Philosophy of Mind

An Introduction

Tim Bayne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000471069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Developments in the philosophy of mind over the last 20 years have dramatically changed the nature of the subject. In this major new introduction, Tim Bayne presents an outstanding overview of many of the key topics, problems, and debates, taking account not only of changes in philosophy of mind itself but also of important developments in the scientific study of the mind.

The following topics are discussed in depth:

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• What distinguishes a physicalist conception of the mind?

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• Behaviourism, the identity theory, functionalism, and eliminativism as accounts of the mental

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• The nature of perception, including the issue of perceptual transparency, the admissible contents of perception, and the question of unconscious perception

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• The nature of thought, including the language of thought hypothesis, Searle's Chinese room argument, and the Turing test

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• The basis of intentional content

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• Externalist accounts of content and the 'extended mind' thesis

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• Consciousness-based objections to physicalism, and illusionist and panpsychist conceptions of consciousness

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• Theories of consciousness, including methodological issues in the study of consciousness

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• Mental causation, including both philosophical and scientific challenges

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• The problem(s) of other minds, including knowledge of non-human minds

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• Self-knowledge

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• Personal identity and the nature of the self

The book features a number of boxes that provide a more in-depth look at particular issues. Also included are chapter summaries, guides to further reading, and a helpful glossary of terms.

Written by a leading figure in the field, Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction is an invaluable core text for any student coming to philosophy of mind for the first time.

1

Marks of the mental

DOI: 10.4324/9781003225348-2

Chapter overview

• Considers three possible ‘marks of the mental’: privacy, intentionality, and consciousness
• Introduces the relationship between consciousness and intentionality as a key question in the philosophy of mind
• Presents the notion of folk psychology.

1.1 Aspects of mentality

How do minded beings differ from those that lack minds? One feature that distinguishes things with minds from things without minds is that the former have various faculties that the latter lack. Consider, for example, your ability to read the sentences on this page. In order to see these sentences you need to employ the faculty of sight, and in order to comprehend their meaning you must have the capacity to read. Species differ in the kinds of perceptual systems that they possess, but arguably all minded creatures have the capacity to perceive a range of objects and events in their environment.

Other mental capacities are concerned with action. Minded beings are agents, and it seems a pretty safe bet to assume that the evolution of mentality was heavily constrained by the need for smart and efficient action. Your brain is an expensive organ to run – although it weighs only 2% of your total body weight, it demands 20% of your resting metabolic energy – and evolution is unlikely to have fostered the capacity for mentality unless it paid off. Whether it involves reaching for a cup of coffee, looking for a friend in a crowd, or deciding which pant leg to put on first, much of our mental lives is dedicated to the control of behaviour.

The mental capacities of some creatures don’t extend much beyond those that are directly implicated in perception and action. Other creatures, however, enjoy a broader suite of mental capacities. We ourselves belong to this second class: not only can we perceive and act, we can also think. (Is thinking a kind of acting? Perhaps, but it’s certainly a different kind of acting from moving one’s body.) We can weigh up competing sources of evidence, we can consider the consequences of a various plans of action, and we can adopt the perspectives of other creatures. Thought allows us to exploit our perceptual capacities in novel ways. Instead of waiting for the world to present itself for inspection, a thinker can manipulate the world in order to see what would happen under certain conditions. (That, in a nutshell, is what an experiment is.) Thought also enables us to exploit our capacities for action in new ways, and thus massively expand the kind of control we have over our environments.

There are other mental faculties too, of course. There is the faculty of memory, which can perhaps be regarded as a kind of perception of the past. There is emotion, which is bound up in complex ways with perceiving, thinking, and acting. And there is imagination, a faculty that enables us to envisage how things might be in the future or how they might have been had things gone differently. A full understanding of mentality needs to account for each of these faculties and the ways in which they are related to each other.

In addition to considering the contrast between different types of mental faculties, we also need to consider the contrast between different types of mental phenomena. Here, we can distinguish between mental events, mental processes, and mental states.

Mental events are dated, particular, happenings. The paradigmatic examples of mental events are bodily sensations, such as headaches, itches, pains, sensations of thirst and of hunger, and feelings of drowsiness and of lightheadedness. But not all mental events involve the awareness of one’s body; indeed, not all mental events are sensory. Some mental events – such as getting a joke or realizing that one has been insulted – are cognitive.

Mental processes unfold over time and often involve transitions between mental events. Consider what is involved in deciding where to go for dinner. You might weigh up the pros and cons of various options and deliberate about what the best course of action is. This is an example of practical reasoning. Other mental processes involve theoretical reasoning. When you encounter authors with divergent views on some topic in the philosophy of mind (as you surely will) then you will need to deliberate as to which of the competing claims is the more plausible. Mental processes can also involve imagery of various kinds. If you’ve just been presented with plans for renovating your house, you may need to engage in a process of visualization in order to know what the result of the renovations will look like.

