Minds and Bodies: An Introduction with Readings (Philosophy and the Human Situation)

This course is delivered online; to participate you must to be familiar with using a computer for purposes such as sending email and searching the Internet. You will also need regular access to the Internet and a computer meeting our recommended minimum computer specification. This course aims to introduce students to philosophy of mind and in particular to the problem of the relation between the mind and the body, by:. Assessment for this course is based on two written assignments - one short assignment of words due half way through the course and one longer assignment of words due at the end of the course.

Please use the 'Book' or 'Apply' button on this page. Alternatively, please contact us to obtain an application form. This website uses cookies. Please read our cookie policy for more information. Philosophy of Mind Online. Other runs of this course Mon 29 Apr to 12 Jul Book now Contact us Notify me. Overview The philosophy of mind is one of the most exciting areas within philosophy.

Programme details The areas you will cover in this course are: Recommended reading To participate in the course you will need to have regular access to the Internet and you will need to buy the following paperback book: Assignments are not graded but are marked either pass or fail. IT requirements This course is delivered online; to participate you must to be familiar with using a computer for purposes such as sending email and searching the Internet.

Tutor Ms Rachel Paine. Course aims This course aims to introduce students to philosophy of mind and in particular to the problem of the relation between the mind and the body, by: Guiding them through a number of classical and contemporary readings. Helping them to think for themselves about these important but difficult issues. Introduce students to philosophical thinking. Help participants understand the mind-body problem.

Familiarise students with the key arguments for and against the main positions in the debate about the mind-body problem. Enable students to think for themselves about the issues involved in the mind-body problem. Teaching methods Guided reading of texts. Group discussions of particular issues. Questions to be answered in personal folders. Debating from positions given rather than from personal belief to hone skills of debate. Behaviourism is itself a materialist view, in that it denies that minds are immaterial things.

In fact, behaviourists deny that minds are things at all. So, for example, to have a sudden pain in your knee is to become disposed to wince, cry out, rub your knee, complain, and so on. Or to take an example Ryle himself uses to believe that the ice on a pond is thin is be disposed to warn people about the ice, be careful when skating on the ice, and so on — the nature of actions depending on the circumstances.

Philosophy and the Human Condition

Armstrong is quite sympathetic to behaviourism and he explains its advantages over Cartesian dualism and other views. He sees his own view as a natural step on from behaviourism. He agrees with Ryle that there is a very close connection between being in a certain mental state and being disposed to behave in certain ways, but instead of saying that the mental state is the disposition to display a certain pattern of behaviour, he says it is the brain state that causes us to display that pattern of behaviour.

A pain in the knee is the brain state that tends to cause wincing, crying out, knee rubbing, and so on. The belief that the ice is thin is the brain state that tends to cause giving warnings, skating with care, and so on. The idea is that there is some specific brain state the activation of a certain bunch of nerve fibres that tends to produce the relevant cluster of actions, and that this brain state is the mental state — the pain or the belief, or whatever.

So the mind turns out to be the same thing as the brain or the central nervous system. Armstrong calls this view central-state theory.

Indeed, identity theory was sometimes referred to as Australian materialism — sometimes with the unwarranted implication that it was an unsophisticated view. Australia has continued to produce important philosophers of mind — Frank Jackson and David Chalmers, for example, though those two have been critical of materialism. So to be clear, Armstrong is presenting a theory where the mind is the brain explained in terms of its causal powers. How is that argument presented? In the first part of the book, Armstrong makes a general case for the view that mental states are brain states the central-state theory.

Then in the second part — which takes up most of the book — he shows how this view could be true, how mental states could be nothing more than brain states. He surveys a wide range of different mental states and processes and argues that they can all be analysed in causal terms — in terms of the behaviour they tend to cause, and also, in some cases, the things that cause them.

So when we talk about someone willing, or believing, or perceiving, or whatever, we can translate that into talk about causal processes, about there being an internal state that was caused in a certain way and tends to have certain effects. These analyses are very detailed and often illuminating, and they go a long way towards demystifying the mind. Armstrong shows how mental phenomena that may initially seem mysterious and inexplicable can be naturally understood as complex but unmysterious causal processes. What then turns that explanation in terms of cause and effect into a materialist theory?

Well, the causal analysis shows that mental states are just states that have certain causes and effects — that play a certain causal role. They could be states of an immaterial soul. But it shows that they could be brain states. Well, Dennett is more wary of identifying mental states with brain states. But he doubts that our everyday talk of mental states will map neatly onto scientific talk about brain states — that for every mental state a person has there will be a discrete brain state that causes all the associated behaviour.

So his view is closer to that of Ryle, with whom he studied in the early s.

