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A Materialist Theory of the Mind
This classic work of recent philosophy was first published in 1968, and remains the most compelling and comprehensive statement of the view that the mind is material or physical. In A Materialist Theory of the Mind, D. M. Armstrong provided insight into the debate surrounding the relationship of the mind and body. He put forth a detailed materialist account of all the main mental phenomena, including perception, sensation, belief, the will, introspection, mental images, and consciousness. This causal analysis of mental concepts, along with the similar theory by David Lewis, has come to dominate all subsequent debates in the philosophy of mind.
In the preface to this updated edition, Armstrong reflects on the impact of the book, and places it in the context of subsequent developments. A full bibliography of all the key writings that have appeared in the materialist debate is also provided.
400 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 23, 1993
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About the author
D.M. Armstrong
35 books13 followersDavid Malet Armstrong (born 8 July 1926), often D. M. Armstrong, is an Australian philosopher. He is well-known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the laws of nature. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 31, 2024
Psychiatry is a medical specialty, but even other physicians have a hard time understanding how the field falls under medicine and not psychology, or behavioral health, or even magic. I think that is because of how entrenched civilization is with regard to traditional philosophies of mind. Since Descartes, the mind has been popularly conceptualized as a weird non-physical "substance" that is somehow separate but interacting with the body. People who have never read philosophy in their lives still unconsciously default to what could be called some form of "Dualism". As Armstrong says, "the whole world studied by science contains nothing but physical things operating according to the laws of physics--with the exception of the mind." So the point of this book is to argue that if everything else is reducible to physics, the mind should be no different.
Honestly, that does SEEM to be the case. Psychiatry (as opposed to psychology!) has evolved to something more akin to neurology with a focus on how brain disease manifests as behavioral and emotional disability. We have learned so much about how the brain works as a biologic computer, and how that biology is really chemistry, and that the chemistry operates through the laws of physics. So the contemporary psychiatrist's job has started to have more in common with an IT technician. Similarly, as neuroscience has advanced, it is no surprise that philosophy has new information to analyze, and thus new theories on just what this thing we call the "mind" really is. And for many philosophers today, neuroscience seems to make the Dualist seem outdated. It's hard to argue against the empirical evidence that the brain itself is the source of our experiences we attribute to the mind. This is called the Materialist school of Mind. Materialism as a philosophical basis has been around in some form or other since Epicure, and one can even say that Marx and Engels took Hegel's dialectics and stripped them of their Idealism to form their "scientific" system of Communism. But when it comes to a Materialist theory of mind, one of its most important leaders was D.M. Armstrong.
Behaviorism is a form of Materialism, espoused by folks like B.F. Skinner, but this denies the existence of inner mental states; whereas, Armstrong affirms them. Therefore, Armstrong makes the case for his own brand of "Central-state Materialism," which identifies mental states as states of the brain. This is consistent with his overall system of philosophy based on scientific realism. There are no Platonic forms, no spiritual substance. If it exists, science will eventually be able to explain it, not because you want it to exist. Post-modernists probably hate the guy.
He asks some questions that have bothered me, and I'm sure many of you as well. For example, if the mind is separate from the brain, then when in the development of the human organism does the our conglomerate of cells exactly become endowed with a mind or a soul? When did our evolutionary ancestors acquire Mind? When does it happen in the womb?
Now, you may be surprised to hear that, despite my psychiatric training, I am NOT a Materialist. A psychiatrist will NEVER make a person suffering from mental illness WELL if the approach is from a materialist perspective. Materialism leads to false expectations that psychiatric problems are nothing that a little R&D and Big Pharma can't fix. What has convinced me, at least so far, that Materialism doesn't logically offer the full picture of the mind is a story best discussed in reviews of other philosophies. I only want to emphasize here that I found this book to be truly one of the best and clearest arguments for Materialism I've ever come across, even if I don't buy in to every conclusion.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if you have some philosophy background but are a fairly new student to the study of Mind, HERE is a great place to really dig in. The first five chapters spell out nicely and succinctly the evolution of Mind Theory up to the Sixties. This section is important in order to have a nice basis for understanding Armstrong's arguments throughout the subsequent 400 pages or so. I wish that I had read this book first--before I delved into other literature and debates about the mind, from Chisholm to Chalmers to Yablo to Swinburne. Armstrong's classic would have made it much easier for me to grasp the concepts discussed in those other papers and books. But that just means I should now go back and reread these other philosophers with a more informed eye.
So I do encourage people to read Armstrong. It does get very technical, though, but at times his writing can still be so clear that I realized that there really is no excuse for philosophers to be abstruse.
It doesn't mean that I consider Armstrong's work "indubitable," to use his terminology. He is victim to the pitfalls of all philosophical writing. When the book does becomes hard to follow, it is because Armstrong is stretching himself too thin over lacunae in his arguments. When he is slipping into doublespeak, he tends to use a lot of acceptable but annoying double negatives, like "it is not unnatural to say...", and thus "it is not uncommon" to become confused!
