The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 63 pptx

called the ‘school of experience and association’. He
denied that there is knowledge independent of experience
and held that attitudes and beliefs are the products of psy-
chological laws of association. His view of human beings
is *naturalistic and his ethics is utilitarian. But he
redesigned the liberal edifice built on these foundations to
the romantic patterns of the nineteenth century. For these
he was himself one of the great spokesmen. He learned
much of the historical sociology which was so important
to his liberalism from Frenchmen; but it was to German
romanticism, via his Coleridgean friends, that he owes his
deepest ethical theme—that of human nature as the seat
of individuality and autonomy, capable of being brought
to fruition through the culture of the whole man.
The controversy over Mill’s achievement has always
centred on whether the synthesis he sought, of enlighten-
ment and romantic-idealist themes, is a possible one. Kant
had argued that the naturalism of the *Enlightenment
subverted reason, and idealist philosophers of the nine-
teenth century followed him in that. Kant and Mill do in
fact agree on a vital aspect of this question. They agree
that if the mind is only a part of nature, no knowledge of
the natural world can be *a priori. Either all knowledge is
a posteriori, grounded in experience, or there is no know-
ledge. Any grounds for asserting a proposition that has
real content must be empirical grounds. However, much
more important is the difference between them: whereas
Kant thought knowledge could not be grounded on such a
basis, and thus rejected naturalism, Mill thought it could.
This radically empiricist doctrine is the thesis of the System
of Logic.

There Mill draws a distinction between ‘verbal’ and
‘real’ propositions, and between ‘merely apparent’ and
‘real’ inferences. The distinction corresponds, as Mill him-
self notes, to that which Kant makes between analytic and
synthetic judgements. But Mill applies it with greater
strictness than anyone had done before, insisting with
greater resolution that merely apparent inferences have
no genuine cognitive content. He points out that pure
mathematics, and logic itself, contain real propositions
and inferences with genuine cognitive content. This clear
assertion is central to the System of Logic, and the basis of its
continuing importance in the empiricist tradition. For if
Mill is also right in holding that naturalism entails that no
real proposition is a priori, he has shown the implications
of naturalism to be radical indeed. Not only mathematics
but logic itself will be empirical.
His strategy is a pincer movement. One pincer is an
indirect argument. If logic did not contain real inferences,
all deductive reasoning would be a petitio principii, a beg-
ging of the question—it could produce no new know-
ledge. Yet clearly it does produce new knowledge. So logic
must contain real inferences. The other pincer is a direct
semantic analysis of basic logical laws. It shows them to be
real and not merely verbal. The same strategy is applied to
mathematics. If it was merely verbal, mathematical rea-
soning would be a petitio principii. But a detailed semantic
analysis shows that it does contain real propositions.
Why do we think these real propositions in logic and
mathematics to be a priori? Because we find their neg-
ations inconceivable, or derive them, by principles whose

unsoundness we find inconceivable, from premisses
whose negation we find inconceivable. Mill thought he
could explain these facts about unthinkability, or imagin-
ative unrepresentability, in associationist terms. His
explanations are none too convincing, but his philosophi-
cal point still stands: the step from our inability to repre-
sent to ourselves the negation of a proposition to
acceptance of its truth calls for justification. Moreover, the
justification itself must be a priori if it is to show that the
proposition is known a priori. (Thus Mill is prepared, for
example, to concede the reliability of geometrical intu-
ition: but he stresses that its reliability is an empirical fact,
itself known inductively.)
All reasoning is empirical. What then is the basis of rea-
soning? Epistemologically, historically, and psycho-
logically, Mill holds, it is enumerative induction, simple
generalization from experience. We spontaneously agree
in reasoning that way, and in holding that way of reason-
ing to be sound. The proposition ‘Enumerative induction
is a valid mode of reasoning’ is not a verbal proposition.
But nor is it grounded in an a priori intuition. All that Mill
will say for it is that people in general, and the reader in
particular, in fact agree on reflection in accepting it. It is on
that basis alone that he rests its claim.
He does not take seriously Hume’s sceptical problem
of *induction; his concern in the System of Logic is rather
to find ways of improving the reliability of inductive
reasoning:
if induction by simple enumeration were an invalid process, no
process grounded on it would be valid; just as no reliance could be

placed on telescopes, if we could not trust our eyes. But though a
valid process, it is a fallible one, and fallible in very different
degrees: if therefore we can substitute for the more fallible forms
of the process, an operation grounded on the same process in a
less fallible form, we shall have effected a very material improve-
ment. And this is what scientific induction does.
So Mill’s question is not a sceptical but an internal
one—why is it that some inductions are more trustworthy
than others? He answers by means of a natural history of
induction, which traces how enumerative induction is
internally vindicated by its actual success in establishing
regularities, and how it eventually gives rise to more
searching methods of investigation.
The origins are ‘spontaneous’ and ‘unscientific’ induc-
tions about particular unconnected natural phenomena.
They accumulate, interweave, and are not disconfirmed
by further experience. As they accumulate and inter-
weave, they justify the second-order inductive conclusion
that all phenomena are subject to uniformity, and, more
specifically, that all have discoverable sufficient condi-
tions. In this less vague form, the principle of general uni-
formity becomes, given Mill’s analysis of causation, the
law of universal causation. This conclusion in turn pro-
vides (Mill believes) the grounding assumption for a new
style of reasoning about nature—eliminative induction.
600 Mill, John Stuart
Here the assumption that a type of phenomenon has
uniform causes, together with a (revisable) assumption
about what its possible causes are, initiates a comparative
inquiry in which the actual cause is identified by elimin-

