Samuel Guttenplan’s Mind’s Landscape: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (ML) is a detailed philosophical discussion of our everyday or ‘commonsense’ conception of the mind. It is organized in a particular way: it begins at a very superficial level of description, deconstructing this conception of mind into its various distinctive features, which are then analyzed at great length. This approach guides the reader through an in-depth yet engaging and accessible discussion of commonsense psychology (each chapter builds upon the material presented in the previous one), revealing the difficulties and contradictions inherent in our ordinary understanding of the mind, as well offering various (specifically philosophical) approaches to reconciling these difficulties. Once we scratch the surface of commonsense psychology, it seems that ‘our ordinary thoughts about the mind can seem to dissolve into incoherence’ (p. vii). Guttenplan’s intention is not to push his own solution to these inconsistencies; rather, his purpose is to identify them, and to present a comprehensive discussion of them.

Guttenplan’s presentation of the material is, well-written, well-structured and systematic. His explanatory style is persistent, making often difficult arguments and fine-grained reasoning quite straightforward. This is commendable, considering the technicality of many of the ideas presented. The accessibility of ML makes this text highly suitable for philosophy undergraduates wanting an in-depth examination of the basic philosophical issues arising from commonsense psychology, or for non-philosophers (e.g. psychology students) interested in the philosopher’s ‘take’ on the mind. I think that the philosophically uninitiated might find some of the material hard going, but not impossible to follow (this is mainly due to the introduction of technical philosophical concepts and ideas, although these are explained using non-technical language and examples). However, perseverance will be rewarding. The advanced philosopher, I suspect, will become impatient with the extended discussion.

Chapter 1 sketches our ordinary conception of the mind. Three distinctly mental phenomena are identified – consciousness (experience), (propositional) attitudes, and actions – as well as the criteria for categorizing individual mental states (observability, accessibility, expressibility, directionality, and theoreticity). For readers familiar with Guttenplan’s introductory chapter to A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (S. Guttenplan (Ed.), Basil Blackwell, 1994), this ‘ordering’ of the mind will come as no surprise. ML is an expansion of this work.

In Chapter 2, Guttenplan tries to unravel the various beliefs we hold about consciousness, attitudes and action. The discussion resolves itself around the problematic distinction between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’. The account of the attitudes focuses on their directionality (or aboutness), and highlights how mind and world often come apart. The excellent discussion of experience and consciousness focuses on the distinction between the first-personal perspective (the qualitative nature of our experience, the ‘what it is like’), and the third-personal, objective perspective. The emphasis of the section on action is whether actions are mental phenomena (acts of will), or whether they are more event-like (bodily movements).

Chapter 3 is concerned with explanation and personal identity. The discussion of the nature of explanations centers on folk (commonsense) psychology. Two broad explanatory approaches are considered. The underlying assumption of Theory Theory is that human behavior is subject to regularities and theoretical generalizations (as we find in the sciences). It is an ‘objective’, impersonal or deductive-regularity conception. Simulation Theory explanation focuses on agents’ reasons and points of view, and involves the ability to simulate other’s behavior using ourselves as models. It is a ‘subjective’ or personal approach. The entertaining discussion of personal identity covers the basic ground: is personhood (or selfhood) based on bodily (‘outer’) or psychological (‘inner’) criteria? Using ‘trading places’-style thought experiments Guttenplan pumps our intuitions on this question, and demonstrates the complexity involved in providing a coherent response.

Chapter 4 contains an excellent summary of these five mental phenomena, and attempts to identify the relationships between them. Each phenomenon involves a dichotomy, reflecting a duality characteristic of the mind itself. Underlying this duality is an important unity: the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aspects of mind are different points of view (perspectives) towards mental phenomena. This duality and unity capture the core problem in philosophy of mind: is a reconciliation (or ‘coalescence’) between the two perspectives possible, which does justice to both?

Chapter 5 introduces the problem of overdetermination to illustrate the importance of the reconciliation question. While we can explain someone’s action in mentalistic terms (experiences and attitudes), we can also explain actions in neurophysiological/neurochemical terms. However, if effects only have one cause, which of these (mind or brain) is the cause of action? Guttenplan considers, and rejects, dualist and eliminativist approaches to this problem (the eliminativist strategy does not seem to capture the important perspectival/non-perspectival nature of the mind, while the dualist strategy does not seem to capture the unity of the mental landscape). The coalescence of mind and brain is the way to go. (Behaviourist coalescence of mind with action is also rejected.)

