Naturalisms in Philosophy of Mind

Most contemporary philosophers of mind claim to be in search of a ‘naturalistic’ theory. However, when we look more closely, we find that there are a number of different and even conflicting ideas of what would count as a ‘naturalization’ of the mind. This article attempts to show what various naturalistic philosophies of mind have in common, and also how they differ from one another. Additionally, it explores the differences between naturalistic philosophies of mind and naturalisms found in ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. Section 1 introduces a distinction between two types of project that have been styled ‘naturalistic’, which I call philosophical naturalism and empirical naturalism. Sections 2 to 6 canvass different strands of philosophical naturalism concerning the mind, followed by a much briefer discussion of attempts to provide empirical naturalizations of the mind in Section 7. Section 8 concludes the essay with a consideration of the relations between philosophical and empirical naturalism in philosophy of mind, arguing that at least some types of philosophical naturalism are incompatible with empirical naturalism. A casual observer of recent philosophy of mind would likely come to the conclusion that, amidst all of the disagreements between specialists in this field, there is at least one thing that stands as more or less a consensus view: the commitment to a naturalistic philosophy of mind. Almost everyone writing in philosophy of mind over the past several decades has described his or her theory as ‘naturalistic’. This includes the proponents of quite a wide variety of views: reductionist, eliminativist, informational, non-reductive physicalist, functionalist, computational, and evolutionary. Even David Chalmers, perhaps the most influential figure in the revival of property dualism in the 1990s, describes his position as ‘naturalistic’ (cf. Chalmers). At first glance, then, philosophers of mind might seem to have found at least one happy point of agreement at the turn of the millennium. However, the very fact that attempts to ‘naturalize’ the mind have become something of a cottage industry indicates that there are features of the mind that at least seem to be very different from those that are paradigmatically ‘natural’. No one, after all, feels a need to try to ‘naturalize’ geology or chemistry. The phenomena treated by those sciences are 220 Naturalisms in Philosophy of Mind © 2008 The Author Philosophy Compass 4/1 (2009): 219–254, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00191.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd already regarded as ‘natural’, and their explanations are not seen as being importantly different from explanations of other natural phenomena. But the mind presents us with several features that seem to be importantly different from anything we find in the physical or biological sciences. Many contemporary writers think that qualia (the subjective feelings of experiential states) and consciousness (subjective awareness) pose special ‘hard problems’ for the naturalist ( Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’; Levine; T. Nagel; Chalmers). To this list others would add intentional states, such as occurrent beliefs and desires, either on the grounds that they involve consciousness (Searle; Horst, Symbols, Computation and Intentionality; Siewert; Horgan and Tienson) or because they involve normative properties that cannot be derived from facts (Brandom, Making it Explicit; ‘Modality, Normativity, and Intentionality’; Putnam, ‘Why Reason Can’t be Naturalized’). Some of these writers indeed see these features of the mind as posing deep problems for naturalism; but others join a much larger group of philosophers of mind in holding that these properties either are already ‘natural’ properties or else can be explained by more paradigmatically natural phenomena, particularly physical or neural phenomena. Most philosophers of mind tend to see qualia, consciousness, intentionality, and normativity as presenting problems, but not insurmountable problems, for the naturalist. But things are not quite so simple. And the fact that they are not so simple ought to be foreshadowed by the very variety of views that can be styled as ‘naturalistic’. If a reductionist, an evolutionary theorist and a dualist can each apply the label ‘naturalist’ to himself, it is very likely to prove the case, either that they are using the word in subtly different ways, or else that the word has become so bland and ecumenical as to be essentially useless. While this is an important realization, it is by no means a new one. The ambiguity of the word ‘naturalism’ has been widely noted, and has been remarked upon for perhaps half a century now. The philosopher of science Ernest Nagel, in his 1955 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, noted that ‘the number of distinguishable doctrines for which the word “naturalism” has been a counter in the history of thought is notorious’ (3). In their introduction to the anthology Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal, Steven Wagner and Richard Warner express a similar view: Participants in current discussions of naturalism seem to assume that the meaning of ‘naturalism’ (‘naturalist program’, etc.), its motivations and – often – its correctness, one way or the other, are almost obvious. The historical situation makes such assumptions exceedingly unlikely. Philosophers have taken just about every possible stance with some manner of justification, and all of the main programs within this area (‘naturalism’, ‘phenomenology’, ‘analytic philosophy’, and so forth) have been open to sharp differences of interpretation by their adherents. (3)