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You might wonder, at some point today, what's going on in another person's mind​. You may compliment someone's great mind, or say they are.
Table of contents
Smart saw Ryle's theory as friendly to physicalism though that was not part of Ryle's motivation. Smart hoped that the hypotheticals would ultimately be explained by neuroscience and cybernetics. Being unable to refute Place, and recognizing the unsatisfactoriness of Ryle's treatment of inner experience, to some extent recognized by Ryle himself Ryle , p.
They would dangle from the nomological net of physical science and should strike one as implausible excrescences on the fair face of science. Place spoke of constitution rather than of identity. Place remarked p. We find out whether this is a table in a different way from the way in which we find out that it is an old packing case. We find out whether a thing is lightning by looking and that it is a motion of electric charges by theory and experiment. This does not prevent the table being identical to the old packing case and the perceived lightning being nothing other than an electric discharge.
Feigl and Smart put the matter more in terms of the distinction between meaning and reference. Of course these expressions could be construed as referring to different things, different sequences of temporal stages of Venus, but not necessarily or most naturally so. There did seem to be a tendency among philosophers to have thought that identity statements needed to be necessary and a priori truths.
We had to find out that the identity holds. Aristotle, after all, thought that the brain was for cooling the blood.
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Descartes thought that consciousness is immaterial. It was sometimes objected that sensation statements are incorrigible whereas statements about brains are corrigible. The inference was made that there must be something different about sensations. Nevertheless my sensation and my putative awareness of the sensation are distinct existences and so, by Hume's principle, it must be possible for one to occur without the other.
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One should deny anything other than a relative incorrigibility Place As remarked above, Place preferred to express the theory by the notion of constitution, whereas Smart preferred to make prominent the notion of identity as it occurs in the axioms of identity in logic. So Smart had to say that if sensation X is identical to brain process Y then if Y is between my ears and is straight or circular absurdly to oversimplify then the sensation X is between my ears and is straight or circular.
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Of course it is not presented to us as such in experience. Perhaps only the neuroscientist could know that it is straight or circular. The professor of anatomy might be identical with the dean of the medical school. A visitor might know that the professor hiccups in lectures but not know that the dean hiccups in lectures.
Someone might object that the dean of the medical school does not qua dean hiccup in lectures. Qua dean he goes to meetings with the vice-chancellor. This is not to the point but there is a point behind it. This is that the property of being the professor of anatomy is not identical with the property of being the dean of the medical school. The question might be asked, that even if sensations are identical with brain processes, are there not introspected non-physical properties of sensations that are not identical with properties of brain processes? How would a physicalist identity theorist deal with this?
Distinguishing Brain From Mind
If you overheard only these words in a conversation you would not be able to tell whether the conversation was one of mathematics, physics, geology, history, theology, or any other subject. Thus to say that a sensation is caused by lightning or the presence of a cabbage before my eyes leaves it open as to whether the sensation is non-physical as the dualist believes or is physical as the materialist believes. This sentence also is neutral as to whether the properties of the sensation are physical or whether some of them are irreducibly psychical.
To see how this idea can be applied to the present purpose let us consider the following example. Suppose that I have a yellow, green and purple striped mental image. That is I would see or seem to see, for example, a flag or an array of lamps which is green, yellow and purple striped. Suppose also, as seems plausible, that there is nothing yellow, green and purple striped in the brain.
Thus it is important for identity theorists to say as indeed they have done that sense data and images are not part of the furniture of the world. This move should not be seen as merely an ad hoc device, since Ryle and J. Austin, in effect Wittgenstein, and others had provided arguments, as when Ryle argued that mental images were not a sort of ghostly picture postcard.
He characterizes this fallacy Place :. Of course, as Smart recognised, this leaves the identity theory dependent on a physicalist account of colour. His early account of colour was too behaviourist, and could not deal, for example, with the reversed spectrum problem, but he later gave a realist and objectivist account Smart Armstrong had been realist about colour but Smart worried that if so colour would be a very idiosyncratic and disjunctive concept, of no cosmic importance, of no interest to extraterrestrials for instance who had different visual systems.