The term ‘mental state’ is employed in different ways within philosophy. Some authors use it to refer solely to what I will call ‘standing states’: mental phenomena that do not ‘unfold over time’ in the way in which mental processes do. Beliefs are standing states. Suppose that Bella believes that sloths are herbivores. As long as Bella doesn’t forget that sloths are herbivores or change her mind for some reason, she will continue to believe that sloths are herbivores even when she is asleep or is engrossed in doing a jigsaw puzzle and is not thinking about sloths at all. Desires and intentions are also standing states. Just as Bella can believe that sloths are herbivores when dreamlessly asleep, so too she can also desire to learn more about sloths or intend to acquire a pet sloth even when dreamlessly asleep. But although some philosophers reserve the phrase ‘mental state’ for standing states of the kind that we have just described, others use the phrase in a more inclusive sense that includes not just standing states but also mental events and processes. I generally use the phrase in this broader sense and will refer to standing states as ‘standing states’.

Another notion that plays an important role in the philosophy of mind is that of a mental property. We each have a great many properties. I have the property of being 5 feet 7 inches tall, of having been to Addis Ababa, and of being a poor swimmer. These are physical properties, but I also have mental properties of various kinds. For example, I have the property of knowing how tall I am, of remembering having been to Addis Ababa, and of intending to become a better swimmer.

How do mental properties differ from mental states? Although the nature (i.e., ontology) of properties is a contested matter, for our purposes the crucial point is that different objects can have (or instantiate) the same property. I am not the only person in the world who is 5 feet 7 inches, nor am I the only person to remember having been to Addis Ababa or who intends to become a better swimmer. By contrast, mental states, events, and processes are what philosophers call particulars: they are datable and locatable occurrences. Although you and I might both believe that Addis Ababa is in Ethiopia, my belief that Addis Ababa is in Ethiopia is distinct from your belief that Addis Ababa is in Ethiopia.

The relationship between mental states and mental properties is something about which there is much debate. Some theorists take mental states as primitives, and hold that a person has a mental property in virtue of being in a certain mental state. Another approach, and one that I find more attractive, takes mental properties as fundamental, and holds that a mental state can be identified with a particular creature having (or ‘instantiating’, as we might put it) a mental property at a time. On this view, mental properties are more basic than mental states. Although the distinction between mental states and mental properties is important for certain debates, one can often move back and forth between talk of mental states and talk of mental properties without undue risk of confusion, and I will often do precisely that.

Thus far we have discussed the notion of mental faculties, events, processes, states, and properties, but what of minds themselves? What is the mind? Talk of the mind needs to be handled with care. Placing the definite article before ‘mind’ suggests that minds are things: objects of a certain kind, on a par perhaps with bricks, bicycles, and bandicoots. But as seductive as that thought might be, it should be regarded with suspicion. Although certain theorists (‘substance dualists’) conceive of minds as things, this position is very much a minority one within the philosophy of mind, and most philosophers are highly (and, in my view, rightly) suspicious of reifying minds (i.e., treating them as ‘things’). In many respects, it is perhaps best to think of the mind as a convenient shorthand for picking out the kinds of mental phenomena that we have surveyed here. That said, we do need to give an account of what distinguishes the mental states of one person from those of another. What makes certain thoughts and feelings yours and other thoughts and feelings mine? This question is bound up with questions about the nature of the self. We consider it in Chapter 13.

1.2 The privacy of the mental

It is all very well to distinguish different kinds of mental phenomena from each other, but what exactly do we mean when we describe something as mental? What distinguishes mental phenomena as a class from non-mental phenomena?

The attempt to find a defining feature of mentality is often referred to as the search for the ‘mark of the mental’. The aim of this project is to find a property (or, perhaps, some collection of properties) that is both necessary and sufficient for mentality. In other words, everything that is mental would have it (that’s the necessary bit), and anything that has it would be mental (that’s the sufficient bit). We might think of the search for the mark (or mark s) of the mental as attempting to capture the essence of mentality.

One property that has sometimes been touted as a potential mark of the mental is privacy. The intuitive idea is that mental phenomena can be distinguished from non-mental phenomena on the basis of the kind of access that one has to them. Suppose that you have a splitting headache. Your access to your own headache isn’t mediated by any kind of evidence, but is direct and immediate. But now consider how things stand from my perspective – the third-person perspective. I might be able to tell that you have a headache from what you do and say, but I don’t have the kind of direct access to it that you do. So, there seems to be a deep contrast between the kind of access that one has to one’s current mental states and the kind of access one has to the mental states of other people (Box: Brain-reading?).

