- Philosophy of mind and empirical psychology
- Terminology and distinctions
- Main problematic phenomena
- Traditional metaphysical positions
- The computational-representational theory of thought (CRTT)
- Further issues
Terminology and distinctions
Some basic metaphysical categories
Mental phenomena appear in the full variety of basic categories displayed by phenomena in most other domains, and it is often extremely important to bear in mind just which category is being discussed. Providing definitions of these basic categories is the task of metaphysics in general and will not be undertaken here. What follows are some illustrative examples.
Substances are the basic things—the basic “stuff”—out of which the world is composed. Earth, air, fire, and water were candidate substances in ancient times; energy, the chemical elements, and subatomic particles are more contemporary examples. Historically, many philosophers have thought that the mind involves a special substance that is different in some fundamental way from material substances. This view, however, has largely been replaced by more moderate claims involving other metaphysical categories to be discussed below.
Objects are, in the first instance, just what are ordinarily called “objects”—tables, chairs, rocks, planets, stars, and human and animal bodies, among innumerable other things. Physicists sometimes talk further about “unobservable” objects, such as molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles; and psychologists have posited unobservable objects such as drives, instincts, memory traces, egos, and superegos. All of these are objects in the philosophical sense. Particularly problematic examples, to be discussed below, are “apparent” objects such as pains, tickles, and mental images.
Abstract and concrete
Most objects one thinks of are located somewhere in space and time. Philosophers call anything that is potentially located in space and time “concrete.” Some apparent objects, however, seem to be neither in space nor in time. There exists, after all, a positive square root of nine, namely, the number three; by contrast, the positive square root of -1 does not exist. But the square root of nine is not located in any particular part of space. It seems to exist outside of time entirely, neither coming into existence nor passing out of it. Objects of this sort are called “abstract.”
Some mental phenomena are straightforwardly abstract—for example, the thoughts and beliefs that are shared between the present-day citizens of Beijing and the citizens of ancient Athens. But other mental phenomena are especially puzzling in this regard. For example, Brutus might have had regretful thoughts after stabbing Julius Caesar, and these thoughts might have caused him to blush. But precisely where did these regretful thoughts occur so that they could have had this effect? Does it even make sense to say they occurred at a point one millimeter away from Brutus’s hypothalamus? Sensations are even more peculiar, since they often seem to be located in very specific places, as when one feels a pain in one’s left forearm. But, as occurs in the case of phantom limb syndrome, one could have such a pain without actually having a forearm. And mental images seem downright paradoxical: people with vivid visual imaginations may report having images of a cow jumping over the Moon, for example, but no one supposes that there is an actual image of this sort in anyone’s brain.
Objects seem to have properties: a tennis ball is spherical and fuzzy; a billiard ball is spherical and smooth. To a first approximation, a property can be thought of as the thing named by that part of a simple sentence that is left over when the subject of the sentence is omitted; thus, the property expressed by is spherical (or the property of sphericality, or being spherical) is obtained by omitting a tennis ball from A tennis ball is spherical. As these examples show, a property such as sphericality can be shared by many different objects (for this reason, properties have traditionally been called universals). Mental properties, such as being conscious and being in pain, can obviously be shared by many people and animals—and, much more controversially, perhaps also by machines.
Relations are what is expressed by what is left when not only the subject but also the direct and indirect object (or objects) of a sentence are omitted. Thus, the relation of kissing is obtained by omitting both Mary and John from Mary kissed John; and the relation of giving is obtained by omitting Eve, Adam, and an apple from Eve gave Adam an apple. Likewise, the relation of understanding is obtained by omitting both Mary and that John is depressed from Mary understands that John is depressed. In this case the object that Mary understands is often called a thought (see below Thoughts and propositions).
Properties and relations are often spoken of as being “instantiated” by the things that have them: a ball instantiates sphericality; the trio of Eve, Adam, and the apple instantiates the relation of giving. A difficult question over which philosophers disagree is whether properties and relations can exist even if they are completely uninstantiated. Is there a property of being a unicorn, a property of being a round square, or a relation of “being the reincarnation of”? This question will be left open here, since there is widespread disagreement about it. In general, however, one should not simply assume without argument that an uninstantiated property or relation exists.
States consist simply of objects having properties or standing in relations to other objects. For example, Caesar’s mental state of being conscious presumably ended with the event of his death. An event consists of objects’ losing or acquiring various properties and relations; thus, Caesar’s death was an event that consisted of his losing the property of being alive, and John’s seeing Mary is an event that consists of John’s and Mary’s coming to stand in the relation of seeing.
Thoughts and attitudes
Thoughts and propositions
It was noted above that understanding is a relation that someone can bear to a thought. But what sort of thing is a thought? This is a topic of enormous controversy, but one can begin to get a grasp of it by noticing that thoughts are typically referred to, or expressed by, sentential complements, or clauses beginning with that. Thus, one may have the thought that Venus is uninhabitable or the thought that 26 + 26 = 52. (There are, of course, other ways of expressing thoughts—a mere gesture can suffice—but it will be useful to take “that” clauses to be standard.) That a thought is different from the sentence that expresses it is entailed by the fact that different sentences can express the same thought: the thought expressed by Snow is white is also expressed in German by Der Schnee ist weiss and in French by La neige est blanche. Indeed, thoughts are often taken to be the meanings of sentences, in which case they are called “propositions.” (Meaning is an enormously controversial topic in its own right; see semantics and philosophy of language.)