galen strawson, mental reality

442 BOOK REVIEWS

References

Almeida, Michael J. (1987), ‘Reasoning about the Temporal Structure of Narratives’, TechnicalReport 87-10, Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science.

Almeida, Michael J. (1995), ‘Time in Narratives’, in Judith F. Duchan, Gail A. Bruder, and LynneE. Hewitt (eds.), Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective, Hillsdale, NJ: LawrenceErlbaum Associates, pp. 159–189.

Barwise, Jon, and Perry, John (1983), Situations and Attitudes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Hinrichs, Erhard (1986), ‘Temporal Anaphora in Discourses of English’, Linguistics and Philosophy

9, pp. 63–82.Kamp, Hans, and Reyle, Uwe (1993), From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Modeltheoretic

Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory, Dordrecht,Holland: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Vendler, Zeno (1967), Linguistics in Philosophy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, MICHAEL J. ALMEIDAUniversity of Maryland Eastern Shore,Princess Anne, MD 21835, [email protected]

Galen Strawson, Mental Reality, Representation and Mind Series, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 1994, xv + 337 pp., $17.50 (paper), ISBN 0-262-69183-3.

This book is a bold assertion of a view of the mind that is at least “affection-ately inclined toward” (p. 324) a naturalized Cartesianism. It is opposed to thosephilosophers, such as a number of Wittgensteinians (see, e.g. Hacker 1972, or TylerBurge 1979, or Donald Davidson 1987, for example), whose rejection of a Carte-sian view of the mind is largely independent of the question of materialism. Andit is opposed to those (functionalists, for example) who have, in Strawson’s view,failed to acknowledge sufficiently the autonomy of the mental, whether becausethey attempt to accommodate the mental too swiftly within the physical, or becausethey are seduced by a kind of verificationism that is one of the legacies of pos-itivism. I would count myself among the first group of people whom the bookopposes. Speaking from that point of view, I found the book instructive, thoughtprovoking, and irritating (though no doubt some of that irritation was due to thesense that opponents will always have that their concerns are not being given properweight).

Strawson calls his general metaphysical view, which is for him a kind of faith,‘agnostic materialism’: materialist, in that he holds that “There is a fundamentalsense in which reality is only physical” (p. 46), and agnostic, because he holds thatwe do not yet have an adequate conception of the physical. Within the frameworkof this general view, he addresses three questions:

1. Is reference to non-mental phenomena central and indispensable in a satisfac-tory account of the nature of mental phenomena?

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2. Is reference to publicly observable phenomena central and indispensable in asatisfactory account of the nature of mental phenomena?

3. Is reference to behavior central and indispensable in a satisfactory account ofthe essential nature of the mental?

While recognising a certain vagueness and contestability about the extension of theterm ‘mental’, Strawson argues that there is no more to the mental that the experien-tial. In answer to question (1), he doubts whether it can actually be proved that theexistence of experiential phenomena requires the existence of non-experiential phe-nomena, though his materialism requires that there be “massive” non-experientialunderpinning to the experiential. And he returns a firm ‘No’ to both of questions(2) and (3) (at least on the standard conception of behavior; in the last substantivechapter, “Behavior”, Strawson argues plausibly for a liberalisation of that concep-tion), and the answer is the same, even when the extension of ‘mental’ is broadenedto include propositional attitudes like belief and desire. Since Cartesianism aboutthe mind might for many people be defined by its giving a negative answer to eachof these three question, the affinities between it and Strawson’s view are clear.

Strawson’s “agnostic materialism” is a very demanding thesis, though not veryclearly motivated. The sense in which reality is held to be only physical is avery strong one: “all natural properties of physical things are entirely physicalproperties” (p. 57). And this has this consequence, as Strawson understands it:

It is your experience considered solely in respect of the experiential characterit has for you right now that is physical, and that must, specifically in respect ofits complex experiential character, be as comprehensively accounted for by anyhypothetical complete physics as the motions of billiard balls; if materialismis true. (p. 59.)

It is not clear how any of the features that Strawson appeals to in order to explainthis view lead him to prefer this kind of materialism to a blander “supervenience”materialism, whose principal thesis is that there can be no change or differenceof any sort without some change or difference describable by physics. He saysthat he believes in the existence of non-experiential properties, that there wasonce no experience like ours, and that “there came to be experience like ours asa result of processes that at no point involved anything not wholly physical ormaterial in nature” (p.104). Unless ‘involved’ is used here in a simply question-begging way, we need a substantial argument to show that this rejection of thesupernatural provides grounds for a materialism as extreme as Strawson’s, andStrawson provides none.

And yet, as Strawson insists, we have no idea at all how there could be a completephysics that both had the “theoretical integratedness” (p. 88) of contemporaryphysics and provided an explanation of experience as such. It seems to me thatthis ought to have made Strawson a little more sceptical about the belief that theremust be such a physics if we are to avoid appealing to the supernatural. And thereis a consequence of Strawson’s view that deserves comment at least: This is that


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at least a large portion of the work of solving what Strawson himself takes to bethe central part of the “mind–body” problem is to be done by the physicist – it is atask of theoretical physics rather than philosophy.

