Philosophy 244/244W/444

Philosophy of Mind

Fall 2006

First Paper Assignment

Write a paper, following all of the instructions below. E-mail it as an attachment to david.braun@rochester.edu by 10:00 am, Monday, September 25. Late papers will be strongly penalized. Please keep an electronic copy of your paper, for your own protection.

Format Instructions

Your paper must be a Word or pdf document. It should be about 3-4 pages or about 1,000 words long (upper-level writing students and graduate students: 4-5 pages, 1,200 words). It must be produced in 12-point font, double-spaced, with one-inch margins on all sides. Its pages must be numbered by your word-processor. Your e-mail address must appear on the first page. Upper-Level Writing students must mark their papers with the phrase “Upper-Level Writing”.

Content Instructions

Write your paper on the argument by Paul Churchland that appears in the text on the following page.

0.         Provide required citations (see the Citations handout).

1.         Write your paper so that it can be understood by an undergraduate philosophy major who is not in this class. It should have a standard essay format, except for a displayed argument with numbered premises and conclusion. It should have at least one introductory sentence, and sentences that connect together the paragraphs in which you extract, explain, and evaluate the argument. Make these sentences brief and to the point. Do not begin your paper with a sentence like “Since the dawn of time, humans have wondered about the nature of mind.” Instead, begin with something along the lines of “This paper critically examines an argument by Paul Churchland (1988) against a certain sort of dualism.”

2.         Describe the sort of dualism that Churchland is criticizing. (This theory may or may not coincide with the theory that we have called “dualism” in class.) Describe only those parts of the theory that are relevant to Churchland’s criticism.

3.         Extract an argument from the text, and display it in numbered premise-conclusion form. The argument should be valid. It may (but need not) have subconclusions. Every simple argument in it should have one of the forms given on the Arguments handout (MP, MT, etc.). There should be no idle premises. The main conclusion must be a sentence of the form “X is false” or “X is not true”, where “X” is the name of the view you described earlier. It would be wise to make this formal argument relatively short and simple.

4.         Explain the argument line by line. That is, explain the technical terms (if any) that occur in it, and give reasons in favor of each of its premises (Churchland’s, if he offers any). Write your explanation in ordinary paragraph form: do not number its parts or display it. However, be clear about which line you are explaining at all times.

5.         Evaluate the argument. First, for each simple argument in your formal argument, state whether it is valid and name the form that it exemplifies. Next, present at least one objection to the argument, even if you think that it is sound. (It may help to imagine how a defender of dualism might respond to Churchland’s argument.) Be sure to specify which premise you are criticizing.

6.         Required for upper-level writing students and graduate students, optional for others: Describe how Churchland might respond to your objection to his argument. Undergraduates who are not upper-level writing students should follow this optional instruction only if they have space for it.

7.         Required for everyone: After considering the argument and the objections and replies, give a concluding evaluation of Churchland’s argument: is it sound?

Some Advice

This assignment asks you to Extract, Explain, and Evaluate an argument from the following text. You can choose between two strategies when extracting an argument. (1) You can try to state all or most of the author’s argument in the numbered premises and conclusion. The resulting argument may be rather complex. (2) You can state only the highlights or main points in the numbered premises and conclusion, and state the rest of the author’s argument in your line-by-line explanation. It may be wiser to follow strategy (2) rather than strategy (1).

The Author and the Text

Paul Churchland is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He has written many articles, and several books, in philosophy of mind. The following selection comes from pp. 20-21 of the following book:

Churchland, Paul. 1988. Matter and Consciousness, revised ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

What is the origin of a complex and sophisticated species such as ours? What, for that matter, is the origin of the dolphin, the mouse, or the housefly? Thanks to the fossil record, comparative anatomy, and the biochemistry of proteins and nucleic acids, there is no longer any significant doubt on this matter. Each existing species is a surviving type from a number of variations on an earlier type of organism; each earlier type is in turn a surviving type from a number of variations on a still earlier type of organism; and so on down the branches of the evolutionary tree until, some three billion years ago, we find a trunk of just one or a handful of very simple organisms. These organisms, like their more complex offspring, are just self-repairing, self-replicating, energy-driven molecular structures. . . .

For purposes of our discussion, the important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process. Like all but the simplest of organisms, we have a nervous system. And for the same reason: a nervous system permits the discriminative guidance of behavior. But a nervous system is just an active matrix of cells, and a cell is just an active matrix of molecules. We are notable only in that our nervous system is more complex and powerful than those of our fellow creatures. Our inner nature differs from that of simpler creatures in degree, but not in kind.

If this is the correct account of our origins, then there seems neither need, nor room, to fit any nonphysical substances or properties into our theoretical account of ourselves. We are creatures of matter. And we should lean to live with that fact. (pp. 20-21 of Churchland 1988. Ellipses due to David Braun.)