Another problem I noticed is that his limited knowledge of human physiology is painfully obvious when he tries to apply his medical understanding in support of his philosophical conclusions. For instance, he tries to say that not all states of the body apt to produce a certain behavior are mental states, and he uses the state of the liver as an example of a bodily organ that can affect a person's behavior without affecting the brain, and thus not being a mental state. But liver function DOES impact brain function! Liver failure can promote too much ammonia to build up in the blood, which causes neurologic dysfunction and thus confusion, irritability, etc. This was known to medical science at the time, and he does admit to processes that cascade from the liver serving as "adequate causes" to affect the brain, but what was his point? He missed an opportunity to use this example appropriately to support his theory that brain states are mental states. Instead, he unwittingly gave ammunition to Dualism by saying that an organ that was NOT the brain could impact mental processes. Why did he even go there? Those of you who've studied Armstrong should feel free to explain what I am missing in the comments.
But this is not the only time when Armstrong seems to act as a Dualist in disguise. For example, I've seen Dualists argue that a Materialist theory of mind doesn't explain hallucinations. But it sure as hell does! Hallucinations are centrally aroused PERCEPTIONS caused by various alterations in brain chemistry. Armstrong rightfully says this. But what about mental IMAGES? These are not PERCEPTIONS. Armstrong tries to argue that they may, in fact, be perceptions, just a compilation of perceptions you had of other things encoded in your hippocampus. Like your image of a mermaid. But then he admits that you can willfully call up such an image. If that's true, and I say it is, then it's not a perception. I can't turn perception from my eyes off and on, unless I open or close my eyelids, but I can more or less control my mental images. What allows me to evoke a mental image at will? I don't see how this is compatible with Materialism. Perhaps I'm too dumb to understand his argument, or he is missing something here.
Despite its flaws, if you are serious about developing your own understanding about the wonders of the mind, I still think this book is worth reading--as long as you don't stop here! This book only represents some of the best that philosophy could bring to the mind-body debate by the mid-20th Century, before Thomas Nagel introduced readers to the concept of "qualia," and modern quantum physics blew everyone's mind about what is really going on at the subatomic level. From a personal standpoint, I believe much of the legitimacy of psychiatry today is indebted to Armstrong and his colleagues, but this book is only part of the story, albeit one you need to know before you try to go further down the rabbit hole of the mind.
Another Goodreads review quipped that if you are a rationalist and want to annoy someone who has transcended, get them this book. It's funny, but true. That's because this book is literally soulless. It argues against anything non-material as a logical property of what makes a human being. But don't let that detract you from reading this if you are someone looking beyond the material universe. Ironically, Armstrong gives readers the basic tools they need from a philosophy standpoint to formulate their own conceptual framework of the mind, so this book is helpful even for someone in search for the soul, or for meaning outside of what can be described by the physical sciences.
In conclusion, though I am not a committed Materialist, I can't help but give this book a high recommendation. An important milestone in this branch of philosophy.
SCORE: 3.5, rounded to 4 tautologies out of 5
WORD OF THE DAY: Contumely
SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRINGS: "Materialist" by Bad Religion; "Mind and Brain" by Rocketman
Honestly, that does SEEM to be the case. Psychiatry (as opposed to psychology!) has evolved to something more akin to neurology with a focus on how brain disease manifests as behavioral and emotional disability. We have learned so much about how the brain works as a biologic computer, and how that biology is really chemistry, and that the chemistry operates through the laws of physics. So the contemporary psychiatrist's job has started to have more in common with an IT technician. Similarly, as neuroscience has advanced, it is no surprise that philosophy has new information to analyze, and thus new theories on just what this thing we call the "mind" really is. And for many philosophers today, neuroscience seems to make the Dualist seem outdated. It's hard to argue against the empirical evidence that the brain itself is the source of our experiences we attribute to the mind. This is called the Materialist school of Mind. Materialism as a philosophical basis has been around in some form or other since Epicure, and one can even say that Marx and Engels took Hegel's dialectics and stripped them of their Idealism to form their "scientific" system of Communism. But when it comes to a Materialist theory of mind, one of its most important leaders was D.M. Armstrong.
Behaviorism is a form of Materialism, espoused by folks like B.F. Skinner, but this denies the existence of inner mental states; whereas, Armstrong affirms them. Therefore, Armstrong makes the case for his own brand of "Central-state Materialism," which identifies mental states as states of the brain. This is consistent with his overall system of philosophy based on scientific realism. There are no Platonic forms, no spiritual substance. If it exists, science will eventually be able to explain it, not because you want it to exist. Post-modernists probably hate the guy.
He asks some questions that have bothered me, and I'm sure many of you as well. For example, if the mind is separate from the brain, then when in the development of the human organism does the our conglomerate of cells exactly become endowed with a mind or a soul? When did our evolutionary ancestors acquire Mind? When does it happen in the womb?
