a materialist theory of the mind by d. m. armstrong
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8/9/2019 A Materialist Theory of the Mind by D. M. Armstrong
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Journal of Philosophy Inc.
A Materialist Theory of the Mind by D. M. ArmstrongReview by: Alvin I. GoldmanThe Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 22 (Nov. 20, 1969), pp. 812-818Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2024373.
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8/9/2019 A Materialist Theory of the Mind by D. M. Armstrong
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Step
1.
Inflationary ontological
reduction:
We replace
R
by
R'
and
D
by
D
u
N; the proxy function
is
identity.
Step 2. Ontological reduction without change of domain: We replace R'
by (3 z)
-
(Nz
&
R'xy)
V
(z) (Nz
&
RN'XY).
This reinterpretation pre-
serves truth,
since
in
the
domain D
v
N the interpretation coincides
with
R'; the proxy function
is
identity.
Step
3.
Ontological
destruction: Eliminate
D
from the domain.
This
reduces the interpretation of R in effect to
RN
and, hence, preserves
truth.
Thus it appears that, if Pythagoreanism is to be resisted, either
some
further condition
must be
added
or a further explication of the pres-
ent conditions must be given. A more drastic alternative would be
to seek
a
less
model-theoretic approach to ontological questions.
R.
E. G.
BOOK REVIEWS
A Materialist Theory of the Mind. D. M. ARMSTRONG.
New York:
Hu-
manities Press, 1968. xii, 372 p. $8.50.
This book is a stimulating defense of the
thesis
that the
mind is
identical with the brain (or central nervous system) and that men-
tal states are physicochemical states of the brain. Armstrong fits
the
identity thesis into the framework of a general theory of the mind,
and provides one of the most
comprehensive and clearly structured
discussions of the subject in the recent
literature.
The
book begins with a threefold
classification
of theories of
mind:
(1) Dualism, (2) The Attribute
Theory,
and
(3) Materialism.
The author's own theory is a species of
materialism,
which he
calls
Central-state Materialism. Armstrong then sets out to criticize
the rival theories. He charges that
dualism is unable to capture
the
unity of mind and body, that it fails to give a satisfactory account
of
the
interaction
of
mind
and body, and that it cannot
explain
the
emergence
and
growth
of
the
mind
over time.
The
attribute
theory
differs from Cartesian dualism
in
positing only
one
substance,
but
contrasts with materialism in claiming that mental states are
non-
material attributes of the substance. Though it escapes some of the
difficulties confronting dualism, Armstrong thinks that other objec-
tions raised against
dualism
also
hold for
it.
Moreover,
he finds it
just mysterious
that there should
be
properties
of
the
brain that
are not reducible to material properties.
The advance
of science,
he
feels, renders implausible
the
hypothesis
of
any entity
or attribute
that is not reducible to
the entities and attributes of
physical
science.
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8/9/2019 A Materialist Theory of the Mind by D. M. Armstrong
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Behaviorism is
classed as a species
of materialism, or physicalism,
since it tries to
reduce the mind to physical behavior and
to tenden-
cies to behave physically in certain ways. Armstrong's main criti-
cism of behaviorism is precisely its emphasis
on outer behavior
and
its consequent failure to account for
the inner nature
of mental
states. According
to behaviorism, says
Armstrong, the mind is just
the body in action
(56). Central-state materialism, on
the other
hand, sees the
mind as an inner arena
identified by its causal rela-
tions to outward
act (129). Nevertheless, Armstrong's
own theory
closely resembles
behaviorism; for, like the behaviorist,
he thinks
our concepts of mental states are dispositional concepts. Unlike the
behaviorist, however, he contends
that dispositional
states must
have a categorical
basis. Thus, although we may think
of a men-
tal state as a state apt for producing
certain behavior,
such a state
must also have an intrinsic nature.
Question then arises
concerning
this intrinsic nature,
and central-state materialism asserts
that it is
a
physicochemical state. Armstrong
compares the process
of identi-
fying the mind with the brain to the
process of identifying
the gene
with the DNA molecule.
The concept of a gene is a causal-disposi-
tional concept: that of a factor apt for producing hereditary charac-
teristics. Biological
evidence suggests that the production
of such
characteristics is
attributable to DNA.
Hence, the gene is identified
with the
DNA
molecule.
Similarly, the
concept of the mind is the
concept
of
a
factor apt for producing
certain behavior. Hence, since
scientific evidence
suggests that the
thing apt for producing this
behavior is the
brain, the mind is identified
with the brain.
