Exam 4: Mind and Body

Differentiate between two senses in which an occurrence was said to be explained, according to Ryle. For instance: Why did the glass break? One explanation is "because a stone hit it," and another is "because it is brittle." Which explanation is causal, and which is expressing an underlying law like proposition? How did Ryle apply this concept of "different senses of an explanation" to the concept of "disposition" in his analysis of the mind?

If you believe that Data, the android on the TV show Star Trek, is sentient and conscious, even though his "brain" is made out of silicon and metal, then you would be a(n) __________.

J. J. C. Smart argued that the identity theory was false because it was incompatible with modern science.

__________, in all forms, becomes nonsense in one's own case when one is trying to understand and talk about one's own mental states.

Husserl's conception of consciousness depends on __________.

Why do you suppose it was much easier for Descartes to prove the existence of his own mind than anyone else's? Why was Descartes's proof of his own mental existence foundational? How did he eventually argue for the existence of other minds?

When Aristotle wrote about the soul, he was referring to __________.

__________ claimed that his various fleeting thoughts could not be unified into a coherent, enduring self without the intervention of a higher power.

Behaviorism is the idea that __________.

According to Ryle, it is a necessary feature of whatever has physical existence that it is in __________.

Nagel claims that the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means that there is something it is like to __________ that organism.

In reference to the "contents" of consciousness philosopher William James developed this popular phrase, __________.

Differentiate between the two senses of the meaning of "identity," that is, empirical identity could be discovered through observation, experimentation, and experience, whereas logical identity is about synonymous terminology.

The __________ denied dualism by insisting that mental terms referred to a neurological process that scientists someday would be able to specify precisely.

Ryle believed that it was a mistake to think that "the mind" and its events were some strange and mysteriously private sort of thing behind our behavior when, in fact, the mind was the pattern of our behavior and not "behind" behavior at all.

According to Ryle, attributing a mental property to someone is logically equivalent to saying that the person will act in a certain way.

__________ believed that belief in consciousness went back to the ancient days of superstition and magic.

According to Ryle, a(n) __________ is a tendency for something to happen given certain conditions.

__________ believed that with our increasing knowledge of neurology, our ordinary language would be seriously revised.

Why do eliminative materialists believe that a smooth intertheoretic reduction between folk psychology and neurobiology is not possible? They don't think that mental states, such as thoughts, desires, fears, beliefs, and so forth, match up in a one-to-one correspondence to brain states (i.e., particular patterns of neuronal firings). Paul Churchland, for one, was convinced that folk-psychological terms were not simply incomplete representations of our inner states but rather that they were misrepresentations, in the way phlogiston was. Use the phlogiston example to argue the eliminative materialist's case that the poverty of our current conceptual framework will be overhauled with the advancement of neuroscience.