Strawson’s view that the mental is the experiential is linked to his view thatexperience provides the only hard part of the “mind–body” problem. He claims thathigher intellectual abilities and discriminatory capacities are only either difficultto explain in naturalistic terms or intuitively counted as mental when they involvea capacity for experience (otherwise, they are just the kinds of things that chess-playing computers and other machines possess). Propositional attitudes are notcounted as strictly mental; there is said to be no problem about how mental contentcan appear to be causally efficacious. Intentionality in experiencing creatures isbroken down into properties that are said to be explicable by current science, onthe one hand, and “purely experiential” properties on the other, leaving only thelatter as a source of problems.

In these claims, Strawson seems to me to do justice neither to the difficulty ofthe issues nor to the views of his opponents. There is a view (traceable to Kant atleast) that to have a mind is to be free. This has a reasonable claim to be a factorwe take into account when deciding that the activities of chess-playing computersare not genuinely mental. But it raises questions about just the kinds of area thatStrawson thinks are unproblematically dealt with in terms of natural science. Forif a mind is essentially free, it is not at all obvious that we can think of perception(and in general our “links” with our “environment”) as a matter of being caused topass into some mental state, or of action as a matter of something being caused bysomething somehow internal to use. It looks as if the traditional problem of freewill is a way of seeing one part of the “mind–body” problem, a part that Strawsonsimply ignores.

And even within the terms of the contemporary debate, Strawson’s treatmentseems extremely glib. There is no serious consideration of the difficulties that facenaturalistic theories of content (not least of which is that they seem to have toprovide a naturalistic account of truth) or of the problems that have been raisedfor the computational account of the causal efficaciousness of content. Strawsonclaims that there must be an isolable “purely experiential” property of intentionalstates, on the characteristically Cartesian grounds that it is “conceivable” that weourselves are brains in vats or that we ourselves came into existence just a momentago. But he does not consider or even refer to the extensive discussion of thequestion whether this is really conceivable. The claim that there are no dispositionalnon-experiential mental phenomena (that is, propositional attitudes are not reallymental) rests on the supposition that reports of propositional attitudes are made trueby the “physics-describable” physical arrangement of the brain (together, perhaps,with some causal facts about the connection between the brain and some features ofits environment), but no physics-describable physical arrangement of the brain is“intrinsically mentally contentful”, because, in effect, it can always be interpreteddifferently or put to different use. But no argument is supplied for the claim that


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these facts really are what make reports of propositional attitudes true – a claimthat is made doubtful precisely because these facts fail to determine the contentof the attitudes. And it is hard to see how it is justified even within Strawson’smaterialism, since we are, on his account, so far short of an adequate conceptionof physics.

The chapters that argue for a negative answer to questions (2) and (3) seemed tome the strongest part of the book, though again I felt that some issues were skatedacross rather quickly. Strawson considers a version of Wittgenstein’s “private-language argument” that seems to argue for a positive answer to both questions forthe case of pain. The version he considers is a traditional (though still widespread)verificationist one, to which Strawson makes the traditional (though still correct)objection that it is verificationist. He then considers a number of peculiar imaginarycreatures, trying to make it plausible that they may both have mental states and talkor think articulately about them, even though there is not the kind of connectionwith the publicly observable that some Wittgensteinians have insisted on.

First are the Sirians, who only feel pain when they think about a peculiarphysical transition that there is a taboo on their mentioning; they therefore nevermention the pain either, and have no word for it. Then there is their controversialnovelist, N. N., who dares to coin a word for the pain. There are the Betelgeuzians,whose only pains are fearful headaches that have no typical observable causes ornonverbal behavioural effects. And there are the Weather Watchers, who are rootedto the ground and entirely immobile, but who are said to have a full range of mentalstates and to be capable of contemplating them.

These creatures are all delightful fictions, presented with really literary flourish.They deserve more extensive consideration than I can give here, so I shall confinemyself to a few general remarks. First, it seems to me unsafe to trust the “intuitions”that these cases provoke and exploit: the creatures are fairy-tale creatures, andit may be that they are made sense of as we make sense of fairy tales; it isunclear that they demonstrate more than that certain things are “conceivable” ona familiarly Cartesian conception of conceivability, which still leaves open largequestions about real possibility. Secondly, although the fictional examples lead oneto question a standard Wittgensteinian conception of the link between mental statesand behaviour, and make at least an interesting case for the claim that one can bein all kinds of mental states without even being disposed to behave overtly in anyway, it is unclear that they either do or can show that a negative answer to questions(2) and (3) is correct. The hard question is what makes this feeling these creatureshave pain? Suppose it feels the same (to them?) as pain does (to us?). But not allpains feel the same; what makes some of the feelings we have pain, and othersnot? It cannot be merely that we are inclined to classify them together, for thatmakes it hard to see how we could be wrong about what pain is. There are twopoints to be made here: First, if the answer at any point appeals to training (ourtraining, not the Sirians’ or the Betelgeuzians’), then it will have to make reference


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to something overt; and, second, the issue does not seem appropriately decided bythinking about curious fictional cases.

