IN discussions of the identity theory of mind, there is constant recourse to two related types of argument, from ordinary language usage, to the effect that the theory in question is either false or meaningless. We can refer to the two arguments under discussion as the category argument and the meaninglessness argument. If either one of these arguments were well founded we could decide a priori without waiting for further research in the relevant sciences, whether or (...) not the mind could be identified with processes of the central nervous system. The answer would be in the negative. It is proposed to examine these two arguments here, and to question the persuasive simplicity with which they have been frequently put forward. If they do not bear up well under closer scrutiny we may not, of course, conclude to the truth of the identity theory; we will conclude only that it has not been a priori eliminated, by these arguments, as a contender for the solution of the mind-body problem. (shrink)

IN discussions of the identity theory of mind, there is constant recourse to two related types of argument, from ordinary language usage, to the effect that the theory in question is either false or meaningless. We can refer to the two arguments under discussion as the category argument and the meaninglessness argument. If either one of these arguments were well founded we could decide a priori without waiting for further research in the relevant sciences, whether or (...) not the mind could be identified with processes of the central nervous system. The answer would be in the negative. It is proposed to examine these two arguments here, and to question the persuasive simplicity with which they have been frequently put forward. If they do not bear up well under closer scrutiny we may not, of course, conclude to the truth of the identity theory; we will conclude only that it has not been a priori eliminated, by these arguments, as a contender for the solution of the mind-body problem. (shrink)

The 1964 Congress of the Australasian Association of Philosophy was the occasion for the delivery of the five major papers in this volume. Comments by J. J. C. Smart on four of the papers are included, since, not surprisingly, discussion of the identity theory was centered almost exclusively around Smart's formulation of it. Of the four papers upon which Smart commented, three are very critical of the identity theory while the fourth is sympathetic but uncommitted. The (...) fifth paper, "Ryle and the Mechanical Hypothesis," is a greatly expanded version of the paper Brian Medlin read to the Congress. Medlin's paper is largely an ad hoc defense of central state materialism against objections which might be raised by a Rylean. Rollins and Herbst have added replies to Medlin's paper; Herbst's comments are, in particular, quite acute in the way in which they bring out the ideological undersurface of the identity theory. In the critical papers, Gunner argues that Smart has not sufficiently clarified the notion of identity so as to make the thesis meaningful; Rollins argues that Smart has failed to notice the context-dependency of an explanation, i.e., an explanation is an explanation for some--but not necessarily all--purposes; Herbst suggests that Smart has given no intelligible account of how the identity theory could be verified without begging the question. In his "Comments" Smart reaffirms his faith in physicalism and announces his recent conversion to a Feyerabendian contextual account of a truth. This conversion solves all the difficulties of the theory. The effects are inconclusive, when not evasive.--E. A. R. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a two-pronged argument devoted to defending the type-identity theory of mind against the argument presented by Kripke in _Naming and Necessity_. In the first part, the interpersonal case, I show that since it is not possible to establish the metaphysical conditions for phenomenal identity, it is not possible to argue that there can be physical differences between two subjects despite their phenomenal identity. In the second part, the intrapersonal case, I (...) consider the possibility of imagining one and the same individual having the same phenomenal state while counterfactually being in very different physical states. I argue that this case should respect Kripke’s implicit theory of personal identity—but this proves to be a very difficult task to accomplish, thus preventing the argument from getting off the ground. Therefore, I maintain, that the type-identity theory is still the better option to solve the mind–body problem. (shrink)

Functionalists in philosophy of mind traditionally raise two major arguments against the type identity theory: (1) psychological states are _multiply realizable_ so that there are no one-to-one mappings of psychological states onto neural states and (2) the most that evidence could ever establish is the _correlation_ of psychological and neural states, not their identity. We defend a variant on the traditional type identity theory which we call _heuristic identity theory_ (HIT) against both of (...) these objections. Drawing its inspiration from scientific practice, heuristic identity theory construes identity claims as hypotheses that guide subsequent inquiry, not as conclusions of the research. (shrink)

This book argues that correspondence theories of truth fail because the relation that holds between a true thought and a fact is that of identity, not correspondence. Facts are not complexes of worldly entities which make thoughts true they are merely true thoughts. According to Julian Dodd, the resulting modest identity theory, while not defining truth, correctly diagnoses the failure of correspondence theories, and thereby prepares the ground for a defensible deflation of the concept of truth.

