Issues facing dualism Flashcards
name all the objections to substance dualism
- The problem of other minds
- Dualism makes a “category mistake” (Gilbert Ryle)
- the conceptual interaction problem (as articulated by Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia)
- the empirical interaction problem.
Explain the problem of other minds
Fundamentally, I believe that other people have minds
but how can we know that other people have minds?
we experience our own minds from within, through introspection.
Our knowledge of other people’s minds is very different, we cannot experience other people’s mental states. It seems that all we have to go on is other people’s behaviour, which is expressed through their bodies.
Anita Avramides - special problem for SUBSTANCE DUALISM- radical scepticism about the mind of others.
P1: Descartes says that mind and body are radically separate entities.
P2: I know my own mind directly by introspection
P3: I do not know other minds as I do not have access to other people’s mental states.
C: Therefore I do not know others have minds.
Once mind is radically divorced from the body, then even if we can show that there can be knowledge of body there remains the further question, How do we know whether there is a mind connected with any given body that we may encounter?
Response 1 (to the problem of other minds): The argument from analogy
Mill Shows that we can use the behaviour of other people to infer that they have minds too.
P1: I have a mind
P2: I know from experience that my mental states causes my behaviour
P3: Other people have bodies similar to mine and behave similarly to me in similar situations.
C1: Therefore, by analogy, their behaviour has the same type of cause as my behaviour, namely mental states.
C2: Therefore, other people have minds.
Objection to the argument from analogy
In general to argue from analogy with a single case is not a very strong procedure.
How is the arguement from analogy reframed to avoid the problem (that it is arguing from a single case)?
Explain what it does then state formally
We can formulate the arguement to cite many instances of behaviour which we know to have a mental cause.
P1: This behaviour has a mental cause
P2: That beahviour has a mental cause
P3: That third behaviour has a mental cause
P4: Etc
C1: Therefore, many behaviours have a mental cause (I know this from my own experience)
P5: Other people exhibit the same types of behaviours as cited above
C2: Therefore, those beahviours also have mental causes
C3: Therefore, other people have minds.
What are the problems with the reformulated arguement from analogy?
- There is still in the end one entity proposed which is the cause for all the behaviours - my mind. So it doesn’t avoid the issue of arguing from one mind to the existsence of others.
- The arguements relies on the contentious claim that similar effects (behavious) have similar causes (mental states). But sometimes similar effects can have different causes, perhaps those instances of other people’s behaviours that are similar to my behaviour have different (non-mental) causes.
Response 2 (to the problem of other minds): The existence of other minds is the best hypothesis
Rather than referring from one’s own case to other minds, we may employ a standard form of theoretical scientific reasoning, inferece to the best explanation, also known as abuctive argumentation.
abuctive: seen the effect, assume the cause
How does the response:
The existence of other minds is the best hypothesis,
avoid the criticism that the arguement from analogy faces?
It doesn’t appeal to the first personal xperience of having a mind nor does it draw an analogy between my behaviour and that of other people. Instead the questioin ius entirelkt third-personal. Why do human beings behave as they do? What hypotehsis best explains people’s beahviour in general?
**The claim is that the best explanation is that people have minds and that their mental states cause them to behave as they do. And if people in general have minds, then obviosuly people other than me have minds. **
What is the issue with ‘The existence of other minds is the best hypothesis’ response?
It is a more practical solution, but it is not certain.
Also, what we consider now to be the best hypothesis, is largely opinion based and of our time, people used to think Zeus becoming anrgy was the best hypothesis, so evidently this cab change.
No matter how plausible folk psychology(hypothesis) may be it may be fal
(Dualism makes a category mistake: Ryle’s critique)
Explain the approach of the ordinary language school of philosophy to what causes philosophical problems .
- Philosophical problems are nothing more than the result of linguistic confusion and misunbderstanding.
- They beleive there are no actual philosophical problems.
Ryle is an ordinary language philosopher
What would Ryle say about the mind/body problem?
