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

by Richard Rorty

All these are good questions, and nothing that I have said so far helps answer them. To answer them, I think, nothing will serve save the history of ideas. Just as the patient needs to relive his past to answer his questions, so philosophy needs to relive its past in order to answer its questions. So far I have, in the customary manner of contemporary philosophers of mind, been flinging around terms like “phenomenal,” “functional,” “intentional,” “spatial” and the like as if these formed the obvious vocabulary in which to discuss the topic. But of course the philosophers who created the language which gave us the mind-body problem did not use this vocabulary, or anything close to it. If we are to understand how we got the intuitions which make us think that there must be a real, indissoluble, philosophical problem somewhere in the neighborhood, we have to set aside our up-to-date jargon and think in the vocabulary of the philosophers whose books gave us those intuitions. In my Wittgensteinian view, an intuition is never anything more or less than familiarity with a language-game, so to discover the source of our intuitions is to relive the history of the philosophical language-game we find ourselves playing.

09-01-2020. 34. Is this not very similar to Nietzschean genealogy?

hylomorphic

5. ability to sustain relations to the inexistent (“intentionality”)

09-02-2020. 35.

Philosophers have constantly seized upon some distinctive feature of human life in order to give our intuition of our uniqueness a “firm philosophical basis.” Because these firm bases are so varied, naturalisms and materialisms, when not shrugged off as hopeless attempts to jump a vast ontological (or epistemological, or linguistic) gulf, are often treated as trivially true but pointless. They are pointless, it is explained, because our uniqueness has nothing whatever to do with whichever abyss the naturalist has laboriously filled in, but everything to do with some other abyss which has all the while been gaping just behind his back. In

09-02-2020. 36. Like our reasoning with morality. If you believe in morality you must be a dualist!

In the present chapter, I want to stick as closely as possible to the question: Why should consciousness seem to have anything to do with reason or with personhood? By sticking to the three topics of grasping universals, separation from the body, and non-spatiality, I shall move toward my conclusion that if we hold these last three historically distinct notions apart, then we shall no longer be tempted by the notion that knowledge is made possible by a special Glassy Essence which enables human beings to mirror nature. Thus we shall not be tempted to think that the possession of an inner life, a stream of consciousness, is relevant to reason. Once consciousness and reason are separated out in this way, then personhood can be seen for what I claim it is—a matter of decision rather than knowledge, an acceptance of another being into fellowship rather than a recognition of a common essence.

09-02-2020. 38. Chapter thesis.

When this question was answered in terms of the distinction between the eye of the body and the Eye of the Mind, νου̂ς—thought, intellect, insight—was identified as what separates men from beasts. There was, we moderns may say with the ingratitude of hindsight, no particular reason why this ocular metaphor seized the imagination of the founders of Western thought. But it did, and contemporary philosophers are still working out its consequences, analyzing the problems it created, and asking whether there may not be something to it after all. The notion of “contemplation,” of knowledge of universal concepts or truths as θϵωρία, makes the Eye of the Mind the inescapable model for the better sort of knowledge. But it is fruitless to ask whether the Greek language, or Greek economic conditions, or the idle fancy of some nameless pre-Socratic, is responsible for viewing this sort of knowledge as looking at something (rather than, say, rubbing up against it, or crushing it underfoot, or having sexual intercourse with it).6

09-02-2020. 39. Do not see the truth, sex the truth.

“sour”

But this “naturalistic” view of soul did not prevent Aristotle from arguing that since the intellect had the power of receiving the form of, for example, froghood (skimming off the universal from the clearly known particular frog, so to speak) and taking it on itself without thereby becoming a frog, the intellect (νου̂ς) must be something very special indeed. It must be something immaterial—even though no such strange quasi-substance need be postulated to explain most human activity, any more than it need be postulated to explain the frog’s.8

“Why Isn’t the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?”15

In my view, as I have said, “essentialist intuitions” and “clear and distinct perceptions” are always appeals to linguistic habits entrenched in the language by our predecessors. So what needs explanation is how Descartes was able to convince himself that his repackaging was “intuitive.”

09-02-2020. 56.

