Philosophy of mind concepts and terminology

09.06.
2020 Philosophy of mind -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind, reflection on the nature of
mental phenomena and especially on the relation of TABLE OF CONTENTS
the mind to the body and to the rest of the physical
world. Introduction
Philosophy of mind and empirical
Philosophy of mind and psychology
empirical psychology Terminology and distinctions
Main problematic phenomena

Philosophy is often concerned with the most general
Traditional metaphysical positions
questions about the nature of things: What is the
nature of beauty? What is it to have genuine The computational-representational
theory of thought (CRTT)
knowledge? What makes an action virtuous or an
assertion true? Such questions can be asked with Further issues
respect to many specific domains, with the result

that there are whole fields devoted to the philosophy
of art (aesthetics), to the philosophy of science, to ethics, to epistemology (the theory of knowledge), and to
metaphysics (the study of the ultimate categories of the world). The philosophy of mind is specifically
concerned with quite general questions about the nature of mental phenomena: what, for example, is the
nature of thought, feeling, perception, consciousness, and sensory experience?
These philosophical questions about the nature of a phenomenon need to be distinguished from similar-
sounding questions that tend to be the concern of more purely empirical investigations—such as experimental
psychology—which depend crucially on the results of sensory observation. Empirical psychologists are, by
and large, concerned with discovering contingent facts about actual people and animals—things that happen
to be true, though they could have turned out to be false. For example, they might discover that a certain
chemical is released when and only when people are frightened or that a certain region of the brain is
activated when and only when people are in pain or think of their fathers. But the philosopher wants to know
whether releasing that chemical or having one’s brain activated in that region is essential to being afraid or
being in pain or having thoughts of one’s father: would beings lacking that particular chemical or cranial
layout be incapable of these experiences? Is it possible for something to have such experiences and to be
composed of no “matter” at all—as in the case of ghosts, as many people imagine? In asking these questions,
philosophers have in mind not merely the (perhaps) remote possibilities of ghosts or gods or extraterrestrial
creatures (whose physical constitutions presumably would be very different from those of humans) but also
and especially a possibility that seems to be looming ever larger in contemporary life—the possibility of
computers that are capable of thought. Could a computer have a mind? What would it take to create a
computer that could have a specific thought, emotion, or experience?
Perhaps a computer could have a mind only if it were made up of the same kinds of neurons and chemicals of
which human brains are composed. But this suggestion may seem crudely chauvinistic, rather like saying that
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09.06.2020 Philosophy of mind -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
a human being can have mental states only if his eyes are a certain colour. On the other hand, surely not just
any computing device has a mind. Whether or not in the near future machines will be created that come close
to being serious candidates for having mental states, focusing on this increasingly serious possibility is a good
way to begin to understand the kinds of questions addressed in the philosophy of mind.
Although philosophical questions tend to focus on what is possible or necessary or essential, as opposed to
what simply is, this is not to say that what is—i.e., the contingent findings of empirical science—is not
importantly relevant to philosophical speculation about the mind or any other topic. Indeed, many
philosophers think that medical research can reveal the essence, or “nature,” of many diseases (for example,
that polio involves the active presence of a certain virus) or that chemistry can reveal the nature of many
substances (e.g., that water is H O). However, unlike the cases of diseases and substances, questions about
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the nature of thought do not seem to be answerable by empirical research alone. At any rate, no empirical
researcher has been able to answer them to the satisfaction of enough people. So the issues fall, at least in
part, to philosophy.
One reason that these questions have been so difficult to answer is that there is substantial unclarity, both in
common understanding and in theoretical psychology, about how objective the phenomena of the mind can be
taken to be. Sensations, for example, seem essentially private and subjective, not open to the kind of public,
objective inspection required of the subject matter of serious science. How, after all, would it be possible to
find out what someone else’s private thoughts and feelings really are? Each person seems to be in a special
“privileged position” with regard to his own thoughts and feelings, a position that no one else could ever
occupy.
For many people, this subjectivity is bound up with issues of meaning and significance, as well as with a style
of explanation and understanding of human life and action that is both necessary and importantly distinct
from the kinds of explanation and understanding characteristic of the natural sciences. To explain the motion
of the tides, for example, a physicist might appeal to simple generalizations about the correlation between
tidal motion and the Moon’s proximity to the Earth. Or, more deeply, he might appeal to general laws—e.g.,
those regarding universal gravitation. But in order to explain why someone is writing a novel, it is not enough
merely to note that his writing is correlated with other events in his physical environment (e.g., he tends to
begin writing at sunrise) or even that it is correlated with certain neurochemical states in his brain. Nor is
there any physical “law” about writing behaviour to which a putatively scientific explanation of his writing
could appeal. Rather, one needs to understand the person’s reasons for writing, what writing means to him, or
what role it plays in his life. Many people have thought that this kind of understanding can be gained only by
empathizing with the person—by “putting oneself in his shoes”; others have thought that it requires judging
the person according to certain norms of rationality that are not part of natural science. The German
sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) and others have emphasized the first conception, distinguishing
empathic understanding (Verstehen), which they regarded as typical of the human and social sciences, from
the kind of scientific explanation (Erklären) that is provided by the natural sciences. The second conception
has become increasingly influential in much contemporary analytic philosophy—e.g., in the work of the
American philosophers Donald Davidson (1917–2003) and Daniel Dennett.
Terminology and distinctions

Some basic metaphysical categories
Mental phenomena appear in the full variety of basic categories
displayed by phenomena in most other domains, and it is often
extremely important to bear in mind just which category is
being discussed. Providing definitions of these basic categories
is the task of metaphysics in general and will not be undertaken
here. What follows are some illustrative examples.
Substance
Substances are the basic things—the basic “stuff”—out of which
the world is composed. Earth, air, fire, and water were candidate
Max Weber substances in ancient times; energy, the chemical elements, and
Max Weber, 1918. subatomic particles are more contemporary examples.
Leif Geiges Historically, many philosophers have thought that the mind
involves a special substance that is different in some
fundamental way from material substances. This view, however, has largely been replaced by more moderate
claims involving other metaphysical categories to be discussed below.
Object
Objects are, in the first instance, just what are ordinarily called “objects”—tables, chairs, rocks, planets, stars,
and human and animal bodies, among innumerable other things. Physicists sometimes talk further about
“unobservable” objects, such as molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles; and psychologists have posited
unobservable objects such as drives, instincts, memory traces, egos, and superegos. All of these are objects in
the philosophical sense. Particularly problematic examples, to be discussed below, are “apparent” objects
such as pains, tickles, and mental images.
Abstract and concrete

Most objects one thinks of are located somewhere in space and time. Philosophers call anything that is
potentially located in space and time “concrete.” Some apparent objects, however, seem to be neither in space
nor in time. There exists, after all, a positive square root of nine, namely, the number three; by contrast, the
positive square root of -1 does not exist. But the square root of nine is not located in any particular part of
space. It seems to exist outside of time entirely, neither coming into existence nor passing out of it. Objects of
this sort are called “abstract.”
Some mental phenomena are straightforwardly abstract—for example, the thoughts and beliefs that are shared
between the present-day citizens of Beijing and the citizens of ancient Athens. But other mental phenomena
are especially puzzling in this regard. For example, Brutus might have had regretful thoughts after stabbing
Julius Caesar, and these thoughts might have caused him to blush. But precisely where did these regretful
thoughts occur so that they could have had this effect? Does it even make sense to say they occurred at a
point one millimeter away from Brutus’s hypothalamus? Sensations are even more peculiar, since they often
seem to be located in very specific places, as when one feels a pain in one’s left forearm. But, as occurs in the
case of phantom limb syndrome, one could have such a pain without actually having a forearm. And mental
images seem downright paradoxical: people with vivid visual imaginations may report having images of a
cow jumping over the Moon, for example, but no one supposes that there is an actual image of this sort in
anyone’s brain.
Properties and relations
Objects seem to have properties: a tennis ball is spherical and fuzzy; a billiard ball is spherical and smooth.
To a first approximation, a property can be thought of as the thing named by that part of a simple sentence
that is left over when the subject of the sentence is omitted; thus, the property expressed by is spherical (or
the property of sphericality, or being spherical) is obtained by omitting a tennis ball from A tennis ball is
spherical. As these examples show, a property such as sphericality can be shared by many different objects
(for this reason, properties have traditionally been called universals). Mental properties, such as being
conscious and being in pain, can obviously be shared by many people and animals—and, much more
controversially, perhaps also by machines.
Relations are what is expressed by what is left when not only the subject but also the direct and indirect
object (or objects) of a sentence are omitted. Thus, the relation of kissing is obtained by omitting both Mary
and John from Mary kissed John; and the relation of giving is obtained by omitting Eve, Adam, and an apple
from Eve gave Adam an apple. Likewise, the relation of understanding is obtained by omitting both Mary and
that John is depressed from Mary understands that John is depressed. In this case the object that Mary
understands is often called a thought (see below Thoughts and propositions).
Properties and relations are often spoken of as being “instantiated” by the things that have them: a ball
instantiates sphericality; the trio of Eve, Adam, and the apple instantiates the relation of giving. A difficult
question over which philosophers disagree is whether properties and relations can exist even if they are
completely uninstantiated. Is there a property of being a unicorn, a property of being a round square, or a
relation of “being the reincarnation of”? This question will be left open here, since there is widespread
disagreement about it. In general, however, one should not simply assume without argument that an
uninstantiated property or relation exists.
States and events

States consist simply of objects having properties or standing in relations to other objects. For example,
Caesar’s mental state of being conscious presumably ended with the event of his death. An event consists of
objects’ losing or acquiring various properties and relations; thus, Caesar’s death was an event that consisted
of his losing the property of being alive, and John’s seeing Mary is an event that consists of John’s and
Mary’s coming to stand in the relation of seeing.
Thoughts and attitudes

Thoughts and propositions

It was noted above that understanding is a relation that someone can bear to a thought. But what sort of thing
is a thought? This is a topic of enormous controversy, but one can begin to get a grasp of it by noticing that
thoughts are typically referred to, or expressed by, sentential complements, or clauses beginning with that.
Thus, one may have the thought that Venus is uninhabitable or the thought that 26 + 26 = 52. (There are, of
course, other ways of expressing thoughts—a mere gesture can suffice—but it will be useful to take “that”
clauses to be standard.) That a thought is different from the sentence that expresses it is entailed by the fact
that different sentences can express the same thought: the thought expressed by Snow is white is also
expressed in German by Der Schnee ist weiss and in French by La neige est blanche. Indeed, thoughts are
often taken to be the meanings of sentences, in which case they are called “propositions.” (Meaning is an
enormously controversial topic in its own right; see semantics and philosophy of language.)
Types and tokens

