Fundamentals of Philosophy: Philosophy Of Mind (PDF)
(Sprache: Englisch)
A welcome introduction to one of the most intellectually demanding areas of the undergraduate philosophy curriculum. The authors provide a clear framework within which students can fit contemporary developments in the Anglo-American tradition which provide...
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A welcome introduction to one of the most intellectually demanding areas of the undergraduate philosophy curriculum. The authors provide a clear framework within which students can fit contemporary developments in the Anglo-American tradition which provide the core themes of philosophy of mind and which connect to their other work in epistemology and philosophy of language.
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Chapter 2 Reductionism and the road to functionalism (p. 24-25)
Causation, scientific realism, and physicalism Contemporary philosophy of mind is marked by its acceptance of one major strand in Cartesian thinking and its rejection of another. The strand that has been accepted is the causalist one: our psychological states are causally related to our behaviour, and thus they make a difference to what happens in the world of objects. Descartes accepted this and also held, of course, that mental states were states of an immaterial substance.
This generated a key problem for him, namely to accommodate the causal interaction between mental and physical states. This is the part of his position which contemporary theorists resolutely reject. For them the only kind of substance is material substance.
They therefore have to confront the question, if we abandon dualism, what is a mental state? In some way mental states must be states of a material substance. Different stories of how this can be the case have dominated philosophy of mind for the last fifty years or so. As we made clear in Chapter 1, Descartes had reasons for his adoption of an immaterialist metaphysic. He was struck by characteristics of the mental, in addition to its causal role, which seemed difficult to reconcile with a simple mechanistic conception of human beingsrationality and subjectivity to name two key ones.
Any materialist position therefore has to provide some account of how these features can be accommodated outside of Descartes dualistic framework. We will address these issues in later chapters. Here our focus will be on the attempts which have been made to put together a causal role for the mental with a materialist metaphysic. We will begin by considering what concept of causation is informing this task. The central assumption, which has been dominant from the time of Hume, is that to provide a causal explanation of an event is to show that it is the kind or
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type of thing which generally happens in the circumstances in which it occurs. To point to a particular cause is to point to something which is of a kind or type to regularly bring about the kind of effect in question.
If we ask "Why is the window broken?", we may answer "Because a ball hit it." If there is genuine causality here, then this sequence is an example of the kind of thing that generally happens. To spell out the generality would involve references to more than balls and windows. Whether the window breaks depends on more than the ball hitting it; how fragile it was, for example, and how hard it was hit. We often cannot spell out all the conditions relevant to a particular causal sequence when we make a causal claim.
According to the account of causation in terms of regularity, however, there will always be a set of conditions present which ensure that the individual causal sequence is an instance of a general law-like generalization. The account of causation in terms of regularities is interdependent with an account in terms of future conditionals and counterfactuals. Causal claims characteristically support future conditional and counterfactual claims. If the ball hitting the window caused the window to break, then, barring the coincidence of another cause of the window breaking occurring simultaneously, if the ball had not hit the window then the window would not have broken.
Moreover, given that the ball hit the window, in those circumstances, then the window would, or probably would, break.3 Where we point to one phenomenon as causally explaining another we are therefore claiming that in the circumstances the cause was both necessary and sufficient for (or rendered probable) its effect. The grounding of the truth or warranty of conditional and counterfactual claims is a controversial issue in philosophy.
If we ask "Why is the window broken?", we may answer "Because a ball hit it." If there is genuine causality here, then this sequence is an example of the kind of thing that generally happens. To spell out the generality would involve references to more than balls and windows. Whether the window breaks depends on more than the ball hitting it; how fragile it was, for example, and how hard it was hit. We often cannot spell out all the conditions relevant to a particular causal sequence when we make a causal claim.
According to the account of causation in terms of regularity, however, there will always be a set of conditions present which ensure that the individual causal sequence is an instance of a general law-like generalization. The account of causation in terms of regularities is interdependent with an account in terms of future conditionals and counterfactuals. Causal claims characteristically support future conditional and counterfactual claims. If the ball hitting the window caused the window to break, then, barring the coincidence of another cause of the window breaking occurring simultaneously, if the ball had not hit the window then the window would not have broken.
Moreover, given that the ball hit the window, in those circumstances, then the window would, or probably would, break.3 Where we point to one phenomenon as causally explaining another we are therefore claiming that in the circumstances the cause was both necessary and sufficient for (or rendered probable) its effect. The grounding of the truth or warranty of conditional and counterfactual claims is a controversial issue in philosophy.
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Bibliographische Angaben
- Autoren: Paul Gilbert , Kathleen Lennon
- 1998, 232 Seiten, Englisch
- ISBN-10: 0203978609
- ISBN-13: 9780203978603
- Erscheinungsdatum: 15.12.1998
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