Granted that the “argument from doubt” has no merit, I think that nevertheless it is one of those cases of “finding bad reasons for what we believe on instinct” which serves as a clue to the instincts which actually do the convincing. The hunch in question here was, I think, that the indubitably known mathematical truths (once their proofs had been worked through so as to make them clearly and distinctly perceived with a sort of “phenomenal” vividness and non-discursiveness) and the indubitable momentary states of consciousness had something in common—something permitting them to be packaged inside of one substance.

09-02-2020. 56.

Once such second-generation Cartesians, who viewed Descartes himself as having one foot still implanted in the scholastic mud, had purified and “normalized” Cartesian doctrine, we got the full-fledged version of the “‘idea’ idea,” the one which made it possible for Berkeley to think of extended substance as a hypothesis of which we had no need. This thought could never have occurred to a pre-Cartesian bishop, struggling with the flesh rather than with intellectual confusion. With this full-fledged “‘idea’ idea” there came the possibility of philosophy as a discipline which centered around, of all things, epistemology, rather than around God and morality.

09-02-2020. 60.

The Cartesian change from mind-as-reason to mind-as-inner-arena was not the triumph of the prideful individual subject freed from scholastic shackles so much as the triumph of the quest for certainty over the quest for wisdom. From that time forward, the way was open for philosophers either to attain the rigor of the mathematician or the mathematical physicist, or to explain the appearance of rigor in these fields, rather than to help people attain peace of mind. Science, rather than living, became philosophy’s subject, and epistemology its center.

09-02-2020. 61. Nietzsche wants to help us foward wisdom with perspectival knowledge.

The Cartesian change from mind-as-reason to mind-as-inner-arena was not the triumph of the prideful individual subject freed from scholastic shackles so much as the triumph of the quest for certainty over the quest for wisdom. From that time forward, the way was open for philosophers either to attain the rigor of the mathematician or the mathematical physicist, or to explain the appearance of rigor in these fields, rather than to help people attain peace of mind. Science, rather than living, became philosophy’s subject, and epistemology its center.

09-02-2020. 61.

For Aristotle, and still for St. Thomas, the paradigm of a substance was an individual man or frog. Detached parts of men or frogs were, like clumps of turf or pailsful of water, dubious borderline cases—they were “capable of existing separately” in one sense (spatial separation), but they did not have the functional unity or “nature” which proper substances should have. Aristotle, when worried about such cases, was wont to dismiss them as “mere potencies”—as neither accidents, like the frog’s color, nor proper actualities, like the living, leaping frog itself.36 Descartes pretends that he is using “distinct substance” in the standard sense of “capable of separate existence,” but he does not mean either spatial separation or functional unity.37 He means something like “capable of having everything else disappear [or be “thought away”] and still being around.”38 This definition of “capacity for separate existence” fits the One, the Platonic Ideas, and Aristotle’s Unmoved Movers, but almost nothing else. Given such a definition, it is hardly surprising that there should turn out to be, at most, only three substances—God, mind, and matter. Nor is it surprising that Malebranche and Berkeley should begin to have doubts about the third candidate, and Spinoza about both third and second. It would not have occurred to Aristotle to think that frogs, stars, and men were simply so many accidents of one big substance merely on the ground that if we imagine all the other bodies in the ...

09-02-2020. 65.

Whereas the ancients took only the universal-grasping part of Descartes’s nonextended substance as “separately existing,” contemporary dualists (conceding beliefs, desires, and the like to Ryle as ways of speaking of dispositions) take only event-like candidates for mentality as “separately existing.” Whereas Thomists, for example, accuse Descartes of having pointlessly endowed sense with the immateriality which is the prerogative of reason, contemporary dualists accuse him of having pointlessly endowed mathematical knowledge and decisions on conduct with the immaterial thinghood which belongs to pains, after-images, and occurrent thoughts.

09-03-2020. 67.

