Abstract
In most methodologies of social sciences one of the crucial problems is the relationship between mental and social phenomena. Often the problem is mediated by concepts like individual action or decision. In other cases the problem is implicit or even hidden. Nevertheless, every methodology of social sciences must, sooner or later, “cross the street” that connects mind and society. In the same way as the parallel mind–body problem, the mind-society problem concerns a number of variegated fundamental philosophical questions. These are metaphysical when they deal with the existence of one or more ontological levels of reality between mind and society; with the efficacy of social causation as distinct from individual mental causation; with the feature of social properties as second order properties compared to the first order mental properties; with supervenience, epiphenomenalism or realizationism between the mental and social dimensions; and so on. They are epistemological when they privilege the problem of explanation and representation. Can we explain social phenomena by connection with other social events or only by reduction to individual mental phenomena? Can we establish genuinely autonomous scientific laws at the social level or should they only be derived from the laws that represent the psychological dimension?
The present chapter is a modified version of Viale, R. (2000). The mind-society problem, published in Mind & Society, 1, vol. 1.
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Notes
- 1.
Prospect theory is an empirical theory of choice, which claims that people in a loss condition have a greater risk propensity than those in a gain condition (see Chap. 2, Part II of this volume).
- 2.
I’m using the term reduction in a broad meaning inclusive of reductionist and non-reductionist approaches introduced in the previous chapter.
- 3.
According to this tradition, a law of nature should be part of a deductive system of laws, each of which is linked logically to the others.
- 4.
Psychophysical dualism is composed of the following main alternative doctrines:
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(a)
Autonomism: it conceives body and mind as mutually independent.
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(b)
Parallelism: for Leibniz, body and mind are parallel or synchronous to one another.
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(c)
Epiphenomenalism: for Broad and Ayer, body affects or causes mind.
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(d)
Animism: for Plato and Augustine, mind affects, causes, animates, or controls the body.
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(e)
Interactionism: for Descartes and Popper-Eccles, body and mind interact.
Psychophysical monism is composed of the following main alternative doctrines:
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(a)
Panpsychism: Whitehead and Theillard de Chardin think that everything is mental.
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(b)
Neutral Monism: for Russell and Schlick, the physical and the mental are so many aspects or manifestations of a single entity.
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(c)
Eliminative Materialism: for Behaviourism, nothing is mental.
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(d)
Reductive Materialism: for Lashley and Smart, mind is physical.
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(e)
Emergentist Materialism: for Darwin, Hebb, and Bunge, the mind is a set of emergent brain functions and activities.
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(a)
- 5.
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(a)
Mind must be immaterial because we know it differently from the way we know matter: the former knowledge is private, the latter is public.
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(b)
Phenomenal predicates cannot be reduced to physical predicates, so the mind must be substantially different from the brain.
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(c)
There must be a mind animating the brain machinery, for machines are mindless (Popper and Eccles 1977).
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(d)
Dualism squares with emergentism and the hypothesis of the level structure of reality.
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(e)
Whereas neurons fire digitally, we can have continuous experiences (Sellars 1963).
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(a)
- 6.
For example if a is equal to b, i.e. if Mary is equal to my sister, then we can say that Fa, i.e. Mary has stomach ache, is equal to Fb, my sister has stomach ache. We may exchange Mary with my sister without twisting the truth.
- 7.
A classical example comes from Frege (1982). In astronomy, the entity denoted by the expression “the morning star” is identical to the one denoted by the expression “the evening star”, so it should be logical to expect that, on the basis of the Leibniz law, these expressions could be interchangeable in every linguistic context. On the contrary, these substitutions are false in propositions including predicates that express mental states like “believing that”. For example, if a is equal to b, i.e. the “morning star” is identical to the “evening star”, Fa, i.e. “the ancients believed the morning star was identical to the morning star” is not the same as Fb, i.e. “the ancients believed that the morning star was identical to the evening star”.
- 8.
