SWIF Philosophy of Mind Review
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SWIF Philosophy of Mind Review http://lgxserver.uniba.it/lei/mind/swifpmr.htm Symposium on From an Ontological Point of View by John Heil Edited by Giacomo Romano Vol. 6 - No. 2 - 2007 http://lgxserver.uniba.it/lei/mind/swifpmr/0620072.pdf SWIF Philosophy of Mind Review http://lgxserver.uniba.it/lei/mind/swifpmr.htm An on-line publication of the SWIF Sito Web Italiano per la Filosofia (Italian Web Site for Philosophy) http://www.swif.it/ ISSN 1126-4780 General editor: Luca Malatesti (University of Hull) The copyrights of the articles belong to their authors. Contents Towards an Ontology for the Mind, Giacomo Romano.....................................................................1 Précis of From an Ontological Point of View, John Heil..................................................................11 A Critical Study of John Heil’s From an Ontological Point of View, Ross Cameron and Elizabeth Barnes................................................................................................................................................22 Words, Pictures and Ontology, Heather Dyke..................................................................................31 An Analysis of Properties in John Heil’s From an Ontological Point of View, Sharon R. Ford.....42 Levels of reality and levels of analysis, Sandro Nannini ................................................................52 Do zombies hunger for humean brains?, Neil Williams ...................................................................62 Reply to Ross Cameron and Elizabeth Barnes, John Heil................................................................73 Reply to Heather Dyke, John Heil....................................................................................................77 Reply to Sharon Ford, John Heil.......................................................................................................82 Reply to Sandro Nannini, John Heil..................................................................................................86 Reply to Neil Williams, John Heil....................................................................................................89 Towards an Ontology for the Mind A presentation of John Heil's From an Ontological Point of View Giacomo Romano Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences The University of Siena In the last fifty years philosophy of mind has developed and established as a broad area of contemporary philosophical reflection. This is a huge area, whose boundaries are not easily defined because the themes and problems involved in it occupy interdisciplinary regions. The relationship between mental and physical, intentionality, consciousness, are questions in relation to which investigations about the theory of knowledge, philosophy of science, action theory, moral philosophy, etc. overlap and may transform into questions debated by empirical sciences. There are several approaches to the different subject matters of philosophy of mind. On the one hand a personal and hermeneutic approach to the study of the mental aetiology of action may be advantageous; on the other hand the sub-personal strategy of the representational and computational theory of mind might seem more suitable. By means of this second strategy many authors, inspired by the classic paradigm of cognitive psychology, have attempted to explain how the mind works (cf. Pinker 1997; Fodor 2000). In some cases such a strategy has attained remarkable and indisputable results. Regardless of their approach, scholars who deal with the main topics in the philosophy of mind are crucially involved with one basic problem, and that is, the nature of the mind, even though this question has often been evaded more or less implicitly. To know what the mind is, or, better, what the mental is (that is, not to know how the mind works, what is the mark of the mental, how the mental should be characterized) means knowing some robust conceptual coordinates which can be used in order to set up (and hopefully to solve) most of the other problems that are connected with the mind and the mental. Clarifying the nature of the mental is a task that concerns theoretical controversies which are rooted in a past more remote than the last five decades. What we are dealing with is a problem that is genuinely philosophical: it is a “what is?” problem, therefore is an exquisitely metaphysical, or more precisely ‘ontological’, problem. John Heil has understood and embraced this consideration ever since he began exploring problems in the philosophy of mind. For years he has maintained that: “… the fundamental philosophical questions concerning the mind remain metaphysical questions – where metaphysics is understood as something more than the a priori pursuit of eternal verities: metaphysics takes the sciences at their word. More particularly, the fundamental questions are questions of ontology – our best accounting of what, in the most general terms, there is.” (Heil 1997: ix). The idea of characterizing some of the more important problems of the philosophy of mind as metaphysical and more particularly as ontological problems has deep implications. In fact, if we approach the mental with a metaphysical methodology, then we have to justify the metaphysical SWIF Philosophy of Mind Review, Vol. 6, No.2, 2007. http://lgxserver.uniba.it/mind/swifpmr/0620072.pdf 2 Towards an Ontology for the Mind assumptions on which such a methodology is grounded, and we need to buy into the theoretical consequences to which those assumptions lead. In other words, a more rigorous metaphysical (and ontological) framework is needed in order to deal with the implications of a metaphysical definition of problems in the philosophy of mind. Indeed the formulation of any philosophical problem is based on, or presupposes, a system of metaphysical assumptions, regardless of whether these assumptions are required by the intuitions of common sense or are postulated by those principles upon which scientific knowledge is built. In his book From an Ontological Point of View Heil elaborates an ambitious project as a strategy to solving the problems in the philosophy of mind with solid metaphysical foundations. This is the first and foremost goal that he pursues in the construction of a basic ontology; he is not intimidated about making the metaphysical feature of his program explicit. Heil subscribes to an all-Australian “ontological seriousness”, that he thinks absolutely necessary when dealing with the rigours of the discourse about the philosophy of mind and the metaphysical difficulties with which they are regularly involved as well as with any other philosophical discourse. Therefore understanding the characterization of an ontological point of view is crucial in order to engage in problems concerning the mental: this is a primeval and foundational task that has to be made in the light of day. And it is with this spirit that Heil has written his book. The articulation of Heil’s project, even though written in a style that is sober and accessible, is rather complex. Here I propose a synthetic interpretation of it, that perhaps does not reflect the expository dynamics of the original text. With its brevity I hope it will provide the reader with a quick but direct look of the book. On the one hand Heil insists on the necessity of constructing a clear ontological basis in order to answer problems in the philosophy of mind, on the other hand he claims that such a metaphysical basis has to be compatible with knowledge of the empirical sciences; even better, this metaphysical enterprise should reconcile our ordinary experience and the sciences (cf. also Heil 1998 and Heil’s Précis). Indeed, in order to overcome the divergence between scientific knowledge and our intuitions we have to appeal to a unified ontological framework. This hypothesis has been neglected for a long time because of an inaccurate characterization of ontological questions. Heil thinks that the inaccuracy in the characterization of ontological questions is due to what he calls the ‘Picture Theory’. The Picture Theory is more of an abstraction than a real formulation, but it is an abstraction of a conviction that is deeply rooted and that underlies great deal of the (mainly Anglophone) philosophical reflection of the past century. According to this convincement, in order to grasp the true nature of reality we need to analyse the characterizations that we make of it with language. The Picture Theory holds that if we are able to rigorously define the predicates that we use to talk about the world, then we are able to define the features of the world, because, even though sometimes in an indirect way, real properties of the world correspond to the predicates of our language. Therein lies the first and most serious perplexity in relation to the Picture Theory. Of course some predicates that are formulated through language are taken to mirror real properties, but it is wrong to assume that every predicate mirrors a real property, even though every characterization of some aspect of the world is likely to be expressed with the attribution of some predicates on the basis of the identification of real properties. Thus, Cyran may think that his nose is awkward without there being any effective property that corresponds to the awkwardness of his nose. Obviously the adherents of the Picture Theory will not directly defend the reality of a property such as awkwardness. They have a prompt and ready explanation at their disposal that is based