The first four papers center on emergentism. That is, that microphysical particles constitute molecules, which in turn constitute whole cells, etc. Kim argues that the world is too complex and variegated to presume that it fits into one perfectly layered model. He proposes instead that organized structures be classified as inhabiting sub-domains of physics This flattening of the world also fits well with his presumption in favor of reductionism Beyond this, they are unpredictable and unexplainable by reference to base properties alone Emergent properties also possess downward causal ability Kim argues, however, that the base property is causally sufficient, so the emergent property must lack efficacy He proposes reductionism as a solution to this problem.
Thus, expectedly, Kim raises similar themes, but makes his points with even more force and clarity. Emergent properties supervene upon 68 —and hence are irreducible to 70 —base properties. But then, the base properties are causally sufficient to bring about an effect, so the emergent properties fail to possess downward causation The next cluster of papers deals with action explanation.
Kim argues that the nomological account of causation is insufficient, as a primary reason could then be simply predictive rather than causal Kim uses this model to consider cases of mistaken self- ascriptions and of the evaluation of the behavior of others In this book, we are chiefly, though not exclusively, concerned with the mind-body problem.
In contemporary philosophy of mind, however, the world is conceived to be fundamentally material: There are persuasive some will say compelling reasons to believe that the world we live in is made up wholly of material particles and their structured aggregates, all behaving strictly in accordance with physical laws.
How can we accommodate minds and mentality in such an austerely material world? That is our main question. But before we set out to consider specific doctrines concerning the mind-body relationship, it will be helpful to survey some of the basic concepts, principles, and assumptions that guide the discussions to follow. On his view, minds are things of a special kind, souls or immaterial substances, and having a mind simply amounts to having a soul, something outside physical space, whose essence consists in mental activities like thinking and being conscious.
We examine this view of minds in chapter 2. Where are these dances and walks when no one is dancing or walking them?
What could you do with a dance except dance it? Dancing a waltz is not like owning an SUV or kicking a tire. Dancing a waltz is merely a manner of dancing, and taking a walk is a manner of moving your limbs in a certain relationship to the physical surroundings.
In using these expressions, we need not accept the existence of entities like waltzes and walks; all we need to admit into our ontology—the scheme of entities we accept as real—are persons who waltz and persons who walk. Having a mind can be construed simply as having a certain group of properties , features, and capacities that are possessed by humans and some higher animals but absent in things like rocks and trees.
However, this is not to preclude substantival minds at the outset; the point is only that we should not infer their existence from our use of certain forms of expression.
As we will see in the chapter to follow, there are serious philosophical arguments that we must accept minds as immaterial things. Moreover, an influential contemporary view identifies minds with brains discussed in chapter 4.
The main point we should keep in mind is that all this requires philosophical considerations and arguments, as we will see in the rest of this book. Mentality is a broad and complex category.
As we just saw, there are numerous specific properties and functions through which mentality manifests itself, such as experiencing sensations, entertaining thoughts, reasoning and judging, making decisions, and feeling emotions.
There are also more specific properties that fall within these categories, such as experiencing a throbbing pain in the right elbow, believing that Kabul is in Afghanistan, wanting to visit Tibet, and being annoyed at your roommate.
When you shut a door on your thumb, you will likely instantiate or exemplify the property of being in pain; most of us have, or instantiate, the property of believing that snow is white; some of us have the property of wanting to visit Tibet; and so on. We suppose, first, that our scheme includes substances, that is, things or objects including persons, biological organisms and their organs, molecules, computers, and such and that they have various properties and stand in various relations to each other.
Properties and relations are together called attributes. Some of these are physical, like having a certain mass or temperature, being one meter long, being longer than, and being between two other objects.
Some things—in particular, persons and certain biological organisms—can also instantiate mental properties, like being in pain, fearing darkness, and disliking the smell of ammonia.
