Abstract
In “Max Black’s Objection to Mind–Body Identity,” Ned Block seeks to offer a definitive treatment of property dualism arguments that exploit modes of presentation. I will argue that Block’s central response to property dualism is confused. The property dualist can happily grant that mental modes of presentation have a hidden physical nature. What matters for the property dualist is not the hidden physical side of the property, but the apparent mental side. Once that ‘thin’ side is granted, the property dualist has won. I conclude that although Block is wrong to think that the property dualist must argue for so-called thin mental properties, Block, and the physicalist, are able to resist property dualism. But any attempt to bolster this resistance and do more than dogmatically assert the crucial identity runs a serious risk of undermining the physicalism it is meant to save.
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Notes
Perhaps of some historical interest, Smart himself addressed this objection by adopting a topic-neutral analysis of the relevant mode of presentation.
This characterization is rough because, according to Block, if physical properties are thin, the thick/thin distinction will have to be relativized to concepts. See p. 290 for the details. It is not clear to me that the thin/thick distinction won’t have to be relativized to concepts in any event. It would seem that subsuming a property under a concept that expresses its essence would make the property thin relative to that concept.
It strikes me that it would be more natural to run the argument in terms of CMoP’s. But Block chooses to focus on MMoP’s, so I am obliged to follow.
Of course, to say that the property is part of the route does not entail that it is not the whole of the route. But it would be odd for Block to say that it is part of the route if he was thinking that it was also all of the route.
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for raising this objection.
See Horgan & Tienson (2001). The argument in the text differs somewhat from theirs. But the central move from awareness to reality remains the same.
An anonymous referee questioned the rationale for restricting the class of properties to those that are functionalizable. The justification is dialectical: I want the narrowest class that will plausibly address the problem cases. There’s no reason to expand the class of properties and incur any added epistemic burden if functional properties alone will fill the bill.
Many thanks to Robert Schroer for suggesting this line of criticism.
For this formulation of neutral monism, see Stubenberg (2005).
References
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Stubenberg, L. (2005). Neutral monism. The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (spring 2005 edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2005/entries/neutral-monism.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Robert Schroer for helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper. In addition, I would like to thank the participants in an NEH seminar directed by John Heil at Washington University in St. Louis during the summer 2006. Finally, I would also like to thank the referee for Philosopia who provided many valuable comments.
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O’Sullivan, B. Through Thick and Thin with Ned Block: How Not to Rebut the Property Dualism Argument. Philosophia 36, 531–544 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9137-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9137-5