Tim Crane

Elements of Mind provides a unique introduction to the main problems and debates in contemporary philosophy of mind. Author Tim Crane opposes those currently popular conceptions of the mind that divide mental phenomena into two very different kinds (the intentional and the qualitative) and proposes instead a challenging and unified theory of all the phenomena of mind. In light of this theory, Crane engages students with the central problems of the philosophy of mind--the mind-body problem, the problem of intentionality (or mental representation), the problem of consciousness, and the problem of perception--and attempts to find solutions to these problems. A fresh and engaging exploration of the main issues in the philosophy of mind, Elements of Mind is easily accessible to students with no background in the subject.

In ‘The Mental Causation Debate’ (1995), I pointed out the parallel between the premises in some traditional arguments for physicalism and the assumptions which give rise to the problem of mental causation. I argued that the dominant contemporary version of physicalism finds mental causation problematic because it accepts the main premises of the traditional arguments, but rejects their conclusion: the identification of mental with physical causes. Moreover, the orthodox way of responding to this problem (which I call the ‘constitution view’) implicitly rejects an assumption hidden in the original argument for physicalism: the assumption that mental and physical causation are the same kind of relation (‘homogeneity’). The conclusion of my paper was that if you reject homogeneity, then there is no obvious need for an account of the relation between mental and physical properties.

This book is about the nature of dispositional properties, or dispositions. It is hard to give an uncontroversial definition of the notion of a disposition, since its very definition is one of the matters under dispute. But we can make a start with the following preliminary definition: a disposition is a property (such as solubility, fragility, elasticity) whose instantiation entails that the thing which has the property would change, or bring about some change, under certain conditions. For instance, to say that some object is soluble is to say that it would dissolve if put in water; to say that something is fragile is to say that it would break if (for instance) dropped in suitable circumstances; to say that something is elastic is to say that it would stretch when pulled. The fragility (solubility, elasticity) is a disposition; the breaking (dissolving, stretching) is the manifestation of the disposition.

Michael Dummett says in the preface to his book on Frege that he is always disappointed when a book lacks a preface. ‘it is like arriving at someone’s house for dinner’ Dummett says ‘and being conducted straight into the dining room’. I feel the same way about inaugural lectures. To give an inaugural lecture is in part an acknowledgement of a professional honour, and in part an opportunity to pay a personal tribute to the institution which has honoured you in this way. It is not difficult, and a pleasant task, to do this. My professorship has no predecessor, of course, but I hope that this does not disqualify me from saying something about what I owe to UCL and to its philosophy department. The intellectual character of the department as it is now was largely shaped by the influence of the late Richard Wollheim. I am sorry to say that I did not know Richard Wollheim well, and it is a cause of great sadness for the whole department that Richard was never able to return to the department as he had planned to do before he died last autumn. But I nonetheless feel the influence he left in the department, and I would like to pay a small tribute to it here.

What is the relationship between unconscious and conscious intentionality? Contemporary philosophy of mind treats the contents of conscious 10 intentional mental states as the same kind of thing as the contents of un- conscious mental states. According to the standard view that beliefs and desires are propositional attitudes, for example, the contents of these states are propositions, whether or not the states are conscious or unconscious. I dispute this way of thinking of conscious and unconscious content, and propose an alternative, which helps to explain why the various mental things that are called unconscious deserve that label.

A distinctive feature of recent popular science writing is the parade of books by distinguished scientists – from Roger Penrose to Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman – which attempt solutions to the traditional problems of mind and consciousness. The Feeling of What Happens by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio lies squarely in this tradition, as did his earlier Descartes’ Error. These books, like those of Penrose, Crick and others, attempt a difficult double task: to explain scientific results to the general reader and to use these results to illuminate the deepest mysteries of the human mind. Their declared aim is not to debunk the traditional philosophical debates and problems, but to solve them by the employment of rigorous science...

Many philosophers are impressed by the progress achieved by physical sciences. This has had an especially deep effect on their ontological views: it has made many of them physicalists. Physicalists believe that everything is physical: more precisely, that all entities, properties, relations, and facts are those which are studied by physics or other physical sciences. They may not all agree with the spirit of Rutherford's quoted remark that 'there is physics; and there is stamp-collecting',' but they all grant physical science a unique ontological authority: the authority to tell us what there is. Physicalism is now almost orthodox in much philosophy, notably in much recent philosophy of mind. But although often invoked, it is rarely explicitly defined. It should be. The claim that everything is physical is not as clear as it seems. In this paper, we examine a number of proposed definitions of physicalism and reasons for being a physicalist. We will argue both that physicalism lacks a clear and credible definition, and that in no non-vacuous interpretation is it true. We are concerned here only with physicalism as a doctrine about the empirical world. In particular, it should not be confused with nominalism, the doctrine that there are no universals.2 Nominalism and physicalism are quite independent doctrines. Believers in universals may as consistently assert as deny that the only properties and relations are those studied by physical science. And nominalists may with equal consistency assert or deny that physical science could provide enough predicates to describe the world. That is the question which concerns physicalists, not whether physical predicates name real universals. (We will for brevity write as if they do, but we do not need that assumption.)

