This volume collects papers based on those delivered
in London for the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s annual lecture series for
2001-2.  As the title indicates, the papers center on the topics of minds and
persons, broadly construed.  Though there is no one unifying theme connecting
all the papers, some problems are discussed in multiple essays.  Four authors
address issues related to consciousness, three discuss the nature of (human)
mindedness, and two each contend with mental substance and free will.  The
quality of the contributions is almost uniformly high, as one might suspect
from a brief glance at the list of contributors.  The diversity of the
collection and the depth of most of the individual papers may test the limits
some readers’ understanding, but these papers are reasonably accessible to
those with some exposure to contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics. 
At a minimum, the hard work put into reading these papers will be repaid by a
better appreciation for the difficulty of these problems.  In what follows, I
describe several of the papers I found to be particularly interesting. 

The paper by José Luis Bermúdez is
concerned with the role of folk psychology in social cognition.  Bermúdez
favors a narrow construal of the domain of folk psychology, and argues that
some social cognition does not require the conscious attribution of mental
states to individuals.  In support of his claim, Bermúdez discusses a few
examples of social interaction that may be modeled in non-folk psychological
terms.  One example involves social interactions in routine or stereotypical
scenarios€”e.g., interacting with a clerk at a retail shop.  Bermúdez contends
that in such routine situations, one need only identify the social role of the
various agents to negotiate the social scenario, and this does not require the
conscious attribution of mental states to those agents.  One may object that to
treat a sales clerk in this way (as an element in a Minskian frame) is not to
treat her as a person, but merely as an object with certain behavioral
dispositions.  Negotiating an environment of such objects may not constitute an
instance of social cognition after all.  On the other hand, one might agree
with Bermúdez that we do not attribute beliefs and desires to individuals in
such routine cases, but object that the social roles we rely on are themselves
constructed from attributions of generic folk psychological considerations. 

In "Moderately Massive
Modularity," Peter Carruthers proposes a version of the modularity of mind
thesis€”i.e., the thesis that the mind is organized into hierarchies of
domain-specific, innately specified processing systems.  Carruthers’s account
lies on the continuum between Fodor’s minimal modularity and the massive
modularity of Cosmides and Tooby.  The two extremes differ (among other things)
over the extent to which the mind is said to be modular: Fodor limits
modularity to the peripheral systems (e.g., vision, language-processing, and
motor-control), whereas Cosmides and Tooby argue on evolutionary grounds that
nearly all cognitive systems€”including central-conceptual systems€”are modular. 
Carruthers is sympathetic to Cosmides and Tooby’s contention that many central
systems are modular, but he agrees with Fodor that evidence from ordinary
introspective awareness of our thoughts confirms that we can link together
concepts from widely disparate domains.  Carruthers proposes a non-modular
central processing arena in which the natural language module serves as the
medium for inter-modular integration.  Carruthers offers only a sketch here,
but it continues the theme in his work emphasizing the important role of
natural language in consciousness and cognition.  Carruthers’s essay is written
in his characteristically clear and straightforward style.

Michael Tye’s contribution is about
the nature of phenomenal concepts, which are the concepts we employ when we
become aware of the qualitative character of our experiences via
introspection.  Tye aims to provide an account of phenomenal concepts that
seems to him "both to respect anti-physicalist intuitions and to give the
physicalist everything she needs" (104).  Those familiar with the
literature on consciousness will recognize the anti-physicalist intuitions: the
conceivability of absent qualia, an explanation for why Frank Jackson’s Mary
seems to discover new things upon her release from the black and white world,
and sensitivity to the "what-it’s-like-ness" of certain mental
states.  Tye characterizes the introspection of phenomenal character as a
reliable process that takes phenomenal character as input and delivers as
output awareness that a state is present with a certain phenomenal character. 
The relationship between the concept and its referent is causal and direct. 
The perspectival aspect of a phenomenal concept is captured, on Tye’s view, by
its characteristic functional role€”i.e., its being "laid down" in
memory by undergoing the appropriate experiences, and its tendency to trigger
the appropriate conscious images in response to certain cognitive tasks.  This
latter feature of phenomenal concepts is supposed to account for the intuition
that Mary does discover something new when released.  This is an impressive
addition to Tye’s burgeoning elaboration and defense of the representationalist
theory of phenomenal consciousness. 