Now, you may be surprised to hear that, despite my psychiatric training, I am NOT a Materialist. A psychiatrist will NEVER make a person suffering from mental illness WELL if the approach is from a materialist perspective. Materialism leads to false expectations that psychiatric problems are nothing that a little R&D and Big Pharma can't fix. What has convinced me, at least so far, that Materialism doesn't logically offer the full picture of the mind is a story best discussed in reviews of other philosophies. I only want to emphasize here that I found this book to be truly one of the best and clearest arguments for Materialism I've ever come across, even if I don't buy in to every conclusion.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if you have some philosophy background but are a fairly new student to the study of Mind, HERE is a great place to really dig in. The first five chapters spell out nicely and succinctly the evolution of Mind Theory up to the Sixties. This section is important in order to have a nice basis for understanding Armstrong's arguments throughout the subsequent 400 pages or so. I wish that I had read this book first--before I delved into other literature and debates about the mind, from Chisholm to Chalmers to Yablo to Swinburne. Armstrong's classic would have made it much easier for me to grasp the concepts discussed in those other papers and books. But that just means I should now go back and reread these other philosophers with a more informed eye.
So I do encourage people to read Armstrong. It does get very technical, though, but at times his writing can still be so clear that I realized that there really is no excuse for philosophers to be abstruse.
It doesn't mean that I consider Armstrong's work "indubitable," to use his terminology. He is victim to the pitfalls of all philosophical writing. When the book does becomes hard to follow, it is because Armstrong is stretching himself too thin over lacunae in his arguments. When he is slipping into doublespeak, he tends to use a lot of acceptable but annoying double negatives, like "it is not unnatural to say...", and thus "it is not uncommon" to become confused!
Another problem I noticed is that his limited knowledge of human physiology is painfully obvious when he tries to apply his medical understanding in support of his philosophical conclusions. For instance, he tries to say that not all states of the body apt to produce a certain behavior are mental states, and he uses the state of the liver as an example of a bodily organ that can affect a person's behavior without affecting the brain, and thus not being a mental state. But liver function DOES impact brain function! Liver failure can promote too much ammonia to build up in the blood, which causes neurologic dysfunction and thus confusion, irritability, etc. This was known to medical science at the time, and he does admit to processes that cascade from the liver serving as "adequate causes" to affect the brain, but what was his point? He missed an opportunity to use this example appropriately to support his theory that brain states are mental states. Instead, he unwittingly gave ammunition to Dualism by saying that an organ that was NOT the brain could impact mental processes. Why did he even go there? Those of you who've studied Armstrong should feel free to explain what I am missing in the comments.
But this is not the only time when Armstrong seems to act as a Dualist in disguise. For example, I've seen Dualists argue that a Materialist theory of mind doesn't explain hallucinations. But it sure as hell does! Hallucinations are centrally aroused PERCEPTIONS caused by various alterations in brain chemistry. Armstrong rightfully says this. But what about mental IMAGES? These are not PERCEPTIONS. Armstrong tries to argue that they may, in fact, be perceptions, just a compilation of perceptions you had of other things encoded in your hippocampus. Like your image of a mermaid. But then he admits that you can willfully call up such an image. If that's true, and I say it is, then it's not a perception. I can't turn perception from my eyes off and on, unless I open or close my eyelids, but I can more or less control my mental images. What allows me to evoke a mental image at will? I don't see how this is compatible with Materialism. Perhaps I'm too dumb to understand his argument, or he is missing something here.
Despite its flaws, if you are serious about developing your own understanding about the wonders of the mind, I still think this book is worth reading--as long as you don't stop here! This book only represents some of the best that philosophy could bring to the mind-body debate by the mid-20th Century, before Thomas Nagel introduced readers to the concept of "qualia," and modern quantum physics blew everyone's mind about what is really going on at the subatomic level. From a personal standpoint, I believe much of the legitimacy of psychiatry today is indebted to Armstrong and his colleagues, but this book is only part of the story, albeit one you need to know before you try to go further down the rabbit hole of the mind.
Another Goodreads review quipped that if you are a rationalist and want to annoy someone who has transcended, get them this book. It's funny, but true. That's because this book is literally soulless. It argues against anything non-material as a logical property of what makes a human being. But don't let that detract you from reading this if you are someone looking beyond the material universe. Ironically, Armstrong gives readers the basic tools they need from a philosophy standpoint to formulate their own conceptual framework of the mind, so this book is helpful even for someone in search for the soul, or for meaning outside of what can be described by the physical sciences.
In conclusion, though I am not a committed Materialist, I can't help but give this book a high recommendation. An important milestone in this branch of philosophy.
SCORE: 3.5, rounded to 4 tautologies out of 5
WORD OF THE DAY: Contumely
SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRINGS: "Materialist" by Bad Religion; "Mind and Brain" by Rocketman
January 5, 2021
If you're a rationalist who hates somebody who obviously transcended, get them this book.
May 28, 2022
A classic, and an important book. But a little long for the argument.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews