Precis of The Nature of Mental Things

Abstract

The Nature of Mental Things (NMT) examines the concepts of belief, consciousness, perceptual experience and reason-giving explanation from the standpoint of the conviction that all the prevailing schools of contemporary philosophy of mind share a stultifying commitment to an essentially Cartesian conception of mental realities. Descartes and the classical empiricists thought of the conscious mind as an inner realm of non-material private phenomena. Of course, there have been repeated efforts to reject this conception and to adopt a wholly non-Cartesian conception of the mind. But these efforts have been vitiated by a persistent focus on the metaphysical status of inner things. In consequence, the prevailing philosophies of mind attempt to correct Cartesianism by substituting inner physical realities for the spiritual or mental things envisioned by dualists. The underlying contention of NMT is that the decisive difficulty in the Cartesian conception is the concept of an inner domain of mental reality. The metaphysical constitution of that inner domain is far less significant and has been an unfortunate distraction in the thinking of most modern philosophers of mind. In the context of the concept of belief, the general Cartesian understanding of mental realities issues in the idea that believing is a matter of the presence of inner belief-states. The prevailing philosophies of mind accept this broad conception of belief without critical reflection as if it were something that is established before any philosophical step is taken. Philosophers and cognitive scientists are supposed to have the job of saying just what these inner realities in believers are. Are they, for example, brain-states, or neural states involving inscriptions of sentences, or functional-states having neural realizations in human believers? NMT rejects all these accounts, and behaviorism and Cartesianism with them, on the ground that they all make believing that p into a subject matter about which the believer could make assertions (and