GIVING DUALISM ITS DUE
William
G. Lycan
I have been a materialist
about the
mind for forty years, since first I considered the mind-body issue. In all that time I have seen exactly one
argument for mind-body dualism that I thought even prima facie
convincing.<1>. And like many other materialists, I have
often quickly cited standard objections to dualism that are widely
taken to be
fatal<2>—notoriously
the dread Interaction Problem. My
materialism has never wavered. Nor is it
about to waver now; I cannot take dualism very seriously.
Being a philosopher, of
course I would
like to think that my stance is rational, held not just instinctively
and
scientistically and in the mainstream but because the arguments do
indeed favor
materialism over dualism. But I do not
think that, though I used to. My
position may be rational, broadly speaking, but not because the
arguments favor
it: Though the arguments for dualism do
(indeed) fail, so do the arguments for materialism.
And the standard objections to dualism are not
very convincing; if one really manages to be a dualist in the first
place, one
should not be much impressed by them. My
purpose in this paper is to hold my own feet to the fire and admit that
I do
not proportion my belief to the evidence.<3>
I
Arguments for materialism
Arguments for materialism
are
few. Tyler Burge and others have
maintained that the naturalistic picture of the world is more like a
political
or religious ideology than like a position well supported by evidence,
and that
materialism is an article of faith based on the worship of science.<4> That
is an overstatement.
But Ryle (to start with) gave no argument
that I can recall for materialism per se; he only inveighed against the
particularly
Cartesian “dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”
[S]ensations, states of
consciousness,…seem to be the one sort of thing left outside the
physicalist
picture, and for various reasons I just cannot believe that this can be
so…. That everything should be
explicable in terms of physics…except the occurrence of sensations
seems to me
frankly unbelievable….
The above is largely a
confession of
faith…. (pp. 142-43)
Just so, and just so. I too simply refuse to believe in spookstuff
or surds in nature. But this argumentum
ad recuso credere is no argument at
all; it is at best, in David Lewis’ famous phrase, an incredulous stare.
But then Smart did advance
a real argument; he
appealed to mind-brain correlations: It
is reasonable to think that every mental state or event at least has a corresponding
type of brain state or event. The best,
because most parsimonious, explanation of those correlations is that
the mental
states/events just are the “corresponding” brain states/events. (In general:
When Xs are invariably accompanied by Ys and you can find
nothing to
distinguish Xs from Ys, the best explanation is that Xs just are Ys.)
I firmly agree that
parsimony or simplicity is a
reason for preferring one hypothesis to another.<7> But
it is a very posterior reason. That is,
not only does it always carry the
qualification “other things being equal,” but many,
nearly all, other things must be equal before parsimony is
called in to break the tie. And no party
to the mind-body dispute will deny that dualists have found plenty of
features
that seem to distinguish mental states/events from neurophysiological
ones—even
if, as materialists contend, all those differences are ultimately
specious. To anyone uncontaminated by
neuroscience or materialist philosophizing, the mental does not seem physical in any way at all, much
less neurophysiological. The parsimony
argument does not even come in the door until it is agreed that we can
find
nothing to distinguish mental states from neurophysiological ones. And the latter will not be agreed any time
soon.
More decisively, Smart’s
alleged correlations have
never materialized. Notice that he must
have meant type-correlations; unless
one were already presuming token identity, it would have made little
sense to
say that for every mental token, there is a “corresponding”
neurophysiological
token. There may be a few
type-correlations holding within particular species, but if so they are
very
few. Whatever is in common as between
all human beings who believe that a Frenchman has been assassinated in
Trafalgar Square (to take an old example of Dennett’s), that feature
could not
possibly be characterized in neuroscientific terms; there are no
“Frenchman”
neurons, nor “assassination” areas of the cerebral cortex; at best the
feature
would be a complicated set of external psychosemantic relations to
Frenchmen,
to assassinations, and to Trafalgar Square.
