Introduction: Why I Wrote This Book

Abstract

Abstract There are many recent introductory books on the philosophy of mind. Several give a more or less comprehensive survey of the main positions and arguments currently in the field. Some, indeed, are written with great clarity, rigor, intelligence, and scholarship. What then is my excuse for adding another book to this glut? Well, of course, any philosopher who has worked hard on a subject is unlikely to be completely satisfied with somebody else’s writings on that same subject, and I suppose that I am a typical philosopher in this respect. But in addition to the usual desire for wanting to state my disagreements, there is an overriding reason for my wanting to write a general introduction to the philosophy of mind. Almost all of the works that I have read accept the same set of historically inherited categories for describing mental phenomena, especially consciousness, and with these categories a certain set of assumptions about how consciousness and other mental phenomena relate to each other and to the rest of the world. It is this set of categories, and the assumptions that the categories carry like heavy baggage, that is completely unchallenged and that keeps the discussion going. The different positions then are all taken within a set of mistaken assumptions. The result is that the philosophy of mind is unique among contemporary philosophical subjects, in that all of the most famous and influential theories are false. By such theories I mean just about anything that has “ism” in its name. I am thinking of dualism, both property dualism and substance dualism, materialism, physicalism, computationalism, functionalism, behaviorism, epiphenomenalism, cognitivism, eliminativism, pan psychism, dual-aspect theory, and emergentism, as it is standardly conceived. To make the whole subject even more poignant, many of these theories, especially dualism and materialism, are trying to say something true. One of my many aims is to try to rescue the truth from the overwhelming urge to falsehood. I have attempted some of this task in other works, especially The Rediscovery of the Mind,1 but this is my only attempt at a comprehensive introduction to the entire subject of the philosophy of mind.