Let us tentatively assume that the human mind both can be and is a legitimate object of scientific investigation. Even when that point is granted, one still is not entitled to suppose that the mind is such an object, in exactly the same way and sense that applies to other, more standard cases—entities like neutrons, electro-magnetic fields, viruses, species of African antelopes, volcanoes, periods of geo-logical history, galaxies, and so forth. Accordingly, everyone who thinks of him-or herself as a cognitive scientist needs to consider the following questions: (1) What constitutes the (scientific) distinctiveness of the human mind? (2) For ex-ample, is its distinctiveness just a matter of degree, or of kind? (3) Still more narrowly, what types of scientific research are capable of throwing light on mind’s nature and properties? (4) What makes these particular disciplines, methods, and conceptions both suited and able to perform that role? The authors represented in this second part of the book propose answers to these and related problems from the perspective of the knowledge, experience, values, and priorities that each of them brings to the task.
To begin, Thomas Leahey (“Psychology as Engineering”) follows the lead of people like Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker in suggesting that the best way to think about cognitive science—the “science of mind”—is as a practical or helping discipline as opposed to a theoretical, descriptive one. More particularly, Leahey argues that setting aside the currently popular idea of psychology as just another, more or less ordinary natural science1would have the good effect of showing how its practitioners can respond to important criticisms made by so-called social con-structivists without thereby having to sacrifice psychology’s rigor and empirical force. Still more concretely, Leahey claims there is a strong connection between psychology, correctly conceived, on one hand, and (post-Darwinian) biology, on the other, by virtue of the fact that—similar to the case of biology—psychology’s main goal is to piece together an account of how humans and other animals
“work” by means of reverse engineering. Thus Leahey’s position apparently implies
that the mind does not really count as a part of the objectively describable world at all, or, at least, that would-be natural scientists who tried to describe and explain mind in that particular way would be wasting time pursuing a misleading and hopeless task. Rather, thinking of psychology as one of the healing arts (and therefore as a discipline not well suited to reveal the nature of “things in them-selves”) leaves one free to conclude that the principal raison d’eˆtre of this field is simply to help make the world a better (more satisfactory and effective) place for human habitation.
Gunther Stent (“Epistemic Dualism”) rejects the currently popular dogma that the position of dualism is completely discredited. He maintains that the gen-eral approach represented by dualism can provide the basis for an insightful, ex-planatory, and scientifically defensible theory of mind if one interprets it in epis-temological rather than ontological terms. He then proposes to revive a view first adumbrated by Kant and later reworked and given a more concrete and empirical form by the biologist Konrad Lorenz. According to this theory, the basic reason the mind has all the characteristics it now possesses is simply that it is an ordinary biological entity (or set of functions) that has been shaped by forces of natural selection. However, Stent admits that this view contains one central, glaring prob-lem (even though it shares this difficulty with virtually all other recent accounts of mind as well): what humans like ourselves are and do, insofar as we are physical objects, is not the same as what we are and do when we are considered as active, intelligent, intentional, moral agents. Furthermore, while it presumably is true that these two aspects of human beings are intimately (ontologically) related, it is hard for us to understand or express how this can be the case since, as far as we can tell, these two dimensions of “humanness” seem to have little to do with one another. At this point (similar to what Hattiangadi maintained in his contribution to the previous part), Stent appeals to Niels Bohr’s notion of complementarity, a familiar idea adopted from the area of quantum microphysics, as the key to a solution of the puzzle. For instance, he points out that the characteristic answer of twentieth- and twenty-first-century physicists to the question “Does light energy take the form of particles or of waves?” is “Both.” Or, to state the same point more positively and less paradoxically, physicists have come to see that in some circum-stances, light behaves like particles (i.e., its implicit, particle-like features then assume more prominence), and in other conditions, it behaves more like a wave phenomenon. Stent claims that this is not just a suggestive parallel or metaphor for helping us think more clearly about the “twoness” naturally associated with human beings. Instead, it is a clue that guides us in the direction of literally understanding what it means to say that every human is “one entity compounded of two dissimilar parts.”
David Olson (“Mind, Brain, and Culture”) claims that Stent’s remarks about natural selection (Olson has almost nothing to say about Stent’s views on quantum mechanics) are too general and indeterminate to be a genuinely informative, le-gitimately scientific theory of mind. Why does he take this attitude? The reason is that although it is obvious that the human mind is special and distinctive in the realm of nature, simply pointing out that it is a product of evolution by natural
t h e s t u d y o f m i n d 123
selection does nothing to account for what is special about it. Thus—and here I am elaborating somewhat on Olson’s statements—it is a primary goal of cognitive science to discover what distinguishes humans, on one side, from the rest of the living world, on the other. But appealing to the principle of natural selection cannot explain this difference, since all other creatures—and their “minds,” if any—were produced by the very same type of selective pressures that also led to humans. Still more narrowly, Olson says that Stent’s general strategy cannot be adequate because it fails to take account of at least two important matters. The first is the clear fact that culture (interpreted broadly as one’s relations to other people) exerts a profound influence on any human mind. The second omitted point is that Stent pays no attention to the temporal stages through which all humans pass in order to become full members of a particular cultural group.
