fragments of consciousness

New SEP entries

There have been a number of new Stanford Encyclopedia entries in the philosophy of mind since last report: Steven Yalowitz on anomalous monism, Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence on concepts, Alec Hyslop on other minds, Murat Aydede on pain, Leonard Katz on pleasure, Karen Bennett and Brian McLaughlin on supervenience.  Also Roberto Casati and Jerome Dokic on sounds (commissioned by the metaphysics editors).  Check them out.

Russell, Newman, and the mind-body problem

Bertrand Russell's The Analysis of Matter has had a resurgence of interest in recent years, both among philosophers of science interested in structural realism, and among philosophers of mind interested in the mind-body problem.  Russell's basic idea that science characterizes the physical world in terms of its structure but not in terms of its intrinsic nature has seemed to some philosophers (Russell himself, and more recently Grover Maxwell, Michael Lockwood, and me, among others) to leave the door open to a close tie between the unknown intrinsic properties at the basis of physics and consciousness itself.  This leads to the view that I have called Russellian monism (or type-F monism, in "Consciousness and the Place in Nature").

At the same time, Russell's structuralism suffers from a well-known difficulty, pointed out in 1928 by the mathematician M.H.A. Newman in "Mr. Russell's 'Causal Theory of Perception'" (JSTOR link), and revived in a 1985 article by Demopoulos and Friedman.  A purely structural description of the world, saying that there exists a relation under which entities in the world are related with a certain structure, can be satisfied by any set of the appropriate cardinality, by defining an appropriate relation on that set.   So this sort of purely structural description seems near-vacuous.  Some philosophers take this to be a devastating problem for structuralism (e.g. Michael Friedman raises it as a deathknell for Carnap's Aufbau), while others (e.g. Putnam in his model-theoretic argument) use it to raise problems about realism and reference.

I received an interesting e-mail from Moises Macias, an undergraduate at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, asking how one can reconcile this problem for structuralism with its popularity in the philosophy of mind.  This led to some useful correspondence.  Since this is an issue that quite often comes up in discussion, and it's one of my favorite issues, I thought I'd post some of the correspondence here (after the fold, with text from Moises indented).

Jaegwon Kim comes out

Jaegwon Kim's new book, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, was recently published.  This book is full of interesting arguments about the mind-body problem.  But it is especially notable for the fact that Kim, often seen as an arch-reductionist, comes out of the closet as a dualist.  In the last couple of pages of the book, he embraces epiphenomenalist property dualism about qualia, combined with functionalist reductionism about intentional states.  The position is not too far from a view that is often attributed to The Conscious Mind, though as a matter of fact I'm much less confident about both the epiphenomenalism (about the phenomenal) and the functionalism (about the intentional) than Kim is.  Here's a review of the book by Andrew Melnyk, and here's a sample chapter.

As the title suggests, Kim softpedals his debut as a dualist a little. Here's the last paragraph of the book:

The position is, as we might say, a slightly defective physicalism -- physicalism manque but not by much.  I believe that this is as much physicalism as we can have, and that there is no credible alternative to physicalism as a general worldview.  Physicalism is not the whole truth, but it is the truth near enough, and near enough should be good enough.

(As someone suggested, this calls to mind a counterfactual book called Straight, Or Something Near Enough.  With subtitle: I Just Fool Around With Guys on Weekends.  "The position is, as we might say, a slightly defective heterosexuality -- heterosexuality manque but not by much.  Near enough should be good enough.")

Tone aside, this makes at least three prominent materialists who have abandoned the view in the last few years.  Apart from Kim, there's Terry Horgan and Stephen White (balanced, of course, by Frank Jackson moving the other way).  One still sometimes sees the claim that almost everyone these days is a materialist (e.g. in Peter Carruthers' new book, p. 5: "Just about everyone now working in this area is an ontological physicalist, with the exception of Chalmers (1996) and perhaps a few others").  I don't think one can get away with saying this any more.  Apart from the four counterexamples just mentioned, here are a few other contemporary anti-materialists about consciousness who come quickly to mind: Joseph Almog, Torin Alter, George Bealer, Laurence BonJour, Paul Boghossian, Tyler Burge, Tim Crane, John Foster, Brie Gertler, George Graham, W.D. Hart, Ted Honderich, Steven Horst, Saul Kripke, Harold Langsam, E.J. Lowe, Kirk Ludwig, Trenton Merricks, Martine Nida-Rumelin, Adam Pautz, David Pitt, Alvin Plantinga, Howard Robinson, William Robinson, Gregg Rosenberg, A.D. Smith, and Richard Swinburne.  There are plenty of others, and then at least as many again agnostics.  If I had to guess, I'd guess that the numbers within philosophy of mind are 50% materialist, 25% agnostic, 25% dualist.