Let me now remind the reader of the course I have followed in this chapter. In sections 1–2 I argued that we could make no sense of the notion of “mental entities” as a distinct ontological genus without invoking the notion of “phenomenal entities” such as pains, entities whose being was exhausted by the single property of, for example, painfulness. I claimed that the real problem was not to abjure such hypostatized universals but to explain why anyone had taken them seriously, and how they came to seem relevant to discussions of the nature of personhood and of reason. I hope that sections 3–6 have given an idea of how I think these historical questions can be answered (although I am painfully aware of the lacunae in the story I have told). My answer to the question “Why do we tend to lump the intentional and the phenomenal together as ‘the mental’?” is that Descartes used the notion of the “incorrigibly known” to bridge the gap between them. So I now need to spell out more fully my own anti-Cartesian, Wittgensteinian, view of the nature of “our privileged access to the mental.” In the following chapter, therefore, I put aside personhood and reason, and discuss consciousness almost exclusively. I shall try to show that the purportedly metaphysical “problem of consciousness” is no more and no less than the epistemological “problem of privileged access,” and that once this is seen questions about dualism versus materialism lose their interest.

09-03-2020. 69.

1. THE ANTIPODEANS Far away, on the other side of our galaxy, there was a planet on which lived beings like ourselves—featherless bipeds who built houses and bombs, and wrote poems and computer programs. These beings did not know that they had minds. They had notions like “wanting to” and “intending to” and “believing that” and “feeling terrible” and “feeling marvelous.” But they had no notion that these signified mental states—states of a peculiar and distinct sort—quite different from “sitting down,” “having a cold,” and “being sexually aroused.” Although they used the notions of believing and knowing and wanting and being moody of their pets and their robots as well as of themselves, they did not regard pets or robots as included in what was meant when they said, “We all believe …” or “We never do such things as….” That is to say, they treated only members of their own species as persons. But they did not explain the difference between persons and non-persons by such notions as “mind,” “consciousness,” “spirit,” or anything of the sort. They did not explain it at all; they just treated it as the difference between “us” and everything else. They believed in immortality for themselves, and a few believed that this would be shared by the pets or the robots, or both. But this immortality did not involve the notion of a “soul” which separated from the body. It was a straightforward matter of bodily resurrection followed by mysterious and instantaneous motion to what they ref...

09-03-2020. 71.

In most respects, then, the language, life, technology, and philosophy of this race were much like ours. But there was one important difference. Neurology and biochemistry had been the first disciplines in which technological breakthroughs had been achieved, and a large part of the conversation of these people concerned the state of their nerves.

09-03-2020. 71.

Plato’s Theaetetus, Descartes’s Meditations, Hume’s Treatise, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology, Strawson’s Individuals, etc.

(This conforms to Antipodean practice, as well as to our intuition that dogs have nonphysical states simply by virtue of having pains, whereas computers do not, even by virtue of offering us novel and exciting truths.)

September 17, 2020. Page 81.

As for interactionism, the Antipodeans would not dream of denying that beliefs and desires, for example, interact causally with irradiations of the retina, movements of the arm, and so on. But they view talk of such an interaction not as yoking different ontological realms but as a handy (because brief) reference to function rather than to structure. (It is as philosophically unproblematic as a transaction between a government and an individual. No set of necessary and sufficient conditions stated in terms of just who did what to whom can be given for a remark about such a transaction, any more than for remarks about beliefs caused by radiations and movements caused by beliefs—but who would have thought they could?) Interaction would only be of interest if a neural discharge were swerved from its course by a raw feel, or drained of some of its power by a raw feel, or something of the sort. But the Antipodean neurologists have no need of such hypotheses.

September 17, 2020. Page 83.

Still, we must ask whether there is some pre-philosophical intuition which is preserved in (P) and which can be separated from the Cartesian picture. What exactly is the difference between misdescribing something like a star and misdescribing something like a pain? Why does the former seem obviously possible and the latter unimaginable? Perhaps the answer goes something like this. We expect the star to look the same even after we realize that it is a faraway ball of flame rather than a nearby hole, but the pain ought to feel different once we realize that it is a stimulated C-fiber, for the pain is a feeling, as the star is not a visual appearance. If we give this answer, however, we are still stuck with the notion of “feeling” and with the puzzle about whether the Antipodeans have any feelings.

September 18, 2020. Not bad yet. Page 85.