Don Ross argues in his chapter “Chalmers’s Naturalistic Dualism: The Irrel-evance of the Mind-Body Problem to the Scientific Study of Consciousness” that there is no room in cognitive science for a priori speculations about the mind’s relation to the body, or the metaphysical status of consciousness. Ross claims—in roughly the same way as Pinker, Leahey, and Dennett—that we should think of this field as organized around practical and pragmatic principles, rather than the-oretic ones. Moreover, one of the most important of these practical principles is a commitment to safeguard the scientific rigor and objectivity of the conclusions of cognitive science by assessing each of them in terms of a type of empirical verificationism. This last point implies that no theorist has a right to dictate the future course of the mind sciences by laying down conceptual limits within which their practitioners must proceed. For example, David Chalmers has argued that cognitive scientists should recognize a realm of conscious experience, separate from and irreducible to matter, simply because they can conceive (introspectively) of another world like our own in every respect except that it contains no such experiences. However, Ross rejects this idea on the grounds (following Dennett) that the “philosophical zombies” Chalmers claims he can picture in his mind’s eye—that is, individuals who look and act exactly like us, but lack inner experi-ences—are not really conceivable. (To express this same point another way, zom-bies of that sort are not, and cannot be, legitimate objects of scientific investigation.) That is, Ross and Dennett believe that part of what it means to be a scientist is to form one’s idea of what is and is not conceivable exclusively by induction from scientific practice and past scientific history, and not on the basis of what certain people, at certain times, claim that they are able to conceive.
The approach of William Seager (“Emergence and Efficacy”) is very different from that of Ross. Seager imagines a future time when scientists have arrived at the final physical micropicture of the world—one that provides them with the means, at least in principle, of reducing all material objects to their ultimate, subatomic constituents. He then asks whether such a development would allow for the complete explanation of all aspects of the mind. We noted before that Ross, following Dennett, answers yes to a question of this sort on the basis of a certain type of verificationist reductionism. But Seager agrees instead with Chalmers that the right answer is no, since, according to him, scientists in that ultimate situation
still would have no means of accounting for the existence and properties of con-sciousness. In this chapter, Seager does not give an exhaustive account of his reasons for choosing this alternative and rejecting the other. Instead, he invites readers who want to explore the matter further to consult his book.
But let us engage in a bit of speculation. Saul Kripke (1972) and Thomas Nagel (1974) once argued that consciousness must be irreducible to matter, be-cause reduction centrally involves a movement from subjective to objective thought and knowledge, and since conscious experience is essentially subjective, it is impossible to know it objectively. One sign that Seager might be taking a similar approach is that he is happy to accept the title “mysterianism” for his view—a word Owen Flanagan (1992), following McGinn (1991), used as an abu-sive designation for the general type of theory about consciousness just mentioned.
Of course, however, Seager proposes to interpret this term in a complimentary or at least neutral sense, not (as originally intended) in a negative, dismissive, and scornful way.
Finally, I want to mention that we originally intended to include a chapter by biologist Robert Haynes titled “Is the Problem of ‘Redness’ Insoluble?” at the end of part II. We were not able to do this because even though Haynes read one tentative version of his projected chapter at the 1996 conference, he never had time to complete the chapter in a way that satisfied him because of a sudden onset of sickness that finally ended in his death. The outline of the chapter, which we included in the literature for the conference, runs as follows:
Science is “the art of the soluble” (P.B. Medawar). Scientists who grapple with insoluble problems, as scientists, are deemed by their colleagues to be artless, unwise, or foolish. On the other hand, there are many presently unsolved problems in science—for example, the basic problems of aging in organisms. (I deliberately exclude here the social problems of aging in humans.) Yet biologists expect that these problems will be largely solved, in the not-too-distant future, as a result of ongoing research pro-grams in the physiology, genetics, and cellular and molecular biology of aging. Thus, for scientists, unsolved problems are not necessarily insol-uble problems. History shows that the unsolved problems of the day often have been solved later by more hard work and hard thinking, or by new discoveries and/or the development of new technologies. Thus it is im-portant for scientists to distinguish between unsolved and insoluble prob-lems. Unfortunately, to make such distinctions unequivocally in all cases might itself be an insoluble problem, for no one can predict with assur-ance the discoveries of tomorrow.
In this paper I will review the ideas that have been put forward on the nature and origin of qualia—that is, the subjective qualities of mental experiences such as the “redness” of red. I will then argue that “the problem of qualia” might be an insoluble problem in science, although it is usefully discussed and analyzed by philosophers. If it can be shown that the problem of “redness” is insoluble, then the problem of qualia is
t h e s t u d y o f m i n d 125
not a scientific problem. Since qualia are part of the problem of con-sciousness, then mind cannot be wholly an object of science.
All of this is obviously relevant to the dispute described earlier, between Ross and Seager. Haynes asked the methodological metaquestion of whether there are two separate questions that theorists interested in describing and accounting for the nature of mind traditionally have considered—one of which it is possible to answer, the other not. The answer he proposed was yes (at least, from the viewpoint of practicing scientists like Haynes himself). Thus according to him, to consider just one typical example, appealing to the techniques of modern empirical science does not provide a suitable means of solving problems about the character and function of the conscious experience of “redness.”
If Haynes’ suggestion here is correct, it follows that traditional concerns about the nature of mind can be no more than partly, and not wholly, scientific in character. Thus his position seems to be at least roughly similar to Chalmers’s theory, but with one crucial difference. While Chalmers argued for his view by employing the tools of metaphysical analysis and introspection, Haynes chose to support his by invoking considerations drawn from hardheaded, practical experi-ence. I am sure that all the readers of this book would like to know more about this. And therefore it is very unfortunate that Robert Haynes died before having had a chance to explain his ideas more fully, in a completed chapter.
Note
1. Recall the following statement made by Harre´ in chapter 1: “In the United States, where most of those who style themselves psychologists currently live and work, it seems to be taken as settled that psychology is or is to be a kind of Naturwissen-schaft.”
References
Flanagan, Owen. 1991. Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kripke, Saul A. 1972. “Naming and Necessity.” Pp. 253–355 in G. Harman and D.
Davidson (Eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: Reidel.
McGinn, C. 1991. The Problem of Consciousness. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, Octo-ber, 1974, pp. 435–450.
126