Philosophy E156: Philosophy of Mind

1. Philosophy E156: Philosophy of Mind Week Seven: From Behaviorism to Identity Theory and Functionalism

5. Ryle’s Conception of Descartes’s Dualism in The Concept of Mind • He calls it “the official theory” in the first paragraph of The Concept of Mind, because it “is so prevalent among theorists and even among laymen.” • It goes like this: “With the doubtful exceptions of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a mind…. His body and his mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body his mind may continue to exist and function.” • “Human bodies are in space … subject to …mechanical laws which govern all bodies in space. Bodily processes and states can be inspected by external observers. So a man’s bodily life … is a public affair….” • “But minds are not in space, nor are their operations subject to mechanical laws. [A mind’s] career is private.”

6. Ryle’s Summary of the Cartesian Picture • “A person therefore lives through two collateral histories, one consisting of what happens in and to his body, the other consisting of what happens in and to his mind.” • “The first [what happens in and to his body] is public, the second [what happens in and to his mind] private.” • “The events in the first history [what happens in and to his body] are events in the physical world, those in the second [what happens in and to his mind] are events in the mental world.”

7. What Ryle Thinks Is Wrong with “the Official Theory” • At the start of §2, Ryle says that he will refer to “the official theory,” using what he calls “deliberate abrasiveness,” with the label “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.” • He says that it is not “an assemblage of particular mistakes” but rather “one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind.” • The special kind of mistake that he alleges the theory to be he calls a “category-mistake.” • What makes it a “category-mistake” is that it “represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category … when they actually belong to another.”

8. Ryle’s Examples of Category-Mistakes • Although he seems to give a definition for “category-mistake” in the 1st paragraph of §2, Ryle says in the 2nd paragraph that he will “indicate what is meant by the phrase … in a series of illustrations.” • The University Example. A foreigner visiting Oxford, shown the various buildings, still asks, “But where is the University?” • The Military Example. Seeing a parade of the battalions, batteries and squadrons making up a division, a child asks, “When will the division appear?” • The Cricket Example. A foreigner learns what the bowlers, batsmen, fielders, umpires and scorers do but says, “But there is no one left on the field to contribute the famous element of team-spirit … esprit de corps.”

9. Ryle’s Summary of the Examples • “These illustrations of category-mistakes have a common feature which must be noticed. The mistakes were made by people who did not know how to wield the concepts University, division and team-spirit. Their puzzles arose from inability to use certain items in the English vocabulary.” • “The theoretically interesting category-mistakes are those made by people who are perfectly competent to apply concepts, at least in situations with which they are familiar, but are still liable in their abstract thinking to allocate those concepts to logical types to which they do not belong.”

10. How Dualism Is Supposedly a Category-Mistake • “My destructive purpose,” Ryle writes at the end of §2, “is to show that a family of radical category-mistakes is the source of the double-life theory. The representation of a person as a ghost mysteriously ensconced in a machine derives from this argument.” • “[A]s is true, a person’s thinking, feeling and purposive doing cannot be described solely in the idioms of physics, chemistry and physiology, therefore they must be described in counterpart idioms.”

11. Descartes’s Alleged Mistake • See ¶8 of §3: Descartes “had mistaken the logic of his problem. Instead of asking by what criteria intelligent behavior is actually distinguished from non-intelligent behavior, he asked, ‘Given that the principle of mechanical causation does not tell us the difference, what other causal principle will tell it to us?’ He realized that the problem was not one of mechanics and assumed that it must therefore be one of some counterpart to mechanics.”

12. Ryle’s Assessment of Descartes’s Reasoning • Look at ¶2 of §3 of the Ryle passage: “[Descartes] and subsequent philosophers naturally but erroneously availed themselves of the following escape-route. Since mental-conduct words are not to be construed as signifying the occurrence of mechanical processes, they must be construed as signifying the occurrence of non-mechanical processes; since mechanical laws explain movements in space as the effects of other movements in space, other laws must explain some of the non-spatial workings of the mind.” • Ryle seems to accept the premise that he ascribes to Descartes, that “mental-conduct words are not to be construed as signifying the occurrence of mechanical processes.” The error is he finds is with the conclusion he believes that Descartes draws from that premise.

13. Ryle’s Behaviorism • Although, Ryle says, Descartes distinguishes a mind from a machine by a mind’s having, and a machine’s lacking, a certain hidden internal cause, the logical behaviorist can distinguish a mind (i.e., a person) from a machine in terms of the mind’s having, and the machine’s lacking, a certain sort of behavior.

14. A Comment on Ryle’s Reading of Descartes • As far as I can see, Ryle’s reading of Descartes is very narrow. • The criticism that Ryle makes of Descartes’s arguments for dualism at best applies to the Machine Argument in the Discourse of Method, where Descartes argued that since no machine process could account for human speech and intelligent behavior some non-mechanical, a nonphysical process was required. • But it does not seem to apply at all to the Conceivability Argument and the Split Brain Argument.

15. Reservations about Ryle’s Criticism of the Machine Argument • According to Ryle, Descartes “asked, ‘Given that the principle of mechanical causation does not tell us the difference, what other causal principle will tell it to us?’ He realized that the problem was not one of mechanics and assumed that it must therefore be one of some counterpart to mechanics.” • Ryle assumes that Descartes’s evidence that “the principle of mechanical causation does not tell us the difference” is that “mental-conduct words are not to be construed as signifying the occurrence of mechanical processes,” which Ryle accepts. • But there are two problems: • Why assume that’s true? Why can’t “feeling” refer to a type of mechanical process? • Descartes’s evidence, in fact, was that no machine could talk or behave in all the ways human behave. That’s very different, and it’s arguably correct. And the correct inference would be that we’re not machines.

16. The Definition of Behaviorism • Might be useful to have a definition. • But Heil never presents a definition of what he calls “philosophical behaviorism.” • What Heil seems to have in mind conforms to the definition Armstrong offers in A Materialist Theory of the Mind: • “According to this view [i.e., behaviorism], we can give an account of all mental processes in terms of the physical behavior and tendencies to behave of men’s bodies.”

17. The Anti-Dualist Program of Behaviorism • Behaviorism is primarily anti-dualist • What appealed to Ryle and other behaviorists about the behaviorist strategy is that it offered an alternative to dualism which did not require the existence of “nonphysical” stuff • The inner states Descartes and other dualists posit are supposed to be “nonphysical” • Behaviorism gets rid of the “nonphysical” by getting rid of the need to posit inner states

18. An example of a behaviorist approach: The dispositional account of belief • The dispositional account of belief • Debate over it suggests an objection to behaviorism but also the behaviorist’s resources for replying • When someone believes that elephants are ordinarily not blue, he is not behaving any certain way, so one might incorrectly draw the conclusion that the belief is an inner mental state. • But behaviorists argued that it is merely a dispositionto act in a certain way – e.g., to utter “Elephants are ordinarily not blue” when prompted. • Thus, no need to posit an inner “nonphysical” state of the dualist sort

19. Behaviorist Account of “Privileged Access” • Debate over “privileged access” is similar. • I have “privileged access” to my own dispositions (e.g., that I might express by proclaiming thirst) that others lack. • Against those who say we can only explain this by our having access to evidence of our own inner mental processes, the behaviorist says that our privileged access in these cases is based on no evidence at all. • E.g.,rather than reporting thirst, based on evidence of thirst, I am disposed to express thirst, based on no evidence all. • All there is to thirst, the behaviorist says, is thirst behavior, not further inner state that I report with verbal behavior.

20. Reports of inner states vs. pieces of behavior • It is tempting to take first-person use of mental concepts as reports of inner states. • But often they can be taken as pieces of behavior. • If someone says he is in pain, one need not take his words as a report of something inside but instead a linguistic substitute for pain expressions like winces or groans.

21. Four Examples of Criticisms of Logical Behaviorism • Armstrong’s criticism: ongoing calculation in one’s head • Heil’s criticism: appeal to reflexes cannot be extended • Putnam’s polio example • Putnam’s Super-Spartans

22. Armstrong’s Criticism of Logical Behaviorism • Suppose one does a calculation in one’s head • Part of what’s going on, apart from any behavior, is a “current event” – something going on at the time of the calculation – and that, by hypothesis, is not behavior • The Wittgenstein-Malcolm strategy of saying that it’s an illusion that something goes on; Malcolm’s example of dreams. • Another problem: It’s contingent and empirical that nothing goes on prior to dream reports, not necessary and a priori, as behaviorism requires.

23. Heil’s Claim That Reflex Model Can’t Be Extended • We can imagine a simple mechanism that explains reflex motions, linking stimulus and response • But even in a rat, stimuli are often connected with a variety of responses • And what determines which response are the rat’s purposes and desires

24. Hilary Putnam’s Polio Example • One kind of logical behaviorism thought that mind-talk could be translated into behavior-talk, at least (as Armstrong says) in a “rough” way. Thus, to be in pain would be to behave a certain way – wincing, writhing – perhaps as the result of certain stimuli. • But there are problems with this view that Putnam identifies. He interprets the behaviorist as holding: • (1) having pain means the presence of pain-behavior • But Putnam contends that (2) is true: • (2) having pain means the cause of pain-behavior • He compares polio, which is not the presence of such-and-such symptoms but rather the cause of symptoms.

