This theme raises both metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning the mind. What is the mind? What is its place in nature? What is the relationship between mentality and physicality? How are mental states identified, experienced and known? Material covered in this theme is particularly useful as a complement to issues raised in the textual study of Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding or Descartes’ Meditations in Unit 4.
Substance dualism
While the issue of what is and what isn’t ‘reductive’ is contentious the term has been applied to analytically reductive views, ontologically reductive views and to attempts to define mental states in terms of the causal role they play.
If attempts at reduction are deemed to be unsuccessful where does this leave us?
Substance dualism
- Cartesian, or substance, dualism: the view that mind and body are distinct and separate entities. Reasons for holding this view.
- Problems associated with this view of mind, including solipsism; the problem of other minds and the mind-body problem.
- Responses to these problems: arguments against the possibility of starting from one’s own case, how we learn to self-ascribe and whether there could be a necessarily private language (such as a language describing private mental states); the argument from analogy and inference to the best explanation; accounts of the relationship between mind and body.
While the issue of what is and what isn’t ‘reductive’ is contentious the term has been applied to analytically reductive views, ontologically reductive views and to attempts to define mental states in terms of the causal role they play.
- Logical behaviourism, the logical analysis of mental concepts in terms of behaviour; identity theories, type and token versions of the ontological reduction of minds and mental processes to brains and brain processes; functionalist theories, machine and teleological versions of the reduction of mental states to a causal role. Arguments for and against these positions.
- The features of consciousness thought to resist reduction: particularly qualia and intentionality.
- The hard problem of consciousness: how is it that some physical organisms are subjects of experience, how does the water of the brain give rise to the rich wine of consciousness? Whether zombies are conceivable and possible. Whether artificial intelligence is intelligent.
If attempts at reduction are deemed to be unsuccessful where does this leave us?
- The view of consciousness as an emergent or supervenient property of the brain (or other suitably complex physical system). Biological naturalism or anomalous monism. Arguments and difficulties for such positions.
- Whether such views are materialist or versions of property dualism. Accounts of mental causation:how can we explain, or explain away, the belief that mental states such as reasons, beliefs, sensations and emotions are causes of actions.
- Eliminative materialism, the view that there’s nothing to reduce. The claim that talk about the mind and the mental articulates a redundant theory: ‘folk psychology’.
