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Full Idea
We should be ontological monists, but we should be conceptual dualists. We need to recognise a special phenomenal way of thinking about conscious properties, if we are to dispel the confusions that persuade us that conscious properties cannot be material.
Gist of Idea
Accept ontological monism, but conceptual dualism; we think in a different way about phenomenal thought
Source
David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 7.01)
Book Ref
Papineau,David: 'Thinking about Consciousness' [OUP 2004], p.175
A Reaction
This idea came to me as a revelation, and strikes me as spot on. We have developed conceptual dualism simply because humans cannot directly see that their thinking is actually physical brain activity. Thought seems ungrounded, and utterly different.
| 3643 | The concept of mind excludes body, and vice versa [Descartes] |
| 8462 | A hallucination can, like an ague, be identified with its host; the ontology is physical, the idiom mental [Quine] |
| 7881 | Accept ontological monism, but conceptual dualism; we think in a different way about phenomenal thought [Papineau] |
| 13396 | Analysing mental concepts points to 'inclusionism' - that mental phenomena are part of the physical [Jubien] |