But, we may then say, let that other brain-state be the referent of “pain” rather than the stimulated C-fibers. Every time the materialist says “but that’s just our description of a brain-state,” his opponent will reply, “Okay, let’s talk about the brain-state which is the ‘act of imperfect apprehension’ of the first brain-state.”6 And so the materialist seems to be pressed ever backward—with the mental cropping up again wherever error does. It is as if man’s Glassy Essence, the Mirror of Nature, only became visible to itself when slightly clouded. A neural system can’t have clouds but a mind can. So minds, we conclude, cannot be neural systems.

September 18, 2020. Not bed yet. Page 87.

To sharpen the issue a bit further, perhaps we may drop from consideration the Antipodean epiphenomenalists and the Terrestrial skeptics. The former’s problem about the neurology of pain reports seems insoluble; if they are to continue charitably to ascribe states to Earthmen which are unknown to Antipodeans they will have to swallow a whole dualistic system, irrefutable by further empirical inquiry, in order to explain our linguistic behavior. As for the Terran skeptic’s claim that the Antipodeans have no raw feels, this is based entirely on the a priori dictum that one cannot have a raw feel and lack a word for it. Neither intellectual position—the extreme charity of the Antipodean epiphenomenalist and the parochial distrust of the Terrestrial skeptic—is attractive. We are left with the Antipodean materialist saying “They think they have feelings but they don’t” on the one hand and Terrestrial philosophers saying “They have feelings but don’t know it” on the other hand. Is there a way out of this impasse, given that every empirical result (brain-switching, etc.) seems to weigh equally on both sides? Are there powerful philosophical methods which will cut through the problem and either settle it or offer some happy compromise?

September 18, 2020. Not bad yet. Page 88. The principle of charity.

One philosophical method which will do no good at all is “analysis of meanings.” Everybody understands everybody else’s meanings very well indeed. The problem is that one side thinks there are too many meanings around and the other side too few. In this respect the closest analogy one can find is the conflict between inspired theists and uninspired atheists. An inspired theist, let us say, is one who “just knows” that there are supernatural beings which play certain explanatory roles in accounting for natural phenomena. (They are not to be confused with natural theologians—who offer the supernatural as the best explanation of these phenomena.) Inspired theists have inherited their picture of the universe as divided into two great ontological realms—the supernatural and the natural—along with their language. The way they talk about things is inextricably tied up with—or at least strikes them as inextricably tied up with—references to the divine. The notion of the supernatural does not strike them as a “theory” any more than the notion of the mental strikes us as a “theory.” When they encounter atheists they view them as people who don’t know what’s going on, although they admit that atheists seem able to predict and control natural phenomena very nicely indeed. (“Thank heaven,” they say, “that we are not as those natural theologians are, or we too might lose touch with the real.”) The atheists view these theists as having too many words in their language and too many meanin...

September 18, 2020. Not bed yet. Page 89. Believing in the mental as a theist.

Thus some tender-minded philosophers have risen above the “warfare between science and theology” and seen Bonaventure and Bohr as possessing different, noncompetitive “forms of consciousness.” The question “consciousness of what?” is answered by something like “the world” or “the thing-in-itself” or “the sensible manifold” or “stimulations.” It does not matter which of these is offered, since all are terms of art designed to name entities with no interesting features save placid neutrality. The analogue of this tactic among tough-minded philosophers of mind is neutral monism, in which the mental and the physical are seen as two “aspects” of some underlying reality which need not be described further. Sometimes we are told that this reality is intuited (Bergson) or is identical with the raw material of sensation (Russell, Ayer), but sometimes it is simply postulated as the only means of avoiding epistemological skepticism (James, Dewey). In no case are we told anything about it save that “we just know what it’s like” or that reason (i.e., the need to avoid philosophical dilemmas) requires it. Neutral monists like to suggest that philosophy has discovered, or should look for, an underlying substrate, in the same way in which the scientist has discovered molecules beneath elements, atoms beneath molecules, and so on. But in fact the “neutral stuff” which is neither mental nor physical is not found to have powers or properties of its own, but simply postulated and then forgott...