ation. Mill formulates the logic of this eliminative reason-
ing in his ‘methods of empirical inquiry’. The improved
scientific induction which results spills back on to the
principle of universal causation on which it rests, and
raises its certainty to a new level. That in turn raises our
confidence in the totality of particular enumerative induc-
tions from which the principle is derived. This analysis of
the ‘inductive process’ is one of Mill’s most elegant
achievements.
Mill and Hume then are both naturalistic radicals, but
in quite different ways—Hume by virtue of his scepticism,
Mill by virtue of his empiricist analysis of deduction. The
only cognitive dispositions which Mill recognizes as primi-
tively legitimate are the disposition to rely on memory
and the habit of enumerative induction. The whole of sci-
ence, he thinks, is built from the materials of experience
and memory by disciplined employment of this habit.
This is Mill’s inductivism—the view that enumerative
induction is the only ultimate method of inference which
puts us in possession of new truths. Is he right in thinking
it to be so? In his own time the question produced an
important, if confused, controversy between him and
William Whewell. Whewell argued that fundamental to
scientific inquiry was the hypothetical method, in which
one argues to the truth of a hypothesis from the fact that it
would explain observed phenomena. Mill, on the other
hand, could not accept that the mere fact that a hypothesis
accounted for the data in itself provided a reason for think-
ing it true. The point he appealed to is a powerful one: it is
always possible that a body of data may be explained

equally well by more than one hypothesis.
What he does not see, and this is one of the points of
weakness in his philosophy, is how much must be torn
from the fabric of our belief if inductivism is applied
strictly. Thus, for example, while his case for empiricism
about logic and mathematics is very strong, it is his
methodology of science which then forces him to hold
that we know basic logical and mathematical principles
only by an enumerative induction. That is desperately
implausible; accepting the hypothetical method would be
one, though only one, possible remedy.
Inductivism also plays a key role in Mill’s metaphysics.
He sets this out in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s
Philosophy (1865)—a detailed criticism of the Scottish
philosopher who had attempted to bring together the
views of Reid and Kant. Here Mill endorses a doctrine
which was then accepted, as he says, on all sides (though it
would now be treated with greater mistrust). The doc-
trine is that our knowledge and conception of objects
external to consciousness consists entirely in the con-
scious states they excite in us, or that we can imagine them
exciting in us.
This leaves open the question whether objects exist
independently of consciousness. It may be held that there
are such objects, although we can only know them by
hypothesis from their effects on us. Mill rejects this view—
as, given his inductivism, he must. Instead he argues that
external objects amount to nothing more than ‘perman-
ent possibilities of sensation’. The possibilities are ‘per-
manent’ in the sense that they obtain whether or not

realized; they would occur if an antecedent condition
obtained. (As well as ‘permanent’ Mill uses other terms,
such as ‘certified’ or ‘guaranteed’.)
Our knowledge of mind, like our knowledge of matter,
Mill thinks to be ‘entirely relative’. But he baulks at resolv-
ing it into a series of feelings and possibilities of feeling. For
‘the thread of consciousness’ contains memories and
expectations as well as sensations. To remember or expect
a feeling is not simply to believe that it has existed or will
exist; it is to believe that I have experienced or will experi-
ence that feeling. Thus if the mind is to be a series of feel-
ings, we would, he thinks, be forced to conclude that it is a
series that can be aware of itself as a series. This drives him
to recognize in mind, or self, a reality greater than the exist-
ence as a permanent possibility which is the only reality he
concedes to matter. He fails to note that the doctrine that
mind resolves into a series of feelings need not literally
identify selves with series: it paraphrases talk of selves in
terms of talk of series.
Discounting this uncertainty about what to say of the
self, all that ultimately exists in Mill’s view is experience in
a temporal order. But he claims this to be consistent with
*common-sense realism, and he continues to see minds as
proper parts of a natural order. The difficulties of this
begin to emerge when we ask whether the experiences
referred to in Mill’s metaphysics are the very same as those
referred to by common sense—and explained by physical
antecedents. The same difficulties emerge for later *phe-
nomenalists, but Mill never addresses them.
To the succeeding generation of philosophers, who

took Kant’s philosophy seriously, Mill’s naturalism
seemed thoroughly incoherent. He fails to see the need for
a synthetic a priori to render any knowledge possible,
even though he gives an account of real propositions and
inferences which agrees in essentials with Kant. On top of
that, in accepting phenomenalism he accepts a doctrine
which must lead to a transcendental view of conscious-
ness, yet he remains determinedly naturalistic in his view
of the mind. Perhaps present-day naturalism is finding
ways of avoiding this second impasse, by being more rig-
orously naturalistic about experience than Mill was. But it
has yet to cope clearly with the first.
In ethics and politics Mill’s premisses remain those of
enlightenment *humanism. Value resides in the well-
being achieved within individual lives; the interests of all
make an equal claim on the consideration of all. Happi-
ness is most effectively attained when society leaves
people free to pursue their own ends subject to rules estab-
lished for the general good. A science of man will ground
rational policies for social improvement.
His reason for thinking that *happiness is the only
ultimate human end is just like his reason for thinking
Mill, John Stuart 601
enumerative induction is the only ultimate principle of
reasoning. He appeals to reflective agreement, in this case
of desires rather than reasoning dispositions: ‘the sole evi-
dence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is
that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utili-
tarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in
practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever

convince any person that it was so.’
But do we not, in theory and in practice, desire things
under ends other than the end of happiness, for example
under the idea of duty? Mill’s response to this question has
strength and subtlety. He acknowledges that we can will
against inclination: ‘instead of willing the thing because
we desire it, we often desire it only because we will it’.
There are, he agrees, conscientious actions, flowing not
from any unmotivated desire but solely from acceptance
of duty. But his point is that when we unmotivatedly
desire a thing we desire it under the idea of it as pleasant.
He further distinguishes between desiring a thing as ‘part’
of our happiness and desiring it as a means to our happi-
ness. Virtuous ends can be a part of happiness: consider,
for example, the difference between a spontaneously gen-
erous man and a conscientious giver. The first wants to
give because he takes pleasure in giving. The second gives
from a ‘confirmed will to do right’. The benefit of another
is for the first, but not the second, a ‘part’ of his own
happiness.
The *virtues can become a part of our happiness, and
for Mill they ideally should be so. That ideal state is not an
unrealistic one, for the virtues have a natural basis and a
moral education can build on it by association. More gen-
erally, people can come to a deeper understanding of hap-
piness through education and experience. Mill holds that
some forms of happiness are inherently preferred as
finer by those able to experience them fully—but these
valuations are still in his view made from within the
perspective of happiness, not from outside it.

