Reinaldo Elugardo

Explaining Attitudes is an important contribution to the philosophy of mind. It is the latest installment in Lynne Rudder Baker’s work, which began with her equally important book, Saving Belief, to restore the attitudes to their proper place. In Explaining Attitudes, she undertakes two important projects. The first is a critique of recent attempts to either naturalize the mind or to cast folk psychology as a discredited theory. The second is the development of an alternative view of the mind, one that adheres with and illuminates our ordinary practices of psychological explanation and ascriptions.

In a well known paper, “Mind and Ideas in Berkeley” George Pitcher has argued that Berkeley's account of how minds are related to sensible ideas must be incoherent. Douglas Odegard has already criticized Pitcher's treatment of Berkeley, but the criticisms pertain to other questions. No one appears to have challenged Pitcher's most important argument. I hope to show that, while it is well worth analyzing, the argument fails to provide any effective reductio ad absurdum of Berkeley's real position.Pitcher's argument trades on two logically independent versions of the adverbial analysis of ideas. The first is what I shall call “the identity version”. Its proponent asserts that the ideas are identical with sensings, with mental acts or states of sensing which are adverbially describable. The philosopher who follows the second or “constitutive” version asserts that ideas are sensa and exist as constituents of sensing states. For him ideas are not mental states but are constituents of such states. A sponsor of either version will hold that sensings are qualities of the mind.

And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work on one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception.Gottlieb Leibniz, The Mondadology, Section 17Functionalism, as it is currently understood, is the view that each type of mental state is identical with a state that is a causal consequent of certain kinds of inputs and other mental states and which, in turn, causally brings about certain kinds of outputs and other mental states.