Criticism of Dualism

Question 1

what is the problem of mental causation

Answer 1

by virtue of WHAT do the mind and body interact.

If they are different substances how can they interact

how can an immaterial mind cause a material body to react

Question 2

what is the two balls theory and some questions to consider when evaluating the theory?

Answer 2

one is physical (extended) one is Cartesian (non-extended)

they are two different substances, how can one ball move the other?

how much does your pain weigh?
how tall is your envy?
where is sadness located?
does happiness have sharp edges?

these questions are nonsensical because we know these are non physical things

Question 3

Ryle’s “Descartes myth” is an attack on the…

Answer 3

Dogma of the ghost in the machine

Question 4

according to Ryle what is the official Doctrine?

Answer 4

the idea held commonly held by philosophers that there are two kinds of things

Question 5

what are the two categories of the official doctrine?

Answer 5

physical, public, directly observable, time and space, external, extended.

mental, private, indirectly observable, time only, internal, thinking,

Question 6

what are the two kinds of lives according to Ryle

Answer 6

Public, directly observable.
Private, indirectly observable.

Question 7

what is Ryle’s thesis?

Answer 7

Dualism is false, not only in detail but in principle.

dualism makes several mistakes, A CATEGORY MISTAKE.

Question 8

what is a category mistake

Answer 8

when someone places a concept in an inappropriate category the “additional” thing becomes ghostly because it is not something that can be found

Question 9

what are the examples of a category mistake

Answer 9

looking for the “university” while at the university.

having left right AND a pair of gloves

Question 10

what is Ryle’s first criticism of dualism

Answer 10

the problem of explanatory power

a theory of mind should have some explanatory power and dualism does not-it can only tell us what the mind is NOT

dualism makes things harder to understand-bad, dead end theory.

mind becomes mysterious, inaccessible, unstudyable, inexplicable, it is no where to be found

“the ghost in the machine”

Question 11

what is Ryle’s second criticism of dualism

Answer 11

the category mistake

Descartes makes a category mistake when he takes the mind to belong to the same category as the body–the mind is not a ‘thing’ at all

Descartes treats it as a “thing separate from the body and this creates a ghost of the mind and you then will never find it .

Question 12

according to Ryle, there is only a _____

Answer 12

body

there is no mind AND body, there is only body

Question 13

what is logical behaviourism

Answer 13

all mental phenomena can be translated to Behaviour and dispositions to behaviour. there is nothing more to mind than that.

mind is just a bundled concept

Question 14

all mental ascriptions are…

Answer 14

…shorthand language used to describe incredibly complex behaviours and dispositions

Question 15

what is a bundled concept

Answer 15

mind is not an actual thing but a bundled concept– Just as there is no “university” to arrive to, there is no mind to arrive to

there are labs and rooms– and there are behaviours and dispositions to behaviour– but no uni and no mind

Question 16

what is Ryle’s view of the mind

Answer 16

to say you have a mind is to say no more than that you engage in and you are disposed to engage in certain behaviours to which it is appropriate to apply mental concepts.

Question 17

what is the goal/project of logical behaviourism

Answer 17

to translate mental terms/ categories into behavioural terms.

reduce mind to behaviour

meant to have more explanatory power than dualism

turn “i feel cold” into “if asked i would say i am cold”

what it is to “feel cold” is a complete list of behaviours that result from being cold

(i feel cold is a bundled concept)

Question 18

mental states are ______ to behavioural states

Answer 18

identical

logical identity–they are not two things

Question 19

what does “reductionism of the concept mind” mean

Answer 19

mind and B&D2B are the same thing, so take away “mind” and just call it all B&D2B.

Question 20

Ryle says you are purely _______, there is no ______ _____ but only what you ____

Answer 20

you are purely mechanical, there is no hidden world bit only what you see

Question 21

what is the first criticism of logical behaviourism

Answer 21

jones translation is incomplete.

it is simply not true that jones will always say he is cold.

translation:
if asked jones will say he is cold, only if he doesn’t THINK it will offend.

think is a mental term. needs further translation

we can not translate far enough to be able to eliminate mental terms–all translations will always involve a mental term.

