Philosophy of Mind Meets Logical Theory: Perry on Neo‐Dualism

Abstract

John Perry's new book makes an important philosophical contribution at two quite distinct levels. The first and most obvious is its systematic critical discussion of three of the most notorious recent arguments in favor of some form of Property Dualism: Chalmers' Zombie Argument, Jackson's Knowledge Argument, and Kripke's Modal Argument. Perry no stranger himself to matters modal, indexical, and demonstrative brings an especial authority to this task. Unlike many of us, he eats, drinks, and breathes the same modal vocabulary deployed by all three of these authors, and, unlike some of us, he accepts most of what passes for conventional wisdom in current modal theory. Moreover, while antecedently inclined toward some form of physicalism in the philosophy of mind (something in the intersection of functionalism and the identity theory would suit him just fine), he has no particular ideological axe to grind here. Perry never turns (as, for example, this reviewer surely would) to extol the positive virtues of this, that, or the other materialist theory of mind above its various dualist adversaries. He just wishes to determine whether any of the three celebrated arguments cited above provides the antecedent materialist with a motive for reconsidering that general position. Other readers will be eager, as was I, to see how a judge with Perry's solid but prototypically analytic credentials comes down on this issue. His judgment, it emerges, is negative in all three cases. But hereby hangs a tale, for Perry is concerned, at a second and deeper level, to advance some novel views about the nature and varieties of semantic content. In particular, he urges the existence and relevance of something he calls as opposed to the more familiar subject matter contents of traditional, externalist, objectivist, attributivist, Tarski-style reckonings of the semantic content of any representation. On his view, one and the same representation whether an overt sentence or a covert thought can have several different reflexive contents, depending on a variety of contextual factors having to do with the objective situation and current cognitive state (possibly uninformed) of the agent who asserts it. This allows us, argues Perry, to