Customer Reviews

Philosophy of Mind

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I have read a lot of books, introductory and advanced, on the philosophy of mind, but I rarely review them. However, this book had some flaws that were just so evident that I felt I had a responsability to comment on them. But of course, I will not just shun the book and leave. Not everything that is flawed is useless. This book, far from being useless, is an adequate introduction to the philosophy of mind. But the author does not have this as his only goal, and also attempts to defend a property dualistic ontology of mind. He is also an emergentist, but here I have few objections. But emergentism itself is not incompatible with materialism, as the author seems to imply sometimes.

The book is short, easy to read, and covers the necessary ground for any begginer who wants to learn the generalso of philosophy of mind. There are chapters on the diferent types of dualism, materialism, philosophy of artificial intelligence and on intentionality. The author discusses classic and modern positions in all of these things, and makes it all clear and non-technical. The problem is that everytime he tries to attack some position or other, he simply does not seem to succeed. I mean, even Descartes's substance dualism is defensible form Jacquettes critique! Now to be more specific, I will limit myself to his main argument against materialism, for wich he concludes propery dualism is a better bet at expaining the ontology of mind.

The argument is roughly as follows (Pge 20): The mind has intentionallity. The body as such does not. Therefore the mind cannott be fully explained by alluding to purely physical (body) processes. Here the property of being intentional leads one to property dualism, according to Jacquette. Now anyone with any knowledge of philosophy of mind will quickly point out that the 2 premises can be attacked, as can the conclusion even when one accepts the validity of the premises. First, it is not clear why intentionality could not be explained physically. Jacquette begs the question in assuming that this is not possible. John Searle, for example, is a materialist, even though he accepts the importance of intentionality. So to say that the body as such can have no intentionality is begging the same question. And finally, the fact that mind and body might have diferent properties does not necessarily lead one to any kind of dualism, for the differences might be only in virtue of epistemistic access. That is, if one knows something by description instead of by aquaintance, one may believe one of these descriptions has a property that the other does not, even when they refer to the same things.(In fact, this is related to Jacksons knowledge argument, of which Jacquette talks inadequately). To illustrate my points, and to show to what extent Jaquettes discussion is incoherent look at this extract:

"conceivably...imput-output simulations of mind, in which physical syntax tokens casually interact with themselves in an apropiate...enviroment, might duplicate the brain's power to produce...intentional thought.." (pge 81).

Here the author accepts the posibility that intentionallity might be physically realizable after all! What happened to the intentionality argument?
The author gives no reason of why physicalism might be inadequate to explain the mind fully, and offers the worst defence of property dualism I have read yet. Nothing I have said can be taken to imply that physicalism is true, however.