Thoughts regarded as propositions are clearly shareable. Two people can have the same thought—e.g., that
snow is white. But thoughts in this sense must be distinguished from the individual thoughts that people have
at particular times, which are not shareable, even if they may be expressed by the same sentences. In this
sense, different people may have their own particular thoughts that snow is white.
This ambiguity also arises in the case of language. One can, for example, write “the same word” twice, once
on a blackboard and once on a piece of paper. When philosophers want to talk about words (or sentences or
books) that are located in specific places for specific periods of time, they use the term tokens of the word (or
sentence or book); when they want to talk about words (or sentences or books) that can appear in different
places and times, they use the term types of word (or sentence or book). In the terminology introduced above,
one can say that word tokens are concrete and word types are abstract—indeed, word types can be regarded
as simply the set of all word tokens that are spelled the same. (Notice that word tokens need not be written
down; many of them might merely be pronounced, and others might be encoded on magnetic discs, for
example.) In an analogous fashion, philosophers often also distinguish between tokens and types of thoughts:
two people may have different tokens of the same type of thought, that snow is white.
Concepts
To a first approximation, concepts are constituents of thoughts or propositions in much the same way that
words are constituents of the sentential complements by which thoughts or propositions are expressed. Thus,
someone who thinks that Venus is uninhabitable has the concept of Venus and the concept of being
uninhabitable. Concepts are obviously subject to the type-token distinction, which enables one to understand
otherwise peculiar sentences such as John’s concept of God is different from Mary’s. It could be that John and
Mary are both having thoughts involving the type-concept God but that John’s token-concept involves
connections to beliefs that are different from the beliefs to which Mary’s token-concept is connected (e.g.,
John might think that God loves all human beings, and Mary might think that he is more selective).
Depending upon one’s view of the thorny issue of what thoughts and propositions are, one might make
further distinctions between the representational vehicles that can be used to express a concept. Thus, some
people represent unicorns with an image of a stereotypical horselike creature with a horn; other people make
do with mere words, such as unicorn in English or Einhorn in German. Some contents of thought might not
involve full concepts at all: an infant who recognizes a triangle dangling before his eyes presumably does not
have the concept of a three- sided closed coplanar figure, yet he seems to be deploying some kind of
representation with the content “triangle” nonetheless. Such cases of apparently “nonconceptual content”
have received extensive discussion since the late 20th century, most notably in the work of the British
philosophers Christopher Peacocke and Tim Crane.
Just as properties may or may not be instantiated by real things,

concepts may or may not refer to, or pick out, real things. The
concept “dog” refers to dogs and the concept “number” refers to
numbers, but presumably the concepts “round square” and
“number that is both odd and even” do not refer to anything
(this is apparently also true of concepts corresponding to words
such as and, or, and not). It is slightly controversial whether
concepts such as “unicorn” and “ghost” refer to anything, since
some people believe in such things, and it is extremely
controversial (among philosophers) whether there are real-world
referents of mental concepts such as “pain” and “itch.”
One controversy with regard to which it will be useful to take a

very modest stand from the start is whether every concept of a
property or relation picks out a real property or relation. At first
tapestry: The Lady and the Unicorn
blush, the answer to this question might seem to be “yes”: the
Unicorn, detail from The Lady and the
property or relation is just whatever one is thinking about when
Unicorn tapestry, late 15th century; in the
Musée de Cluny, Paris. one uses the corresponding concept. However, it seems rash to
Giraudon/Art Resource, New York assume that a property or relation must exist if people happen to
have a concept of it. This assumption is not plausible in the case
of objects, so why should it be plausible in the case of properties and relations? Accordingly, in keeping with
the neutrality about uninstantiated properties recommended above, this article will not assume that concepts
of properties and relations always refer to real things.
Propositional attitudes
Perhaps the largest and most diverse class of mental states are those that seem to involve various relations to
thoughts: these are the states that are typically described by verbs that take a sentential complement as their
direct object. Thus, while the direct objects of verbs such as touch or push are standardly physical objects, the
direct objects of verbs such as believe, hope, expect, and want are the propositions picked out by such a
clause:
John believes that the stock market will fall.
John expects the stock market to fall.
Mary wants to be a doctor.
Note that sentential complements need not always be expressed by a “that” clause: the word that (in English)
may often be deleted, and a “to” clause is often used instead of a “that” clause when the subject of the
complement is the same as the subject of the entire sentence; Mary wants to be a doctor means the same as
Mary desires that she herself be a doctor.
Philosophers have called such mental states “propositional attitudes” because they seem in one way or
another to involve some attitude that an agent—a human being, an animal, or perhaps a machine—has to a
thought or proposition, which again is often taken to be the meaning of the sentential complement that
expresses it. When John expects the stock market to fall, he stands in a certain relation to the proposition or
sentence-meaning “the stock market will fall”; and when Mary wants to be a doctor, she stands in a different
relation to the proposition or sentence-meaning “Mary will be a doctor.”
Yet another ambiguity arises when one speaks about an attitude; one can be speaking about the state of a
person—as in It was her desire to be a doctor that led her to move to Boston—or about the proposition
toward which a person has an attitude—as in Her belief about the stock market was the same as his. “The
same attitude” can mean the same relation to possibly different propositions—She has the same belief in his
goodness as she does in his sincerity—or the same proposition in possibly different relations—She believed
what he doubted.
Sensations and qualitative states
Many mental phenomena do not appear (at least initially) to be propositional attitudes. First and foremost are
the conscious sensations that people seem to experience in most of their waking moments. Talk of sensations
is also a bit loose, in a way that can be crucial, sometimes referring to, for example, particular pains, itches, or
mental images (what philosophers call “phenomenal objects”), sometimes to pain or itchiness itself, and
sometimes to the properties of mental images (e.g., red or elliptical). In cases in which an experience is taken
to reflect some real phenomenon in the world, descriptions of the experience are often ambiguous between an
external phenomenon (The rose is red) and an inner one (The mental image is red). It is this ambiguity that
gives rise to the familiar puzzle about whether a tree falling in an uninhabited forest actually makes any
sound: one might say that it makes a sound in the external sense but not in the internal sense; there is the
usual external cause of the mental experience, but there is no one in whom the experience is actually brought
about. Many philosophers think, however, that experience itself is always described externally—or, as they
put it, “transparently.” When a person describes his experience, he will use words, such as red and oval, that
describe not the experience (e.g., the image) itself but the worldly object the experience is of.
Emotions, moods, and traits
Moods and emotions—such as joy, sadness, fear, and anxiety—are hard to classify. It is not clear that they
form a “natural kind” about which any interesting generalizations can be made. Many of them may simply be
complex composites of intentional and phenomenal states. Thus, fear might be a combination of a certain
thought (the thought that there is an abyss ahead), a certain desire (a desire not to fall), and certain sensations
(those peculiar to anxiety). Character traits, such as honesty or humility, might be long-term dispositions to
have certain emotions and attitudes and to act in certain ways in certain circumstances. Although there is a
sizable literature on the nature of emotions, moods, and traits, they are not at the centre of most discussions in
the philosophy of mind and so will not be considered further in this article.
Main problematic phenomena

