Andrew Melnyk

When a belief is cited as part of the explanation of an agent's behaviour, it seems that the belief is explanatorily relevant in virtue of its content. In his Explaining Behavior, Dretske presents an account of belief, content, and explanation according to which this can be so. I supply some examples of beliefs whose explanatory relevance in virtue of content apparently cannot be accounted for in the Dretskean way. After considering some possible responses to this challenge, I end by discussing how serious these counterexamples are for Dretske's account.

We experience the intuition of distinctness when, for example, we attend introspectively to the phenomenal redness of a current visual sensation and it seems to us that that very property could not literally be a physical property of neural activity in a certain tiny region of our brain. The book begins by arguing that the intuition of distinctness underlies certain otherwise puzzling attitudes manifested in debates both inside and outside philosophy about whether physicalism (or materialism) can accommodate phenomenal properties (or qualia). It then argues systematically against the dualist suggestion that the intuition of distinctness gives us reason to reject the physicalist view that phenomenal properties are physical, and to adopt property dualism instead. In the course of the argument, it defends an unorthodox version of representationalism and offers positive accounts of what makes our introspective knowledge of phenomenal properties special, how introspection could tell us that an introspected property is physical, and what the subjectivity of phenomenal properties could be. Finally, after critically surveying previous attempts to account for the intuition of distinctness consistently with physicalism, it elaborates a novel explanation of the intuition of distinctness. The intuition arises because introspection is, in a certain way, conceptually encapsulated, as a result of which we are unable to do something that we can do in the case of every other kind of identity claim that we believe or entertain, and therefore unable to believe, or even to imagine believing, that an introspected phenomenal property is physical.

Late twentieth-century physicalism—here understood, broadly, as a comprehensive view about the nature of contingent reality, rather than, narrowly, as a view about the relation of the mental to the physical—is widely regarded as the descendant of the materialist hypotheses familiar from the history of philosophy both ancient and modern. This chapter contends that contemporary physicalism differs significantly from historical hypotheses of materialism, significantly enough that the prospects for physicalism cannot be inferred from those for materialism. The chapter brings out these differences by identifying the two main challenges faced by philosophers who want to revive the materialist hypotheses of earlier centuries, and then indicating the author’s possibly idiosyncratic view of how these challenges are best overcome. The first challenge is to formulate physicalism adequately, so that it is interesting but neither obviously true nor obviously false; the second challenge is to specify what would count as empirical evidence for an adequately-formulated hypothesis of physicalism. The chapter’s survey of responses to these two challenges constitutes an opinionated history of central aspects of the past fifty (or so) years of philosophical reflection on physicalism.

Can two-dimensional semantics provide a foundation for linguistic analysis, i.e., the conceptual analysis of words in a natural language? I make a case for skepticism. I argue that, even if the two-dimensionalist account of linguistic analysis is true, practitioners of linguistic analysis who reflect on the account have an undermining defeater for the belief-forming process that is claimed to operate in linguistic analysis. The defeater is the fact that, given the available evidence, the two-dimensionalist account of linguistic understanding is not clearly more probable than an externalist account on which linguistic analysis does not constitute a reliable belief-forming process.

This paper argues in unprecedented empirical and philosophical detail that, given only what science has discovered about pain, we should prefer the materialist hypothesis that pains are purely material over the dualist hypothesis that they are immaterial. The empirical findings cited provide strong evidence for the thesis of empirical supervenience: that to every sort of introspectible change over time in pains, or variation among pains at a time, there corresponds in fact a certain sort of simultaneous neural change over time, or variation at a time. The empirical supervenience of pain on the neural is shown in turn to favor the hypothesis that pains are, in a sense that is made precise, purely material.

Gillett's goal is to articulate and defend a view of the nature of thought that opposes the widely-accepted view that thoughts are internal states whose representational content is owed to causal connections with the environment, and whose interactions play a part in the causation of behavior. According to Gillett, discourse about human mental activity is not about goings-on in an inner realm of causal representational states". What is it about, then? Gillett's alternative view rests entirely upon an account of the nature of concepts. "To grasp a concept is to master a principled way of responding to the world involving techniques of selected attention and directed search for criterial information which reveals whether a presentation instances the concept in question". Two features of Gillett's account deserve emphasis. First, it turns out that responding to the world in "a principled way" is not merely a matter of responding to it in a de facto rule-governed way: "In using a concept, a thinker does not merely respond but can represent to himself the fact that a norm governs that response and is independent of it". Second, the responses to the world which concept-mastery requires are meant to be public responses, apparently taking the form of judgements expressed in a natural language.

A Physicalist Manifesto is a full treatment of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience; that, so formulated, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; that it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and that it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. Two concluding chapters argue in detail that contemporary science provides no significant empirical evidence against physicalism and some considerable evidence for it. Written in a brisk, candid and exceptionally clear style, this 2003 book should appeal to professionals and students in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and philosophy of science.

  Discussion of Searle's case against strong AI has usually focused upon his Chinese Room thought-experiment. In this paper, however, I expound and then try to refute what I call his abstract argument against strong AI, an argument which turns upon quite general considerations concerning programs, syntax, and semantics, and which seems not to depend on intuitions about the Chinese Room. I claim that this argument fails, since it assumes one particular account of what a program is. I suggest an alternative account which, however, cannot play a role in a Searle-type argument, and argue that Searle gives no good reason for favoring his account, which allows the abstract argument to work, over the alternative, which doesn't. This response to Searle's abstract argument also, incidentally, enables the Robot Reply to the Chinese Room to defend itself against objections Searle makes to it

Materialism is nearly universally assumed by cognitive scientists. Intuitively, materialism says that a person’s mental states are nothing over and above his or her material states, while dualism denies this. Philosophers have introduced concepts (e.g., realization, supervenience) to assist in formulating the theses of materialism and dualism with more precision, and distinguished among importantly different versions of each view (e.g., eliminative materialism, substance dualism, emergentism). They have also clarified the logic of arguments that use empirical findings to support materialism. Finally, they have devised various objections to materialism, objections that therefore serve also as arguments for dualism. These objections typically center around two features of mental states that materialism has had trouble in accommodating. The first feature is intentionality, the property of representing, or being about, objects, properties, and states of affairs external to the mental states. The second feature is phenomenal consciousness, the property possessed by many mental states of there being something it is like for the subject of the mental state to be in that mental state.

Positive rights are, roughly, rights that one be provided with certain things; and so they entail obligations on others, not merely to refrain from interfering with the bearer of the rights, but to see to it that one gets whatever one has the rights to. An example of a positive right would be the right to a welfare minimum; the right, that is, to resources sufficient to satisfy basic physical needs. In this paper I criticise a couple of recent attempts (by Den Uyl and Machan, and by M. Levin) to show that alleged positive rights fail a purely formal test of universality and can thus be disqualified for that reason alone.

When a belief is cited as part of the explanation of an agent’s behaviour, it seems that the belief is explanatorily relevant in virtue of its content. In his Explaining Behavior, Dretske presents an account of belief, content, and explanation according to which this can be so. I supply some examples of beliefs whose explanatory relevance in virtue of content apparently cannot be accounted for in the Dretskean way. After considering some possible responses to this challenge, I end by discussing how serious these counterexamples are for Dretske’s account.