We also speak of mental or physical events, states, and processes and sometimes of facts. A process can be thought of as a causally connected series of events and states; events differ from states in that they suggest change, whereas states do not. We often use one or another of these terms in a broad sense inclusive of the rest. How events and states are related to objects and their properties is a question of some controversy in metaphysics. Some events are psychological events, such as pains, beliefs, and onsets of anger, and these are instantiations by persons and other organisms of mental properties.
Some events are physical, such as earthquakes, hiccups and sneezes, and the firing of a bundle of neurons, and these are instantiations of physical properties. Another point to note: In the context of the mind-body problem, the physical usually goes beyond the properties and phenomena studied in physics; the biological, the chemical, the geological, and so on, also count as physical.
So much for the ontological preliminaries. Sometimes clarity and precision demand attention to ontological details, but as far as possible we will try to avoid general metaphysical issues that are not germane to our concerns about the nature of mind. You walk into a booth. When the transporter is activated, your body is instantly disassembled; exhaustive information concerning your bodily structure and composition, down to the last molecule, is transmitted, instantaneously, to another location, often a great distance away, where a body that is exactly like yours is reconstituted presumably with local material.
And someone who looks just like you materializes on the spot and starts doing the tasks you were assigned to do there. Let us not worry about whether the person who is created at the destination is really you or only your replacement. In fact, we can avoid this issue by slightly changing the story: Exhaustive information about your bodily composition is obtained by a scanner that does no harm to you, and on the basis of this information, an exact physical replica of your body—a molecule-for-molecule identical duplicate—is created at another location.
By assumption, you and your replica have exactly the same physical properties; you and your replica could not be distinguished by any current intrinsic physical differences.
Given that your replica is your physical replica, will she also be your psychological replica? Will she be identical with you in all mental respects as well? Will she be as smart and witty as you are, and as prone to daydream? Will she share your likes and dislikes in food and music and behave just as you would when angry or irritable?
Will she prefer blue to green and have a visual experience exactly like yours when you and she both gaze at a Van Gogh landscape of yellow wheat fields against a dark blue sky? Will her twinges, itches, and tickles feel to her just the way yours feel to you? Well, you get the idea. An unquestioned assumption of Star Trek and similar science-fiction fantasies seems to be that the answer is yes to each of these questions. The mental supervenes on the physical in that things objects, events, organisms, persons, and so on that are exactly alike in all physical properties cannot differ with respect to mental properties.
That is, physical indiscernibility entails psychological indiscernibility. Or as it is sometimes put: No mental difference without a physical difference. Notice that this principle does not say that things that are alike in psychological respects must be alike in physical respects. We seem to be able coherently to imagine intelligent extraterrestrial creatures whose biochemistry is different from ours say, their physiology is not carbon-based and yet who share the same psychology with us.
As we might say, the same psychology could be realized in different physical systems. Now, that may or may not be the case. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that mind-body supervenience asserts only that creatures could not be psychologically different and yet physically identical.
There are two other important ways of explaining the idea that the mental supervenes on the physical. The mental supervenes on the physical in that if anything x has a mental property M, there is a physical property P such that x has P, and necessarily any object that has P has M. Suppose that a creature is in pain that is, it has the mental property of being in pain.
How is this new statement of mind-body supervenience related to the earlier statement? It is pretty straightforward to show that the supervenience principle II entails I ; that is, if the mental supervenes on the physical according to II , it will also supervene according to I. Whether I entails II is more problematic. The mental supervenes on the physical in that worlds that are alike in all physical respects are alike in all mental respects as well; in fact, worlds that are physically alike are exactly alike overall.
If God created this world, all he had to do was to put the right basic particles in the right places and fix basic physical laws, and all else, including all aspects of mentality, would just come along.
Once the basic physical structure is put in place, his job is finished; he does not also have to create minds or mentality, any more than trees or mountains or bridges.
The question whether this formulation of supervenience is equivalent to either of the earlier two is a somewhat complicated one; let it suffice to say that there are close relationships between all three.
