1. Make the strongest case you can in favor of some form of Dualism, either by defending it directly or by offering replies to the sketchy anti-Dualist considerations offered in class.
2. Discuss and criticize one or more of Descartes’ Dualist arguments, either as reconstructed in the handout “Some of Descartes’ Arguments” or as otherwise reconstructed by you. (This is not meant to encourage Descartes scholarship; the idea is just to discuss an interesting Cartesian argument.)
3. Prosecute the case against Cartesian Dualism, expanding one of our four objections or adding a new one of your own.
4. Try to defend Analytical Behaviorism against one or more of the objections offered in class. Is there hope for Analytical Behaviorism after all?
5. Evaluate Place’s defense of the Identity Theory, or discuss any one of his arguments in detail.
6. If you happen to have read it, discuss Smart's position in “Sensations and Brain Processes.” Do his replies to all the objections work? Are there other objections he should have considered?
7. Discuss Armstrong's defense of his methodological scientism and his use of it in support of materialism. (To do a good job on this, you should read his article “Epistemological Foundations for a Materialist Theory of the Mind.”) If you're unconvinced, what do you think is a superior method for metaphysical investigation, and (briefly) why?
8. Discuss Armstrong's program of “causal analyses” of mental concepts. (To get a feel for what they look like, you might read a sample chapter or so from Part Two of A Materialist Theory of the Mind.) Are analyses of Armstrong's form plausible, or can you think of principled objections to them?
9. Are there any further criticisms you want to make of Armstrong's argument for the Identity Theory?
10. Discuss Armstrong's account of the secondary qualities, on pp. 25-26.
11. If you happen to have read David Lewis, evaluate his Ramsified version of the Commonsense Causal Theory.
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12. Are you entirely convinced by Putnam's “species chauvinism” or “multiple realizability” objection to the (Type-)Identity Theory?
13. I said in class that Analytical Behaviorism neatly avoided all our objections to Dualism, and I said the same of the Identity Theory. But is that true? Revisit the Other Minds problem. Ryle emphasized that Analytical Behaviorism avoids that one with ease. Does it really? And/or, what about the Identity Theory? Discuss the relation between the Identity Theory and the problem of other minds.
14. Does Putnam's Turing Machine Functionalism have any further advantages over the Identity Theory, that have not yet been touted? Does it have any drawbacks from which the Identity Theory is free?
15. I suggested in class that the Turing Machine architecture is a bad one for the computational Functionalist to take as a model. If you agree, give some reasons, and point in a direction that Putnam might usefully have gone instead.
16. Assess the “Homuncular Functionalist” picture as presented by Fodor and/or by me. Does it really have all the advantages we collectively claim for it? Does it have offsetting disadvantages and liabilities?
17. Discuss my teleological constraint on functional “realization.” Is there a problem about supposing (as I did in “The Continuity of Levels of Nature”) that teleologicalness shades off gradually as one proceeds downward through the corporate hierarchy of Nature? Are teleological characteristics ever literally true, supposing for the sake of argument that biological functions are not literally intended by a divine creator? Etc. Or address my teleological response to Ned Block’s “Chinese giant” scenario, examining some hypothetical cases in between the two extremes (of (i) the program happening to be “realized” by the Chinese people going about their everyday business, vs. (ii) the Chinese people’s bodies being used as mere material, locked in nomologically as parts of a big organism).
18. Discuss Dennett's exceedingly convolute view of the propositional attitudes, as variously expressed in the readings. Can you clarify the nature of his instrumentalism regarding beliefs and desires? Can you give a more convincing argument for it than he does? Can you argue against it?
19. Adjudicate between Stich and Dennett's reply to him ("Making Sense of Ourselves," Philosophical Topics 12 (1981): 63-81, reprinted in the 1990 edition of my anthology).
20. Help Dennett refine his epistemological view in the face of difficulties raised in class. ("Making Sense of Ourselves" is relevant here too.)
21. Discuss Dennett's remarks on “patterns,” and the Martian example. What should we take to be the true moral of the example? Can you spell out the sense in which the Laplacean Martians are “missing something objective and important”? (If you’re really interested in Dennett, you should look at his more recent article, “Real Patterns,” also in our anthology.)
22. Look at and discuss the prototheory of aboutness that Dennett sketches on pp. 161-63 of “True Believers.”
23. Explore some analogies and disanalogies between thought and overt speech. There's a lot more to be said about this; try to make a list of disanalogies in particular. Do the disanalogies impair or destroy Fodor’s Sellarsian theory?