What José Luis Bermúdez calls the paradox of self-consciousness is essentially the conflict between two claims: (1) The capacity to use first-personal referential devices like “I” must be explained in terms of the capacity to think first-person thoughts. (2) The only way to explain the capacity for having a certain kind of thought is by explaining the capacity for the canonical linguistic expression of thoughts of that kind. (Bermúdez calls this the “Thought-Language Principle”.) The conflict between (1) and (2) is obvious enough. However, if a paradox is an unacceptable conclusion drawn from apparently valid reasoning from apparently true premises, then Bermúdez’s conflict is no paradox. It is rather a conflict between the view that thought must be explained in terms of language, and the view that first person linguistic reference must be explained in terms of first-person thought. Neither view is immediately obvious, and nor is it obvious that the arguments for either are equally compelling. What we have here is a difference of philosophical opinion, not a paradox.

In 1991, Darwin College Cambridge was given a substantial bequest to fund a research post in parapsychology. The event became something of a cause célebre. Various Cambridge University academics objected to accepting this money: the professor of philosophy, D.H. Mellor, said on BBC radio that funding such a position would be like funding a research post to determine whether the earth is round. Other members of Darwin College were (understandably, perhaps) reluctant to turn down any offer of money for research. In the end the situation was resolved to the satisfaction of the sceptics: Nicholas Humphrey, psychologist and broadcaster, was given the post to research into the reasons why people believe in parapsychology. The present book is one result.

In 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge', Donald Davidson argues that it is not possible for us to be massively mistaken in our beliefs. The argument is based on the possibility of an omniscient interpreter who uses the method of radical interpretation to attribute beliefs, since an omniscient interpreter who uses this method will attribute largely true beliefs to those he is inteipreting. In this paper we investigate some of the assumptions behind this argument, and we argue that these assumptions are incompatible with Davidson's view that the object of a belief is its cause. If Davidson wants to keep his interpretationist theory of mind, he should therefore abandon that view.

Over the past decade or so, David Papineau has given an account of the content and motivation of a physicalist conception of the world with more thoroughness and argumentative defence than many physicalists have thought necessary. In doing this, he has substantially advanced the debate on physicalism, and physicalists and non-physicalists alike should be grateful to him.1 At the heart of Papineau’s defence of physicalism in his recent book (2002) is his theory of phenomenal concepts. Like many physicalists, Papineau diagnoses the apparent threats to physicalism posed by the phenomena of consciousness by locating the source of anti-physicalist intuitions in features of our thinking rather than in non-physical features of reality. But what is new in Thinking About Consciousness is his detailed account of which features of our thinking it is that generate these supposedly confused anti-physicalist arguments. Hence the bulk of the book is an attempt to show that the most famous ‘consciousness-based’ anti-physicalist arguments—the knowledge argument, the zombie argument and the explanatory gap argument—rest on a mistaken understanding of certain kinds of concepts: phenomenal concepts. I agree with Papineau that physicalism (properly understood) should not be troubled by the knowledge argument and the explanatory gap argument, and that some other anti-physicalist arguments seem to move from assumptions about ways of thinking to conclusions about reality. But I doubt whether his theory of phenomenal concepts can help his defence of physicalism and his diagnosis of the errors of dualism. My reason for saying this is that I do not think there are any such concepts. In saying this I do not mean to deny that there is a useful distinction to be made between scientific concepts, the mastery of which requires knowledge of a certain amount of theory, and concepts which are acquired on the basis of experience, which can be called ‘phenomenal’ concepts.

Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1993) is one of the very few films made about a philosopher’s life. Almost a parody of a late twentieth-century art-house movie, it contains a mimetic performance by Karl Johnson in the title role, plus cameos by Michael Gough (Bertrand Russell) and the ubiquitous Tilda Swinton (Russell’s lover, Ottoline Morrell). There is a green Martian (played by Nabil Shaban) who quizzes the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a collection of handsome young men sitting on deckchairs, looking puzzled and gazing adoringly at the Master. The action, such as it is, takes place against a theatrical black background with a few props, and the whole thing lasts a brisk seventy minutes...

The death of David Lewis at the age of 60 has deprived philosophy of one of its most original and brilliant thinkers. Lewis was a systematic philosopher in a traditional sense, who created a system of thought (or metaphysical system) which attempts to reconcile the insights of modern science with pervasive elements of commonsense belief. Lewis was not a populariser and he had little to do with the more concrete and practical areas of philosophy. His work is forbiddingly abstract, and deals with many of the deepest and most difficult of philosophy’s traditional concerns, including the nature of mind, causation, necessity and being.