For example, if we establish that “Mary has stomach ache” means “Mary touches her stomach, takes the pills, complains, etc.”, then every time that “Mary touches her stomach, takes the pills, complains, etc.” it means that “Mary has stomach ache”. But what if Mary simulates a pain that she does not feel, or she truly has stomach ache but does not display “stomach ache behavior”? Then the proposition “Mary touches her stomach, takes the pills, complains, etc.” may also be synonymous with propositions like “Mary simulates stomach ache”, and vice versa “Mary simulates stomach ache” may be expressed by “Mary touches her stomach, takes the pills, complains, etc.…”.
- 9.
For example, the causal proposition “Mary took the medicine because she had stomach ache means that “if there had been medicine, Mary would have taken it and the medicine really was there”.
- 10.
For example it is impossible that the dispositional analysis of “If Mary has a stomach-ache” can mean “Mary is disposed to exhibit stomach ache behaviour.” It is impossible because it is a typical example of event-event causation: the stomach ache mental event causes the disposition mental event to exhibit stomach ache behaviour. The fact that she may or may not exhibit it depends on the other events interacting at a mental level, such as the desire to get rid of the stomach ache, a belief in the existence and efficacy of the stomach ache treatment, etc.
- 11.
The CSIT is divided in two main alternatives:
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(a)
Reductive Materialism: the CNS is a physical identity that only differs from the other physical system in complexity. Hence an explanation of the mental should require only physical concepts and theories in the narrow or technical sense of physical. Reductive materialism involves both ontological reduction (i.e. levelling) and epistemological reduction (i.e. transformation of psychology into a branch of physics).
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(b)
Emergentist Materialism: the CNS, far from being a physical entity, is a biosystem, i.e. a complex thing endowed with properties and laws peculiar to living things and moreover very peculiar in itself, i.e. not shared by all biosystems. Mental functions would be CNS functions, and far from being purely physical processes, they would emerge in relation to the physical level (Bunge 1980).
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(a)
- 12.
According to this theory, typical mental state attributions are deductions by inference of the best explanation, which move from the behaviour effect to the supposed mental causes. Mary takes the medicine because she has stomach ache. This movement is possible because we acknowledge the existence of the mental causes that are identified with the neurophysiological causes. This logical inference is never demonstrative, but may supply some explanation that reflects the evidence better than other alternative hypotheses. On the other hand, with regard to causal relations, it is clear that if there are two states S1 and S2, and S2 is the effect of S1, it might be possible that the same situation may occur not as an effect of S1. A causal relation from the effect to the cause is always contingent. Every effect might have had a cause that is different from what really happened.
- 13.
“A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference.” This slogan can be cashed out in many different ways. But to illustrate the basic idea, imagine that there is a perfect forger. Her copies of paintings not only fool the art dealers, but are in fact exact duplicates of the originals down to the precise placement of every molecule of pigment – indeed, down to every microphysical detail. Suppose that she produces such a copy of El Greco's A View of Toledo. It is of course different from the original in various respects – it is a forgery, it was not painted by El Greco, it is worth quite a bit less at Sotheby's, and so forth. But the forgery is also exactly like the original in other respects. It is the same shape, size, and weight. The surface of the canvas contains the same arrangements of colors and shapes – a blue rectangle here, a green swirl there. Indeed, it looks just the same, at least to a single viewer under identical lighting conditions and so forth. Perhaps it is even just as beautiful as the original, though that is more controversial. The properties that the forgery is guaranteed to share with the original are those that supervene upon its microphysical properties. Two paintings that are microphysically just alike are guaranteed to be just alike in the arrangement of colors and shapes on their canvases. That is, you cannot change the arrangement of colors and shapes on a painting's canvas without changing its microphysical properties. This is just to say that the arrangement of colors and shapes supervenes on its microphysical properties” (Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy).
- 14.
As I will show in the following chapters of this volume, nowadays there are many data coming from brain research, realized mainly with FMRi and other techniques, that seem to be quite successful in discovering a correspondence between particular neural structures and mental events (Gazzaniga et al. 2002; Smith and Kosslyn 2007).
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Viale, R. (2012). The Mind-Society Problem. In: Methodological Cognitivism. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24743-9_3
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