24. Assess any one of Fodor’s positive arguments for LOT.
25. Respond to Churchland and Churchland’s critique of LOT.
26. Respond to another criticism of LOT, if you know one (Later we will consider an objection of Stich’s based on “methodological solipsism”; leave that one aside for now.)
27. Refute my deductive argument for LOT. ($50.00 PRIZE.)
28. Make some progress on the briefly noted problem of “tacit” belief. Is a tacit belief just a disposition, or what? (If you’re particularly interested in this issue, you should obtain from me a copy of my justly revered 1986 article, “Tacit Belief.”)
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29. Pursue Fodor’s “asymmetrical dependence” theory further.
30. Can you clarify Millikan’s psychosemantics? If so, defend it further or attack it.
31. Propose or defend some psychosemantics other than Fodor's or Millikan's.
32. Address either the "final" objection (noncognitive propositional attitudes) or the "post-final" objection (metaphorical thought) to all existing psychosemantics.
33. Comment on some other aspect or implication of methodological solipsism. E.g., is a “naturalistic,” nonsolipsistic psychology as unattainable as Stich insists? Must a solipsistically oriented psychologist abandon the use of ‘that’-clauses? Are Stich and I right in contending that Fodor has failed to see the drastic consequences of his own view? If you’ve read it, discuss Stich’s paper, “Narrow Content Meets Fat Syntax.”
34. If you’re interested in it and know something
about it, comment on the problem of “intentional causation.” It is
really two problems, that of supervenient causation (see the Kim
and McLaughlin readings in section 14 of our anthology) and more interestingly
in light of content externalism, that of wide causation (Fodor and
Wilson, section 15).
These problems were much discussed
in the 1990s, hot issues indeed. The reason I have not included them
in our syllabus is that, as I mention on p. 255, neither of them is at
all peculiar to the mind. Supervenient causation pervades nature,
and wide causation is found in biology, geology, astronomy, and elsewhere.
It is an as yet unexplained historical accident that metaphysical discussion
of them took place largely in the guise of philosophy of mind.
35. Assess White’s idea, once borrowed by Fodor and glanced off by Devitt, of “narrow content” as a function from environments or “settings” to wide content. Can it be saved from the standard objection that "narrow content isn't content"? Possibly by Antony's appeal to indexicals and Kaplanian characters (e.g., in "What Are You Thinking?: Character and Content in the Language of Thought")?
36. Investigate one or more of the possibilities
for a purely solipsistic psychological vocabulary. Might psychologists
realistically hope for sort of “machine language” that they could use to
describe brain events in purely “syntactic” terms? What are the prospects
for an alternative belief vocabulary of the sort Stich considers on p.
266-67? Is Devitt’s “narrow RTM,” based on “simply abstract[ing]”
from extracranial meaning, a credible instance of that strategy?
(On the strategy as couched in terms of a creature’s “notional world,”
see Dennett's “Beyond Belief.”)
Or how about just using ordinary attitude
locutions but understanding them as shorthand for narrow/autonomous descriptions
of the relevant states? That is, we might let psychologists use `that'-clauses
relative to a fixed choice of interpretation scheme but use that scheme
only to make clear which narrow/autonomous states they are talking about;
cf. Devitt’s bracketing device on pp. 301-02, and Stich’s on p. 312.
Or, evaluate Devitt's asterisk strategy
on its own. Is it substantive (much less does it succeed), or is
it a mere labelling of the problem?
37. Evaluate Devitt's argument for methodological solipsism "NARROW PSYCHOLOGY") based on his appeal to laws. (Incidentally, he has since renounced the doctrine and, now persuaded by Burge, plumped for WIDE PSYCHOLOGY; see Ch. 5 of his 1996 book Coming to Our Senses. He there also acknowledges his confusion of the two notions of "function," and discusses the difference.)
38. Here is a further problem for Devitt, that I
did not get to in class. In characterizing the "functional links"
to stimuli that ground his narrow contents, Devitt appeals (p. 293) to
stimuli as individuated by reference to types of external object.
What semantically distinguishes "platypus" from "echidna" is that the former
is linked to "platypus-ish" stimuli and the latter to "echidna-ish" stimuli.
