1.2. Brief Historical Introduction
Philosophy can be defined in terms of its history, methodology, or content. In terms of its history, it is one of the oldest academic disciplines, playing a key role in the development of universities in (at least) Ancient Greece, India, and China (e.g., Walden, 1910, p. 18; Pinkney, 2015; Walton, 2018). In Ancient Greece, the term “philosophy” originally meant something like “striving after wisdom,” but in the academy it came to mean “the methodical work of thought, through which we are to know that which ‘is’ ” (Windelband, 1893, pp. 1–2). The term was once much more widely used to describe academic subjects, such that “in the late sixteenth century, Andreas Libavius warned a former student not to associate with chemists who were not philosophers” (Nye, 1994, p. 59). While physics and chemistry separated from philosophy relatively early, “psychology and sociology became essentially distinct from philosophy around the turn of the [20th] century” (Brooks, 1998, p. 15). Given this background, the story of philosophy as the progenitor of other academic disciplines is a compelling one, but philosophy has meant different things at different times, making it difficult to trace its definitive history as an academic discipline (Windelband, 1893, p. 4). Some have even asserted that the discipline is a modern invention (Ree, 1978).
Regardless of its history, philosophy continues to include the methodology and content of many other disciplines, making it difficult to separate from other disciplines: “Philosophy is unrivalled among academic disciplines in terms of its many and deep connections with the subject matter of other disciplines” (Hansson, 2008). Philosophers use methods from introspection to experimentation, on topics from art to mathematics. Yet, philosophy also includes methodology and content that are largely unique to the discipline and have long been seen as its core: “others contend that [philosophy] has its own special sphere, and identify it with logic, epistemology, ethics, or metaphysics” (Dodson, 1908, p. 454). Philosophy is also distinct from other disciplines in that it is concerned with questions and problems that are typically more abstract, conceptual, and theoretical than in other disciplines, such as understanding the nature of justice, knowledge, and power. Some general philosophical methods that are especially useful in the study of mind include critical reasoning (formulating and analyzing arguments), conceptual analysis (clarifying concepts through linguistic analysis or reconstruction), and intellectual history (tracing the origins of arguments and ideas; Van Gelder, 1998a).
Philosophers have long been engaged with scientific or “empirical” work, with Aristotle being responsible for foundational work in both philosophy and physics in Ancient Greece. In fact, philosophers often take a stance of naturalism, a viewpoint in which observed phenomena are assumed to be related to the natural world and candidates for scientific study (Papineau, 2021). Yet, philosophers vary in their understanding and appreciation of science, as well as in the consistency of their theories with science. A central figure in philosophy of mind, for example, is Descartes, a philosopher with “a naturalistic stance” who famously argued for a form of dualism—the theory that the mind is distinct from matter, in this case because it is made up of a nonmaterial substance (Hatfield, 2018; see Chapter 5). That substance is not spatially extended, making it difficult or impossible to reconcile with the sciences that study phenomena that are spatially extended. In the second half of the 20th century, many philosophers of mind engaged little with the relevant sciences: “Even those philosophers . . . who purported to take science as a model for philosophy of mind had little to say about the theories of any science” (Burge, 1992, p. 43). This changed in the 21st century. Philosophers of mind are now much more likely to be empirically informed and to engage with the sciences of mind. Thus, this textbook aims to update the philosophy of mind in keeping with this trend.
The scientific fields most relevant to the study of mind are psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience: the study of behavior, cognitive mechanism, and brain, respectively. Psychology broke off from philosophy in the late 19th century with the adoption of controlled behavioral experiments and, eventually, the rejection of introspective methods (see, e.g., Ben-David & Collins, 1966; Nicolas & Charvillat, 2001). It was transformed by “behaviorism,” a movement that shunned discussion of the internal workings of the mind, including attention and consciousness: “Perception became discrimination, memory became learning, language became verbal behavior, intelligence became what intelligence tests test” (Miller, 2003). This movement yielded the important discovery that much of human and animal behavior is subject to conditioning, meaning that it can be predicted and controlled (see, e.g., Watson, 1957). Yet, it was eclipsed by findings that led to the “cognitive revolution,” such as findings on the impact of attention on behavior. Broadbent’s work on attention, for example, “contributed substantially to the so-called cognitive revolution” by showing that “because humans can select auditory messages without moving the head or ears, shifting attention from one ear to the other must be effected centrally” (Hiscock & Kinsbourne, 2011).
The cognitive revolution led to the new field of cognitive science: “the study of mind as machine” (Boden, 2008, p. XXXV). The origin of this field coincided with the digital revolution, leading many cognitive scientists to think of the mind as a computer. This “computational metaphor” holds that the mind is primarily an information processor and that we can understand the mind as computations that take place in the brain (see Chapter 2; Pylyshyn, 1980). As cognitive science developed, it looked to other mechanisms, such as network connections and dynamical systems, to explain mental phenomena (see Chapter 11). For example, according to dynamical systems theory,
for every kind of cognitive performance exhibited by a natural cognitive agent, there is some quantitative system instantiated by the agent at the highest relevant level of causal organization, so that performances of that kind are behaviors of that system.
(Van Gelder, 1998b)
While cognitive science was initially seen as an interdisciplinary field in which “at least six disciplines were involved: psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, anthropology and philosophy” (Miller, 2003), that interdisciplinarity is argued to have faded over time in favor of dominance by cognitive psychology (Nunez et al., 2019).
More recently, neuroscience developed as an autonomous discipline. As with many other disciplines, it is possible to trace the origins of neuroscience to Ancient Greece, with Herophilus of the 3rd century BCE “credited with being the first to describe the ventricles as well as distinguish the cerebrum from cerebellum” while also arguing that “the brain was the seat of the soul” (Moon et al., 2010). In the 19th century, Broca established localization in the brain by finding that damage to a particular region of the brain is associated with the loss of language production (Finger, 2001, p. 38). In the early 20th century, Penfield found that “patients would occasionally report ‘flashbacks’ ” when their brains were stimulated, leaving him to speculate that the brain held an “experiential record” (Finger, 2001, p. 363). Yet, despite these and other important findings, it was not until the 1980s that cognitive psychology and neuroscience joined forces to form the subfield of cognitive neuroscience, in part due to the development of brain imaging technologies (Feinberg & Farah, 2006). The success of these technologies has meant that, by the late 20th century, our understanding of the visual system was developed enough to allow for a rudimentary form of mindreading: “fMRI signals in early visual areas could reliably predict on individual trials which of eight stimulus orientations the subject was seeing” (Kamitani & Tong, 2005).
Given these scientific advancements, philosophy of mind is no longer able to avoid the relevance of empirical findings. It is increasingly common for graduate students to seek training in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience to keep up with the latest research. Likewise, the sciences of mind have much to gain from philosophy. Van Gelder colorfully describes the various roles that philosophers have played in cognitive science, for example: pioneer (by discovering new areas of research), building inspector (by investigating the foundations of a discipline), Zen monk (by working on the deep problems not covered by science), cartographer (by mapping the relevant views), archivist (by keeping track of intellectual history), cheerleader (by noting what is intellectually significant), and gadfly (by disrupting the norm; Van Gelder, 1998a). This textbook is for those in philosophy of mind who wish to be informed of the connections and findings from scie...