A complete and self-contained introduction to metaphysics, this anthology provides an extensive and varied collection of fifty-four of the best classical and contemporary readings on the subject. The readings are organized into ten sections: God, idealism and realism, being, universals and particulars, necessity and contingency, causation, space and time, identity, mind and body, and freewill and determinism. It features a substantial general introduction and detailed section introductions that set the selections in context and guide readers through them. Discussion questions and detailed guides to further reading are also included.

The central and defining characteristic of thoughts is that they have objects. The object of a thought is what the thought concerns, or what it is about. Since there cannot be thoughts which are not about anything, or which do not concern anything, there cannot be thoughts without objects. Mental states or events or processes which have objects in this sense are traditionally called ‘intentional,’ and ‘intentionality’ is for this reason the general term for this defining characteristic of thought. Under the heading of ‘thought’ we can include many different kinds of mental apprehension of an object—including relatively temporary episodes of contemplating or scrutinising, as well as persisting states like beliefs and hopes which are not similarly episodic in character. These are all ways of thinking about an object. But even construing ‘thought’ in this broad way, it is clear that not all mental states and events are thoughts: sensations, emotions and perceptual experiences are not thoughts, but they are also paradigmatically mental. Do these mental states and events have objects too? Or are there mental states and events which have no objects?

Cognitive neuroscientists frequently talk about the brain representing the world. Some philosophers claim that this is a confusion. This paper argues that there is no confusion, and outlines one thing that might mean, using the notion of a model derived from the philosophy of science. This description is then extended to make apply to propositional attitude attributions. A number of problems about propositional attitude attributions can be solved or dissolved by treating propositional attitudes as models.

Many philosophers want to say both that everything is determined by the physical and subject to physical laws and principles, and that certain mental entities cannot be identified with any physical entities. The problem of mental causation is to make these two assumptions compatible with the causal efficacy of the mental. The concern is that this physicalist picture of the world leaves no space for the causal efficacy of anything non-physical. The physical, as it is sometimes said, excludes anything non- physical from doing causal work.

Some philosophers have argued recently that introspective evidence provides direct support for an intentionalist theory of visual experience. An intentionalist theory of visual experience treats experience as an intentional state, a state with an intentional content. (I shall use the word ’state’ in a general way, for any kind of mental phenomenon, and here I shall not distinguish states proper from events, though the distinction is important.) Intentionalist theories characteristically say that the phenomenal character of an experience, what it is like to have the experience, is exhausted by its intentional content. Visual experience, and on some views sense-experience generally, does not involve the awareness of ’qualia’, intrinsic, non-intentional features of the experience. According to Gilbert Harman and Michael Tye, support for this view comes from introspecting on experience. Tye describes his ’argument from introspection’ as follows: Standing on the beach in Santa Barbara a couple of summers ago on a bright sunny day, I found myself transfixed by the intense blue of the Pacific Ocean. Was I not here delighting in the phenomenal aspects of my visual experience? And if I was, doesn’t this show that there are visual qualia? I am not convinced. It seems to me that what I found so pleasing in the above instance, what I was focusing on, as it were, were a certain shade and intensity of the colour blue. I experienced blue as a property of the ocean not as a property of my experience. My experience itself certainly wasn’t blue. Rather, it was an experience which represented the ocean as blue. What I was really delighting in, then, were specific aspects of the content of the experience. Tye goes on to suggest that this might have been the sort of thing Moore meant when he said that the sensation of blue is ’diaphanous’, and glosses this as follows: When one tries to focus on it in introspection one cannot help but see right through it so that what one actually ends up attending to is the real colour blue. 1An early version of this paper was presented at the conference, Mental Phenomena III in Dubrovnik, Croatia..

The grand opposition between theories of the mind which is presented in this book will be familiar, in its broad outlines, to many readers. On the one side we have the Cartesians, who understand the mind in terms of representation, causation and the inner life; on the other we have the Wittgensteinians, who understand the mind in terms of activity, normativity and its external embedding in its bodily and social environment. In this book—one of a pair, the second of which has yet to be translated—Vincent Descombes puts up a spirited defence of the Wittgensteinian approach. The Cartesian approach, which he calls ‘mental philosophy’, and which is exemplified most typically in the ‘cognitivism’ of Jerry Fodor, is fundamentally mistaken, he argues, since it underestimates, neglects or ignores both the active and external characteristics of the mind.1 Instead we should2 understand the mind in terms of a human being’s participation in a culture or a ‘form of life’, a form of engagement which is structured by norms rather than causal laws. This ‘anthropological holism’ draws not only upon the work of Wittgenstein, but also on Le´vi-Strauss, Lacan and, among other things, on the role of fiction in shaping our selfunderstanding.