But this means, paradoxically enough, that a species of behaviorism is entailed by the very principle that incarnates the Cartesian image of the Eye of the Mind—the very image which has often been accused of leading to the “veil of ideas” and to solipsism.

September 18, 2020. Page 94. Not bed yet. Do the Antipodians believe in god or soul?

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.

For the remainder of this chapter, however, I shall try to support my claim that we should drop (P) and thus be neither dualists, skeptics, behaviorists, nor “identity-theorists.” I do not know how to argue against (P) directly, since the claim that incorrigible knowledge is a matter of being presented with a phenomenal property is not so much a claim as an abbreviation for an entire theory—a whole set of terms and assumptions which center around the image of mind as mirroring nature, and which conspire to give sense to the Cartesian claim that the mind is naturally “given” to itself. It is this image itself which has to be set aside if we are to see through the seventeenth-century notion that we can understand and improve our knowing by understanding the workings of our mind. I hope to show the difference between setting it aside and adopting any of the positions which presuppose this image. So the remainder of this chapter is devoted to behaviorism, skepticism, and the mind-body identity theory, in an attempt to differentiate my position from each of these. In the concluding section of the chapter—“Materialism without Identity”—I attempt to say something more positive, but this attempt needs to be linked up with the discussion of other “mind-body problems” in chapter one in order to appear plausible.

September 18, 2020. Not bad yet. Page 98. Rorty's claim. What is P?

It is easy to heap ridicule on the notion that we can discover the truth of such a claim by doing something called “analyzing meanings.”9 It seems easy to say (with the skeptic) that we might have the ability without the feels. But it is hard, as Wittgenstein and Bouwsma have made clear, actually to tell a coherent story about what we have imagined. Despite this, (P′) has a certain plausibility. The reason it is plausible is that it is, once again, a corollary of: (P) Whenever we make an incorrigible report on a state of ourselves, there must be a property with which we are presented which induces us to make this report—

September 18, 2020. Not bed yet. Page 100. Wittgenstein does not think we can accurately report what we imagine. Why?

Ryle thought that he had eschewed this picture, but that he was unable to do so is shown by his attempt to show, paradoxically and fruitlessly, that there were no such things as incorrigible reports. Ryle was afraid that if there were any such reports, then something like (P) would have to be true in order to explain their existence. For he thought that if there were such a thing as an ability to make incorrigible noninferential reports on inner states, this would show that someone who knew nothing of behavior could know everything about inner states, and thus that Descartes was right after all. He rightly criticized the usual Cartesian account of introspection as a piece of “para-optics,” but he did not have another account available and thus was forced into the impossible position of having to deny the phenomenon of privileged access altogether. He devoted the least convincing chapter of The Concept of Mind (“Self-Knowledge”) to the paradoxical claim that “the sorts of things that I can find out about myself are the same as the sorts of things that I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same.”10 The result was that many philosophers who agreed that Ryle had shown that beliefs and desires were not inner states agreed also that he had left raw feels untouched, and thus that a choice still had to be made between dualism and materialism.11

September 18, 2020. Not bad yet. Page 101. Ryle is wrestling with Descartes Which shows the relevance of Descartes still.

How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviorism arise?—The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them—we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring-trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)12 Alan Donagan provides an admirable gloss on this passage, saying that the Cartesians … transformed the grammatical facts which we summed up in the proposition that sensation is non-dispositional and private into the grammatical fiction that sensations are states or processes in a private, and hence non-material, medium.

September 18, 2020. Not that yet. Page 103. I would like to understand this better.

This doctrine—that the most knowable was the most real—which George Pitcher has dubbed the “Platonic Principle,”15 added to the principle of the Naturally Given, produced either an idealistic or panpsychist reduction of the physical to the mental, or a behaviorist or materialist reduction in the other direction.

September 18, 2020. Page 105.

Here, as elsewhere, epistemology precedes, and tempts us into, metaphysics.

September 18, 2020. Page 108.

It has been emphasized by Strawson that Wittgenstein had two distinct sorts of “hostility”—one to privacy and one to immediacy. The latter, I think, was crucially important, but the former was entirely misguided.16

September 18, 2020. Page 109.