This contrast does not characterize one’s access to physical states, for there is no deep asymmetry between the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective when it comes to knowledge of a person’s physical states. In principle, you can figure out my height, age, and weight in roughly the same kinds of ways that I can. Indeed, sometimes other people are better informed about one’s own height, age, and weight than one is oneself. So, mental phenomena seem to exhibit a kind of privacy that physical phenomena do not.

Box: Brain-reading?

At present, gaining access to another person’s mind requires interrogating their behaviour and drawing inferences from what they do and say. However, advances in neuroscience raise the prospect of ‘brain-reading’ (or ‘brain-decoding’), in which information about brain activity is used to identify a person’s thoughts. In one study, subjects were told that they would be presented with two numerals (e.g., 3 and 7), and that they were to then either mentally add the presented numbers together or subtract one number from the other. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the experimenters were able to tell with up to 70% accuracy whether a subject had decided to add the two numbers or subtract one number from the other (Haynes et al. 2007). In a sense, fMRI was being used to engage in a primitive form of mindreading.

At only 70% accuracy, there is arguably no real threat to mental privacy here. The interesting questions revolve around what the future of this kind of technology might be. Could someone armed with a suitably powerful brain decoder know exactly what you’re thinking and feeling? Could another person’s access to your mental states rival – or even outstrip – your own? Or are there fundamental limits on the kind of access that other people could have to your mental states?

Further reading

• Dennett, D. 1978. Brain Writing and Mind Reading. Brainstorms. MIT Press.
• Haynes, J-D. et al. 2007. Reading Hidden Intentions in the Human Brain. Current Biology, 17: 323–28.

Although privacy is certainly an important aspect of mentality, it is doubtful whether it can provide us with a mark of the mental – something that enables us to distinguish mental from non-mental phenomena. There are at least three reasons for this.

First, although neurotypical adult human beings have robust access to many of their own mental states, it is doubtful whether this kind of access extends to all minded creatures. Perhaps young children, people who have suffered from severe brain damage, or certain types of non-human animals lack the capacity to become aware of their own experiences and thoughts. In fact, there are pathologies of adult cognition in which individuals seem to lack full access to their own mental states. For example, individuals who suffer from Anton’s syndrome believe that they can see despite the fact that they are largely, and in some cases completely, blind (Forde & Wallesch 2003; Goldenberg et al. 1995). Anton’s syndrome is a species of anosognosia, a condition in which patients are unaware of a deficit from which they suffer, such as paralysis, deafness, or aphasia (difficulty producing meaningful speech). Anosognosia is of great philosophical interest, for it puts pressure on the intuitive idea that we always know our own states of mind better than other people do.¹

Second, the kind of direct access that we have to many kinds of mental phenomena doesn’t seem to extend to mental phenomena of all forms. Even if one always has better access to one’s own pains, aches, and itches than other people do, one’s anger, depression, or grief might be more apparent to others than it is to oneself. Similarly, self-deception can blind a person to their own desires and motivations.

Third, there are mental states to which we lack any kind of first-person access. For example, vision scientists explain why we are susceptible to certain kinds of perceptual illusions by supposing that there are representations in the visual system which ‘assume’ that objects are illuminated from above. These representations are not states to which you have direct access. Instead, your reasons for ascribing these states to yourself are precisely the same reasons that I have for ascribing them to you; namely, that they explain certain kinds of illusions. Although one could deny that representational states of these kinds are genuine mental states (as some theorists do), there are good reasons to adopt a more inclusive conception of what counts as mental, and to hold that mental phenomena don’t just include familiar personal-level states such as pains, beliefs, and visual experiences, but also the kinds of subpersonal representational states that are posited by psychologists and neuroscientists to explain our behaviour (see Box: The personal/subpersonal distinction).

Box: The personal/subpersonal distinction

In his book Content and Consciousness, Daniel Dennett introduced an important contrast between two types of explanations: personal explanations and subpersonal explanations. The former concern ‘people and their sensations and activities’, whereas the latter focus on the ‘level of brains and events in the nervous system’ (Dennett 1969: 93). Dennett claimed that both personal and subpersonal explanations are mental, but he argued that it is important not to confuse subpersonal explanations with personal ones (or vice versa), for they are subject to different kinds of constraints. Corresponding to this distinction between two kinds of explanation is a distinction between two kinds of mental phenomena. Deciding to walk along a boulder-strewn beach involves states and processes at the personal level (it’s something that you do), whereas the computati...