In this book, we do not have an occasion to use III ; however, it is stated here because this is the formulation some philosophers favor and you will likely come across it in the philosophy of mind literature. To put mind-body supervenience in perspective, it might be helpful to look at supervenience theses in other areas—in ethics and aesthetics. Most moral philosophers would accept the thesis that the ethical, or normative, properties of persons, acts, and the like are supervenient on their nonmoral, descriptive properties.
That is, if two persons, or two acts, are exactly alike in all nonmoral respects say, the persons are both honest, courageous, kind, generous, and so on , they could not differ in moral respects say, one of them is a morally good person but the other is not. Supervenience seems to apply to aesthetic qualities as well: If two pieces of sculpture are physically exactly alike the same shape, size, color, texture, and all the rest , they cannot differ in some aesthetic respect say, one of them is elegant, heroic, and expressive while the second has none of these properties.
One more example: Just as mental properties are thought to supervene on physical properties, most consider biological properties to supervene on more basic physicochemical properties. It seems natural to suppose that if two things are exactly alike in basic physical and chemical features, including, of course, their material composition and structure, it could not be the case that one of them is a living thing and the other is not, or that one of them is performing a certain biological function say, photosynthesis and the other is not.
That is to say, physicochemically indiscernible things must be biologically indiscernible. As noted, most philosophers accept these supervenience theses; however, whether they are true, or why they are true, are philosophically nontrivial questions. And each supervenience thesis must be evaluated and assessed on its own merit.
Mind-body supervenience, of course, is our present concern. Our ready acceptance of the idea of the Star Trek transporter shows the strong intuitive attraction of mind-body supervenience. But is it true? What is the evidence in its favor? Should we accept it? These are deep and complex questions.
One reason is that, in spirit and substance, they amount to the following questions: Is physicalism true?
Should we accept physicalism? Materialism is the doctrine that all things that exist in the world are bits of matter or aggregates of bits of matter. Physicalism is the contemporary successor to materialism. The thought is that the traditional notion of material stuff was illsuited to what we now know about the material world from contemporary physics.
Physicalism is the doctrine that all things that exist are entities recognized by the science of physics, or systems aggregated out of such entities. Psychological properties are among the prime candidates for such nonphysical properties possessed by physical systems.
If you are comfortable with the idea of the Star Trek transporter, that means you are comfortable with physicalism as a perspective on the mind-body problem. The wide and seemingly natural acceptance of the transporter idea shows how pervasively physicalism has penetrated contemporary culture, although when this is made explicit some people would no doubt recoil and proclaim themselves to be against physicalism.
What is the relationship between mind-body supervenience and physicalism? We have not so far defined what physicalism is, but the term itself suggests that it is a doctrine that affirms the primacy, or basicness, of what is physical. With this very rough idea in mind, let us see what mind-body supervenience implies for the dualist view to be discussed in more detail in chapter 2 associated with Descartes that minds are immaterial substances with no physical properties whatever.
Take two immaterial minds: Evidently, they are exactly alike in all physical respects since neither has any physical property and as a result it is impossible to distinguish them from a physical perspective. So if mind-body supervenience, in the form of I , holds, it follows that they are alike in all mental respects. That is, under mind-body supervenience I , all Cartesian immaterial souls are exactly alike in all mental respects, from which it follows that they are exactly alike in all possible respects.
From this it seems to follow that there can be at most one immaterial soul! No serious mind-body dualist would find these consequences of mind-body supervenience tolerable. This is one way of seeing why the dualist will want to reject mind-body supervenience. To appreciate the physicalist implication of mind-body supervenience, we must consider one aspect of supervenience that we have not so far discussed. Many philosophers regard the supervenience thesis as affirming a relation of dependence or determination between the mental and the physical; that is, the mental properties a given thing has depend on, or are determined by, the physical properties it has.
