[ExI] common sense

Gordon Swobe gts_2000 at yahoo.com
Tue Mar 9 15:31:45 UTC 2010


--- On Mon, 3/8/10, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:

> One might well believe that the sky would fall were we to
> embrace the opposite POV

If we embrace the opposite point of view in which we do reduce mental phenomena to nothing but third-person objective physical facts, both epistemically and ontologically, then we have embraced type-type (or its close cousin token-token) physicalism. In the neurology of pain, for example, stimulation of C-fibers correlate with the experience of pain. The type-type physicalist reduces mental phenomena both epistemically and ontologically and declares that C-fiber stimulation IS pain. 

But common sense tells us that "pain" means something that we actually experience in the first-person. Third-person stories about C-fibers do not explain or capture the subjective first-person experience of what we mean by the word. In effect we lose the concept of pain -- the very thing that interests us in this case -- when we reduce it philosophically to nothing but its objective third-person description. Type-type physicalism defies common sense, literally.

One might ask why anyone should want to embrace type-type or token-token physicalism, and the answer seems to be that many philosophers of the materialistic persuasion cannot see that as materialists we can reduce mental phenomena scientifically to third-person descriptions while preserving their subjective reality -- and that we can do this *without* embracing dualism. We can reduce them to third-person causal descriptions without also reducing them ontologically; in this case, we can tell a true scientific story about the neurology of pain while recognizing that our epistemic reduction to objective scientific facts does not entail an ontological reduction. 

We can and should reduce mental phenomena scientifically in third-person terms, but those phenomena nevertheless have an irreducible first-person ontology. Once we accept that simple fact, the word "pain" and others like it can remain in our philosophical vocabulary. "Pain" represents just one of many possible real subjective experiences, just as common sense informs us. 

-gts




      



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