PHI302/6225 Autumn 2024 Lecture notes 4: ’Mind’ and ‘Body’

Linguistic confusions

It’s easy to get confused in philosophy, because the subject matter is complicated and
messy. But you can make yourself more prone to confusion by using certain technical
terms—jargon words—without properly understanding them. This is a very common fault
in student writing, and it’s the reason why we encourage students not to use technical
terms unless it’s absolutely necessary. It’s better to put everything in plain, simple
language. The plainer and simpler you can make it, the better. (In the book, Segal and I
tried to minimise the use of technical terms, and those we did use were carefully defined.)

Some jargon words are easy to spot, because they’re not part of ordinary, everyday
language: existentialism; expressivism; supervenience (or supervenes on); coextensive;
intentionality; functionally equivalent. One technical term that I’ve used is ‘substance’, and
I was careful to define it. Terms like this need defining, because there are different things
that they can mean. This also serves to remind you, the author, of their meaning.

But a few technical terms sound like ordinary language, yet are used in philosophy (and
sometimes in other disciplines too) in a special, technical sense. These terms are
especially dangerous, because we may not see the need to explain what we mean by
them.

One example is ‘soul’. I’ve explained carefully what this term means in connection with
dualism, but it’s often used in a more nebulous way.

More dangerous is the word ‘self’, used as a free-standing noun. There’s no problem with
ordinary ordinary words like ‘herself’ or ‘self-employed’, but ‘self’ in philosophy—and in
psychology too—is a morass. When philosophers talk about ‘the self’, or ‘a self’ or
‘selves’, it’s very often completely unclear what they’re trying to say, and they almost never
explain. Sometimes expressions like ‘the metaphysics of the self’ just mean the
metaphysical nature of human beings. But when people say things like ‘modern
neuroscience has exploded the myth of the self’, we’re left guessing what they mean.
They’re certainly not saying that neuroscience suggests that there are no such things as
human beings. Certain versions of Indian Buddhism teach that there is no self. Do they
mean that there are no human beings (and more generally no dogs or cats or trees)? It’s
not clear.

‘The mind’

The word ‘mind’ is less infected with obscurity than ‘self’, but still needs careful handling.
Dualism is often stated by saying ‘the mind is distinct from the body’. You may be

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tempted to say this yourself. (And it’s the conclusion Descartes draws from the ‘divisibility
argument’ in the Sixth Meditation, which I’ll talk about later.) This formulation is liable to
mislead. The terms ‘mind’ and ‘body’ are very dangerous words in metaphysics, and
philosophers would be better off without them.

Why do I say this? Set aside the word ‘body’ for now, and consider the view that the mind
is immaterial or nonphysical. What does that mean? Can you restate it in a way that
doesn’t use the term ‘mind’? What does the term ‘the mind’ refer to? If it refers to
anything, then more specific terms like ‘my mind’ and ‘your mind’ will also refer to
something. These terms suggest that each of us—and probably every dog or chicken too
—has a mind—just one of them—much as each of us has one mother. So what is this
thing that each of us has exactly one of, and in what sense do we have it?

You might answer: an immaterial thinking substance—a soul. But whether we have minds
in that sense is disputed: materialists deny it. It makes our having minds equivalent to
substance dualism. Yet materialists don’t deny that we have minds. (Materialism is
sometimes stated by saying ‘the mind is the body’.) They don’t take the word ‘mind’ to
mean ‘immaterial thinking thing’. But if the two sides of the debate use the word ‘mind’
with a different meaning, they’ll be talking past each other. Defining ‘mind’ as ‘immaerial
thinking substance’ would be, as van Inwagen says, tendentious, in the sense that it
makes a serious philosophical claim into a trivial verbal falsehood—a contradiction in
terms. The materialist will say, ‘If that’s what you mean by ‘mind’ there are no minds.’ An
acceptable definition of the term ‘mind’, or of the possessive phrase ‘x’s mind’, must be
one that both dualists and materialists can agree on: after all, are they not offering
competing accounts of the mind—that is, of the same thing? What might it be? Can we
complete the formula

x is y’s mind iffdf…x…y…?

I haven’t got any good guesses here. Now our inability to define a word doesn’t by itself
imply that it has no clear meaning. The word ‘set’ in the mathematical sense, for example,
cannot be defined in any useful way, and the same goes for modal terms like ‘possible’
and moral terms like ‘good’. Yet we know perfectly well how to reason using these terms.
But we don’t know how to reason using the term ‘mind’, at least as it’s used in sentences
like ‘the mind is distinct from the body’.

