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Armstrong's Materialism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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Central-state materialism ( = CSM) is a very strong, but also very exciting theory of mind according to which each mental state is identical with a state of the central nervous system. CSM thus goes considerably beyond early versions of the identity theory of mind, since those early accounts (e.g., those of Place and Smart) held only that sensations are to be identified with neural events. CSM, by contrast, is a thesis about all mental states; every mental state is held to be a state of the central nervous system. In fact, as we will see shortly, CSM is an even more sweeping thesis than this formulation of it suggests, since it is not concerned simply with mental states.
One prominent defender of CSM, David Armstrong, has maintained that CSM can be established by means of a two-step argument.
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References
1 See especially Place's two papers, “The Concept of Heed”, British Journal of Psychology 45 (1954), and “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?”, Ibid 47 (1956); and Smart, J. J. C. Sensations and Brain Processes”, Philosophical Review 68 (1959).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Armstrong, D. M. A Materialist Theory of the Mind (New York: Humanities, 1968), pp. 90–91.Google Scholar Hereafter, this book will be cited as MTM.
3 Actually, matters are slightly more complex since Armstrong reckons such states as caused in specific ways as well. For simplification, I will ignore this factor and speak throughout of inner causal states of persons.
4 He offers some stipulative definitions of these notions at MTM, pp. 130–131, but he adds that “they are definitions meant to correspond reasonably closely to an ordinary meaning of each word.“
5 See MTM, pp. 217–221, and the much more detailed arguments in one of Armstrong, 's earlier books, Perception and the Physical World (New York: Humanities, 1961).Google Scholar
6 One drawback is that if the argument is understood in this restricted manner, then Armstrong's conceptual step is not compatible with all forms of materialism, despite his claim that his analysis “does not entail, but neither does it exclude, Materialism” (MTM, p. 91). For instance, various versions of eliminative materialism incorporate the claim that no mental concepts have instantiations; so, some materialist theories of mind would be in open conflict with this restricted construal of the conceptual first step. On the other hand, dropping the restriction would require the analysis of the concepts of mental individuals and their phenomenal properties; and that requirement would certainly be inimical to Armstrong's case for CSM. Not only has he not analyzed those concepts, it is also difficult to see what a causal analysis of such concepts would be like.
For discussion of the various versions of eliminative materialism, see Lycan, W. G. and Pappas, G. S. “What Is Eliminative Materialism?”, Australasian journal of Philosophy 50 (1972),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and further references therein, and their “Quine's Materialism”, Philosophia (in press); and, Cornman, J. W. Materialism and Sensations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 131–190.Google Scholar
7 While Armstrong argues that there are no phenomenal individuals, he does not eliminate images and sense-impressions. Instead, he claims these are reducible to events of specific sorts; d. MTM, chaps. 10-13.
8 The meritorious features in question are indicated by the fact that CSM plausibly meets a series of ten conditions that, Armstrong claims, any adequate theory of mind should meet. See MTM, pp. 74–76.
9 For these two concluding steps, see MTM, chap. 17.
10 This is not quite right, since at one point Armstrong alludes to the eliminative materialist position of Feyerabend; he characterizes that position as “desperate” (MTM, p. 78).
11 See Putnam, H. “Psychological Predicates”, in Capitan, W. and Merrill, D. (eds.), Art, Mind and Religion (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), pp. 44–45.Google Scholar
12 On this objection, see Putnam, op. cit., and Lycan, W. G. “Mental States and Putnam's Functionalist Hypothesis”, Australasian journal of Philosophy 52 (1974), p. 59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 While this problem is not particularly damaging to the case for CSM, it is damaging to Armstrong's epistemic analysis of perception. For further details on this point, see my “Perception without Belief”, Ratio (in press).
