The mind-body problem: Taking stock after forty years

Nous-Supplement: Philosophical Perspectives

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 185-207

  Kim, Jaegwon ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 61949131758     PISSN: 15208583     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. J.J.C. Smart, "Sensations and Brain Processes", Philosophical Review 68 (1958): 141-156.
2. Herbert Feigl, "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'", Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, ed. Herbert Feigl, Grover Maxwell, and Michael Scriven (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958).
3. U.T. Place, "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?", British Journal of Psychology 47, Part I (1956): 44-50.
4. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson and Company, Ltd., 1949).
5. C.D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1925).
6. In "Psychological Predicates" first published in 1968 and later reprinted under the title "The Nature of Mental States", in Hilary Putnam, Collected Papers II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
7. See, e.g., Zenon Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).
8. Two notable exceptions were David Armstrong and David Lewis. On the ambiguous metaphysical stance of functionalism concerning the mind-body problem, see Ned Block's "Introduction: What Is Functionalism?", in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. Block (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).
9. The first philosophical use of this term I know of in the current sense in Hilary Putnam's "Minds and Machines", in Dimensions of Mind ed. Sydney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1960).
10. In his "Antireductionism Strikes Back", forthcoming in Philosophical Perspectives.
11. I have argued elsewhere that classic emergentism is appropriately taken as the first articulation of nonreductive physicalism. See my "The Nonreductivist's Troubles with Mental Causation", in Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
12. See, e.g., John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992).
13. Another sign of new interest in emergence is the volume of essays on emergence, Emergence or Reduction?, ed. Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flohr, and Jaegwon Kim (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992).
14. E.g., Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993). See especially Part IV entitled "Varieties of Emergence".
15. On the need for explaining supervenience relations see Terence Horgan, "Supervenience and Cosmic Hermeneutics", Southern Journal of Philosophy 22 (1984), Supplement: 19-38
16. and Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons, "Troubles on Moral Twin Earth: Moral Queerness Revisited", Synthese 92 (1992): 221-260.
17. In his work on vision David Marr famously distinguishes three levels of analysis: the computational, the algorithmic, and the implementational. See his Vision (New York: Freeman Press, 1982).
18. The emergentists, early in this century, appear to have been first to give an explicit formulation of the layered model; see, e.g., C. Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1923).
19. For a particularly clear and useful statement of the model, see Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam, "Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis", Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2 (1958).
20. Hilary Putnam is responsible for both the functionalist conception of mentality and the general idea of a second-order property. On the latter see his "On Properties", in Philosophical Papers, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Ned Block has extensively used the notion of second-order property in discussions of functionalism. In "On Properties", however, Putnam did not explicitly relate the notion of realization to that of second-order property.
21. Unless we have in mind "total realizers" in something like Sydney Shoemaker's sense. See his helpful distinction between "core realization" and "total realization", in "Some Varieties of Functionalism", reprinted in Identity, Cause, and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
22. See also Ronald Endicott, "Constructival Plasticity", Philosophical Studies 74 (1994): 51-75. The discussion here assumes that input and output specifications are held constant for all systems, which is a highly idealized (in fact, evidently false) assumption. Surely, what counts as pain input or pain output differ greatly for different species (say, humans and octopuses) from a purely physical-behavioral point of view, and is likely to show significant differences even among humans.
23. See The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), chapter 11.
24. See J.A. Fodor, "Special Sciences (or The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)", Synthese 28 (1974): 97-115.
25. On this point see Robert Causey's persuasive arguments in his Unity of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977).
26. See also Horgan, "Supervenience and Cosmic Hermeneutics".
27. For further details and development, see my "Postscripts to Mental Causation" in Supervenience and Mind, and Mind in a Physical World, forthcoming.
28. Brian McLaughlin makes this point in his "The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism", in Emergence or Reduction?, ed. A. Beckermann, H. Flohr, and J. Kim.
29. On this point concerning reducibility and functionalization, what I am advocating here has a good deal in common with David Armstrong's argument for central-state materialism, although of course we differ on the functionalizability of phenomenal properties. See his A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1968). See also the papers by Horgan and by Horgan and Timmons cited in note 12;
30. Robert Van Gulick's "Nonreductive Materialism and the Nature of Intertheoretical Constraint", in Emergence or Reduction?;
31. and Joseph Levine, "On Leaving Out What It Is Like", in Consciousness ed. Martin Davies and Glyn W. Humphries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)
32. See Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988;
33. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind.