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Materialism and the First Person

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Geoffrey Madell
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Extract

Here are some sentences from Fred Dretske's book Naturalising the Mind:

For a materialist there are no facts that are accessible to only one person … If the subjective life of another being, what it is like to be that creature, seems inaccessible, this must be because we fail to understand what we are talking about when we talk about its subjective states. If S feels some way, and its feeling some way is a material state, how can it be impossible for us to know how S feels? Though each of us has direct information about our own experiences, there is no privileged access. If you know where to look, you can get the same information I have about the character of my experiences. This is a result of thinking about the mind in naturalistic terms. Subjectivity becomes part of the objective order. For materialists, this is as it should be.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 53 , September 2003 , pp. 123 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2003

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References

1 Dretske, F., Naturalising the Mind (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997), 65Google Scholar.

2 See F. Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, reprinted in W. G. Lycan (ed.), Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 470–2.

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6 Tye, 713.

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8 Lycan, 64.

9 Lycan, 45.

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11 Tye, ‘Phenomenal Consciousness’, 708.

12 See Chalmers, D., The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 136–43Google Scholar.

13 Lycan, 79.

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15 Lycan, 114–5.

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18 Chalmers, 85.

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21 Papineau actually says that there is nothing physically in common to all thermostats apart from their all turning the heater off when the water gets hot enough. That crucial qualification undermines the suggested parallel with psychological concepts.

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24 Kim actually allows that abandoning physicalism in favour of substantival dualism is a serious option, and one that will entail the rejection of mind-body supervenience. See Kim, op. cit., 119.