Of course, sociology isn't the important thing here.  Philosophy is. So as philosophy, let me recommend Kim's book as a thoughtful and insightful treatment of the mind-body problem that's well worth reading.

Stubenberg on neutral monism

Leopold Stubenberg's marvelous SEP entry on neutral monism is now online.

Books in the philosophy of mind

There have been recent discussions on other weblogs of the last century's five most important books in epistemology and ten most important books in the philosophy of biology (also here and here).  Being something of a listmaniac, I couldn't help starting to think about a similar list in the philosophy of mind.  What's surprising was how hard it was.  By my lights, three books select themselves: Broad's The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925), Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949), and Armstrong's A Materialist Theory of the Mind (1968).  But it's hard to think of others that stand alongside these.  Maybe Sellars' Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1953) and Feigl's The "Mental" and the "Physical" (1958) count retrospectively, although neither was a book at the time.  One could make a case for Price's Perception (1932) and just maybe something by Russell (The Analysis of Mind?) or Wittgenstein (the Investigations?).  One should probably include something by Husserl (but which book?), and some would include Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and/or Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943).  But no book from the last thirty years or so seems to quite stand alongside the first three, although of course there could be illusions of perspective.

So to make it easier, I then lowered the standards and considered the ten most important books in the philosophy of mind from the last thirty years.  It wasn't too hard to come up with a first pass at a list: Fodor's The Language of Thought (1975), Jackson's Perception (1977), Dennett's Brainstorms (1978), Churchland's Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979), Dretske's Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981), Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), Searle's Intentionality (1983), Millikan's Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (1983), Fodor's Psychosemantics (1987), and Dennett's The Intentional Stance (1987).  I see there's nothing there from the last 15 years, because that's just too close.  But anyway, I'm sure that I've overlooked a number of books and that a better list is possible.

So I hereby throw open the listmaking to all-comers.  People are welcome to contribute to either question: most important of the last 100 years, and of the last 30 years.  Feel free to include books from the last 15 years if you like (but I stipulate that no book by an author of this weblog is eligible).

Anthology: Philosophy of Cognitive Science

I published the anthology Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings with Oxford University Press in 2002.  In preparing that anthology, it proved impossible to do justice to the philosophy of cognitive science, which has become a huge field in its own right.  So that volume concentrated on relatively traditional philosophy of mind, and in the introduction I promised an eventual companion anthology on the philosophy of cognitive science.  Those promises catch up with one, and the press thinks it's time for the new anthology.  So Tim Bayne and I have put together a proposal.

The proposed table of contents is below.  Note that this list is extremely tentative: it hasn't yet been through the review process for the press, and we haven't yet sought permission to reprint any of the articles.  So the final product may look significantly different.  We have aimed for good coverage of many different areas of the philosophy of cognitive science, including both traditional areas of the field and recently active areas.  We've also aimed for a fairly even mix of articles by philosophers and articles by scientists on foundational topics.  Note that one constraint was that the anthology shouldn't overlap with the other anthology, so it doesn't include any of those articles (contents here) and more generally doesn't aim for extensive coverage of traditional philosophy of mind.  Another constraint is that the anthology probably can't be any longer than this (11 sections with 6 articles per section).

At this point we are looking for feedback on the proposal.  It would be especially useful to get feedback from people who teach courses in the philosophy of cognitive science (or related topics such as the philosophy of psychology/AI/neuroscience) about what would be desirable for a collection to be used in those courses.  But all thoughts are welcome, including suggestions about other papers that might be included, about the balance of coverage, and so on.  Feel free to comment either here or by e-mail.