The
defense of
the
mind-brain
identity
thesis is
hereby
divided
into two stages. The first stage, a purely conceptual one, consists in
an analysis of the concept of
a
mental state
as a state
apt for bring-
ing about a certain
sort
of
behavior
(82).
The
second
stage argues
the
contingent hypothesis
that these
behavior-causing
states are
physicochemical
states
of
the brain.
Actually very
little
space
is
de-
voted to
the second
stage,
whereas
the first
occupies
the bulk
of
the
book. In a wide-ranging survey,
Armstrong
seeks to
analyze
numer-
ous mental-state
concepts
in terms
of
their
dispositions
to
cause
behavior (and,
in
some
cases,
to
be caused
by
certain
stimuli).
Among
the
concepts analyzed
are those of
desire, deliberation, plea-
sure and
pain,
emotion, inference,
perception, belief,
mental im-
agery,
and
bodily
sensation.
The two
most
important
mental
concepts
in
Armstrong's theory
are desire
and
perception,
which
play
an
important part
in the
analysis
of
various other mental
concepts. Armstrong begins
with
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8/9/2019 A Materialist Theory of the Mind by D. M. Armstrong
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the concept
of desire,
which is the clearest case
of
a mental
state that
tends to produce
behavior.
Problems
arise
immediately, however.
Some desires do not really tend to cause behavior; for example, an
agent does
not
act upon
a desire that he
knows
he
cannot
fulfill.
Armstrong tries to handle such cases by suitable counterfactuals,
saying
what behavior
would
result
from
these desires
if
the
agent
had certain beliefs. Secondly, desires
are not the
only mental states
that produce behavior; so distinguishing features of desires must
be introduced. Armstrong tries
to do
this by defining a purpose (or
desire) as a state whose behavioral effects depend on perceptual
feedback:
Purposive activity .
..
is a train of activities initiated
and sustained by
a mental 'thrust' or causal state. At the beginning of
the
activity,
and
as the activity develops, perceptions of the current
state of
the
agent
and
his
environment occur.
Where the information
.
.
.
contained
in
the perceptions is relevant, it feeds back to the causal
state, modifying
the latter in a way suitable (or believed to be suitable) for the achieve-
ment of the 'end' of the activity.
The 'end'
is simply
the state of affairs
such that perception that
it
has
been reached
feeds back to
the
sus-
taining causal state and stops the causal state operating. Purposive ac-
tivity is a train of activities, initiated
and sustained
by
a mental
state,
and
controlled
from
beginning to
end
by perception
acting
as
a
feed-
back cause on the mental state.
To
put
forward
a slogan:
a
purpose
is
an
information-sensitive mental cause (139).
Having explained
desire in
part
in
terms of perception, Armstrong
turns to
the latter
concept.
Here
again
he
employs
the formula char-
acterizing mental states as states apt
for
producing
certain
sorts
of
behavior, though
he
admits that
perception
does
not
have
the
same
sort
of
causal
role as desires or
purposes.
Now,
in
the case of perception, there is no question of the inner event
actually tending to bring
about
behavior.
What we must say, rather,
is
that perception supplies a necessary
preconditionfor appropriate be-
havior. If a baby can perceive a difference between a green and a blue
block,
then it is
in
a
position
to
discriminate between
them
in
its be-
havior if it should want
to. . .
. Perception enables
discriminating be-
havior, but does not impel towards that behavior (249).
The
behavioral
effects
of
perception
tell
only part
of the story, how-
ever.
Armstrong says
that
certain
mental-state concepts must be ana-
lyzed partly
in
terms
of
the propensity to be
caused by certain stim-
uli, and perception is the main example of this. To perceive an ob-
ject
or
situation
in the
environment,
he
says,
is
to
acquire
a belief
about the
environment.
(This thesis was espoused
in
his
earlier
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BOOK REVIEWS
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book,
Perception
and the
Physical
World.')
Such
belief-acquirings
are apt
for
being brought
about
by
the
corresponding
objects or
situations in the environment, which is what occurs in veridical per-
ception.
Thus,
perception
is to
be
understood
in
terms
of
the
stimuli
that
characteristically cause
it,
as
well
as the
behavioral differences
it
is apt
to
produce.
Armstrong's
analysis of mental-state
concepts
turns out to be far
less
simple
and straightforward
than the
original
billing suggests.
As
we have seen,
he not
only appeals to
behavioral
consequences
in
analyzing
mental
concepts,
but
also to
stimulus causes.
