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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: What is Philosophy?
- Sprache: Englisch
We all have minds, but what exactly is a mind? Is your mind the same thing as your brain? How does what's happening in your mind cause your behaviour? Can you know what's going on in other people's minds? Can you even be sure what's going on in your own? Are babies conscious? How about cats? Or self-driving cars? Philosophy of mind grapples with questions like these, exploring who we are and how we fit into the world. In this student-friendly guide, McClelland introduces the key ideas in philosophy of mind, showing why they matter and how philosophers have tried to answer them. He covers the major historical moments in philosophy of mind, from Descartes and his troubles with immaterial souls up to today's 'consciousness wars'. Additionally, he examines the implications that philosophy of mind has for psychology, artificial intelligence and even particle physics. McClelland lays out the centuries-long dialogue between philosophy and science, presenting a uniquely grounded, practical picture of the field for students. Rich with real-world examples and written for the absolute beginner, What is Philosophy of Mind? gives students the tools to delve deeper into this dynamic field of philosophy.
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Seitenzahl: 241
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
1 The Mind and Its Problems
1.1 Philosophizing about the Mental
1.2 A Whistle-Stop Tour of the Mind
1.3 The Mark of the Mental
1.4 The Three Big Questions
1.5 A Plan of Action
Key Concepts
References and Further Reading
2 Descartes’ Dualism
2.1 The Mechanical Philosophy
2.2 The Case for Substance Dualism
2.3 Dualism and the Three Big Questions
Key Concepts
References and Further Reading
3 The Materialist Turn
3.1 The Materialist Turn in Context
3.2 The Case for Behaviourism
3.3 Behaviourism and the Three Big Questions
3.4 The Case for Identity Theory
3.5 Identity Theory and the Three Big Questions
Key Concepts
References and Further Reading
4 Functionalism and the Computer Revolution
4.1 Functionalism in Context
4.2 The Case for Functionalism
4.3 Functionalism and the Three Big Questions
Key Concepts
References and Further Reading
5 The Problem of Consciousness
5.1 Inconvenient Truths
5.2 Three Arguments Against Materialism
5.3 Dualism and Illusionism
5.4 Property Dualism, Illusionism and the Three Big Questions
5.5 Some Final Thoughts on Consciousness
Key Concepts
References and Further Reading
6 The Mind Today
6.1 The Interdisciplinary Study of the Mind
6.2 The Three Big Questions Today
6.3 The Future of the Mind
Key Concepts
References and Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1
Mental and Non-Mental Properties
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Polity’s What is Philosophy? series
Stephen Hetherington, What is Epistemology?Tom McClelland, What is Philosophy of Mind?
Dean Rickles, What is Philosophy of Science?James P. Sterba, What is Ethics?
Charles Taliaferro, What is Philosophy of Religion?
What is Philosophy of Mind?
Tom McClelland
polity
Copyright © Tom McClelland 2021
The right of Tom McClelland to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3878-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McClelland, Tom, author.Title: What is philosophy of mind? / Tom McClelland.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, 2021. | Series: What is philosophy? | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The most student-friendly short introduction to philosophy of mind available”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020047693 (print) | LCCN 2020047694 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509538768 | ISBN 9781509538775 (pb) | ISBN 9781509538782 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy of mind.Classification: LCC BD418.3 .M3625 2021 (print) | LCC BD418.3 (ebook) | DDC 128/.2--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047693LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047694
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Pascal Porcheron at Polity Press for his invaluable guidance and to two anonymous referees for their insightful suggestions. Thanks, too, to all my students, past and present, for teaching me how to think about the philosophy of mind. I’d also like to thank Laura, Albus and Atticus for all their support. This book could not have been completed without the help of Yorkshire Tea.
1The Mind and Its Problems
1.1 Philosophizing about the Mental
So what is philosophy of mind? Well, we all know what a mind is. Everyone has one, after all, and nothing could be more familiar to us than the contents of our own mind. Putting into words exactly what it means to have a mind can be very tricky, as can describing the different kinds of thing that happen in the mind. But we at least have some intuitive grip on the mind and on a whole host of familiar mental phenomena like perceptions, pains, beliefs, desires, emotions and intentions. We also know what philosophy is. Philosophy is the discipline that asks the big questions about life, the universe and everything. It asks metaphysical questions about the nature of reality, epistemological questions about our knowledge of reality, and normative questions about the value of things in reality. It grapples with these questions by challenging our most basic assumptions, analysing our most foundational concepts and constructing a clear and coherent framework for thinking about the world.
