Review of C . B . Martin ’ s The Mind in Nature ∗

C. B. Martin’s The Mind in Nature is a manifesto in favor of a comprehensive powersbased ontology, aiming to treat the actual and the modal, the causal and the constitutive, the scientific and the mathematical, and the physical and the mental, all by primary appeal to the notion of an irreducible qualitatively informed disposition (with some substratum thrown in for good measure). Like many manifestos, it suffers from an irritating tendency towards baroque prose and underdeveloped argumentation. Nonetheless, The Mind in Nature is worth reading, as the presently only available survey of Martin’s deeply interesting world-view—a legacy needing, but certainly deserving, further defense and development. The first half of the book (Ch 1–7) canvasses many of Martin’s past contributions. Here we have Martin’s objections to competing ontologies that would reduce dispositions to conditional facts (Ch 2) or categorical features (Ch 5), or privilege dispositionality to the exclusion of qualitativity (Ch 6). We are presented with Martin’s comparatively more robust ontology (Ch 1, Ch 7), where whatever fundamental substantialia there might be (space-time, fundamental particles or fields) have properties that are primitively both dispositional and qualitative. Here also Martin advertises certain ramifications of his view, including an account of dispositions rather than possible worlds as the truthmakers for modal claims (Ch 3), an account of composition eschewing commitment to multiple levels of reality (Ch 4), and an account of causation as the mutual manifestation of reciprocal dispositions (Ch 5). Most of this material is available (and better developed) elsewhere, but in addition to presenting the big picture, provides grounds sufficient for some retrospective assessment (see, e.g., below). The second half of the book (Ch 8–15) presents Martin’s “new view of mind”, applying his ontology to the problem of intentionality. Roughly, on Martin’s view mental intentionality involves the having, by certain kinds of complex dispositional system, of the capacity for use of sensory qualities or percepts in representation (Ch 15). As I’ll discuss below, Martin’s focus on intentionality is somewhat odd, and his proposed account treats this problem only by introducing the harder problem of mental qualitativity. I’ll also suggest, however—reading between the lines—that Martin’s ontology has resources to treat the hard problem, in a genuinely novel way.