(And good luck to the psychosemanticist.<8>)
Matters improved when,
independently of each other, David
Lewis and D.M. Armstrong offered their respective causal arguments for
identifying mental states and events with neurophysiological states and
events. Their common idea was that mental
concepts are causal role concepts, and so they afford role-occupant
identifications (as in the case of genes and segments of DNA molecules).<9> E.g.:
1.
Pain = Whatever state of a person plays role P (being typically
caused
by tissue damage, and in turn causing wincing, crying out, withdrawal,
favoring, etc.) [We know this a
priori;
we have all got the concept of pain.]
2. The
occupant of role P = the firing of c-fibers
(i.e., it is c-fiber firings that are typically caused by tissue
damage,
etc.). [Discovered empirically
by
neuroscientists.]
_________________________________________________________
\ 3. Pain
= the
firing of c-fibers. qed
This was an important
development, because the
argument was deductive and obviously valid.
But is either premise true?
Premise 1 was counterexampled early on by Keith Campbell and
others: A
state of a creature, or for that matter of an assembly of Tinkertoys or
beer
cans, could occupy the commonsense role of pain but without being
mental at
all, much less feeling like a pain.<10>
(Remember, 1 is a conceptual or at least
a priori claim; fantastical imaginary cases are fair play. And remember how little information there is
in
a commonsense causal analysis of pain; see, e.g., Armstrong’s analysis
on pp. 310-16.)
Also, 1 is a culpably good
premise for materialists. Obviously,
if the very concept of pain is a causal concept like “poison” or
“sunburn” or
“footprint,” and what gets caused is physical motion in the form of
behavior,
it would be hard to resist the inference that pain is physical. 1 does not formally beg the question, but it
comes close. And I shall argue shortly
that a dualist can quite reasonably resist it.
The dualist should never and would never accept 1 in the first
place. Pain is first and foremost what
presents
itself to consciousness as pain, what feels like pain.
That sort of sensation is indeed caused by
tissue damage and does cause the customary behavior, but those are
plainly a posteriori
facts. (For the dualist to insist that
they are contingent would beg the
question, but the present materialist claim is that they are not just
necessary
but a priori.).
More generally:
The materialist of course takes the third-person perspective;
s/he scientistically
thinks in terms of looking at other people, or rather at various
humanoid bags
of protoplasm, and explaining their behavior. But
the dualist is back with Descartes in the
first-person perspective, acquainted with the contents of her own
consciousness, aware of them as such. Notice
carefully that we need not endorse many of Descartes’ own antique and
weird views
about the mind (that it is entirely nonspatial, that it has no parts,
that mentality
requires language). The point is only
that we know the mind primarily through introspection. (Duh!)
That idea may, very
surprisingly, be wrong; it has been attacked by Ryle, by Wittgenstein
and by
Sellars among others.<11>
But it is obviously common sense, and to deny
it is a radical move. N.b., it does not
entail or even strongly suggest that the mind is better
known than the body or the rest of the physical world.
Turning to the
Lewis-Armstrong premise 2, it seems
fine until one realizes that its first word is “the.”
2 begs the question against the dualist view that
role P is causally overdetermined: The
typical causes cause both neural events and immaterial pain events, and
pain-behavior is doubly caused by the neural events aforementioned and
the immaterial
pain events. (One may feel—as I certainly
do—that this overdetermination view is silly and stupid.<12> But
on what evidence? Of
course the view offends against parsimony,
but as before, parsimony must wait till all substance has been
adjudicated.)
In “Naturalism,
Materialism and First Philosophy,”<13>
Armstrong
gives a general argument for the thesis that we should count a thing as
real
and admit it to our ontology only if we can identify it by its causal
powers,
for: “…if a thing lacks any power, if it has no possible effects, then,
although it may exist, we can never have any good reason
to believe that it exists” (p. 156). That
claim leads directly to materialism, Armstrong
contends, because we know of no physical effects produced by supposedly
immaterial occurrences; “[m]ost neurophysiologists would be astounded
to hear
that what happens to the brain has any other cause except earlier
states of the
brain and its physical environment” (p. 154).
