The Knowledge Argument

Say there's a woman named Mary who has monochromacy, or black/white color blindness, so that everything looks like a black and white film. Despite this disadvantage, Mary becomes a celebrated neurologist, and actually the foremost expert on color perception. She knows exactly what is happening in the brain when someone sees the color blue, for example, even though she can't see it herself.

Anyhoo, one day Mary is sitting underneath a tree reading a book about Isaac Newton when an apple falls on her head and momentarily knocks her out. When she wakes up her monochromacy is gone: she can see the green grass, she can see purple mountain majesties, and she can see the clear blue sky. She had never seen these colors before. She had never known what "blue" looks like. But she knew everything that happened in the brain when someone experienced the color blue. So the question is: does Mary know something now that she didn't know before? This is the Knowledge Argument.

This isn't as easy to answer as you might think. I've been asking my students this for years and it's usually a split vote. One point to make here is that knowing what blue looks like wouldn't be propositional knowledge, but does it count as knowledge then? Some people think it's obvious Mary knows something that she didn't know before (what blue looks like) and others think it's obvious she doesn't.

The issue here is about qualia (singular: qualium), the "what it's like" experiences. Thomas Nagel wrote an essay called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" which really brought this point home. Many philosophers of mind say that qualia are the heart and soul of the mind, and even human life in general. But the problem is that qualia can't be quantified and are effectively invisible to science. Science seeks to explain things from a third person perspective, but qualia are intrinsically first person in nature. Mary could describe color perception from a third person perspective but with no awareness of the qualium "what blue looks like". So the reason this is important is that, if Mary knows something after seeing the color blue that she did not know before, then there are important things -- foundational, fundamental things -- that science cannot address. If you had a complete physical, scientific description of the entire universe, it would be intrinsically incomplete, since it would not include qualia.

Moreover, the third person perspective is derived from the first person: to describe something from the third is to observe it from another standpoint, but ultimately this just means to observe it from what a first person perspective from that other standpoint would be. There can be no (to reference another Nagel work) view from nowhere. So science is utterly dependent on the first person perspective, and thus qualia, but cannot address them.

Naturally, all this is controversial. Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett, deny the reality of qualia. The philosopher who came up with the Knowledge Argument, Frank Jackson, eventually changed his mind about it because of the implications it had, viz., that there is more to reality than the physical world. Jaegwon Kim, who gives Nagel a run for his money as the greatest living philosopher in my opinion, fully accepts the reality of qualia and their centrality in human life, but still defends physicalism: see his books Mind in a Physical World and Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. And there's a collection of some of the most important essays about the Knowledge Argument which has the unfortunate title There's Something about Mary. So now you know what to read during the quarantine.

Your eyes are the darkest shade of light gray I've ever seen . . .

Some more recent acquisitions

Nonfiction:

William P. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth.

---,  The Reliability of Sense Perception.

Robert Audi, The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality.

Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning.

Michael Bergmann, Justification without Awareness: A Defense of Epistemic Externalism.

Edwyn Bevan, Symbolism and Belief.

Roderick M. Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing.

Paul Copan, ed., Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? A Debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan.

Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.

Alvin I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition.

George S. Pappas and Marshall Swain, eds., Essays on Knowledge and Justification.

Ernest Sosa, Epistemology.

Ernest Sosa and Jaegwon Kim, eds., Epistemology: An Anthology (1st edition).

Barry Stroud, Hume.

Peter Unger, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1.

---, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2.

Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus' Essential Teachings on Discipleship.

Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

Fiction:

Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics.

Tony Daniel, The Robot's Twilight Companion.

Jack Dann, ed., Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Philip José Farmer, Night of Light.

Walter M. Miller, Jr., Conditionally Human.

---, The View from the Stars.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Martians.

---, Galileo's Dream.

---, The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man.

Robert Charles Wilson, Spin.

Feser on Kim

Ed Feser comments on Jaegwon Kim's supervenience and attempted solving of the mind-body problem from Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. I've read it, but didn't remember Kim's use of Jonathan Edwards's occasionalism which is what Feser addresses. That just means I have to read it again, which I am happy to do. Kim is a master. Good stuff.

Looking back at the last few posts, I guess I could have collected them together as a linkfest. Oh well.

