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On Quine’s Philosophy of Mind

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Abstract

In this paper, I offer a systematic account of Quine’s philosophy of mind. In doing so, I respond to an interpretive problem of reconciling Quine’s admission of irreducible mentalistic predicates with his physicalism. I argue that the required reconciliation takes place in a theory of mind that accords a central explanatory role to dispositions, but which nevertheless is non-behavioristic and non-reductive. A second, and intermediate, project of this paper is to explicate Quine’s account of dispositions and their status in Quine’s regimented theory. Particularly, I will argue that Quine’s non-reductive physicalism about the mind rests on a distinction between two kinds of dispositions.

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Notes

  1. Quine, W. V. Word and Object (1960), p. 264.

  2. Quine, W. V. Word and Object (1960), pp. 210, 257–260.

  3. Quine, W.V. “Things and Their Place in Theories” (1995), p.244.

  4. For more on proxy functions, see From Stimulus to Science, p.86; “The Language and Scope of Science”, pp. 206, “Things and Their Place in Theories”, p. 244.

  5. I follow Quine’s criterion for ontological commitment as suggested in Quine, W. “On What There Is” (2004), pp. 177–193.

  6. See Quine, W.V. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (2004), pp. 31–45.

  7. See Ryle (2009), G. The Concept of Mind, pp. 100–131.

  8. Quine, W.V. “Facts of the Matter” (1978), p. 167.

  9. Quine, W.V. Word and Object (1960), pp. 33, 222–265.

  10. Quine, W.V. Roots of Reference (1973), p.8.

  11. Ryle, op. cit.

  12. Quine, W.V. Roots of Reference (1973), p.12.

  13. Objective probability here is what is now often called “frequentist probability”. Here, the probability of P in a finite reference class Q is the relative frequency of actual occurrences of P in Q. For the history and development of this distinctions between “objective” and “subjective” probability, see Daston (1994), “How Probabilities Came to Be Objective and Subjective”.

  14. Ibid, pp. 8–14.

  15. Quine, W.V. Word and Object (1960), p.222.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Quine, W.V. “Propositional Objects” (1969), p. 144.

  18. For an example of this, see Wasserman 2011, “Dispositions and Generics”.

  19. Quine, W.V. “Natural Kinds” (1969), pp. 129–130, 134–137.

  20. Quine, W.V. “Mind and Verbal Dispositions” (2004), p. 322.

  21. Quine, W.V. Word and Object (1960), pp. 224–225.

  22. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this.

  23. Quine, W.V. “Natural Kinds” (1969), p. 134.

  24. Quine, W.V. From Stimulus to Science (1995), p. 76.

  25. Quine, W.V. Word and Object (1960), p. 31.

  26. Quine, W.V. Roots of Reference (1973), p. 10.

  27. Here, Quine is showing sensitivity to the kinds of problems raised by Hilary Putnam against identity-theory. See Putnam (1967), “Psychological Predicates”.

  28. Quine discusses these examples in From Stimulus to Science, pp. 87–88 and “Mind, Brain and Behaviour”, p.4.

  29. As an anonymous reviewer has pointed out to be, even some purely physical predicates are subject to multiple-realizability, and thus not subject to a simple inter-theoretic reduction. For instance, temperature, being characterized as mean kinetic energy is differently realized in solids and plasmas.

  30. Quine, W.V. From Stimulus to Science (1995), p. 87.

  31. Quine, W.V. “Mind and Verbal Dispositions” (2004), p. 324.

  32. Quine, W.V. “Reply to P. F. Strawson” (1986), p. 533.

  33. Quine, W.V. From Stimulus to Science (1995), p.87.

  34. Quine, W.V. Roots of Reference (1973), p. 14.

  35. Quine, W.V. “Facts of the Matter” (1978), p. 167.

  36. Quine, W.V. “Facts of the Matter” (1978), p. 162.

  37. At the time of writing, the notion of supervenience was already a familiar one to Quine, having been made popular by Davidson (1970) in his “Mental Events”.

  38. Quine, W.V. “Facts of the Matter” (1978), p. 162.

  39. Quine, W.V. “States of Mind” (1985), p. 5.

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  1. Centre for Philosophy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

    Prashant Kumar

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Kumar, P. On Quine’s Philosophy of Mind. Philosophia 50, 97–107 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00379-7

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