerned with the distinctions between, and relations between, mental and bodily events, states and properties.

Property Dualism

Property dualists deny that mental properties just are physical properties. But they needn’t be committed to the claim that mind and matter are distinct substances, and they needn’t be committed to the idea that it is possible for us to continue to exist as purely mental disembodied subjects.

Conscious thinking and Sensory Consciousness

Current day property dualists often seem to think that there are aspects of sensory consciousness that present the real difficulty for physicalists.

Note the difference here with Descartes: For Descartes, sensory consciousness is a form of consciousness that is only available to the embodied subject, whereas conscious thinking is an activity that the disembodied agent can engage in.

So it is the latter, and not the former, that occupies a central place in his argument against materialism. Concerns that arise in connection with the former – i.e. sensory consciousness – seem, for Descartes, to have more to do with embodiment – the distinctive way in which distinct substances are united in the embodied, conscious, human subject.

Cartesian and Anti-Cartesian Approaches to Mind

Descartes’ legacy:

• Metaphysical thesis: The idea that there is a merely contingent connection between one’s mental life and the expression of one’s mental life in the publicly observable bodily action.

• Epistemological thesis: The suggestion is that even when a subject’s epistemic access to the material world is compromised, her epistemic access to her own mind and mental life remains intact.

“Metaphysical Hermits”

The two theses are related: The subject’s epistemic access to her own mind and mental life does not depend on a secure epistemic route to the material world, for the connections between the mental and material realms are merely causal and contingent. There is an asymmetry between one’s knowledge of one’s own mind and one’s knowledge of the material world – the former is especially secure in a way that the latter is not.

Brian O’Shaughenssy: On this view inhabitants of the mental realm are “metaphysical hermits”. They “stand in no binding need of manifesting their existence in bodily extremities in any way”.

Anti-Cartesian Approaches

The twentieth century reaction against this ‘Cartesian’ conception of the mental, and against the postulation of such “metaphysical hermits”, emerges under various guises, and develops in a variety of ways.

Anti-Cartesian Approaches

The rejection of an epistemic view that would make a subject’s mental life both private to that subject and infallibly accessible to her. The claim that it is a mistake to regard as merely contingent the connections between one’s mental life and publicly observable bodily manifestations of one’s mental life.

Anti-Cartesian Approaches

This development puts bodily action right at the heart of this new approach to, and understanding of, mentality. An understanding of the psychological subject as, essentially, a bodily agent.

Behaviourism, Functionalism, and Davidson’s Interpretationist view of the mind all accommodate this idea in different ways.

The emergence of a further problem

The suggestion that maybe the publicly observable bodily manifestations of our mentality and agency can be explained without essential recourse to certain conscious, phenomenal aspects of mind.

Does this give rise to a conception of mentality that creates conceptual space for a notion of mentality and agency that doesn’t entail phenomenal consciousness? The suggestion that were we to strip mentality of these phenomenal features we would still have mentality and agency?

The ‘Hard’ Problem of Consciousness

Gives rise to the problem of phenomenal consciousness: The problem of ‘subjective experience’ – those aspects of mind for which there is something it is like to be in them or undergo them.

Puzzles raised about how such aspects of mind fit into our more general view of the world.

The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.

Physicalism

Physicalism is (perhaps) close to the orthodoxy in current philosophy of mind. But why think that physicalism is correct? What problem or problems is physicalism supposed to resolve?

Physicalism

What is physicalism? How are we to define the view?

Everything that exists is (really) physical. So, the mental / the mind / I is / am physical.

The ‘Physical’?

Problems are involved in stating exactly what each term in the definition means.

How should we define what’s meant by physical?

Compare Descartes’ understanding of the ‘material’: extension is the principal attribute of matter. Should we define the physical in such terms?

Two problems:• Definition of matter no longer helpful given

advances in physics.

• We need to think about the problem, not in terms of substances, but in terms of other ontological categories, such as states, events, properties etc.

Defining ‘Physical’

We need to try to define physicalism without begging the question as to whether the mental is physical, and without making assumptions about the kinds of things that physics might eventually say there is.

E.g. The Physical is everything that the ultimately correct and complete physics will say there is.

Defining ‘mental’

How should we define the mental?

Is ‘intentionality’ the mark of the mental?Is consciousness the mark of the mental?

Many simply take paradigm cases of what we think of as mental and determine whether there are any arguments to suggest that such things must really be physical.

‘is’?

Leaves the problem of how to define “is”.

The “is” of identity? If so, what is identical with what? Mental properties identical with physical properties? Mental events identical with physical events? Mental states identical with physical states? Mental actions identical with physical events?

Argument for Physicalism – the causal argument

1. Mental events cause physical events2. Completeness of physics3. No overdetermination

Solution: Mental events are physical events.

Questions

What justifies the completeness of physics claim?

What kind of physicalism would this commit us to?

Argument for non-physicalism: Jackson’s Mary Argument

A thought experiment:

Mary, a brilliant scientist, is confined to a black-and-white room, and is educated through black-and-white books.

She learns everything there is to know about the nature of the physical world, so her knowledge includes all the physical facts there are to know about colour vision. But she has never seen the colour red.

When Mary is eventually let out of her black-and-white room and she finally sees something red, she learns something new - she learns what it is like to see red.

Mary learns some new fact – a new fact about the mental.

She knew all the physical facts. So there are some aspects of the mind – some facts about the mental – that physics is incapable of explaining and accounting for.

So the mental is not simply physical.

Therefore, Physicalism is false.