Simple mindedness : in defense of naive naturalism in the philosophy of mind

How is our conception of what there is affected by our counting ourselves as inhabitants of the natural world? How do our actions fit into a world that is altered through our agency? And how do we accommodate our understanding of one another as fellow subjects of experience--as beings with thoughts and wants and hopes and fears? These questions provide the impetus for the detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation presented in this book. The answers offer a distinctive view of questions about "the mind's place in nature," and they argue for a particular position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism. This position opposes the whole drift of the last thirty or forty years' philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world. Jennifer Hornsby sets naive naturalism against dualism, but without advancing the claims of "materialism," "physicalism," or "naturalism" as these have come to be known. She shows how we can, and why we should, abandon the view that thoughts and actions, to be seen as real, must be subject to scientific explanation. Contents......Page 2 Acknowledgments......Page 4 Preface......Page 5 Introduction......Page 6 I Ontological Questions......Page 19 1. Introduction: Persons and Their States, and Events......Page 20 2. Descartes, Rorty and the Mind-Body Fiction......Page 27 Postscript: Rorty on Anomalous Monism......Page 44 3. Physicalism, Events and Part-Whole Relations......Page 49 4. Which Physical Events Are Mental Events?......Page 66 Postscript to Part I: The Nomological Character of Causality......Page 81 II Agency......Page 84 5. Introduction: Action and the Mental-Physical Divide......Page 85 6. Bodily Movements, Actions and Epistemology......Page 95 Postscript: A Disjunctive Conception of Bodily Movements......Page 104 7. Physicalist Thinking and Conceptions of Behaviour......Page 113 8. Agency and Causal Explanation......Page 131 III Mind, Causation and Explanation......Page 156 9. Introduction: Personal and Subpersonal Levels......Page 157 10. Dennett's Naturalism......Page 168 11. Causation in Intuitive Physics and in Commonsense Psychology......Page 185 12. Semantic Innocence and Psychological Understanding......Page 195 Postscript: Externalism......Page 217 Notes......Page 222 References......Page 252 Subject Index......Page 260 Name Index......Page 263 How is our conception of what there is affected by the fact that we count ourselves as inhabitants of the natural world? How do our actions fit into a world that is altered through our agency? And how do we accommodate our understanding of one another as fellow subjects of experience - as beings with thoughts and wants and hopes and fears? These questions provide the impetus for the detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation presented in this book. The answers offer a distinctive view of questions about "the mind's place in nature," and they argue for a particular position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism. This position opposes the whole drift of the last thirty or forty years of philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world. Jennifer Hornsby sets naive naturalism against dualism, but without advancing the claims of "materialism," "physicalism," or "naturalism" as these have come to be known. She shows how we can, and why we should, abandon the view that thoughts and actions, to be seen as real, must be subject to scientific explanation. Jennifer Hornsby offers here detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation. In her distinctive view of questions about "the mind's place in nature" she argues for a particular position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism.