Ned Block

What is Functionalism? Functionalism is one of the major proposals that have been offered as solutions to the mind/body problem. Solutions to the mind/body problem usually try to answer questions such as: What is the ultimate nature of the mental? At the most general level, what makes a mental state mental? Or more specifically, What do thoughts have in common in virtue of which they are thoughts? That is, what makes a thought a thought? What makes a pain a pain? Cartesian Dualism said the ultimate nature of the mental was to be found in a special mental substance. Behaviorism identified mental states with behavioral dispositions; physicalism in its most influential version identifies mental states with brain states. Functionalism says that mental states are constituted by their causal relations to one another and to sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. Functionalism is one of the major theoretical developments of Twentieth Century analytic philosophy, and provides the conceptual underpinnings of much work in cognitive science

Perhaps you are wondering what I mean by ‘holism’. After all, everyone seems to use the term in a different sense. Even if we restrict ourselves to holism of meaning and content, we have many different holisms. Some take holism about meaning to be the doctrine that if you’ve got one meaning, you’ve got lots of them.2 On other views, to say meaning is holistic is to say that the meaning of each term depends on the meanings of all or most other terms.3 Others take meaning holism to be the doctrine that there is no real distinction between language and theory or between the “dictionary” and the “encyclopedia”