Putting this together, we can describe philosophy of mind as a sub-discipline that investigates the mind philosophically. It asks metaphysical questions about what the mind is, about which things have minds and about how the mind fits into reality. It asks epistemological questions about how we know what’s going on in our own minds and how we know about other minds. It even asks some normative questions about the value of having a mind and about how things with minds ought to be treated. And philosophy of mind deals with these questions by challenging our everyday assumptions about mental phenomena, probing the concepts we use to describe those phenomena and developing a better framework for thinking about the mind and its place in nature.
Philosophy is not, of course, the only discipline that has the mind as its target. The cognitive sciences are an interconnected family of disciplines that investigate the mind and mental phenomena. Cognitive science encompasses neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence (AI) and aspects of anthropology. Given how successful these disciplines have been at providing insights into the mind, one might wonder what philosophy has to offer. Why not just hand over the big questions to cognitive scientists and give philosophers the day off? The answer is that these disciplines aren’t in a position to deal with the kinds of question raised by the philosophy of mind.
Any scientific investigation of the mind will be built upon metaphysical assumptions: assumptions about what the mind is, about how the mind relates to the brain, and about the nature of specific mental phenomena like pain or love. But these are exactly the kinds of assumption that philosophy seeks to critique. Cognitive science also makes epistemological assumptions about the methods we should use to learn about mental phenomena. But these are again precisely the assumptions that philosophers call into question. One objective of philosophy of mind is to determine whether the cognitive sciences are well founded, and this isn’t an objective that can be accomplished by the cognitive sciences themselves. Trying to use cognitive science to justify its own assumptions is like trying to jump on your own shadow – it’s ill-conceived and ultimately futile. Of course, philosophers too will often have to make assumptions, but the difference is that none of these assumptions are built into the fabric of the discipline. For philosophers, everything is up for debate.
Another reason that the cognitive sciences are unsuited to answering philosophical questions is that these questions are so general in scope. Philosophy explores the big picture of how all of our knowledge fits together – what we know from our everyday experiences, what we know from the natural sciences and what we know from the cognitive sciences. But sciences proceed by zooming in on specific regions of the big picture. Each science picks out a special domain, such as language or intelligence, and investigates that domain without worrying too much about how it relates to the rest of the picture. So philosophy of mind again aims to offer something that science cannot: an overall picture of the mind and its place in the world.
None of this is to say that one way of investigating the mind is superior to the other. Philosophy has one role to play and science another. Nor is it to say that philosophy and science must be kept apart. Philosophy can do conceptual work that helps science to succeed and science can yield empirical insights that help philosophers to answer their conceptual questions. Indeed, a driving message of this book is that the history of philosophy of mind is best understood as a centuries-long dialogue between philosophy and science. Exactly how this give-and-take should work is a matter of some debate, but what’s clear is that philosophical questions about the mental are unavoidable and that philosophy has an indispensable role to play in the study of the mind.
1.2 A Whistle-Stop Tour of the Mind
Since we’re going to be asking philosophical questions about the mind, it will help to have a clearer idea of our subject matter. The mind is, after all, a highly complex and multifaceted thing. To know your way around the mind, you need to have a grip on the full range of mental phenomena that make up our mental lives. Let’s start by examining the different mental states that someone has at a specific time.
Our subject – let’s call her Mindy – is the striker for her university football team (by which I mean ‘soccer’ team). It’s the cup final and, in the last minutes of the game, her team has been awarded a penalty kick. If she scores the penalty, her team will surely win. As she strides up to the penalty spot, what’s going through Mindy’s mind? She can hear the crowd cheering, taste the sweat dripping into her mouth, and smell the cut grass. She can feel the mud on her knees and the pain in her muscles. She sees a whole visual scene before her: the ball on the penalty spot, the goalkeeper in the goal, the crowd watching behind. She feels a buzz of excitement mixed with a pang of dread. She thinks about where to aim her shot. She wants to score and believes that the best way to do this is to go the opposite way to the goalkeeper. She remembers that the last time the goalkeeper faced a penalty she dived to the right of the goal and Mindy infers that she’ll dive the same way today. She decides to aim for the left and imagines kicking the ball hard into the bottom left corner. She runs up to the ball, kicks it and scores. She feels a huge rush of elation and runs to her teammates to celebrate.
