Lecture 4, Notes, 23/09/02
Drs. Deutsch and Mallon
READ FOR WEDS 25/09/02: McGinn pp. 23-39
I. The puzzle of the epistemology of the mental: One acquires knowledge of ones own mental properties in a way different from the way in which one acquires knowledge of the mental properties of others. In one’s own case, one knows by ‘looking within’ or introspecting. In the case of others, one relies on verbal and other behavioral evidence.
If the content of mental concepts reflect their characteristic mode of ascription, then it looks as though the mental concepts I apply to myself are different from those that I apply to others. But they are not different.
A. The danger that the puzzle poses (according to McGinn): We’ll tend to favor one perspective over the other.
B. Is there a genuine puzzle here? Knowing what the what the weather is like…
C. A related puzzle that is not merely apparent: Certain knowledge from the 1st-person perspective. Less than certain knowledge from the 3rd. (Just a fact, not a puzzle).
II. Mental phenomena-a taxonomy
A. The mental appears to divide into two main categories: the propositional attitudes (aka the intentional states) and the sensations.
1. The sensations: The sensations further divide into two main groups:
bodily feelings, e.g. pains, tickles, itches, dizziness… and perceptual experiences, e.g. seeming to see a red rose, smelling a daisy, hearing a car pass by… Both bodily feelings and perceptual experiences have a phenomenology-there is something it is like to be in such states.
a. Bodily feelings are not about anything; they lack representational content.
b. Perceptual experiences are representational.
2. The propositional attitudes: beliefs, desires, hopes, fears…The
propositional attitudes are essentially representational or intentional. They
represent (carry information about) the world to us. Unlike the sensations, the propositional attitudes seem to lack a distinctive phenomenology. Every propositional attitude is ‘two-component’—a combination of attitude-type (belief, desire, etc.) and propositional (or representational) content. (For example: The belief that Mary is coming to the party is a belief with the content that Mary is coming to the party. The same content can be shared by different attitudes. There is the desire that Mary is coming to the party, and the hope that she is, and the fear that she is, and so on.)
3. Sensations are apparently more “basic” than the propositional attitudes. Rats can feel pain and see things, but they presumably can’t believe Hong Kong is more exciting than Shanghai. Rationality goes hand in hand with the attitudes but not the sensations. The attitudes are “behavior explainers”, the sensations aren’t.
4. The application of the notion of consciousness: There can be unconscious attitudes but not unconscious sensations. The ambiguity of ‘conscious mental state’.
III. The mind-body problem: What is the nature of the relation between the mind and the body-and-brain? Why a problem? On the one hand, the mind possesses features which, it seems, are not and could not be possessed by mere physical stuff: phenomenology, infallible first-person knowledge, consciousness, meaning, rationality, freedom, self-awareness. How could a pain be a mere arrangement of molecules? On the other hand, the mind can’t be conceived of as lying completely outside the physical realm. Minds have some sort of spatio-temporal location; minds have all sort of causal connections to physical things and events; Minds emerge from mere matter. These incline us to think that the mind must be physical. Thus the problem: the mind could not, but must, be physical.
A. The traditional responses to the mind-body problem: Dualism and Materialism
1. Dualism: the view that the mind is different in essential nature from the body.
a. Some arguments for dualism
(i) The argument from doubt: I can doubt the
existence of my body. But when I doubt the existence of my body I don’t thereby doubt my own existence. In fact, it’s impossible for me to doubt my own existence. So I am not my body. But what am I? A thinking thing--a mind. So this mind that is me is not just a body+a brain.
(ii) The argument from conceivable post-mortem survival: I can conceive of surviving past the death of my body and brain. So my essential nature must be different from that of my body and brain. My essential nature is mental. So the essential nature of the mental must be different from that of the body and brain.
(iii) The argument from the conceivability of zombies: It is conceivable that there could be a creature physically identical to me down to the last micro-particle yet lacking all of my mental properties entirely. Hence the mental must be essentially different from the physical.
b. Some objections to dualism
(i) Some dualists are “substance-dualists”—they believe that one’s mental properties inhere in a kind of stuff, but that this stuff is immaterial. One problem with substance dualism is that it is difficult to form a clear conception of what this immaterial stuff is like.
(ii) Dualists “seal off” the mind from the physical realm and the connections between the two realms becomes a mystery.
(iii) Dualists seem stuck with causal-overdetermination
(iv) The possibility of disembodiment is hard to stomach. (McGinn’s odd reason for saying so: We’ll have to accept the possibility of disembodied rat and pig minds)
2. Materialism: The view that there is nothing but physical stuff, the mind being simply a particular, complex arrangement of physical stuff.