This is a collection of previously written essays. An introduction has been written to state the central unifying theme, and there has been some rewriting and additions to highlight connections between the different essays. Essay 9 titled "Introduction: Personal and Subpersonal Levels" is especially useful as a summing up of previous conclusions and an introduction to the three chapters that follow.

The book as a whole is a bold attempt to solve the central problem posed by 20^th century philosophy’s rejection of Cartesian dualism. If dualism is false, if what we refer to as "mind" or the "mental" is not ontologically distinct from the physical world studied by the empirical sciences, aren’t we forced to accept some form of materialism? Hornsby, like many of us today, finds herself unwilling to return to the dualism of the past, but also unable to accept the versions of materialism (or "physicalism," as it is more commonly referred to) put form by its recent advocates. For this reason, she says she finds herself in opposition, not just "to some ideas that have come into favour recently, but to the whole drift of the last thirty or forty years in philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world" (p. 9). Instead, she chooses the more benign term "naturalism" to characterize her position, and describes it as a "naive naturalism" – a type of naturalism with affinities to Davidson’s "anomalous monism" – that preserves some our basic intuitions about the uniqueness of our mental lives. Her version, she claims, "avoids dualism without advancing any of the claims of materialism or physicalism or of naturalism as these have come to be known" (12).

This is an admirable goal, but readers will find the route to it in the essays a meandering one. As is common in philosophy, we learn more in the essays about what Hornsby is against than we do about the specific alternative she is advancing. There are some very effective criticisms of reductionist attempts to identify mental states of persons such as beliefs or desires and mental events such as the having of a pain with states or events in the brain as described by neurophysiology. The descriptions of the mental and the neurophysiological are of different levels, the former at a macro level as contrasted to the latter’s micro level, a contrast in later essays she describes as the contrast between the personal and subpersonal. To attempt to reduce the macro to the micro requires us, she says, to "examine events at a degree of resolution that we never need to achieve in order to make sense of one another" (68). Later in Essay 5 where the topic is actions she agrees with Davidson’s remark that a different subject is raised in the shift from the personal to the subpersonal: "A different subject matter is treated, not people and their doings, when an impersonal point of view is taken" (87). In Essay 7 there is a similar criticism of functionalism, which is said to have an "impoverished notion of behavior" because it restricts itself to describing basic actions such as the movement of a hand (119). When we describe the actions of persons, she correctly notes, we describe such movements as a trying to reach the telephone or a knocking over of a vase. Again, the error is that of substituting a subpersonal level of description for the personal level at which in daily life we describe and explain actions.

All of this suggests that Hornsby is advocating a two-levels solution to the mind/body problem, with mental attributes applying to bodies characterized as persons at one level, and physical attributes at another level applying to bodies characterized by inner structures and behavior. Such a solution fails, I think, to adequately explain the reasons for the uniqueness of mental descriptions, most notably our attributions of attitudes such as beliefs and desires. They are unique because they have a transactional role in our commerce with others. We describe the beliefs of others because they may be mistaken and because their correction can avoid harms, either to the subject of the belief or our interlocutor. Actions are described in a way that enables us to attribute responsibility, praise, and blame. Though they have descriptive aspects, these mental attributions are not purely descriptive, but are used in ways very different from descriptions of chemicals, cells, and lawful behavior described by the sciences. The sciences describe, but our mental language is used primarily to coordinate with and control others through correction, blame, endorsement, and praise. This may suggest the "irrealism" about the mental that Hornsby says she wants to avoid (168). But acknowledging the transactional role played by mental language is necessary to adequately explain the contrasts she so expertly draws in her book.

© D. S. Clarke, 2001

D. S. Clarke is a Professor Emeritus at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. His books include Practical Inferences, Principles of Semiotic, Rational Acceptance and Purpose, Sources of Semiotic, and Philosophy’s Second Revolution. He has also contributed many articles and reviews to analytical journals.

Categories: Philosophical