Of course the causal
criterion is controversial, because
numbers and sets seem to be exceptions.
And the argument for it is flawed, because as we know from
epistemology,
knowledge does not require that one’s belief have been caused by the
fact
known.<14> But in any case the inference to materialism
rests on remorselessly third-person scientism and (again) on the tacit
assumption that the physical effects are not overdetermined.
David Papineau offers a
simple deductive argument for
materialism, based on the causal completeness of physics:<15> Conscious events
have physical effects; all
physical effects have sufficient physical causes; the physical effects
of
conscious causes are not, or not always, overdetermined by physical
causes;
therefore conscious events are physical events.
This is (indeed) an
argument rather than merely a confession
of faith, and Papineau admits that there is nothing to support the
first
premise against epiphenomenalism, pre-established harmony and other
noninteractive
dualisms but appeal to “standard principles of theory choice” (p. 23),
but he
does in fact appeal to parsimony: “If both views can accommodate the
empirical
data equally well, then ordinary scientific methodology will advise us
to
accept the simple view that unifies mind and brain, rather than the
ontologically more profligate story which has the conscious states
dangling impotently
from the brain states” (ibid.). Of
course I agree, but this argument is hardly deductive, and without it
the first
premise begs the question. And on behalf
of good old Cartesian interactive dualism, the same point can be made
against
the third premise that I have made against Lewis and Armstrong, that so
far as
has been shown, physical events are
systematically overdetermined by physical and nonphysical causes. As before, there is no evidence against that
view; it only offends parsimony.
I know of no other
arguments for
materialism.
II
Objections to Cartesian dualism
Here, very briefly, are
the four
standard objections I highlighted in Consciousness
(op. cit.). (This was the usual
perfunctory throat-clearing; we all know why Cartesian dualism was
rejected.) (1) The Interaction Problem of
course. (2) Cartesian egos are
excrescences;
they are not needed for the explanation of any publicly known fact. (3) Even if conceptually intelligible,
Cartesian
interaction violates known laws of physics, particularly the
conservation of
matter-energy.<16> (4) Evolutionary theory embarrasses
dualism, since we have no idea how natural selection could have
produced
Cartesian egos; an immaterial substance could not possibly be adaptive.
In his well-regarded
textbook Matter and Consciousness,<17> Paul Churchland too has
rehearsed objections (1)-(4), and like Smart he
appeals
to simplicity. He adds two further
criticisms: (5) In comparison to
neuroscience,
dualism is explanatorily impotent (pp. 18-19).
(6) All known mental phenomena are highly dependent on
detailed
brain function (p. 20; Churchland says this “comes close to being an
outright refutation
of (substance) dualism”).
There are even more
objections, not
mentioned by Churchland or me:
(7) Cartesian minds and mental entities are queer and
obscure. They are nonspatial; how could
that be? And the mental entities have
weird
properties: intrinsic intentionality, subjectivity, etc.
(8) Ryle argued that Descartes got the
epistemology radically wrong. If
Cartesian dualism were true, we could not possibly ever know what was
going on
in someone else’s mind; yet we have such knowledge very easily. (9) There are problems of unity
and individuation. In virtue of
what are the contents of a
Cartesian mind contents of that mind rather than another one? We might answer that by reference to the
uniquely associated body, but then what accounts for the unique
relation
between the mind and that body?
The case sounds
overwhelming. But now suppose, if you can,
that you are a
Cartesian dualist. (Paragraph break to
let that supposition sink in.)
Would you be cowed? No.
There are nine objections to your view.
Of course there are; any interesting philosophical view faces at
least
nine objections. The question is, how
well you can answer them? And I contend
that the dualist can answer them fairly respectably.
I shall start with the Interaction Problem
because I think it is by far the most damaging.
III The Interaction Problem
Entirely nonspatial mental
events
could not possibly cause physical motion in the way that billiard balls
cause
physical motion; that is nearly tautologous.
But (to my knowledge) no one has ever believed that mental
events do
cause physical motion in the way that billiard balls do.<18> What,
then, is the problem?
