New Directions in the Study of the Mind
Project Outline
A metaphysical account of the mind specifies the most general categories in terms of which we should understand mental phenomena.
Should we employ the category of substance, or event, or property in our most general theory of the mind? To what extent should we employ the categories of commonsense or ‘folk’ psychology in our theorizing about the mind? What are the fundamental ways of dividing and distinguishing mental phenomena? Should it be in terms of consciousness, intentionality (or mental representation), both or neither?
Physicalism
Contemporary metaphysics of mind tends to be physicalist and reductionist, and it tends to approach all the above questions in this light. Physicalism holds that the world is fundamentally physical. The fundamental reality of the world is the reality described by physics and physical science: the world of particles, spacetime, forces and fields. All other phenomena have their reality vindicated by being demonstrated to ‘reduce’ (in one or another sense) to physical phenomena.
So if the mind is real, then the mind must reduce to something physical, either by being shown to be identical with some physical thing, or to metaphysically depend on physical reality, or to be constituted by physical reality, or in some other way. Consciousness must be shown to be reducible to something physical, intentionality must be given a reductive explanation, and the metaphysical categories of substance, event and property must have their credentials validated by showing how they can be incorporated by this physicalist worldview.
According to physicalism, if mental phenomena cannot be shown to be physical, then their reality must be called into question. This has been the dominant approach to the metaphysics of mind for the last sixty years or so.
Non-physicalist approaches
The overall aim of the Cambridge New Directions project is to investigate some alternative ways of approaching the metaphysics of mind. In particular, the project will examine the viability of non-physicalist and non-reductive approaches to the study of the central mental phenomena of consciousness and intentionality.
While there has been a considerable debate about whether physicalism is true (see Robinson 1993, Gillett and Loewer 2001, Bealer and Koons 2010) less attention has been paid to working out the details of a non-physicalist picture. The debate over physicalism has taken the form of discussion of counterexamples to physicalism (see Chalmers 1996) and certain canonical arguments (e.g. the knowledge argument of Jackson 1982 and Robinson 1982).
The discussion has been largely about the truth of physicalism; there has been less discussion of the details of alternatives to physicalism, and what non-physicalist accounts of specific mental phenomena might look like.
While the project will not explicitly reject physicalism nor all forms of reductionism, it aims to open up the discussion and explore alternatives to physicalism and reductionism in various areas of the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. The project is conceived as exploratory rather than ideological.
The scientific study of the mind
Sometimes it is said that a scientific approach to the mind requires the truth of physicalism (Poland 1993), and many arguments for physicalism assume that it is the only metaphysical picture which is properly harmonious with modern science.
The current project rejects this assumption. It will maintain that the scientific investigation of the mind – by psychology and neuroscience – does not require that physicalism is true.
One of the distinctive features of this project, then, is the combination of a skeptical attitude to physicalism with a fully scientific approach to the mind. In this sense, then, the project is consistent with naturalism, where that doctrine is understood in terms of the holistic continuity of philosophical and scientific knowledge. But it is not consistent with naturalism understood (as it by, e.g., Papineau 1992) as a form of physicalism.
Consciousness and intentionality
The two central mental categories to be explored in this project are consciousness and intentionality.
Consciousness, the awareness of the world in experience and thought, has been one of the stumbling blocks for physicalist theories of the mind (Nagel 1970, Chalmers 1996, Levine 2001). The project will look at the investigation of consciousness in another way. Rather than looking for a reductive physicalist account, the project will attempt to chart the elements of the ontology of consciousness from a non-reductive perspective.
It will address questions such as: what are the categories to which conscious phenomena belong? Is the consciousness involved in sensory experience of a different kind from the consciousness involved in thought? How should the various forms of consciousness be investigated from a non-reductionist perspective?
Similarly with intentionality. The central questions about intentionality can be asked independently of the truth of physicalism: are all mental phenomena intentional? Is intentionality a relation? How can intentional states represent things that do not exist? What is the relationship between intentionality and consciousness? What roles do the central notions of the theory of intentionality (e.g. object, content, mode) play in the empirical sciences of the mind?
The guiding assumption of this project is that these questions can be addressed by the philosophy and science of the mind without necessarily adopting a physicalist or reductionist approach.
References
Armstrong, D.M. (1968) A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge).