So Mill deepened the Benthamite understanding of
happiness; however, he never adequately examined the
principle of utility itself. It was a philosopher of the gener-
ation after Mill’s, Henry Sidgwick, who probed its ground-
ings most deeply. But when we turn to Mill’s conception
of the relationship between the utility principle and the
texture of norms by which day-to-day social life proceeds,
we find him at his most impressive. His ability to combine
abstract moral theory with the human understanding of a
great political and social thinker here comes into its own.
Benthamite radicalism lacks historical and sociological
sense. The philosophes of the eighteenth century,
‘attempting to new-model society without the binding
forces which hold society together, met with such success
as might have been expected’.
The utilitarian, he says, need not and cannot require
that ‘the test of conduct should also be the exclusive
motive of it’. This historical and concrete aspect of Mill’s
*utilitarianism is the key to his view of the institutions of
justice and liberty; though his analysis of rights follows
Bentham. A person has a right to a thing, he holds, if there
is an obligation on society to protect him in his possession
of that thing. But the obligation itself must be grounded in
general utility.
The rights of *justice reflect a class of exceptionally
stringent obligations on society. They are obligations to
provide to each person ‘the essentials of human well-
being’. The claim of justice is the ‘claim we have on our
fellow-creatures to join in making safe for us the very
groundwork of our existence’. Because justice-rights pro-

tect those utilities which touch that groundwork they take
priority over the direct pursuit of general utility as well as
over the private pursuit of personal ends.
With *liberty we find again that Mill’s liberalism is
grounded on a utilitarian base. He appeals to ‘utility in the
largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of
man as a progressive being’. In that respect, his liberalism
stands opposed to the classical natural-rights liberalism of
Locke. The famous principle which Mill enunciates in his
On Liberty is intended to safeguard the individual’s free-
dom to pursue his goals in his private domain: ‘the only
purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over
any member of a civilised community, against his will, is
to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical
or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.’
Mill magnificently defends this principle of liberty on
two grounds: it enables individuals to realize their individ-
ual potential in their own way, and, by liberating talents,
creativity, and dynamism, it sets up the essential pre-
condition for moral and intellectual progress. Yet the
limitations of his Benthamite inheritance, despite the
major enlargements he made to it, residually constrain
him. His defence of the principle would have been still
stronger if he had weakened (or liberalized) its founda-
tion—by acknowledging the irreducible plurality of
human ends and substituting for aggregate utility the
generic concept of general good. j.m.s.
Fred R. Berger, Happiness, Justice and Freedom: The Moral and Polit-
ical Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London, 1984).
Wendy Donner, The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill’s Moral and Polit-

ical Philosophy (Ithaca, NY, 1991).
Alan Ryan, J. S. Mill (London, 1974).
Geoffrey Scarre, Logic and Reality in the Philosophy of John Stuart
Mill (Dordrecht, 1989).
John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (London, 1989).
—— (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mill (Cambridge, 1998).
C. L. Ten, Mill on Liberty (Oxford, 1980).
Millikan, Ruth (1933– ). In her work Language, Thought
and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge, Mass., 1984),
and in subsequent articles, Ruth Millikan has presented
arguably the most detailed application of evolutionary
theory to certain philosophical problems. She develops a
notion of a thing’s function in terms of things of that type,
in the past, having being selected to play a particular causal
role, so capturing the intuition that a thing can have a
function that, in fact, it does not now carry out. She applies
this notion to thought and language, claiming that, in each
case, representation is the biological function of the
602 Mill, John Stuart
medium of thought and of language. This impels her to
espouse a type of realism, and deny what she calls ‘mean-
ing rationalism’, the view that language-users and
thinkers have privileged access to the meanings they have
conveyed by their language use, or which constitute their
thought. p.j.p.n.
*evolution.
Mill’s methods: see method of agreement; method of dif-
ference; method, joint; method of residues; method of
concomitant variations.
mimesis. Imitation, representation. Plato’s well-known

attack on the poets begins with the assertion that poetry is
a kind of ‘mimesis’. The word is evidently used in two
senses. (1) Playing a dramatic role or reciting a speech
from Homer is imitating (or impersonating) someone.
Such mimesis can harm the actor if the character imitated
is bad. (2) Narrative *poetry represents people’s behaviour.
Mimesis in this sense is also exemplified by reflections in
mirrors and representational painting. To produce such
representations, Plato says, one does not need knowledge
of the thing represented, but only of how it appears.
His complaint is that poets achieve with their skills a
dangerous reputation as authorities on matters, such as
good conduct, of which they are ignorant. ‘Children and
fools’ are similarly taken in by trompe-l’œil paintings.
r.j.h.
Plato, Republic x. Various translations available, e.g. that by G. M.
A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, 1992).
mind. You have a mind if you think, perceive, or feel. Your
mind is like your life or your weight, an abstract version of
an unproblematic property. When minds are thought of
as objects in their own right, with parts as if they were spa-
tially extended and with continuity through time as if they
were physical objects, then they become much more
thought-provoking. They become like souls or selves. We
don’t have to take minds as objects. They can be features
of other objects, such as persons (persons typically have
heights and weights and minds) or features of person’s
lives. Still, we can study minds inasmuch as we can study
thinking, perceiving, and feeling. This is psychology.
The concepts of thinking, perceiving, and feeling are

