Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

This position seems to hold out hope of a sense in which the materialists’ metaphysical claim “Mental states are nothing but neural states” can be cheaply bought. For now it can be defended without the need to do anything as laborious or as shady as “philosophical analysis.” We can say that although in one sense there just are no sensations, in another sense what people called “sensations,” viz., neural states, do indeed exist. The distinction of senses is no more sophisticated than when we say that the sky does not exist, but that there is something which people call the sky (the appearance of a blue dome as a result of refracted sunlight) which does exist (although, as the prevalence of the Brandt-Campbell objection discussed in section 2 shows, the analogy cannot be pressed so as to make a mental state the “appearance” of a neural state). So it looks as if the argument for dualism above can be handled by saying that all the dualist is entitled to is the following premise: 1′. Some statements of the form “I just had a sensation of pain” are as properly taken as true as “The sky is overcast” and “The sun is rising,” but none of them is true. If we substitute (1’) for (1) in the argument, then we will substitute the following for (2): 2′. If there were any sensations of pain, they would be mental events and then draw the conclusion: 6′. The things which people have been calling “sensations” are physical (and, specifically, neural) events. We can then conclude that altho...

September 19, 2020. Page 118. The sky as parallel to the mind.