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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2010
Life Science Library now claims to examine ‘the most complex of all biological organs: the human mind’, and scientists quite commonly make no distinction between mind and brain — they delight in talking about the brain classifying, decoding, perceiving, deciding or giving orders. And while resisting the conceptual muddle involved in talking of the brain doing what persons do, the identity hypothesis tries to provide a philosophically respectable basis for the equation of mind and brain, maintaining that ‘mind’ is just a term for a group of activities and dispositions, and that these in turn are in some sense to be identified with brain activities or traces. On the other hand, from the point of view of religion and traditional philosophy the suggestion is completely unplausible — creative or inventive thought, and aesthetic, moral or religious experiences seem so far removed from mechanical or physiological processes that a good deal of softening up is necessary if any kind of identity theory is to get a fair hearing. This softening up is best carried out by considering the difficulties in the main rival philosophical view, interactionism.
page 161 note 1 Strawson, P. F., Individuals (Methuen, 1959), pp. 104 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 163 note 1 Smythies, J. R., ed., Brain and Mind (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 252.Google Scholar
page 164 note 1 Cf. Passmore, J., Philosophical Reasoning (Duckworth, 1961), p. 54.Google Scholar
page 166 note 1 Feigl, H., ‘The “Mental” and the “Physical”’ in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. ii (University of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp. 370–497.Google Scholar
page 166 note 2 Ibid., p. 445.
page 166 note 3 Ibid., p. 446.
page 168 note 1 Sellars, Wilfred, ‘The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem’, Review of Metaphysics, xviii (1965), pp. 430 ff., esp. p. 442.Google Scholar Sellars also thinks that what is at issue is the identity of ‘raw-feels’ universals and brain-state universals. But how then can the identity be empirical and not logical?
page 170 note 1 Smart, J. J. C., ‘Sensations and Brain Processes, Philosophical Review, 68 (1959), pp. 148–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cf. his Philosophy and Scientific Realism (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), esp. pp. 94 ffGoogle Scholar.
page 171 note 1 , Smart, Philosophical Review, 70 (1961), p. 407,Google Scholar explains the elusiveness as ‘our inability to describe sensations except by reference to stimulus conditions’. But we have no such inability, cf. ‘loud’, ‘sour’, ‘pungent’, ‘dazzling’, ‘a dull ache’, although as sensations are private (not elusive) we may find it easiest to convey information about them in unusual cases by referring to what presumably gives other persons the same experience.
page 172 note 1 Hirst, R. J., Problems of Perception (Allen & Unwin, 1959), ch. 7,Google Scholar and Wyburn, G. M., Pickford, R. W. and Hirst, R. J., Human Senses and Perception (Oliver & Boyd, 1964), ch. 15Google Scholar.
page 174 note 1 See above, p. 148.
page 175 note 1 Objections (ii)-(iv) are raised by Beloff, J. in Brain and Mind (1965), ed. Smythies, J. R., pp. 47 ffGoogle Scholar.
page 176 note 1 See Hirst, R. J., Problems of Perception, p. 203.Google Scholar
page 177 note 1 Price, H. H. in Brain and Mind, ed. Smythies, , p. 59.Google Scholar But, as Chisholm sees, the possible non-existence of the object is the important point, cf. Brentano, Franz, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874),Google Scholar bk. n, ch. 1, sec. 5, ed. Kraus (Leipzig, 1924), vol. i, p. 124, and vol. ii, pp. 133-4.
page 177 note 2 Cf. Chisholm, R., Perceiving (Cornell, 1957), pp. 169–70.Google Scholar
page 177 note 3 Kenny, A., Action, Emotion and Will (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 198.Google Scholar His own favoured scholastic criterion placing ‘the intentionality of psychological actions precisely in the fact that they do not change their objects’ rules out ‘love’, ‘hate’, ‘fear’ and other psychological attitudes which affect their human or animal objects if present.
page 178 note 1 As Mackay, D. M. points out inBrain and Mind, p. 174.Google Scholar
page 178 note 1 Spinoza, Ethics, note to Proposition n of Part III.