In those few moments, Mindy has experienced a whole variety of mental phenomena. Let’s start with what Mindy perceives. We perceive things through our senses – a set of systems that register information about our environment through our sense organs. Mindy hears the crowd, smells the grass, tastes the sweat, feels the mud and sees the scene before her. This covers the five main senses: hearing, smell, taste, touch and sight. Mindy will also have perceptual states generated by two other sensory systems: the vestibular system, which is responsible for our sense of balance, and the proprioceptive system, which is responsible for our sense of where our body is positioned. Another thing Mindy experiences is the pain in her muscles. This might be classified as a bodily sensation, like the feeling of mud on her knees. Alternatively, it might be classified as a kind of ‘hedonic feeling’. On this view, feelings like pain or pleasure tell us how good or bad something is rather than conveying sensory information.
Now let’s consider Mindy’s emotions. She experiences excitement, dread and – once she’s scored the goal – elation. Each emotion has several different aspects. Mindy’s feeling of elation, for example, has a physiological component: her heart rate and blood pressure go up. The emotion also constitutes a kind of evaluation of the situation Mindy is in: it presents the goal to Mindy as being a good thing in some way. The emotion manifests itself in Mindy’s behaviour: she sprints to celebrate with her teammates. It also manifests itself in her expressions: her eyebrows raise, her mouth opens, her arms go up in the air. It’s a matter of some debate where to locate the emotion itself in all this. Perhaps elation is something that causes these things to happen, or perhaps being elated is just an amalgam of all these things. It’s also hard to pin down what the experience of an emotion contains: is the feeling of elation just the feeling of your heart rate increasing, your facial expression lifting and so on, or is there also some distinctive feeling of elation separate from these peripheral things?
Next up are Mindy’s thoughts. Thoughts come in various forms, many of which Mindy exemplifies. Her thoughts include: a desire to score; a belief that scoring is best achieved by going the opposite way to the goalkeeper; a memory that the goalkeeper went right in the past; another belief that the goalkeeper will go right again; an intention to kick the ball to the left; and an imaginative experience of scoring the goal. The first thing to notice about these different thoughts is how they fit together. Her intention is justified by a rational process involving her beliefs, her desires and her memories. Reasoning is not a specific mental state but rather a mental process that unfolds over time and that encompasses all sorts of different mental states. How Mindy reasons about her situation plays a big role in determining what she thinks. This is quite different to perception – when Mindy looks at the goal she sees the goalkeeper, and no amount of reasoning can stop her from seeing the goalkeeper. It’s also quite different to emotion – when Mindy feels an emotion, she can’t easily reason herself into having a different emotion. We should stop short of claiming that perception and emotion are completely unresponsive to reasoning. Sometimes the way we perceive or feel about a situation is influenced by our rational thoughts. Nevertheless, there is a clear sense in which perceiving and feeling are outside our direct rational control in a way that thinking is not.
Another thing to notice about Mindy’s thoughts is that they each share a common structure. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) introduced the term propositional attitude to describe the different mental attitudes that we can take towards a given content. In the sentence ‘Mindy believes that the goalkeeper will go left’, the propositional attitude is belief and the proposition is that the goalkeeper will go left. Propositions are typically designated using a ‘that’ clause, and a propositional attitude is typically specified by whatever verb precedes the word ‘that’. Propositions are things that can be true or false. The proposition that the goalkeeper will go left, for instance, is true if the goalkeeper in fact goes left and false if not.
