Publisher's Synopsis
What is distinctive of the mental? In "Mental Reality", Galen Strawson argues that the answer is not intelligence or sapience, representational content or intentionality broadly understood, but conscious experience. Strawson challenges neo-behaviourist accounts of the mental. He argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind is still confused by positivism and its various offspring. It gives undue primacy of place to nonmental phenomena, publicly observable phenomena, and behavioural phenomena in its account of the nature of mental life.;Many philosophers think that reference to behaviour enters centrally and indispensably into any adequate account of the essential nature of mind. They are motivated by many things: some by the theory of evolution, others by aspects of the theory of meaning. The latter treat the claim about behaviour as a conceptual truth. They see it as part of the larger claim that reference to publicly observable phenomena and nonmental phenomena must enter centrally and indispensably into any adequate account of the essential nature of mind. It is still quite widely held that a satisfactory account of mind must ultimately be given in wholly nonmental terms.;Strawson questions whether any of this is right. He describes an alternative position, naturalized Cartesianism, that couples the materialist view that mind is entirely natural and wholly physical with respect for the idea that the only distinctively mental phenomena are those of conscious experience.
