Identity, Cause, and Mind: Philosophical Essays

by Sydney Shoemaker

This is an expanded edition of Sydney Shoemaker's seminal collection of his work on interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Reproducing all of the original papers, many of which are now regarded as classics, and including four papers published since the first edition appeared in 1984, Identity, Cause, and Mind 's reappearance will be warmly welcomed by philosophers and students alike.

Genres: Philosophy

476 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 1984

About the author

Sydney Shoemaker is an American philosopher. Until his retirement, he was a Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He holds a PhD from Cornell and BA from Reed. In 1971, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University. He has worked primarily in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, and has many classic papers in both of these areas (as well as their overlap). In "Functionalism and Qualia" (1975), he argues that functionalism about mental states can account for the qualitative character (or 'raw feel') of mental states. In "Self-Reference and Self-Awareness" (1968), he argues that the phenomenon of absolute 'Immunity to Error Through Misidentification' is what distinguishes self-attributions of mental states (such as "I see a canary") from self-attributions of physical states (such as "I weigh 200 pounds"). In metaphysics, he has defended the view that laws are metaphysically necessary, a position that follows from his view of properties as clusters of conditional causal powers. He has also applied his view of properties to the problem of mental causation. He also has distinguished contributions to the literature on self-knowledge and personal identity, where he defended a Lockean psychological continuity theory in his influential paper "Persons and their Pasts". In his recent work on the content of perception, he has argued for a distinctive version of internalist representationalism.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have not yet finished this collection of essays (I had to return it to the library), but what I have read is very impressive. An example of an argument I found interesting:

1. If absent qualia are possible without thereby changing functions in an organism, then qualia have no causal efficacy whatsoever.
2. Either qualia have some causal efficacy or they do not.
3. If qualia have no causal efficacy, we cannot know anything about them or that they exist (assuming a causal theory of knowledgy acquisition).
4. If qualia do have causal efficacy, absent qualia without functional difference are impossible.
5. Thus, knowledge of qualia is impossible or absent qualia arguments fail because an identical functional organism absent qualia is impossible.
6. We do have knowledge of qualia.
7. TF, absent qualia arguments fail.

[Cassidy Brinn]

Functionalism attracts me. Life should certainly be thought of as a system in which each component must be relatively defined through its activity, which in turn contributes towards the definition of each other component. And yet, I'm not surprised nor saddened to learn that it's fallen out of favor.

As I've gotten to know it through this group of essays, functionalism lacks a justification for why it ought to exist. What will we use these definitions for? This should be one of the first questions answered: what functional role does a functional system play? Of course you can throw a formal term on anything, and thereby make it relatable to every other thing, but why would you? Is predictability the goal? Does he want to help programmers create the best AI? Or argue for AI being a legitimate method to study and understand the human condition? The only possibility I could make out was functionalism as a plea for the humane treatment of martians, should we one day meet them, and should they appear to feel pain despite the lack of C-fibres.

The silence might not be so insidiuous, but Shoemaker then uses functional definability as a crucial element in determining the nature of qualitative beliefs and desires. And here, we mustn't follow, because not only don't we know exactly how they are functionally defined, we also don't know why we'd want to define them in this way.

What is a qualitative mental state? When he tries to get at all specific, he falls into a fatal regress, which is only acceptable if you take care to arm yourself with the logical antidote!

He goes a little deeper into one mental state, namely that which occasions the immediate non-referential subject use of 'I' (as in 'I believe I see a table' rather than the object use 'I see a table.' The former does not identify some object in the world, is therefore immediate and immune to error through misidentification relative to the first person pronoun or some other linguistic stand in for a first person pronoun). He points out that this immediate self-consciousness is the cause of every belief and desire and that it is not won by perception. He fails, though, to draw out the consequences of this basic I-relatedness for the entire system. Particularly the reflections on phenomenal similarity, and conceptually necessary embodiment suffer from not being related to the first essay. What is the relation between law and experience?

In the end, I wouldn't reject functionalism for logical mistakes, because it never commits itself fully enough to make any. Shoemaker needs to turn to history and to other concrete examples, and attempt to explain the actual world with his functional definitions. Instead, he dwells in thought experiments, which never distinguish to my satisfaction between logically necessary results and results which depend on popular notions of different terms.