Ideas from 'Philosophical Naturalism' by David Papineau [1993], by Theme Structure

[found in 'Philosophical Naturalism' by Papineau,David [Blackwell 1993,0-631-18903-3]].

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7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 5. Naturalism
Externalism may be the key idea in philosophical naturalism
                        Full Idea: Some people view an externalist approach to epistemology as the essence of philosophical naturalism.
                        From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], Intro)
                        A reaction: I suspect philosophers avoid psychology and mental events, simply because they are elusive. Externalism is a theory about justification, and independent of naturalism as a metaphysic.
17. Mind and Body / A. Mind-Body Dualism / 8. Dualism of Mind Critique
How does a dualist mind represent, exist outside space, and be transparent to itself?
                        Full Idea: Even dualists must explain how the mind represents things, but then their mind-stuff has so many special powers already (being outside space but in time, being transparent to itself etc.) that one more scarcely seems worth worrying about.
                        From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 3.1 n1)
                        A reaction: I share the exasperation. It is hard to see how a dualist could even begin to formulate a theory about HOW the mind does so many different things. Could Descartes get a research grant for it? Would we understand God if he tried to explain it to us?
17. Mind and Body / C. Functionalism / 8. Functionalism critique
Functionalism needs causation and intentionality to explain actions
                        Full Idea: The functionalist approach to the mind needs to invoke assumptions about what desires are for and beliefs are about, in order to infer what agents will do.
                        From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 3.2)
                        A reaction: Isn't the idea that you discover what desires are for and what beliefs are about by examining their function, and what the agent does? Which end should we start?
17. Mind and Body / D. Property Dualism / 5. Supervenience of mind
Supervenience requires all mental events to have physical effects
                        Full Idea: The argument for supervenience rests on the principle that any mental difference must be capable of showing itself in differential physical consequences.
                        From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.8)
                        A reaction: With our current knowledge of the brain, to assume anything less than this sort of correlation would be crazy.
Epiphenomenalism is supervenience without physicalism
                        Full Idea: Supervenience is a necessary condition for physicalism, but it is not sufficient. Epiphenomenalism rules out mental variation without physical variation, but says mental properties are quite distinct from physical properties.
                        From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.2)
                        A reaction: I take full epiphenomenalism about mind to be incoherent, and not worth even mentioning (see Idea 7379). Papineau seems to be thinking of so-called property dualism (which may also be incoherent!).
17. Mind and Body / E. Mind as Physical / 1. Physical Mind
Knowing what it is like to be something only involves being (physically) that thing
                        Full Idea: Physicalism does not deny that there are conscious experiences, nor that 'it is like something to have them'. The claim is only that this is nothing different from what it is to be a physical system of the relevant kind.
                        From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 4.2)
                        A reaction: The implication is that no physicalist is an extreme eliminativist about consciousness, which seems to be correct. We all concede that weather exists, but have a reductive view of it. The key question is whether mind is reducible to physics.
17. Mind and Body / E. Mind as Physical / 7. Anti-Physicalism / b. Multiple realisability
If a mental state is multiply realisable, why does it lead to similar behaviour?
                        Full Idea: If functionalism implies that there is nothing physically in common among the realisations of a given mental state, then there is no possibility of any uniform explanation of why they all give rise to a common physical result.
                        From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 2.2)
                        A reaction: This is the well known interaction problem for dualism. The standard reply is to accept interaction as a given (with no apparent explanation). A miracle, if you like.
19. Language / F. Communication / 4. Private Language
The Private Language argument only means people may misjudge their experiences
                        Full Idea: I take the moral of the Private Language argument to be that there must be room for error in people's judgements about their experiences, not that those judgements must necessarily be expressed in a language used by a community.
                        From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 4.4 n10)
                        A reaction: These two readings don't seem to be in conflict, and the argument must have something to say about the communal nature of thought expressed in language. Language imposes introspection on us?