Philosophical discussions about the mind have tended to focus upon three main phenomena: consciousness,
rationality, and intentionality.
Consciousness
The word consciousness is used in a variety of ways that need to be distinguished. Sometimes the word
means merely any human mental activity at all (as when one talks about the “history of consciousness”), and
sometimes it means merely being awake (as in As the anesthetic wore off, the animal regained
consciousness). The most philosophically troublesome usage concerns phenomena with which people seem to
be “directly acquainted”—as the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) described them—each in
his own case. Each person seems to have direct, immediate knowledge of his own conscious sensations and
of the contents of his propositional attitudes—what he consciously thinks, believes, desires, hopes, fears, and
so on. In common philosophical parlance, a person is said to have “incorrigible” (or uncorrectable) access to
his own mental states. For many people, the existence of these conscious states in their own case is more
obvious and undeniable than anything else in the world. Indeed, the French mathematician and philosopher
René Descartes (1596–1650) regarded his immediate conscious thoughts as the basis of all of the rest of his
knowledge. Views that emphasize this first-person immediacy of conscious states have consequently come to
be called “Cartesian.”
It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to say much about consciousness that is not highly controversial. Initial
efforts in the 19th century to approach psychology with the rigour of other experimental sciences led
researchers to engage in careful introspection of their own mental states. Although there emerged some
interesting results regarding the relation of certain sensory states to external stimulation—for example, laws
proposed by Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87) that relate the apparent to the real amplitude of a sound—
much of the research dissolved into vagaries and complexities of experience that varied greatly over different
individuals and about which interesting generalizations were not forthcoming.
It is worth pausing over some of the difficulties of introspection and the consequent pitfalls of thinking of
conscious processes as the central subject matter of psychology. While it can seem natural to think that all
mental phenomena are accessible to consciousness, close attention to the full range of cases suggests
otherwise. The Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was particularly adept at
calling attention to the rich and subtle variety of ordinary mental states and to how little they lend themselves
to the model of an introspectively observed object. In a typical passage from his later writings (Zettel, §§484–
504), he asked:
Is it hair-splitting to say: —joy, enjoyment, delight, are not sensations? —Let us at least ask
ourselves: How much analogy is there between delight and what we call “sensation”? “I feel
great joy” —Where? —that sounds like nonsense. And yet one does say “I feel a joyful agitation
in my breast.” —But why is joy not localized? Is it because it is distributed over the whole
body? … Love is not a feeling. Love is put to the test, pain not. One does not say: “That was not
true pain, or it would not have gone off so quickly.”
In a related vein, the American linguist Ray Jackendoff proposed that one is never directly conscious of
abstract ideas, such as goodness and justice—they are not items in the stream of consciousness. At best, one
is aware of the perceptual qualities one might associate with such ideas—for example, an image of someone
acting in a kindly way. While it can seem that there is something right in such suggestions, it also seems to be
immensely difficult to determine exactly what the truth might be on the basis of introspection alone.
In the late 20th century, the validity and reliability of introspection were subject to much experimental study.
In an influential review of the literature on “self-attribution,” the American psychologists Richard Nisbett and
Timothy Wilson discussed a wide range of experiments that showed that people are often demonstrably
mistaken about their own psychological processes. For example, in problem-solving tasks, people are often
sensitive to crucial clues of which they are quite unaware, and they often provide patently confabulated
accounts of the problem-solving methods they actually employ. Nisbett and Wilson speculated that in many
cases introspection may not involve privileged access to one’s own mental states but rather the imposition
upon oneself of popular theories about what mental states a person in one’s situation is likely to have. This
possibility should be considered seriously when evaluating many of the traditional claims about the alleged
incorrigibility of people’s access to their own minds.
In any event, it is important to note that not all mental phenomena are conscious. Indeed, the existence of
unconscious mental states has been recognized in the West since the time of the ancient Greeks. Obvious
examples include the beliefs, long-range plans, and desires that a person is not consciously thinking about at a
particular time, as well as things that have “slipped one’s mind,” though they must in some way still be there,
since one can be reminded of them. Plato thought that the kinds of a priori reasoning typically used in
mathematics and geometry involve the “recollection” (anamnesis) of temporarily forgotten thoughts from a
previous life. Modern followers of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) have argued that a great many ordinary
parapraxes (or “Freudian slips”) are the result of deeply repressed unconscious thoughts and desires. And, as
noted above, many experiments reveal myriad ways in which people are unaware of, and sometimes
demonstrably mistaken about, the character of their mental processes, which are therefore unconscious at
least at the time they occur.
Partly out of frustration with introspectionism, psychologists during the first half of the 20th century tended
to ignore consciousness entirely and instead study only “objective behaviour” (see below Radical
behaviourism). In the last decades of the century, psychologists began to turn their attention once again to
consciousness and introspection, but their methods differed radically from those of early introspectionists, in
ways that can be understood against the background of other issues.
One might wonder what makes an unconscious mental process “mental” at all. If a person does not have
immediate knowledge of it, why is it not merely part of the purely physical machinery of the brain? Why
bring in mentality at all? Accessibility to consciousness, however, is not the only criterion for determining
whether a given state or process is mental. One alternative criterion is that mental states and processes enter
into the rationality of the systems of which they are a part.
Rationality
There are standardly thought to be four sorts of rationality, each presenting different theoretical problems.
Deductive, inductive, and abductive reason have to do with increasing the likelihood of truth, and practical
reason has to do with trying to base one’s actions (or “practice”) in part on truth and in part upon what one
wants or values.
Deduction
Deduction is the sort of rationality that is the central concern of traditional logic. It involves deductively valid
arguments, or arguments in which, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true. In a
deductively valid argument, it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. Some
standard examples are:
(1) All human beings are mortal; all women are human beings; therefore, all women are mortal.
(2) Some angels are archangels; all archangels are divine; therefore, some angels are divine.
These simple arguments (deductive arguments can be infinitely more complex) illustrate two important
features of deductive reasoning: it need not be about real things, and it can be applied to any subject matter
whatsoever—i.e., it is universal.
One of the significant achievements of philosophy in the 20th century was the development of rigorous ways
of characterizing such arguments in terms of the logical form of the sentences they comprise. Techniques of
formal logic (also called symbolic logic) were developed for a very large class of arguments involving words
such as and, or, not, some, all, and, in modal logic, possibly (or possible) and necessarily (or necessary). (See
below The computational account of rationality.)
Although deduction marks a kind of ideal of reason, in which the truth of the conclusion is absolutely
guaranteed by the truth of the premises, people’s lives depend upon making do with much less. There are two
forms of such nondeductive reasoning: induction and abduction.
Induction
Induction consists essentially of statistical reasoning, in which the truth of the premises makes the conclusion
likely to be true, even though it could still be false. For example, from the fact that every death cap
mushroom (Amanita phalloides) anybody has ever sampled has been poisonous, it would be reasonable to
conclude that all death cap mushrooms are poisonous, even though it is logically possible that there is one
such mushroom that is not poisonous. Such inferences are indispensable, given that it is seldom possible to
sample all the members of a given class of things. In a good statistical inference, one takes a sufficiently large
and representative sample. The field of formal statistics explores myriad refinements of arguments of this
sort.
Abduction
Another sort of nondeductive rationality that is indispensable to at least much of the higher intelligence
displayed by human beings is reasoning to a conclusion that essentially contains terms not included in the
premises. This typically occurs when someone gets a good idea about how to explain some data in terms of a
hypothesis that mentions phenomena that have not been observed in the data itself. A familiar example is that
of the detective who infers the identity of a certain criminal from the evidence at the scene of the crime.
Sherlock Holmes erroneously calls such reasoning “deduction”; it is more properly called abduction, or
“inference to the best explanation.” Abduction is also typically exercised by juries when they decide whether
the prosecution has established the guilt of the defendant “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Most spectacularly, it
is the form of reasoning that seems to be involved in the great leaps of imagination that have taken place in
the history of scientific thought, as when Isaac Newton (1642–1727) proposed the theory of universal
gravitation as an explanation of the motions of planets, projectiles, and tides.
Practical reason
All the forms of rationality so far considered involve proceeding from one belief to another. But sometimes
people proceed from belief to action. Here desire as well as belief is relevant, since successful rational action
is action that satisfies one’s desires. Suppose, for example, that a person desires to have cheese for dinner and
believes that cheese can be had from the shop down the street. Other things being equal—that is, he has no
other more pressing desires and no beliefs about some awful risk he would take by going to the shop—the
“rational” thing for him to do would be to go to the shop and buy some cheese. Indeed, if this desire and this
belief were offered as the “reason” why the person went to the shop and bought some cheese, one would
consider it a satisfactory explanation of his behaviour.
Although this example is trivial, it illustrates a form of reasoning that is appealed to in the explanation of
countless actions people perform every day. Much of life is, of course, more complex than this, in part
because one often has to choose between competing preferences and estimate how likely it is that one can
actually satisfy them in the circumstances one takes oneself to be in. Often one must resort to what has come
to be called cost-benefit analysis—trying to do that which is most likely to secure what one prefers most
overall with as little cost as possible. At any rate, engaging in cost-benefit analysis seems to be one way of
behaving rationally. The ways in which people can be practically rational are the subject of formal decision
theory, which was developed in considerable detail in the 20th century in psychology and in other social
sciences, especially economics.
None of the foregoing should be taken to suggest that people are always rational. Many people report being
“weak-willed,” failing to perform what they deem to be the best or most rational act, as when they fail to diet
despite their better judgment. In the case of many other actions, however, rationality seems to be simply
irrelevant: jumping up and down in glee, kicking a machine that fails to work, or merely tapping one’s fingers
impatiently are actions that do not seem to be performed for any particular reason. The claim here is only that
rationality forms one important basis for thinking that something has genuine mental states.
Intentionality
Despite their differences, the various forms of rationality share one important trait: they involve propositional
attitudes, particularly belief and desire. These attitudes, and the ways in which they are typically described,
raise a number of problems that have been the focus of attention not only in the philosophy of mind but also
in logic and the philosophy of language. One particularly troublesome property of these attitudes is
“intentionality”: they are “about things.” For example, the belief that cows are mammals is a belief about
cows, and the belief that archangels are divine is a belief about archangels. In contrast, consider a star or a
stone: on the face of it, it does not make sense to ask what they are about; stars and stones do not represent
anything at all. But minds do. Beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are all about something—they have
“intentional content.” (Indeed, as noted above, this content is usually that of the sentential complement used
to specify the attitude.)
Following medieval terminology, the German philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917) called this property
of mental states intentionality. (This term is unfortunate, however, because intentionality in this sense has
nothing specially to do with deliberate action, as in He did it intentionally. Many states that are intentional in
Brentano’s sense can be unintentional in the ordinary sense.) Indeed, Brentano went so far as to propose that
intentionality is a characteristic of all mental states and thus a mark of the mental. This idea is sometimes
expressed as the claim that “consciousness is always consciousness of something.”
Of course, many of the peculiar products of minds—words, paintings, and gestures—also have content or are
about things. The novel Moby Dick, for example, is about a great white whale. Such content, however, is
usually derived from the mind or minds of the product’s creators or users; hence, it is called “derived”
intentionality, as opposed to the “intrinsic,” or “original,” intentionality of mental states. One controversy
about computers is whether the intentionality they display is original or merely derived.
Brentano noted a number of peculiarities about intentionality; two in particular are worth reviewing here.
1. Although intentional phenomena are about something, this “something” need not be real. People
sometimes have thoughts about Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, or round squares—if only in thinking that they do
not exist. Somehow, when people agree that Santa Claus does not exist, they are still thinking about the same
thing. They are thinking thoughts with the same intentional content.
2. Intentional content seems to play a role in people’s thoughts even when it is about a real object in the
world, since people can associate different intentional contents with the same real object. The German
logician Gottlob Frege (1848–1924) noted that, from the fact that someone thinks that the morning star is
Venus, it does not follow that he thinks that the evening star is, even though the morning star and the evening
star are one and the same thing (Venus). Indeed, in general one needs to be very careful about substituting
words that refer to the same thing in the complement clauses of propositional-attitude verbs, since doing so
can affect the validity of the inferences in which the sentences are involved. As the American philosopher
W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000) discussed in some detail, such verbs are “referentially opaque,” and this feature
seems to be a peculiar manifestation of the intentionality of the states they describe. In contrast, most verbs,
such as visit, are “referentially transparent”; if someone visits the morning star, then it follows that he visits
the evening star.
These and other peculiarities led Brentano to be deeply

Gottlob Frege
pessimistic about the possibility of explaining intentionality in
Gottlob Frege.
physical terms, or “reducing” it to the physical, a view that has
Courtesy of the Universitatsbibliothek, Jena,
Ger. come to be called Brentano’s thesis (see below Reductionism).
Despite the concerted efforts of many philosophers during and
since the 20th century, no one has succeeded in refuting Brentano’s thesis (see below Research strategies for
intentionality).
Peripheral issues
There are two issues that were once central to the philosophy of mind but are now somewhat peripheral to it,
though they still command a great deal of philosophical attention. They are the problem of free will, also
called the problem of freedom and determinism, and the problem of whether a person’s mind can survive his
death.
Free will
A problem that dates to at least the Middle Ages is that of whether a person’s moral responsibility for an
action is undermined by an omniscient God’s foreknowledge of his performance of that action. If God knows
in advance that a person is going to sin, how could the person possibly be free to resist? With the rise of
modern science, the problem came to be expressed in terms of determinism, or the view that any future state
of the universe is logically determined by its initial state (i.e., the big bang) and the laws of physics. If such
determinism is true, how could anyone be free to do other than what physics and the initial state determined?
Although this problem obviously has much to do with the philosophy of mind, it is less important than it used
to be, in part because there are already so many problematic mental phenomena that need not involve free
will; conscious and intentional states, for example, often occur quite independently of issues of choice.
Moreover, many aspects of the problem can be seen as instances of certain more general issues in
metaphysics, particularly issues regarding the logic of counterfactual statements (statements about what
might have happened but did not) and the nature of causality and determinism.
The soul and personal identity
Perhaps the problem that most people think of first when they think about the nature of the mind is whether
the mind can survive the death of the body. The possibility that it can is, of course, central to many religious
doctrines, and it played an explicit role in Descartes’s formulations of mind-body dualism, the view that mind
and body constitute fundamentally different substances (see below Substance dualism and property dualism).
However, it would be a serious mistake to think that contemporary controversies about the nature of the mind
really turn on this remote possibility. Although it can often seem as though debates between dualism and
reductionism—the view that, in some sense, all mental phenomena are “nothing but” physical phenomena—
are about the existence of disembodied spirits, virtually none of the contemporary forms of these disputes
take this possibility seriously, and for good reason: there is simply no serious evidence that anyone’s mind has
ever survived the complete dissolution of his body. Purported “out of body” experiences, as well as people’s
alleged memories of events occurring minutes after they are pronounced dead, are no more evidence of
disembodiment than are the dreams that many people have of witnessing themselves doing various things.
There is, however, an interesting problem related to the question of disembodied souls, one that can be raised
even for someone who does not believe in that possibility: the problem of personal identity. What makes
someone the same person over time? Is it the persistence of the same body? Suppose that the cells in one’s
body became diseased and that it was medically possible to replace them one-by-one with new cells.
Arguably, if the replacement was extensive enough, one would be the same person with a new body. And it is
presumably something like this possibility that people envision when they imagine reincarnation.
But if it is not the body that is essential to being the same person, then it must be something more purely
psychological—perhaps one’s memories and character traits. But these come and go over a lifetime; most
people remember very little of their early childhoods, and some people have trouble remembering what they
did only a week earlier. Certainly, many of one’s interests and character traits change as one matures from
childhood to adolescence and then to early, middle, and late adulthood. So what stays the same? In particular,
what is it that underlies the peculiar concern and attachment one feels about the even distant future and past
portions of one’s life? It is not at all easy to say. (Note that this is a problem as much for the believer in
immaterial souls as for the person who believes only in bodies. To vary the story by Mark Twain, how would
it be possible, without some criterion of personal identity, to distinguish the case of a prince being
reincarnated as a pauper from the simple case of a pauper being born shortly after the death of a prince?)
Traditional metaphysical positions

