Galen Strawson on Mental Reality

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Ratio (new series) X 1 April 1997 0034–0006

DISCUSSION GALEN STRAWSON ON MENTAL REALITY By Tim Crane Much contemporary philosophy of mind involves balancing the claims of naturalistic metaphysics with the claims of phenomenology. Naturalism is the view that mental phenomena are part of the natural world—where this is normally taken to be the world as conceived by the natural sciences. In its most common version, physicalism, it involves explaining exactly in what sense mental phenomena are dependent on physical phenomena. Phenomenology, on the other hand, is an attempt to characterise what is distinctive of the lived world of mental phenomena: how mental phenomena seem to us, what distinguishes the various kinds of mental phenomena from one another, and how they are related. In some cases, the balance can seem precarious. An example is the question of whether naturalism or physicalism can account for consciousness. Here the claims of naturalism and the claims of phenomenology can seem at odds: for even once physicalism has identified (say) having a toothache with a state of one’s brain, it appears that full physical knowledge of the brain fails to yield knowledge of what it is like to have a toothache, and that the physicalist story must therefore be incomplete. Physicalists have not been slow to respond to this challenge,1 but recent years have seen the emergence of a self-proclaimed dissenting tradition, which attempts to reject some of the assumptions of this particular physicalism/anti-physicalism debate, and tries to recover some of the obvious phenomenological truths about the mind. In a sense, Galen Strawson’s new book2 is part of the dissenting tradition. Like other dissenters (notably John Searle3) Strawson believes that much contemporary philosophy of mind has neglected the central importance of the notion of consciousness, or conscious experience. And like Searle, too, he does not reject 1 See, in particular, David Lewis, ‘What experience teaches’ in W. G. Lycan (ed.) Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell 1991). 2 Galen Strawson, Mental Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1995) pp. xiv + 337, £24.95. 3 John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1992).

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physicalism, but other naturalistic doctrines which are sometimes allied to it.4 While Searle’s main target is the computational theory of mind, and the notion of unconscious intentionality it employs, Strawson’s target is what he calls ‘neobehaviourism’: the doctrine that reference to public behaviour is essential to an account of all (or almost all) mental phenomena. Strawson believes that ‘most contemporary philosophers of mind are neobehaviourists’ in this sense (p. 291) and the second half of Mental Reality is devoted to the refutation of the doctrine. The first half of the book is devoted to a classification of traditional approaches to the mind-body question: materialism, idealism, dualism and so on. Strawson’s favoured position is what he calls ‘naturalised Cartesianism’, which ‘couples belief in materialism with respect for the idea that the only distinctively mental phenomena are the phenomena of conscious experience’ (p. xi). The two distinctive theses of this book are the thesis about the link between mentality and conscious experience, and the denial of neobehaviourism. These theses are, of course, linked: since experience is all that is really essential to the mind, then the connection between mind and behaviour cannot be. The most controversial of these two theses is likely to be the denial of any constitutive connection between any mental state and publicly observable behaviour. Many philosophers might be prepared to accept this for the case of pain, for example, where Putnam’s claim that there is no essential link between pain and behaviour seems to have been widely accepted.5 But Strawson goes further and denies that even states like desire—which have been traditionally associated with motivation and therefore essentially with dispositions to behave—are essentially connected to behaviour. This claim is striking, and needs examining carefully. What argument can be given for the claim? The main argument Strawson employs is illustrated by a thought-experiment involving some apparently possible creatures, whom Strawson calls the ‘weather watchers’. The weather watchers are creatures 4 Actually, Searle claims that he is rejecting physicalism/materialism and dualism: but this claim is at odds with much else in his book, to the extent that it must be considered a mistake. See my critical notice of The Rediscovery of the Mind in International Journal of Philosophical Studies 1993. 5 H. Putnam, ‘Brains and behaviour’ in Mind, Language and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975).

