Search Results

This chapter concludes the book by doing three things: reviewing the reasons for rejecting eliminativism and primitivism; criticizing an independent argument for these views that would, if successful, also undermine our own position — this is an argument founded on the idea, known as “revelation”, that understanding experience means knowing its essence; and finally, summarizing and making explicit some general morals.

This chapter outlines the contemporary conversation in philosophy of mind. Reductionists claim the mind can or must be reducible to natural phenomena. Eliminativists claim the mind cannot be so reduced and that this implies that our mentalistic categories should be eliminated in favor of a more naturalistic vocabulary. Dualists point to an explanatory gap between mind and nature and argue that this implies the mind is not reducible to something else, and that this entails either substance or property dualism. Mysterians agree that the mind is irreducible but trace this to a limitation of our ability to understand mind‐body relations. Nonreductive materialists also reject reduction but hold that the mind is nothing over and above a set of natural phenomena. All of these views share the assumption that intertheoretic reduction is the norm in the natural sciences, and this assumption motivates both reductionism and the idea that the explanatory gap poses a unique and disturbing problem.

This chapter argues that the idea of causation has similar status to ideas of cohesion, forces, and things. Appreciating the role of causation in a notional world is crucial to understanding the nature of the special sciences, and the general ways in which they differ from fundamental physics. Causation, unlike cohesion, is both a notional-world concept and a folk concept. Moreover, causation, unlike cohesion, is a basic category of traditional metaphysics, including metaphysics that purports to be naturalistic but falls short of this ambition. This chapter also argues that causation, just like cohesion, is a representational real pattern that is necessary for an adequately comprehensive science. It begins with an account that eliminates causation altogether on naturalistic grounds, and then shows, using principle of naturalistic closure (PNC)-mandated motivations, why this outright eliminativism is too strong. The eliminativist argument to be discussed is due to Bertrand Russell, whose view has some important contemporary adherents among philosophers of physics.

If we don't need ordinary objects in our causal explanations, it is often held, Occam's razor enjoins us to eliminate them. This chapter examines these arguments from parsimony, suggesting first that Occam's razor does not generalize to cases in which there are analytic entailments between existence claims. Moreover, it is argued that eliminativists, such as van Inwagen and Merricks who seek to paraphrase claims, for example, about baseballs in terms of claims about atoms arranged baseballwise, don't really offer a more parsimonious theory, since their paraphrased claims may be pleonastically transformed into claims that are explicitly committed to ordinary objects. This provides the basis for an argument for the existence of ordinary objects, and against Quine's criterion of ontological commitment. In closing, this chapter considers whether this also entails commitment to extraordinary objects, and whether more severe forms of eliminativism can do better.

The introductory chapter lays out the motivations for defending a common sense ontology and provides an overview of the various eliminativist arguments against ordinary objects that will be discussed in the book. It also describes the argument strategy of the book: the early chapters (2 and 3) argue for central views about reference and modality — namely, a hybrid approach to reference, and a conceptualist understanding of modality. But the later chapters provide the most important evidence for these views by demonstrating their ability to defuse all of the arguments against ordinary objects, and to make sense of our common sense world view nonproblematically. The book closes by sketching important metaontological results of the above work regarding which metaphysical questions are and are not answerable, and what methods should be employed in pursuing them.

It is argued that most of the counterintuitive elements of traditional sceptical theories do not apply to the live sceptical theories, and that the live sceptic’s argument is identical in form to arguments we rely on without hesitation. The live sceptic is not denying anyone of the warrant they think they have; neither are they denying its quality. The knowledge denied by the live sceptic (knowledge of our own beliefs, the locations of our own pains, and the colours of objects in perfect view) is frequently ruled out in uncontroversial circumstances. This is important to the live sceptic’s case because it might be objected that it’s nearly impossible not to know one’s own beliefs, pain locations, or sock colours when the beliefs are formed in maximally veridical ways.

This chapter considers the different positions and proposes a new form of monism. It explores the different claims of the eliminativist and reductionist responses and provides some assessment to their relative merits. The second section of this chapter presents the varieties of property monism: categorical reductionism, dispositional reductionism, categorical reductionism, categorical eliminativism, and dispositional eliminativism. The third and fourth sections consider the case for and against eliminativism. What essentially distinguishes an eliminativist position from a reductionist one is a denial of identities between dispositional and categorical properties. The fifth section assesses the arguments for reductionism. The sixth section suggests a monism without reductionism.

The argument template of chapter 3 is taken together with other live hypotheses to generate other kinds of live scepticism. For instance, one can focus on error theories with regard to colour, or pain location, or character traits. Or, oddly enough, we can plug in, as a live hypothesis, the hypothesis that no one knows any external world proposition. The upshot is that in intellectual communities, in which error theories about belief, pain locations, character traits, and colour are live, mere mortals don’t know that fire engines are red, don’t know that they sometimes have pains in their lower backs, don’t know that John Rawls was kind, and don’t even know that they believe any of those truths.