Question 22

what is the second criticism of logical behaviourism

Answer 22

it does not appear to be true that mental phenomena are identical to behaviour

you can act a mental state without feeling it

you can have a pain tolerance and not act pain when you feel it.

it is possible to have one without the other making it possible for them to be different.

actors and stoics

Question 23

what is the third criticism of logical behaviourism

Answer 23

pain is supposed to be nothing more than pain behaviour. but what about the actual pain part?

pain actually does FEEL like something.

Pain has a certain quality to it. (Qualia)

Question 24

what is Qualia

Answer 24

qualitative SUBJECTIVE content.

the subjective quality of conscious experiences

what it FEELS like to experience something

Question 25

what theory did j. j.c smart subscribe to

Answer 25

he was a materialist. specifically the theory of identity

Question 26

what do the physicists try and avoid

Answer 26

dualism, they believed it was a bad approach to the mind body problem

Question 27

what is Smarts question regarding pain

Answer 27

when i repot that i am in pain, what am i reporting?

Question 28

what view about the mind did Smart disagree with

Answer 28

that the mind is made of irreducible mental states

Question 29

“It seems to me that science is increasingly giving us a viewpoint whereby organisms are able to be seen as ______________________…even the behaviour of man himself will one day be explicable in ____________________ terms. There does seem to be, so far as science is concerned, nothing in the world but increasingly complex arrangements of _______________________ constituents.”

Answer 29

“It seems to me that science is increasingly giving us a viewpoint whereby organisms are able to be seen as ____physical, chemical, mechanisms____…even the behaviour of man himself will one day be explicable in ______mechanistic____ terms. There does seem to be, so far as science is concerned, nothing in the world but increasingly complex arrangements of ________physical________ constituents.”

Question 30

what is Smart’s identity theory

Answer 30

For every TYPE of mental state there is a NUMERICALLY IDENTICAL brain state

simplified: minds are brains

Question 31

according to smart sensations (mental stuff) are not…

Answer 31

…caused by brain processes(states) but ARE them

Question 32

according to Smart what does reporting seeing red amount to

Answer 32

reporting a brain state.

“i see red” is actually just “ i am in brain state X”
“i am in pain” “my C fibers are firing”

all mental states are reducible to the numerically identical brain state that it is. “i am experiencing a neurological process”

Question 33

what is mind equal to, according to Smart

Answer 33

Brain

Question 34

what are the three steps of Smart’s argument for materialism

Answer 34

1. It seems that everything except ____consciousness______ can be explained in physical terms.
2. But it would be very strange if ______consciousness ______ were the only thing that couldn’t be explained in physical terms.
3. Therefore, it seems _________consciousness __________ must be explicable in physical terms.

Question 35

smart claims “That everything should be explicable in terms of physics…except the occurrence of _______________ seems to me to be frankly unbelievable.”
Non physical minds and mental states would be “_________________”

Answer 35

“That everything should be explicable in terms of physics…except the occurrence of ___sensations _________ seems to me to be frankly unbelievable.”
Non physical minds and mental states would be “________ nomological danglers _________”

Question 36

what are nomological danglers

Answer 36

those things that dangle outside of the laws of physics

if the mind is inexplicable in physical terms, then it would be a nomological dangler

Question 37

materialism is a theory of _____

Answer 37

identification

Question 38

what are some examples of the identity theory

Answer 38

demons -> germs
heat -> mean kinetic energy
two stars -> one star

A is reduced to B

what we once CALLED A and Thought A to be is learned to be B and now understood as B even is some still call and believe it to be A

this is an issue of language and identity

Question 39

what is the issue smart has to address and how does he address it?

Answer 39

how can i report on a brain state if i don’t know what brain state i am in?

simple answer: children do it all the time, we reference things we don’t actually know about all the time”

Question 40

what does Smart mean when he says we have to overcome our intuitions

Answer 40

discoveries always seem counter intuitive at the time. reduction always seems to take away sacredness or mysticism

Question 41

what is intertheoretic reductionism

Answer 41

a process in philosophy of science where one theory is reduced to another