among a large family of concepts, including, for example,
remembering, loving, and wishing, which every person
picks up in childhood when they acquire their culture’s
conception of mind. Developmental psychologists have
differing opinions about whether this conception is a fairly
arbitrary theory which could vary in essential respects
from one culture to another, or whether there is a core
way of thinking about mind to which humans inevitably
gravitate. Such a core conception would correspond to
what functionalist thinkers in the philosophy of mind,
such as Putnam and Fodor, have postulated as the set of
essential connections between beliefs, desires, memories,
and other states, which characterize mind: a mind is
anything, be it human, animal, or extraterrestrial, which
has states connected in the way the core conception
describes.
Even if there were a core concept of mind, it could be
wrong. That is, the underlying neurological facts about
why we act in the ways that we describe as thinking, per-
ceiving, and feeling may be so different from our charac-
terizations of them in everyday or ‘folk psychological’
terms that to think of people as being or having minds is
positively misleading. This is the position of eliminative
materialism, associated with Feyerabend, Rorty, and
Patricia and Paul Churchland. It is not at all obviously
right. There is a lot of philosophical and scientific work to
do before we can see where the answer lies.
If minds are real features of people then there may be
aspects of these features which are not easily described in
terms of everyday concepts such as thinking, perceiving,

and feeling. For example, there might be subconscious
processes which are best described in the language of psy-
choanalysis. Psychology, psychoanalysis, and other discip-
lines might tell us things about what we call mind which
are unavailable to common-sense or to introspection.
Certainly one conclusion that seems to be emerging from
cognitive psychology, for example in the work of Nisbett
and Ross, is that the explanations people give of the rea-
sons for their actions are much more often wrong than
they imagine. Whatever our limitations in knowing what
we are thinking or feeling, our limitations in knowing why
we think or feel seem to be very much greater. In one way
this might not be surprising, for the reasons why we think
or feel surely include many physical causes of which a per-
son is completely unaware. And in fact one of the sources
of the impression of free will may be the blindness of con-
sciousness to the causes of thought and feeling. a.m.
*cognitive architecture; consciousness, its irreducibil-
ity; mind, syntax, and semantics; psyche; dualism;
mind–body problem; eliminative materialism; free-
dom; functionalism; self.
Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.,
1988).
D. C. Dennett and R. Hofstadter, The Mind’s I (New York, 1981;
Harmondsworth, 1982).
Henry Wellman, The Child’s Theory of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.,
1990).
mind, history of the philosophy of. Philosophizing
about the mind is as old as philosophy itself, whereas phil-
osophy of mind, proper—a distinctive subfield of philoso-

phy—is of relatively recent advent. Both Plato and
Aristotle present mature theories of the nature, structure,
and types of psyche, theories that clearly depended on
prior theorizing. And every great philosopher of the mod-
ern period, most notably Descartes, but also Hobbes,
Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, propose theories of
mind. In general, this theorizing takes place within meta-
physics, epistemology, or moral theory and not in the
service of developing a theory of mind for its own
sake. Plato’s tripartite division of psyche into rational,
mind, history of the philosophy of 603
appetitive, and temperamental parts occurs in the Republic
as part of the rationale for structuring political life in a cer-
tain way. Aristotle’s distinction among the types of psyche
in nature are part of his biological metaphysic; and his
vision of the distinctive features of the human psyche as
involving the capacity for reason and virtue serves his eth-
ical theory. *Mind–body dualism emerges as a fundamen-
tal truth within Descartes’s epistemological project.
Hobbes’s mechanistic psychology in the first part of
Leviathan prepares the way for the famous claims about
human nature in chapter 13. The laws of association of the
Empiricists were attempts to answer distinctively philo-
sophical questions about the nature and limits of human
knowledge. And, of course, Kant’s Copernican turn in
philosophy, the proposal that mind lays down certain a
priori conditions for experience, was meant to answer the
deep scepticism about causation, *self, and transcendental
matters such as the existence of God generated by Hume’s
epistemology.

The philosophy of mind now exists as a distinctive sub-
field of philosophy. There are journals devoted to work in
it; job applicants claim to specialize in it; and so on. But its
emergence cannot be precisely dated. It is best to think of
the philosophy of mind as emerging during the late nine-
teenth century and first half of the twentieth century. Pro-
fessional recognition of it as a distinct and important
subfield comes only after 1950, despite the fact that one
finds ‘philosophical anthropology’ and ‘philosophy of
mind’ on medieval lists under the entry ‘Metaphysics’, and
works like that of the Scottish philosopher Thomas
Brown’s Lectures on the Philosophy of the Mind appear as
early as 1820.
The following developments were seminal in the early
stages. First, the founding of scientific psychology as an
offshoot from philosophy is, in the lore, dated to Wilhelm
Wundt’s founding of a psychological laboratory in Leipzig
in 1879. Here master introspectors were trained and mem-
ory and reaction-time experiments were set up and carried
out. All the founding documents of scientific psychology
attest to acute self-concern on the part of the founders in
making clear and defensible philosophical assumptions
and in developing empirically secure methods that would
be immune from the scorn the new science brought
against a priori theorizing about mind. So psychology was
born in the late 1800s as a philosophically self-conscious
discipline.
Second, in 1874 Franz Brentano published his Psych-
ology from an Empirical Standpoint. It is here that Brentano
resurrected Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s notion of *intention-

ality — from the Latin, intendo, meaning ‘to aim at or point
toward’. The idea was that paradigm-case mental states,
beliefs, desires, hopes, expectations, and the like, have
intentional objects. Beliefs, desires, wishes, expectations,
and so on, are of or about something: I believe that
[Thatcher was Prime Minister]; I wish that [Reagan had
not been President]. What a belief or wish is about—
Thatcher or Reagan—is its ‘object’, whereas the propos-
itional thought expressed—that Thatcher was Prime
Minister or that Reagan had not been elected—is its
‘content’.
Brentano’s thesis is that *intentionality is the inelimin-
able mark of the mental. Psychology will need to be
intentional, that is, the explanation of human thought and
action will require us to make an inventory of all the types
of mental state (beliefs, desires, and so on) that human
minds are capable of going into, and it will also need to
focus on the intentional objects and contents of these states
(it remains a possibility that not all mental states are inten-
tional; perhaps pains and moods have no objects or propos-
itional contents and thus are not of or about anything at
all). To explain why an individual reaches for that cool
drink, we will need to posit not only belief and desire states,
but belief and desire states with a particular intentional
object, a cool drink, and content, that this is a cool drink.
A lively contemporary debate concerns the issue of
whether only conscious mental states can be intentional,
and whether other states involved in belief or desire for-
mation are purely computational, not ‘mental’ at all in any
interesting sense. It is noteworthy that Sigmund Freud