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who are ‘constitutionally incapable’ of behaviour or any motion whatsoever. Yet, Strawson claims we can imagine that they have thoughts, emotions and desires. They are, for instance, ‘profoundly interested in the local weather’ (p. 251). The weather watchers, if they are possible, are a counter-example to neobehaviourism. But are they possible? A sceptic about such thought-experiments might say that we have not been told enough to distinguish the thought-experiment from the thesis it is designed to support. The thesis is that no mental state is essentially connected to behaviour; the thought-experiment is simply a description of creatures who have mental states but are incapable of behaviour. If I want to know why I should believe that such creatures are possible, I am told to imagine the story of the weather watchers. But given the minimal description of the story, I can’t distinguish imagining this from imagining the thesis is true. And I already knew I could imagine the thesis to be true. What I don’t know is whether it is true. So how can the issue be settled? Fortunately, as Strawson says, we do not need the weather watchers story in order to make the point in question. For consider, in your own case, a possible desire you might have: the desire that the weather be fine on the day of your daughter’s wedding. On reflection, it seems that we can make sense of someone who wants the weather to be fine without having any desire to do anything at all. If this is right, then it seems to lend support to Strawson’s view that ‘to want something is, essentially, just to want it. It is not necessarily and ipso facto to be disposed to do anything’ (p. 286). Now someone who held a dispositional view of belief and desire might defend the idea that this desire is a disposition to act in the sense that if you thought you could do something about the presence of clouds, the position of the sun etc., you would try and do something to bring these favourable conditions about. Strawson rejects this on the grounds that it implies that someone who did not grasp the dispositional nature of desire would not have a full understanding of the concept of desire. But it seems to me that this is an implication which a dispositionalist would be happy to accept. Nonetheless, Strawson’s discussions of desire and belief are subtle and challenging, and should be considered by anyone interested in the question of the relation between thought and behaviour. The issues here are complex, and deserve extended  Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997

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discussion on their own terms, not just in the context of ‘neobehaviourism’. It is worth pointing out that at the end of his book, Strawson redefines the notion of behaviour to include purely mental actions and other doings—any correct answer to the question, ‘what is S doing?’ will inform us about S’s behaviour. He claims that many mental states are linked to behaviour in this more natural sense and thus ultimately endorses a form of neobehaviourism. The other provocative thesis is about the centrality of consciousness. Those who think of consciousness purely in terms of ‘qualia’—nonintentional, ineffable qualities of experience— will find this thesis baffling. But so much the worse for thinking of consciousness in terms of qualia. One of the merits of Strawson’s approach is his broadening of the standard definition of experience, allowing there to be such a thing as the experience of understanding something—a phenomenon which many contemporary philosophers of mind have neglected. Like the broad definition of ‘behaviour’, this re-orientation of the concept of experience seems to me a useful way to proceed with these issues. Nonetheless, in arguing that experience is the only really distinctively mental phenomenon, Strawson is explicitly opposing those who think that intentionality is the mark (or at least one of the marks) of the mental. For the conventional wisdom is that intentionality is not essentially conscious or experiential. One suggestion made in chapter 7 is that the only real problems about intentionality are problems about the nature of experience. Strawson’s reasoning here seems to be as follows. If there were unconscious intentionality, then explaining it from a naturalistic point of view would be relatively unproblematic. (For example, he argues that explaining the intentionality of thoughts about concrete particles is just a matter of explaining the causal origin of such thoughts.) But when we consider the problem of conscious intentionality, the problems for a naturalist seem much greater. So the only ‘deep’ problems about intentionality are really problems about experience. But this is surely an exaggeration. What is partly responsible for it is an unfortunate concern with what are (to my mind) spurious or ill-focused questions about naturalism (of which more below). Many philosophers with little concern for naturalism have been concerned with intentionality: and many have thought it problematic, for instance, how thoughts can concern things  Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997

