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Although your proposed partner may appreciate your detailed commitments, he or

she is unlikely to respond in the passionate, intimate way that you likely hope for. Re-
ducing the complex richness of our inner life and consciousness to a list of behaviors
and potential behaviors simply doesn’t do the job conceptually for most people.
Ironically, Ryle ends up being his own most incisive critic. He bases his criticism
of Cartesian dualism on the premise that “the central principles of the doctrine are
unsound and conflict with the whole body of what we know about minds when we
are not speculating about them.” But exactly the same criticism can be made of Ryle’s
logical behaviorism: It attempts to define and translate the self and the complex men-
tal/emotional richness of the life of the mind into a listing of behaviors (and potential
behaviors) that “conflicts with the whole body of what we know about minds when
we are not speculating about them.” As the Australian philosopher J. J. C. Smart notes,
“There does seem to be, so far as science is concerned, nothing in the world but com-
plex arrangements of physical constituents. All except for one place: consciousness.”
In the final analysis, despite his devastating critique of Descartes’ dualism, Ryle hasn’t
been able to provide a compelling philosophical explanation of Descartes’ “I think.”
Ryle’s denial of inner selves causes a difficulty analogous to that engendered by
Hume’s denial of a similar entity—namely, that Ryle writes, speaks, and acts as if the
existence of their inner selves is not in doubt. In fact, it’s not clear how a person who
truly believed what behaviorists say they believe would actually function in life. The
philosopher Brand Blanshard (1892–1987) provides a biting analysis of the behavior-
ists’ denial of consciousness along with their stated belief that the self is the same as
bodily behavior.
Consider the behaviorist who has a headache and takes aspirin. What he means
by his “headache” is the grimaces or claspings of the head that an observer
might behold. Since these are the headache, it must be these he finds objection-
able. But it is absurd to say a set of motions . . . is objectionable . . . except as
they are associated with the conscious pain. Suppose again, that he identifies
the pain with the grimaces and outward movements then all he would have to
do to banish the pain would be to stop these movements and behave in a nor-
mal fashion. But he knows perfectly well that this is not enough; that is why he
falls back on aspirin. In short, his action implies a disbelief in his own theory.i

Reading Critically
Analyzing Ryle’s View of Self as Behavior
• Think of someone you know and try to describe him or her solely in terms of his or her
observable behavior. Then analyze your portrait: What aspects of his or her self does
your description capture? What aspects of his or her self does your description omit?
• Now think about yourself. Assume the perspective of someone who knows you well
and describe your self as he or she might see you, based solely on your observable
behavior. What aspects of your self do you think his or her description would cap-
ture? What aspects of your self do you think his or her portrait of you would omit?
• Identify several of the defining qualities of your self: for example, empathetic, gre-
garious, reflective, fun-loving, curious, and so on. Then, using Ryle’s approach,
describe the qualities in terms of “a tendency to act a certain way in certain circum-
stances.”
• Analyze your characterizations. Do your descriptions communicate fully the per-
sonal qualities of your self that you identified? If not, what’s missing?

iBrand Blanchard, “The Limits of Naturalism,” in Contemporary American Philosophy, ed. J. Smith (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1970).

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3.10 The Self Is the Brain: Physicalism

Physicalism is the philosophical view that all aspects of the universe are composed of Physicalism
matter and energy and can be fully explained by physical laws.* The thesis that “everything is
Philosophers and psychologists who are physicalists believe that in the final physical,” that there is “nothing
analysis, mental states are identical with, reducible to, or explainable in terms of over and above” the physical.
physical brain states. From a physicalist perspective, there is no immaterial “self”
that exists independently from the brain or the body, a view articulated by the phi-
losopher Thomas Hobbes in his memorable statement, “The Universe, that is the
whole mass of things that are, is corporeal, that is to say body; and has the dimen-
sions of magnitude, namely length, breadth, and depth . . . and that which is not
body is no part of the universe.” There are a wide variety of theoretical perspectives
within the general category of physicalism. In this section, we are going to explore
two such perspectives:

• Functionalism This view, held by philosophers like Jerry Fodor, Daniel Dennett, Functionalism
and D. M. Armstrong, contends that the mind can be explained in terms of patterns A theory of the mind in contempo-
of sensory inputs and behavior outputs mediated by functionally defined mental rary philosophy based on the core
states. idea that mental states (beliefs,
desires, being in pain, etc.) are con-
• Eliminative materialism This view is embodied in the work of philosophers like
stituted solely by their functional
Paul Churchland, who believes that the mind is the brain and that over time a ma-
role—that is, they are causal rela-
ture neuroscience vocabulary will replace the “folk psychology” that we currently tions to other mental states, sensory
use to think about our selves and our minds. inputs, and behavioral outputs.
In addition to these two physicalistic theories, we will be examining the article Eliminative materialism
“Contemporary Issues in Philosophy of Mind” by the philosopher Richard Brown. The radical claim that our ordi-
The article provides an overview of the current state of the argumentative landscape nary, commonsense understand-
between dualists and physicalists, with particular attention to the nature of conscious- ing of the mind is deeply wrong
ness and its relation to the brain. and that some or all of the mental
states posited by common sense

Functionalism do not actually exist.

