Philosophy of Mind and Dualism
I have noticed that much of the recent writing in philosophy of mind assumes that dualism is false. It assumes that some materialist version of monism is correct. Since dualism was popular in the past, one would expect that the rejection of it occurred because of good reasons. One would also expect that popular texts on philosophy of mind would present the various kinds of dualism together with the arguments that defeated it. Now I really do not know enough about the historical situation to comment on it. What I can say is that my expectations were not satisfied. I have read a few introductions to philosophy of mind and they have two glaring problems. They present bad arguments against dualism, and they fail to mention that there are historically non-Cartesian forms of dualism.
The most common arguments I have heard against dualism are the science objection and the interaction objection. You have to keep in mind that these objections should be the best. The first objection simply says that our modern scientific knowledge precludes dualism. It does nothing of the kind. It precludes naive Cartesian dualism, but not all forms of Cartesian dualism and certainly not all kinds of dualism. So that objection is a complete failure. The second objection is that it is implausible to suppose that two radically different kinds of things causally interact. Of course, the nature of causation is undefined, so this objection is vague. But on certain accounts of causation, this objection is false and a problem for the materialist in any case. Since both of these objections are horrible, one can only conclude that introductory textbook writers don't know why dualism is supposed to be false. Perhaps they are just following the crowd.
It would be bad enough if bad reasons were given to support a denial of dualism. However, when a vast section of dualistic views are ignored, it shows that most writers on introductory philosophy of mind books don't know what dualism is and certainly don't understand it. A major dualist view is that of Thomas Aquinas. For those who do not know, he was not a Cartesian dualist. His analysis of human persons followed that of Aristotle. So he believed that the body was not the mere vehicle for the soul. Thoughts could occur on the material plane, at least in some sense. Yet a person did survive the death of their body with the memories of their current life. Since Aquinas is a major figure within philosophy, there is no good reason to ignore him.
It would be a mistake to extrapolate from these facts any sort of conclusion about the field of philosophy of mind. But I do have suspicions. I suspect that the field assumes materialism without argument. If faced with a living dualist, the philosopher would first mention something about the age of the argument. If that did not work, the he would mention one of the two problems above. If the dualist is still not convinced, then the materialist philosopher would leave convinced that the dualist was irrational. I hope that this is not the case. But my experiences with introductory textbooks give me reason to suspect that it is.
The most common arguments I have heard against dualism are the science objection and the interaction objection. You have to keep in mind that these objections should be the best. The first objection simply says that our modern scientific knowledge precludes dualism. It does nothing of the kind. It precludes naive Cartesian dualism, but not all forms of Cartesian dualism and certainly not all kinds of dualism. So that objection is a complete failure. The second objection is that it is implausible to suppose that two radically different kinds of things causally interact. Of course, the nature of causation is undefined, so this objection is vague. But on certain accounts of causation, this objection is false and a problem for the materialist in any case. Since both of these objections are horrible, one can only conclude that introductory textbook writers don't know why dualism is supposed to be false. Perhaps they are just following the crowd.
It would be bad enough if bad reasons were given to support a denial of dualism. However, when a vast section of dualistic views are ignored, it shows that most writers on introductory philosophy of mind books don't know what dualism is and certainly don't understand it. A major dualist view is that of Thomas Aquinas. For those who do not know, he was not a Cartesian dualist. His analysis of human persons followed that of Aristotle. So he believed that the body was not the mere vehicle for the soul. Thoughts could occur on the material plane, at least in some sense. Yet a person did survive the death of their body with the memories of their current life. Since Aquinas is a major figure within philosophy, there is no good reason to ignore him.
It would be a mistake to extrapolate from these facts any sort of conclusion about the field of philosophy of mind. But I do have suspicions. I suspect that the field assumes materialism without argument. If faced with a living dualist, the philosopher would first mention something about the age of the argument. If that did not work, the he would mention one of the two problems above. If the dualist is still not convinced, then the materialist philosopher would leave convinced that the dualist was irrational. I hope that this is not the case. But my experiences with introductory textbooks give me reason to suspect that it is.
posted by Matthew at 4:28 PM
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