Explaining Mental Life: Some philosophical issues in psychology

300 Pages·1984·29.138 MB·English

by  James Russell (auth.)

Explaining Mental Life
Also by James Russell
The Acquisition of Knowledge
Explaining Mental Life
Some philosophical issues in psychology
James Russell
Senior Lecturer in Psychology
University of Liverpool, England
Macmillan Education
ISBN 978-0-333-34324-1 ISBN 978-1-349-17671-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-17671-7
©James Russell 1984
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1984 978-0-333-34323-4
All rights reserved. For information, write:
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Published in the United Kingdom by The Macmillan Press Ltd
First published in the United States of America in 1984
ISBN 978-0-312-27743-7
Ubruy of Conpess Cataloging in Publication Data
Russell, James, 1948-
Explaining mental life.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Psychology-Philosopy. I. Title.
BF38.R87 1984 150'.1 83-40545
ISBN 978-0-312-27743-7
For Mary and Jim Russell
Contents
Acknowledgements IX
Introduction: Setting the Scene 1
1 Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature 6
The questions to ask of human nature 6
The first sceptical case: explanation as interpretation 18
The second sceptical case: the ideographic nature of
mental causes 26
From philosophical analysis to empirical psychology 38
2 Brain and Mind 48
The neural causation of motivational and affective states 50
Eliminative reduction and learning theories 58
The 'autonomy' of the higher mental processes 65
3 The Computational Theory of Mind: Old Problems for
New Paradigms 80
The what and the how of modelling 82
The new dualism? 91
The new behaviourism? 99
4 Conditions for Belief and Knowledge 106
The coherence condition 108
The subject-object condition: intensionality 118
The subject-object condition: the psychology of
knowledge 128
The computational theory of mind -concluding remarks 136
Vlll Contents
5 Perception 139
Theories of the 'given' 140
The theory of direct perception {TOP) 143
Objections to TOP 149
Perceptioni and intelligence 167
6 Representation 176
The case against representational theories of memory 177
The case against natural language representation 184
The case against images as mental objects 195
What positive thesis remains? 203
Two issues in the psychology of representation 204
7 Meaning: the Thought of Language 216
Sentence meaning: Chomsky's thesis 218
Word meaning: Fodor's thesis 230
Good and bad alternatives to semantic essence-ism 238
From intentions to intensions 251
Postscript 254
Notes and References 256
Index 285
Acknowledgements
First of all I would like to record my thanks to Liverpool University
for giving me the sabbatical year in which the main body of this book
was written.
I am also indebted to a number of people who were generous enough
to read and comment on earlier drafts. Here I must thank Peter Bryant,
Alan Costal!, Howard Robinson, Keith Stenning, Ray Tallis and Ev
Thornton, who all read portions of the text, and, in particular, David
Hamlyn, who read and made detailed comments on the whole thing.
(Needless to say, all remaining howlers and infelicities are well and
truly my own.) More distantly, I should acknowledge the excellent
teaching of Jim Hopkins, Nick Dent and Harold Cox which fostered
my interest in some of the questions discussed here.
Thanks are also due to John Winckler for support in the early stages
of preparation and to Steven Kennedy for his sympathetic treatment
of the finished article. Finally, I am very grateful to Dorothy Foulds for
organising the typing of the final draft.
University of Liverpool, England JAMES RUSSELL
ix
Introduction: Setting the
Scene
Because William James's definition 'the science of mental life' is so
frequently trotted out in answer to the question 'what is psychology?',
we are apt to forget how radically it diverges from the view of
psychology which so many of its practitioners hold today. Not only is
there such a thing as mental life as distinct from the existence of, say,
chunks of metal, flowers and livers, but this constitutes the domain of
scientific psychology.
It is behaviourism, of course, which explicitly denies the relevance of
mental life to psychology. But despite the fact that behaviourism is
now a waning force in the academic discipline, many psychologists,
especially those who work in the cognitive areas, take a 'functionalist'
view that implies a very similar denial. To explain this: James's
definition clearly implicates experience-the experience of remember
ing, perceiving, using language, intending, believing and so on.
However, the prevailing functionalist1 philosophy in cognitive psy
chology sets as the focal question: how can the tasks of memory, belief,
perception and reasoning be achieved? The mind contains a set of
functions or capacities, the assumption runs, and the fact that human
beings (and doubtless other species too) have experiences when they
achieve memory, perception and so on is at best uninteresting and at
worst a red herring. This is a view made explicit in the so-called
'computational theory of the mind', the case against which, and by
implication for the Jamesian view implicating experience, is the
dominant motif of these chapters.
However this is just one theme among others, not the essential task
of the book. My primary aim is to highlight some of the issues in
psychology that are conceptual issues, that is, not metatheoretical or
speculative questions but issues concerning how mental concepts are
1