Gray Matters

Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind

Sanford Goldberg, Andrew Pessin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317469391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

Gray Matters is a thorough examination of the main topics in recent philosophy of mind. It aims at surveying a broad range of issues, not all of which can be subsumed under one position or one philosopher's theory. In this way, the authors avoid neglecting interesting issues out of allegiance to a given theory of mind.

1
Naturalism

Naturalism and the Philosophy of Mind

Overview

Speculation about the nature of mind is as ancient as philosophy itself. In this book we attempt to give a broad introduction to five of the main issues that contemporary philosophers discuss in relation to the mind. Because there is one assumption that plays a particularly prominent role throughout our discussion, we begin our introduction with a chapter on this prominent assumption, the doctrine of naturalism.

The doctrine of naturalism (N) is a metaphysical doctrine. In broad outline it states that the only properties, states, entities, and events that exist are natural properties, states, entities, and events. The significance of this claim rests on the conception of what is to count as "natural"; in particular, N holds that a property, state, entity, or event is natural when and only when it can be understood in terms of the fundamental theories of natural science. So understood, N is a thesis about how to study the furniture of our world: It tells us that if our aim is to come to know of the existence and nature of all there is, then our best guide is natural science.

Below we present a defense of N on the grounds that N embodies a sensible repudiation of supernatural forces and entities. But before we do this, let's give a quick sense of the relevance of N to philosophical discussions concerning the nature of mind. That relevance is straightforward: Not long after the start of a philosophical discussion about the nature of mind, one begins to hear reference to such things as minds, mental states, mental properties, and mental events. In fact it is often in these terms that philosophers have formulated the central questions of philosophy of mind: Just what are the nature of these mental states, properties, and events, and how do they fit together to compose what we call "the mind"?

To be sure, such questions would not seem particularly problematic —at least they would not seem philosophically problematic—unless we already knew something of the nature of mental states and what we knew (or thought we knew) gave rise to perplexity. This is precisely the case; When we examine the assumptions we make when we speak about minds and mental states in everyday discourse, we find that they do lead to some bewilderment. And in fact it is here that the doctrine of naturalism figures so prominently, for we become puzzled as soon as we try to square what we think we know about minds with the assumption that the mind can be understood naturalistically.

Pretheoretical Doctrines and Accompanying Terminology

Perhaps we should begin by stating the assumption that gives rise to the view that the mind can be understood in natural terms. Since the seventeenth century, most people have assumed that minds (at least those of the human variety) are intimately related to brains (or perhaps the whole central nervous system). In order to avoid squabbles about just what physical entity is the seat of the mind, let's be even more vague: The human mind is intimately related to (some part of) the human body. So stated, this assumption is vague enough to have the feel of a truism. But hazy as it is, this "truism" already gives us enough to be perplexed. For (to trot out another "truism") the human body and all of its parts are physical, and yet (as we shall see) mental states have some characteristics that make it difficult to comprehend how there could be an "intimate relation" between the mind and anything that is physical. Although we develop this theme at length throughout the book, we pause here to anticipate some of our subsequent discussions.

To begin, consider a mental state like the feeling of excruciating pain. What is distinctive about such a mental state is the "feel" that it has: Pain feels like nothing else, has an almost indescribable qualitative awfulness. Suppose, then, we want to understand the connection between this almost indescribable qualitative awfulness and the body to which the feeling is purportedly "intimately related." Perhaps the response will be that states of the body are causally related to the pain. (Doesn't medical science tell us that damage to a body gives rise to feelings of pain?) Well, consider what we would say if a friend of ours told us that some rock over yonder feels pain whenever it is physically damaged. Surely we would greet such a statement with incredulity: How could a rock "feel pain" at all? A rock, after all, is a physical object through and through, and objects that are physical through and through are not in the business of "feeling" anything at all. The parallel between rocks and the human body is meant to be unflattering, of course. For if we're incredulous when hearing of a rock's feeling pain, why aren't we incredulous when hearing of a human body's feeling pain? The body, after all, is a physical object through and through, too—how could it give rise to something like a "feel"?