took three and a half years of elective courses with Franz
Brentano while he was in medical school. Indeed, one
fruitful way of thinking of psychoanalysis is as involving
an extension of Brentano’s basic insight. Not only are con-
scious intentional states causally efficacious, but so too are
unconscious intentional states. So just as my desire for a
cool drink and my belief that this is a water-fountain in
front of me explains my taking a drink, so too my uncon-
scious desire to kill the boss explains my hostile verbal
edge towards him.
Third, in 1890 William James published his monumen-
tal Principles of Psychology. Not only was this great work a
compendium of all known psychological knowledge,
culled mostly from the new scientific psychologists but
also from more traditional philosophical sources, it was
also a troubled testimony to James’s own recognition that
a scientific theory of mind was in deep tension with trad-
itional philosophical ways of thinking about mind. This
comes out clearly in the book when James discusses the
deterministic assumption made by psychologists and the
assumptions about human freedom made in ethics. James
indicates that for purposes of living, but not for doing
psychology, the assumption of *free will is the stronger.
This same ambivalence carried over to James’s ambi-
valence about what field he himself worked in. Over a
brief period in the late 1880s and 1990s, James switched his
Harvard appointment several times between medicine,
psychology, and philosophy, before finally settling into
philosophy for the remainder of his career.
James’s Psychology treats all the great metaphysical and

epistemological problems in the philosophy of mind. In
addition to the problem of *free will and free action, he
discusses the status of introspection, the problem of other
minds, the nature of the emotions, the mind–body prob-
lem. And he takes not only Cartesian dualism, but Male-
branche’s occasionalism, Leibniz’s parallelism, and
Huxley’s epiphenomenalism, as live options.
604 mind, history of the philosophy of
Wundt, Brentano, and James together represent some
of the most important foundational work in the science of
the mind. But it is, at the same time, important work in the
philosophy of mind, work filled with philosophical
assumptions about the nature of mind, analyses of com-
peting models, and recommendations about the proper
methods for studying mind and conceiving its nature. In
their hands, mind becomes an important topic in its own
right, worthy of attention in a science of its own, the fledg-
ling psychology, and in need of a general philosophical
analysis of such questions as: What is this thing called
‘mind’? What is its place in nature? How is mind to be
known?
The next phase in the development of the philosophy of
mind, a phase which leads to its finding a distinctive niche,
and to its professional recognition as a subfield, occurs
between 1900 and 1950. Roughly, what happens is this:
scientific psychology emerges not as a unified theory but
as a bundle of theories with radically different methodo-
logical approaches. There were introspectionists, and
anti-introspectionists, behaviourists, and functionalists,
depth psychologists, and their opponents. In 1933 Edna

Heidbreder wrote her important Seven Psychologies, still an
excellent survey of the theory diffusion affecting psych-
ology at its birth. This theoretical diffusion forced debate
about the proper methods and assumptions of psych-
ology, both among leading psychologists like Wundt, Titch-
ener, John B. Watson (whose manifesto ‘Psychology as a
Behaviorist Views It’ was published in 1913), and eventu-
ally B. F. Skinner—who left a poet’s life in Greenwich Vil-
lage for the halls of psychology (in what is today William
James Hall, the philosophy department at Harvard being
housed in Emerson Hall) after reading a popular magazine
article by Bertrand Russell about *Logical Positivism—
and also among philosophers as diverse as James and Rus-
sell, and John Dewey and Rudolf Carnap. Indeed, so close
were the relations between *psychology and philosophy
even after the new science had declared its independence
that three philosophers, William James, Mary Calkins,
James’s student and a professor of philosophy and
psychology at Wellesley College, and John Dewey, held
the presidencies of both the American Philosophical Associ-
ation and the American Psychological Association during
the early years of psychology’s development. And it was
only in 1974 that Mind dropped the fifth and sixth words
from its subtitle, ‘A Quarterly Review of Psychology and
Philosophy’.
Dewey and Carnap can be thought of as representatives
of what were to become the two sides of the philosophy of
mind, one side concerned primarily with the metaphysics
of mind, the other with the methodological foundations
of psychology and the epistemic status of first- and third-

person psychological reports. In a series of papers pub-
lished at the turn of the century, Dewey began to defend a
picture of mind that was naturalistic without being mech-
anistic. He rejected the picture of mental action as con-
sisting of simple reflexes or complexes of reflexes, as well
as the Cartesian picture of the mind as an incorporeal sub-
stance. Dewey proposed instead a picture of mind inspired
by Darwin and James. The human mind is the result of
selective forces building the most powerful and adaptive
organism ever known. If Dewey was concerned primarily
with developing a naturalistic metaphysic of mind con-
sonant with evolutionary theory, Carnap was concerned
primarily with the epistemological status of first- and
third-person psychological reports. In part this concern
was motivated by the appeal the positivists made to obser-
vation reports as the rock-bottom foundation for all sci-
ence. Statements such as ‘Water is H
2
O’ or ‘The atomic
number of gold is 79’ depend on grounding theory in
observation, often observations mediated by instrumen-
tation. Perceptual reports ground all science—even chem-
istry and physics. How trustworthy are such reports? The
positivists were quick to defend intersubjective observa-
tion reports, reports made by several independent
observers, as reliable enough for the physical sciences. But
what about the status of intrasubjective, first-person psy-
chological sentences, such as ‘I’m in a good mood’ or ‘I’m
visualizing my mother’s face’? What about the whole idea
that expertise in introspection could be developed? How

