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Mental Reality
What is distinctive of the mental? In Mental Reality, Galen Strawson argues that the answer is not intelligence or sapience, representational content or intentionality broadly understood, but conscious experience. Strawson challenges neobehaviourist accounts of the mental. He argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind is still confused by positivism and its various offspring. It gives undue primacy of place to nonmental phenomena, publicly observable phenomena, and behavioural phenomena in its account of the nature of mental life. Strawson describes an alternative position, naturalized Cartesianism, that couples the materialist view that mind is entirely natural and wholly physical with respect for the idea that the only distinctively mental phenomena are those of conscious experience.
- GenresPhilosophy
Paperback
First published November 17, 1994
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About the author
Galen Strawson
20 books74 followersGalen John Strawson is a British professor of philosopher and literary critic primarily workin the fields of mind, metaphysics, and free will.
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February 20, 2022
I got in over my head, but reading Mental Reality was worthwhile and helped to clarify, peripherally, some of the amateur epistemological/aesthetic thoughts I’ve been mulling for the past decade. I first encountered Strawson in 2018, with his Some Things that Bother Me, a collection of his occasional essays, which ruminated on such topics as death, free will, consciousness, and the culturally current theme (which he considers misguided) that “self” can be defined as a life-narrative.
The gist of Strawson’s book is that 20th-century attempts to deal with mental phenomena, particularly the nature of thought itself, have been hamstrung by attempts to make it conform to positivist or behaviorist principles that deny conscious thought/experience status as something real (as either phenomena or as physical matter). Strawson ably and at length demonstrates the limitations to these approaches to deny the realness of consciousness. While Strawson cannot positively define the nature of consciousness’ realness, Strawson’s intuition (his word) about thought/consciousness is that its nature is at present beyond the ken of physical laws. Till such laws are revealed, the mental representation of reality we experience as consciousness remains in a liminal state, clearly real but somehow inexplicable, hence metaphysical (a ghost in the machine).
In my own conception of things, the chief difficulty with thinking about thinking is that it is both recursive and subject to ramifications that were they charted would limn the process as a fractal structure, illimitable. My interest in the topic is Jamesian, how thought is a flowing of images, sensations, words, concepts that in sum can never be fully articulated/described. The miracle is that from this wealth of material churning in this mental maelstrom humans have derived logic and scientific processes; yet the other aspects of this stream continue equally to inspire and frustrate us, to become the subject of narrative arts that attempt to reconcile the mental urges/promptings that make humans capable of the best and worst behaviors.
In sum, Strawson sets out to do what he intends, but if like me, you’re already certain thinking/consciousness/experience is real, then there will appear to be a good deal of extraneous matter in Strawson’s book, as he methodically erects arguments and counterarguments from a variety of schools of thought (behaviorism, materialism, positivism, neobehaviorism, et al.) in order to show their inadequacies.
The gist of Strawson’s book is that 20th-century attempts to deal with mental phenomena, particularly the nature of thought itself, have been hamstrung by attempts to make it conform to positivist or behaviorist principles that deny conscious thought/experience status as something real (as either phenomena or as physical matter). Strawson ably and at length demonstrates the limitations to these approaches to deny the realness of consciousness. While Strawson cannot positively define the nature of consciousness’ realness, Strawson’s intuition (his word) about thought/consciousness is that its nature is at present beyond the ken of physical laws. Till such laws are revealed, the mental representation of reality we experience as consciousness remains in a liminal state, clearly real but somehow inexplicable, hence metaphysical (a ghost in the machine).
In my own conception of things, the chief difficulty with thinking about thinking is that it is both recursive and subject to ramifications that were they charted would limn the process as a fractal structure, illimitable. My interest in the topic is Jamesian, how thought is a flowing of images, sensations, words, concepts that in sum can never be fully articulated/described. The miracle is that from this wealth of material churning in this mental maelstrom humans have derived logic and scientific processes; yet the other aspects of this stream continue equally to inspire and frustrate us, to become the subject of narrative arts that attempt to reconcile the mental urges/promptings that make humans capable of the best and worst behaviors.
In sum, Strawson sets out to do what he intends, but if like me, you’re already certain thinking/consciousness/experience is real, then there will appear to be a good deal of extraneous matter in Strawson’s book, as he methodically erects arguments and counterarguments from a variety of schools of thought (behaviorism, materialism, positivism, neobehaviorism, et al.) in order to show their inadequacies.
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