It might be thought that what differentiates the two cases is that there is a person intimately related to the physical states of the human body, while there is no person intimately related to the physical states of the rock. On this response, only persons are suitable subjects for felt pains—that is, only persons (not bodies or rocks) feel pains—and since no person is related to the physical states of the rock as a person is related to the physical states of a human body, the rock can't be intimately related to felt pains at all. But suppose now that our friend who insisted on the rock's feeling pain also insisted that, common assumptions notwithstanding, there is a person intimately related to the rock! After all, he points out, this supposition appears to be no more crazy than the supposition that persons are intimately related to the human body. Both rocks and bodies are wholly physical objects, so if we allow that persons can be intimately related to one (namely, human bodies), then it appears that parallel reasoning requires us to allow that persons can be intimately related to the other (namely, rocks).

In fact few people would draw such a conclusion from this line of reasoning. But we may note something that this line of reasoning has shown. It has shown that the appeal to an intimate relation between persons and human bodies only transforms the issue we originally began with—how pains can be related to bodies—into the issue how persons can be related to bodies. But the issues are fundamentally the same; in no sense does the appeal to the intimate person-body relation resolve the issue. In light of this, let us stick with the original formulation of the issue: How can bodies be related to feels?

We can now state one property that (some) mental states have that appears incompatible with the supposition of an intimate mind-body relation. We use the term "qualia" to designate this property. By "qualia" we understand those "intrinsic qualitative feels" that are features of (some) mental states. To get a sense of what qualia are, consider how we distinguish between hunger and satiety; pain and pleasure; itchiness and nauseousness. Each of these phenomena is characterized by an "intrinsic feel": There is that characteristic feeling of hunger and feeling of fullness, feeling of pain and feeling of pleasure, and so on. (Life without such feelings would be bland indeed.) In any case, the feature whereby some mental states have associated qualia—have a qualitative dimension—is the first of the features that make the mind-brain relation hard to fathom: How could merely physical states like states of the human body be intimately related to anything like "intrinsic feels"?¹

There is a second feature possessed by (some) mental states that makes the mind-body relation difficult to conceive in naturalistic terms. Consider a mental state like believing that philosophy is dull. This state has the peculiar feature of being about the dullness of philosophy. And in fact it is easily seen that many (most?) of our mental states have this peculiar property of being about something. In general, any state that can be described as a state of believing, hoping, fearing, desiring, wondering, imagining, and so on is a state that has this feature of aboutness. But: How can a state of our bodies be about anything at all? To see the peculiarity of this question, return again to that rock over yonder: What is it about? The overwhelming inclination is to say that it is not in the aboutness business; but if it isn't, then by what right do we suppose that the human body (the central nervous system; the brain) is in that business?

Here we have identified a second feature of mental states that, while perhaps not truly unique to minds as qualia are—consider that pictures and sentences also have this property of aboutness—nonetheless is a feature that raises some perplexity when we consider matters from the perspective of the physical body. We call this feature whereby a mental state is about something the "intentional" dimension of a mental state. And we use the term "intentionality" to cover this property of aboutness in all its manifestations, whether we are talking about mental states, pictures, or sentences.

Given that we do have these other examples of physical objects that possess intentionality, the task of fitting the intentional dimension of mental states into the physical world of the body need not pose the kind of deep perplexity that we encountered when we thought about the task of fitting qualia into the physical world. Nonetheless it is an interesting (and, as we shall see, by no means easy) problem to determine how (any part of) the body could be the locus of intentionality. To get a brief glimpse of the difficulty, we need to introduce one final term associated with the intentional dimension of mental states. We use the term "representational content" (or sometimes simply "content") to refer to what a given mental state is about. So when the mental state in question is a belief that philosophy is dull, the representational content of this mental state is that philosophy is dull. And an idea of a particular cow has as its representational content that particular cow that the idea is of.² The perplexity arises when we try to figure out which of the body's physical features determine the representational content of the associated mental state. (In fact many philosophers have argued that the body alone is not sufficient for determining the representational content of our beliefs, thoughts, imaginings, and so on; rather, the body needs the help of the world to provide the subject matter of these mental states.)

