Type physicalism - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Type physicalism is a physicalist

Physicalism

Physicalism is a philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things...

theory, in philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...

. It asserts that mental event

Mental event

A mental event is a particular occurrence of something going on in the mind or mind substitute. It can be a thought, a dream, a feeling, a realization, or any other mental activity. Mental events are not limited to human thought but can be associated with animal and artificial intelligence as...

s can be grouped into types, and can then be correlated

Correlation

In statistics, dependence refers to any statistical relationship between two random variables or two sets of data. Correlation refers to any of a broad class of statistical relationships involving dependence....

with types of physical events in the brain. For example, one type of mental event like "mental pains" will, presumably, turn out to be describing one type of physical event (like C-fiber

Group C nerve fiber

-Location:C fibers are found in the peripheral nerves of the somatic sensory system. They are afferent fibers, conveying input signals from the periphery to the central nervous system.-Structure:...

firings).

Type physicalism is contrasted by token identity
Anomalous monism
Anomalous monism is a philosophical thesis about the mind-body relationship. It was first proposed by Donald Davidson in his 1970 paper Mental events. The theory is twofold and states that mental events are identical with physical events, and that the mental is anomalous, i.e. under their mental...

physicalism. Token identity physicalism argues that mental events are unlikely to have "steady" or categorical biological correlates. These positions make use of the philosophical Type–token distinction

Type–token distinction

In disciplines such as philosophy and knowledge representation, the type-token distinction is a distinction that separates an abstract concept from the objects which are particular instances of the concept...

(e.g. having the same type of car need not mean that you and your friend share a token, a single vehicle). Type physicalism can now be understood to argue that there is identicalness between types, whereas token identity physicalism says we are only describing a particular, unique, brain event.

There are other ways a physicalist might criticize type physicalism; Eliminative materialism

Eliminative materialism

Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...

and Revisionary materialism

Revisionary materialism

Revisionary materialism is the view that falls between Eliminative materialism and Reductive materialism when it comes to a particular psychological phenomenon....

question whether science is currently using the best categorisations. In the same way talk of demonic possession

Demonic possession

Demonic possession is held by many belief systems to be the control of an individual by a malevolent supernatural being. Descriptions of demonic possessions often include erased memories or personalities, convulsions, “fits” and fainting as if one were dying...

was questioned with scientific advance, categorisations like "pain" may need to be revised.

Background

According to U.T. Place

Ullin Place

Ullin Place was a British philosopher and psychologist. Along with J. J. C. Smart, he developed the identity theory of mind. Place was born in Yorkshire and studied under Gilbert Ryle at Oxford University. There, he became acquainted with philosophy of mind in the logical behaviorist tradition,...

, one of the popularizers of the idea of type-identity in the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of type-identity physicalism originated in the 1930s with the psychologist E. G. Boring and took nearly a quarter of a century to gain acceptance from the philosophical community. Boring, in a book entitled The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness (1933) wrote that:

To the author a perfect correlation is identity. Two events that always occur together at the same time in the same place, without any temporal or spatial differentiation at all, are not two events but the same event. The mind-body correlations as formulated at present, do not admit of spatial correlation, so they reduce to matters of simple correlation in time. The need for identification is no less urgent in this case (p. 16, quoted in Place [unpublished]).

The barrier to the acceptance of any such vision of the mind, according to Place, was that philosophers and logicians had not yet taken a substantial interest in questions of identity and referential identification in general. The dominant epistemology of the logical positivists

Logical positivism

Logical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...

at that time was phenomenalism

Phenomenalism

Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects do not exist as things in themselves but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli situated in time and in space...

, in the guise of the theory of sense-data. Indeed Boring himself subscribed to the phenomenalist creed, attempting to reconcile it with an identity theory and this resulted in a reductio ad absurdum of the identity theory, since brain states would have turned out, on this analysis, to be identical to colors, shapes, tones and other sensory experiences.

