PERPLEXITIES ABOUT MENTALISM AND ‘CARTESIANISM’ IN THE CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

The portrait of the mental that emerges from the collaborative effort reconstructed in the preceding chapter is undoubtedly innovative and suggestive. For many philosophers of mind the features attributable to the sensory, intellective, and conscious universe of man constitute a dimension of the human world at once autonomous and different from that of the bodily. Correspondingly, there seems to be a discipline, a ‘discourse’, relative to that universe characterized by its own irreducible peculiarity. The claims advanced by the identity and eliminationist camps tending in various ways to penalize this discourse now appear to be even less valid than before. It also appears that the knowledge relative to this peculiar ‘human’ universe can and must be legitimately articulated into distinct cognitive spheres: spheres that, although certainly not in conflict, are accessible to non-coincident types of investigation implying distinct procedures and goals.

It must be pointed out, however, that not all the philosophy of mind committed to rethinking the mental in non-physicalist terms is completely satisfied with the new characterization of the mental we have described above. It is not merely a question of a difference of opinion concerning this or that aspect of the mind, or of its cognitive experience. Nor is it a question of adjusting the picture by adding or subtracting other marks of the mental.