Two more books

I just received two books, one of which I've been wanting for years. That would be Physicalism, or Something Near Enough by Jaegwon Kim, one of the most important living philosophers. On that note, the last time I checked the Wikipedia article on Kim it was pathetic; just a few sentences. Now, however, it is much more extensive and goes over a lot of his philosophy -- I particularly enjoyed seeing that he says he learned from Carl Hempel "a certain style of philosophy, one that emphasizes clarity, responsible argument, and aversion to studied obscurities and feigned profundities."

The other book is Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. I'm sure I'll have more to say on it soon.

Quote of the Day

Mentality is often considered naturalistically suspect and in need of a naturalistic vindication, or "naturalization." For many naturalists, Cartesian immaterial minds are the worst case: they are almost invariably presumed to be transnatural entities, beyond any possibility of naturalistic redemption. Steven Horst is typical; he simply declares "Philosophical Naturalism...involves rejection of paradigmatically supernatural entities and properties (e.g., Cartesian souls)." This is unwarranted. As every introductory student of philosophy knows, Cartesian minds were conceived as causally interacting with bodily objects and events, and again as everyone knows, Descartes was taken to task, immediately, for this eminently commonsensical idea. It was his illustrious contemporaries, like Leibniz, who, by denying minds' interaction with matter, placed minds outside the natural world. If we wanted "paradigmatic" supernaturalists about minds from the period, we would do better to mention Leibniz with his pre-established harmony, Malebranche and his occasionalist followers, and others. It may well be that Descartes's idea of an immaterial mind in causal relations to material bodies was inherently flawed, or that as a matter of fact Cartesian immaterial minds do not exist. But that is something that needs to be shown, by a naturalistically acceptable procedure. The point is that Cartesian minds were conceived as part of the causal-explanatory structure of the natural world; if they do not exist, they do not exist as part of the natural world. It isn't as though they are kicked upstairs into a supernatural world and find a home there. The problem with immaterial souls, as with phlogiston and caloric fluids, is that there are no such things as far as we know. It would be nonsense to think that all we found out about phlogiston and caloric fluids was that they turned out to be transcendental, supernatural entities.

Jaegwon Kim
"From Naturalism to Physicalism: Supervenience Redux" (Romanell Lecture)
Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association 85/2 (2011): 109-34.
(footnotes omitted)

Eliminating Reductivism

Bill Vallicella has a couple of great posts on the attempt to avoid eliminative materialism while still maintaining a reductive materialist stance. His first post engages Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, a book I desperately want to read, and his second post clarifies some issues. Good stuff.

Three more books

A friend for whom I recently did a minor favor very graciously bought me a $50 gift certificate for Amazon.com. This is probably the best kind of gift to give to someone like me. The shipping costs to send them to Belgium were fairly high, but I managed to finagle three books out of it. I really wanted to get Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, but couldn't figure out a way of doing it and still getting two more books. I received my order a few days ago and realized that as the books are completely incommensurate with each other, they illustrate the diversity of my psychoses. Here they are, for what it's worth:

Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. I use this book in my dissertation, and it finally reached the point where it was much more convenient to own it than to continue getting it from a library. In fact, I really need to familiarize myself with all of Dennett's books as his philosophical foci overlap mine in several places. Also, the more I read him the more I like him.

Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. I've been wanting this one ever since it came out, especially to read Dennis Danielson's chapter, but never had the spare change to buy it. Now all I need is the spare time to read it.

Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge. I've mentioned before how this book sounds like it's written to address my particular spiritual condition. I read somewhere that you shouldn't constantly read new books on spirituality, but instead find a handful of books that speak to your condition and just feed off them. Dallas Willard's books fill that role for me. I also note that his website has brought back the page on his current projects which I mentioned here.

Quote of the Day

I have claimed that, on the assumption of the causal closure of the physical, no one ever accepts a belief because it is supported by good reasons., Since this assertion is key to the argument, some further discussion is in order. What we have to consider is the relationship between the physicalistic explanation of a person's holding a belief -- "She believes so-and-so because of such-and-such antecedent physical conditions" -- and the rational explanation of that same belief -- "She believes so-and-so because she sees that it is supported by sound reasons." By hypothesis, the physical causes are sufficient, under the given conditions, to produce the belief in question. There can be no question, on the other hand, of the reasons for the belief being by themselves sufficient to produce the belief. For the reasons to give rise to the belief, the person's cognitive apparatus has to be in working order, and this includes a vast number of extremely complex circumstances that are quite distinct from the possession of the reasons in question.