The Best Books on the Philosophy of Mind | Five Books

In the years after Armstrong wrote, the idea that mental states are brain states became widely accepted, though it was tweaked in various ways. This view is known as property dualism as opposed to substance, or Cartesian, dualism, which holds that the mind is a non-physical thing. Nerve impulses from your retinas travel to your brain and produce a certain brain state, which in turn produces certain effects it produces the belief that the sky is blue, disposes you to say that the sky is blue, and so on. This is the familiar story from Armstrong. And in principle a neuroscientist could identify that brain state and tell you all about it.

The same goes for all other sense experiences. Now if you think about consciousness this way, then it seems incredibly mysterious. This is what David Chalmers has called the hard problem of consciousness. Not an answer to the hard problem exactly. Dennett thinks that that picture is a relic of Cartesian dualism, and he calls the supposed inner theatre the Cartesian Theatre.

We used to think there really was an inner observer — the immaterial soul. Descartes thought that signals from the sense organs were channelled to the pineal gland in the centre of the brain, from where they were somehow transmitted to the soul. Once we give up Cartesian dualism and accept that mental processes are just hugely complex patterns of neural activity, then we must give up the picture of consciousness that went with it. How then does Dennett explain consciousness?

Because that just sounds like a machine.

Mind–body problem

And Dennett thinks that one of the effects of those brain systems is to create in us the sense that we have this inner world. It seems to us when we reflect on our experiences that there is an inner show, but that is an illusion. By a thought experiment, you mean an imaginary situation used to clarify our thinking? You see a woman jog past. She is not wearing glasses, but she reminds you of someone who does, and that memory immediately contaminates your memory of the running woman so that you become convinced she was wearing glasses. Now Dennett asks how this memory contamination affected your conscious experience.

Did the contamination happen post-consciousness, so that you had a conscious experience of the woman without glasses, and then the memory of this experience was wiped and replaced with a false memory of her with glasses? Or did it happen pre-consciousness, so that your brain constructed a false conscious experience of her as having glasses? If there were a Cartesian Theatre, then there should be a fact of the matter: Suppose we were monitoring your brain as the women passed and found that your brain detected the presence of a women without glasses before it activated the memory of the other woman with glasses.

Nor would asking you have settled it. Suppose that as the women passed we had asked you whether she was wearing glasses. Which report would have caught the content of your consciousness? All we — or you — can really be sure of is what you sincerely think you saw, and that depends on the precise timing of the question. The book is packed with thought experiments like this, all designed to undermine the intuitive but misleading picture of the Cartesian Theatre. He is trying to explain away consciousness in that sense. He thinks that that conception of consciousness is confused and unhelpful, and his aim is to persuade us to adopt a different one.

The brain is continually constructing multiple interpretations of sensory stimuli woman without glasses, women with glasses , like multiple drafts of an essay, which circulate and compete for control of speech and other behaviour. Which version we report will depend on exactly when we are questioned — on which version has most influence at that moment.

In a later book Dennett speaks of consciousness as fame in the brain. The idea is that those interpretations that are conscious are those that get a lot of influence over other brain processes — that become neurally famous. We actively stimulate our own cognitive systems, mainly by talking to ourselves in inner speech.

This creates what Dennett calls the Joycean Machine — a sort of program running on the biological brain, which has all kinds of useful effects. Is it just whichever gives the best explanation? Dennett thinks there are both conceptual and empirical reasons for preferring the Multiple Drafts view. But he also cites a lot of scientific evidence in support of the Multiple Drafts view — for example, concerning how the brain represents time. And he certainly thinks his offers a better explanation of our behaviour, including our intuitions about consciousness.

1. Programme details?
2. Philosophy and the Human Situation.
3. Werke von Max Ring (German Edition)?
4. Keeping the Wolf At Bay;
5. Life On My Knees.
6. Why Famous Men Walked & How To Discover Happiness Within..
7. Organizational Change and its Resistance?

For example, I was just thinking about my car, thinking that it is parked outside. Philosophers call this property of aboutness intentionality , and they say that what a mental state is about is its intentional content. Like consciousness, intentionality poses a problem for materialist theories. If mental states are brain states, how do they come to have intentional content? How can a brain state be about something, and how can it be true or false? Many materialists think the answer involves positing mental representations.

Then the next question is how brain states can be representations. A lot of work in contemporary philosophy of mind has been devoted to this task of building a theory of mental representation. There are many books on this topic I could have chosen — by Fred Dretske, for example, or Jerry Fodor. Is this the same as meaning? How do mental representations of some kind acquire meaning for us? Yes, the problem is how mental representations come to mean, or signify, or stand for, things. As the title indicates, Millikan thinks there are many varieties of meaning.