THE Identity Theory of Herbert Feigl is an elaborate and painstaking attempt to overcome the perplexities of the mind-body problem which Anglo-Saxon philosophers have inherited from Descartes and which has been compounded by the empiricist heritage of Hume. In common with influential contemporaries such as Russell, Ryle, Strawson and Hampshire, Feigl believes that the substance dualism of Descartes is an incoherent doctrine. There can be no adequate account of the nature and status of the person if (...) class='Hi'>mind and body, conscious immaterial self and extended corporeal substance are regarded as distinct and disparate entities. It is paradoxical however and indicative of the pervasive influence of the Cartesian framework, that the Identity Theory combines an explicit rejection of dualism with an uncompromising acceptance and even extension of another feature of that framework, in that it hinges on a more comprehensive reliance on the knowledge claims of science than even Descartes was prepared to sanction. (shrink)

THE Identity Theory of Herbert Feigl is an elaborate and painstaking attempt to overcome the perplexities of the mind-body problem which Anglo-Saxon philosophers have inherited from Descartes and which has been compounded by the empiricist heritage of Hume. In common with influential contemporaries such as Russell, Ryle, Strawson and Hampshire, Feigl believes that the substance dualism of Descartes is an incoherent doctrine. There can be no adequate account of the nature and status of the person if (...) class='Hi'>mind and body, conscious immaterial self and extended corporeal substance are regarded as distinct and disparate entities. It is paradoxical however and indicative of the pervasive influence of the Cartesian framework, that the Identity Theory combines an explicit rejection of dualism with an uncompromising acceptance and even extension of another feature of that framework, in that it hinges on a more comprehensive reliance on the knowledge claims of science than even Descartes was prepared to sanction. (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that John McDowell (in his Mind and World) tries to occupy a position that is not coherently statable; namely, that facts have objects and properties as constituents and are yet identical with true (Fregean) Thoughts. This position is contrasted with two other identity theories of truth: the robust theory, in which true propositions are identified with facts (which are understood to have objects and properties as constituents); and the modest (...) class='Hi'>theory, in which facts are identified with true Fregean Thoughts. I argue that the modest theory is to be preferred. (shrink)

Concealing information requires that adolescents manage the information that they share, which requires cognitive skills, for example, theory of mind. This study explored motivations for concealment that early adolescents endorsed concealing or disclosing to friends and parents, in relation to their theory of mind. We found that adolescents broadly endorsed disclosure to both parents and friends, even when it might mean they would face consequences, be impolite, or face negative identity-related emotions. We found that ToM (...) ability was associated with a tendency to endorse being forthcoming and sharing information with both friends and parents. These findings provide new insight into how the relation between ToM and concealment may change with age, specifically how in early adolescence it may foster open communication rather than concealment as is the case in early and middle childhood. (shrink)

