also unlikely that propositional attitudes will provide a counter-example. A propositional attitude is about whatever figures in the proposition. It also looks like intentions are inevitably intentional (though not because of the superficial similarity of the terms). Intentions are directed at whatever they are intentions to do. Pains might cause more trouble. One might argue that pains aren’t really about anything – they just are. Emotions can also cause difficulties. Although emotions like Mindy’s elation have a clear intentional object, other emotions seem to be undirected. Your mood might be cheerful, or grumpy, or melancholy, yet none of these emotions need to be about anything in particular. Maybe we can say that these emotions are about the world in general but there would have to be good arguments for understanding them that way.
The claim that intentionality is the mark of the mental certainly deserves to be taken seriously. But even if we stop short of advocating Brentano’s thesis, the foregoing provides us with something useful. First, it gives us some idea of how to draw the line between the mental and the non-mental, and thus of how to delineate the subject matter of philosophy of mind. Second, it gives us the valuable concept of intentionality to put in our conceptual toolkit. My initial sketch of what was going on in Mindy’s mind was a sketch of her perspective – her take on the world – with different mental states contributing to that perspective in their own distinctive ways. Understanding the mind will at least partly be a matter of understanding someone’s perspective, and we can apply that insight as we begin to explore the big questions that define the philosophy of mind.
1.4 The Three Big Questions
The mind invites a huge range of philosophical questions. Some of these we’ve come across in the last two sections – questions about the nature of perception, emotion, pain and so on, questions about the mark of the mental, perspectives and intentionality. And there are countless other questions that we won’t even touch upon. My focus in this book will be on the Three Big Questions:
1 The Mind and Matter Question: What is the relationship between mind and matter?
2 The Knowledge Question: How do we acquire knowledge of our own minds and the minds of others?
3 The Distribution Question: Which things have minds and what kind of mind do they have?
So what marks these out as the questions most deserving of our attention? Over the rest of this section, we’ll see that how we answer has important ramifications for how we answer the smaller questions. It’s hard to give an account of the nature of pain, for example, without taking a stance on the relationship between mind and matter. And over the rest of this book we’ll see that the most important theories in philosophy of mind are defined by how they answer the Big Questions. In fact, the whole history of philosophy of mind can helpfully be framed as the history of thought on these questions. With that in mind, let’s consider each question in turn.
1.4.1 The Mind and Matter Question
The Mind and Matter Question invites us to make sense of how the mind fits into the material world. The material world is the world of matter – of physical objects distributed in space and time and governed by the laws of physics. Material objects include everything from molehills to mountains to meteors. But all these different things are made out of the same kind of stuff, namely matter. If you want to know about matter, ask a physicist. They’ll tell you that there’s a small set of fundamental particle types – things like quarks and leptons – that make up the entire universe. And the behaviour of those particles is governed by a small set of physical laws. Think of it like a giant Lego set: from a few types of brick and some basic rules governing how they fit together, a near-infinite variety of things can be made. To be a material object is to be either one of the basic physical building blocks of the material world, or to be something made out of those basic physical building blocks. So our question is whether the mind is constituted by physical building blocks or whether it introduces a whole new immaterial constituent to reality.
Materialists (aka physicalists) claim that there are no immaterial entities: that everything in the universe is constituted by the great material Lego set. Minds are no exception to this. Mindy’s mind is constituted by a material object – presumably her brain. The challenge for the materialist is to make sense of how this could be so. How can Mindy’s beliefs be a state of Mindy’s brain? How can her decisions be a neural process? How can her perceptions be a sparking of neurons? Dualists adopt the anti-materialist view that the world includes at least some immaterial entities, namely minds. Distinct from Mindy’s physical body is a non-physical mind – something that cannot be constituted by the physical building blocks described by physics. The challenge for the dualist is to make sense of where immaterial minds come from and how they’re connected to the brain.
A key battleground for materialists and dualists is causation. Mindy’s visual experience is caused by physical events such as light hitting her retina in a particular way. And Mindy’s intention to kick the ball causes the physical event of her kicking it. How can we make sense of these causal interactions? For materialists, these interactions take place within the material world. The story of Mindy’s penalty kick is a completely physical story, and the challenge for materialists is to make sense of how Mindy’s mental states fit within that story. For dualists, these interactions take place between physical and non-physical things. The story of Mindy’s penalty kick involves both events in the material world and events in Mindy’s immaterial mind, and the challenge for dualists is to make sense of how these two kinds of event hook up. The challenges here run deep, and both sides must confront the possibility that the apparent interactions between mind and body are not as they seem. Perhaps Mindy’s perceptual experiences aren’t really caused by her environment and perhaps her intentions aren’t really the cause of her actions. This is a threat we’ll be coming back to throughout the book.
How we answer the Mind and Matter Question can have huge implications for how we see ourselves and how we live our lives. Do we have a special place in nature, standing apart from the world of material entities, or is the mind smoothly continuous with the rest of the material world? Do we come into existence when our brain comes into existence or might our minds predate our bodies? Do we die when our body dies or could the mind survive our bodily death? Are we really responsible for our actions or is our behaviour outside our control? Each of these urgent questions comes back to the core question of how mind and matter are related.
1.4.2 The Knowledge Question
Metaphysics asks about the nature of reality and the Mind and Matter Question is a central question in the metaphysics of mind. The Knowledge Question, by contrast, is an epistemological question about our knowledge of mental states: how do I know what’s going on in my own mind or in the minds of others? The first thing to notice is that the way you know about your own mind is quite different to the way you know about other minds. You can only know about Mindy’s muscle pain from its outward signs – things like her facial expression or her verbal reports – but she knows about her muscle pain from the inside. There’s thus an epistemic asymmetry between knowledge of one’s own mind and knowledge of other minds.
It’s tempting to say that we know our own minds via a kind of inner sense. Just as Mindy knows what’s going on around her through perception, she knows what’s going on in her own mind through introspection. But what is this introspection and how does it work? We can also ask about how secure our self-knowledge is. Can you think you are in a mental state but be wrong? Perhaps Mindy can misidentify her nervousness as excitement, but it’s harder to make sense of her being wrong that she’s in pain. Can you be in a mental state without knowing that you are? We can make sense of Mindy having memories she doesn’t know about, but it’s harder to make sense of her failing to know that she’s in pain.
What about our knowledge of other minds? Our knowledge of other minds seems less secure. Mindy knows her own intentions quite clearly but has a much harder time working out which way the goalkeeper intends to dive.