Gilbert Ryle’s logical behaviorism that we explored in the previous section is actu-
ally a form of physicalism, since the theory holds that there is no immaterial self
that exists independently of one’s body or visible behavior. But, as we saw, there are
serious problems with this particular view. Brand Blanshard’s devastating critique
of behaviorism’s equating of the self with bodily behavior is punctuated with the in-
delible image of a behaviorist whose headache is defined in terms of a set of behav-
iors: grimacing, clutching one’s head, and so on. Although behaviorism remained
an influential movement in modern psychology for much of the twentieth century,
most philosophers abandoned it as a viable model of the self. However, with the ad-
vent of computers, some philosophers saw an opportunity to recast the behaviorist
model in a new form that would avoid the conceptual inadequacy of defining the
self solely in terms of a person’s observable behavior, while at the same time retain-
ing some of behaviorism’s advantages. What advantages? First and foremost, as a
form of physicalism, behaviorism made it possible to avoid the dualism of Plato,
Augustine, Descartes, and others, the “ghost in the machine” that leaves us wonder-
ing exactly how our nonphysical, immaterial self is related to our physical, mate-
rial self. As the philosopher Jerry Fodor notes in an essay entitled “The Mind–Body
Problem,”
Jerry Fodor (b. 1935). Fodor,
a professor at Rutgers University
in New Jersey, is a philosopher and
cognitive scientist who focuses on the
* Some philosophers use the term materialism to denote historical versions of this view, and physicalism to denote
modern versions of it, which include developments in mathematical physics. We will be using the terms inter- philosophy of the mind and the phi-
changeably. losophy of language.

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Jerry Fodor, from The Mind-Body Problem

The chief drawback of dualism is its failure to account adequately for mental causation.
If the mind is nonphysical, it has no position in physical space. How, then, can a men-
tal cause give rise to a behavioral effect that has a position in space? To put it another
way, how can the nonphysical give rise to the physical without violating the laws of the
conservation of mass, of energy and of momentum? The dualist might respond that the
problem of how an immaterial substance can cause physical events is not much obscurer
than the problem of how one physical event can cause another. Yet there is an important
difference: there are many clear cases of physical causation but not one clear case of non-
physical causation. Scientific American, 1981

In other words, a dualistic perspective on the mind-body situation leaves us with

a profoundly unscientific view of the self. In contrast, behaviorism’s approach, deny-
ing the immaterial, unobservable self, makes it possible for scientists to observe and
experiment with the behavior that is thought to define the self and the sensory stimu-
lants that give rise to the behavior.

Jerry Fodor, from The Mind-Body Problem

In the past 15 years, a philosophy of the mind called functionalism that is neither dualist nor
materialist has emerged from philosophical reflection on developments in artificial intelligence,
computational theory, linguistics, cybernetics and psychology. All these fields, which are col-
lectively known as the cognitive sciences, have in common a certain level of abstraction and
a concern with systems that process information. Functionalism, which seeks to provide a
philosophical account of this level of abstractions, recognizes the possibility that systems as
diverse as human beings, calculating machines and disembodied spirits could all have men-
tal states. In the functionalist view, the psychology of a system depends not on the stuff it is
made of (living cells, metal or spiritual energy) but on how the stuff is put together.

Using computers as a model of human functioning, a new school of thought—

“functionalism”—developed. It was a perspective that, like behaviorism, still main-
tained that the model for the human mind was the connection between sensory
stimulation and observable behavior. The difference was that functionalists also ac-
knowledged that there were “mental states” that served to “connect” the sensory stim-
ulation and observable behavior. For functionalism, what makes something a mental
state does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather the way it functions, or
the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. Jerry Fodor explains:
Computers serve functionalists as a model of human mental functioning in several
ways. To begin with, computers initially operated on an input/output model: Certain in-
structions or tasks are given to the computer, such as a mathematical problem (input), and
the computer responds by solving the problem through internal operations and presenting
the answer to us (output). Functionalists contend that this is the same basic model for hu-
mans: We receive a complex variety of stimuli through our senses (seeing, hearing, smell-
ing, tasting, touching)—“input”—that activate various mental states that ultimately result
in observable behavior—“output.” Jerry Fodor provides an example to illustrate this point:
ironically, the same “headache” example cited by the behaviorist critic Brand Blanshard:

Jerry Fodor, from The Mind-Body Problem

The intuition underlying functionalism is that what determines the psychological type to
which a mental particular belongs is the causal role of the particular in the mental life
of the organism. Functional individuation is differentiation with respect to causal role.

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