Mind body, not a pseudo-problem, by H. Feigl.--Is consciousness a brain process? by U. T. Place.--Sensations and brain processes, by J. J. C. Smart.--The nature of mind, by D. M. Armstrong.--Materialism as a scientific hypothesis, by U. T. Place.--Sensations and brain processes: a reply to J. J. C. Smart, by J. T. Stevenson.--Further remarks on sensations and brain processes, by J. J. C. Smart.--Smart on sensations, by K. Baier.--Brain processes and incorrigibility, by J. J. C. Smart.--Could mental states (...) be brain processes? by J. Shaffer.--The identity of mind and body, by J. Cornman.--Shaffer on the identity of mental states and brain processes, by R. Coburn.--Mental events and the brain, by J. Shaffer.--Comment: mental events and the brain, by P. Feyerabend.--Materialism and the mind-body problem, by P. Feyerabend.--Materialism, by J. J. C. Smart.--Scientific materialism and the identity theory, by N. Malcolm.--Professor Malcolm on scientific materialism and the identity theory, by E. Sosa.--Rejoinder to Mr. Sosa, by N. Malcolm.--Mind-body identity, privacy and categories, by R. Rorty.--Physicalism, by T. Nagel.--Mind-body identity, a side issue? by C. Taylor.--Illusions and identity, by J. M. Hinton.--Bibliography (p. [259]-261). (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to criticize Thomas Baldwin's claim, that in developing an identity theory of truth, F H Bradley was following Hegel. It is argued that Baldwin has incorrectly understood certain passages from Hegel which he cites in defense of this view, and that Hegel's conception of truth was primarily material, not propositional.

The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain. Strictly speaking, it need not hold that the mind is identical to the brain. Idiomatically we do use ‘She has a good mind’ and ‘She has a good brain’ interchangeably but we would hardly say ‘Her mind weighs fifty ounces’. Here I take identifying mind and brain as being a matter (...) of identifying processes and perhaps states of the mind and brain. Consider an experience of pain, or of seeing something, or of having a mental image. The identity theory of mind is to the effect that these experiences just are brain processes, not merely correlated with brain processes. (shrink)

In a recent article, Hofweber presents a new, and surprising, argument for idealism. His argument is surprising because it starts with an apparently innocent premiss from the philosophy of language: that ‘that’-clauses do not refer. I do not think that Hofweber's argument works, and my first aim in this paper is to explain why. However, I agree with Hofweber that what we say about ‘that’-clauses has important metaphysical consequences. My second aim is to argue that, far from leading us into (...) idealism, denying that ‘that’-clauses refer is the first step toward a kind of direct realism about belief. (shrink)

A general characterization of functionalist theories of mind is offered and a number of issues are discussed which allow for alternative versions of functionalism. Some issues, such as the distinction between the implicit definition and partial specification views are of a general nature, while others raise questions more specific to functionalism, such as whether the relation between psychological and physiological properties is one of identity or instantiation. Section II attempts to undermine several arguments which have been offered to (...) support the non-identity position. In the final section, the suggestions that the relevant notions of functional equivalence might be unpacked solely in terms of abstract automata features or entirely in terms of causal relations to nonintentionally characterized behavior are shown to be inadequate. (shrink)

Most research on aboriginal mind and mental health has sought to apply or confirm preexisting European-derived theories among aboriginal people. Culture has been underappreciate. An understanding of uniquely aboriginal models for mind and mental health might lead to more effective and robust interventions. To address this issue, a core group of elders from five separate regions of North America was developed to help determine how aboriginal people conceived of mind, self, and identity before European contact. The (...) process utilized for this study is iterative and involves discussions of teachings, traditional stories, and elder's comments on conclusions drawn. The elders endorsed a relational theory of mind in which mind exists between people as a product of the stories told and created within and by that relationship. Mind is distinguished from consciousness which is without language and exists within the individual as awareness. Language immediately results in an "out there" orientation in which two or more individuals generate stories about their experiences. The community is the basic unit of study for mind and mental health, and mental "illness" is not distinguished from physical "illness," but rather all are seen as a continuum of suffering and pain. What emerged from this research is that North American theories of mind are more closely related to Daoist and Shinto theories than to the logical positivism which drives most of North America's conventional psychology and psychiatry. Within European traditions, however, the philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin with his emphasis on a dialogical self coupled with system theory comes closest to resembling North American aboriginal theories. This model explains why ceremony and ritual, community interventions, talking circles, and family therapy are more compatible with aboriginal thought than conventional North American biomedicine and psychology. (shrink)