Consider version II of mind-body supervenience: It says that for every mental property M, if anything has M, it has some physical property P that necessitates M—if anything has P, i t must have M. So a dependence relation can naturally be read into the claim that the mental supervenes on the physical, although, strictly speaking, the supervenience theses as stated only make claims about how mental properties covary with physical properties.
The mental properties a given thing has depend on, and are determined by, the physical properties it has. That is, our psychological character is wholly determined by our physical nature. The dependence thesis is important because it is an explicit affirmation of the ontological primacy, or priority, of the physical in relation to the mental. The thesis seems to accord well with the way we ordinarily think of the mind-body relation, as well as with scientific assumptions and practices.
Few of us would think that there can be mental events and processes that float free, so to speak, of physical processes; most of us believe that what happens in our mental life, including the fact that we have a mental life at all, is dependent on what happens in our body, in particular in our nervous system. Furthermore, it is because mental states depend on what goes on in the brain that it is possible to intervene in the mental goings-on.
To ease your headache, you take aspirin—the only way you can affect the headache is to alter the neural base on which it supervenes. There apparently is no other way. For these reasons, we can think of the mind-body supervenience thesis, in one form or another, as minimal physicalism, in the sense that it is one commitment that all who consider themselves physicalists must accept. But is it sufficient as physicalism? That is, can we say that anyone who accepts mind-body supervenience is ipso facto a full physicalist?
Opinions differ on this question. We saw earlier that supervenience does not by itself completely rule out the existence of immaterial minds, something antithetical to physicalism. But we also saw that supervenience has consequences that no serious dualist can accept. Whether supervenience itself suffices to deliver physicalism depends, by and large, on what we consider to be full and robust physicalism.
As our starting options, then, let us see what varieties of physicalism are out there. First, there is an ontological claim about what objects there are in this world: Substance Physicalism. There is nothing else in the space-time world. This thesis, though it is disputed by Descartes and other substance dualists, is accepted by most contemporary philosophers of mind.
The main point of contention concerns the properties of material or physical things. Certain complex physical systems, like higher organisms, are also psychological systems; they exhibit psychological properties and engage in psychological activities and functions.
How are the psychological properties and physical properties of a system related to each other? Broadly speaking, an ontological physicalist has a choice between the following two options: Property Dualism, or Nonreductive Physicalism. The psychological properties of a system are distinct from, and irreducible to, its physical properties. Psychological properties or kinds, types are reducible to physical properties kinds, types.
That is, psychological properties and kinds are physical properties and kinds. There are only properties of one sort exemplified in this world, and they are physical properties. You could be a property dualist because you reject mind-body supervenience, but then you would not count as a physicalist since, as we argued, mind-body supervenience is a necessary element of physicalism. So the physicalist we have in mind is someone who accepts mind-body supervenience.
However, it is generally supposed that mind-body supervenience is consistent with property dualism, the claim that the supervenient psychological properties are irreducible to, and not identical with, the underlying physical base properties.
In defense of this claim, some point to the fact that philosophers who accept the supervenience of moral properties on nonmoral, descriptive properties for the most part reject the reducibility of moral properties, like being good or being right, to nonmoral, purely descriptive properties.
The situation seems the same with the case of aesthetic supervenience and aesthetic properties. So pain, as a mental kind, is not identical with, or reducible to, a kind of physical event or state, and yet each individual instance of pain—this pain here now—is usually a physical event.
Token physicalism is considered a form of nonreductive physicalism. The continuing debate between nonreductive physicalists and reductive physicalists has largely shaped the contemporary debate on the mind-body problem.
The following list is not intended to be complete or systematic, and some categories obviously overlap others. First, we may distinguish those mental phenomena that involve sensations or sensory qualities: pains, itches, tickles, having an afterimage, seeing a round green patch, smelling ammonia, feeling nauseous, and so on.
To use a popular term, there is something it is like to experience such phenomena or be in such states. Thus, pains have a special qualitative feel that is distinctive of pains—they hurt. Similarly, itches itch and tickles tickle. When you look at a green patch, there is a distinctive way the patch looks to you: It looks green, and your visual experience involves this green look.
