Abstract

I discuss the significance of intuitions of contingency for the Mind-Body problem. The intuitions are of the alleged contingency of the relation between the mind and the brain. Chapter one deals with White's property dualism argument, in which he argues that we are committed to property dualism if there is no a priori identification of the mind and brain. I argue that his argument is unsound given the falsity of a semantic principle, the effect of which is to conflate our having no a priori identification with our having successful intuitions of contingency. I also argue that Loar makes the same conflation in his reply to similar arguments. ;Chapter two deals with the intuitions as they arise in arguments for the explanatory gap, an allegedly "merely epistemic" problem for physicalism. Proponents of the gap argue that since intuitions are a matter of what is conceivable, they have no metaphysical implications; rather they show only what is epistemically possible. I argue that this reply involves a flawed view of conceivability. The intuitions have implications . The real issue lies in whether what is claimed to be conceivable is genuinely conceivable. I conclude that the intuitions of contingency pose no merely epistemic problem over and above the original metaphysical challenge. ;In chapter three, I propose a compositional view of the mind as an empirical thesis that would account for one sort of intuitions of contingency. First, I classify the intuitions into five types. The first three types support either substance or property dualism; the fourth supports functionalism; and a fifth supports the proposed view, according to which a mental property such as pain is the property of being composed of physical matter that instantiates certain physical properties of the brain. I contrast the view these intuitions support with Searle's biological naturalism. Since Searle claims to rely on one of the first three sorts of intuitions, he cannot go on to claim as he does that biological naturalism avoids dualism. I argue that my proposed view should be welcomed, over Searle's view, by materialists.