The standard view on explicit theory of mind development holds that children around the age of 4 years start to ascribe beliefs to themselves and others. At this age they begin to master FB tasks in which they have to ascribe a mistaken belief to someone else. The emerging competence in FB tasks goes hand in hand with the developing ability to master various tasks that also require the understanding of different perspectives, like the alternative naming game, false (...) sign or identity tasks. Mental Files Theory allows to explain this developmental synchrony. It also helps to explain why older children struggle to understand that beliefs about an object depend on how one is acquainted with it (aspectuality), and why these difficulties disappear once children master second-order belief tasks at age 6. In this chapter, I focus on children’s developing mental file management, and how this accounts for the developmental synchrony of tasks that require taking into account different perspectives. In addition, I address several challenges for this view from the literature. (shrink)

Progress in understanding the mind-body problem can be made without attempting to solve it as one unified problem, which it is not. Pepper's "Identity Theory" solution to the problem is now seen as not necessarily clarifying for the question of dualism. Residual asymmetrical dualism is proposed as a theory offering one very good way to think about this set of problems in a variety of modes of inquiry. These include neurophysiological research on the amygdala by LeDoux, (...) research in the phenonenon of hearing and learning while under general anesthetic, Gendlin's methods of focusing upon the body during therapeutic procedures and during creative composition of poetry, and Dewey's position concerning "primary experience" versus a "secondary pseudo-environment" inhabited by the civilized human. Residual asymmetrical dualism is not a value-neutral theory: it is based on a determination that bodily intelligence must ultimately guide mental functioning if survival and well-being are to be secured. It leads to take actions within society to carry out whatever steps are needed to alleviate the mind-body split whenever such a split is harmful to human interaction. (shrink)

A general characterization of functionalist theories of mind is offered and a number of issues are discussed which allow for alternative versions of functionalism. Some issues, such as the distinction between the implicit definition and partial specification views are of a general nature, while others raise questions more specific to functionalism, such as whether the relation between psychological and physiological properties is one of identity or instantiation. Section II attempts to undermine several arguments which have been offered to (...) support the non-identity position. In the final section, the suggestions that the relevant notions of functional equivalence might be unpacked solely in terms of abstract automata features or entirely in terms of causal relations to nonintentionally characterized behavior are shown to be inadequate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes’s Theory of MindEnrique Chávez-ArvizoDesmond M. Clarke. Descartes’s Theory of Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 267. Cloth, $49.95.Desmond Clarke, commentator on Cartesian natural philosophy, has now published an interpretation of Descartes's dualism, a theme which can hardly be said to be underrepresented in the literature. The monograph is divided into nine chapters concerned with explanation, sensation, imagination and memory, the passions, the (...) will, language, thought, substance, and property dualism—yes, property dualism.The book pushes forward a reading of Descartes's theory of mind, made from a perspective which Clarke has adopted over the last three decades or so, that maintains that Descartes was primarily (and willingly) a scientist and incidentally (and reluctantly) a philosopher. From this viewpoint, according to Clarke, natural philosophy provides the paradigm for genuine explanation in Descartes's metaphysics. Furthermore, given that Descartes rejects Scholastic substantial forms and real qualities as explanatorily infertile and since substances are equally unfruitful, substances play no explanatory role in his system of philosophy. Substance dualism is not at the center of Descartes's philosophy of mind; his account of explanation is. This makes Descartes not a substance dualist; but a property dualist. So argues, in very broad strokes, Clarke. [End Page 116]Unlike us, Descartes did not draw a sharp distinction between philosophy and science. For him, these two realms of enquiry were part of a unified realm of knowledge, what he deemed scientia or philosophy in the wider sense. Hence his use of the instructive metaphor of philosophy as a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, the trunk physics, and the branches the other sciences which he reduces to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics, and morals (Letter Preface to Picot, French translation of the Principles of Philosophy, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery [Paris: Vrin, 1989], 14). However, Descartes did distinguish the roots from the trunk, that is, metaphysics (or "first philosophy") from physics (or "natural philosophy"). Commentators on Descartes's system of philosophy ignore his natural philosophy at their peril, for it does shed considerable light on his metaphysics. But, likewise, Descartes's philosophy greatly illuminates his science. It is for this reason that I want to cast doubt on Clarke's apparent scientific imperialism in which Descartes's methodological, epistemological, and metaphysical concerns are forced to play second fiddle to his scientific views. We cannot neatly fit Descartes's metaphysical views into Clarke's scientific mold, nor can we force them in, without incurring serious error. I do not think that one has to choose between one and the other as being primary, between the tree of knowledge and the inverted tree of knowledge. We need to keep in mind that in Descartes's system of philosophy, both science and philosophy are interconnected and that both parts elucidate each other.Clarke's attempt to eliminate substance from Descartes's account of mind is problematic. True, the term 'substance' is an extremely ambiguous one and Descartes's comments about it are often blurred and puzzling. On the one hand, one must concede that the concept of substance plays a small role in Descartes's natural philosophy, in which although the material universe is depicted in terms of extended substance or res extensa, physics is ultimately unwrapped by way of laws describing the behavior of particles in virtue of their size, shape, and motion. But, in contrast, substance plays a far more prominent role in his metaphysics, not to mention in his theology. This leads to a related point. Clarke overlooks the importance of theology for Descartes's philosophical project and the role of God in Cartesian natural philosophy.The level of argument drops considerably in the final chapter, where Clarke offers an uncritical and not very clear survey of naming and necessity, the identity theory, anomalous monism, and property dualism. This chapter seems in tension with his disapproval of anachronistic readings of Descartes (8-9) and contains some serious slips. Clarke's answer to his own question "Was Descartes, then, a substance dualist" is a mind boggling "Yes and no" (258), and his claim that Descartes was a property dualist, collapses under... (shrink)