could such expertise be measured or verified? In his 1931
paper ‘Psychology in a Physical Language’, Carnap
asserted that first-person psychological reports were
‘intertranslatable with some sentence of physical lan-
guage, namely, with a sentence about the physical state of
the person in question’. Such reports refer (inadvertently,
we might say) ‘to physical processes in the body of the per-
son in question. On any other interpretation’ such reports
‘become untestable in principle, and thus meaningless’.
The two strands, concern with the metaphysics of mind
and with the logical status of sentences about mind, come
together in Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949). If
there is a founding document in the contemporary philoso-
phy of mind proper, Ryle’s book is it. First, there is a
spirited attack on the Cartesian picture of mind as a
*‘ghost in the machine’. Second, there is a relentless attack
on the doctrine of *privileged access, the view that the
mind is transparent to its owner, and that we each have
unmediated and incorrigible access to our own mental
states. Third, there is the proposal that *‘mind’, the Cartesian
conception of mind, at any rate, is simply a mystifying way
of speaking about certain behavioural dispositions of the
organism. According to Ryle’s logical behaviourism, just
as ‘solubility’ is nothing mysterious, referring simply to
the disposition of a substance to dissolve in liquid, likewise
talk of mental states, talk of ‘belief ’ and ‘desire’, is, in so far
as it is meaningful, talk of dispositions of the organism to
behave in certain ways. It is ironic that the locus classicus of
contemporary philosophy of mind argued in a sense that
there really was no such thing as ‘mind’ as traditionally

understood.
The work after Ryle constitutes the recent history of
the philosophy of mind, a period characterized by two
somewhat distinct sorts of work. First, there was work of
analysis—work devoted to the analysis of *sensation and
*perception (Chisholm, Armstrong, Sellars), intentionality,
mind, history of the philosophy of 605
free action, the *emotions (Kenny), the debate about *rea-
sons and causes, the possibility of *private language, and
of knowledge of one’s own and *other minds.
Ryle while claiming to be no behaviourist emphasized
the centrality, indeed the indispensability, of behaviour in
the ascription of mental terms. Wittgenstein did much the
same thing in his Philosophical Investigations (Eng. tr. 1953).
Wittgenstein’s specific argument against the develop-
ment of a private language was developed, clarified, and
defended by Norman Malcolm in his review of the Philo-
sophical Investigations in the Philosophical Review in 1954.
Malcolm pointed out the relevance of the private lan-
guage argument for the problem of other minds in his
‘Knowledge of Other Minds’ (1958). Other important
work on other minds includes A. J. Ayer’s, The Concept of a
Person (1956) and The Problem of Knowledge (1963).
Important works on free action and the question
whether reasons can be causes include: G. E. M.
Anscombe’s Intention (2nd edn. 1963), Hart and Honoré’s
Causation in the Law (1959), A. I. Melden’s Free Action
(1961), J. L. Austin’s ‘Ifs and Cans’ (1961), and Donald
Davidson’s ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ (1963).
It was P. F. Strawson’s Individuals (1959), an essay in

‘descriptive metaphysics’, that made the radical but
extremely helpful proposal that the traditional
mind–body problem be reconceived along the following
lines: the concept of a person is primitive and both mental
and physical predicates are ascribable to persons, that is, to
one and the same thing.
In addition to the latter work of philosophical analysis
of mental concepts and attempts to state more clearly and
helpfully traditional philosophical problems, there was a
spate of work specifically devoted to developing distinct-
ive materialistic alternatives to Cartesian *dualism and
to each other, and by debates among the proponents
of these different theories about the nature of psycho-
logical explanation. The three main materialistic theories
are *identity theory, *eliminative materialism, and
*functionalism.
Type-identity theory (reductive materialism).J. J. C. Smart,
U. T. Place, and David Armstrong proposed this simple
and compelling solution to the mind–body problem: each
type of mental state is identical to some type of yet-to-be-
discovered neural state. Just as water is H
2
O and common
salt is NaCl and the temperature of a gas is mean molecu-
lar kinetic energy, mental terms like ‘believing’, ‘desiring’,
and ‘loving’ will be shown to be synonymous with terms
that refer to types of neural events, so that some day
we shall be able to say ‘Love is such-and-such activity in
sector 1704’.
Eliminativism. Paul Feyerabend and Richard Rorty

issued this objection to identity theory: identity theory
assumes that our ordinary mentalistic ways of taxonomiz-
ing psychological events, in terms of beliefs, desires, and
the like, are not only good ways to taxonomize things for
ordinary purposes, but in fact map perfectly on to (yet-to-
be-discovered) underlying neural kinds. But why think
that the case of belief and its kin is more like the case of
water, where the mapping to H
2
O in fact works out, than
like the case of our ordinary concept of fish, or, even
worse, like the concepts of witch or phlogiston? In the case
of fish, whales and dolphins were picked out by the con-
cept for millennia, but are now known not to be fish at all,
but mammals. The concepts witch and phlogiston both
had great importance in their day, but both are now
known to refer to nothing at all. Type identity theory
assumes precise mappings from the mental to the neural
which warrant a reduction or replacement of the mental-
istic vocabulary with the neural vocabulary, and at the
same time legitimizes the mentalistic vocabulary by
showing that it always (inadvertently) referred to the
underlying types of neural events. But Feyerabend and
Rorty contend that mental talk was not intended to refer
to neural events, nor did it inadvertently succeed in so
doing. *‘Folk psychology’, with its strong Cartesian roots,
was intended as, and succeeded in being, a theory that
rivals scientific ways of conceiving of mind. The elimin-
ativist position has been developed further and cham-
pioned in recent years by Patricia S. Churchland and

Paul M. Churchland and is a challenge to ‘mental realism’,
our ordinary way(s) of conceiving of the mental.
Functionalism challenges both type-identity theory and
eliminativism. An important but iconoclastic paper in this
genre is Donald Davidson’s ‘Mental Events’ (1970), in
which he proposed the view he called *anomalous
monism. According to this doctrine mental events are
physical events but they are not reducible by definition or
natural law, nor are they in any other straightforward way
intertranslatable with physical terms. Against type-
identity theory, the functionalist thinks it implausible that
every person’s belief that ‘snow is white’ is or must be real-
ized in the same type of neural state. Functionalists think
that all beliefs in the whiteness of snow are physical but
allow for multiple physical *realizations of the belief. Just
as ‘capital’ comes in many different forms, any form of
cash or property will do, so too my belief that snow is
white, and yours, and a Martian’s, could be realized in dif-
ferent ways. The idea of multiple realizations has made
functionalism a favourite doctrine among believers in
strong artificial intelligence, the view that there is no rea-
son in principle why computers shouldn’t have bona fide
mental states—indeed even be conscious. Different real-
ization would be consistent with physicalism (token-
physicalism), but would dash hopes for smooth type–type
reductions since there would be no bridge law translating
predicates such as ‘believes snow is white’, ‘is in love’,
‘wants a drink’ into single predicates in physical language
(to be fair to identity theory, it can accommodate this idea
up to a point by allowing for species-specific type-identities,