But is the possession of good reasons necessary, under the given circumstances, for the production of the belief in question? What we have to evaluate is the following pair of counterfactual conditionals:

(a) She would have accepted the belief if she had not seen that it was supported by good reasons.
(b) She would not have accepted the belief if she had not seen that it was supported by good reasons.

I submit that, in the absence of further information, neither of these counterfactuals can be evaluated as true. Following John Pollock, we assume that a counterfactual conditional is true if and only if the consequent is true in all those worlds minimally changed from the actual world in which the antecedent is true. Would a world minimally changed from the actual world in which she doesn't see that her belief is supported by good reasons, be one in which she would not accept that belief? No doubt there are a number of different ways in which the world could be changed just enough to satisfy the antecedent of the conditional; in some of these she accepts the belief while in others she doesn't. And there is no basis for saying that those in which she doesn't accept it are less changed from the actual world than those in which she does -- or vice versa. We conclude, then, that (a) and (b) are both false; what is true is

(c) If she had not seen that the belief was supported by good reasons, she might have accepted the belief, but it's also the case that she might not have accepted it.

Consider, on the other hand:

(d) She would have accepted the belief if the antecedent conditions were not sufficient (as determined by the laws of physics) for her accepting it.
(e) She would not have accepted the belief if the antecedent conditions were not sufficient (as determined by the laws of physics) for her accepting it.

Here we can state unambiguously that (d) is false and (e) is true; the fact that one, and not the other, is in accord with the physical laws means there is no question that worlds in which she does not accept the belief are closer to the actual world than the ones in which she does. All of this merely restates, in the language of counterfactual conditions, what should by now be obvious: In a physicalistic world, principles of sound reasoning have no relevance to determining what actually happens.

Because the matter is so crucial, I am going to risk excess by restating the point once more, this time in terms of possible worlds. In order to identify the possible worlds we want to consider, note again the final clause in the definition of strong supervenience: "necessarily, if any y has [physical property] G, it has [mental property] F." If "necessarily" here is understood as physical necessity, identifying the relevant world is easy: consider a possible world that is physically exactly similar to the present world, but in which the natural laws establishing psychophysical connections do not obtain. In such a world all the physical facts, and with them the entire physical course of events, are exactly as in the actual world: the complete absence of mentality makes no difference whatever. Similarly, we may consider a possible world physically identical with the actual world, but in which mental properties are redistributed in as bizarre a fashion as one might wish: this world is still indistinguishable from our own in all physical respects. Could there be a more dramatic demonstration of the fact that, given the closure of the physical, mental facts are irrelevant to the physical course of events?

Suppose, however, "necessarily" in the definition of supervenience is understood as metaphysical necessity. This embodies the idea (for which I've expressed some sympathy) that the natural laws that obtain are expressions of the essential causal powers of the kinds of objects that exist, so that in no possible world do those very same objects exist governed by different natural laws. This means we can't simply cancel the psychophysical connections while leaving the rest of the actual world unchanged. Instead, we proceed as follows: take a world consisting of objects exactly similar to the objects of our world, except with regard to the psychophysical connections that obtain. For reasons that should be evident, we will designate this as the physically equivalent zombie-world to our own world. In the zombie-world matter will not consist of protons, neutrons, electrons, etc., but rather of zombie-protons, zombie-neutrons, zombie electrons ... The zombie-electrons will not have the properties of mass, charge, and spin but rather of zombie-mass, zombie-charge, and zombie-spin. Such a world will be similar to the "mindless world" described in the previous paragraph in every respect but one: it will not contain the identical objects, organisms, etc. that exist in our world (and in the mindless world) because those objects consist of ordinary matter and not of zombie-matter. But the zombie-world is physically equivalent to both the mindless world and the actual world; all three worlds are identical in all physically observable respects. Once again, we have a dramatic demonstration of the fact that neither in the zombie-world, nor in the mindless world, nor in the actual world given the assumption of the causal closure of the physical, do principles of rational inference play any role whatever in determining what happens. And in the actual world (which is not mindless), the principles of inference play no role, given causal closure and supervenience, in determining what beliefs people come to accept.

One way in which a physicalist might respond here is by questioning the assumption that good reasons and principles of rationality need to be thought of as causally relevant to what happens in the world. Wittgensteinians often adopted the stance that reasons-explanations and causal explanations belong to different language-games and so do not conflict with each other. And Kim recommends as "well worth exploring" the idea that rationalizing explanation is "a fundamentally noncausal mode of understanding actions," so that "a rationalizing explanation is to be viewed as a normative assessment of an action in the context of the agent's relevant intentional states."