In this paper I maintain that Spinoza systematizes independently credible accounts of belief-formation, affect, and desire into an intriguing general theory of how the mind works. His account also explains disparate downstream psychological phenomena, including: (1) emotional responses to fiction; (2) belief perseverance; (3) the reduction of cognitive dissonance; (4) epistemic conservativism that opens us up to confirmation bias, identity protection, and intolerance. Given the promise of Spinoza’s program, I conclude with a plea for further philosophical engagement.

Chapter One The most plausible arguments for the identity of mind and body that have been advanced in this century have been for the identity of mental ...

The article is an attempt to uncover the metaphysical assumptions implicit in the otherwise highly scientific contemporary identity theories. 1) the identity statement, Being a philosophical interpretation of dualistic psychophysical correspondence, Requires for its support a justificatory ontological or linguistic premise. 2) the conception of the mental as the hidden, Unobservable, Subjective and private is a metaphysical distortion with historical roots in an empiricist and positivist interpretation of the cartesian dichotomy of thinking and extended thing. 3) acceptance of (...) an artificial dichotomy and reliance on a narrow conceptual framework lead identity theorists to misrepresent the nature of the mental-Physical relation and to see ontological reductionism as the only solution. 4) alternative explanations are possible which bypass the shortcomings mentioned and propose the irreducibility of mind to body without postulating a dualistic ontology; merleau-Ponty's and wittgenstein's theories are good examples of an ontological monism which allows for the reality and meaningfulness of the mental within the scope of the physical. (edited). (shrink)

Eliminative materialism is a popular view of the mind which holds that propositional attitudes, the typical units of our traditional understanding, are unsupported by modern connectionist psychology and neuroscience, and consequently that propositional attitudes are a poor scientific postulate, and do not exist. Since our traditional folk psychology employs propositional attitudes, the usual argument runs, it too represents a poor theory, and may in the future be replaced by a more successful neurologically grounded theory, resulting in a (...) drastic improvement in our interpersonal relationships. I contend that these eliminativist arguments typically run together two distinct capacities: the folk psychological mechanisms which we use to understand one another, and scientific and philosophical guesses about the structure of those understandings. Both capacities are ontologically committed and therefore empirical. However, the commitments whose prospects look so dismal to the eliminativist, in particular the causal and logical image of propositional attitudes, belong to the guesses, and not necessarily to the underlying mechanisms. It is the commitments of traditional philosophical perspectives about the operation of our folk psychology which are contradicted by␣new evidence and modeling methods in connectionist psychology. Our actual folk psychology was not clearly committed to causal, sentential propositional attitudes, and thus is not directly threatened by connectionist psychology. (shrink)

