Paul Churchland has just published a third edition of Matter and Consciousness, his widely used introductory textbook on the philosophy of mind. The blog Philosophy of Brains has posted a symposium on the book, with contributions from Amy Kind, William Ramsey, and Pete Mandik. Prof. Kind, who deals with Churchland’s discussion of dualism, is kind to him indeed -- a little too kind, as it happens. Longtime readers will recall a series of posts I did several years ago on the previous edition of Churchland’s book, in which I showed how extremely superficial, misleading, and frankly incompetent is its treatment of dualism. Prof. Kind commends Churchland’s “clear writing style and incisive argumentation” as “a model for us all.” While I agree with her about the clarity of Churchland’s style, I cannot concur with her judgment of the quality of the book’s argumentation, for at least with respect to dualism, this new edition is as bad as the old.
As a public service for those hapless undergrads, grad students, and general readers whose knowledge of dualism might otherwise come entirely from Churchland’s inept treatment, I post below links to (and descriptions of the contents of) the four installments of my series on Churchland’s critique of dualism. I will also make some brief remarks about the new material in the latest edition of the book. Here are the original posts:
Part I: In this post I discuss how Churchland misrepresents the content of dualism, ignores the main arguments in its favor defended by dualists past and present, and overemphasizes weaker arguments that dualists themselves do not put much stock in in the first place.
Part II: Here I discuss how Churchland’s response to the argument from introspection is utterly fallacious, and indeed unwittingly gives support to dualism rather than undermining it. His response to the argument from irreducibility is also fallacious, and superficial too, completely ignoring a rather obvious retort that has been raised by prominent philosophers.
Part III: Here I show how Churchland’s positive arguments against dualism are entirely without force, directed as they are at a crude straw man, and either completely miss the point of the key arguments for dualism or simply beg the question against them.
Part IV: Here I discuss Churchland’s response (in some later papers reprinted in his book A Neurocomputational Perspective) to Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument,” in which he attacks the same straw man version of dualism that was his target in Matter and Consciousness.
Though Kind is complimentary toward Churchland, she does offer some criticism of the book. She too laments the “misleading impression” Churchland is bound to give the unwary reader about the role religion plays in philosophical arguments for dualism. She also laments Churchland’s failure to convey the force of more recent arguments for dualism, and his neglect of questions raised by recent philosophers of mind about whether we have a clear understanding of matter (never mind mind), and of views like Russellian monism which aim to present an alternative to both dualism and materialism.
Kind also allows that “one might well have hoped for greater updating” in Churchland’s recommendations for further reading. That is putting it mildly. One will find in Churchland’s book no passing reference even to the works, much less the ideas and arguments, of prominent dualist philosophers like John Foster, Richard Swinburne, W. D. Hart, Howard Robinson, E. J. Lowe, William Hasker, and Brie Gertler. Not to mention the Aristotelian and Thomistic arguments of philosophers like David Oderberg, William Jaworski, and James Ross.
As Kind notes, “much of the argumentation of the chapter [discussing dualism] is retained from the previous edition.” In other words, the old caricatures and fallacies remain. Churchland does add some material on David Chalmers’ “zombie argument” and on the argument of Thomas Nagel’s famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” but it is as superficial as the existing material was. Indeed, the response to Nagel is just a rehash of the same straw man argument from A Neurocomputational Perspective that I discussed in Part IV on my series of posts on Churchland, linked to above. And the response to Chalmers commits essentially the same fallacy as the response to the argument from introspection that I discussed in Part II.
The only thing more outrageous than Churchland’s persistence in superficiality and caricature would be the continued widespread use of his book as a main text for introductory courses in philosophy of mind -- at least if it were not heavily supplemented with readings that correct his errors, and actually bother to present the main arguments for dualism.
[Some further relevant reading: Links to other posts on dualism, materialism, the mind-body problem, etc. are collected here. Churchland is by no means alone among materialists in responding only superficially to Nagel’s argument, as we saw in my series of posts on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. Churchland is also a proponent of eliminative materialism, a view I criticized in great detail in a series of posts on Alex Rosenberg’s paper “Eliminativism without Tears,” and in an earlier series on Rosenberg’s book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.]
