The Sociality of Reason
Term:
Fall 2011
Subject Code:
GPHI
Course Number:
6648
When thinking about the minds of
others, whether human or animal, it is easy to worry that we can never
really know what their mental lives are like. That is, it is easy to think that there is a
distinction between our inner mental lives and
the outer world, that our ownmental lives have a kind of
ineliminable privacy, and that thisprivacy implies that the qualitative
character of our mentalexperience can never find full
outward expression. Such worries aboutknowing the minds of others rest upon
a conception of the mind as aself-contained, private, inner space
whose contents can beindividuated independently of its
relations to the outside world andothers. In many ways, such a conception of the mind
has becomephilosophical common sense, as
evidenced, for example, by the easewith which we worry about the
ineffability of qualia. Over the pasthalf-century, however, this
conception of the mind has come undersustained attack from a variety of
angles. This course is anin-depth look at one such line of
attack: the externalist challenge incontemporary philosophy of mind. We will begin by setting the stagefor this attack by surveying a number
of prominent philosophical viewsabout the mind that support
conceiving of it as self-contained, suchas Cartesian dualism, mind-brain
identity theory, and functionalism.We will then trace the emergence and
development of the externalistchallenge, focusing on figures such
as Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge,Donald Davidson, John McDowell, John
Haugeland, and Andy Clark.
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