Abstract

Professor Sikora rightly says that the claim that there might turn out to be no mental events turns on finding some mark of the mental “such that certain events could be mental at one time and then cease to be mental at another time.” This sounds paradoxical, but perhaps the paradox can be mitigated as follows. On the view that I want to recommend, “being mental” resembles “being a capital crime.” One might want to say that there never were any such crimes—for there never were any acts which deserved death. Or one might want to say that there used to be such crimes, but that now, thanks to new legislation, there no longer are.