Does dualism make a difference?
This entry was posted on 9/15/2006 7:01 AM and is filed under Psychology,Intentionality,Cognition,Consciousness,Explanation,Neuroscience.
On my long, long list of "Things I Don't Really Have Time to Think About But Wish I Did" is the following simple question:
Does dualism make a difference to one's overall view of the mind?
Since some might assume that the obvious answer to the question is an
obvious "yes"—and in fact that answer is a part of the kind of
folklore of cognitive science—let me explain why I think things are
not so straight forward. If you look at the history of modern
philosophy, the bulk of the thinkers we continue to read today were
dualists. But they nearly all have some quite elaborate story to
tell about how the mind works, and that story is quite often pretty
mechanistic. You might think that if you're a dualist work your
salt, then you'd just throw up your hands and say "Sorry, no story to
be told about how the mind works BECAUSE IT IS IMMATERIAL". But
although all classic dualists end up in something like this position,
they rarely start there, and on the way manage to provide accounts of
lots and lot of phenomena that at least we think of as mental or
mindful. The same seems to me true in the contemporary
literature: self-professed dualists, while still grasping for some kind
of mysterian view about some particular aspect of the mind (e.g,.
consciousness and the hard problem), still manage to act pretty much
like the most die-hard physicalists and naturalists about most of the
mind. But one might expect a seemingly gaping divide, that
between dualism and physicalism as fundamental views of the mind, to
make itself more manifest in the more mundane, day-to-day philosophical
work of those who fall on one or the other side of it. My
impression is that it doesn't. So maybe we should take the
negative answer to the question of whether dualism makes a difference
more seriously, both in how we think about the history of psychology /
phil of mind, and in what we think matters in contemporary discussions.