Moreover,
in many cases mental states are characterized in terms of their causal
relations
to other
mental
states,
rather than their
direct
ties to be-
havior or
stimuli.
Emotions
are
analyzed
in
terms
of
propensities
to cause
certain
desires
and
to be caused
by certain
beliefs,
and de-
liberation
is analyzed as a
process apt for
causing a
decision.
Again,
even the
primary
mental
concepts,
desire and
perception,
are
not
independently
analyzed. As we
have
seen,
Armstrong's
analysis of
desire
or
purpose
makes use of the
concept
of
perception,
and
his
analysis
of
perception
presupposes the
concept
of
desire; hence,
he
calls them package-deal concepts (253). But a full analysis re-
quires him
to
distinguish
the
joint
operation of
purpose
and per-
ception
from that
of
other
mechanisms, e.g., automatic
self-regulat-
ing
mechanisms in the
body.
In
his
attempt to do
this,
Armstrong
is
eventually
forced to
appeal to the
enormously greater
complex-
ity
of purpose
and
perception (252).
In
addition
to
the
analysis
of
particular
mental
concepts, a com-
plete
theory of the mind
must
also give an
account
of
self-knowledge
and of consciousness in general. Here seem to lurk large obstacles to
a
causal-materialist
account of the mind.
For example,
if a
mental
state
is a
disposition
to
produce
behavior, how
is
noninferential
knowledge
of it
possible? And
if a
mental state is a
physicochemical
state of the
brain, why should a
statement
concerning such
a state
have
a different
epistemic
status from, say, a
statement about
the
state
of
one's
liver? Yet it
is
widely
claimed that
first-person mental
statements
do
have
a
unique
epistemic status:
they
are
incorrigible
and
self-intimating.
Armstrong
confronts these
challenges
head on. He
argues
that
noninferential
knowledge
of
dispositions
is
perfectly possible
and,
hence,
that noninferential
knowledge
of one's mental
states
is
also
possible. On
the
other
hand,
he
emphatically
denies
the
incorrigi-
' New York: Humanities,
1961; reviewed
in this JOURNAL,
LIX, 14
(July
5,
1962):
384-388.
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bility and self-intimatingness of first-person
mental statements.
That
I believe I am in mental state
M,
he says, does not entail that
I
am
in
M; and that
I
am in
M
does not entail that
I
believe,
or
am
aware, that
I
am.
Armstrong's position
is that
. . . our cognitive relation to
our mind ...
is like our cognitive
rela-
tion to anything else
in
nature. We know in part, guess in part, in
part we are mistakenand
in
large part
we
are
simply ignorant.Being
in a mental state entails nothing about our awarenessof that state
(115).
If mental states are physicochemical states of the brain, indubitable
knowledge of them should not be expected. Consciousness of one's
mental states
is a
self-scanning process. One is conscious of a men-
tal state when it is scanned by a further mental state. Although
successful
scanning
is
possible,
there is no reason to
expect every
mental
state
to be
scanned or
every putative scanning to
be correct.
Thus, Armstrong's position squares well with his materialism.
On the
whole,
this
is a valuable book
that
deserves, and will
receive, considerable attention. It presents a coherent and systematic
theory of the mind, with reasonably clear-cut proposals for the solu-
tion of
many
traditional
problems
in
this domain.
It
certainly
con-
stitutes
the most detailed
defense
of the
contingent identity
thesis
yet to appear.
In
addition, Armstrong writes lucidly
and
engagingly;
he
puts
all his cards face
up
on the
table,
both
in
criticism of others
and in
defense
of
his
own
views.
Though
the
book is
long,
it is
emi-
nently readable.
Of
special
use to
students
is
Armstrong's classification
of theories
of mind and his critique of theories that rival his own. His criticisms
of
rivals
are often
imaginative.
I
was
disappointed, however, by
in-
sufficient discussion
of
the
concept of
reduction. In
criticizing
the
attribute
theory, Armstrong claims
that mental
attributes, or prop-
erties, must be
reducible to
physical ones, but he never explains
what this means.
Presumably, reducibility requires some sort of reg-
ularities
holding between the
incidence of mental
properties
and
of
physical properties.
But
the nature of these regularities goes com-
pletely unexplored.
In
the
same
vein, one
wishes
Armstrong
had
said
more
about criteria
of
identity
for states or
events. In
the
early
part
of the book he talks almost
exclusively
of the
identification of
mind
and brain. But since
the mind
is
just shorthand,
I
think,
for
a certain
class
of states and
events,
one wishes there
were
some
elaboration
of the
problem
of
when
two
states
can be
considered
identical.
