Summary
Wittgenstein remarks that philosophy leaves everything as it is. This book is, in that respect at least, Wittgenstenian. I do not advance a new programme of research in the philosophy of mind nor promote any startling views as to the character of mental states and episodes. There are quite enough new programmes and startling views in circulation already. My aim, rather, is to reconcile emerging conceptions of the mind and its contents that have, in recent years, come to seem irreconcilable. Post-Cartesian philosophers face the challenge of comprehending minds as natural objects possessing apparently nonnatural powers of thought. The difficulty is to understand how our mental capacities, no less than our biological or chemical characteristics, might ultimately be products of our fundamental physical constituents, and to do so in a way that preserves the phenomena. Having abandoned Cartesian dualism, we confront a dilemma. On the one hand, we could opt for an out-and-out eliminativism, according to which minds and their contents are taken to be, like Ptolemaic epicycles, discredited posits of outmoded theories. On the other hand, we might suppose that mental properties or kinds are, in one way or another, reducible to physical properties or kinds. Since reductionism is often taken to be a species of implicit, back-door eliminativism, and since naturalism gives rise to the dilemma, it may seem that we must choose between eliminativism and some nonnaturalistic conception of mind.
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- The Nature of True Minds , pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992