This chapter identifies three categories of questions answers to which are required if one is to have a full understanding of Aristotle's teleology: Analysis, Basis, Extent. It then focuses on the ‘Basis’ questions and presents a typology of recent interpretations of the ontological basis of Aristotelian natural teleology, which it labels (i) Strong irreducibility (e.g., Gotthelf); (ii) Regulative/pragmatic (e.g., Nussbaum and Sorabji); (iii) limited irreducibility (e.g., Charles); (iv) weak irreduciblilty (e.g., M. Bradie and F.D. Miller, Jr.); (v) intrinsic cause/eliminativism (e.g., S. S. Meyer). Views (iv) and (v) are assessed at some length. Meyer, it is argued, confuses Aristotle's grounds for rejecting his opponents’ view (eliminativism) with what he takes to be the basis of his own view (anti‐reductionism). In addressing view (v) it is it is proposed that, in the face of contemporary science, Aristotle would have retreated to something like the contemporary etiological view of biological teleology.

Dennett's intellectualist theory of consciousness trades on an equivocation between weaker and stronger claims that might be leveled against traditional psychology and epistemology. Only the weaker claims find support in the empirical evidence to which he appeals. Merleau–Ponty, by contrast, while also dismissive of pure qualia, argues that intellectualism takes for granted the constancy hypothesis by making sensory qualities dependent in principle on sensory stimuli. O'Regan and Noë advance an alternative ‘sensorimotor’ approach to perception that remains behavioristic, like Dennett's theory, by describing perceptual experience as constituted by a knowledge of causal contingencies between sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. But perception is not just what we do, it's what we are. Phenomenology is inescapable, since it is what allows us to specify at the outset what any theory of perception or consciousness must be a theory of.

This chapter argues that, with certain qualifications, the right theory of colour is a form of eliminativism. The first qualification is that the subject of colour is complex, and an adequate theory of the subject, likewise, will be complex, containing both metaphysical and semantic theses. Eliminativism, rightly understood, comprises only a part of the story, but an indispensable part. The second qualification is that it has to be the right kind of eliminativism, for there are several varieties. This chapter argues that we can be ontological eliminativists, holding that there are no colours, as ordinarily understood, without being conceptual eliminativists. There are important reasons for retaining the concept, even if it is not instantiated—as well as for accepting a place for other concepts of colour.

This chapter argues that current work on racial cognition is relevant to many of philosophers' concerns about race. It first examines several positions within the philosophy of race, pointing out where facts about the psychology of race could have an impact upon the feasibility of reform proposals offered by philosophers. It then reviews two relatively separate sets of psychological literature. The first shows that the content of racial thought is not a simple product of one's social environment, but is also shaped by the operation of certain evolved psychological mechanisms. After drawing out implications of this work for several types of proposals made by philosophers, it turns to the question of racial evaluation. Recent studies suggest that implicit racist biases can exist and influence behavior even in persons sincerely professing tolerant or even anti-racist views, and that implicit racial evaluations can be insulated in important ways from more explicitly held beliefs. The chapter then argues that these findings bear on the feasibility of proposals made in the philosophical literature on race, and may be useful in shaping novel proposals.

Contemporary physicalists, materialists, and naturalists generally hold two theses: that mental states such as pains are identical to physical states of the brain, and that these identities are a posteriori. The property dualism argument raises a problem for such mental-physical identities. Suppose that pains are identical with c-fiber firings. That the identity is a posteriori means that a subject could be perfectly rational in believing what would be naturally expressed by saying ‘I am in pain’ and what would be naturally expressed by saying ‘My c-fibers are not firing’. There is, however, a pervasive ambiguity in the literature as to what is meant by ‘mode of presentation’ — whether it is representational, something on the side of our language, beliefs, or conceptual scheme, or something on the side of the world, something represented. This chapter argues that the assumption that we have a meaningful vocabulary of mentalistic terms such as ‘pain’ entails that there are modes of presentation of both kinds — concepts and the properties that give those concepts their content. And the properties that give such concepts content are thin. Thus, they confer no empirically discoverable nature on the objects that instantiate them. It concludes that there must be some irreducibly mentalistic properties — properties not identical to any physical properties — and that this is a consequence of the assumptions made by the proponents of a posteriori mental-physical identities themselves.The alternative is ‘local eliminativism’. This view is unstable — it collapses into straightforward eliminativism regarding the mental, which is incompatible with the qualia realism of the proponents of a posteriori mental-physical identities.

Stich points out that typical arguments for eliminativism about the mind presuppose a description theory of reference. His gloomy view of theories of reference leads him to a gloomy view of ontological issues in general. What has gone wrong? Stich thinks that the mistake came in looking to such theories to settle ontological issues. This chapter argues that Stich is right about that, but for the wrong reasons. We should not share his gloom about theories of reference, taken as proto-science. Still, an appropriately modest view of the accomplishments of this proto-science counts against using it to settle ontological issues. We should put metaphysics first. How then are we to settle ontological issues? Stich's answer is very much along the right lines. We do not have any principles adequate to help us with the difficult cases and it may be that some of these are indeterminate.