The treatment of the possibility of words for their pains being invented bythe Sirians and the Betelgeuzians again seemed much too swift to me, giventhe background of the debate – outrageously swift, indeed, in the case of theBetelgeuzians, where there is no more argument or explanation than the baldclaim “language will find a way” (p. 238). The significant thing is that Strawsonseems in general to hold, and not to question, a view of language that is the targetof Wittgenstein’s criticisms throughout his Philosophical Investigations (1958),and that work is the original source of many of the objections that Strawsonis explicitly concerned to rebut. In the “private language” sections (Wittgenstein1958, xx243–427, at least), the criticisms are linked with a view of the special statusof first-person “statements” about states of mind. Very roughly, a Cartesian view(to which a holder of the traditional conceptions of language seems to be forced)takes our knowledge of our own states of mind to be a special kind of observationalknowledge; the difficulty with this is that it does not seem to secure the right kind ofincorrigibility. The moment one questions this Cartesian view, the idea of “mentalphenomena” (a phrase that occurs throughout this book) seems questionable, too,and the phrase ‘mental reality’, which seems to emphasise the common-or-gardenthing-ness of states of mind (and forms the title of this book, perhaps for that veryreason) might also make one pause. At the very least, Strawson owes us an accountof self-knowledge.

If I have a general criticism of the book, it is that Strawson is too little concernedto explain things (one might say uncharitably: too little concerned to understandthem). One chapter begins, “What is pain? We all know what it is” (p. 214). Well, dowe? Presumably, it is the same confidence that leads Strawson not to acknowledgethat one significant motive for dispositional theories of belief and desire (or, ingeneral, theories that explain the nature of these things in terms of the way theyexplain behaviour) is to try to understand how appeal to belief and desire couldpossibly explain behaviour. Strawson himself offers no account of what beliefand desire might be, beyond some tentative suggestions about the special linksbetween desires and pleasure (or its opposite). One might see a similar attitude tothe need for philosophical explanation in his basic conviction (qualified though itis by agnosticism) that experience is something physical, even though he cannotsee how it could be. In all these cases, Strawson is able to preserve his traditionalist“intuitions” by simply not addressing, or by delegating to another kind of enquiry,the problems that have led philosophers to question them. This is partly a matterof philosophical taste, of course: Strawson’s attitude picks up a deep and persistentstrand in empirical realism. More thoroughgoing empiricists are likely to find thebook more satisfying. The rest of us will enjoy the elegance of Strawson’s prose,will become warier of quick links between the mental and the publicly observable,but will feel that our larger concerns have hardly been touched.


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References

Burge, Tyler (1979), ‘Individualism and the Mental’, in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr.,and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Studies in Epistemology, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 4,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 73–122.

Davidson, Donald (1987), ‘Knowing One’s Own Mind’, Proceedings and Addresses of the AmericanPhilosophical Association 60, pp. 441–458.

Hacker, Peter (1972), Insight and Illusion: Wittgenstein on Philosophy and the Metaphysics ofExperience, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958), Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell.

School of English and American Studies, MICHAEL MORRISUniversity of Sussex,Falmer,Brighton BN1 9QN, [email protected]

Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, and Andy Clark, eds., Mind and Morals: Essayson Cognitive Science and Ethics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, x + 315 pp.,$20.00 (paper), ISBN 0-262-63165-2.

All moral philosophers of which we are aware grant that any viable moral theorymust be consistent with a reasonable theory of human psychology. Yet, as the editorsof this volume note, since G. E. Moore’s (1903) discussion of the naturalistic fallacy– that one cannot derive an ought from an is – field of ethics has basically beensevered from the fields of psychology and sociology. Although moral philosophershave granted the need for consistency with plausible psychological theories, theyseemed to assume that work on such consistency could be put on the back burner.The essays in this volume challenge this assumption. Recent work in cognitivescience is challenging the idea that moral understanding and moral knowledgeinvolve the application of general rules to specific situations via logical inferences.Rather, work in cognitive science indicates that moral understanding and moralknowledge may be more like perception than logical reasoning. If actual humanmoral understanding is not a matter of making logical inferences from generalrules of moral conduct using rules of logic, this would severely constrain possiblereasonable accounts of morality, including the sorts of rule-based accounts thathave played a central role in ethical theory. This collection presents and discussesnew developments in cognitive research and their relevance to moral philosophy.And, as the editors say in their introduction, the relationship between cognitivescience and moral philosophy must also be approached from the direction of whatmoral philosophy might contribute to the on-going practice of cognitive science.

The book is divided into four parts. In Part I, “Ethics Naturalized?”, the relation-ship between cognitive science and moral theory is problematized in its own right.

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galen strawson, mental reality

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