The Life of the Mind: An Essay on Phenomenological Externalism

by McCulloch,Gregory

• ISBN13: 9780415266222
• ISBN10: 041526622X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 12/20/2002
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Life of the Mindpresents an original and striking conception of the mind and its place in nature. In a spirited and rigorous attack on most of the orthodox positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, McCulloch connects three of the orthodoxy's central themes-- externalism, phenomenology and the relation between science and commonsense psychology in a defense of a thoroughly anti-Cartesian conception of mental life. McCulloch argues that the life of the mind will never be understood until we properly understand the subject's essential embodiment and immersion in the world, until we give up the idea that an understanding of the mind must be "scientific," and until we give up the idea that intentionality and phenomenology must be understood separately.

Table of Contents

Foreword	xi
Preface	xv
Introduction: the Demonic Dilemma	1	(1)
Descartes and the ontological Real Distinction	1	(4)
Intentionality and the Demonic Dilemma	5	(4)
The Phenomenological	9	(2)
Externalism	11	(2)
The epistemological Real Distinction	13	(5)
Outline	18	(3)
PART I Mind and World	21	(68)
The Phenomenological	23	(18)
The mind's objects	23	(4)
What it is like	27	(3)
Interpretation	30	(6)
Indirect Realism and the purely qualitative	36	(1)
Pictures in the head and sensational objects	37	(4)
Content Externalism	41	(13)
Putnam and the Twin Earth contradiction	41	(4)
A quick review of some alternative ways out	45	(3)
McDowell and No Sinn without Bedeutung	48	(6)
Scientific Realism, the Subjective, the Objective	54	(19)
W-recalibration and M-recalibration	54	(2)
The argument from transposed modalities	56	(3)
The morals of the story	59	(4)
The cases for M-recalibration and elimination	63	(3)
Diagnosis	66	(7)
The Epistemological Real Distinction	73	(16)
Simulation theory and Theory theory	74	(2)
Use and Mention: Objectification and Acquiescence	76	(3)
Beneath Translation	79	(6)
Some ramifications	85	(4)
PART II Mind and Body	89	(52)
Behaviour-embracing Mentalism	91	(18)
Quine and the radical case: behaviourism	91	(2)
Mentalisms	93	(1)
Davidson and the radical case	94	(2)
The primacy of sentences and of the radical case	96	(4)
Ideas and building blocks	100	(1)
Impotence and the phenomenology of content	101	(5)
Davidson without `radical analysis'	106	(3)
Behaviour-rejecting Mentalism, Bipartism, Tripartism	109	(17)
Back to Twin Earth	109	(3)
Back to the Demonic Dilemma	112	(3)
Bipartism and Tripartism	115	(2)
Against Bipartisms	117	(9)
Let the vat-brains speak for themselves	126	(15)
Some varieties of vat-brain	126	(3)
Vat-brain: 1 and vat-brain:2	129	(5)
Vat-brain:3 and vat-brain:4	134	(7)
Bibliography	141	(4)
Index	145