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which do not exist.6 Although this problem does arise for conscious intentionality, one does not have to take a stand on the question of (essentially) conscious versus (possibly) unconscious intentionality to raise the problem as one of the traditional puzzles of intentionality. Strawson does consider the question of thoughts about things that don’t exist, but he thinks that once this is distinguished from the problem of experience, it is ‘complicated but not fundamentally problematic from the naturalistic point of view’ (p. 206). Suppose this is true; the question remains why so many non-naturalistic philosophers have thought that there is something problematic about intentionality. After all, it is not as if the motivation for being naturalistic is to solve the problem of intentionality—indeed, on one popular construal of that problem, naturalism is what gives rise to it.7 To be fair, Strawson recognises (pp. 177–178) that there may be more to the problem of intentionality than the problem of its naturalistic reduction. But it is not clear where he thinks a discussion of these other problems will fit into his account of the mind. In any case, it is not obvious that Strawson’s account of the structure of the problem of intentionality succeeds, even by its own lights. Putting experience to one side, his view is that we can explain all aboutness in terms of ‘naturalistically tractable causal relations and nonexperiential structures’ (p. 207). This brisk confidence will not impress those naturalistic philosophers like Fodor and Dretske, who have struggled with the problem of accounting for error within a naturalistic framework. There is no consensus about the success of their solutions to this problem, and it is unlikely that Strawson’s claim that intentionality ‘falls out rather lightly from the existence of beings that have evolved the capacity to discriminate, classify, represent, and order their environment’ (p. 207) will significantly advance this particular debate. And the reason is that the capacities to classify, represent (and so on) raise exactly the problems about correct and incorrect representation with which most naturalistic philosophers have been concerned.

6 For a discussion of this problem in Aristotle, see Victor Caston, ‘Aristotle and the problem of intentionality’, forthcoming. For an account of scholastic discussions, see Christian Knudsen, ‘Intentions and impositions’ in A. Kenny et al (eds.) The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982). 7 See, for example, Fodor, Psychosemantics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1987) chapter 4.

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It is a shame that Strawson forces himself to close off certain kinds of answer to the questions about intentionality, since his general phenomenological approach to mental phenomena should in principle be open to discussion of them. It ought to be possible to consider the question of how thought can reach out and gain access to things outside itself, ‘things’ that need not even exist, without always having to consider it within the context of the stultifying question, ‘but how can the brain produce experience?’. This lack of focus on the problem of intentionality indicates one way in which Strawson (despite his heterodox views on behaviour and experience) fails to let his approach break free from some of the preoccupations of current philosophy of mind: in particular, from the current obsession with naturalism and materialism. It is appropriate, then, to say something about Strawson’s treatment of materialism. Like many materialists, Strawson doesn’t know exactly what it is that materialism says. Materialism says that ‘in some sense’ (or: ‘in some fundamental sense’) everything is physical: I agree with many other materialists, who want to say that in some sense there are only physical phenomena but who also want to grant the undeniable and say that experiential phenomena . . . are fully real. (p. 47) But materialists are not often able to say what the ‘physical’ is. However, it is to Strawson’s credit that unlike many other materialists, he is prepared to acknowledge the shortcomings of this statement of the doctrine. He thinks that the only thing a reasonable materialist should say is that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena. But if they are, then it seems that we must be ignorant of the nature of the physical in some fundamental way, for experiential phenomena . . . just do not show up in what we think of as our best account of the nature of the physical: physics (or physics plus the sciences that we take to be reducible to physics). (p. 47) Strawson’s own version of materialism incorporates our ignorance about the physical: it is called (unsurprisingly) ‘agnostic materialism’. Strawson mentions with approval Locke’s famous expression of ignorance over the relation between mental and physical phenomena. But he still insists on calling himself a materialist, rather than (say) an ‘agnostic monist’. One reason given for this  Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997

