Description
Consciousness emerges as the key topic in this second edition of Owen Flanagan's popular introduction to cognitive science and the philosophy of psychology. in a new chapter Flanagan develops a neurophilosophical theory of subjective mental life. He brings recent developments in the theory of neuronal group selection and connectionism to bear on the problems of the evolution of consciousness, qualia, the unique first-personal aspects of consciousness, the causal role of consciousness, and the function and development of the sense of personal identity. He has also substantially revised the chapter on cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence to incorporate recent discussions of connectionism and parallel distributed processing.
Collection
Publication
A Bradford Book (1991), Edition: second edition, 440 pages
User reviews
LibraryThing member NoLongerAtEase
I used Flanagan's book to help prep for a "Philosophy of Psychology" course that I taught.
My overall assessment is that it is useful, though flawed.
It is useful in the following ways: Flanagan is a fairly lucid writer and is able to come up with some nice illustrations of the various arguments
What is most helpful about "Science of the Mind" is that it captures a sufficient amount of history while remaining critical. Flanagan does actually *assess* the views of his predecessors and, unsurprisingly, finds them wanting in various places. This separates "Science of the Mind" from the of history of science/social science texts that try for a disinterested presentation.
So, on the positive end, I'd say Flanagan succeeds in presenting a critical introduction to a number of psychological research programs that philosophers may not be terribly familiar with, and he does so in a way that cuts through the historical clutter to get at the fundamental issues that excite philosophers.
My issues with the book are as follows:
First, Flanagan really overstates the case against dualism. His primary argument, the old standard based on the conservation of matter, is simply question begging. It presupposes that the an sich universe is casually closed. If *that's* true there is a bit of a problem for any dualism resembling Descartes'. But, why accept the causal closure of the universe? Many people do...but besides appeals to parsimony and (often coupled with) a kind of weird historicism about scientific progress the arguments aren't forthcoming.
Along these same lines, Flanagan's arguments against the transparency of the mental are just not especially convincing and seem to me to conflate two different conceptions of transparency. There is one sense in which transparency is an obviously false thesis which claims that nothing goes on in or about the mind without first flowing through the stream of consciousness. Surely this is much too strong and perhaps Flanagan is right that experimental psychology has produced compelling dis-confirming evidence. However, there is a second sense of transparency which is something like the view that one's beliefs must be somehow accessible to one if they are to count as beliefs at all. This view has a basis in common sense and ordinary language. It is one thing to say that there are mental processes that occur outside of our consciousness or that not all of the information we have stored is always flashing before us at every moment, it is another thing to say that we sometimes believe things that we do not believe that we believe.
Along similar lines, Flanagan seems, at times, to suggest that there is evidence against and reason to doubt the widely held position that introspective reports are incorrigible. One gets that sense that incorrigibility, which is an epistemic feature of some beliefs is being run together with a view about the metaphysics of the mind. Certainly the epistemic status of a belief is going to supervene on the metaphysics of the belief producing mechanism in some way or other. What the world is like will in some way determine how we can know about that world. But it seems to me that we can perhaps remain neutral on the metaphysics and still support incorrigibility. I've yet to find a compelling reason to doubt the accuracy of statements like "It seems warm to me".
Second, Flanagan is a bit too gung-ho, I'd say, about functionalism. While it's true that this book was composed in the heady days of the early 1980s, functionalism is far from the final word. Admittedly, there are many appealing features of functionalism...but even then there were worries...these don't, to my mind, receive sufficient coverage.
My overall assessment is that it is useful, though flawed.
It is useful in the following ways: Flanagan is a fairly lucid writer and is able to come up with some nice illustrations of the various arguments
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covered. Further, the aim of the book is to argue that a truly "scientific " account of the mind is both possible and desirable. To that end, Flanagan covers not just philosophy of mind but also some of the more straight forward empirical psychology of the past century. Of course, he pursues this project as a philosopher would, attempting to clarify and critique the basic assumptions of various research programs in empirical psychology (including Jamesian introspective psychology, Freudian analysis, Watson-Skinner-Boring behaviorism, and Piaget's stage theory, and more recent cognitive science). This is especially useful for philosophers who may teach or do a bit of research in philosophy of mind but don't consider it their primary area of specialization. Few of us, I imagine, have taken the time to read much Piaget, so it's nice to see what other philosophers have to say about him. What is most helpful about "Science of the Mind" is that it captures a sufficient amount of history while remaining critical. Flanagan does actually *assess* the views of his predecessors and, unsurprisingly, finds them wanting in various places. This separates "Science of the Mind" from the of history of science/social science texts that try for a disinterested presentation.
So, on the positive end, I'd say Flanagan succeeds in presenting a critical introduction to a number of psychological research programs that philosophers may not be terribly familiar with, and he does so in a way that cuts through the historical clutter to get at the fundamental issues that excite philosophers.
My issues with the book are as follows:
First, Flanagan really overstates the case against dualism. His primary argument, the old standard based on the conservation of matter, is simply question begging. It presupposes that the an sich universe is casually closed. If *that's* true there is a bit of a problem for any dualism resembling Descartes'. But, why accept the causal closure of the universe? Many people do...but besides appeals to parsimony and (often coupled with) a kind of weird historicism about scientific progress the arguments aren't forthcoming.
Along these same lines, Flanagan's arguments against the transparency of the mental are just not especially convincing and seem to me to conflate two different conceptions of transparency. There is one sense in which transparency is an obviously false thesis which claims that nothing goes on in or about the mind without first flowing through the stream of consciousness. Surely this is much too strong and perhaps Flanagan is right that experimental psychology has produced compelling dis-confirming evidence. However, there is a second sense of transparency which is something like the view that one's beliefs must be somehow accessible to one if they are to count as beliefs at all. This view has a basis in common sense and ordinary language. It is one thing to say that there are mental processes that occur outside of our consciousness or that not all of the information we have stored is always flashing before us at every moment, it is another thing to say that we sometimes believe things that we do not believe that we believe.
Along similar lines, Flanagan seems, at times, to suggest that there is evidence against and reason to doubt the widely held position that introspective reports are incorrigible. One gets that sense that incorrigibility, which is an epistemic feature of some beliefs is being run together with a view about the metaphysics of the mind. Certainly the epistemic status of a belief is going to supervene on the metaphysics of the belief producing mechanism in some way or other. What the world is like will in some way determine how we can know about that world. But it seems to me that we can perhaps remain neutral on the metaphysics and still support incorrigibility. I've yet to find a compelling reason to doubt the accuracy of statements like "It seems warm to me".
Second, Flanagan is a bit too gung-ho, I'd say, about functionalism. While it's true that this book was composed in the heady days of the early 1980s, functionalism is far from the final word. Admittedly, there are many appealing features of functionalism...but even then there were worries...these don't, to my mind, receive sufficient coverage.
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Original language
English