Abstract

The dissertation is organized around the issue of whether and in what sense there are psychophysical laws. Roughly the first half is concerned with the topic of whether and in what sense there are psychophysical laws subsuming sensory states, while the second half addresses the issue of whether and in what sense there are psychophysical laws subsuming perceptual judgments. ;The opening chapter outlines a general view of the nature of events and causal explanation which serves as the framework for the discussion of the causation and explanation of sensory and perceptual events. Chapters 2 through 4 isolate a special class of sensory states with a distinctive role in our mental lives. In chapter 5 I turn to the task of extracting psychophysical laws from some contemporary work on the neurobiology of sensory experience. Here, as elsewhere, when one takes a close look at the scientific work, and carefully analyzes the relevant aspects of our everyday 'folk psychology', we see that there is a pretty comfortable fit between the two. ;The remaining chapters all concern the nature and possibility of psychophysical laws subsuming perceptual judgments. ;Chapter 6 is devoted to critically analyzing Jaegwon Kim's reconstruction of Donald Davidson's well-known argument against the very possibility of psychophysical laws linking intentional states with neural states; it is concluded that the argument does not succeed. I then turn, in chapter 7, to spelling out and distinguishing the different functionalist accounts of the metaphysics of mental states. Chapters 8 and 9 show how to extract psychophysical laws from a contemporary neural model of memory and perceptual judgment; it is argued that there is no incompatibility between these models and a functionalist account of the nature of mentality--indeed, there is no incompatibility with any reasonable metaphysics of mentality. Finally, in chapter 10, I close with a brief look at some of the conceptual and methodological issues concerning the foundations of cognitive psychology that are raised by recent work in cognitive neuroscience.