Philosophy of Mind

This book examines how emotions form a bridge between our experience of art and of life. We often find that a particular poem, painting, or piece of music carries an emotional charge; we may also experience emotions towards, or on behalf of, a particular fictional character. These experiences are philosophically puzzling, for their causes seem quite different from the causes of emotion in the rest of our lives. Using many literary, visual and musical examples, this book shows that what these experiences have in common, and what links them to the expression of emotion in non-artistic cases, is the role played by feeling. It surveys various accounts of the nature of fiction, attacks contemporary cognitivist accounts of expression, and offers an uncompromising defence of a controversial view about musical expression: that music expresses the emotions it causes its listeners to feel. Whilst this book engages with the work of contemporary theorists, it remains accessible to readers without philosophical training.

All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, “irrepressibly artful minds”. Cognitively modern minds have produced a staggering list of behavioral singularities—science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art—that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the basic mental operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate? These are the questions that occupy the chapters in this book. These chapters bring to bear a range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the relationship between art (broadly conceived), the mind, and the brain. Together they hope to provide directions for a new field of research that can play a significant role in answering the great riddle of human singularity.

People backslide. They freely do things they believe it would be best on the whole not to do – and best from their own point of view, not just the perspective of their peers or their parents. The aim of this book is to explain why that happens. The first main item of business is to clarify the nature of backsliding – of actions that display some weakness of will. To this end, Mele uses traditional philosophical techniques dating back to Plato and Aristotle (whose work on weakness of will or “akrasia” he discusses) and some new studies in the emerging field of experimental philosophy. He then attacks the thesis that backsliding is an illusion because people never freely act contrary to what they judge best. Mele argues that it is extremely plausible that if people ever act freely, they sometimes backslide. The biggest challenge posed by backsliding is to explain why it happens. At the book’s heart is the development of a theoretical and empirical framework that sheds light both on backsliding and on exercises of self-control that prevent it. Here, Mele draws on work in social and developmental psychology and in psychiatry to motivate a view of human behavior in which both backsliding and overcoming the temptation to backslide are explicable. He argues that backsliding is no illusion and our theories about the springs of action, the power of evaluative judgments, human agency, human rationality, practical reasoning, and motivation should accommodate backsliding.

This book revolves around the theme that psychological space demands physical space; that the inner world is embedded in, and fabricated from, interactions between world and mind. The following themes in moral philosophy are considered: the nature of the ‘subject’, agency, free will, and self-knowledge. The first three chapters of the book focus on memory, anxiety, and time. The next three chapters are explicitly about the subject, and about first-person, propositional thought. The final chapters articulate the idea that one cannot hive off the subjective aspects of a person from those that are objective.

There are few more unsettling philosophical questions than this: ‘what happens in attempts to reduce some properties to some other more fundamental properties?’ Reflection on this question inevitably touches on very deep issues about ourselves, our own interactions with the world and each other, and our very understanding of what there is and what goes on around us. If we cannot command a clear view of these deep issues, then very many other debates in contemporary philosophy seem to lose traction — think of causation, laws of nature, explanation, consciousness, personal identity, intentionality, normativity, freedom, responsibility, justice, and so on. Reduction can easily seem to unravel our world. This book aims to answer this question. Its chapters span a number of current debates in philosophy and cognitive science: what is the nature of reduction, of reductive explanation, of mental causation? The chapters range from approaches in analytical metaphysics, over philosophy of the special sciences and physics, to interdisciplinary studies in psychiatry and neurobiology. The chapters connect strands in contemporary philosophy that are often treated separately, and in combination they show how issues of reduction, explanation, and causation mutually constrain each other.

Some of our beliefs are fundamentally about ourselves: these are beliefs about who we are, where we are, and which features we have. Philosophers typically suppose that the contents of our beliefs and other cognitive attitudes are propositions. Propositions are things that might be true or false, and their truth values do not vary from time to time, place to place, or person to person. The main thesis of this book is that this supposition is mistaken and must be replaced with another view about content. The view that belief contents are propositions breaks down in the face of belief about the self, or so-called de se belief. On the view defended here, the content of a de se belief is a property that the believer reflexively takes himself or herself to have. The relation of self-ascription connects believers and such properties. Unlike propositions, properties lack absolute truth values that do not vary with time, place, or person. This book offers a sustained defense of the property theory of content, according to which the content of every cognitive attitude is a property rather than a proposition. The theory is supported with some new arguments, defended from various objections, and applied to some important problems and puzzles in the philosophy of mind.

This book aims to reconcile pragmatism (in both its classical American and its Wittgensteinian forms) with analytic philosophy. It investigates relations between the meaning of linguistic expressions and their use. Giving due weight both to what one has to do in order to count as saying various things and to what one needs to say in order to specify those doings makes it possible to shed new light on the relations between semantics (the theory of the meanings of utterances and the contents of thoughts) and pragmatics (the theory of the functional relations among meaningful or contentful items). Among the vocabularies whose interrelated use and meaning are considered are: logical, indexical, modal, normative, and intentional vocabulary. As the argument proceeds, new ways of thinking about the classical analytic core programs of empiricism, naturalism, and functionalism are offered, as well as novel insights about the ideas of artificial intelligence, the nature of logic, and intentional relations between subjects and objects.

The focus of this book is consequentialism, the moral theory upon which an action is morally right just in case its performance leads to the best state of affairs. The theory can with some plausibility claim a status as the default alternative in contemporary moral philosophy. Moreover, its pervasive deployment in spheres such as economics, public policy, and jurisprudence is one of the striking developments of the last 150 years. It is the thesis of this book that debates concerning the challenge of consequentialism tend to overlook a fundamental challenge to consequentialism, an unresolved tension between the theory and many of its most fundamental presuppositions. An appreciation of the nature of this tension grounds the articulation of a fundamental challenge to the theory from within. This challenge is developed and sharpened through the first 4 chapters of the book. Development of this challenge to consequentialism in turn reveals the apparent force of the challenge of consequentialism to be largely illusory. Chapter 5 demonstrates that many traditional rationales offered in its support draw upon systematic misappropriations of intuitions linking rightness of actions and goodness of actions, treating them as intuitions concerning rightness of actions and goodness of overall states of affairs. Chapters 6 and 7 demonstrate that one remaining rationale — a rationale grounded in the appeal to the impartiality of morality — does not provide support for the theory; indeed, that attempts to respond to the tension within consequentialism suggest a fundamental role for an alternative to the consequentialist's impersonal conception of impartiality, an interpersonal rather than an impersonal conception of equal concern. Unlike the consequentialist's impersonal conception, such interpersonal impartiality can allow for the ordinary moral convictions that actions that do not promote the best overall state of affairs are often morally permitted, and are sometimes morally required.

Contemporary debates in philosophy of mind‐between reductionists, dualists, nonreductive materialists, and eliminativists‐have been based upon the perception that mental phenomena like consciousness and intentionality are uniquely irreducible. The “explanatory gap” between mind and body seems to be an urgent and fascinating problem if one assumes that intertheoretic reductions are the rule in the special sciences, with the mind as the lone exception. While this debate was going on in philosophy of mind, however, philosophers of science were rejecting this very sort of reductionism: intertheoretic reductions are not ubiquitous but rare. This book argues that post‐reductionist philosophy of science poses problems for all the familiar positions in philosophy of mind and calls for a deep rethinking of the problematic. To this end, a new perspective, Cognitive Pluralism, is urged.