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BOOK REVIEWS
8I7
Armstrong's causal
analysis of mental
concepts is a
salutary
devel-
opment
in the
philosophy
of mind. Its
main
importance,
I think,
lies in its refutation of the oft-repeated dogma that logical connec-
tions and
causal
connections are
incompatible.
Armstrong is
quite
right to point
to
concepts, such as
the
gene, whose
analysis
includes
a
propensity
to
cause
certain
effects. He
is also
right,
I
think,
in
sug-
gesting
that the
concept of
desire or
purpose
is the
concept of
a
state
whose
analysis
includes
the propensity
to
cause
behavior.
There is
a sense,
then, in
which there is
a
conceptual, or
logical,
tie
between
desire and
action.
Yet this
logical tie
is perfectly
compati-
ble with the fact that actions are caused by desires.
More
dubious, however,
is
Armstrong's
extension
of this
logical
connection
thesis to
all
mental states.
First,
even where we
can
agree
that
a certain kind
of mental
state
characteristically
produces cer-
tain
behavior,
it may
not be
evident
that this is a
logical truth.
Sec-
ondly, there
are
many kinds of
mental
states that do
not
seem to be
associated with
specific
kinds of
physical
behavior.
What sorts
of
overt
behavior
are
typically
associated
with
entertaining a
hypothe-
sis,
doubting a
proposition, or
daydreaming? The
conceptual rela-
tionship between such states and overt behavior-even an
indirect
relationship via other
mental states-is,
at
best, extremely
tenuous.
Armstrong's willingness
to
come
to
grips
with
the
consequences
of
his
view
is
most
in evidence in
his
treatment
of
noninferential
knowledge of mental states
and
his
treatment
of consciousness. He
clearly
recognizes
the
implications
of his
causal-materialist
position
on
these
issues,
and his
positions
on
them are
original
and
refresh-
ing.
I
remain
unconvinced,
however, by
his
support
for
noninferen-
tial knowledge of dispositions. He claims that pressure is a state apt
for
producing
movement in
a
body,
so that
noninferential
knowl-
edge
of
pressure
on one's
body
is
noninferential
knowledge
of a dis-
position.
But this is dubious.
His
view of
consciousness as a
self-
scanning
process
is
also
questionable.
On his
view,
M
is a
conscious
mental
event
if
it
is the
object
of
another mental
event
(the
aware-
ness
of
M).
Otherwise
it
is
unconscious.
It
follows that an
awareness
is itself
an
unconscious mental event
if
it
is not the
object
of a
fur-
ther
awareness.
Thus,
an
awareness
of
a
pain
is
unconscious
if
it
goes
unscanned
by
a
higher-level
awareness. This
strikes me
as
extremely
counterintuitive.
There
are
other
specific points
where
Armstrong's
discussion
is
inadequate,
sometimes because he
tries
too
hard to fit
things into
his
framework without
full
cognizance
of
the
difficulties
involved.
On
the
other
hand,
his
development
of the
theory
is
always
interest-
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ing and frequently ingenious. Bold theories, like Armstrong's,
are
the stuff of which
philosophical progress is made, and so this is a
val-
uable contribution
to
the
philosophy of mind.
ALVIN
I.
GOLDMAN
University
of
Michigan
ERRATUM. The last item of the
APA Program for Saturday,
December 27, in
LXVI,
20 (Oct.
16, 1969): 725-735,
page 726, was omitted. This
line
should
have read:
8:00
Smoker,
Grand Ballroom
The editors regret
the
omission,
and trust that many
of our readers will
attend
the
Smoker.
NOTES AND NEWS
The editors
report with deep
regret
the death of A. N. Prior, fellow
in
phi-
losophy
of Balliol College, Oxford,
and former
editor
of the Journal
of
Symbolic
Logic.
Professor Prior was
born and educated
in New Zealand;
he
had taught
at Otago University
and
at
Canterbury University,
and
also
at Manchester
University,
England. At
the
time
of his death he was
on
sabbatical
leave, visiting
at the
University
of Oslo. He died
in
Trondheim,
Norway, on October
6, i969,
at the age of fifty-four.
The editors regret to learn that J. W. Swanson, Professor of Philosophy at
the
University
of
Massachusettts,
Amherst,
and a contributor
to
this
JOURNAL,
died on November
6, i969.
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