so that cat-thoughts that ‘there is water’ and human ones
are realized in different ways). Against the eliminativist,
the functionalist holds out hope for folk psychology or,
better, sees it as a starting-place, subject to refinement
and rigour, for the development of an autonomous sci-
ence of the mind. We start with a conception of mind as
roughed out by folk psychology but with a commitment
606 mind, history of the philosophy of
to physicalism. We then do experiments, draw inferences
about how different cognitive subsystems work to pro-
duce the phenomenon being studied, e.g. language com-
prehension, memory, etc., and in so doing arrive at an
abstract conception of how the mind works—without
ever mentioning how these workings are realized
physically.
As identity theory, functionalism, and eliminativism
bumped up against each other throughout the 1960s,
1970s, and 1980s, they also began to bump up against the
emerging amalgam of disciplines known today as *cogni-
tive science. Cognitive science was rooted in work of logi-
cians, psychologists, computer scientists, and
neuro-scientists, great thinkers such as Alan Turing, Ken-
neth Craik, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Warren
McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Karl Lashley, and John von Neu-
mann (Howard Gardner dates the birth of cognitive sci-
ence from the Hixon Conference at Caltech in 1948), who
were thrilled by the prospect of blending insights from
their different disciplines in order to understand the mind.
The interdisciplinary attitude and the wait-and-see-we-
are-early-in-the-game attitude that pervade cognitive sci-

ence made philosophers of mind aware that we could not
know a priori how the relations among folk psychology,
more refined cognitive models, and neuroscience would
work out. It could be that identity theory is true in certain
domains and in species-specific ways, e.g. chimpanzee
vision might map neatly in chimps’ brains and human
vision in human brains. And it might be that neuroscience
will spell doom for certain ways of thinking about mind,
while certain abstract functional modes of explanation
retain their value. The view favoured by most contempor-
ary philosophers of mind is the co-evolutionary idea. P. S.
Churchland, cooling recently towards eliminativism,
expresses the basic idea in terms of constraining and devel-
oping each type of explanation by what is known at other
levels of explanation, especially at adjacent levels.
The co-evolutionary strategy has important implica-
tions for the very idea of philosophy of mind as tradition-
ally conceived, for it suggests that there is no subfield of
philosophy proper that can deepen our understanding of
mind. Mind will be understood, if it is understood, by our
best science. Philosophers who study work in the relevant
sciences will be welcomed in the interdisciplinary quest to
understand mind. Quine proposed that philosophy was
continuous with science; philosophy of mind as practised
today has taken Quine to heart. At the same time it has
become somewhat less clear what if anything the distinc-
tively philosophical, as opposed to the scientific, issues are.
In what sense, one might ask, is the question of the nature
of mind a philosophical question rather than a founda-
tional question within the science of the mind? o.f.

*consciousness; consciousness, its irreducibility; men-
tal events; mental states; identity theory; eliminativism;
functionalism.
Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, Mass.,
1986).
Owen Flanagan, The Science of the Mind, 2nd edn. (Cambridge,
Mass., 1991).
Jerry Fodor, ‘Special Sciences’, in Representations: Philosophical
Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Mass.,
1981).
Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive
Revolution (New York, 1985).
John Heil and Alfred Mele (eds.), Mental Causation (Oxford, 1993).
A. J. P. Kenny, Ancient Philosophy (Oxford, 2004), ch.7.
—— Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, 2005), ch.7.
David Rosenthal (ed.), Materialism and the Mind–Body Problem
(Indianapolis, 1987).
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (first pub. 1949; Chicago, 1984).
mind, problems of the philosophy of. Philosophical
problems about the mind are among the enduring prob-
lems of philosophy; arguably, they are among the most
deeply puzzling and challenging issues that philosophy
has had to face.
1. Characterizing the mental. We come face to face with
one of these issues when we try to give an initial delin-
eation of the sphere of the mental. Mental events or states
seem to fall under two broad kinds. One is comprised of
those involving sensory qualities, or *‘qualia’, such as
pains and itches, seeing colours and hearing sounds, experi-
encing pangs of hunger, and having after-images, and

the like. As it is often put, there is ‘something it is like’ to be
in one of these states—it is like something to see a yellow
field of sunflowers, and that is different from what it is like
to see the blue sky above it. These may be called ‘qualita-
tive mental states’ or, more simply, ‘experiences’. The sec-
ond class of mental states, called ‘propositional attitudes’
or ‘intentional states’, includes states that have content,
such as believing that Mt. Everest is the tallest mountain,
being pleased that the home team has won the football
match, and remembering one’s telephone number. (Some
mental states, such as emotions and perceptions, appear
to possess both content and sensory aspects; e.g. feeling
annoyed that your flight has been cancelled, noticing that
the traffic-lights have just turned red.) But it has not been
easy to answer the following question: What common
property, or properties, do phenomena of these two kinds
share in virtue of which they are all mental? What do
itches and beliefs have in common that makes both
mental?
One might say, following Descartes, that your know-
ledge that you are in one of these states is in some sense
‘immediate’ or ‘direct’ and carries a special sort of first-
person authority. However, people often have beliefs and
desires of which they are not aware, much less ‘immedi-
ately aware’; and research in cognitive psychology has
shown that much of our perceptual information-
processing is not at all accessible to the subject. Moreover,
it has been argued that there can be sensations, such as
pains, of which the subjects, in the heat of combat or
intense absorption in another activity, are unaware. Can