14 Armstrong adopts a Realist view of dispositions, about which he says: “According to the Realist view, to speak of an object's having a dispositional property entails that the object is in some non-dispositional state or that it has some property (there exists a ‘categorical basis’) which is responsible for the object manifesting certain behaviour in certain circumstances, manifestations whose nature makes the dispositional property the particular dispositional property it is” (MTM, p. 86). For a definitive criticism of this account, see Alston, William “Dispositions and Occurrences”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1971), pp. 142–143,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and especially footnote 12, p. 143.
15 Actually, there is a way out of this objection; one need only stipulate that all counterfactuals relevant to the perceptual cases at hand function to attribute dispositions. For a rejoinder to this way out, and for additional criticisms of Armstrong's account of potential belief, see my “Perception Without Belief”, op. cit.
16 In my view it is a mistake to think of causal relations holding between states, but the point is not relevant to our present concerns.
17 Actually, Armstrong's contextual analyses are more complicated than I have here made them out. For example, in the case of the analysis of sentences oft he form of (f), he clearly recognizes that some such sentences will not be analyzable along the lines of (g). One may, after all, think that p without knowing or believing that p. Cases of this sort, he claims are logically secondary to those sentences for which (g) is the correct analysis; i.e., sentences of the form of (f) but where the individual, S, neither knows nor believes that p, are to be analyzed as asserting that S is in a certain inner causal state that can only be described by means of its resemblance to corresponding belief states (that is, by resemblance to the belief state S would be in were he to believe that-p.) See MTM, pp. 155–157 for the case of idle wants; and pp. 223–224 for the case of idle perceptions. Notice that although Armstrong's analyses are completed in the manner just described, this does not affect the point that all sentences of the form of (f) are analyzable into sentences of the form of (h); the inner causal state analysis still is to hold across the board. Hence, the above complications do not affect (3.1). We made a related point concerning perception above, in Ill.
18 Armstrong's case for mental-event sentences and for mental-process sentences parallels that described here for mental-state sentences. The relevant contextual analyses are offered, the twin upshots of which are claims corresponding to (3.1) for mental-event sentences and mental-process sentences, respectively. The conjunction of those two latter claims and (3.1), I believe, more precisely spells out his overall conceptual step (stated earlier as (6)).
19 Recall our assumption that we are dealing just with states of persons.
20 See the related argument used by Cornman in Materialism and Sensations, pp. 163–164.
21 Cf. Lycan and Pappas, “What Is Eliminative Materialism?”, op. cit.
22 These matters are very fully discussed in Cornman, Metaphysics, Reference and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).Google Scholar
23 David Lewis has also defended a causal analysis of mental concepts, and argued from that analysis to CSM. His analysis, and resulting argument, is considerably different from those considered above in IV. See his papers “How to Define Theoretical Terms”, Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970), and “Psychological and Theoretical Identifications”, Australasian journal of Philosophy 49 (1972). Lewis's position is critically examined in Lycan and Pappas, Materialist Theories of Mind (forthcoming).
24 For discussion of this conflict in a related context, see my “Incorrigibility and Central-State Materialism”, Philosophical Studies (in press), and Armstrong's reply, “Incorrigibility, Materialism and Causation: A Reply to George Pappas”, Philosophical Studies (in press).
25 For detailed discussion of this argument, see Lycan and Pappas, “Quine's Materialism”, op. cit., and Pappas, “Postulation and Eliminative Materialism”, (forthcoming).
26 Cf. MTM, pp. 217–218.
27 For a similar “explanationist” defense of a belief theory of perception, see Pitcher, G. A Theory of Perception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).Google Scholar
28 Some idea of the scope of this task can be gotten from what I believe is the fullest, most detailed explanationist defense of a philosophical account of perception yet to appear, viz., Cornman, 's Perception, Common Sense and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).Google Scholar Admittedly, Armstrong does compare the relative explanatory power of his causal accounts of mental items with alternatives, especially in his treatments of perception and the will. But even in those cases, his explanationist arguments are incomplete.
29 I am indebted to Steve Boer, Robert Kraut and Bill Lycan for helpful comments and suggestions.