We can drop this notion if, with Wittgenstein, we note that unless there were such a thing as typical pain behavior we would never be able to teach a child the meaning of, for example, “toothache.” More generally, we can note that the way in which the pre-linguistic infant knows that it has a pain is the way in which the record-changer knows the spindle is empty, the plant the direction of the sun, and the amoeba the temperature of the water. But this way has no connection with what a language-user knows when he knows what pain is—that it is mental rather than physical, typically produced by injured tissues, etc. The mistake which Wittgenstein exposed was to assume that we learn what a pain is in the second sense by casting linguistic garb over our knowledge of what pain is in the first sense—by clothing our direct acquaintance with special felt, incommunicable qualities in words (thus rendering ourselves forever skeptical about whether the same incommunicable quality is being named when our friends use the same word).

September 18, 2020. Page 110.

de trop,

Any theory which views knowledge as accuracy of representation, and which holds that certainty can only be rationally had about representations, will make skepticism inevitable.

September 19, 2020. Page 113.

1. Some statements of the form “I just had a sensation of pain” are true 2. Sensations of pain are mental events 3. Neural processes are physical events 4. “Mental” and “physical” are incompatible predicates 5. No sensation of pain is a neural event 6. There are some nonphysical events Ryleans, and some Wittgensteinians, taking mentality to consist in accessibility to privileged access, and indulging what Strawson calls “a hostility to privacy,” deny (2). Panpsychists have denied (3).22 “Reductive” materialists such as Smart and Armstrong, who offer “topic-neutral” analyses of mentalistic terms, challenge (4). “Eliminative” materialists like Feyerabend and Quine deny (1).

September 19, 2020. Page 117.

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.

This attempt at a cheap version of the identity of minds and brains will work well enough if we refrain from pressing questions about criteria of identity of reference, just as topic-neutral analyses will work well enough if we refrain from pressing questions about identity of meaning. I do not, however, think that there are criteria for the identity of either which are useful in philosophically controversial cases. So I do not think that “eliminative materialism” is a more plausible version of the thesis of mind-brain identity than “reductive materialism.” When we try to make sense of any claim of the form “There aren’t really any X’s; what you have been talking about are nothing but Y’s,” it is always possible to object that (a) “X” refers to X’s, and (b) we cannot refer to what does not exist. So to get around this standard criticism the eliminative materialist would have to say either that “sensation” does not refer to sensations, but to nothing at all, or that “refer” in the sense of “talk about” is not subject to (b). Either line is defensible, and I defend the second in discussing the notion of reference in connection with the so-called problem of conceptual change in chapter six below. But since I think that the reductive and eliminative versions of the identity theory are both merely awkward attempts to throw into current philosophical jargon our natural reaction to an encounter with the Antipodeans, I do not think that the difference between the two should be pre...

September 19, 2020. Page 119. Eliminative materialism.

Philosophers are too involved with notions like “ontological status” to take such developments lightly, but no other part of culture is. (Consider the fact that only philosophers remain perplexed about how one can have unconscious motives and desires.) Only the notion that philosophy should provide a permanent matrix of categories into which every possible empirical discovery and cultural development can be fitted without strain impels us to ask unanswerable questions like “Would this mean that there were no minds?”

September 19, 2020. Page 123. Philosopher's often take things too seriously and do not seek to understand Actual human motivation which is often not about rationality.

To think otherwise is to commit the fallacy of omne ignotum pro spectro—taking everything one cannot understand to be a ghost, something known in advance to be beyond the reach of science, and which must therefore be despairingly handed over to philosophy.26

September 19, 2020. Page 124.

7. EPISTEMOLOGY AND “THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND” I hope that the two chapters on the “mind-body problem” which the reader has just finished have persuaded him of at least the following points: Unless we are willing to revive Platonic and Aristotelian notions about grasping universals, we shall not think that knowledge of general truths is made possible by some special, metaphysically distinctive, ingredient in human beings. Unless we wish to revive the seventeenth century’s somewhat awkward and inconsistent use of the Aristotelian notion of “substance” we shall not make sense of the notion of two ontological realms—the mental and the physical. Unless we wish to affirm what I have called Principle (P)—roughly, the claim that a distinctive metaphysical property of “presence to consciousness” grounds some of our noninferential reports of our states—we shall not be able to use the notion of “entities whose appearance exhausts their reality” to bolster the mental-physical distinction.