I believe it is that even
now we have
no good model at all for Cartesian
interaction.<19> Descartes tried the analogy of
gravitational
attraction, which was promptly blasted by Elisabeth.
No one has done much better since.
I agree that the lack of a
good model
is a trenchant objection and not just a prejudice.
But it is hardly fatal as yet. For
one thing, the lack results at least
partly from the fact that we have no good theory of causality itself. The theories that have been called theories
“of causality” all seem to have been theories of different things, not
of a
single phenomenon with agreed-upon clear cases.
More to the point, causal
realism itself
has not been popular until pretty recently.<20> 20th-century
theories of causality
were predominantly Humean, though of course there were exceptions. The more recently prevalent counterfactual
theories such as David Lewis’<21>
are
not antirealist, but they are semiHumean, requiring only specific forms
of
counterfactual dependence; and no reason has been given why physical
events
could not depend counterfactually on Cartesian mental events. (N.b., if one says that the relevant
counterfactuals need actual categorical truthmakers, one thereby gives
up the
counterfactual theory in question. Lewis
himself held that the counterfactuals’ truthmakers were facts about
other
possible worlds and relations between them.)
Now, further:
Give up any tacit assumption of physical determinism. I believe that will help reduce the sense of
outrage, and even hint at a model: perhaps mind-body interaction is
only
probabilistic, as purely physical causation is.
And now acknowledge the
prevalence of
weird quantum phenomena. Though there is
as yet no model for Cartesian interaction, microphysics gets more and
more
bizarre, and indeed itself resorts (on some interpretations of quantum
mechanics) to quasi-mental vocabulary.<22>
We cannot possibly be sure that no model for
Cartesian interaction will emerge.
Finally, I have a
revisionist
suggestion. The nonspatiality of Cartesian
egos remains the big problem for interaction.
My suggestion is that the dualist give up nonspatiality. Descartes had his own 17th-century
metaphysical reasons for insisting that minds are entirely nonspatial,
but we
need not accept those. Why not suppose
that minds are located where it feels as if they are located, in the
head
behind the eyes?<23>
If it be protested that our heads are already
entirely full of physical stuff and that two things cannot occupy the
same
region of space at the same time:
(1) Immaterial minds are not physical.
And what is true is only that two physical
things cannot occupy the same
region of space at the same time. For
that matter, (2) our heads are not entirely
full of physical stuff. Physically, they
are mostly empty space, with minuscule particles zipping through them
at very
high speeds.
For the rest of this
paper, I shall
assume that minds, though immaterial, have locations in physical space.
IV
Objections (2)-(4)
(2)
Excrescencehood: The
materialist here lodges
firmly in the third-person perspective and assumes a very strong form
of the
“Theory” theory, that the sole job of mental ascription is to explain
facts
about the physical world. But as before,
the dualist cannot be expected to grant any such assumption in the
first
place. Cartesian minds are not
explanatory posits at all, much less posited to explain physical facts. They are known from the inside.
(And arguments are given for the view that
they are Cartesian rather than physical.)
Nor is the strong “Theory” theory tenable: As
Kathleen Wilkes has argued, mental
ascriptions have all sorts of uses other than explanatory ones.<24>
Classical Cartesian egos
do have one
property that is flatly incompatible with modern physics’ conception of
spacetime: Cartesian mental events occur
in real time, but not in space; but that is impossible if time is only
one of
the four dimensions of spacetime.<26>
Fortunately, we have abandoned Descartes’
nonspatiality assumption.
(4) Evolutionary
theory: At least as stated,
the objection is that natural selection could not have produced
Cartesian egos
because they could not be adaptive. But
that assumes an extreme Panglossianism: That a trait or entity could
not emerge
in the course of evolution by natural selection unless it,
itself, were adaptive. No
evolutionary biologist believes that.