Whatever its merits in general, Kim's suggestion is singularly unpromising in its application to the relation between reasons and beliefs. To see this, the reader is asked to reflect on the way she goes about assessing an argument of moderate complexity. I presume she begins by reflecting on the premises of the argument -- are they propositions she believes, or at least considers reasonably plausible? She then considers carefully the logical connections that are alleged to obtain between the premises and the conclusion -- do the premises indeed provide support for the conclusion, and if so does the support amount to deductive validity, or is there some lesser degree of support? Are there ambiguities in the argument which might undermine the soundness of the inference? Sometimes these questions are assessed in the light of specific, explicitly formulated principles of logic and argument; at other times she relies on a more intuitive grasp of the particular argument at hand. If the assessment is favorable, she accepts the conclusion, either tentatively or with considerable firmness, depending on the particulars of the case. If she is skillful in carrying out such assessments, she is said to possess "good logical insight," an intellectual virtue which is prized, in part, for the specific reason that it enables one to reach good, well-justified conclusions about the arguments one encounters. The entire process makes no sense at all, except on the assumption that a person's awareness of reasons and her knowledge and application of principles of rationality make a difference to the conclusions that are accepted.

Kim's suggestion, as applied to the relation between reasons and beliefs, is not only implausible; it is also futile. For surely those who would argue that principles of rationality serve the purpose of a "normative assessment" of our reasoning would allow that these principles can in fact be used in making such an assessment. But of course, such a normative assessment of a piece of reasoning is itself also an example of the kind of reasoning that is being assessed. (Note that the example of reasoning described above involved precisely the examination of an already formulated argument.) Are good reasons, and the principles of sound reasoning, allowed to be causally effective in determining the outcome of the assessment process? Or is some other account to be given of how the process goes? In any case, whatever answer is give here could equally well have been given in the first place; the move to the level of "normative assessment" changes nothing.

William Hasker
The Emergent Self
(footnotes omitted)

Quote of the Day

The kind of situation Goldman describes, namely one in which two events C and C* are seen to be nomologically necessary and sufficient for each other, and in which each of them is thought to constitute an explanans for one and the same event E, is an inherently unstable situation. This is so especially when C and C* are each a member of a system of events (or concepts) such that the two systems to which they respectively belong show the kind of systematic nomological connections Goldman envisages for the psychological and the physiological. The instability of the situation generates a strong pressure to find an acceptable account of the relationship between C and C*, and, by extension, that between the two systems to which they belong; the instability is dissipated and a cognitive equilibrium restored when we come to see a more specific relationship between the two explanations. As we shall see, in cases of interest, the specific relationship replacing equivalence will be either identity or some asymmetric dependency relation.

Another way of putting my point would be this: a certain instability exists in a situation in which two distinct events are claimed to be nomologically equivalent causes or explanations of the same phenomenon; stability is restored when equivalence is replaced by identity or some asymmetric relation of dependence. That is, either two explanations (or causes) in effect collapse into one or, if there indeed are two distinct explanations (or causes) here, we must see one of them as dependent on, or derivative from, the other -- or, what is the same, one of them as gaining explanatory or causal dominance over the other.

The tension in this situation that gives rise to the instability can be seen in various ways. First, if C and C* are each a sufficient cause of the event E, then why isn't E overdetermined? It is at best extremely odd to think that each and every bit of action we perform is overdetermined in virtue of having two distinct sufficient causes. To be sure, this differs from the standard case of overdetermination in which the two overdetermining causes are not nomologically connected. But why does the supposed nomological relationship between C and C* void the claim that this is a case of causal overdetermination? Notice the trade-off here: the closer this is to a standard case of overdetermination, the less dependent are the two explanations in relation to each other, and, correlatively, the more one stresses the point that this is not a case of standard overdetermination because of the nomic equivalence between the explanations, the less plausible is one's claim that we have here two distinct and independent explanations.

Second, if C and C* are nomic equivalents, they co-occur as a matter of law -- that is, it is inomologically impossible to have one of these occur without the other. Why then do they not form a single jointly sufficient cause of E rather than two individually sufficient causes? How do we know that each of C and C* is not just a partial cause of E? Why, that is, should we not regard C and C* as forming a single complete explanation of E rather than two separately sufficient explanations of it? How do we decide one way or the other?