Notice that Mindy can adopt different attitudes towards the same proposition: she can hope the goalkeeper will go left, desire that the goalkeeper will go left, imagine that the goalkeeper will go left and so on. And she can also adopt the same attitude towards different propositions: she can believe that it’s the cup final, believe that she’s about to score, believe that tonight will be a riotous party and so on. All these different thoughts have the same structure: they are constituted by a propositional content and a mental attitude towards that content. This list makes the structure more explicit by italicizing the propositional attitude and underlining the proposition:
Mindy desires that she will score the penalty
Mindy imagines that she will score the penalty
Mindy remembers that the goalkeeper went left in the past
Mindy intends that she will kick the ball to the left-hand
side of the goal
Mindy believes that the goalkeeper will go left
Mindy believes that scoring is best achieved by going the
opposite way to the goalkeeper
Notice that the first two thoughts are constituted by Mindy having different propositional attitudes to the same proposition, and that the last two thoughts are constituted by Mindy having the same propositional attitude to different propositions. The concept of propositional attitudes offers a useful way of capturing how different thoughts resemble and differ from one another.
One complication here is that some of these thoughts involve more than just adopting a particular propositional attitude. For instance, when Mindy remembers that the goalkeeper went left in the past, she might have a vague mental image of their last dive. Similarly, when Mindy imagines scoring, she might have a vague mental image of the ball hitting the back of the net. Here it seems that Mindy’s thoughts have a kind of perceptionlike component that would need to be included in a complete account of thought.
The final group of mental states we will consider are volitions. We have seen lots of different mental states leading up to Mindy stepping forward and kicking the ball, but none of these mental states are enough to make Mindy actually do anything. Even once she’s reasoned through what to do, even once she’s formed an intention to go for the bottom-left corner, a volition is needed to put her body into motion. This volition might be described as an act of will. Volitions are the things that turn thought into action – they are the mental states that make things happen. Some hold that this concept of volitions overcomplicates matters. They argue that intentions can cause actions and that there’s no need for a third kind of mental state mediating between the two. For our purposes, we can remain neutral on whether we really have volitions.
The states we’ve considered have all been conscious mental states – states of which Mindy is aware. But there are good reasons for thinking that our conscious mental life is just the tip of the iceberg, and that below the surface there are countless unconscious mental states. Some unconscious mental states can easily be brought into consciousness. You have the unconscious belief that Paris is the capital of France, but now that I’ve raised the topic of France’s capital, that belief will have become conscious. Other unconscious mental states are much harder to retrieve. You might have an unconscious desire to murder your neighbour that only becomes conscious after months of psychotherapy. There might even be mental states that can never enter our consciousness. Your visual experience is the product of many stages of sensory processing and what goes on in the early stages of this process could well be inaccessible to us.
Many of the mental states we’ve considered come in conscious and unconscious varieties. The propositional attitudes offer some clear cases. Although Mindy is conscious of some of her beliefs, countless others of her beliefs are unconscious. She has beliefs about the history of the World Cup, beliefs about what’s on her bookshelf at home, beliefs about the capitals of European countries, and so on. The same goes for desires. Mindy has a desire to get new football boots, a desire to learn to juggle and a desire to go travelling, but none of these desires are conscious while she’s taking the penalty kick. Memories are another good case. Mindy has memories of her childhood, memories of last week’s training session and memories of this morning’s breakfast, but these memories are all unconscious. What about imagination? Can Mindy unconsciously imagine that she’s going to be made captain? The answer’s not so clear, but it’s at least a live possibility that there are such unconscious imaginings.
Moving on to perception, psychological research has revealed that some perceptual states occur unconsciously. In subliminal perception, your mind registers a stimulus without you being aware of it. Let’s say that the big screen at the football ground quickly flashes an advert for Jaffa Cakes. Mindy could perceive this advert, without even consciously experiencing it. Later on, she might even find herself with an inexplicable craving for Jaffa Cakes! The sensation of pain is an interesting case. It’s tempting to say that you can’t be in pain without that pain being conscious. But what if Mindy were to say, ‘I didn’t notice the pain in my ankle’? Should we conclude that Mindy had an unconscious pain or that the pain only started when Mindy started to have a conscious experience of pain? To answer this, we’d need to refine our understanding of what it is to be in pain and, indeed, our understanding of what it is for a mental state to be conscious.
Can you have emotions you aren’t conscious of? We can imagine Mindy saying, ‘It was only after the final whistle that I realized how nervous I’d been’. Perhaps this describes an unconscious emotion of nervousness. If you’re angry at someone all day, must you be conscious of your anger all day or can your anger sometimes be bubbling away unconsciously? The answer will again depend on how we understand the nature of emotions and the nature of consciousness, but it’s certainly an open possibility that our unconscious mind is populated by emotions.
What about volitions? On the one hand, you could argue that volitions have to be conscious. It’s not clear how something could be an act of will if it’s unconscious. On the other hand, there are lots of actions we perform without any conscious volition. When absentmindedly driving a familiar road, for example, perhaps each change of gear is the result of an unconscious volition. Again, it’s an open question.
1.3 The Mark of the Mental
The foregoing demonstrates the sheer diversity of what happens in the mind. Pains are as different to beliefs as beliefs are to perceptions. We bundle these diverse phenomena under the heading of ‘mental’, but what is it that makes a state mental? To say that Mindy has a certain ‘state’ is just to say that Mindy has some property at a particular time. And there are countless non-mental properties that Mindy has, such as having a body temperature of 37.1° Celsius. But why don’t they qualify as mental?
Consider the table on the following page. This looks like an intuitive way of organizing Mindy’s states. Although states like Mindy’s muscle fatigue can cause mental states like the feeling of achy muscles, it remains clear that muscle fatigue itself is non-mental. So what determines whether a state goes in the first column or the second? We can ask the same question about the processes Mindy is undergoing. A process is a sequence of states that unfolds over time. For instance, Mindy is in the process of reasoning about where to aim her shot and in the process of digesting her lunch. But what makes the former process mental and the latter nonmental? To answer this, we need to find some defining feature of mentality – a feature possessed by everything in the mental column but nothing in the non-mental column. This elusive feature is known as the mark of the mental.
Table 1.1 Mental and Non-Mental Properties
MENTAL
NON-MENTAL
Perceiving the football
Having a temperature of 37.1° Celsius
Feeling an ache in her muscles
Having a heart rate of 125 beats per minute
Feeling excited
Having a blood pressure of 100/70
Believing that the goalkeeper will go left
Having muscle fatigue
Desiring that she will score
Being well hydrated
Remembering that the goalkeeper went left before
Being 6ft tall
Having an intention to kick the ball
Being in good physical health
A tempting proposal is that mental states are distinguished by being states of the mind. Notice that everything in the first column is a state of Mindy’s mind while everything in the second column is a state of Mindy’s body. The problem with this proposal is that it just relocates the question we were trying to answer. Now we face the question of what makes something a state of the mind rather than a state of the body and we’re no better off than we were. Another possible response is that there is no mark of the mental. We apply the label ‘mental’ to some states and not others, but our groupings are more or less arbitrary. On this view, there’s no interesting feature that marks out all the states in the first column. One difficulty with this proposal is that grouping mental states together seems far from arbitrary. Intuitively, there is something these states have in common, even if that ‘something’ is hard to pin down. The sceptical response would also be bad news for our theorizing about the mind. We want to understand what mental states are, how we know about them and which things possess them. Anyone claiming that the category ‘mental’ is spurious will have to deny that these are worthwhile questions to investigate because they employ arbitrary categories.
A more promising proposal is that the mark of the mental is intentionality. The word ‘intentionality’ sounds like it should have something to do with a person’s intentions, but this appearance is misleading. The word is derived from medieval Latin, and to have intentionality is to be about something. Mindy’s perceptual experience, for example, is a perception of the football. So although her perceptual state is something in her mind, that state is about something beyond itself, namely the football. We can call the target of an intentional state an intentional object. Going through Mindy’s other mental states, it’s not too hard to pick out their intentional objects. Her achy feeling is about her muscles, her excitement is about her prospective goal, her desire is about scoring and her belief and memory are about the goalkeeper. In contrast, Mindy’s non-mental states don’t seem to be about anything. Mindy’s height and muscle fatigue aren’t about anything – they just exist without pointing beyond themselves.
An interesting feature of intentionality is that something can have an intentional object even when that object does not exist. A desire to find the Holy Grail is about the Holy Grail, even if no such object exists. A perceptual experience of a floating dagger is about a dagger, even though no such dagger is present. A belief in fairies is about fairies, even though there are no such creatures. We can make sense of this distinctive feature of intentionality by making an analogy with paintings. Some paintings are paintings of real things. Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII, for example, is of a real flesh-and-blood person. Other paintings are not of real things. Burne-Jones’s painting The Beguiling of Merlin is a painting of Merlin, even though no such magician exists. So the fact that a painting is about