we say then, following *Brentano, that the *mentality of
mental phenomena consists in their *‘intentionality’—
their ‘aboutness’ or ‘being directed upon’ an object? Thus,
mind, problems of the philosophy of 607
your belief that Mt. Everest is the tallest mountain is about
Mt. Everest, and is directed upon it. Or, as we may say,
your thought has Mt. Everest as its ‘intentional object’.
However, it is difficult, if not incoherent, to conceive of a
pain, or a tickle, to be ‘about’, or ‘directed upon’, anything.
There are perhaps other possible approaches to this issue,
but the problem of formulating an adequate ‘criterion of
the mental’ has resisted solution. It may be that all mental
states are characterized by a certain kind of subjectivity, a
‘point of view’ or ‘perspectivalness’; however, precisely
what this subjectivity amounts to is still an open question.
2. The mind–body problem. In a broad sense, the problem
of accounting for the place of mind in a world that is fun-
damentally physical is coextensive with philosophy of
mind. In a narrower sense, the problem is that of explain-
ing the relationship between mentality and the physical
nature of our being. Substance dualism, which posits
immaterial souls or minds as bearers of mental states, has
largely disappeared from contemporary discussion, and
the focus of discussion in the mind–body debate has
shifted to the status of mental states, processes, and prop-
erties vis-à-vis physical states, processes, and properties.
We know, from familiar daily experience as well as scien-
tific and clinical observations, that mental phenomena are
correlated in lawlike ways with various specific physical
processes going on in the body, and neurophysiological

research has amassed huge amounts of information on the
details of how specific mental capacities, functions, and
processes depend on the structure and functioning of our
central nervous system. But is it possible that the mental
depends on and yet remains distinct from the physical? If
so, what is the nature of this dependency? Or is the mental
in fact a subspecies of the physical?
The mind–body identity theory, also known as central-
state materialism, brain-state theory, and type *physical-
ism, holds that mental properties, or kinds, are reducible
to, or can be reductively identified with, physical (pre-
sumably, neurobiological) properties and kinds. Just as sci-
entific research has shown that light is a form of
electromagnetic radiation and that genes are DNA mol-
ecules, argues the reductionist, neurophysiological
research will show (perhaps, it has already shown) that
pain is just the excitation of a certain group of neurons in
the hypothalamus, that consciousness is 40 Herz synchron-
ized neuronal oscillation, and, in general, that mental
states are just neural processes in the brain. Physical
reductionism of this form, however, has not been popular,
since the 1970s. *Functionalism, which has been influen-
tial since the late 1960s, maintains that mental kinds are
not physical kinds, but rather ‘functional kinds’, defined
by their causal role in relation to sensory inputs, behav-
iour outputs, and other mental states. On this approach,
pain, for example, would be an internal state of an organ-
ism that is typically caused by tissue damage and that in
turn causes such effects as winces, groans, and a sense of
distress. However, the ontological status of functional

properties, in particular their status as causal powers, has
remained elusive; and serious doubts have been raised as
to whether the sensory or qualitative character of mental-
ity can be captured on the functionalist approach. More-
over, it is not clear exactly how functionalism differs from
the identity theory, and it remains an open question
whether functionalism is a form of reductionism. Others
maintain that the mind–body relation is adequately char-
acterized as one of *‘supervenience’—that is, in the claim
that there could not be two entities, or worlds, that are
exactly alike in all physical respects but differ in some men-
tal respect. But it is arguable that supervenience in this
sense lacks sufficient content to qualify as a full theory of
the mind–body relation; this is perhaps evident in the
apparent fact that the reductionist, the functionalist, and
even the epiphenomenalist are all committed to mind–
body supervenience. There is also the *eliminativist alter-
native: mentality, like the posits of discarded scientific the-
ories such as phlogiston and magnetic effluvia, will be
expunged from our ontology as the neuroscientific under-
standing of human nature makes its inexorable advance.
3. How can my mind move my limbs? Impingements on our
sensory surfaces cause sensations and perceptions, which
in turn cause us to form beliefs about our surroundings.
Our desires and wants, in concert with the beliefs we hold
about the world, cause us to act, by moving our limbs or
making our vocal cords vibrate in appropriate ways. Men-
tal causation—that is, causality involving mental events as
causes or effects—seems an undeniable fact of daily experi-
ence. Evidently, moreover, it is essential to our concep-

tion of ourselves as cognizers and agents: the acquisition
of knowledge about our surroundings requires our per-
ceptions and beliefs to be appropriately caused by ambient
events, and genuine agency requires that the agent’s
intentions and decisions have the power to cause his limbs
to move and thereby alter the arrangements of objects
around him.
A fundamental difficulty with Descartes’s interactionist
dualism of mental and material substances was its per-
ceived inability to explain how mental causation was pos-
sible. How could some wholly immaterial substance,
entirely outside physical space, affect the motion of even a
single molecule? By what mechanism is this miraculous
transmission of causal influence accomplished? More-
over, there is reason to believe that the physical domain is
causally closed; that is, tracing back a causal chain starting
with a physical event should not take us out of the physical
domain. To deny this would be tantamount to denying
the completability of a physical theory of the physical
world; it would be to assert that only by importing non-
physical causal agents or forces could physics hope to be a
complete explanatory theory of physical phenomena. For
these reasons, some have found *epiphenomenalism
attractive: mental phenomena are caused by physical (pre-
sumably, neural) phenomena, but they are themselves
mere ‘epiphenomena’ with no causal powers of their
own. They are like shadows or afterglows cast by neural
processes.
608 mind, problems of the philosophy of
donald davidson addressed in seminal articles a variety of

the most prominent questions in late twentieth-century phil-
osophy of mind and language; their prominence is largely
attributable to his treatment of them.
hilary putnam has deployed mathematical and scientific
expertise to establish a clearer view of the status of scientific
and philosophical knowledge and truth.
john searle first came to prominence in the 1960s with his
work on the philosophy of language; now he is a leading crit-
ic of cognitive science, specifically of the aim of giving a mate-
rialist account of the mind.
thomas nagel has not shrunk from the big questions:
What does it all mean? What is it like to be a bat? (The
second is about the nature of consciousness.)
Photographs by Steve Pyke
recent american philosophy (1)