When we reflect on the special case of psychophysical causation, where C, let's say, is a psychological event, C* is its physiological correlate, and E is some bodily movement associated with an action, it would be highly implausible to regard C as directly acting on the body to bring about E (e.g., my belief and desire telekinetically acting on the muscles in my arm and shoulder and making them contract, thereby causing my arm to go up); it would be more credible to think that if the belief-desire pair is to cause the movement of my arm, it must "work through" the physical causal chain starting from C*, some neural event in the brain, culminating in a muscle contraction. If this is right, we cannot regard C and C* as constituting independent explanations of E. We must think of the causal efficacy of C in bringing about E as dependent on that of its physical correlate C*.

I believe that these perplexities are removed only when we have an account of the relation between C and C*, the two supposed causes of a single action, and that, as I shall argue, an account that is adequate to this task will show that C and C* could not each constitute a complete and independent explanation of the action.

Jaegwon Kim
"Mechanism, Purpose, and Explanatory Exclusion"
Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays

Mind and Physicalism

I think Jaegwon Kim is the clearest contemporary expositor of philosophy of mind, not to mention one of its most important contributors. If you're interested in this subject at all, I highly recommend his books. For one thing, he really exposes the difficulties in accounting for the properties of the mind in physicalistic terms.

For example, in Philosophy of Mind and Physicalism, or Something Near Enough he discusses the problem of qualia. These are basically the first person experience of things, the "what it is like" to have a particular experience or be a particular entity (a bat, say). So when you experience pain, the qualia is not the firing of C-fibers, it's not the nerve endings, it's not your response to move away from whatever is causing it. The qualia is the pain, the "this hurts" experience. The difficulty in explaining qualia as physical properties is notorious, so much so that some philosophers feel it necessary to deny their existence (I guess the thinking is, if your philosophy conflicts with reality, the problem must be in the latter). The problem of qualia really opens the floodgates to the problems of explaining consciousness in general in terms of physical phenomena and processes.

Another example is where Kim discusses the difficulties in reconciling the causal closure of the physical with mental causation. Mental causation is simply the idea that the mind can cause a physical event (for example, that I can decide to pick up a pencil). But if the physical realm is causally closed, we are led to the problem of causal exclusion. In Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation, he writes,

To acknowledge mental event m (occurring at t) as a cause of physical event p but deny that p has a physical cause at t would be a clear violation of the causal closure of the physical domain, a relapse into Cartesian interactionist dualism which mixes physical and nonphysical events in a single causal chain. But to acknowledge that p has also a physical cause, p*, at t is to invite the question: Given that p has a physical cause p*, what causal work is left for m to contribute? The physical cause therefore threatens to exclude, and preempt, the mental cause. This is the problem of causal exclusion. The antireductive physicalist who wants to remain a mental realist, therefore, must give an account of how the mental cause and the physical cause of one and the same event are related to each other. ... Thus the problem of causal exclusion is to answer this question: Given that every physical event that has a cause has a physical cause, how is a mental cause also possible?

Yet another example comes from a passage in Philosophy of Mind where Kim gives some detail about Donald Davidson's anomalous monism, as can be found in his collection, Essays on Actions and Events (which is on my to-read list). The point is that rational processes must follow different rules than (mere) physical processes, and so the former cannot be reduced to the latter.