A good deal of traditional discussion in the philosophy of mind is concerned with the so-called mind-body
problem, or the problem of how to explain the relation of mental phenomena to physical phenomena. In
particular, how could any mere material thing possibly display the phenomenon of intentionality, rationality,
or consciousness?
Interest in this issue is not confined merely to those with a penchant for physics. On pain of circularity, if
mental phenomena are ultimately to be explained in any way at all, they must be explained in terms of
nonmental phenomena, and it is a significant fact that all known nonmental phenomena are physical. In any
case, as noted above, reductionism—also called materialism or physicalism—is the view that all mental
phenomena are nothing but physical phenomena.
Reductionism
The identity theory

The simplest proposal for explaining how the mental is nothing but the physical is the identity theory. In his
classic paper “Materialism” (1963), the Australian philosopher J.J.C. Smart proposed that every mental state
is identical to a physical state in the same way, for example, that episodes of lightning are identical to
episodes of electrical discharge. The primary argument for this view is that it enables a kind of economy in
one’s account of the different kinds of things in the world, as well as a unification of causal claims: mental
events enter into causal relations with physical ones because in the end they are physical events themselves.
This view is also called reductionism, which unfortunately conveys the misleading suggestion that the mental
is somehow “made less” by being physical. This is of course mistaken, as lightning is no less lightning for
being reduced to electrical discharge, and water is no less water for being reduced to H O.
2
The comparisons with lightning and water, however, carry what many philosophers have thought to be an
implausible implication. Although every instance of lightning is an instance of the same type of physical state
—electrical discharge—it is doubtful that every instance of believing that grass grows, for example, is also an
instance of the same type of physical state—i.e., the excitation of specific neurons in the brain. This is
because it seems possible for two people to have brains composed of slightly different substances and yet to
share the same belief or other mental state. Likewise, it could be that there are extraterrestrials who believe
that grass grows, though their brains are composed of materials very different from those that make up human
brains. Why should reductionists rule out this possibility?
This unwanted implication can be avoided by noticing an ambiguity in identity statements between types and
tokens. According to a “type-identity” theory, every type of mental phenomenon is some (naturally
specifiable) type of physical phenomenon. This is quite a strong claim, akin to saying that every letter of the
alphabet is identical to a certain type of physical shape (or sound). But this seems clearly wrong: there is quite
a diversity of shapes (and sounds) that can count as a token of the letter a. A more reasonable claim would be
that every token of the letter a is identical to a token of some type of physical shape (or sound). Accordingly,
many materialist philosophers have retreated to a “token-identity” theory, according to which every mental
phenomenon is identical to some physical phenomenon.
The distinction between types and tokens of mental phenomena may afford a way for the reductive
physicalist to concede a point to the traditional dualist without giving up anything important. This is because
distinguishing between types of phenomena can be regarded as a way of distinguishing between different
ways of classifying them, and there may be any number of ways of classifying a given phenomenon that are
not reducible to each other. For example, every piece of luggage is presumably a physical object, but no one
believes that “luggage” is a classification that can be expressed in—or reduced to—physics, and no one has
ever seriously proposed a “luggage-physics” dualism. If this is the kind of dualism that the mental involves, it
would therefore seem to be quite innocuous.
Even if the identity theory is restricted to token-identity claims, however, there are still problems. One simple
example concerns the relation of many mental phenomena to physical space. As noted earlier (see above
Abstract and concrete), it is ordinarily quite unclear exactly where such things as beliefs and desires are
located. They are often said to be “in the head”—but where in the head, exactly? Or, to take a harder
example, mental images seem to have certain physical properties, such as being oval and vividly coloured.
But if such images are to be identified with physical things, then it would seem to follow that those things
should have the same physical properties—there should be oval, vividly coloured objects in the brains of
people who experience such images. But this is absurd. So it would seem that a mental image cannot be a
physical thing. (Arguments of this sort are sometimes called “Leibniz-law arguments,” after a metaphysical
principle formulated by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [1646–1716]: if x = y, then
whatever is true of x must also be true of y). Other, more technical problems with the identity theory (pressed
most vigorously by the American philosopher Saul Kripke) are beyond the scope of this article. The
cumulative effect of these difficulties has been to make philosophers wary of couching reductionism in terms
of identity.
An alternative is to say not that mental phenomena are identical to physical phenomena but rather that they
are “constituted” by them. Consider a porcelain vase. Suppose someone were to break the vase and make a
statue out of all of the pieces. If both the vase and the statue are identical to the pieces, it would follow that
the statue is identical to the vase, which is absurd. So the vase and the statue are not identical to the pieces but
merely constituted by (or composed of) them.
Physicalists think that it is possible to say more than this. Not only is every mental phenomenon constituted
by physical phenomena, but every property of the mental crucially depends upon some physical property.
Physicalists think that mental properties “supervene” on the physical, in the sense that every change or
difference in a mental property depends upon some change or difference in a physical property. It follows that
it is impossible for there to be two universes that are physically identical throughout their entire history but
that differ with respect to whether a certain individual is in pain at a particular time.
Explanatory gaps
The thesis of supervenience has called attention to a particularly striking difficulty about how to integrate talk
about minds into a general scientific understanding of the world, a difficulty that arises both in the case of
conscious states and in the case of intentional ones. Although mental properties may well supervene on
physical properties, it is surprisingly difficult to say exactly how they might do so.
Consider how most ordinary nonmental phenomena are explained. It is one of the impressive achievements of
modern science that it seems to afford in principle quite illuminating explanations of almost every nonmental
phenomenon one can think of. For example, most adults who want to understand why water expands when it
freezes, why the Sun shines, why the continents move, or why fetuses grow can easily imagine at least the
bare outlines of a scientific explanation. The explanation would consider the physical properties of trillions of
little particles, their spatial and temporal relations, and the physical (e.g., gravitational and electrical) forces
between them. If these particles exist in these relations and are subject to these forces, it follows that water
expands, the Sun shines, and so on. Indeed, if one knew these physical facts, one would see in each case that
these phenomena must happen as they do. As the American philosopher Joseph Levine nicely put it, the
microphysical phenomena “upwardly necessitate” the macrophysical phenomena: water could not but expand
when it freezes, given the properties of its physical parts.
But it is precisely this upward necessitation that seems very difficult to even imagine in the case of the
mental, particularly in the case of the two phenomena discussed above—consciousness and intentionality.
The easiest way to see this is to consider a simple puzzle called the “inverted spectrum.” How is it possible to
determine whether two people’s colour experiences are the same? Or, to put the question in terms of
physicalism: what physical facts about a person determine that he must be having red experiences and not
green ones when he looks at ordinary blood? This problem is made especially acute by the fact that the three-
dimensional colour solid (in which every hue, saturation, and tone of every colour can be assigned a specific
location) is almost perfectly symmetrical: the reds occupy positions on one side of the solid that are nearly
symmetrical with the positions occupied by the greens. This suggests that with a little tinkering—e.g.,
secretly implanting colour-reversal lenses in a child at birth—one could produce someone who used colour
vocabulary just as other people do but had experiences that were exactly the reverse of theirs. Or would they
be? Perhaps the effect of the tinkering would be to ensure not that the person’s experiences were the reverse
of others’ experiences but that they were the same.
The problem is that it seems impossible to imagine how one could discover which description is correct.
Unlike the case of the expansion of water, knowing the microphysical facts does not seem to be enough. One
would like somehow to get inside other people’s minds, in something like the way each person seems to be
able do in his own case. But mere access to the physical facts about other people’s brains does not enable one
to do this. (An analogous problem about intentionality was raised by Quine: What physical facts about
someone’s brain would determine that he is thinking about a rabbit as opposed to “rabbithood” or
“undetached rabbit parts”?)
Indeed, to press the point further, it is not even clear how physical facts about a person’s brain determine that
he is having any experiences at all. Many philosophers think that it is perfectly coherent to imagine that all of
the people one encounters are actually “zombies” who behave and perhaps even think in the manner of a
computer but do not have any conscious mental states. This is a contemporary version of the traditional
problem of other minds, the problem of identifying what reasons anyone could have for believing that anyone
else has a mental life; it is also sometimes called the problem of “absent qualia.” Again, the question to be
asked is: What is it about the physical constitution of a creature’s brain that compels one to think that it has a
mental life, in the same way that the physics of water compels one to think that it must expand when it
freezes?
Dualism
Substance dualism and property dualism