The revival of interest in the work of Gottlob Frege

Gottlob Frege

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on...

and his ideas of sense

Sense

Senses are physiological capacities of organisms that provide inputs for perception. The senses and their operation, classification, and theory are overlapping topics studied by a variety of fields, most notably neuroscience, cognitive psychology , and philosophy of perception...

and reference

Reference

Reference is derived from Middle English referren, from Middle French rèférer, from Latin referre, "to carry back", formed from the prefix re- and ferre, "to bear"...

on the part of Herbert Feigl

Herbert Feigl

Herbert Feigl was an Austrian philosopher and a member of the Vienna Circle.-Biography:The son of a weaver, Feigl was born in Reichenberg , Bohemia, and matriculated at the University of Vienna in 1922...

and J.J.C. Smart, along with the discrediting of phenomenalism through the influence of the later Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...

and J.L. Austin, led to a more tolerant climate toward physicalistic and realist ideas. Logical behaviorism

Behaviorism

Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...

emerged as a serious contender to take the place of the Cartesian "ghost in the machine

Ghost in the machine

The "ghost in the machine" is the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle's description of René Descartes' mind-body dualism. The phrase was introduced in Ryle's book The Concept of Mind to highlight the perceived absurdity of dualist systems like Descartes' where mental activity carries on in parallel...

" and, although not lasting very long as a dominant position on the mind/body problem, its elimination of the whole realm of internal mental events was strongly influential in the formation and acceptance of the thesis of type identity.

Versions of type identity theory

There were actually subtle but interesting differences between the three most widely credited formulations of the type-identity thesis, those of Place, Feigl and Smart which were published in several articles in the late 1950s. However, all of the versions share the central idea that the mind is identical to something physical.

U.T. Place

U.T. Place's (1956) notion of the relation of identity was derived from Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...

's distinction among several types of is statements: the is of identity

Identity (philosophy)

In philosophy, identity, from , is the relation each thing bears just to itself. According to Leibniz's law two things sharing every attribute are not only similar, but are the same thing. The concept of sameness has given rise to the general concept of identity, as in personal identity and...

, the is of equality and the is of composition. Place's version of the relation of identity is more accurately described as a relation of composition. For Place, higher-level mental events are composed out of lower-level physical events and will eventually be analytically reduced to these. So, to the objection that "sensations" do not mean the same thing as "mental processes", Place could simply reply with the example that "lightning" does not mean the same thing as "electrical discharge" since we determine that something is lightning by looking and seeing it, whereas we determine that something is an electrical discharge through experimentation and testing. Nevertheless, "lightning is an electrical discharge" is true since the one is composed of the other.

Feigl and Smart

For Feigl

Herbert Feigl

(1957) and Smart

J. J. C. Smart

John Jamieson Carswell "Jack" Smart AC is an Australian philosopher and academic who is currently Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Australia...

(1959), on the other hand, the identity was to be interpreted as the identity between the referents of two descriptions (senses) which referred to the same thing, as in "the morning star" and "the evening star" both referring to Venus. So to the objection about the lack of equality of meaning between "sensation" and "brain process", their response was to invoke this Fregean distinction: "sensations" and "brain" processes do indeed mean different things but they refer to the same physical phenomenon. Moreover, "sensations are brain processes" is a contingent, not a necessary, identity.

Multiple realizability

One of the most influential and common objections to the type identity theory is the argument from multiple realizability

Multiple realizability

Multiple realizability, in philosophy of mind, is the thesis that the same mental property, state, or event can be implemented by different physical properties, states or events...

. The multiple realizability thesis asserts that mental states can be realized in multiple kinds of systems, not just brains, for example. Since the identity theory identifies mental events with certain brain states, it does not allow for mental states to be realized in organisms or computational systems that do not have a brain. This is in effect an argument that the identity theory is too narrow because it does not allow for organisms without brains to have mental states. However, token identity (where only particular tokens of mental states are identical with particular tokens of physical events) and functionalism

Functionalism (philosophy of mind)

Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviourism. Its core idea is that mental states are constituted solely by their functional role — that is, they are causal relations to other mental...

both account for multiple realizability.

