Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:54:00.545Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Materialism and the First Person

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Geoffrey Madell
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.

3 Flanagan, O., Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992), 91, 116Google Scholar.

4 Lycan, W. G., Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996), 54–68Google Scholar.

5 Tye, M., ‘Phenomenal Consciousness: The Explanatory Gap as a Cognitive Illusion’, Mind 108, No. 432 (10 1999), 710CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Tye, 713.

7 Sturgeon, S., ‘The Epistemic View of Subjectivity’, Journal of Philosophy 91, No. 5 (05 1994), 235CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Lycan, 64.

9 Lycan, 45.

10 Tye, M., Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996), 92Google Scholar.

11 Tye, ‘Phenomenal Consciousness’, 708.

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

13 Lycan, 79.

14 See Brewer's, B. review of Tye's, M.Consciousness, Colour and Content in Mind 110, No. 439 (07 2001), 871Google Scholar.

15 Lycan, 114–5.

16 Loar, B., ‘Phenomenal States’, Philosophical Perceptives, 4 (Atascadero, California: Ridgeview, 1990), 81–108Google Scholar.

17 Perry, J., Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001), 205–6Google Scholar.

18 Chalmers, 85.

19 Dennett, D., ‘True Believers’, in his The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1987), 26Google Scholar.

20 Papineau, D., ‘Irreducibility and Teleology’, in Charles, D. and Lennon, K. (eds), Reduction, Explanation and Realism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 60–4Google Scholar.

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.

22 Cussins, A., ‘The Limitations of Pluralism’, in Reduction, Explanation and Realism, p. 198Google Scholar.

23 Kim, J., Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998), 101Google Scholar.

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.