September 19, 2020. Page 126. He wants us To take this from the 2 chapters on philosophy of mind. Also principal P.

The notion that there is a problem about mind and body originated in the seventeenth century’s attempt to make “the mind” a self-contained sphere of inquiry. The idea was to offer a para-mechanical account of mental processes which, somehow, would underwrite some claims to knowledge and disallow other claims. The paradigm of the “epistemological turn” taken by philosophy in the seventeenth century was what Kant called “the physiology of the human understanding of the celebrated Mr. Locke”—a causal account of mental processes which is supposed to criticize and justify knowledge-claims. To get this notion off the ground required the Cartesian replacement of the ancient and medieval problem of reason by the modern problem of consciousness. If what I have been saying in the past two chapters is right, the persistence of notions like the “mind-body problem” and “the philosophy of mind” is due to the persistence of the notion that there is some link between the older notions of reason or personhood and the Cartesian notion of consciousness. Part II of this book attempts to dissolve the modern version of the problem of reason—the notion that there is a problem about the possibility or extent of accurate representation which is the concern of a discipline called “epistemology.” Insofar as it succeeds, this attempt frees us from the notion of human knowledge as an assemblage of representations in a Mirror of Nature, and thus reinforces the claim of part I that we can do without the...

September 19, 2020. Page 127.

Looking backward we see Descartes and Hobbes as “beginning modern philosophy,” but they thought of their own cultural role in terms of what Lecky was to call “the warfare between science and theology.” They were fighting (albeit discreetly) to make the intellectual world safe for Copernicus and Galileo. They did not think of themselves as offering “philosophical systems,” but as contributing to the efflorescence of research in mathematics and mechanics, as well as liberating intellectual life from ecclesiastical institutions. Hobbes defined “philosophy” as “such knowledge of effects of appearances, as we acquire by true ratiocination from the knowledge we have first of their causes of generation.”1 He had no wish to distinguish what he was doing from something else called “science.” It was not until after Kant that our modern philosophy-science distinction took hold. Until the power of the churches over science and scholarship was broken, the energies of the men we now think of as “philosophers” were directed toward demarcating their activities from religion. It was only after that battle had been won that the question of separation from the sciences could arise.

October 24, 2020. Page 132. Yet philosophy of religion is so big!

This project of learning more about what we could know and how we might know it better by studying how our mind worked was eventually to be christened “epistemology.”

October 24, 2020. Page 137. Epistemology.

Kant put philosophy “on the secure path of a science” by putting outer space inside inner space (the space of the constituting activity of the transcendental ego) and then claiming Cartesian certainty about the inner for the laws of what had previously been thought to be outer. He thus reconciled the Cartesian claim that we can have certainty only about our ideas with the fact that we already had certainty—a priori knowledge—about what seemed not to be ideas. The Copernican revolution was based on the notion that we can only know about objects a priori if we “constitute” them, and Kant was never troubled by the question of how we could have apodictic knowledge of these “constituting activities,” for Cartesian privileged access was supposed to take care of that.12 Once Kant replaced the “physiology of the human understanding of the celebrated Mr. Locke” with (in Strawson’s words) “the mythical subject of transcendental psychology,” “epistemology” as a discipline came of age.

October 24, 2020. Page 138.

It was just the notion of an “impression” upon which Reid—the great eighteenth-century enemy of the “‘idea’ idea”—fastened, to be followed by Green in the following century, and by a host of others (H. A. Prichard, Wilfrid Sellars, J. L. Austin, Jonathan Bennett) in our own. Reid says: There is no prejudice more natural to man, than to conceive of the mind as having some similitude to body in its operations. Hence, men have been prone to imagine, that as bodies are put in motion by some impulse or impression made upon them by contiguous bodies; so the mind is made to think and to perceive by some impression made upon it, or some impulse given to it by contiguous bodies.18

October 24, 2020. Page 142. Thomas Reid.