Bealer, George and R. Koons (eds.) (2010) The Waning of Materialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Block, Ned and Stalnaker, Robert (1999) ‘Conceptual, Analysis, Dualism and the explanatory gap’ Philosophical Review 108
Carnap, Rudolf, (1932) ‘Psychology in Physical Language’
Carnap, R., (1955) Logical Syntax of Language (Berkeley, University of California Press).
Chalmers, David C. (1996) The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Chalmers, David C. (2011) The Character of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Crane, Tim (2001), Elements of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Crane, Tim (2013) The Objects of Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Crane, Tim and D.H. Mellor (1990) ‘There is no Question of Physicalism’ Mind 99: 185-206
Craver, Carl (2009), Explaining the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Davidson, Donald (1980) ‘Mental Events’ in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 79–101.
Descartes, René (1985) Meditations on First Philosophy in J. Cottingham, R. Stoothof and D. Murdoch (eds.) The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes Three volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Dretske, Fred I. (1981) Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Oxford: Blackwell).
Fodor, Jerry (1974) ‘Special Sciences’ Synthese
Fodor, Jerry (1987) Psychosemantics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
Fodor, Jerry (1990) A Theory of Content and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press)
Giullett and Loewer 2003
Groff, D. and John Greco Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (London: Routledge 2013)
Hill, Christopher (1991) Sensations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Hill, Christopher (2009) Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Bayne, Tim and Michelle Montague (eds.) (2012) Cognitive Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Hill, Christopher and Simone Gozzano (eds.) (2012) New Perspectives on Type Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Howhy, Jakob and Jesper Kallestrup (eds.) (2008) Being Reduced (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Humphreys, Paul, (1997b) ‘How Properties Emerge’ Philosophy of Science, 64: 1-17.
Humphreys, Paul (1997b) ‘Emergence, Not Supervenience’ Philosophy of Science, 64 (1997b): 337-345
Jackson, Frank (1982) ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’ Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127–136.
Jackson, Frank (1998) From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Jackson, Frank and David Chalmers 2001 ‘Conceptual Analysis and Reuctive Explanation’ Philosophical Review
James, William (1904), ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1(18)
Kim, Jaegwon (1993) Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Koch Christof (2004) The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Denver, CO: Roberts).
Kriegel, Uriah (ed.) (2013) Phenomenal Intentionality (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Levine, Joseph (2001) Purple Haze (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press)
Lewis, David (1966) ‘An Argument for the Identity Theory’ Journal of Philosophy 63: 17-25.
Lewis, David (1986) Philosophical Papers, Vol. II (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Lewis, David (1994) ‘Reduction of Mind’, in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers) 412–431
Lowe, E.J. (2006) A Four Category Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Machamer Peter, et al (2000), Thinking about mechanisms Phil science 67
McDonald, Cynthia and Graham McDonald (eds.) (2010) Emergence in Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
McGinn, Colin (1982) The Character of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
McLaughlin, Brian, ‘The rise and fall of British emergentism’ in A. Beckerman et al. (eds.) Emergence or Reduction? (Berlin: de Gruyter 1992)Millikan 1984
Molnar, George (2003) Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, S. Mumford (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Mumford, Stephen (1998) Dispositions, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Nagel, Thomas (1974), ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ Philosophical Review 83: 435–450.
Nagel, Thomas (2012) Mind and Cosmos (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Nagel Ernest (1979) The Structure of Science (Indianapolis, Hackett; second edition)
Papineau, David (1992) Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell).
Papineau, David (2002) Thinking About Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Pettit, Philip (1993) ‘A definition of physicalism’ Analysis 53: 213-233.
Poland, J., (1993) Physicalism: the Philosophical Foundations (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
Putnam, Hilary (1975) ‘The Nature of Mental States’ in Mind, Language, and Reality. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Robinson, Howard (1982) Matter and Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Robinson, Howard (ed.) (1990) Objections to Physicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Russell, Bertrand (1921) Analysis of Mind (London: George Allen and Unwin).
Ryle, Gilbert (1949) The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson)
Smart, J.J.C., “Sensations and Brain Processes”. Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 141-156.
Stoljar, Daniel (2005) ‘Physicalism’ Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy
Tahko Tuomas (ed.) (2012) Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Yolton, John (1984) Thinking Matter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)
Project Outline
A metaphysical account of the mind specifies the most general categories in terms of which we should understand mental phenomena.