25. Putnam’s Super-Spartans • The Super-Spartans do not have any pain behavior, although they have pain. • This is a rather direct counterexample to the behavior’s connection between pain and pain-behavior. • They don’t even have a disposition to pain behavior, since they never behave in that way

26. Putnam’s X-Worlders • Putnam uses the X-worlders to argue against the view that verbal reports – i.e., “I am in pain” – are behaviors definitive of pain. • The X-worlders, by hypothesis, are what Putnam calls “super-super-Spartans” – they suppress even pain reports. • Thus these super-super-Spartan X-worlders have no behaviors characteristic of pain – either verbal or nonverbal – but have pain.

27. Review: The Logical Behaviorist Strategy • According to logical behaviorism, mental talk is talk not of experiences or attributes “within” us but rather it is talk of behavior of a certain sort. • So, Ryle argues, although Descartes distinguishes a mind from a machine by a mind’s having, and a machine’s lacking, a hidden internal cause, the logical behaviorist tries to distinguish the two in terms of a mind’s having, and a machine’s lacking, a certain sort of behavior.

28. The Logical Behaviorist Strategy Applied to Intelligence and Pain • The logical behaviorist says that intelligence, for example, is not a special sort of cause, one that parallels but is wholly different from other physical causes, but is rather just a way of something’s behaving – intelligently. • Similarly, pain is supposedly not an internal cause of behavior, one that parallels physical causes but is of a different form, but is rather a way of behaving – behaving in a pained way.

29. Dualism and Mentalism • The target of logical behaviorism is dualism. • Take “mentalism” to be the view that mental words refer to hidden internal causes – whether they are states, processes or properties – which are “mental.” • The logical behaviorist takes such mentalism – that there are mental states, processes or properties – to entail dualism – the view that our mental words refer to nonphysical states, processes or properties.

31. John Jamieson Carswell “Jack” Smart • Born in 1920 & received B.Phil. from Oxford, 1948 • Taught in Australia from 1950 on; after retirement in 1985, became Professor Emeritus at Monash University • Published “Sensations and Brain Processes” in 1959

35. Smart’s Attraction to Behaviorism • J. J. C. Smart says, “That everything should be explicable in terms of physics … except the occurrence of sensations seems to me to be frankly unbelievable” • “Such sensations would be ‘nomological danglers’ ….” • He thus finds Wittgenstein’s behaviorist position “congenial.” • “For on this view there are, in a sense, no sensations. A man is a vast arrangement of physical particles, but there are not, over and above this, sensations or states of consciousness. There are just behavioral facts about this vast mechanism, such as that it expresses a temptation (behavioral disposition) to say ‘there is a yellowish-red patch on the wall’ or that it goes through a sophisticated sort of wince, that is, says ‘I am in pain.’”

37. Smart’s Objection to Behaviorism • Nevertheless, despite Smart’s attraction to behaviorism, he rejects it (p. 61, col. 2): • “Though … I am very receptive to the above ‘expressive’ account of sensation statements, I do not feel that it will quite do the trick.” • “[I]t does seem to me as though, when a person says ‘I have an after-image,’ he is making a genuine report, and that when he says ‘I have a pain,’ he is doing more than ‘replace pain-behavior,’ and that ‘this more’ is not just to say that he is in distress.”

39. Smart’s Identity Theory • But Smart does not embrace dualism, either – thus, he rejects the behaviorist’s inference from the truth of mentalism to the truth of dualism: “I am no so sure, however, that to admit this [that the ‘expressive’ account is false] is to admit that there are nonphysical correlates of brain processes” (pp. 61-62). • Identity theory: “Why should not sensations just be brain processes of a certain sort?” • Smart’s strategy: “There are … well-known … philosophical objections to the view that reports of sensations are reports of brain-processes, but I shall … argue that these arguments are by no means as cogent as is commonly thought…”

43. Smart Distinguishes a Translation Thesis from an Identity • Smart distinguishes a translation thesis from an identity thesis – and thus evades the behaviorist objection that mental descriptions don’t mean the same as physical descriptions. • The identity theory, he says, “is not the thesis that, for example, ‘after-image’ or ‘ache’ means the same as ‘brain process of sort X’.” • What I’ll call Smart’s “Contingency Thesis”: “It is that, insofar as ‘after-image’ or ‘ache’ is a report of a process, it is a report of a process that happens to be [is contingently] a brain process.”

44. Strict Identity • Smart says that when he says that a sensation is a brain process or that lightning is an electrical discharge or that 7 is identical with the smallest prime number greater than 5, he means to refer to cases of “strict identity.” • He does not mean that there is just spatiotemporal continuity – overlapping. • He suggests that it is different when he says, “The successful general is the same person as the small boy who stole the apples.” There he only means that two time slices are slices of the same four-dimensional object, and thus there is no strict identity. • My skepticism: It seems to me that in the general/boy case there is strict identity, that these words don’t denote slices.

45. Identity Statements