My aim in what follows is to expound and (if possible) resolve two problems in Spinoza’s theory of mind. The first problem is how Spinoza can accept a key premise in Descartes’s argument for dualism—that thought and extension are separately conceivable, “one without the help of the other”—without accepting Descartes’s conclusion that no substance is both thinking and extended. Resolving this problem will require us to consider a crucial ambiguity in the notion of conceiving one thing without another, (...) the credentials of Descartes’s principle that each substance has a principal attribute, and the prospect of neutral monism as a theory of the mind. The second problem is how Spinoza can maintain that each mental event is identical with some physical event (and conversely) while denying that there is ever any causal interaction between mental and physical events. If one mental event causes another and the first is identical with some physical event, must that physical event not cause the mental event? Resolving this problem will require looking into the reach of opacity in Spinoza’s philosophy and considering whether there are ever any legitimate exceptions to Leibniz’s Law. (shrink)

The philosophy of mind and cognition has been transformed by recent advances in what is loosely called cognitive science. This book is a thoroughly up-to-date introduction to and account of that transformation, in which the many strands in contemporary cognitive science are brought together into a coherent philosophical picture of the mind. The book begins with discussions of the pre-history of contemporary philosophy of mind - dualism, behaviourism, and early versions of the identity theory of (...) mind - and moves through discussions of functionalism in autonomy of psychology, to topics such as eliminative materialism, individualism and the problems of content and representation. The synoptic nature of the discussion makes it ideal as the foundation of an undergraduate course in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The identity theory’s rise to prominence in analytic philosophy of mind during the late 1950s and early 1960s is widely seen as a watershed in the development of physicalism, in the sense that whereas logical behaviourism proposed analytic and a priori ascertainable identities between the meanings of mental and physical-behavioural concepts, the identity theory proposed synthetic and a posteriori knowable identities between mental and physical properties. While this watershed does exist, the standard account of it (...) is misleading, as it is founded in erroneous intensional misreadings of the logical positivists’—especially Carnap’s—extensional notions of translation and meaning, as well as misinterpretations of the positivists’ shift from the strong thesis of translation-physicalism to the weaker and more liberal notion of reduction-physicalism that occurred in the Unity of Science programme. After setting the historical record straight, the essay traces the first truly modern identity theory to Schlick’s pre-positivist views circa 1920 and goes on to explore its further development in Feigl, arguing that the fundamental difference between the Schlick-Feigl identity theory and the more familiar and influential Place-Smart-Armstrong identity theory has resurfaced in the deep and seemingly unbridgeable gulf in contemporary philosophy of consciousness between inflationary mentalism and deflationary physicalism. (shrink)

A critical outline is given of Rorty’s early, “eliminativist” attempt to formulate a materialist version of the mind-body identity theory that does not fall foul of the “irreducible properties objection” (the thought that if mental states are brain states then the latter must exhibit the same properties as the former). An explanation is offered of why Rorty continued to describe himself as a materialist/physicalist despite having come to reject any version of mind-body identity.

