Review of Perry ’ s Knowledge , Possibility , and Consciousness ∗
نویسنده
چکیده
Perry, in this lucid, deep, and entertaining book (based on his 1999 Jean Nicod lectures), supposes that type-identity physicalism is antecedently plausible, and that rejecting this thesis requires good reason (this is " antecedent physicalism "). He aims to show that experience gap arguments, as given by Jackson (the knowledge argument), Kripke (the modal argument), and Chalmers (the zombie argument), fail to provide such reason; and moreover that each failure ultimately stems from an overly restrictive conception of the content of thought. Type-identity physicalism aims to preserve certain intuitions about mind. Mental states (understood as types) have causal roles, and some mental states (" experiences ") also have phenomenal aspects. Experiences are inner states of persons, unanalyzable in terms of causal roles (in contrast with second-order functionalism, discussed below), and knowable from the first-person perspective: " According to antecedent physicalism, this state of these parts of the brain is exactly what we are aware of subjectively when we think of " this [e.g., painful] state " (67). One intuition not preserved by type-identity physicalism is that the experiences of differently constituted creatures might have the same phenomenal aspect. Perry attempts (somewhat half-heartedly) to explain away this intuition, but he mainly rejects it because he takes the physicalist options to be, roughly, type-identity or second-order functionalism (on which a mental state is the state of being in a state playing such-and-such causal role); and he finds functionalism untenable. Perry's taxonomy subsumes supervenience and realization physicalist accounts under the function-alist rubric (see §4.3). It's worth noting, then, that physicalists have non-functionalist accounts of * Thanks to Stacie Friend, Benj Hellie, and Peter Ludlow for helpful comments.
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