Each such sensation has its own distinctive feel and is characterized by a sensory quality that we seem to be able to identify directly, at least as to the general type to which it belongs for example, pain, itch, or seeing green. Do these mental states have a phenomenal, qualitative aspect? We do not normally associate a specific feel with beliefs, another specific feel with desires, and so on.
There does not seem to be any special belief-like feel, a common sensory quality, associated with your belief that Providence is south of Boston and your belief that two is the smallest prime number.
At least it seems that we can say this much: If you believe that two is the smallest prime and I do too, there does not seem to be— nor need there be—any common sensory quality that both of us experience in virtue of sharing this belief.
The importance of these intentional states cannot be overstated. Why did Mary cross the street? Because she wanted some coffee and thought that she could get it at the Starbucks across the street. These states are essential to social psychology, and their analogues are found in various areas of psychology and cognitive science.
They include anger, joy, sadness, depression, elation, pride, embarrassment, remorse, regret, shame, and many others. Notice that emotions are often attributed to persons with a that-clause.
In other words, some states of emotions involve propositional attitudes: For example, you could be embarrassed that you had forgotten to call your mother on her birthday, and she could be disappointed that you did. As the word feeling suggests, there is often a special qualitative component we associate with many emotions, such as anger and grief, although it is not certain that all instances of emotion are accompanied by such qualitative feels, or that there is a single specific sensory feel to each kind of emotion.
These states are propositional attitudes; intentions and decisions have content. When I intend to raise my arm now, I must now undertake to raise my arm; when you intend, or decide, to do something, you commit yourself to doing it.
You must be prepared not only to take the necessary steps toward doing it but also to initiate them at an appropriate time. This is not to say that you cannot change your mind, or that you will necessarily succeed; it is to say that you need to change your intention to be released from the commitment to action.
According to some philosophers, all intentional actions must be preceded by an act of volition. Actions typically involve motions of our bodies, but they do not seem to be mere bodily motions. My arm is going up, and so is yours. However, you are raising your arm, but I am not—my arm is being pulled up by someone else.
The raising of your arm is an action; it is something you do. But the rising of my arm is not an action; it is not something that I do but something that happens to me. Or consider something like buying a loaf of bread. Evidently someone who can engage in the act of buying a loaf of bread must have appropriate beliefs and desires; she must, for example, have a desire to buy bread, or at least a desire to buy something, and knowledge of what bread is.
And to do something like buying, you must have knowledge, or beliefs, about what constitutes buying rather than, say, borrowing or simply taking, about money and exchange of goods, and so on. That is to say, only creatures with beliefs and desires and an understanding of appropriate social conventions and institutions can engage in activities like buying and selling. The same goes for much of what we do as social beings; actions like promising, greeting, and apologizing presuppose a rich and complex background of beliefs, desires, and intentions, as well as an understanding of social relationships and arrangements.
But we can consider them to be mental in an indirect or derivative sense: Honesty is a mental characteristic because it is a tendency, or disposition, to form desires of certain sorts for example, the desire to tell the truth, or not to mislead others and to act in appropriate ways in particular, saying only what you sincerely believe.
In the chapters to follow, we focus on sensations and intentional states. We also discuss some specific philosophical problems about these two principal types of mental states. We will largely bypass detailed questions, however, such as what types of mental states there are, how they are interrelated, and the like. Is there some single property or feature, or a reasonably simple and perspicuous set of them, by virtue of which they all count as mental? Epistemological Criteria You are experiencing a sharp toothache caused by an exposed nerve in a molar.
The toothache that you experience, but not the condition of your molar, is a mental occurrence. But what is the basis of this distinction? One influential answer says that the distinction consists in certain fundamental differences in the way you come to have knowledge of the two phenomena. Direct or Immediate Knowledge. There is nothing else that you know or need to know from which you infer that you have a toothache; that is, your knowledge is not mediated by other beliefs or knowledge.
