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The Relevance of Philosophy of Mind
Feb. 14th, 2005 01:27 amI'm failing to see how philosophy of mind deals with any genuine philosophical questions. It's organized around the mind/body problem. But I've never been able to see this as a genuine problem. It might be a problem for monks, or for researchers in the various cognitive sciences, but it has never presented itself as a problem for me. I don't know whether or how the way I see the world, or the things that I do, will change if I adopt any of various hypotheses in phil. of mind. The mind/body problem is not an impasse. It's a "how do we reconcile x with y?" sort of problem. It might be a medieval problem: e.g. "How do we reconcile science with God?" So we must use levels of explanation (how very interesting!). (It is interesting, I'll admit, if you think about it from the point of view of the ontological structure of the world--: that patterns are operative on any of various levels.) But mainly, this seems to me like a clever and not unpleasant subtlety of how to make theories work, but nothing more.
Phil. of mind is supposed to be philosophical because it deals with our concepts, reconciling them with scientific endeavor; but I think it deals with our concepts in the wrong direction. The problem, to begin with, is pointed away from us, rather than towards us. (I don't want to exclude the possibility that there is a way of finding the proper perspective in all the philosophical subdisciplines that seem pointed in the wrong direction; epistemology, clearly, contains both personally relevant problems and approaches that render them unrecognizable.) I doubt whether it's possible to feel the force of philosophical problems without having had certain life experiences, so perhaps I have only the lack of context in analytic philosophy to blame. Or perhaps my own imagination: if the context hasn't made it clear, the failure is mine, for not seeing the aspect under which I should be troubled.
Phil. of mind is supposed to be philosophical because it deals with our concepts, reconciling them with scientific endeavor; but I think it deals with our concepts in the wrong direction. The problem, to begin with, is pointed away from us, rather than towards us. (I don't want to exclude the possibility that there is a way of finding the proper perspective in all the philosophical subdisciplines that seem pointed in the wrong direction; epistemology, clearly, contains both personally relevant problems and approaches that render them unrecognizable.) I doubt whether it's possible to feel the force of philosophical problems without having had certain life experiences, so perhaps I have only the lack of context in analytic philosophy to blame. Or perhaps my own imagination: if the context hasn't made it clear, the failure is mine, for not seeing the aspect under which I should be troubled.