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seems to be that mind evolved out of matter ‘as a result of processes that at no point involved anything not wholly physical or material in nature’ (p. 105). Thus ‘there is no good reason to think that [experiential properties] are emergent, relative to other physical properties, in such a way that they can correctly be said to be nonphysical properties’. So biological and mental properties are physical properties, and it is in this sense that ‘experience is as much a physical phenomenon as electric charge’. Given, then, that we know enough to know that mental phenomena are physical, why does Strawson say that we are ignorant of the nature of the physical? Not just for the sort of reason that many physicists think: that, for instance, they have not yet unified the four fundamental forces, or that they have not yet explained the relation between macroscopic and quantum phenomena. Strawson’s reason is rather the familiar one that mental properties are (apparently) inexplicable in terms of other physical properties. But why should this be a problem, since we already know enough to know that mental properties are physical, in the liberal sense in which biological properties are physical—so don’t we know enough to declare ourselves materialists? One source of confusion here, in my view, is the broad use of the term ‘physical’ which classifies biological and mental properties as physical properties because (for example) they are the non-emergent products of evolution from inorganic, nonmental matter. While one cannot object in principle to such a stipulation, it is easier in my opinion to express the issue of materialism if one reserves the term ‘physical’ for the entities dealt with in physics proper—that is, the science of physics as we know it now, and whatever it will turn into in the future. Materialism—inheriting the vagueness of this definition of ‘physics’—would then be expressible in terms of the relation between the mental and the physical: either, say, as an identity theory of mental and physical properties, or as a supervenience thesis relating mental and physical truths, or perhaps in some other way. Formulating the issue in this way would enable the materialist to avoid the contortions involved in Strawson’s discussion, which seem to me the least satisfactory part of his book. This point is underlined by the fact that most of what Strawson says about neobehaviourism and about the phenomenology of experience and thought could still be plausible even if he had not mentioned materialism. In fact, the whole discussion of  Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997

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materialism could be condensed into a single declaration: ‘all the mental phenomena discussed in this book are, or are realised in, physical phenomena, “in a sense of ‘realised’ that will need to be discussed” (p. 1)’. Having been granted the materialist imprimatur, the rest of the book could have been written, none the worse for the absence of the inconclusive discussion of materialism. (On this assessment of Mental Reality, it is not an accident that the appropriate sense of ‘realised’ is never actually discussed in this book.) So why does Strawson think that he has to address the question of materialism at all? One reason might be the vagueness of the phrase, ‘an account of the mental’. Strawson begins his book (p. xii) by asking three questions: (1) what part does reference to nonmental phenomena play in an account of the mental? (2) what part does reference to publicly observable phenomena play in an account of the mental?; and (3) what part does reference to behaviour play in an account of the mental? Materialists who identify mental and physical phenomena (states or events) can be said to give an ‘account’ of the mental in the sense that they show how mental phenomena can be part of the world of physical causes and effects. In fact, this seems to be the main motivation for the only forms of materialism worthy of the name (rather than Strawson’s own version of materialism, belief in which is ‘a matter of faith’: p. 43).8 Certainly, giving such an account of mental causation is one way of giving an ‘account’ of the mental. But it doesn’t give a full account. Materialism, on this view, is answering to a specific problem generated by quite specific assumptions about causation and the causal nature of states of mind. A fuller account of mental phenomena would need to go beyond the meagre conception of states of mind which is all that materialism needs in order to pose this very specific problem. Perhaps, then, Strawson should not have set himself the task of asking about ‘a satisfactory account’ of the mental, without first asking the prior question: what problems are the different kinds of account trying to solve? Mental Reality is an ambitious book. It is distinctive in its attempt to reject certain common dogmas of contemporary philosophy of mind. It seems to me that Strawson’s approach in

8 I argue this in ‘The mental causation debate’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 1995.

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this book is vindicated in the following way. The areas where it is most interesting—the discussions of desire and behaviour, for instance—succeed because Strawson has identified some of the constraining assumptions in the recent tradition, and is fighting to break away from them. The areas where the book is less successful is where he uncritically accepts some other of these assumptions—chiefly, the significance of the questions of naturalism and materialism. The positive lesson of this is that interesting work in the philosophy of mind can be pursued independently of the issue of materialism.9 University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT

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I am grateful to Galen Strawson for a number of helpful discussions of his views.

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