Confronted with the problems about identity and explanatory gaps, some philosophers have opted for one
version or another of mind-body dualism, the view that mental phenomena cannot in any way be reduced to
physical phenomena. In its most radical form, proposed by Descartes and consequently called Cartesianism,
dualism is committed to the view that mind constitutes a fundamentally different substance, one whose
functioning cannot be entirely explained by reference to physical phenomena alone. Descartes went so far as
to claim (in accordance with contemporary church doctrine) that this substance was an immortal soul that
survived the dissolution of the body. There are, however, much more modest forms of dualism—most notably
those concerned with mental properties (and sometimes states and events)—that need not involve any
commitment to the persistence of mental life after death.
Causal relations and epiphenomenalism
It is important to distinguish such claims about the dualistic nature of mental phenomena from claims about
their causal relations. In Descartes’s view, mental phenomena, despite their immateriality, can be both causes
and effects of physical phenomena (“dualistic interactionism”). The dualist does not ipso facto deny that
physical phenomena in the brain quite regularly cause events in the mind and vice versa; he merely denies
that those phenomena are identical to anything physical.
A problem with dualistic interactionism, however, concerns the evident lack of any causal break in the
internal processes of the human body. So far as is known, there is no particular state of any part of the body—
no action of any muscle, no secretion of any substance, no change in any cell—that cannot in principle be
explained by existing physical theories, assuming it can be explained at all (quantum indeterminacy is
irrelevant to the present point). Serious evidence of so-called “paranormal” phenomena, such as telepathy, is
yet to be found. More generally, there seems to be very good reason to think that the physical world forms a
closed system, obeying conservation laws such as the conservation of mass and the conservation of energy.
Consequently, there would appear to be no explanatory need to introduce nonphysical phenomena, whether
substances or properties, into any account of human activities. (In contrast, before the introduction of
electromagnetism in the late 19th century, there were myriad phenomena that could not be explained without
supposing the existence of another force in addition to gravitation.)
In response to this difficulty, dualists have tried to exempt the mental from any causal role. Leibniz claimed
that mental events were neither causes nor effects of any physical events—they were simply “synchronized”
by God with physical phenomena, a view known as “parallelism.” A more moderate position, originally
advocated by the English biologist T.H. Huxley (1825–95) and revived by the Australian philosopher Frank
Jackson in the late 20th century, is that mental phenomena are the effects, but not the causes, of physical
phenomena. Known as “epiphenomenalism,” this view allows for the evident causal laws relating physical
stimuli and perceptual experiences but does not commit the dualist to claims that might conflict with the
closure of physics.
These responses, however, may serve only to make the problem worse. If the mental really does not have any
effects, then it becomes entirely unclear why one should believe that it exists. What possible reason could
there be for believing in the existence of something in the spatiotemporal world that does not affect anything
in that world in any way? Epiphenomenal mental phenomena would seem to be no different in this respect
from epiphenomenal angels who accompany the planets without actually pushing them. At this point it
becomes hard to resist the invitation that dualism extends to eliminativism, the view that mental phenomena
do not exist at all.
Eliminativism: Behaviourism and instrumentalism
Eliminativism may at first seem like a preposterous position. Like many extreme philosophical doctrines,
however, it is worth taking seriously, both because it forces its opponents to produce illuminating arguments
against it and because certain versions of it may actually turn out to be plausible for specific classes of mental
phenomena.
The need for nontendentious evidence

One might be tempted to dismiss at least a blanket eliminativist view that denies the reality of any mental
phenomenon by asking how any such theory could explain one’s own present conscious thoughts and
experiences. But here it is crucial to keep in mind a principle that should be observed in any rational debate:
in arguing against a position, one must not presuppose claims that the position explicitly denies. Otherwise,
one is simply begging the question. Thus, it is no argument against a Newtonian account of planetary motion
that it does not explain the fluttering of the angelic planet pushers’ wings, since precisely what the Newtonian
account denies is that one needs to posit angels to explain planetary motion. Similarly, it is no argument
against someone who denies mental phenomena that his view does not explain conscious experiences. “What
conscious experiences?” the eliminativist might ask. What is needed in defending the existence of either
angels or mental states is nontendentious data for the postulation in question.
This is, at first blush, a difficult challenge to meet. It is not obvious what nontendentious evidence for the
existence of minds could consist of; indeed, their existence is actually presupposed by some of the evidence
one might be tempted to cite, such as one’s own thoughts and other people’s deliberate actions. However,
nontendentious evidence can be provided, and regularly is.
Consider standardized aptitude tests, such as the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) and the Graduate Record
Examination (GRE), which are regularly administered to high school and college students in the United
States. Here the standardization consists of the fact that both the question sheets and the answer sheets are
prepared so as to be physically type-identical—i.e., the question sheets consist of identically printed marks on
paper, and the answer sheets consist of identically printed rectangles that are supposed to be filled in with a
graphite pencil, thus permitting a machine to score the test. Consider now the question sheets and the
completed answer sheets that make up a single test that has been administered to millions of students at about
the same time. The observable correlations between the printed marks on the question sheets and the graphite
patterns on the answer sheets will be, from any scientific point of view, staggering. Overwhelmingly, students
will have produced approximately the same graphite patterns in response to the same printed marks. Of
course, the correlations will not be perfect—in fact, the answer sheets are supposed to differ from each other
in ways that indicate likely differences in the students’ academic abilities. Still, the correlations will be well
above any reasonable standard of statistical significance. The problem for the eliminativist is how to explain
these standardized regularities without appealing to putative facts about the test takers’ mental lives—i.e., to
facts about their thoughts, desires, and reasoning abilities.
Here it is important to remember that, in general, what science is in the business of explaining is not this or
that particular event (or event token) but the regularities that obtain between different kinds of events (or
event types). Although the fact that every token physical movement of every test taker is explainable in
principle by physical theories, this is not in itself a guarantee that the types of events that appear in these
correlations can also be so explained. In the case of standardized regularities, it is hard to think of any purely
physical explanation that stands a chance.
Radical behaviourism
While acknowledging that people—and many animals—do appear to act intelligently, eliminativists thought
that they could account for this fact in nonmentalistic terms. For virtually the entire first half of the 20th
century, they pursued a research program that culminated in B.F. Skinner’s (1904–90) doctrine of “radical
behaviourism,” according to which apparently intelligent regularities in the behaviour of humans and many
animals can be explained in purely physical terms—specifically, in terms of “conditioned” physical responses
produced by patterns of physical stimulation and reinforcement (see also behaviourism; conditioning).
Radical behaviourism is now largely only of historical interest, partly because its
B.F. Skinner
main tenets were refuted by the behaviourists’ own wonderfully careful
B.F. Skinner, 1971.
experiments. (Indeed, one of the most significant contributions of behaviourism
AP/REX/Shutterstock.com
was to raise the level of experimental rigour in psychology.) In the favoured
experimental paradigm of a rigid maze, even lowly rats displayed a variety of
navigational skills that defied explanation in terms of conditioning, requiring instead the postulation of
entities such as “mental maps” and “curiosity drives.” The American psychologist Karl S. Lashley (1890–
1958) pointed out that there were, in principle, limitations on the serially ordered behaviours that could be
learned on behaviourist assumptions. And in a famously devastating critique published in 1957, the American
linguist Noam Chomsky demonstrated the hopelessness of Skinner’s efforts to provide a behaviouristic
account of human language learning and use.
Since the demise of radical behaviourism, eliminativist proposals have continued to surface from time to
time. One form of eliminativism, developed in the 1980s and known as “radical connectionism,” was a kind
of behaviourism “taken inside”: instead of thinking of conditioning in terms of external stimuli and responses,
one thinks of it instead in terms of the firing of assemblages of neurons. Each neuron is connected to a
multitude of other neurons, each of which has a specific probability of firing when it fires. Learning consists
of the alteration of these firing probabilities over time in response to further sensory input.
Few theorists of this sort really adopted any thoroughgoing eliminativism, however. Rather, they tended to
adopt positions somewhat intermediate between reductionism and eliminativism. These views can be roughly
characterized as “irreferentialist.”
Irreferentialism
Wittgenstein
It has been noted how, in relation to introspection, Wittgenstein resisted the tendency of philosophers to view
people’s inner mental lives on the familiar model of material objects. This is of a piece with his more general
criticism of philosophical theories, which he believed tended to impose an overly referential conception of
meaning on the complexities of ordinary language. He proposed instead that the meaning of a word be
thought of as its use, or its role in the various “language games” of which ordinary talk consists. Once this is
done, one will see that there is no reason to suppose, for example, that talk of mental images must refer to
peculiar objects in a mysterious mental realm. Rather, terms like thought, sensation, and understanding
should be understood on the model of an expression like the average American family, which of course does
not refer to any actual family but to a ratio. This general approach to mental terms might be called
irreferentialism. It does not deny that many ordinary mental claims are true; it simply denies that the terms in
them refer to any real objects, states, or processes. As Wittgenstein put the point in his Philosophische
Untersuchungen (1953; Philosophical Investigations), “If I speak of a fiction, it is of a grammatical fiction.”
Of course, in the case of the average American family, it is quite easy to paraphrase away the appearance of
reference to some actual family. But how are the apparent references to mental phenomena to be paraphrased
away? What is the literal truth underlying the richly reified façon de parler of mental talk?
Although Wittgenstein resisted general accounts of the meanings of words, insisting that the task of the
philosopher was simply to describe the ordinary ways in which words are used, he did think that “an inner
process stands in need of an outward criterion”—by which he seemed to mean a behavioral criterion.
However, for Wittgenstein a given type of mental state need not be manifested by any particular outward
behaviour: one person may express his grief by wailing, another by somber silence. This approach has
persisted into the present day among philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, who think that the application of
mental terms cannot depart very far from the behavioral basis on which they are learned, even though the
terms might not be definable on that basis.
Ryle and analytical behaviourism