More to the point, why
could the egos
not be adaptive, given that they causally interact with the physical? (We have already addressed the Interaction
Problem, and are entitled to assume on the dualist’s behalf that minds
and
bodies interact.) The objector may
appeal to the causal completeness of physics, even granting the
possibility of
overdetermination noted in our discussion of Papineau’s argument: It is
never
solely because of a Cartesian ego that a creature did well in the
struggle for
resources and safety, and indeed the creature’s physical
characteristics would
have taken care of that on their own.
But on the overdetermination view, it was not, in fact, solely
because
of the physical characteristics either.
Unlike mine, Churchland’s
version of
the evolution objection does not specifically appeal to adaptiveness. What he says is, rather:
For purposes of our
discussion, the
important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human
species
and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely
physical
process…. We are notable in that our
nervous system is more complex and powerful than those of our fellow
creatures. Our inner nature differs from
that of simpler creatures in degree, but not in kind.
(p. 21)
Which simply and blatantly
begs the question.
V
Churchland’s added objections
Each of Churchland’s two
new
objections is a bit odd. (Which is
itself odd, because his book is a textbook.)
(5) Explanatory
impotence: The premises are
true; neuroscience explains a great deal and dualism explains hardly
anything. But the comparison is
misplaced. Dualism competes, not with
neuroscience (a science), but with materialism, an opposing
philosophical
theory. Materialism per se does not
explain much either. (It would have
explained Smart’s mind-brain correlations, had they existed.)
Materialism does have one
explanatory
advantage: Obviously it explains why
brain facts are highly relevant to mental facts, better than dualism
does. But the dualist does have an
explanation: Though many physical
stimuli affect the mind, those that do are meager in their information
content. Even patterned retinal hits
greatly underdetermine the incredibly rich visual experiences that
result, and
the immediate perceptual beliefs that the subject will form as a result
of
those. Prodigious transducing is needed
in order to send the required gigantic mass of hyperfinely structured
information to and through the pineal gland.
And that is what the brain is for.
(Plausible? Of course not. But I think only because dualism itself is
not plausible. If one
actually is a dualist and holds fixed the assumption of
Cartesian interaction, the transducer explanation is pretty good.)
(6) “Neural
dependence”: Here I must quote.
If there really is a
distinct entity
in which reasoning, emotion, and consciousness take place, and if that
entity
is dependent on the brain for nothing more than sensory experiences as
input
and volitional executions as output, then
one would expect reason, emotion, and consciousness to be relatively
invulnerable to direct control or pathology by manipulation or damage
to the
brain. But in fact the exact
opposite is true…. (p. 20, italics
original)
Of course the opposite is
true. But why would any dualist accept the
premise’s
second conjoined antecedent? What
dualist ever said or even implied that the mind is dependent on the
brain for
nothing more than sensory experiences as input and volitional
executions as
output? Descartes himself knew very well
that the mental depended in a detailed way upon the brain.
And the transducer explanation applies here
as well. We may even add that cognition
may interdepend in a close way with brain activity:
There is no reason to suppose that the mind
can do complicated reasoning without the aid of a physical calculator;
in the
real world, most people cannot do complicated reasoning without the aid
of a
physical calculator. Mind-brain
interaction may be constant and very intimate.
(Here again, the picture is implausible, but only because
dualism and
Cartesian interaction are implausible in the first place.
Subtract those two implausibilities, and the
rest of the picture is not bad at all.)
VI
The remaining objections
(7) Queerness: The
first queerness charge is
that nonphysical mental entities are nonspatial. As
before, I agree that the dualist should
give up that thesis of Descartes’.
Secondly, the mental
entities have the
weird properties of intrinsic intentionality, subjectivity, and so on. Well, yes, they do. But
not because they are immaterial. Even if
they are physical, mental states and
events have those properties already.
(8) Epistemology
of other minds: Cartesian
egos
were nonspatial, which made their epistemology seem utterly hopeless. But remember that Cartesian dualism is
interactionist. Mental events cause
behavior. And so, for all that has been
shown, we know that our own mental events cause behavior and we infer
like
causes from like effects. This is a far
from satisfactory solution, but except for Analytical Behaviorism, no
other is
less problematic. The present objection
adds nothing to the Interaction Problem itself.
