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Show Chapter XV. Seven Dogmas of Humeanism 606 this first, critical half of the discussion with a brief conceptual map that locates the Humean conception of the self within its network of Positivist metaphysical dogmas - dogmas which lend one another mutual support and enhance the prima facie credibility of the Humean conception in relation to them. And I offer a very brief preview of how I intend to temper them in the second, substantive half of this discussion. One such dogma that provides a rationale for the Humean position may be found in the epiphenomenalist view of the mind that regards mental contents as nonmaterial and so causally impotent by-products of physical processes, to the extent that they exist at all. If no mental contents have causal efficacy in behavior, then a fortiori thoughts, beliefs, deliberation, reflection and reasoning can have none. Reason as a source of moral motivation is ruled out by fiat. But I argue in Volume II, Chapter V that this inference could not provide support for the causal efficacy of desire without further argument to demonstrate that occurrent desires are or can be interpreted as exclusively physical, whereas occurrent thoughts and beliefs are exclusively mental. And I call into question whether it is possible to demonstrate this. A second, companion dogma is that of mind-body materialism, which claims that only third-personally observable physical matter exists. This is the metaphysical bedrock on which attempts to reduce desire to the exclusively physical rely. Again my aim is not to deny the existence or causal efficacy of observable physical matter, even though the concept of physical matter is starting to look increasingly primitive from the perspective of theoretical physics. It is rather to make explicit what most contemporary moral philosophy takes for granted, i.e. that first-personally observable mental states exist just as robustly and efficaciously. I undertake this task as well in Volume II's Chapter V, along with a third with which it is intertwined, namely behaviorism, the view that there are no inner states - at least none worth scientific notice; and that only those expressed in overt behavior are of interest. This dogma has a particularly robust pedigree, in psychology as well as in mid-century Positivism. Conjointly these three dogmas bear a strong family resemblance to a fourth: what I describe in Volume II, Chapter V as the ideal of spontaneity and what neoclassical economics describes as the theory of revealed preference, i.e. that all inner states are revealed in overt physical behavior, whether verbal or nonverbal. In these cases as well, it is not the concentrated attention to physical behavior to which I object, but rather the doctrinal insistence that physical behavior is all there is. I argue that the anti-psychologistic constellation of epiphenomenalism, materialism and behaviorism was the expression of a reactive, mid-century aversion to psychological interiority consequent on the trauma of the second World War, which it is now time to re-evaluate. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