Should we employ the category of substance, or event, or property in our most general theory of the mind? To what extent should we employ the categories of commonsense or ‘folk’ psychology in our theorizing about the mind? What are the fundamental ways of dividing and distinguishing mental phenomena? Should it be in terms of consciousness, intentionality (or mental representation), both or neither?
Physicalism
Contemporary metaphysics of mind tends to be physicalist and reductionist, and it tends to approach all the above questions in this light. Physicalism holds that the world is fundamentally physical. The fundamental reality of the world is the reality described by physics and physical science: the world of particles, spacetime, forces and fields. All other phenomena have their reality vindicated by being demonstrated to ‘reduce’ (in one or another sense) to physical phenomena.
So if the mind is real, then the mind must reduce to something physical, either by being shown to be identical with some physical thing, or to metaphysically depend on physical reality, or to be constituted by physical reality, or in some other way. Consciousness must be shown to be reducible to something physical, intentionality must be given a reductive explanation, and the metaphysical categories of substance, event and property must have their credentials validated by showing how they can be incorporated by this physicalist worldview.
According to physicalism, if mental phenomena cannot be shown to be physical, then their reality must be called into question. This has been the dominant approach to the metaphysics of mind for the last sixty years or so.
Non-physicalist approaches
The overall aim of the Cambridge New Directions project is to investigate some alternative ways of approaching the metaphysics of mind. In particular, the project will examine the viability of non-physicalist and non-reductive approaches to the study of the central mental phenomena of consciousness and intentionality.
While there has been a considerable debate about whether physicalism is true (see Robinson 1993, Gillett and Loewer 2001, Bealer and Koons 2010) less attention has been paid to working out the details of a non-physicalist picture. The debate over physicalism has taken the form of discussion of counterexamples to physicalism (see Chalmers 1996) and certain canonical arguments (e.g. the knowledge argument of Jackson 1982 and Robinson 1982).
The discussion has been largely about the truth of physicalism; there has been less discussion of the details of alternatives to physicalism, and what non-physicalist accounts of specific mental phenomena might look like.
While the project will not explicitly reject physicalism nor all forms of reductionism, it aims to open up the discussion and explore alternatives to physicalism and reductionism in various areas of the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. The project is conceived as exploratory rather than ideological.
The scientific study of the mind
Sometimes it is said that a scientific approach to the mind requires the truth of physicalism (Poland 1993), and many arguments for physicalism assume that it is the only metaphysical picture which is properly harmonious with modern science.
The current project rejects this assumption. It will maintain that the scientific investigation of the mind – by psychology and neuroscience – does not require that physicalism is true.
One of the distinctive features of this project, then, is the combination of a skeptical attitude to physicalism with a fully scientific approach to the mind. In this sense, then, the project is consistent with naturalism, where that doctrine is understood in terms of the holistic continuity of philosophical and scientific knowledge. But it is not consistent with naturalism understood (as it by, e.g., Papineau 1992) as a form of physicalism.
Consciousness and intentionality
The two central mental categories to be explored in this project are consciousness and intentionality.
Consciousness, the awareness of the world in experience and thought, has been one of the stumbling blocks for physicalist theories of the mind (Nagel 1970, Chalmers 1996, Levine 2001). The project will look at the investigation of consciousness in another way. Rather than looking for a reductive physicalist account, the project will attempt to chart the elements of the ontology of consciousness from a non-reductive perspective.
It will address questions such as: what are the categories to which conscious phenomena belong? Is the consciousness involved in sensory experience of a different kind from the consciousness involved in thought? How should the various forms of consciousness be investigated from a non-reductionist perspective?
Similarly with intentionality. The central questions about intentionality can be asked independently of the truth of physicalism: are all mental phenomena intentional? Is intentionality a relation? How can intentional states represent things that do not exist? What is the relationship between intentionality and consciousness? What roles do the central notions of the theory of intentionality (e.g. object, content, mode) play in the empirical sciences of the mind?
The guiding assumption of this project is that these questions can be addressed by the philosophy and science of the mind without necessarily adopting a physicalist or reductionist approach.
References
Armstrong, D.M. (1968) A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge).
