Marks of the Mental

Epistemological Criteria

Infallibility

Another epistemic feature sometimes associated with mentality is the idea that in some sense one's knowledge of one's own current mental states is "infallible" or "incorrigible," or that it is "self-intimating" (or that your mind is “transparent” to you). The main idea is that mental events—at least events like pains and other sensations—have the following property: You cannot be mistaken concerning whether or not you are experiencing them. That is, if you believe that you are in pain, then it follows that you are in pain, and if you believe that you are not in pain, then you are not; that is, it is not possible to have false beliefs about your own pains. In this sense, your knowledge of your own pain is infallible. So-called psychosomatic pains are pains nonetheless. The same may hold for your knowledge of your propositional attitudes like belief; Descartes famously said that you cannot be mistaken about the fact that you doubt, or that you think.

Marks of the Mental

Epistemological Criteria

Infallibility

In contrast, when your belief concerns a physical occurrence, there is no guarantee that your belief is true: Your belief that you have a decayed molar may be true but its truth is not entailed by the mere fact that you believed it.

About proprioception it should be said that such knowledge may be reliable but not infallible; there can be incorrect belief about your bodily position based on proprioception.

Marks of the Mental

Epistemological Criteria

Self-Intimacy

A state or event m is said to be self-intimating to a person just in case, necessarily, if m occurs, the person is aware that m occurs—that is, she knows that m occurs.

Example: If pains are self-intimating in this sense, there could not be hidden pains—painsthat the subject is unaware of.

Marks of the Mental

Epistemological Criteria

Transparency

We may define “the doctrine of the transparency or mind” as the joint claim that our knowledge of our own mental occurrences is infallible and that all our mental occurrences are self-intimating. On this doctrine, the mind is a totally transparent medium, but only to a single person. This is a doctrine often associated with the traditional conception of the mind, especially Descartes.

Marks of the Mental

A question about infallibility and self-intimacy

Do all or even most mental events satisfy them?

The answer: no1.It is now commonplace to speak of “unconscious” or “subconscious” beliefs, desires, and emotions, like repressed desires and angers—psychological states that the subject is not aware of and would even vehemently deny but that evidently shape and influence his overt behavior.2.It is not always easy for us to determine whether an emotion that we are experiencing is, say, one of embarrassment, remorse, or regret—or one of envy, jealousy, or anger. And we are often not sure whether we “really” believe or desire something. Epistemic uncertainties can happen with sensation as well.

Marks of the Mental

Mentality As Nonspatial

For Descartes, the essential nature of a mind is that it is a thinking thing (“res cogitans”) and the essential nature of a material thing is that it is a spatially extended thing. A corollary of this, for Descartes, is that the mental is essentially nonspatial and the material is essentially lacking in the capacity for thinking.

Substance Dulaism

Marks of the Mental

Mentality As Nonspatial

Consider the following: To say that M is a mental property is to say that the proposition that something, x, has M does not imply that x is spatially extended (“spatial” for short). This is consistent with saying that anything that has M is in fact a spatial thing; that is, the notion of mentality does not require that anything with mentality be a spatially extended material thing, although as a matter of contingent fact, all things that have any mental property are spatially extended things, like humans and other biological organisms.

There may be no material angels in this world, but it seems at least logically consistent to say that there are angels and that angels have beliefs as well as perhaps other mental states, like desires and hopes.

Marks of the Mental

Mentality As Nonspatial

What about physical properties?

It evidently is a contradiction to say that something has a physical property—say, the color red, a triangular shape, or a rough texture—and at the same time deny that it has spatial extensions.

Marks of the Mental

Mentality As Nonspatial

It would seem that if you take this approach seriously, you must also take the idea of mental substance seriously. For you must allow the existence of possible worlds in which mental properties are instantiated by nonphysical beings (beings without spatial extension).

Marks of the Mental

Intentionality as a Criterion of the Mental

Schliemann sought the site of Troy. He was fortunate, he found it. Ponce de León sought the fountain of youth, but he never found it. He could not have found it, since it does not exist and never did.

