Philosophy 244/244W/444

Philosophy of Mind

Fall 2006

Second 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, Friday, October 13. 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 Georges Rey 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 Georges Rey (1987) against a certain sort of behaviorism.”

2.         Describe the sort of behaviorism that Rey is criticizing. (This theory may coincide closely with the theory that we have called “logical behaviorism” in class.) Describe only those parts of the theory that are relevant to Rey’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 (Rey’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 behaviorism might respond to Rey’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 Rey 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 Rey’s argument: is it sound?

The Author and the Selection

Georges Rey is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland. He has written numerous articles in the philosophy of mind. The following selection comes from:

Rey, Georges. 1997. Contemporary Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell.

Ryle and others did propose a more positive approach, which emerged as the doctrine of Analytical Behaviorism (“ABism”). The general idea is that claims about the mind should be understood as equivalent to various sorts of dispositional or conditional claims about how an agent would behave if she were in such and such circumstances, on the model of dispositional claims elsewhere: “Salt is soluble” presumably means something like, “If salt is put into water in certain normal conditions, then it dissolves”. . . .

Both for historical but also . . . for recent purposes, it is important to appreciate some of the intuitive attractions of ABism. In the first place, given our almost complete lack of any direct knowledge of the neurophysiology of the brain, it’s true that we ordinarily don’t seem to be relying on it in applying in mental terms. Indeed, we seem to be prepared to discover most anything about the physical aetiology of mental life. . . .

However, for every thought experiment arguing for ABism, there are compelling ones against it as well. . . . [I]magine someone whose motor cortex has been irreparably damaged, so that he is paralyzed or flails helplessly about: if we are not allowed to let our analyses mention anything about the inner aetiology of behavior, then the fact that such a case might be due merely to damage in the motor cortex can’t be allowed to be relevant. But then, lacking any of the behavioral dispositions associated with mental states, the poor fellow would have to be counted as lacking any of those mental states themselves! (pp. 151-3, Rey 1997. Ellipses and editing due to David Braun.)