Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

The contrast between the space of reasons and the realm of law to which Sellars implicitly appeals was not available before modern times. Ancient philosophers didn’t feel a tension between the idea that knowledge is a normative status and the idea of an exercise of natural powers. Therefore the contrast Sellars draws can set an agenda for philosophy nowadays. I want to distinguish two ways of undertaking such a project. The idea is that the organization of the space of reasons is not, as Sellars suggests, alien to the kind of structure natural science discovers in the world. Thinking and knowing are part of our way of being animals. To show that, I will distinguish between two kinds of naturalism: a restrictive naturalism and liberal naturalism. I want to suggest that Millikan’s argument in favor of a restrictive naturalism when criticizing Frege’s semantic is vitiated by adherence to a residual Cartesianism. This is the result of a familiar trade-off; the price of discarding Cartesian immaterialism, while staying within restrictive naturalism, is that one’s singled-out part of nature is no longer special enough to be credited with powers of thought. I will argue that the proper home of the idea of “grasping senses” is in describing patterns in our lives – our mental lives in this case – that are intelligible only in terms of the relations that structure the space of reasons. This patterning involves genuine rationality, not just “mechanical rationality” (so called). Liberal naturalism needs no more, to make the idea of “grasping senses” unproblematic, than a perfectly reasonable insistence that such patterns really do shape our lives.