The only possible answer, if you take the question seriously, is that you just know. Yet your knowledge of the physical condition of your tooth is based on evidence: Knowledge of this kind usually depends on the testimonial evidence provided by a third party—for example, your dentist. Privacy, or First-Person Privilege. One possible response to the foregoing challenge is to invoke the privacy of our knowledge of our own mental states, namely, the apparent fact that this direct access to a mental event is enjoyed by a single subject, the person to whom the event is occurring.
In the case of the toothache, it is only you, not your dentist or anyone else, who is in this kind of specially privileged position. But this does not hold in the case of seeing the red patch. There is no single person with specially privileged access to the round red spot. In this sense, knowledge of mental events exhibits an asymmetry between first person and third person: It is only the first person, namely the subject who experiences a pain, who enjoys a special epistemic privilege as regards the pain.
Others, that is, third persons, do not. Moreover, the first- person privilege holds only for knowledge of current mental occurrences, not for knowledge of past ones: You know that you had a toothache yesterday, a week ago, or two years ago, from the evidence of memory, an entry in your diary, your dental record, and the like. But what about those bodily states we detect through proprioception, such as the positions and motions of our limbs for example, knowing that your legs are crossed or that you are raising your right hand?
Moreover, first-person privilege seems to hold for such cases: It is only I who know, through proprioception, that my right knee is bent; no third party has similar access to this fact. And yet it is knowledge of a bodily condition, not of a mental occurrence. Psychophysical Emergence in Philosophy of Mind. Direct download 5 more. Direct download 6 more. Reductionism in General Philosophy of Science. Direct download 9 more. Causal Relata in Metaphysics.
This paper analyzes and evaluates quine's influential thesis that epistemology should become a chapter of empirical psychology. Naturalized Epistemology in Epistemology.
This paper explores the fundamental ideas that have motivated the idea of emergence and the movement of emergentism. The concept of reduction, which lies at the heart of the emergence idea is explicated, and it is shown how the thesis that emergent properties are irreducible gives a unified account of emergence. The paper goes on to discuss two fundamental unresolved issues for emergentism. Emergence in Metaphysics.
Direct download 4 more. Psychological Explanation in Philosophy of Cognitive Science. Somewhat loose arguments that non-reductive physicalist realism is untenable.
Anomalous monism makes the mental irrelevant, functionalism is compatible with species-specific reduction, and supervenience is weak or reductive.
Nonreductive Materialism in Philosophy of Mind. Supervenient Causation in Metaphysics. Direct download 7 more. Evolutionary Biology in Philosophy of Biology. Nomological Theories of Causation in Metaphysics. Psychophysical Supervenience in Philosophy of Mind. Explanation, Misc in General Philosophy of Science.
Interlevel Metaphysics, Misc in Metaphysics. Direct download 3 more. The philosophy of mind has always been a staple of the philosophy curriculum. But it has never held a more important place than it does today, with both traditional problems and new topics often sparked by the developments in the psychological, cognitive, and computer sciences. Now in its second edition, Kim explores, maps, and interprets this complex and exciting terrain. But it has never held a more important place than it does today, with both traditional problems and new topics often sparked by the developments in the psychological, cognitive, and computer sciences.
Now in its second edition, Kim explores, maps, and interprets this complex and exciting terrain. The second edition features a new chapter on Cartesian substance dualism-a perspective that has been little discussed in the mainstream philosophy of mind and almost entirely ignored in most introductory books in philosophy of mind. In addition, all the chapters have been revised and updated to reflect the trends and developments of the last decade. Throughout the text, Kim allows readers to come to their own terms with the central problems of the mind.
Comprehensive, clear, and fair, Philosophy of Mind is a model of philosophical exposition. It is a major contribution to the study and teaching of the philosophy of mind. Edit this record. Mark as duplicate. Find it on Scholar. Request removal from index. Revision history. Download options PhilArchive copy. This entry has no external links.
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