Part I the Place of Phenomenology in Philosophy of Mind

Though it is most often deployed in service of naturalist and empirically sensitive explanatory projects, the functionalist theory of mind is essentially a formal theory, drawing its plausibility more from a sophisticated appreciation of the logic and conceptual grammar of terms of psychological description than from any empirical consideration. In this, the functionalist theory of mind exhibits significant methodological continuities with the tradition of phenomenology; but despite its successes, many philosophers believe that functionalism fails in that it leaves out any account of the central explanatory concept of phenomenology, the concept of immediate, subjective experience. In this essay, I analyze the history of the development of functionalism to make perspicuous some of the hidden structural features of the doctrine we know today. Functionalism emerges as a sophisticated response to problems of the meaning and reference of psychological terms left open by its predecessor theories. This shows that the question of the relationship of formally described functional states to empirically described physical states remains open and suggests a new way of viewing the source of functionalism’s continued problems with explaining consciousness. After more than thirty-five years of debate and discussion, versions of the functionalist theory of mind originating in the work of Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, and David Lewis still remain the most popular positions among philosophers of mind on the nature of mental states and processes. Functionalism has enjoyed such popularity owing, at least in part, to its claim to offer a plausible and compelling description of the nature of the mental that is also consistent with an underlying physicalist or materialist ontology. Yet despite its continued popularity, many philosophers now think that functionalism leaves something out, in particular that functional explanations and analyses fail to account for consciousness, qualia, or phenomenal states of experience or awareness.1 If the objection is correct, then functionalism fails in its inability to capture the central explanatory basis of phenomenological explanation: the phenomena of immediate, first-personal, subjective experience. The apparent failure is all the more striking in view of the close methodological parallels that exist between functionalism and phenomenology; for both projects depend centrally on a program of conceptual investigation of the definitional and explanatory interrelationships of our descriptions of experience and other psychological phenomena. A historical overview 1 See. e.g., Nagel (1974), Chalmers (1996), and Searle (1992). 02-Thomasson-chap01.qxd 13/5/05 9:27 AM Page 19