But what are "echidna-ish" stimuli? Presumably the characteristic
visual look of an echidna, as represented by standard photos in encyclopedias
or National Geographic. Or might Devitt, more properly, mean
stimuli
by stimuli, i.e., retinal hits? In any case, (1) I have the concept
of an echidna, and I know what an echidna is. But I have forgotten
what they look like. There is no pattern of retinal irradiation that
would now cause me to token "echidna." (2) Despite the existence
of the "characteristic visual look" as in photographs, an echidna might,
under various visual circumstances, look most any way to you. It
might look like a black blob, or like a beaver, or like a rock, or like
a small statue of General Robert E. Lee. Depending on your environment,
echidnas might never once look to you the way they look in the photographs.
Can you solve this problem on Devitt's
behalf?
39. If you happen to know the Jackson and Chalmers materials on "A-" or "primary intensions," assess the prospects for such intensions as narrow mental contents. Can you rebut the two objections I made in class? (That, even at a time, there is no principled difference between your beliefs about a substance that form part of its concept's official stereotype and those that don't, and that most of the concepts that figure in a stereotype are themselves wide.)
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40. Discuss the problem of externalism vs. self-knowledge. Is there a good incompatibilist argument? Does Burge-Heil succeed? Are the slow-switching examples a problem despite the objection we raised against Boghossian's argument in class?
41. Assess Paul Churchland’s arguments for his Eliminativism or would-be Eliminativism regarding the propositional attitudes. Is FP as despicable as Churchland makes out? If not, can it be exonerated as glibly as I tried to do in class?
42. What about Churchland’s replies to the objections he anticipates? Do they succeed? You might want to pay particular attention to the “self-refutation” (= "cognitive suicide") objection stated on p. 131, especially if you think there is more to it than Churchland's and my rebuttals to it allow.
43. Expand and evaluate the Moorean objection to Eliminativism that I noted in the class handout. (If you’re interested in it, you should probably read my whole article, “A Particularly Compelling Refutation of Eliminative Materialism.”)
44. Discuss classical Eliminativism concerning sensations. (You’ll certainly need to read short papers by Paul Feyerabend and W.V. Quine, at a minimum. But for a real trip, try Rorty.)
45. What has been achieved by Pat Churchland and Terry Sejnowski in their article? Ascribe one or more philosophically interesting claims to them, and evaluate their case for it/them.
46. Join any one of the issues discussed by Bechtel. If you’re interested in issues of compatibility, in particular, you should read Ramsey, Stich and Garon’s “Connectionism, Eliminativism and the Future of Folk Psychology.”
47. Assess the "inner sense" theory of conscious awareness defended by Armstrong and me. You may want to look at the first half of my paper, "The Superiority of HOP to HOT."
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48. Discuss Jackson’s “Knowledge argument.” Does it commit the fallacy of equivocation with which I and others have charged it? Does any version of it succeed in showing anything of interest about qualitative states/events?
49. Discuss the Nemirow-Lewis “Ability analysis.” Respond on their behalf to one or more of the criticisms offered by Levin, Loar and me.
50. Assess Lewis’ rejoinder to the “Fifth Way” on pp. 454-55; the “Fifth Way” is very like one of the responses to Nagel-Jackson that we have discussed in class.
51. Focus on and evaluate the Loar-Lycan-et-al. “introspective perspective” response. Does the idea of an “introspective perspective” make sense, and does it help refute the argument?
52. Discuss the Explanatory Gap, and/or Van Gulick’s treatment of it. Does it have metaphysical significance? If not, what other significance does it have?
53. Discuss any other element of Van Gulick’s article. [EXCEPT, please, do not so much as mention the Kantian business on pp. 468-71, unless you have a reading of it that makes it transparently clear and helpful. If it happens you do have a reading of it that makes it transparently c. and h., I will pay you $50.)
54. Expound and evaluate Harman’s unique response to the “second objection” (i.e., to the Knowledge argument).
55. For that matter, expound and evaluate Harman’s position on “inverted spectrum.”
56. Assess Harman’s Representationist response to the “first objection,” on your own (without necessarily taking up Block’s objection to Harman). And/or, take up more generally the Representationist claim that qualia (strictly so called) are representata or intentional objects.
57. Criticize the view that bodily sensations are representations, and/or the claim that their qualia are represented properties.
58. Does Block’s “Inverted Earth” counterexample work against Representationism? You may want to defend Block against the objections made in class.
59. Criticize “phenomenal externalism,” the claim that qualia such as phenomenal color are wide. (You may want to look at my article, "The Case for Phenomenal Externalism.")
60. Take up any other issue surveyed in my Stanford
Encyclopedia article on the
Representational
theory of qualia.