Adopting spatiality
improves the
situation rhetorically at least. If our
minds are literally in our heads, it is easier to imagine that other
people can
know them. –Though adding spatiality
adds nothing of substance to the previous point.
Ryle thought that you can
just see
(some of) other people’s mental states and events, and do not even
unconsciously have to infer them. I
think that view contains a very large grain of truth, even though I
also think
that the mental states and events themselves are neurophysiological
states and
events inside our skulls. But this is an
issue in the philosophy of perception, not for philosophers of mind.
(9) Unity and individuation: Again,
Cartesian dualism is
interactionist. The contents of a Cartesian
mind are contents
of that mind (rather than another) in virtue of its exclusive causal
connection
to the relevant human body.
But then what explains the
unique
relation between the mind and that body?
This is indeed an embarrassing question, but the answer is to be
found
in whatever would explain the appearance of minds in the evolutionary
process. The objection collapses into
objection (4).
VII
NonCartesian dualisms
Epiphenomenalism gives up
mind-to-body causation, but retains body-to-mind causation; thus, it
does not
claim to solve the Interaction Problem.
It is motivated mainly by the causal closure of physics and the
implausibility of overdetermination.<27>
It faces extra objections of its own, but
those too can be answered.<28>
For myself, I do not see its advantages
over
Cartesian dualism as weighty.
“Property” dualism is
logically
weaker than Cartesian dualism (assuming that a Cartesian ego would
necessarily have
some irreducible mental properties), and so must be more defensible.<29>
I mean to have shown here
that
although Cartesian dualism faces some serious objections, that does not
distinguish it from other philosophical theories, and the objections
are not an
order of magnitude worse than those confronting materialism in
particular. There remain the
implausibilities required by
the Cartesian view; but bare appeal to implausibility is not argument.
Yet, I believe, that
appeal is not
irrational or arational either, and I would not want this paper to turn
anyone
dualist. Have a nice day.[30]
1. It is the
argument from qualia stated on pp. 84-85 of my book Consciousness
(Cambridge, MA: MIT / Bradford Books, 1987). But
it is countered by the Representational
theory of qualia, defended by me there and in: Consciousness
and Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT / Bradford Books,
1995). (Also, “In Defense of the
Representational Theory of Qualia,” Philosophical
Perspectives, Vol. 12: Language, Mind and Ontology (Atascadero:
Ridgeview Publishing, 1998); and
“The Case for Phenomenal Externalism,” Philosophical Perspectives,
Vol. 15:
Metaphysics (Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing, 2001).)
For the
record, I now believe that there is a more powerful argument for
dualism based
on intentionality itself: from the dismal failure of all materialist
psychosemantics;
see note 8 below.
2. See, e.g.,
pp. 2-3 of Consciousness, loc. cit.
3. In
mitigation, I would note that no philosopher has ever proportioned
her/his
belief to the evidence, if only because we have not got any evidence. Cf. Peter van Inwagen, “It Is Wrong,
Everywhere, Always, and for Anyone, to Believe Anything upon
Insufficient
Evidence,” in J. Jordan and D. Howard-Snyder (eds.), Faith,
Freedom, and
Rationality (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).
N.b., we
also always hold our opponents to higher standards of argumentation
than we
obey ourselves. I have always felt
entitled to thumb my nose at dualism so long as no valid deductive
argument has
been presented for it, each of whose premises I must
accept.
My admirers
(however many or few those may be) need not worry about my allegiance: I have no sympathy with any dualist view, and
never will. This paper is only an
uncharacteristic exercise in intellectual honesty.
It grew out of a seminar in which for
methodological purposes I played the role of a committed dualist, as
energetically as I could. That was a
strange feeling, something like being a cat burglar for a week. You could see there was a modus vivendi here,
however uncongenial.
4. Burge, “Mind-Body Causation
and Explanatory Practice,” in Mental
Causation, ed. J. Heil and A. Mele (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). I believe my own faith in materialism is
based on science-worship; for a justification of the latter attitude
(as
opposed to an actual argument for materialism), see D.M. Armstrong,
“Epistemological Foundations for a Materialist Theory of the Mind,” Philosophy
of Science 40 (1973), 178–193. But
Armstrong also argues there for materialism; see below.