Chapters 6 and 7 present lengthy and detailed deliberations on possible solutions to the overdetermination problem beginning with the Identity Theory. The basic idea here is that the relationship of mind to brain is one of identity (mind = brain), thus allowing the reduction of mental processes to brain processes. The discussion see-saw’s over a wide range of arguments for, and objections to, the Identity Theory. While the chapter focuses on experienced states such as pain, a brief analysis of attitudes and action is also provided. Unlike the Identity approach, Functionalism provides an explanatory ‘buffer’ between the mind and the brain (mind = functional organization = brain), promising coalescence but also respecting the perspectives of both mind and brain. The relative strengths and weaknesses of psychofunctionalism and analytical functionalism are analyzed according to two questions: ‘What is the relation between the mind and functional characterization?’ and ‘What is the relation between functional characterization and the brain?’

Chapter 8 covers the standard objections (and replies) to functionalism. Various thought experiments show the difficulty of finding a functional approach which is not either too liberal (attributes mindedness to too many things) or too chauvinistic (denies mindedness to non-human creatures). Chapters 6, 7, and 8 introduce and explain, in very clear language, a number of technical philosophical concepts and ideas. The final brief chapter is titled ‘Division and Elimination’. It is a summary of non-reductive accounts such as Anomalous Monism, non-reductive psychofunctionalism and Elimination. A final section contains ‘Further Readings’; the selection here is impressive, and includes all the important texts relevant to the material discussed in each chapter.

Although ML covers much philosophical ground, I am conscious of the multi-disciplinary readership of this journal. The comments which follow are in no way intended as criticisms, but observations for the non-philosopher. As the title suggests, this is a philosophical rather than a psychological or cognitive science text (although both are mentioned in a subsidiary way). Guttenplan’s aim is to keep both the ‘ordinary and the philosophical in focus’ (p. vii), and this is exactly what ML delivers.

My legally-minded friends advise me that you can get the answer you want depending on how you present your case, and by asking the appropriate sorts of questions (‘Tell me sir, do you still beat your wife?’ [my apologies for this apparent lack of political correctness – but the example perfectly demonstrates my point]). Well, the same goes for philosophy; it’s all to do with how you present your case and frame your questions. The task of ML is specific: it concerns the nature of our ordinary or commonsense conception of the mind, whether this conception is coherent enough to stand up to analysis, and whether a coalescence of the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ perspectives is possible. Now, this line of questioning sets boundaries within which possible answers must fall, and it gestures towards a particular approach for providing those answers.

Guttenplan’s methodology is to begin with the ordinary or everyday, and then go deeper. The data for this ordinary conception of the mind is collated from his students: he asks them what would count as evidence of mindedness. It is from this data that the ‘mental landscape’ is constructed, forming the basis of the discussion and analysis to follow. This project is a fine example of philosophy carried out ‘from the armchair’. The discussion focuses tightly on philosophical argument and analysis of our ordinary conception of the mind. As you can imagine, a great deal of philosophy of mind is carried out (profitably, I might add) this way. The depth of analysis that this method allows is exceptional (this is clearly evident in the excellent discussions of Identity Theory and Functionalism).

However, as a result of this emphasis on in-depth analysis, ML is selective in content. This is only to be expected – breadth must be compromised in favor of unity and completeness. However, armchair philosophy misses out on the wealth of information emerging from the sciences regarding the workings of the mind/brain, information that seems highly relevant to contemporary philosophy of mind. Cognitive science, for example, reveals the mind in action in the world. The cognitive science-oriented reader might wonder why strategies such as dynamicism or connectionism are not considered, since these are now becoming almost permanent fixtures in philosophy of mind courses.

This omission seems to be a result of keeping ‘the ordinary and the philosophical’ in focus. When Guttenplan says he wants to ‘reveal the overall shape of the philosophy of mind’ (p. viii), it seems to be traditional (armchair) philosophy of mind that he means. As I have suggested, the scope of contemporary philosophy of mind is much broader, incorporating material from the sciences. It seems insufficient to explore the mind without taking account of other mechanisms or processes that impinge on our ‘mindedness’. Let me explain why I think this makes a difference by taking short excursions into two non-philosophical but relevant disciplines, social psychology and cognitive anthropology.

