Note on the philosophy of mind

I defend the following theses:

1. Only I can take direct cognizance of the states and processes of my own mind (self-luminosity) save in exceptional cases. Thus I defend qualified privileged access without ruling out the possibility of direct cognizance of the existence of other minds.

2. Mind-conduct words essentially involve episodes of private experience and modifications in the stream of consciousness.

3. The mind is a field of causes and effects.

First of all, these theses are not open to attack via an argument from linguistic usage as examples supporting these theses can be easily adduced.  How can this be squared with the belief that everyday language is in 'perfect logical order' ?

We note that thesis 1 does not necessarily commit one to Cartesian dualism. Hence arguments against Cartesian dualism cannot be used against it.  Indeed there are even physicalist interpretations of thesis 1.

We must be careful with the term 'behaviorism' (associated with J. B. Watson) and be careful to define in what sense we are using it, for instance there is mere methodological behaviorism which rules out introspection as a scientific method.  But Watsonian behaviorism rapidly becomes inconsistent once we start to inquire a little bit more carefully into what constitutes 'publicly observable behavior' in terms of states of the physical body (i.e. should subtle internal physiological changes count ?). Or dubiously interpreting linguistic accounts of internal experience as mere external 'linguistic behavior'.

We define metaphysical behaviorism as a position that states that there are no conscious states or processes or private objects and  that these last are fictions.  This position is incompatible with thesis 1.

We define analytical behaviorism as a position that states that statements about mind and consciousness can be analyzed in terms of the behavior of material things. In other words, statements involving first-person experience can be analyzed into third-person behavioral observation. This is likewise incompatible with thesis 1.

A metaphysical behaviorist could not consistently use expressions such as when an intelligent agent is active he is au fait both with what he has completed and what remains to be done or we eavesdrop on our own unvoiced utterances or speak of a 'tune in my head' or 'image in the mind's eye' or use 'paying heed to' or 'object of retrospection'. And what about the sentence 'he became conscious when he woke up' ?

The structure of natural language harmonizes well with thesis 1 as an analysis of our usage  of to take notice, take heed of, observe, introspect and their adequacy for different forms of sensations shows.

A person's actions can be caused by private occurrences.  Here cause does not need to be interpreted as sufficient reason so there is no problem with resolutions or deliberations. And to ask about someone's goal or motivation for performing an act can indeed be entirely distinct from asking about behavior patterns for similar sets of circumstances.

We note the interesting fact that the verb 'imagine' can be used with a noun 'imagine an A' or with a that-clause 'imagine that p'.  But this last can be also expressed in a grammatically concealed way in 'fancy p' which reads 'isn't it surprising that p'.  This should lead us to question using solely grammatical criteria for discerning deeper level categories. And many predicates that apply to externally perceived images apply equally to images perceived internally in the mind's eye suggesting the two pertain to the same 'category'.

Intelligent actions can be both meditations and immediate as even the most rudimentary analysis of mathematical practice shows. Thus appealing to an infinite regress argument - clearly patterned after Bradley's famous regress argument -  to refute Cartesian dualism fails. The same goes for criticism against self-luminosity, for the very definition of self-luminosity involves knowing the act of knowing without this knowing becoming itself an object of knowledge.

The project we propose involves exploring the anti-solipsist thesis: self-luminosity implies heteroluminosity.  This can be traced back to Kant's arguments in his 'refutation of idealism'.  The knowledge of our process of knowing, and thus the knowledge of our own mind,  is bound up with the knowledge of the existence of other minds (and not only 'objects' as for Kant).