To begin with, she argues that there is a natural form of meaning which is the foundation of it all. We say that dark clouds mean rain, that tracks on the ground mean that pheasants have been there, that geese flying south mean that winter is coming, and so on.

There is a reliable connection, or mapping, between occurrences of the two things, which makes the first a sign of the second. You can get information about the second from the first. Millikan calls these natural signs. So this is one basic form of meaning, but it is limited.

One thing is a sign of another — carries information about it — only if the other thing really is there. Clouds mean rain only if rain is actually coming. Tracks means pheasants only if they were made by pheasants, and so on. So natural signs, unlike our thoughts and perceptions, cannot be false, cannot misrepresent. Yes, they are what Millikan calls intentional signs. But normally they are natural signs too.

Take a sentence of English, rather than a mental representation. Sentences of human language are also intentional signs, as are animal calls. We say this with the purpose of alerting someone to the fact that rain is coming, and we can do this successfully only if rain is coming.

So if we succeed in our purpose, the sentence we produce will be a natural sign that rain is coming, just as dark clouds are. However, it will still be an intentional sign that rain is coming in virtue of the fact that we used it with the purpose of signifying to someone that rain is coming. Millikan argues that intentional signs are always designed for some recipient or consumer.

Roughly, then, an intentional sign of something is a sign whose purpose is to be a natural sign of it. But how then can mental representations have meaning? No, but our brains do. Millikan has a thoroughly evolutionary approach to the mind. Evolution has built biological mechanisms to do certain things — to have certain purposes or functions. And the idea is that the mind is composed of a vast array of systems designed to perform specific tasks — detecting features of the world, interpreting them, reacting to them, and selecting actions to perform.

These systems pass information to each other using representations which are designed to serve as natural signs of certain things — and which are thus intentional signs of those things. In very general terms, then, the view is that mental representations derive their meaning from the purposes with which they are used.

This sort of view is called a teleological theory of meaning. As I said, Millikan takes an evolutionary approach to the mind. She thinks that in order to understand how our minds represent things we need to look at the evolution of mental representation, and she devotes a whole section of the book to this, with lots of information about animal psychology and fascinating observations of animal behaviour. Millikan thinks that the basic kind of intentional signs are what she calls pushmi-pullyu signs, which simultaneously represent what is happening and how to react to it.

An example is the rabbit-thump. When a rabbit thumps its hind foot, this signals to other rabbits both that danger is present and that they should take cover. The sign is both descriptive and directive, and if used successfully, it will be a natural sign both of what is happening now and of what will happen next. Millikan thinks that the bulk of mental representations are of this kind; they represent both what is happening and what response to make.

This enables creatures to take advantage of opportunities for purposive action as they present themselves. Millikan argues that more sophisticated behavioural control requires splitting off the descriptive and directive roles, so that the creature has separate representations of objects and of its goals, expressed in a common mental code, and she devotes two chapters of the book to exploring how this might have happened.

Finally, she argues that even with these separate representations, non-human animals are still limited in what they can represent. They can only represent things that have practical significance for them — things relevant in some way to their needs. We, on the other hand, can represent things that have no practical value for us.

To represent this kind of theoretical information, Millikan argues, a new representational medium was needed with a certain kind of structure, and she thinks that this was provided by language. It is language that has enabled us to collect representational junk and do all the wonderful things we do with it. Millikan argues that linguistic signs emerge from natural signs and that they are normally read in exactly the same way as natural signs. This view has some surprising consequences, which Millikan traces out.

One of them is that we can directly perceive things through language.

A Materialist Theory of the Mind

The idea is that the words are a natural sign of Johnny just as the sound of his voice or the pattern of light reflected from his face is. Of course, there is processing involved in getting from the sound of the words to a belief about Johnny, but Millikan argues that the processes involved are not fundamentally different from those involved in sense perception.

Millikan writes clearly, but the discussion is complex and subtle. But it repays the effort. This is a book with a different approach to the mind? Carruthers makes the case for the thesis of massive modularity — the view that the mind is composed of numerous separate subsystems, or modules, each of which has a specialised function. This view has been popular with people working in evolutionary psychology, since it explains how the human mind could have developed from simpler precursors by adding or repurposing specific modules. Carruthers argues that this view offers the best explanation of a host of experimental data.

Carruthers surveys a huge range of scientific work from across the cognitive sciences and fits it together into a big picture. As I said, this is something experimental psychologists are often wary of doing, because it means going beyond their own particular area of expertise.

Third, because of the way Carruthers argues for his views, drawing on masses of empirical data from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, it is a very informative work.