Philosophy of Mind

The study of mind, from these Cartesian roots, can be seen to take two identifiable paths (although these paths were not clearly distinguished for some considerable time). One path is through philosophy, where questions concerning mind remain closely connected with other philosophical issues such as the nature of the self, the mind's knowledge of the world, and the nature of perception, belief, memory, and the emotions. The other path leads from philosophy to the development of psychology. The work of the British empiricists (John Locke [1632–1704], George Berkeley [1685–1753], David Hume [1711–1776])—in particular their sensationalism and associationism—was taken up in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and developed into a more empirical study of mind. This new study of mind gained momentum both in Great Britain (with associationalists such as David Hartley [1705–1757], James Mill [1773–1836] and John Stuart Mill [1806–1873], and Alexander Bain [1818–1903], as well as with the more Darwinian-inspired work of Sir Francis Galton [1822–1911], James Ward [1843–1925], and G. F. Stout [1806–1944]), in France (with the work of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac [1715–1780] and Claude-Adrien Helvétius [1715–1771]), and in Germany (with the work of Ernst Heinrich Weber [1795–1878], Gustav Theodor Fechner [1801–1887], Friedrich Beneke [1798–1854], Hermann von Helmholz [1821–1894], Wilhelm Wundt [1832–1920], and others).

This study transferred to the United States in the very early twentieth century, where it gave rise (by way of revolt against associationalism) to the highly influential school of behaviorism under the direction of J. B. Watson (1878–1958) and B.F. Skinner (1904–1990). Behaviorism was a rejection of much of Descartes's legacy—of his dualism, as well as of his use of an introspective method in the study of mind. Behaviorists favored a physicalism rooted in the study of responses to stimuli in the environment. Behaviorist doctrines are to be found in both psychological and philosophical studies of the mind at this time. From around the middle of the twentieth century, behaviorist doctrine came under heavy attack. The American linguist Noam Chomsky published an influential review of Skinner's work in which he pointed out that it is not possible to come up with a reduction of, say, a belief in terms of behavior without mentioning other mental states such as desire. The elements of the mind work together to produce behavior. The hope of finding a behaviorist reduction of mind seemed doomed.

With the demise of behaviorism came a renewed interest in mentalist causes and the rise of cognitive psychology. An interaction between philosophy and cognitive psychology emerged in the mid-to late twentieth century in the form of the philosophy of psychology, the study of conceptual issues in psychology using many of the methodological tools of the philosopher. The philosophy of psychology is firmly grounded in empirical studies of the mind. Questions concerning the nature of mental representation, mental imagery, what it is to have a concept, and whether there are innate ideas figure high on the agenda of these philosophers of psychology. Also around this time, there developed a multidisciplinary approach to the study of mind, cognitive science, encompassing philosophy, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and computer science. What these practitioners from different areas of study share is a belief that the workings of the mind can be modeled on the workings of a computer—that the mind is an information processing system and a representational devise. Cognitive science incorporates work that stretches from artificial intelligence (AI) to parallel distributed processing (PDP or connectionist networks). It has been fueled by work such as Chomsky's on generative grammar in linguistics, the work of the American philosopher Jerry Fodor on the language of thought in philosophy and psychology, and the work of the psychologist David Marr on visual processing. The American philosopher John Searle, with a thought experiment called "the Chinese Room," has played the gadfly to much of the work in cognitive science. What Searle questions is the very idea that a computer program, a mere syntactic engine, can be identical to a mind, a semantic engine. In effect, we are back trying to understand the relationship of mind to body.