This work makes the revisionist claim that "the theory of mind in the Critique [of Pure Reason] is much more traditional and rationalistic than it at first appears, but that it is also more defensible than is generally recognized". Specifically, Ameriks aims to show that "Kant can be seen as wanting, above all else, to put... into a respectable form" the "core of the rationalist commitment" "to the idea that we have a special kind of identity that (...) can withstand all the kinds of change that ordinarily spell the end of ordinary objects". But, first, Ameriks's account of the "core of the rationalist commitment" is maddeningly vague and unstable--indeed, Ameriks's conception of rationalism is so ill-defined that at one point skepticism about the external world is treated as a part of rationalism rather than as the very much undesired consequence of certain Cartesian premises which Kant thought it to be!--and the discussion is damagingly ahistorical. Ameriks does emphasize the developmental dimension within Kant's own work, ranging over the whole of Kant's published corpus and mining the various lecture courses on metaphysics which have now been gathered together as volume 28 of the Berlin edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften. But his picture of rationalism itself and its characteristic arguments is undifferentiated and undocumented, and this leads to the misconception that Kant thought that some theoretical defense of rationalist theses could still be maintained while what are merely some possible arguments in their behalf were criticized; but some review of Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten and Meier would surely have shown that Kant was criticizing all of the chief arguments for the rationalist conception of the soul known to him, and attention to Kant's own claim for the completeness of his presentation of these natural and inevitable illusions of human reason could have suggested only that Kant himself thought that these were all the theoretical arguments for a rationalist philosophy of mind there could be. Second, it is questionable whether Ameriks's view really revises our standard reading of Kant's conclusions at all. The gist of Ameriks's argument is that in spite of Kant's specific criticism of the paralogistic arguments of pure psychology, Kant retained a favorable attitude toward the theoretical and not just practical postulation of such properties as immateriality and transcendental freedom at the noumenal level--but this turns out to mean little more than that Kant accepted his own transcendental idealism. This is hardly revolutionary, and the interest of the point is far from strengthened by Ameriks's own conclusion that transcendental idealism cannot be fully proved. (shrink)

In the philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and psychology, the causal relationship between phenomenal consciousness, mentation, and brain states has always been a matter of debate. On the one hand, material monism posits consciousness and mind as pure brain epiphenomena. One of its most stringent lines of reasoning relies on a ‘loss-of-function lesion premise,’ according to which, since brain lesions and neurochemical modifications lead to cognitive impairment and/or altered states of consciousness, there is no reason to doubt the (...) class='Hi'>mind-brain identity. On the other hand, dualism or idealism (in one form or another) regard consciousness and mind as something other than the sole product of cerebral activity pointing at the ineffable, undefinable, and seemingly unphysical nature of our subjective qualitative experiences and its related mental dimension. Here, several neuroscientific findings are reviewed that question the idea that posits phenomenal experience as an emergent property of brain activity, and argue that the premise of material monism is based on a logical correlation-causation fallacy. While these (mostly ignored) findings, if considered separately from each other, could, in principle, be recast into a physicalist paradigm, once viewed from an integral perspective, they substantiate equally well an ontology that posits mind and consciousness as a primal phenomenon. (shrink)

In this highly original work, Teed Rockwell rejects both dualism and the mind-brain identity theory. He proposes instead that mental phenomena emerge not merely from brain activity but from an interacting nexus of brain, body, and world. The mind can be seen not as an organ within the body, but as a "behavioral field" that fluctuates within this brain-body-world nexus. If we reject the dominant form of the mind-brain identity theory -- which Rockwell (...) calls "Cartesian materialism" -- and accept this new alternative, then many philosophical and scientific problems can be solved. Other philosophers have flirted with these ideas, including Dewey, Heidegger, Putnam, Millikan, and Dennett. But Rockwell goes further than these tentative speculations and offers a detailed alternative to the dominant philosophical view, applying pragmatist insights to contemporary scientific and philosophical problems. Rockwell shows that neuroscience no longer supports the mind-brain identity theory because the brain cannot be isolated from the rest of the nervous system; moreover, there is evidence that the mind is hormonal as well as neural. These data, and Rockwell's reanalysis of the concept of causality, show why the borders of mental embodiment cannot be neatly drawn at the skull, or even at the skin. Rockwell then demonstrates how his proposed view of the mind can resolve paradoxes engendered by the mind-brain identity theory in such fields as neuroscience, artificial intelligence, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Finally, he argues that understanding the mind as a "behavioral field" supports the new cognitive science paradigm of dynamic systems theory. (shrink)

(1) Content properties are nonrelational, that is, having a content property does not entail the existence of any contingent object not identical with the thinker or a part of the thinker.2 (2) We have noninferential knowledge of our conscious thoughts, that is, for any of our..