A crucial premise of Davidson's argument is the thesis that the ascription of intentional states, like beliefs and desires, is regulated by certain principles of rationality, principles to ensure that the total set of such states ascribed to a subject will be as rational and coherent as possible. This is why, for example, we refrain from attributing to a person flatly and obviously contradictory beliefs -- even when the sentences uttered have the surface logical form of a contradiction. When someone replies, "Well, I do and don't" when asked, "Do you like Ross Perot?" we do not take her to be expressing a literally contradictory belief, the belief that she both likes and does not like Perot; rather, we take her to be saying something like "I like some aspects of Perot (say, his economic agenda), but I don't like certain other aspects (say, his international policy)." If she were to insist: "No, I don't mean that; I really both do and don't like Perot, period," we wouldn't know what to make of her utterance; perhaps her "and" doesn't mean what the English "and" means. We cast about for some consistent interpretation of her meaning because an interpreter of a person's speech and mental states is under the mandate that an acceptable interpretation must make her come out with a consistent and reasonably coherent set of beliefs -- as coherent and rational as evidence permits. When we fail to come up with a consistent interpretation, we are likely to blame our unsuccessful interpretive efforts rather than accuse our subject of harboring explicitly inconsistent beliefs. We also attribute to a subject beliefs that are obvious logical consequences of beliefs already attributed to him. For example, if we have ascribed to a person the belief that Boston is less than 50 miles from Providence, we would, and should, ascribe to him the belief that Boston is less than 60 miles from Providence, the belief that Boston is less than 70 miles from Providence, and countless others. We do not need independent evidence for these further belief attributions; if we are not prepared to attribute any one of these further beliefs, we should be prepared to withdraw the original belief attribution as well. Our concept of belief does not allow us to say that someone believes that Boston is within 50 miles of Providence but doesn't believe that it is within 70 miles of Providence -- unless we are able to give an intelligible explanation of how this could happen in the particular case involved. This principle, which requires that the set of beliefs be "closed" under obvious logical entailment, goes beyond the simple requirement of consistency in a person's belief system; it requires the belief system to be coherent as a whole -- it must in some sense hang together, without unexplained gaps. In any case, Davidson's thesis is that the requirement of rationality and coherence is of the essence of the mental -- that is, it is constitutive of the mental in the sense that it is exactly what makes the mental mental.

But it is clear that the physical domain is subject to no such requirement; as Davidson says, the principle of rationality and coherence has "no echo" in physical theory. But suppose that we have laws connecting beliefs with brain states; in particular, suppose we have laws that specify a neural substrate for each of our beliefs -- a series of laws of the form "N occurs to a person at t if and only if B occurs to that person at t," where N is a neural state and B is a belief with a particular content (e.g., the belief that there are birches in your yard). If such laws were available, we could attribute beliefs to a subject, one by one, independently of the constraints of the rationality principle. For in order to determine whether she has a certain belief B, all we need to do would be to ascertain whether B's neural substrate N is present in her; there would be no need to check whether this belief makes sense in the context of her other beliefs or even what other beliefs she has. In short, we could read her beliefs off her brain. Thus, neurophysiology would preempt the rationality principle, and the practice of belief attribution would no longer need to be regulated by the rationality principle. By being connected by law with neural state N, belief B becomes hostage to the constraints of physical theory. On Davidson's view, as we saw, the rationality principle is constitutive of mentality, and beliefs that have escaped its jurisdiction can no longer be considered mental states. If, therefore, belief is to retain its identity and integrity as a mental phenomenon, its attribution must be regulated by the rationality principle and hence cannot be connected by law to a physical substrate.

I've mentioned three issues: the problem of qualia, the problem of mental causation, and the dichotomy between rational processes and physical processes. The difficulty in each case is reconciling some property of the mind with physicalism. One might be tempted to say, with Kim, that we can have Physicalism, or Something Near Enough; the fact that we have a few threads that are left hanging doesn't put the physicalist project in jeopardy. But the "hanging threads" metaphor implies that the threads are on the periphery. These three examples, however, are at the center of the cloth, touching, in some way, every other thread. If one of these threads were removed, the whole thing would unravel.

Next up is Kim's Supervenience and Mind. Wish me luck.

Now forgive me for getting on my hobby horse, but the problem of mental causation and the distinction between rational and physical processes sound strikingly similar to what C. S. Lewis argued a half century earlier. In "Bulverism", he claims that rationality cannot be explained by mere brute physical causality; it requires a "special kind of cause called “a reason.”". Similarly, in the third chapter of Miracles, he points out that there is a difference between a mental event being caused and being grounded. Specifically, it is the difference between it having a non-rational cause (i.e. a physical cause) and having a rational cause. For human rationality to be valid, we have to assume that at least some of our beliefs are rationally caused.

To be caused is not to be proved. Wishful thinkings, prejudices, and the delusions of madness, are all caused, but they are ungrounded. Indeed to be caused is so different from being proved that we behave in disputation as if they were mutually exclusive. The mere existence of causes for a belief is popularly treated as raising a presumption that it is groundless, and the most popular way of discrediting a person's opinions is to explain them causally -- "You say that because (Cause and Effect) you are a capitalist, or a hypochondriac, or a mere man, or only a woman." The implication is that if causes fully account for a belief, then, since causes work inevitably, the belief would have had to arise whether it had grounds or not. We need not, it is felt, consider grounds for something which can be fully explained without them.

But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief's occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it?

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)