Reading Notes: June 23rd, 2022

“Representationalism: The view that phenomenal characters somehow reduce to representational properties….A state has a representational property when…it has a meaning or somehow stands in, in some process, for something else, such as an object, or a “proposition”—a putative fact. Paradigmatic mental representational states are beliefs: one who believes that snow is green is in a state which means that snow is green, and which stands in for the putative fact that snow is green in a subject’s reasoning….Standard philosophical theories consequently take representational states to involve a relation between a subject and a “content”—what is meant—via an attitude or the relation borne to that meaning…A representational property of a representational state may thus be characterized as a pair composed of an attitude and a content. Representational states have correctness, or satisfaction conditions, partly determined by the correctness conditions for their contents. A proposition is correct just in the case it is true….A mental state has a representational property just in case it has a meaning of “content,” or is about something. So for instance, if one considers how things would be were snow green, one’s consideration is about snow’s being green. Mental states with meanings always involve bearing a certain attitude toward the meaning: so for instance, considering how things would be were snow green is different from believing that snow is green, even though what the two state are about is the same. A representational property may thus be viewed as a pair consisting of a content and an attitude.” (Hellie, Consciousness and Representationalism, 1-17) 

“In Mental Acts Geach first argues against the view of Ryle that ascriptions of psychological events and activities are equivalent to semi-hypothetical statements about behavior. His objections include the observation that the attempt to distinguish between two individuals’ different mental states exhaustively in terms of different behavioural dispositions gets things back to front. We explain differences in behaviour by reference in part, but ineliminably, to mental acts and not by hypothetical differences in the agents concerned. Furthermore, where two subjects did not differ in behavior it is intelligible to suppose that they may yet have been in different mental states without having any view regarding the truth of different counterfactuals about what each would have done if things that did not happen had occurred. On this basis Geach maintains that at least some psychological ascriptions, those attributing mental acts and events, are categorical and not hypothetical in character.” (Haldane, Anscombe and Geach on Mind and Soul, 16-17) 

“[Anscombe’s] argument against materialism begins with reflections on Wittgenstein’s remarks about the practice of identifying or drawing attention to some object or feature. Imagine someone doing so, and saying “look at this.” Nothing in the physical orientation of the body, even including the direction of the finger, serves to determine the content of the thought, including its formal object (whether substance, shape, colour, texture, location.). What makes it the case that a person had in mind the shape rather than the color, say, is not something passing through consciousness but the context, including what was said and done before and what follows later….[An] intentional action (expressive of, or manifesting, a mental state) cannot be identified with a physical movement, or…with movement plus some brain states…. (Haldane, Anscombe and Geach on Mind and Soul, 27) 

“Physicalism is now almost orthodox in much philosophy…[Physicalism] lacks a clear and credible definition, and…in no non-vacuous interpretation is it true.” (Crane and Mellor, There is No Question of Physicalism, 185) 

“We are concerned here only with physicalism as a doctrine about the empirical world….It says that mental entities, properties, relations and facts are all really physical….[P]hysicalism differs significantly from its materialist ancestors. In its seventeenth century form of mechanism, for instance, materialism was a metaphysical doctrine: it attempted to limit physics a priori by requiring matter to be solid, inert, impenetrable and conserved, and to interact deterministically and only on contact. But as it has subsequently developed, physics has shown this conception of matter to be wrong in almost every respect: the “matter” of modern physics is not all solid, or inert, or impenetrable, or conserved; and it interacts indeterministically and arguably sometimes at a distance. Faced with these discoveries, materialism’s modern descendants have—understandably—lost their metaphysical nerve. No longer trying to limit the matter of physics a priori, they now take a more subservient attitude: the empirical world, they claim, contains just what a true complete physical science would say it contains. But this raises two questions. What is physical science: that is, what sciences does it comprise? And what gives it this ontological authority? In other words, what entitles certain sciences to tell us in their own terms what the world contains—thereby entitling them to the physicalist’s honorific title “physical”? “Physical science” so construed certainly includes physics proper. Physics is the paradigm (hence “physical”). And chemistry, molecular biology and neurophysiology are also indisputably physical sciences. But not psychology, sociology, and economics. One may debate the exact boundary of physical science: but unless some human sciences, of which psychology will be our exemplar, lie beyond its pale, physicalism, as a doctrine about the mind, will be vacuous.” (Crane and Mellor, There is No Question of Physicalism, 185-186) 

“What we know or seem to know in ordinary self-consciousness…is a concrete whole within which mind and body are only abstractly distinguishable as partial factors.” (Stout, Mind & Matter, 67)