Some irreferentialist philosophers thought that something more systematic and substantial could be said, and
they advocated a program for actually defining the mental in behavioral terms. Partly influenced by
Wittgenstein, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900–76) tried to “exorcize” what he called the “ghost in
the machine” by showing that mental terms function in language as abbreviations of dispositions to overt
bodily behaviour, rather in the way that the term solubility, as applied to salt, might be said to refer to the
disposition of salt to dissolve when placed in water in normal circumstances. For example, the belief that God
exists might be regarded as a disposition to answer “yes” to the question “Does God exist?”
A particularly influential proposal of this sort was the Turing test for intelligence, originally developed by the
British logician who first conceived of the modern computer, Alan Turing (1912–52). According to Turing, a
machine should count as intelligent if its teletyped answers to teletyped questions cannot be distinguished
from the teletyped answers of a normal human being. Other, more sophisticated behavioral analyses were
proposed by philosophers such as Ryle and by psychologists such as Clark L. Hull (1884–1952).
This approach to mental vocabulary, which came to be called “analytical behaviourism,” did not meet with
great success. It is not hard to think of cases of creatures who might act exactly as though they were in pain,
for example, but who actually were not: consider expert actors or brainless human bodies wired to be
remotely controlled. Indeed, one thing such examples show is that mental states are simply not so closely tied
to behaviour; typically, they issue in behaviour only in combination with other mental states. Thus, beliefs
issue in behaviour only in conjunction with desires and attention, which in turn issue in behaviour only in
conjunction with beliefs. It is precisely because an actor has different motivations from a normal person that
he can behave as though he is in pain without actually being so. And it is because a person believes that he
should be stoical that he can be in excruciating pain but not behave as though he is.
It is important to note that the Turing test is a particularly poor behaviourist test; the restriction to teletyped
interactions means that one must ignore how the machine would respond in other sorts of ways to other sorts
of stimuli. But intelligence arguably requires not only the ability to converse but the ability to integrate the
content of language into the rest of one’s psychology—for example, to recognize objects and to engage in
practical reasoning, modifying one’s behaviour in the light of changes in one’s beliefs and preferences.
Indeed, it is important to distinguish the Turing test from the much more serious and deeper ideas that Turing
proposed about the construction of a computer; these ideas involved an account not merely of a system’s
behaviour but of how that behaviour might be produced internally. Ironically enough, Turing’s proposals
about machines were instances not of behaviourism but of precisely the kind of view of internal processes
that behaviourists were eager to avoid.
Functionalism
The fact that mental terms seem to be applied in ensembles led a number of philosophers to think about
technical ways of defining an entire set of terms together. Perhaps, they thought, words like belief, desire,
thought, and intention could be defined in the way a physicist might simultaneously define mass, force, and
energy in terms of each other and in relation to other terms. The American philosopher David Lewis (1941–
2001) invoked a technique, called “ramsification” (named for the British philosopher Frank Ramsey [1903–
30]), whereby a set of new terms could be defined by reference to their relations to each other and to other old
terms already understood. Ramsification was based on an idea that had already been noted by the American
philosopher Hilary Putnam with regard to the set of standard states of a computer. Each state in the set is
defined in terms of what the machine does when it receives an input; specifically, the machine produces a
certain output and passes into another of the states in the same set. The states can then be defined together in
terms of the overall patterns produced in this way.
States of computers are not the only things that can be so defined; most any reasonably complex entity that
has parts that function in specific ways will do as well. For example, a carburetor in an internal-combustion
engine can be defined in terms of how it regulates the flow of gasoline and oxygen into the cylinders where
the mixture is ignited, causing the piston to move. Such analogies between mental states and the functional
parts of complex machines provided the inspiration for functionalist approaches to understanding mental
states, which dominated discussions in the philosophy of mind from the 1960s.
Functionalism seemed an attractive approach for a number of reasons: (1) as just noted, it allows for the
definition of many mental terms at once, avoiding the problems created by the piecemeal definitions of
analytical behaviourism; (2) it frees reductionism from a chauvinistic commitment to the particular ways in
which human minds happen to be embodied, allowing them to be “multiply realized” in any number of
substances and bodies, including machines, extraterrestrials, and perhaps even angels and ghosts (in this way,
functionalism is also compatible with the denial of type identities and the endorsement of token identities);
and, most important, (3) it allows philosophers of mind to recognize a complex psychological level of
explanation, one that may not be straightforwardly reducible to a physical level, without denying that every
psychological embodiment is in fact physical. Functionalism thus vindicated the reasonable insistence that
psychology not be replaced by physics while avoiding the postulation of any mysterious nonphysical entities
as psychology’s subject matter.
However, as will emerge in the discussion that follows, these very attractions brought with them a number of
risks. One worry was whether the apparent detachment of functional mental properties from physical
properties would render mental properties explanatorily inert. In a number of influential articles, the
American philosopher Jaegwon Kim argued for an “exclusion principle” according to which, if a functional
property is in fact different from the physical properties that are causally sufficient to explain everything that
happens, then it is superfluous, just as are the epiphenomenal angels that push around the planets. Whether
something like the exclusion principle is correct would seem to depend upon exactly what relation functional
properties bear to their various physical realizations. Although this relation is obviously a good deal more
intimate than that between angels and gravitation, it is unclear how intimate the relation needs to be in order
to ensure that functional properties play some useful explanatory role.
It is important to appreciate the many different ways in which a functionalist approach can be deployed,
depending on the specific kind of functionalist account of the mind one thinks is constitutive of the meaning
of mental terms. Some philosophers—e.g., Lewis and Jackson—think that the account is provided simply by
common “folk” beliefs, or beliefs that almost everyone believes that everyone else believes (e.g., in the case
of the mental, the beliefs that people scratch itches, that they assert what they think, and that they avoid pain).
Others—e.g., Sidney Shoemaker—think that one should engage in philosophical analysis of possible cases
(“analytical functionalism”); and still others—e.g., William Lycan and Georges Rey—look to empirical
psychological theory (“psychofunctionalism”). Although most philosophers construe such functional talk
realistically, as referring to actual states of the brain, some (e.g., Dennett) interpret it irreferentially—indeed,
as merely an instrument for predicting people’s behaviour or as an “intentional stance” that one may (or
equally may not) take toward humans, animals, or computers and about whose truth there is no genuine “fact
of the matter.” In each case, definitions vary according to whether they are derived from an account of the
whole system at once (“holistic” functionalism) or from an account of specific subparts of the system
(“molecular” functionalism) and according to whether the terms to be defined must refer to observable
behaviour or may refer also to specific features of human bodies and their environments (“short-armed”
versus “long-armed” functionalism). Thus, there may be functional definitions of states of specific
subsystems of the mind, such as those involved in sensory reception (hearing, vision, touch) or in capacities
such as language, memory, problem solving, mathematics, and interpersonal empathy. The most influential
form of functionalism is based on the analogy with computers, which, of course, were independently
developed to solve problems that require intelligence.
Sydney Shoemaker The computational-representational

Sydney Shoemaker. theory of thought (CRTT)
Sage School of Philosophy/Cornell University
The idea that thinking and mental processes in general can be
treated as computational processes emerged gradually in the work
of the computer scientists Allen Newell and Herbert Simon and the philosophers Hilary Putnam, Gilbert
Harman, and especially Jerry Fodor. Fodor was the most explicit and influential advocate of the
computational-representational theory of thought, or CRTT—the idea that thinking consists of the
manipulation of electronic tokens of sentences in a “language of thought.” Whatever the ultimate merits or
difficulties of this view, Fodor rightly perceived that something like CRTT, also called the “computer model
of the mind,” is presupposed in an extremely wide range of research in contemporary cognitive psychology,
linguistics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind.
Of course, given the nascent state of many of these disciplines, CRTT is not nearly a finished theory. It is
rather a research program, like the proposal in early chemistry that the chemical elements consist of some
kind of atoms. Just as early chemists did not have a clue about the complexities that would eventually emerge
about the nature of these atoms, so cognitive scientists probably do not have more than very general ideas
about the character of the computations and representations that human thought actually involves. But, as in
the case of atomic theory, CRTT seems to be steering research in promising directions.
The computational account of rationality
The chief inspiration for CRTT was the development of formal logic, the modern systematization of
deductive reasoning (see above Deduction). This systematization made at least deductive validity purely a
matter of derivations (conclusions from premises) that are defined solely in terms of the form—the syntax, or
spelling—of the sentences involved. The work of Turing showed how such formal derivations could be
executed mechanically by a Turing machine, a hypothetical computing device that operates by moving
forward and backward on an indefinitely long tape and scanning cells on which it prints and erases symbols
in some finite alphabet. Turing’s demonstrations of the power of these machines strongly supported his claim
(now called the Church-Turing thesis) that anything that can be computed at all can be computed by a Turing
machine. This idea, of course, led directly to the development of modern computers, as well as to the more
general research programs of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. The hope of CRTT was that all
reasoning—deductive, inductive, abductive, and practical—could be reduced to this kind of mechanical
computation (though it was naturally assumed that the actual architecture of the brain is not the same as the
architecture of a Turing machine).
Note that CRTT is not the claim that any existing computer is, or has, a mind. Rather, it is the claim that
having a mind consists of being a certain sort of computer—or, more plausibly, an elaborate assembly of
many computers, each of which subserves a specific mental capacity (perception, memory, language
processing, decision making, motor control, and so on). All of these computers are united in a complex
“computational architecture” in which the output of one subsystem serves as the input to another. In his
influential book Modularity of Mind (1983), Fodor went so far as to postulate separate “modules” for
perception and language processing that are “informationally encapsulated.” Although the outputs of
perceptual modules serve as inputs to systems of belief fixation, the internal processes of each module are
segregated from each other—explaining, for example, why visual illusions persist even for people who
realize that they are illusions. Proponents of CRTT believe that eventually it will be possible to characterize
the nature of various mental phenomena, such as perception and belief, in terms of this sort of architecture.
Supposing that there are subsystems for perception, belief formation, and decision making, belief in general
might be defined as “the output of the belief-formation system that serves as the input to the decision-making
system” (beliefs are, after all, just those states on which a person rationally acts, given his desires).
For example, a person’s memory that grass grows fast might be regarded as a state involving the existence of
an electronic token of the sentence “Grass grows fast” in a certain location in the person’s brain. This
sentence might be subject to computational processes of deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning,
yielding the sentence “My lawn will grow fast.” This sentence in turn might serve as input to the person’s
decision-making system, where, one may suppose, there exists the desire that his lawn not be overgrown—
i.e., a state involving a certain computational relation to an electronic token of the sentence “My lawn should
not be overgrown.” Finally, this sentence and the previous one might be combined in standard patterns of
decision theory to cause his body to move in such a way that he winds up dragging the lawn mower from the
garage. (Of course, these same computational states may also cause any number of other nonrational effects
—e.g., dreading, cursing, or experiencing a shot of adrenaline at the prospect of the labour involved.)
Although CRTT offers a promise of a theory of thought, it is important to appreciate just how far current
research is from any actual fulfillment of that promise. In the 1960s the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus rightly
ridiculed the naive optimism of early work in the area. Although it is not clear that he provided any argument
in principle against its eventual success, it is worth noting that the position of contemporary theorists is not
much better than that of Descartes, who observed that, although it is possible for machines to emulate this or
that specific bit of intelligent behaviour, no machine has yet displayed the “universal reason” exhibited in the
common sense of normal human beings. People seem to be able to integrate information from arbitrary
domains to reach plausible overall conclusions, as when juries draw upon diverse information to render a
verdict about whether the prosecution has established its case “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Indeed, despite
his own commitment to CRTT as a necessary feature of any adequate theory of the mind, even Fodor doubts
that CRTT is by itself sufficient for such a theory.
Research strategies for intentionality

