I decided to post this short reading list after seeing the following parenthetical remark at Mirror of Justice by Rick Garnett (and not only because it is one of the few occasions we see things eye-to-eye): “I’ll confess to considerable skepticism about whether we really learn much about ‘virtue,’ as I understand it, from research with hard-core ‘mind-is-brain’ reductionist premises.”
The following titles help to undermine the assumption that anything based on the premise that (the properties of) the mind will someday be explanatorily reduced to (the properties of) the brain (or, in the case of eliminativism, that we’ll do better by banishing all talk about ‘the mental’ as redundant and illusory, and therefore unnecessary). In other words, consciousness, intentionality, and normativity are decisive properties or features or characteristics of our mental life which rule out the plausibility of reductionist or eliminativist “hypotheses.” In fact, and more strongly, they might be said to rule out the very possibility of such views being vindicated (i.e., true), for as to the various proposals on offer: emergentism, epiphenomenalism, and supervenience, for example: “It cannot even be said that they are working hypotheses, because a working hypothesis is one that will rise or fall on the basis of relevant evidence, and there is no ‘evidence’ as such that could tell for or against ‘hypotheses’of this sort” (Robinson 2008 below). One alternative presents itself in the work of Ralph Wedgwood, namely, that we might “reconcile the thesis that normative and mental properties are irreducible with the strong naturalistic thesis that all contingent facts are necessarily realized in physical facts.” I have to think more about this provocative proposal before I attempt to say or insinuate anything of substance about it. Addendum: I should have mentioned that Luntley’s book , inspired in many respects by Wittgenstein, also provides us with a non-reductionist account of intentionality and meaning that is, at the same time described as “naturalist” because it is non-representationalist and neo-behaviorist, involving descriptions of our causal encounters with the external world. The attenuated sense of naturalism here is worthy of a separate discussion of course, so suffice to say I cite his book in virtue of its non-reductionist account of intentionality.
- Bennett, M.R. and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
- Bennett, Maxwell, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
- Descombes, Vincent (Stephen Adam Schwartz, tr.). The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
- Finkelstein, David H. Expression and the Inner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
- Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.
- Hutto, Daniel D. The Presence of Mind. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999.
- Hutto, Daniel D. Beyond Physicalism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000.
- Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
- Lloyd, G.E.R. Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2007.
- Luntley, Michael. Contemporary Philosophy of Thought: Truth, World, Content. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999.
- Lynch, Michael P. Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
- McCulloch, Gregory. The Life of the Mind: An essay on phenomenological externalism. London: Routledge, 2003.
- Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson, “Minds, Brains, and Norms” (July 10, 2009). Neuroethics, Forthcoming. University of Alabama Public Law Research Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1432476
- Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson. “Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience” (February 6, 2009). University of Illinois Law Review, 2010. University of Alabama Public Law Research Paper No. 1338763. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1338763
- Putnam, Hilary. The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
- Ram-Pradad, Chakravarthi. Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Outline of Indian Non-Realism. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002.
- Robinson, Daniel N. Consciousness and Mental Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
- Stueber, Karsten R. Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
- Travis, Charles. Unshadowed Thought: Representation in Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
- Velmans, Max. Understanding Consciousness. London: Routledge, 2000.
- Wedgwood, Ralph. The Nature of Normativity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Comments