The Invention of the Mind

1. Criteria of the Mental

Discussions in the philosophy of mind usually start off by assuming that everybody has always known how to divide the world into the mental and the physical — that this distinction is common-sensical and intuitive, even if that between two sorts of "stuff," material and immaterial, is philosophical and baffling. So when Ryle suggests that to talk of mental entities is to talk of dispositions to behave, or when Smart suggests that it is to talk of neural states, they have two strikes against them. For why, if anything like behaviorism or materialism is true, should there be anything like this intuitive distinction?

We seem to have no doubt that pains, moods, images, and sentences which "flash before the mind," dreams, hallucinations, beliefs, attitudes, desires, and intentions all count as "mental" whereas the contractions of the stomach which cause the pain, the neural processes which accompany it, and everything else which can be given a firm location within the body count as nonmental. Our unhesitating classification suggests that not only have we a clear intuition of what "mentality" is, but that it has something to do with non-spatiality and with the notion that even if the body were destroyed the mental entities or states might somehow linger on. Even if we discard the notion of "mind-stuff," even if we drop the notion of res cogitans as subject of predication, we seem able to distinguish mind from body nonetheless, and to do so in a more or less Cartesian way.

These purported intuitions serve to keep something like Cartesian dualism alive. Post-Wittgensteinian philosophers who oppose behaviorism and materialism tend to grant to Wittgenstein and Strawson that in some sense there is nothing there but the human organism, and that we must give up the notion of this organism as made out of a bit of res cogitans nonspatially associated with a bit of res extensa. But, they say, the Cartesian intuition that the mental-physical distinction is unbridgeable by empirical means, that a mental state is no more like a disposition than it is like a neuron, and that no scientific discovery can reveal an identity remains. This intuition seems to them enough to establish an unbridgeable gap. But such neo-dualist philosophers are embarrassed by their own conclusions, since although their metaphysical intuitions seem to be Cartesian, they are not clear whether they are entitled to have such things as "metaphysical intuitions." They tend to be unhappy with the notion of a method of knowing about the world prior to and untouchable by empirical science.

In this situation, it is tempting for the dualist to go linguistic and begin talking about "different vocabularies" or "alternative descriptions." This jargon suggests that the dualistic intuition in question is merely one of the differences between ways of talking about the same phenomenon, and thus seems to lead one from something like dualism to something like Spinoza's double-aspect theory. But the question "two descriptions of what?" makes this a difficult position to hold onto. To reply "two descriptions of organisms" seems all right until we ask, "Are organisms physical?" or "Is there more to organisms, even human organisms, than the actual and possible dispositions of their parts?" Neo-dualists are usually happy to concede a whole raft of mental states to Ryle, and to say that beliefs, desires, attitudes, and intentions (not to mention skills, virtues, and moods) are all merely ways of talking about organisms, their parts, and the actual and possible movements of those parts. (But they may insist, following Brentano and Chisholm, that no Rylean necessary and sufficient conditions can be provided). But when they come to pains, mental images, and occurrent thoughts — short-term mental states which look, so to speak, event-like rather than disposition-like — they hesitate. And well they should. For the difference between dualism and materialism would vanish if once they said that to describe an organism as in pain is simply one way of talking about a state of its parts. These parts, remember, must be physical parts, since once we have Kantized and Strawsonized Descartes the notion of "mental part" will no longer even seem to make sense. What more could a defender of mind-body identity ask for than the admission that talk of how one feels is just an alternative way of reporting on how suitable portions of one's anatomy (presumably neurons) are?

We thus have the following dilemma: either neo-dualists must construct an epistemological account of how we know a priori that entities fall under two irreducibly distinct ontological species, or else they must find some way of expressing their dualism which relies on neither the notion of "ontological gap" nor that of "alternative description." But before casting about for ways of resolving this dilemma, we should look more closely at the notion of "ontological species" or "ontological gap." What sort of notion is this? Do we have any other examples of ontological gaps? Any other case in which we know a priori that no empirical inquiry can identify two entities? We know, perhaps, that no empirical inquiry can identify two spatio-temporal entities which have different locations, but that knowledge seems too trivial to be relevant. Is there any other case in which we know a priori about natural ontological kinds? The only examples which I can think of are the distinctions between finite and infinite, between human and divine, and between particular and universal. Nothing, we intuit, could cross those divides. But these examples do not seem very helpful. We are inclined to say that we do not know what it would be for something infinite to exist. If we try to clarify the orthodox notion of "the divine" we seem to have either a merely negative conception, or else one explicated in terms of the notions of "infinity" and "immateriality." Since reference to infinity explains the obscure by the more obscure, we are left with immateriality. We feel vaguely confident that if the infinite could exist, it, like the universal, could only be exemplified by the immaterial. If it makes any sense to speak of the existence of universals, it would seem that they must exist immaterially, and that is why they can never be identified with spatio-temporal particulars. But what does "immaterial" mean? Is it the same thing as "mental"? Even though it is hard to see more in the notion of being "physical" than being "material" or "spatio-temporal," it is not clear that "mental" and "immaterial" are synonyms. If they were, then such disputes as that about the...