One of Turing’s achievements was to show how computations can be specified purely mechanically, in
particular without any reference to the meanings of the symbols over which the computations are defined.
Contrary to the assertions of some of CRTT’s critics, notably the American philosopher John Searle,
specifying computations without reference to the meanings of symbols does not imply that the symbols do
not have any meaning, any more than the fact that bachelors can be specified without mentioning their eating
habits implies that bachelors do not eat. In fact, the symbols involved in computations typically have a very
obvious meaning—referring, for example, to bank balances, interest rates, gamma globulin levels, or
anything else that can be measured numerically. But, as already noted, the meaning or content of symbols
used by ordinary computers is usually derived by stipulation from the intentional states of their programmers.
In contrast, the symbols involved in human mental activity presumably have intrinsic meaning or
intentionality. The real problem for CRTT, therefore, is how to explain the intrinsic meaning or intentionality
of symbols in the brain.
This is really just an instance of the general problem already noted of filling the explanatory gap between the
physical and the intentional—the problem of answering the challenge raised by Brentano’s thesis. No
remotely adequate proposal has yet been made, but there are two serious research strategies that have been
pursued in various ways by different philosophers. Inspired by the aforementioned “use” view of meaning
urged by Wittgenstein, Ned Block and Christopher Peacocke have developed “internalist” theories according
to which meaning is constituted by some features of a symbol’s causal (or conceptual) role within the brain,
specifically the inferences in which it figures. For example, it might be constitutive of the meaning of the
symbol “bachelor” that it be causally connected to a symbol whose meaning is “unmarried.” Others
philosophers, such as Fred Dretske, Robert Stalnaker, and Fodor, have proposed “externalist” theories
according to which the meaning of a symbol in the brain is constituted by various causal relations between
the symbol and the phenomenon in the external world that it represents. For example, the symbol W might
represent water by virtue of some causal, covariational relation it enjoys to actual water in the world: under
suitable conditions, actual water causes an electronic token of W to appear in the brain. Alternatively, perhaps
the entokening of W in the brain in the presence of actual water once provided a creature’s distant ancestors
with some evolutionary advantage, as suggested in the work of Ruth Millikan and Karen Neander. There have
been quite rich and subtle discussions of whether the thought contents of a system (a human being or an
animal) must be specified “widely,” taking into account the environment the system inhabits, as in the work
of Tyler Burge, or only “narrowly,” independently of any such environment, as in the work of Gabriel Segal.
Objections and responses
A number of objections of varying levels of sophistication have been made against CRTT.
Introspection
A once-common criticism was that people’s introspective experiences of their thinking are nothing like the
computational processes that CRTT proposes are constitutive of human thought. However, like most modern
psychological theories since at least the time of Freud, CRTT does not purport to be an account of how a
person’s psychological life appears introspectively to him, and it is perfectly compatible with the sense that
many people have that they think not in words but in images, maps, or various sorts of somatic feelings.
CRTT is merely a claim about the underlying processes in the brain, the surface appearances of which can be
as remote from the character of those processes as the appearance of an image on a screen can be from the
inner workings of a computer.
Homunculi
Another frequent objection against theories like CRTT, originally voiced by Wittgenstein and Ryle, is that
they merely reproduce the problems they are supposed to solve, since they invariably posit processes—such
as following rules or comparing one thing with another—that seem to require the very kind of intelligence
that the theory is supposed to explain. Another way of formulating the criticism is to say that computational
theories seem committed to the existence in the mind of “homunculi,” or “little men,” to carry out the
processes they postulate.
This objection might be a problem for a theory such as Freud’s, which posits entities such as the superego and
processes such as the unconscious repression of desires. It is not a problem, however, for CRTT, because the
central idea behind the development of the theory is Turing’s characterization of computation in terms of the
purely mechanical steps of a Turing machine. These steps, such as moving left or right one cell at a time, are
so simple and “stupid” that they can obviously be executed without the need of any intelligence at all.
Artifactuality and artificial intelligence (AI)
It is frequently said that people cannot be computers because whereas computers are “programmed” to do
only what the programmer tells them to do, people can do whatever they like. However, this is decreasingly
true of increasingly clever machines, which often come up with specific solutions to problems that certainly
might not have occurred to their programers (there is no reason why good chess programmers themselves
need to be good chess players). Moreover, there is every reason to think that, at some level, human beings are
indeed “programmed,” in the sense of being structured in specific ways by their physical constitutions. The
American linguist Noam Chomsky, for example, has stressed the very specific ways in which the brains of
human beings are innately structured to acquire, upon exposure to relevant data, only a small subset of all the
logically possible languages with which the data are compatible.
Searle’s “Chinese room”

In a widely reprinted paper, “Minds, Brains, and Programs” (1980), Searle claimed that mental processes
cannot possibly consist of the execution of computer programs of any sort, since it is always possible for a
person to follow the instructions of the program without undergoing the target mental process. He offered the
thought experiment of a man who is isolated in a room in which he produces Chinese sentences as “output” in
response to Chinese sentences he receives as “input” by following the rules of a program for engaging in a
Chinese conversation—e.g., by using a simple conversation manual. Such a person could arguably pass a
Chinese-language Turing test for intelligence without having the remotest understanding of the Chinese
sentences he is manipulating. Searle concluded that understanding Chinese cannot be a matter of performing
computations on Chinese sentences, and mental processes in general cannot be reduced to computation.
Critics of Searle have claimed that his thought experiment suffers from a number of problems that make it a
poor argument against CRTT. The chief difficulty, according to them, is that CRTT is not committed to the
behaviourist Turing test for intelligence, so it need not ascribe intelligence to a device that merely presents
output in response to input in the way that Searle describes. In particular, as a functionalist theory, CRTT can
reasonably require that the device involve far more internal processing than a simple Chinese conversation
manual would require. There would also have to be programs for Chinese grammar and for the systematic
translation of Chinese words and sentences into the particular codes (or languages of thought) used in all of
the operations of the machine that are essential to understanding Chinese—e.g., those involved in perception,
memory, reasoning, and decision making. In order for Searle’s example to be a serious problem for CRTT,
according to the theory’s proponents, the man in the room would have to be following programs for the full
array of the processes that CRTT proposes to model. Moreover, the representations in the various subsystems
would arguably have to stand in the kinds of relation to external phenomena proposed by the externalist
theories of intentionality mentioned above. (Searle is right to worry about where meaning comes from but
wrong to ignore the various proposals in the field.)
Defenders of CRTT argue that, once one begins to imagine all of this complexity, it is clear that CRTT is
capable of distinguishing between the mental abilities of the system as a whole and the abilities of the man in
the room. The man is functioning merely as the system’s “central processing unit”—the particular subsystem
that determines what specific actions to perform when. Such a small part of the entire system does not need to
have the language-understanding properties of the whole system, any more than Queen Victoria needs to have
all of the properties of her realm.
Searle’s thought experiment is sometimes confused with a quite different problem that was raised earlier by
Ned Block. This objection, which also (but only coincidentally) involves reference to China, applies not just
to CRTT but to almost any functionalist theory of the mind.
Block’s “nation of China”
There are more than one billion people in China, and there are roughly one billion neurons in the brain.
Suppose that the functional relations that functionalists claim are constitutive of human mental life are
ultimately definable in terms of firing patterns among assemblages of neurons. Now imagine that, perhaps as
a celebration, it is arranged for each person in China to send signals for four hours to other people in China in
precisely the same pattern in which the neurons in the brain of Chairman Mao Zedong fired (or might have
fired) for four hours on his 60th birthday. During those four hours Mao was pleased but then had a headache.
Would the entire nation of China during the new four-hour period be in the same mental states that Mao was
in on his 60th birthday? Would the entire nation be truly describable as being pleased and then having a
headache? Although most people would find this suggestion preposterous, the functionalist might be
committed to it if it turns out that the functional relations that are constitutive of mental states are defined in
terms of the firing patterns of neurons. Of course, it may turn out that other functional relations are essential
as well. But the worry is that, because any functional relation at all can be emulated by the nation of China,
no set of functional relations will be adequate to capture mentality.
Maybe, but maybe not. Both this latter possibility and the criticism of Searle’s Chinese room argument
highlight a fact that is becoming increasingly crucial to the philosophy of mind: the devil is in the details.
Once one moves beyond the large-scale debates between Cartesian dualism and Skinnerian behaviourism to
consider indefinitely complex functionalist proposals about inner organization, many of the standard
arguments and intuitions of traditional philosophy may no longer seem decisive. One simply must assess
specific proposals about specific mental states and processes in order to see how plausible they are, both as an
account of human mentality and as a possibly generalizable approach to systems such as computers and the
nation of China. Block is right, however, to point out that functionalist theories, as well other kinds of theory
in this area, run the peculiar risk of being either too “liberal,” ascribing mentality to just about anything that
happens to realize a certain functional structure, or too “chauvinistic,” limiting mentality to some arbitrary set
of realizations (e.g., to human beings).
Further issues
Consciousness reconsidered
The emergence of computational theories of mind and advances in the understanding of neurophysiology
have contributed to a renewal of interest in consciousness, which had long been avoided by philosophers and
scientists alike as a hopelessly subjective phenomenon. However, although a great deal has been written on
this topic, few researchers are under any illusion that anything like a satisfactory theory of consciousness will
soon be achieved. At most, what researchers have thus far produced are a number of plausible suggestions
about how such a theory might be developed. Some salient examples follow.
Executives, buffers, and HOTs

Since the 1980s there has been a great deal of investigation of the neural correlates of consciousness. One
much-publicized discussion by Francis Crick and Christof Koch reported finding an electrical oscillation of
40 Hz in layers five and six of the primary visual cortex of a cat whenever the cat was having a visual
experience. But however robust this finding may turn out to be, it shows only that there is a correlation
between visual experience and electrical oscillation. As noted at the start of this article, it is a distinctive
concern of the philosophy of mind to determine the nature of mental phenomena, and a mere correlation
between a mental phenomenon and something else does not (by itself) provide such an account. Crick and
Koch’s result, for example, leaves entirely open the question of whether animals lacking the 40-Hz oscillation
would be conscious. Worse, if taken as a proposal about the nature of consciousness, it would imply that a
radio transmitter set to produce oscillations at 40 Hz would be conscious. What is wanted instead is some
suggestion of how an oscillation of 40 Hz plays at least the role that consciousness is supposed to play in
people’s mental lives.
There are three general sorts of theory of what the role of