- It is not a real problem
- It is a problem arising out of linguistic confusion over the way in which mentalistic words function in ordinary speech
- he specificaloly thinks the kind of linguistic confusion involves in the mind/body problem is a category mistake
Define ‘category mistake’
a linguistic error in which one mistakes one type of word for another.
Give an example of a category mistake and explain it
The university example:
You take someone to visit Oxford, you show them around various colleges, the libraries and to meet a few professors, but after the tour they ask ‘where is the university?’
This is an example of mistaking what kind of noun ‘university’ is. The colleges, libraries and professors all refer to concrete entities, but the noun ‘university’ does not refer to an individual concrete thing but rather the specific type of relationaship between the objects.
The person is mistakenly allocating the university to the same category to which the other institutions belong.
In what way can category mistakes lead to philosophical problems?
The superficial grammatical similarity of some kinds of words to other kinds of words can lead a person to create philosophical problems when there are none.
Explain Ryle’s arguement that the category mistrake is being made in the mind/body problem
there’s a lot of words- be warned
there’s an example we use to demonstrate this
mentalistic sentence : ‘John loves Jill’
behaviuoral sentence : ‘John kisses Jill’
The temptation to think of the mentalistic sentence in the same way as the behavioural snentence is becuase of their grammatical similarity, is a categorical mistake.
We mistakenly infer that because ‘John kisses Jill’ is a physical action, that ‘John loves Jill’ is some kind of mental action.
But Ryle argues that ‘love’ is not a real thing in the same way as ‘kiss’ is.
Falsely believing that loving and kissing (mental and physical) are the same kind of thing leads us to beleive there are two realms of being: physical and mental (dualism) AND THIS IS A CATEGORY MISTAKE.
- this produces the mind/body problem.
In brackets is a clarifier
According to Ryle, how should be understand mental language?
(Yes, it is true that behavioural verbs refer to physical activities and objects, but mental language does not refer to mental activites or objects in the same way- so what do they refer to?)
Mental language is shorthand for describing people’s behavioural dispositions, these describve the behavuious that a person is likey to engage in.
Evaluating Ryle
Strengths of Ryle’s objection
- there is plausibility to the example Ryle uses, he makes clear how philsophical problems can arise due to misunderstandings of language.
- hid approach is phsyicalist which will appeal to many because it avoids proposing the existence of metaphysical entitiues like ‘minds; and ‘thoughts’ which are difficult to explain by natural science.
Weaknesses of Ryle’s objection
- It is possible for a person to have a mental state but not to be disposed to show it (SUPER DUPER SPARTANS)
- It does seem on the basis of introspection that mental states are real. It seems that they have a causative role in our behaviour.
EG: Ben wanted to study ethics so Ben enrolled in the philosophy course
Ryle’s analysis of what mental states are doesn’t account for this very well. - (Undermines the experiential aspect oif mental life)
What are the two issues facing interactionist dualism?
- The conceptual interaction problem
- The empirical interaction problem
Background to interactionist dualism issues
Describe the two way interaction between mind and body.
- He believes there is a two way interaction
- (My mind can intend to take the freshly baked cookies out the oven, and my arms subsequenlty do that, but that baking dish is hot OUCH it burns me, and stimulates PANIC resposne in my mind) = two way
mental> physical // physica> mental
Background to interactionist dualism issues
What is Descartes’ belief about mind and body relationship.
- Desartes clains that the brain is the organ mosr inbtimately connected with the mind.
- There is a small part of the brain which contains ‘common sense’ that point which unifies all the different concious experiences we have into a unified consciousness
- This seat for concsiousness is located in the pinneal gland
- From there information is communicated via the nervous system to all parts of the body.
Background to interactionist dualism issues
What does Ryle say about how Descartes conceives of the mind-body interaction?
makes fun of it, calling it the ghost in the machine
What is the conceptual interaction problem?
Who said it + state formally
Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia:
P1: It is inconcievable for two things to causually ineract, unless their surfaces come into contact with eachother
P2: The mind has no surface
C1: Therefore it is inconcievable that the mind interacts with the body
P3: If such interaction is inconcievable, it is impossible
C2: Therefore, mind-body interaction is impossible.