The response of type identity theorists, such as Smart, to this objection is that, while it may be true that mental events are multiply realizable, this does not demonstrate the falsity of type identity. As Smart states:

"The functionalist second order [causal] state is a state of having some first order state or other which causes or is caused by the behavior to which the functionalist alludes. In this way we have a second order type theory."

The fundamental point is that it is extremely difficult to determine where, on the continuum of first order processes, type identity ends and merely token identities begin. Take Quine's example of English country gardens. In such gardens, the tops of hedges are cut into various shapes, for example the shape of an elf. We can make generalizations over the type elf-shaped hedge only if we abstract away from the concrete details of the individual twigs and branches of each hedge. So, whether we say that two things are of the same type or are tokens of the same type because of subtle differences is just a matter of descriptive abstraction. The type-token distinction is not all or nothing.

Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam

Hilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science...

responds to Smart's response by essentially rejecting functionalism because, he believes, it is indeed a second-order type identity theory. Putnam uses multiple realizability against functionalism itself, suggesting that mental events (or kinds, in Putnam's terminology) may be diversely implemented by diverse functional/computational kinds; there may be only a token identification between particular mental kinds and particular functional kinds. Putnam, and many others who have followed him, now tend to identify themselves as generically non-reductive physicalists. Putnam's invocation of multiple realizability does not, of course, directly answer the problem raised by Smart with respect to useful generalizations over types and the flexible nature of the type-token distinction in relation to causal taxonomies in science.

Qualia

Another frequent objection is that type identity theories fail to account for phenomenal mental states (or qualia

Qualia

Qualia , singular "quale" , from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the...

), such as having a pain, feeling sad, experiencing nausea. (Qualia are merely the subjective qualities of conscious experience

Consciousness

Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...

. An example is the way the pain of jarring your elbow feels to you.) Arguments can be found in Saul Kripke (1972) and David Chalmers (1996), for example, according to which the identity theorist cannot identify phenomenal mental states with brain states (or any other physical state for that matter) because one has a sort of direct awareness of the nature of such qualitative mental states, and their nature is qualitative in a way that brain states are not.

A famous formulation of the qualia objection comes from Frank Jackson

Frank Cameron Jackson

Frank Cameron Jackson is an Australian philosopher, currently Distinguished Professor and former Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University. In 2007-2008, he also became a regular visiting professor of philosophy at Princeton University...

(1982) in the form of the Mary's room

Mary's room

Mary's room is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know"...

thought experiment. Let us suppose, Jackson suggests, that a particularly brilliant super-scientist named Mary has been locked away in a completely black-and-white room her entire life. Over the years in her colour-deprived world she has studied (via black-and-white books and television) the sciences of neurophysiology, vision and electromagnetics to their fullest extent; eventually Mary comes to know all the physical facts there are to know about experiencing colour. When Mary is released from her room and experiences colour for the first time, does she learn something new? If we answer "yes" (as Jackson suggests we do) to this question, then we have supposedly denied the truth of type physicalism, for if Mary has exhausted all the physical facts about experiencing colour prior to her release, then her subsequently acquiring some new piece of information about colour upon experiencing its quale reveals that there must be something about the experience of colour which is not captured by the physicalist picture. (See Mary's room

Mary's room

Mary's room is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know"...

page for full discussion).

The type identity theorist, such as Smart, attempts to explain away such phenomena by insisting that the experiential properties of mental events are topic-neutral. The concept of topic-neutral terms and expressions goes back to Gilbert Ryle

Gilbert Ryle

Gilbert Ryle , was a British philosopher, a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers that shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the...

, who identified such topic-neutral terms as "if", "or", "not", "because" and "and." If one were to hear these terms alone in the course of a conversation, it would be impossible to tell whether the topic under discussion concerned geology, physics, history, gardening or selling pizza. For the identity theorist, sense-data and qualia are not real things in the brain (or the physical world in general) but are more like "the average electrician." The average electrician can be further analyzed and explained in terms of real electricians but is not itself a real electrician.

External links

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Background

Versions of type identity theory

U.T. Place

Feigl and Smart

Multiple realizability

Qualia

See also

External links