Guttenplan, in chapter 3, focuses on two explanatory strategies we might employ in explaining other people’s behavior – the deductive-regularity account, and the simulation account. A social scientist, however, might point out that people’s explanations of behavior are inherently inconsistent. People explain their own behavior very differently to how they explain other people’s behavior – for the same situation, they cite situational factors in their own case, but for other people they cite dispositional (not situational) factors. This explanatory discrepancy arises from the fundamental attribution error (for more on this and other examples, see Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, Human Inference: strategies and shortcomings of social judgement, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980). Now this seems to me to be a problem for folk-psychological explanation (however we choose to describe it). It seems to be a prima facie counterexample to the rationale of the simulation approach since, if we actually do explain behavior by simulation using ourselves as a model, then we should cite situational factors for other people too; but this is not the case. It is also problematic for the deductive-regularity approach, since explaining behavior seems to be much more complicated than this view suggests. (Even more seriously, does this direct challenge to the ‘inner’ simulation approach lend support to the Elimination strategy?)

This example highlights another difficulty: we cannot assume that all of our mental states are transparent to us. Guttenplan’s methodology (asking his students), hints at an assumption of this kind. Guttenplan suggests (early, and often) that many of the features associated with our ordinary conception of mind are ‘so familiar to us that it is easy to overlook just how special they are’ (p. 48). As we have seen, these things may not be familiar to us at all. (Well, they may be familiar to a philosopher, but a philosopher has had plenty of time in the armchair to think about them. The philosopher’s description of ‘ordinary’ or ‘commonsense’ is a very peculiar way of describing the mind.) People think, do and expect many things that they cannot explain or are even aware of. My point is that just asking people about the features of the mind may not, by itself, be the most appropriate way of finding out about the mind; and this is where non-philosophical data becomes pertinent.

What, then, is the ‘ordinary’ in our ‘ordinary conception of the mind’. Is the ‘mental landscape’ described by Guttenplan a typical one? A cognitive anthropologist, I think, would suggest ‘no’. Not all societies associate minds with brains; some do not even identify or acknowledge the range of mental states discussed by Guttenplan; some societies deny that mental states cause actions, instead appealing to social, ethereal or other external causes (they de-emphasize the relevance of ‘inner’ life). An accumulating literature supports this variability (see, for example, Stephen Mills, (1998) ‘Is there only one Folk Psychology?’ Acta Analytica, 20:25-41, and Angeline Lillard, (1998) ‘Ethnopsychologies: Cultural Variations in Theories of Mind.’ Psychological Bulletin, 123:3-32). Guttenplan’s mental landscape is by no means a universal one (although, of course, there may be overlaps with the models of mind found in other cultures), but a specifically Western one.

I think that armchair-style philosophy, in missing out on this ‘real world’ information, constrains our understanding of what counts as mindedness. It gives rise to particular sorts of problems (which might be very different for other ‘mental landscapes’), and limits the sorts of responses we might offer. Of course, Guttenplan’s aim is to focus on ‘our’ commonsense conception of the mind, and he has certainly achieved this objective. It’s just that this is a very specific conception of the mind.

Although my comments concern issues perhaps beyond the scope of this text (after all, for practical purposes, books can only be so long) I think that, if only for completeness, they merit mention (as footnotes or references for additional reading). Looking outside philosophy of mind can only enrich the discipline; even gesturing towards these other sources of information about the mind would, I feel, have added force to Guttenplan’s comment that ‘this book is intended as a first, and not the last, word on the philosophy of mind.’ (p. 191) Perhaps a better way to think of this text is Mind’s Landscape: An Introduction to Traditional Philosophy of Mind, or A Philosophical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind.

I think my comments arise from a difference of focus about the philosophy of mind: Guttenplan’s focus in on philosophy, while mine is on mind (sufficiently informed by the sciences). Yet, as I trust I have shown, this difference makes a difference, and it is something that the non-philosopher needs to be aware of. Nevertheless, with these caveats in hand, I can highly recommend ML as an excellent introductory philosophical text.

© Maria Trochatos, 2001

Categories: Philosophical