Prompted by Lewis in conversation Smart came to realize that this was no objection to colours being objective properties. One first gives the notion of a normal human percipient with respect to colour for which there are objective tests in terms of ability to make discriminations with respect to colour. This can be done without circularity. Then Smart elucidated the notion of colour in terms of the discriminations with respect to colour of normal human percipients in normal conditions say cloudy Scottish daylight. This account of colour may be disjunctive and idiosyncratic.
Maxwell's equations might be of interest to Alpha Centaurians but hardly our colour concepts. Anthropocentric and disjunctive they may be, but objective none the less. David R. Hilbert identifies colours with reflectances, thus reducing the idiosyncrasy and disjunctiveness. A few epicycles are easily added to deal with radiated light, the colours of rainbows or the sun at sunset and the colours due to diffraction from feathers. John Locke was on the right track in making the secondary qualities objective as powers in the object, but erred in making these powers to be powers to produce ideas in the mind rather than to make behavioural discriminations.
Also Smart would say that if powers are dispositions we should treat the secondary qualities as the categorical bases of these powers, e. Locke's view suggested that the ideas have mysterious qualia observed on the screen of an internal mental theatre.
Breadcrumb
Let us return to the issue of us having a yellow, purple and green striped sense datum or mental image and yet there being no yellow, purple and green striped thing in the brain. The identity theorist Smart can say that sense data and images are not real things in the world: they are like the average plumber.
Sentences ostensibly about the average plumber can be translated into, or elucidated in terms of, sentences about plumbers. So also there is having a green sense datum or image but not sense data or images, and the having of a green sense datum or image is not itself green. So it can, so far as this goes, easily be a brain process which is not green either. Quoting these passages, David Chalmers , p.
Of course a lot of things go on in me when I have a yellow after image for example my heart is pumping blood through my brain. However they do not typically go on then: they go on at other times too. Of course to be topic neutral is to be able to be both physical and mental, just as arithmetic is. In their accounts of mind, David Lewis and D. Armstrong emphasise the notion of causality. Lewis's was a particularly clear headed presentation of the identity theory in which he says I here refer to the reprint in Lewis , p. Similarly, Robert Kirk has argued for the impossibility of zombies.
If the supposed zombie has all the behavioural and neural properties ascribed to it by those who argue from the possibility of zombies against materialism, then the zombie is conscious and so not a zombie. Thus there is no need for explicit use of Ockham's Razor as in Smart though not in Place Words for colours, smells, sounds, tastes and so on also occur. One can regard common sense platitudes containing both these sorts of these words as constituting a theory and we can take them as theoretical terms of common sense psychology and thus as denoting whatever entities or sorts of entities uniquely realise the theory.
Then if certain neural states do so too as we believe then the mental states must be these neural states. In his he allows for tact in extracting a consistent theory from common sense. One cannot uncritically collect platitudes, just as in producing a grammar, implicit in our speech patterns, one must allow for departures from what on our best theory would constitute grammaticality. A great advantage of this approach over the early identity theory is its holism. Two features of this holism should be noted. One is that the approach is able to allow for the causal interactions between brain states and processes themselves, as well as in the case of external stimuli and responses.
Another is the ability to draw on the notion of Ramseyfication of a theory. Take the terms describing behaviour as the observation terms and psychological terms as the theoretical ones of folk psychology. Then Ramseyfication shows that folk psychology is compatible with materialism. This seems right, though perhaps the earlier identity theory deals more directly with reports of immediate experience. The causal approach was also characteristic of D. Armstrong's careful conceptual analysis of mental states and processes, such as perception and the secondary qualities, sensation, consciousness, belief, desire, emotion, voluntary action, in his A Materialist Theory of the Mind a with a second edition containing a valuable new preface.
Parts I and II of this book are concerned with conceptual analysis, paving the way for a contingent identification of mental states and processes with material ones. Independently of Armstrong and Lewis, Medlin's central state materialism depended, as theirs did, on a causal analysis of concepts of mental states and processes. See Medlin , and including endnote 1. Mention should particularly be made here of two of Armstrong's other books, one on perception , and one on bodily sensations, Armstrong thought of perception as coming to believe by means of the senses compare also Pitcher This combines the advantages of Direct Realism with hospitality towards the scientific causal story which had been thought to have supported the earlier representative theory of perception.