5. Functionalism, the reigning materialism of the past 35 years
or so,
does not
strictly entail materialism, but has been held largely because it is
the least
bad way of remaining a materialist. The
only functionalist dualist I have ever known or heard of was the late
Roland
Puccetti (e.g., in “Why Functionalism Fails,” presented at the APA
(Eastern
Division) meetings, 1981; n.b., “Functionalism” in the title meant,
Functionalist materialism).
6. “Sensations and Brain Processes,” Philosophical
Review
68 (1959), 141-56. Of course there had
previously been the
damningly quick Positivist argument from the Verification theory of
meaning to
Analytical Behaviorism, but: (i) That
was no argument for materialism per se.
And (ii) so much the worse for the Verification theory; in any
number of
cases, it led too quickly to bad metaphysics, such as the view that
there are
not really any little subvisible particles.
7. That is,
as more likely to be true. Despite
obvious examples of curve-fitting and the like, not everyone grants
this; e.g.,
eloquently, Bas van Fraassen in The
Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
In his
contribution to the 1967 Presley volume (“Professor Smart’s ‘Sensations
and
Brain Processes’,” in C.F. Presley (ed.), The
Identity Theory of Mind (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press,
1967)),
the late Don Gunner asked even more eloquently why simplicity should be
a
reason for belief: “[A] question
should be raised as to whether the principles of parsimony and
simplicity have
not become restrictive principles of stinginess and
over-simplification. (Nature is lush,
prodigal, messy, wasteful,
sexy, etc.)” (pp. 4-5). (“Etc.”?)
8. For the
record, I think intentionality is a much greater obstacle to
materialism than
is anything to do with consciousness, qualia, phenomenal character,
subjectivity, etc. If intentionality
itself is naturalized, those other things are pretty easily explicated
in terms
of it (Consciousness and Experience,
op. cit.). But in my view, current
psychosemantics is feeble: it treats only of concepts tied closely to
the
thinker’s physical environment; it addresses only thoughts and beliefs,
and not
more exotic propositional attitudes whose functions are not to be
correct
representations; and it does not apply to any thought that is even
partly
metaphorical. More on these failings in
a subsequent paper.
9. Lewis, “An
Argument for the Identity Theory,” Journal of Philosophy, 63
(1966),
17-25, and “Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications,” Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, 50 (1972), 249-58; Armstrong, A
Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1968), pp. 89-90.
10. K.
Campbell, Body and Mind (New York:
Anchor Books, 1970), pp. 100ff.; Ned Block, “Troubles with
Functionalism,” in
W. Savage (ed.),
11. Ryle’s
material on this point was pretty desperate.
Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument has never been well
understood,
much less generally accepted. Sellars
argued more clearly for the publicity of mental terms’ linguistic
meaning
(“Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind", in H. Feigl and M. Scriven
(eds.), The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of
Psychoanalysis,
Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. I
(Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press; 1956), but even Sellars’ detailed and
ingenious
account is contested at many points.
The
first-person perspective is emphasized by Searle in The
Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). See also
12. Its
falsity is simply assumed by William S. Robinson (“Causation,
Sensations and
Knowledge,” Mind 91 (1982),
524-40)–himself a dualist—and by David Papineau (see below). But for defense, see Eugene O. Mills,
“Interactionism and Overdetermination,” American Philosophical
Quarterly
33 (1996), 105-115.
13. “Naturalism,
Materialism and First Philosophy,” Philosophia
8 (1978), 261-76, reprinted in The Nature
of Mind and Other Essays (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1981); page
references are to the latter.
14. At least
two reasons support the latter point:
First, we have at least some knowledge of the future. Second, although perception
requires causation by the state of affairs perceived,
not all knowledge is perceptual.
15. Thinking
About Consciousness (
16. J.W.
Cornman, “A Nonreductive Identity Thesis About Mind and Body,” in J.
