Abstract

Of fairly recent philosophical vintage is the idea that the mind-body problem--the problem of the ontological relationship obtaining between mental and physical phenomena--can be fruitfully addressed by concentrating on the conceptual frameworks these ontologies are affiliated with. In the 1980's Paul and Patricia Churchland have explicitly developed this idea into a reformulation of the mind-body problem whose fundamental issue concerns the outcome of a future intertheoretic reduction of "folk psychology," the theory affiliated with our commonsense, everyday understanding of the mental, and some comprehensive neuroscience of the future. I begin this dissertation by surveying their proposed reformulation, and find it lacking as a detailed account of the philosophical vision motivating it. But the vision itself and the advantages of it are left untouched by these criticisms, and in later chapters I attempt to provide a detailed account which does service to this vision while avoiding the specific criticisms sinking the Churchlands' reformulation. Borrowing both motivation and some of the detailed apparatus of Wilfrid Sellars' synoptic philosophy, I argue that the philosophical mind-body problem can be fruitfully reformulated as principally concerning a future fusion of an intentional image of the mind with a future neuroscientific image. Not only does this reformulation address the various philosophical issues at stake, but it also provides a framework for understanding the relationships obtaining between various levels of explanation in actual cases from recent psychology and neuroscience.