Not only can you look for something that in fact does not exist, but you can apparently also believe in, think of, write about, and even worship a nonexistent object. Even if God should not exist, he could be, and has been, the object of these mental acts and attitudes on the part of many people.

Marks of the Mental

Intentionality as a Criterion of the Mental

Contrast these mental acts and states with physical ones, like cutting, kicking, and being to the left of. You cannot cut a nonexistent piece of wood, kick nonexistent tires, or be to the left of a nonexistent tree. That you kick something x logically entails that x exists. That you are thinking of x does not entail the existence of x.

Marks of the Mental

Intentionality as a Criterion of the Mental

The Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano called this feature of mentality "the intentional inexistence" of psychological phenomena, claiming that it is this characteristic that separates the mental from the physical. In a well-known passage, he wrote:

“Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not do so in the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (Brentano, 1874, pp. 88-89)

Marks of the Mental

Intentionality as a Criterion of the Mental

This feature of the mental—namely, that mental states are about, or are directed upon, objects, or content, that may not exist or contents that may be false—has been called "intentionality."

Two concepts of intentionality:

- Referential intentionality- Content intentionality

Marks of the Mental

Intentionality as a Criterion of the Mental

Referential intentionality

Referential intentionality concerns the “aboutness” or reference of our thoughts, beliefs, intentions, and the like.

Our words, too, refer to, or are directed upon, objects; “Mount Everest” refers to Mount Everest, and “horse” refers to horses.

Marks of the Mental

Intentionality as a Criterion of the Mental

Content Intentionality

Content intentionality concerns the fact that, as we saw, an important class of mental states—that is, propositional attitudes such as beliefs, hopes, and intentions—have contents or meanings, which are often expressed by full sentences. It is in virtue of having contents that our mental states represent states of affairs both inside us and in the external world. My perceiving that there are flowers in the field represent the fact, or state of affairs, of there being flowers in the field. The capacity of our mental states to represent things external to them—that is, the fact that they have representational content—is clearly a very important fact about them.

Marks of the Mental

Can intentionality be taken as the mark of the mental?There are two apparent difficulties.

The first is that some mental phenomena—in particular, sensations like pains and tickles—do not seem to exhibit either kind of intentionality. The sensation of pain does not seem to be “about”, or to refer to, anything; nor does in have a content in the way that beliefs and intentions do.

Second, it may be argued that mental states are not the only things that exhibit intentionality. In particular, words and sentences can refer to things and have content and meaning. The word “London” refers to London, and the sentence “London is large” refers to, or represents, the fact, or state of affairs, that London is large. A string of 0s and 1s in a computer data structure can mean your name and address, and such strings are ultimately electronic states of a physical system. If these physical items and states are capable of reference and content, how can intentionality be considered and exclusive property of mentality?

Dualism

The term ‘dualism’ has a variety of uses in the history of thought. In general, the idea is that, for some particular domain, there are two fundamental kinds or categories of things or principles. In theology, for example a ‘dualist’ is someone who believes that Good and Evil — or God and the Devil — are independent and more or less equal forces in the world. Dualism contrasts with monism, which is the theory that there is only one fundamental kind, category of thing or principle; and, rather less commonly, with pluralism, which is the view that there are many kinds or categories. In the philosophy of mind, dualism is the theory that the mental and the physical — or mind and body or mind and brain — are, in some sense, radically different kinds of thing. Because common sense tells us that there are physical bodies, and because there is intellectual pressure towards producing a unified view of the world, one could say that materialist monism is the ‘default option’. Discussion about dualism, therefore, tends to start from the assumption of the reality of the physical world, and then to consider arguments for why the mind cannot be treated as simply part of that world.

Dualism

Varieties of Dualism: Ontology

Predicate Dualism

Predicate dualism is the theory that psychological or mentalistic predicates are (a) essential for a full description of the world and (b) are not reducible to physicalistic predicates. For a mental predicate to be reducible, there would be bridging laws connecting types of psychological states to types of physical ones in such a way that the use of the mental predicate carried no information that could not be expressed without it.