Francis Crick
consciousness might be: “executive” theories, “buffer” theories,
Francis Crick.
and “higher-order state” theories. They are not always exclusive of
Print Collector/Heritage-Images/age fotostock
each other, but they each emphasize quite different initial
conceptions.
Executive theories, such as the theory proposed by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980), stress the
role of conscious states in deliberation and planning. Many philosophers, however, doubt that all such
executive activities are conscious; they suspect instead that conscious states play a more tangential role in
determining action.
According to buffer theories, a person is conscious if he stands in certain relations to a specific location in the
brain in which material is stored for specific purposes, such as introspection. In an interesting analogy that
brings in some of the social dimensions that many writers have thought are intrinsic to consciousness,
Dennett has compared a buffer to an executive’s press secretary, who is responsible for “keeping up
appearances,” whether or not they coincide with executive realities. Consciousness is thus the story of
himself that a person is prepared to tell others. Along lines already noted, Jackendoff has made the interesting
suggestion that such material is confined to relatively low-level sensory material.
An important family of much more specific proposals consists of variants of the idea that consciousness
involves some kind of state directed at another state. One such suggestion is that consciousness is an internal
scanning or perception, as suggested by David Armstrong and William Lycan. Another is that it involves an
explicit higher-order thought (HOT)—i.e., a thought that one is in a specific mental state. Thus, the thought
that one wants a glass of beer is conscious only if one thinks that one wants a glass of beer. This does not
mean that the HOT itself is conscious but only that its presence is what renders conscious the lower-order
thought that is its target. David Rosenthal has defended the view that the HOT must actually be occurring at
the time of consciousness, while Peter Carruthers has argued for a more modest view according to which the
agent must simply be disposed to have the relevant HOT. Both views need to contend with the worry that
subsystems of higher thoughts and their targets might be unconscious, as seems to be suggested by Freud’s
theory of repression.
“What it’s like”
Ned Block has pointed out an important distinction between two concepts of consciousness that many of
these proposals might be thought to run together: “access” (or “A-”) consciousness and “phenomenal” (or
“P-”) consciousness. Although they might be defined in a variety of ways, depending upon the details of the
kind of computational (or other) theory of thought being considered, A-consciousness is the concept of some
material’s being conscious by virtue of its being accessible to various mental processes, particularly
introspection, and P-consciousness consists of the qualitative or phenomenal “feel” of things, which may or
may not be so accessible. Indeed, the fact that material is accessible to processes does not entail that it
actually has a feel, that there is “something it’s like,” to be conscious of that material. Block goes on to argue
that the fact it has a certain feel does not entail that it is accessible.
In the second half of the 20th century, the issue of P-consciousness was made particularly vivid by two
influential articles regarding the very special knowledge that one seems to acquire as a result of conscious
experience. In “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), Thomas Nagel pointed out that no matter how much
someone might know about the objective facts about the brains and behaviour of bats and of their peculiar
ability to echolocate (to locate distant or invisible objects by means of sound waves), that knowledge alone
would not suffice to convey the subjective facts about “what it’s like” to be a bat. Indeed, it is unlikely that
human beings will ever be able to know what the world seems like to a bat. In a paper published in 1982,
“Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Jackson made a similar point by imagining a brilliant colour scientist, “Mary” (the
name has become a standard term in discussions of the notion of phenomenal consciousness), who happens to
know all the physical facts about colour vision but has never had an experience of red, either because she is
colour-blind or because she happens to live in an unusual environment. Suppose that one day, through surgery
or by leaving her strange environment, Mary finally does have a red experience. She would thereby seem to
have learned something new, something that she did not know before, even though she previously knew all of
the objective facts about colour vision.
Qualitative states
“Qualiaphilia” is the view that no functionalist theory of consciousness can capture phenomenal
consciousness; in conscious experience one is aware of “qualia” that are not relational but rather are intrinsic
features of experience in some sense. These features might be dualistic, as suggested by David Chalmers, or
they might be physical, as suggested by Ned Block. (John Searle claims that they are “biological” features,
but it is not clear how this claim differs from Block’s, given that all biological properties appear to be
physical.)
A novel strategy that has emerged in the wake of J.J.C. Smart’s discussions of identity theory is the
suggestion that these apparent features of experience are not genuine properties “in the mind” or “in the
world” but only the contents of mental representations (perhaps in a language of thought). Because this
representationalist strategy may initially seem quite counterintuitive, it deserves special discussion.
Representationalism
Smart noted in his early articles that it may be unnecessary to believe in such objects as pains, itches, and
tickles, since one can just as well speak about “experiences of” these things, agreeing that there are such
experiences but denying that there are any additional objects that these experiences are experiences of.
According to this proposal, use of the words … of pain, … of itches, … of tickles, and so on should be
construed irreferentially, as simply a way of classifying the experience in question.
Although this is a widely accepted move in the case of phenomenal objects, many philosophers find it harder
to accept in the case of phenomenal properties. It seems easy to deny the existence of pain as an object but
much harder to deny the existence of pain as a property—to deny, for example, that there is a property of
intense painfulness that is possessed by the experience of unanesthetized dentistry. Indeed, it can seem mad to
deny the existence of a property so immediately obvious in experience.
But what compels one to think that there really is a property being experienced in such cases? Recall the
distinction drawn above between properties and the contents of thoughts—e.g., concepts. It is one thing to
suppose that people have a concept of something and quite another to suppose that the entity in question
exists. Again, this is obvious in the case of objects; why should it not be equally clear in the case of
properties? Consequently, it should be possible for there to be special, contentful qualia representations
without there being any genuine properties answering to that content.
Furthermore, as was noted in the discussion of concepts, the contents of thoughts and representations need
not always be fully conceptual: an infant seeing a triangle might deploy a representation with the
nonconceptual content of a triangle, even though he does not possess the full concept as understood by a
student of geometry. Many representationalists propose that qualitative experiences should be understood as
involving special representations with nonconceptual content of this sort. Thus, a red experience would
consist of the deployment of a representation with the nonconceptual content “red” in response to (for
example) seeing a red rose. The difference between a colour-sighted person and someone colour-blind would
consist of the fact that the former has recourse to representations with specific nonconceptual content,
whereas the latter does not. What is important for the current discussion is that this nonconceptual content
need not be, or correspond to, any genuine property of the qualia of red or of looking red. For the
representationalist, it is enough that a person represents a certain qualia in this special way in order for him to
experience it; there is no explanatory or introspective need for there to be an additional phenomenal property
of red.
Still, many philosophers who are influenced by the externalist approaches to meaning discussed above have
worried about how representations of qualitative experience can possess any content whatsoever, given that
there is no genuine property that they represent. Consequently, many representationalists—including Gilbert
Harman, William Lycan, and Michael Tye—have insisted that the nonconceptual contents of experience must
be “wide,” actually representing real properties in the world. Thus, someone having a red experience is
deploying a representation with a nonconceptual content that represents the real-world property of being red.
(This view has the merit of explaining the apparent “transparency” of descriptions of experience—i.e., the
fact that the words a person uses to describe his experience always apply at a minimum to the worldly object
the experience is of.) However, other philosophers—including Peter Carruthers and Georges Rey—disagree,
arguing that the content of experience is “narrow” and that content itself does not require that there be
anything real that is being represented.
Remaining gaps and first-person skepticism

What continues to bother the qualiaphile are the problems mentioned above regarding the explanatory gaps
between various mental phenomena and the physical. For all their potentially quite elaborate accounts of the
organization of human minds, functionalist theories have not yet shown how “the richness and determinacy of
colour experience,” as Levine put it, are “upwardly necessitated” by mere computations over representations.
It still seems possible to imagine a machine that engages in such computational processing without having
any conscious experiences at all.
As difficult as this and the related problems raised by Block are, it is important to notice an interesting
difference between the relatively familiar behavioral case and a quite unfamiliar, potentially quite obscure
functionalist one. It is one thing to imagine a person’s mental life not being uniquely fixed by his behaviour,
as in the case of excellent actors; it is quite another to imagine a person’s mental life not being uniquely fixed
by his functional organization. Here there are no intuitively clear precedents of mental states being “faked.”
To the contrary, in cases in which changes are made to the organization of a person’s brain (e.g., as a result of
brain surgery), it is reasonable to expect, depending on the extent of the changes, that the person’s mental
capacities—including memory, introspection, intelligence, judgment, and so on—will also be affected. When
considerations such as these are taken into account, the suppositions that mental differences do not turn on
functional ones, and that functional identity might not entail mental identity, seem much less secure. What is
possible in the world may not match what is conceivable in the imaginations of philosophers. Perhaps it is
only conceivable, and not really possible, that there are zombies or inverted qualia.
There is a further, somewhat surprising reason to take this latter suggestion seriously. If one insists on the
possibility that ordinary functional organization is not enough to fix a person’s mental life, one seems thereby
to be committed to the possibility that people may not be as well acquainted with their own mental lives as
they think they are. If people’s conscious mental states are not functionally connected in any particular way to
their other thoughts and reactions, then it would appear to be possible for their thoughts about their conscious
mental states to be mistaken. That is, they may think that they are having certain experiences but be wrong.
Indeed, perhaps they think they are conscious but are in fact precisely in the position of an unconscious
computer that is merely “processing the information” that it is conscious.
This kind of first-person skepticism should give the critic of functionalism pause. It should make him wonder
what good it would do to posit any further condition—whether a purely physical condition of the brain or a
condition of some as-yet-unknown nonphysical substance—that a human being, an animal, or a machine must
possess in order to have a mental life. For whatever condition may be proposed, one could always ask, “What
if I do not have what it takes?”
Consider, finally, the following frightening scenario. Suppose that, in order to avoid the risks to his patient of
anaesthesia, a resourceful surgeon finds a way of temporarily depriving the patient of whatever nonfunctional
condition the critic of functionalism insists on, while keeping the functional organization of the patient’s brain
intact. As the surgeon proceeds with, say, a massive abdominal operation, the patient’s functional
organization might lead him to think that he is in acute pain and to very much prefer that he not be, even
though the surgeon assures him that he could not be in pain because he has been deprived of precisely “what
it takes.” It is hard to believe that even the most ardent qualiaphile would be satisfied by such assurances.
Georges Rey
Citation Information
Article Title: Philosophy of mind
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 08 April 2020
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-mind
Access Date: June 09, 2020

Philosophy of mind concepts and terminology

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Philosophy of mind concepts and terminology

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09.06.

2020 Philosophy of mind -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

empirical psychology Terminology and distinctions

Main problematic phenomena

respect to many specific domains, with the result

Terminology and distinctions

Abstract and concrete

Properties and relations

States and events

Thoughts and attitudes

Thoughts and propositions

Types and tokens

Just as properties may or may not be instantiated by real things,

One controversy with regard to which it will be useful to take a

John believes that the stock market will fall.

John expects the stock market to fall.

Mary wants to be a doctor.

Sensations and qualitative states

Emotions, moods, and traits

Main problematic phenomena

These and other peculiarities led Brentano to be deeply

The soul and personal identity

Traditional metaphysical positions

The identity theory

Substance dualism and property dualism

Causal relations and epiphenomenalism

Eliminativism: Behaviourism and instrumentalism

The need for nontendentious evidence

Ryle and analytical behaviourism

Sydney Shoemaker The computational-representational

The computational account of rationality

Research strategies for intentionality

Objections and responses

Artifactuality and artificial intelligence (AI)

Searle’s “Chinese room”

Block’s “nation of China”

Executives, buffers, and HOTs

There are three general sorts of theory of what the role of

“What it’s like”

Remaining gaps and first-person skepticism

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