In his intriguing paper,
"Language, Belief, and Human Beings," David Cockburn promotes the
important role of non-linguistic behavior in the attribution of propositional
attitudes.  According to Cockburn, one remaining vestige of "Cartesianism"
can be seen in the exclusive primacy given to the linguistic expression of
belief when interpreting others.  Cockburn has in mind here the approach to
meaning exemplified by Davidson’s radical interpretation.  By relying primarily
on verbal behavior, the radical interpreter treats the subject as if she has no
life€”i.e., as if she were not an embodied creature embedded in an environment
of people and things.  While I find talk of "Cartesian imagery" and
the like somewhat vague, Cockburn makes a good point here.  It is usually
assumed by philosophers that if an individual sincerely assents to some
sentence, she believes that sentence’s content€”taking into account the usual
assumptions about rationality, conversational relevance, and truthfulness.  But
why suppose that verbal expression is immune from the contingencies of life
that infect other expressions of belief?  Don’t we sometimes assent to things
unthinkingly€”say, as a result of fatigue or lack of interest?  Indeed, often it
is what is not said that is the most telling about what an individual
believes.  In these cases, an individual’s actions, demeanor, facial
expressions, or tone naturally trump what is said.   None of this is meant to
diminish the importance of linguistic expression.  On the contrary: Cockburn
sees conversation as the first step in making contact with another mind€”a
process that involves attention to affective and behavioral factors as well.

E. J. Lowe and Tim Crane each, in
his own way, attempts to resurrect the notion of mental substance.  For Lowe,
the issue turns on the nature of causation and the hope for a volitionist
solution to the problem of free will.  Lowe argues that substances, not events,
are the primary relata of causal relations.  Crane is dissatisfied with the
view that there is no independent mental thing as the subject of
experience.  He suspects that what motivates this view is suspicion of the idea
of mental substance€”in particular, worries about it’s purported role in the
generation of the mind-body problem, and questions about the very idea of
substance in general.  Crane points out that contemporary formulations of the
mind-body problem appeal to mental and physical properties, and as such do not
presuppose Cartesian (substance) dualism.  As for general worries about
substance, Cranes suggests that we focus on the point of calling something a
substance: to distinguish "real unities" from mere aggregations. 
Real unities are distinguished by having natural principles responsible for
their organization, activities, and boundaries.  Crane acknowledges that this
view is inconsistent with some contemporary ontological theories (e.g., four-dimensionalism),
but insists that it cannot be rejected as entirely innocuous or absurdly
anachronistic.  Crane suggests, in the end, that we ought to take seriously the
idea that it is persons€”as things with both mental and bodily
properties€”that are the best candidates for mental substances. 

Frank Jackson’s entry, "Mind
and Illusion," is notable not least for its repudiation of some of his
earlier views about the inability of physicalism to capture all aspects of
phenomenal consciousness.  In other places, Jackson has capitulated to
criticism of his knowledge argument, which is motivated by intuitions generated
from the case involving black and white Mary mentioned earlier.  Here, Jackson
attempts to identify where these intuitions go wrong, arguing that we are under
an illusion about the nature of color experience.  When we have an experience
of seeing red, the redness of the experience is presented to us as if it were
information about the intrinsic, non-physical properties of our experiential
state.  But this is a mistake, says Jackson; it is the result of conflating an
instantiated property (the intrinsic quality of the experience of seeing red)
with an intensional property (how things are being represented to be). 
Jackson, here, is endorsing a version of the representationalist theory of
phenomenal consciousness.  Unlike Tye, who takes phenomenal character to be a
species of non-conceptual representational content, Jackson doubts that sensory
experiences have only non-conceptual content.  Jackson recommends that one look
to what is special about representation that occurs when something looks or
feels a certain way.  When Mary leaves the black and white world to see a ripe
tomato for the first time, her representational state has different cognitive
properties€”e.g., the content is immediately and inextricably rich, and the
state plays a certain functional role in relation to other cognitive states. 
(This seems to me to be very similar to the account Tye gives of phenomenal
concepts.)  Jackson concludes, interestingly: "We have ended up agreeing
with Laurence Nemirow and David Lewis on what happens to Mary on her release. 
But, for the life of me, I cannot see how we could have known they were right
without going via representationalism" (271). 

On the whole, if you are interested
in contemporary issues at the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophy of
mind, you should find several papers here of great interest. 

© 2004 Ray Rennard

Ray Rennard is Visiting Assistant
Professor of Philosophy at James Madison University. 

Categories: Philosophical