An example of what we believe to be a true type reduction outside psychology is the case of water, where water is always H2O: something is water if and only if it is H2O. If one were to replace the word ‘water’ by ‘H2O’, it is plausible to say that one could convey all the same information. But the terms in many of the special sciences (that is, any science except physics itself) are not reducible in this way. Not every hurricane or every infectious disease, let alone every devaluation of the currency or every coup d'etat has the same constitutive structure. These states are defined more by what they do than by their composition or structure. Their names are classified as functional terms rather than natural kind terms. It goes with this that such kinds of state are multiply realizable; that is, they may be constituted by different kinds of physical structures under different circumstances.

Predicate Dualism

Natural Kind

In philosophy, a natural kind is a "natural" grouping, not an artificial one. Or, it is something a set of things (objects, events, beings) has in common which distinguishes it from other things as a real set rather than as a group of things arbitrarily lumped together by a person or group of people.

Example: If any natural kinds exist at all, good candidates might include each of the chemical elements, like gold or potassium. Physical particles, like quarks, might also be natural kinds. That is, they would still be groups of things, distinct from other things as a group, even if there were no people around to say that they were members of the same group. The set of objects that weigh more than 50 pounds, on the other hand, almost certainly does not comprise a natural kind.

Because of this, unlike in the case of water and H2O, one could not replace these terms by some more basic physical description and still convey the same information. There is no particular description, using the language of physics or chemistry, that would do the work of the word ‘hurricane’, in the way that ‘H2O’ would do the work of ‘water’. It is widely agreed that many, if not all, psychological states are similarly irreducible, and so psychological predicates are not reducible to physical descriptions and one has predicate dualism. (The classic source for irreducibility in the special sciences in general is Fodor (1974), and for irreducibility in the philosophy of mind, Davidson (1971).)

Predicate Dualism

Property Dualism

Whereas predicate dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of predicates in our language, property dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of property out in the world. Property dualism can be seen as a step stronger than predicate dualism. Although the predicate ‘hurricane’ is not equivalent to any single description using the language of physics, we believe that each individual hurricane is nothing but a collection of physical atoms behaving in a certain way: one need have no more than the physical atoms, with their normal physical properties, following normal physical laws, for there to be a hurricane.

One might say that we need more than the language of physics to describe and explain the weather, but we do not need more than its ontology. There is token identity between each individual hurricane and a mass of atoms, even if there is no type identity between hurricanes as kinds and some particular structure of atoms as a kind. Genuine property dualism occurs when, even at the individual level, the ontology of physics is not sufficient to constitute what is there. The irreducible language is not just another way of describing what there is, it requires that there be something more there than was allowed for in the initial ontology. Until the early part of the twentieth century, it was common to think that biological phenomena (‘life’) required property dualism (an irreducible ‘vital force’), but nowadays the special physical sciences other than psychology are generally thought to involve only predicate dualism.

Property Dualism

In the case of mind, property dualism is defended by those who argue that the qualitative nature of consciousness is not merely another way of categorizing states of the brain or of behaviour, but a genuinely emergent phenomenon.

Property Dualism

Substance

Traditionally, two ideas have been closely associated with the concept of a substance. First, a substance is something in which properties “inhere”; that is, it is what has, or exemplifies, properties.

Example: Consider this vase on my table. It is something that has a weight, shape, color, and volume; it has further properties like fragility and beauty. But a substance is not in turn something that other things can exemplify or have a property.

Substance

Linguistically, this idea is sometimes expressed by saying that a substance is the subject of predication, something to which we can attribute predicates like “red”, “heavy”, and “fragile”, whereas it cannot in turn be predicated of anything else.

Substance

Second, and this is more important for us, a substance is thought to be something that has the capacity for independent existence.

Example: Consider the vase and the pencil holder to its right. Both are substances in that either can exist without the other existing. In fact, we could conceive of a world in which only the vase (with all its constituent parts) exists and nothing else, and a world in which only the pencil holder exists and nothing else.