Before moving on to characterize further and defend the doctrine of naturalism, we should make one final point. Consider that the preceding section ended with a point about natural properties and events: We stated that science is the best arbiter of what is to be found in nature. Yet in the present section we abandoned talk of natural properties completely and replaced it with worries about where the mind fits into the physical world. Are we assuming, then, that the only properties discovered by the natural sciences are exclusively physical properties? Well, to the extent that the natural sciences are physical sciences, we are making this assumption. But we must acknowledge that science is an open-ended inquiry, and it is at least conceivable that one day there will be natural sciences that are not physical sciences. In light of this, we distinguish between naturalism, understood as the thesis that our best guide to whatever exists is natural science, and physicalism, understood as the thesis that reality is exhaustively physical in nature. The latter thesis is admittedly more contentious, but in view of the successes of the physical sciences, many people believe that it is still an eminently reasonable thesis.

In any case, at various points throughout this book we assume a physicalist version of naturalism. This is useful for two reasons. First, a good many of the traditional and contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind assume such a version; so our assumption will enable us to introduce the reader to these discussions. Second, whether or not all of nature is physical, the human body is certainly physical—and the issue of how mind relates to body is at the very core of philosophical issues about the mind. Both of these points make the assumption of physicalism useful, if only to bring out the nature of some of the difficulties we examine.

Since it would surely be dogmatic to insist on the truth of a version of physicalism, we pause to make one final acknowledgment. When we consider any of the arguments that depend on the assumption of physicalism (and there will be a few), we always have the option of resisting the conclusion of the argument by rejecting the premise of physicalism. However, given that at present our culture identifies the natural sciences with the physical sciences, this is not a move that we should make lightly: It would require nothing less than a wholesale upheaval, either in the nature of scientific theory itself or in our view concerning the merits of science in our attempts to understand the world.

The Plausibility of the Doctrine of Naturalism

But why should we place such "faith" in the ability of the natural sciences to tell us what there is? Isn't naturalism just the replacement of one faith (in the supernaturalism of religion) with another (in the method of science)? In this section we try to defend the doctrine of naturalism as occupying a justifiably prominent place in our world-view. In characterizing the doctrine, we lean on the idea that N plays an essential role in shaping a properly scientific attitude; our defense of N consists in showing that as a matter of fact, many of our most firm convictions can be justified only by appeal to something like the scientific attitude embodied by N. We attest to this latter claim by considering one kind of difficulty that would arise if we were to abandon the doctrine. The conclusion is that any view of the world that hopes to lay claim to contemporary allegiance will have little choice but to endorse some version of naturalism, on pain of not being able to justify many of our most firm convictions. In short, if naturalism is indeed a "faith," it is the contemporary faith par excellence: Abandoning it would require a radical revision in what we believe (or else in how we justify our beliefs).

Let's begin our discussion of naturalism with a more careful statement of the doctrine itself. As we understand it here, naturalism can be characterized as the view that

Our best scientific theories are the best guide to the types of things that exist: Only those types of states, properties, entities, and events are real that are acknowledged by our best scientific theories as real.

In more intuitive terms, N states that scientific theory provides the best picture we have of the world: The categories that figure in scientific theory serve as a catalogue of all the kinds of things there are in the world, and scientific theory itself gives us the best picture of the nature of such things. To repeat, this view is said to be "naturalistic" because the sciences in question are the natural sciences, and their domain consists of the objects, properties, and events that exist in nature.³

Since N states a view about what types of things (entities, properties, and events) are real, one way to grasp the significance of N is to examine this view. What does it mean when we say that a type of thing (event, property) is (or is not) acknowledged by science to be real? In what ways does scientific theory acknowledge a type of thing to be real?

T...