School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemAnalyticity in the mind-body problem( 1971)In western philosophy two groups of distinctions seem to have appeared at different times in protean forms from antiquity to the present. The first group may be loosely labelled under the one heading, the mind-body distinction : the second group, the analytic-synthetic distinction. The purpose of this investigation is to see to what extent these distinctions have influenced one another.
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ItemAspects of John Searle's biological naturalism( 1999)John Searle, in his theory of biological naturalism, attempts a solution to the mind-body problem that will overcome the 'conceptual dualism' (inherited from Descartes) which sets the categories of the mental and the physical in opposition. This dualism, he believes, leads many contemporary accounts either to deny subjective consciousness or to redefine it so as to eliminate its `first-person' characteristics, which are considered incompatible with the purely physical nature of reality. Searle maintains the reality of consciousness, and its centrality to the mental. As essentially first-person, it is neither directly accessible from a third-person perspective, nor identical with any feature available from such a perspective. By insisting that mental features form a subset of physical features, Searle thinks that the anti-physicalist tendencies of property dualism can be avoided: according to biological naturalism, mental phenomena are higher-level physical features of the brain, but are totally caused by lower-level neurophysiological processes, as liquidity is caused by molecular interactions. Thus the mental causally reduces to the non-mental. Biological naturalism depends on three central premises: the reality of the mental, the purely physical nature of reality, and the universal explanatory power of `bottom-up' causation from lower-level features such as molecular processes to higher-level features such as liquidity. The reality of consciousness, Searle maintains, is an immediately experienced fact, and so cannot and need not be directly argued for. The thesis supports this contention, while adding to Searle's indirect arguments some foundationalist considerations which help undermine the sceptical assumptions implicit in eliminative materialism. The physical nature of reality is next considered. The thesis maintains that the concept 'physical' is most usefully understood partly in opposition to 'mental', but Searle's usage is saved by categorising as physical whatever is causally reducible to the non-mental. A preliminary examination of causal reduction finds no obvious internal incoherence in biological naturalism. However, its truth still depends on the purely physical nature of the world, and this relies on Ockham's Razor for support. Physicalism is vulnerable to philosophical arguments that the mental is not causally reducible to the non-mental, since if successful, such arguments pre-empt Ockham's Razor. Biological naturalism relies on the absence of such proofs, and on the failure of non-physicalist systems such as Cartesianism. A more plausible non-physicalist system than Cartesianism is provided by a holistic system such as Aristotelianism. This is expounded as one alternative to biological naturalism, particularly in the light of quantum indeterminism. In comparison with Aristotelianism, biological naturalism is seen to be still partially Cartesian (in its atomist insistence on the universal explanatory power of bottom-up causation), and partially anti-mental (in its rejection of the possibility of causally irreducible me?tal features). Once we admit the reliability of first-person experience of the mental, various aspects of mental phenomena suggest their non-physical nature. Here we tentatively explore abstract mental contents, which seem ultimately explicable only by appealing to nonphysical ideas in the mind. So 'biological naturalism, whilst one of the best physicalist accounts of the mind, is called into question by threats to physicalism itself.
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ItemMind & language : the possibility of emergence from brain( 1995)This is a thesis about an aspect of the mind-body problem in its late twentieth century manifestation. The advent of cognitive science and the emerging brain sciences have provided new ways of looking at the relation between mind and body - or mind and brain - which have fuelled philosophical interest, analysis and criticism. One area of cognitive science research that is of particular interest to philosophers is the relation between language and thought, a relation central to analytic philosophy. Some cognitive science programmes have taken this relation to be quite literal, postulating hypotheses such as the Language of Thought hypothesis. Using computers as a model for the human mind, advocates of this view have sought to analyze thought as the formal manipulation of symbols. The general motivating idea was something like this: if we can write a computer programme that models the mind then we can concentrate on working out how "wetware" (the "hardware" of the human brain) might instantiate this programme, and thereby explain human cognition. This computational view of the mind has come under considerable criticism, both on philosophical and on empirical grounds. This thesis concentrates on certain considerations in the philosophy of language which are then used to formulate two objections to the view. The first part of the thesis concentrates on meaning in the area of sociolinguistics. The analysis given here is heavily influenced by, but different from, the Internal Realism of Hilary Putnam. It defends one of Putnam's preinternal- realist convictions - that "meanings ain't in the head" - but on very different grounds from those Putnam used in 1975. it then goes on to analyze meaning in terms of rule-following practices. This analysis, I conclude, is antagonistic to the idea that language use can be codified as a system of formai relations and expressed in algorithmic form. The second part of the thesis concentrates on the rule-following considerations as put forward by Kripke's reading of the later Wittgenstein and argues that the consequences of these considerations for an algorithm based view of the mind as a formal symbol manipulator are devastating. It then tackles briefly how our physicalistic intuitions about the mind-brain relation could be satisfied given the view of language I defend. Its contribution to the philosophy of mind is, therefore, a negative one, but also one that is perhaps unlikely to be controversial. Its contribution to the philosophy of language, on the other hand, is a picture that, despite following on a familiar line, stands in stark contrast to some contemporary views.
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ItemThe causal method in philosophy( 1966)