Feinberg
(ed.), Reason and Responsibility
(Encino: Dickenson Publishing, 1978), p. 274.
17. Bradford
18. It is just
possible that Davidson’s early view of events, causation and laws
entails this
(“Mental Events,” in L. Foster and J.W. Swanson (eds.) Experience
and Theory (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1970)).
19. As William
S. Robinson puts it, op. cit.
20. Notice a
general tendency in philosophy: When
working in one area, we feel free to presuppose positions in other
areas that
are (at best) highly controversial among practitioners in those areas. To take a limiting example, philosophers
nearly everywhere outside epistemology presuppose that we have some
knowledge
of the external world. If we do have
it—as I too presume we do—epistemology has delivered not one tenable
account of
how that can be so. (Except possibly
my own; see my etc.)
21. “Causation,” Journal of Philosophy, 70 (1973), 556-67.
22. N.b., I am
very far from joining in the suggestion made by some that quantum
mechanics can
explain important facts about consciousness (e.g., Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain, and the Quantum (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1989); Quentin Smith, “Why Cognitive Scientists Cannot
Ignore
Quantum Mechanics,” in Q. Smith and A. Jokic (eds.), Consciousness:
New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003); and Henry Stapp, Mind,
Matter, and Quantum Mechanics (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, 2004). I do not believe that quantum mechanics could
explain anything at all about consciousness per se; see my “Recent
Naturalistic
Dualisms,” forthcoming in A. Lange, E. Meyers and R. Styers (eds.), Light
Against Darkness: Dualism in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and the
Contemporary World (Leiden: Numen Book Series, Brill Academic
Publishers). The present point is only
about models for
Cartesian interaction.
23. Since
drafting this, I have learned that my bold move was anticipated by no
less a
figure than Isaac Newton (thanks to Hylarie Kochiras for the
references):
That substances of different
kinds do not penetrate each other [i.e., co-occupy space] does not at
all
appear from the phenomena. And we ought not rashly to assert that which
cannot be
inferred from the phenomena. (Unpublished
Draft Conclusion to the Principia)
No being can exist which is
not in some way related to space. God is everywhere, created minds are
somewhere, and body is in the space it occupies. Whatever is neither
everywhere
nor somewhere does not exist. (De Gravitatione et Aequipondio Fluidorum,
in A.R. Hall and M.B. Hall (eds. And tr.), Unpublished
Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press,
1962). p. 141)
Nor is the distinction between mind and body in his philosophy intelligible, unless at the same time we say that mind has no extension at all, and so is not substantially present in any extension, that is, exists nowhere; which seems the same as if we were to say that it does not exist, or at least renders its union with body thoroughly unintelligible and impossible. (Ibid., p.)
24. In, e.g.,
“The Relationship Between Scientific and Common Sense Psychology,” in
S.
Christensen and D. Turner (eds), Folk Psychology and the
Philosophy of Mind
(
25. “Does
Interactionism Violate a Law of Classical Physics?” Mind 90 (1981), 102-7. My
philosophy of physics colleagues John
Roberts and Marc Lange have at least cautiously concurred.
See also R. Larmer, “Mind-body
Interactionism and the Conservation of Energy,” International
Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1986), 277-85.
26. Actually,
William Lane Craig (God, Time, and
Eternity (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, 2001)) has suggested that it
is only
“coordinate time” that requires spatial coordinates; if time functions
rather
as a parameter, it is independent of space.
I have no idea what that means, or whether it is true, or
whether if
true it would save Descartes. (But
thanks to Ken Perszyk for the reference.)
27. Being no
scholar, I do not know whether these are what motivated Malebranche. But see W. Robinson, op. cit.
28. F.
Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical
Quarterly, 32 (1982),
127-36; Robinson, op. cit. and “Epiphenomenalism,” Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007): <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/>. Robinson is probably
29. But not
much more. See my “How is Property
Dualism Better Off than Substance Dualism?,” in preparation.
30. This paper
was presented as a keynote at the 2007 AAP Conference at the