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

by Richard Rorty

My excuse for pretending that the mind is nothing but a set of incorrigibly introspectible raw feels, and that its essence is this special epistemic status, is that the same pretense is current throughout the area called “philosophy of mind.” This area of philosophy has come into existence in the thirty years since Ryle’s The Concept of Mind. The effect of that book was to make issues about minds and bodies turn almost entirely on the cases which resisted Ryle’s own logical behaviorist attempt to dissolve Cartesian dualism—namely, raw feels. Wittgenstein’s discussion of sensations in Philosophical Investigations seemed to offer the same sort of attempt at dissolution. Thus many philosophers have taken it for granted that “the mind-body problem” was the question of whether raw feels could be viewed as dispositions to behave. Thus the only possibilities have seemed to be the ones I have just cited: (a) granting that Ryle and Wittgenstein were right, and that there are no mental objects, (b) saying that they were wrong, and that therefore Cartesian dualism stands intact, with skepticism about other minds a natural consequence, and (c) some form of mind-brain identity theory, according to which Ryle and Wittgenstein were wrong, but Descartes is not thereby vindicated.

September 18, 2020. Not bad yet. Page 96.