Bealer, George and R. Koons (eds.) (2010) The Waning of Materialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Block, Ned and Stalnaker, Robert (1999) ‘Conceptual, Analysis, Dualism and the explanatory gap’ Philosophical Review 108
Carnap, Rudolf, (1932) ‘Psychology in Physical Language’
Carnap, R., (1955) Logical Syntax of Language (Berkeley, University of California Press).
Chalmers, David C. (1996) The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Chalmers, David C. (2011) The Character of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Crane, Tim (2001), Elements of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Crane, Tim (2013) The Objects of Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Crane, Tim and D.H. Mellor (1990) ‘There is no Question of Physicalism’ Mind 99: 185-206
Craver, Carl (2009), Explaining the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Davidson, Donald (1980) ‘Mental Events’ in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 79–101.
Descartes, René (1985) Meditations on First Philosophy in J. Cottingham, R. Stoothof and D. Murdoch (eds.) The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes Three volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Dretske, Fred I. (1981) Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Oxford: Blackwell).
Fodor, Jerry (1974) ‘Special Sciences’ Synthese
Fodor, Jerry (1987) Psychosemantics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
Fodor, Jerry (1990) A Theory of Content and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press)
Giullett and Loewer 2003
Groff, D. and John Greco Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (London: Routledge 2013)
Hill, Christopher (1991) Sensations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Hill, Christopher (2009) Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Bayne, Tim and Michelle Montague (eds.) (2012) Cognitive Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Hill, Christopher and Simone Gozzano (eds.) (2012) New Perspectives on Type Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Howhy, Jakob and Jesper Kallestrup (eds.) (2008) Being Reduced (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Humphreys, Paul, (1997b) ‘How Properties Emerge’ Philosophy of Science, 64: 1-17.
Humphreys, Paul (1997b) ‘Emergence, Not Supervenience’ Philosophy of Science, 64 (1997b): 337-345
Jackson, Frank (1982) ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’ Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127–136.
Jackson, Frank (1998) From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Jackson, Frank and David Chalmers 2001 ‘Conceptual Analysis and Reuctive Explanation’ Philosophical Review
James, William (1904), ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1(18)
Kim, Jaegwon (1993) Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Koch Christof (2004) The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Denver, CO: Roberts).
Kriegel, Uriah (ed.) (2013) Phenomenal Intentionality (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Levine, Joseph (2001) Purple Haze (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press)
Lewis, David (1966) ‘An Argument for the Identity Theory’ Journal of Philosophy 63: 17-25.
Lewis, David (1986) Philosophical Papers, Vol. II (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Lewis, David (1994) ‘Reduction of Mind’, in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers) 412–431
Lowe, E.J. (2006) A Four Category Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Machamer Peter, et al (2000), Thinking about mechanisms Phil science 67
McDonald, Cynthia and Graham McDonald (eds.) (2010) Emergence in Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
McGinn, Colin (1982) The Character of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
McLaughlin, Brian, ‘The rise and fall of British emergentism’ in A. Beckerman et al. (eds.) Emergence or Reduction? (Berlin: de Gruyter 1992)Millikan 1984
Molnar, George (2003) Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, S. Mumford (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Mumford, Stephen (1998) Dispositions, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Nagel, Thomas (1974), ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ Philosophical Review 83: 435–450.
Nagel, Thomas (2012) Mind and Cosmos (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Nagel Ernest (1979) The Structure of Science (Indianapolis, Hackett; second edition)
Papineau, David (1992) Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell).
Papineau, David (2002) Thinking About Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Pettit, Philip (1993) ‘A definition of physicalism’ Analysis 53: 213-233.
Poland, J., (1993) Physicalism: the Philosophical Foundations (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
Putnam, Hilary (1975) ‘The Nature of Mental States’ in Mind, Language, and Reality. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Robinson, Howard (1982) Matter and Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Robinson, Howard (ed.) (1990) Objections to Physicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Russell, Bertrand (1921) Analysis of Mind (London: George Allen and Unwin).
Ryle, Gilbert (1949) The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson)
Smart, J.J.C., “Sensations and Brain Processes”. Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 141-156.
Stoljar, Daniel (2005) ‘Physicalism’ Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy
Tahko Tuomas (ed.) (2012) Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Yolton, John (1984) Thinking Matter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)