If we accept that there is such a thing as my mind, or that the phrase ‘Olson’s mind’ refers
to something, then we need to ask what the relation is between this thing and myself. We
each have a mind, just as we each have a mother. What sort of having is it, and what is
the thing had? Pure dualists may want to say that I am my mind. But this won’t be true by
the definition of the word ‘mind’: we can’t say that x is y’s mind iffdf x is y. That would
make the claim that I am distinct from my mind not just false, but self-contradictory. (It
would be, again, tendentious.) And what’s more, it would make the word ‘mind’ usesless:

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there would be no point in speaking of x’s mind—for any x—because it means nothing
more than simply ‘x’. What, then, does it mean to say that I am my mind? And is it
something that materialists can agree on? Or does materialism imply that I am not my
mind? And if it does, what is the relation between myself and my mind?

I think these are unhelpful questions. It’s clear what it means to ask whether I am a
material thing or an immaterial thing (or something with both material part and an
immaterial part). It’s not clear what it means to ask whether the mind is material or
immaterial, or what the relation is between myself and my mind, or even what would count
as an answer to that question. We can ask all the important questions without using the
word ‘mind’. That word only introduces new questions whose meaning is unclear.

The word ‘mind’ can lead us astray in other ways too. It’s worse than obscure: it can lend
illegitimate support to immaterialism. Consider Socrates. If minds are things that we have,
he certainly had one. What sort of thing was it? How could it be described? We say that
Socrates had a cunning and inquisitive mind. On the face of it, that sentence suggests that
his mind was cunning and inquisitive. But we can’t say that Socrates’ mind had a beard, or
a snub nose, or that it stood five feet, eight inches tall in its socks. We can’t say that it has
any physical property. It’s not that this would conflict with what we know about Socrates’
biography, but that it’s incompatible with the meaning of the word “mind”: the statements
are patently absurd. If the term “Socrates’ mind” is the name of a thing, it looks as if it must
be a thing that did not have a beard or a snub nose. It must be a thing having mental
properties like being inquisitive but no physical properties: an immaterial thinking thing.

This gives us a quick and dirty argument for dualism. Socrates’ mind could hardly be a
different thinking thing from Socrates himself, with its own thoughts: it couldn’t be, for
example, that Socrates had an inquisitive mind but was himself completely incurious. If his
mind thinks, its thinking must be his thinking. But if it’s immaterial (because, as the
argument suggests, it can’t have physical properties), then for Socrates to think is for him
to relate in some way to an immaterial thinking thing. On the natural assumption that this
immaterial thinker would have to be Socrates himself or a part of him, it would follow that
he thinks by having an immaterial thinking part. And the same would go for the rest of us.
We appear to have derived dualism from the very meaning of the word “mind.”

The “mind” argument, as we might call this, is sheer sophistry, and as far as I’m aware, no
professional philosopher has ever tried to argue for dualism in this way. Where does it go
wrong? Consider an analogous argument. Socrates had a kind heart. The term “heart”
here is of course metaphorical, but what sort of thing could this metaphorical heart of his
be? How could we describe it, beyond its being kind? We certainly can’t say that it had a
beard or a snub nose: that’s clearly wrong. Reasoning analogous to the “mind” argument
thus leads to the conclusion that Socrates’ heart is something that did not have a beard.
Since Socrates had a heart, it must be a second kind thing in addition to him: an absurd
conclusion.

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It’s evident that the term “Socrates’ heart” here is not the name of a thing that Socrates in
some sense has. Having a kind heart is not like having a kind mother. To say that Socrates
had a kind heart is to say no more than that Socrates himself was kind. Putting it in terms
of his heart simply indicates that we’re speaking of his character or emotions. That’s why
we can’t say that his heart had a beard: having a beard is not a matter of character or
emotions.

The “mind” argument appears to commit the same fallacy. The term “Socrates’ mind” (in
ordinary language, anyway) is not the name of a thing that Socrates in some sense has:
having an inquisitive mind is not like having an inquisitive mother. To say that Socrates had
an inquisitive mind is just to say that Socrates himself was inquisitive. Putting it in terms of
his mind simply emphasizes that we’re speaking of his cognitive properties—of his
knowledge and reasoning. (This doesn’t hold for all mental properties. We can’t say that
Socrates’ mind is sad or is fond of newts or has a headache. The term ‘Socrates’ mind’ is
more or less synonymous with ‘Socrates’ intellect’—which no one would take to refer to a
thinking thing.) That’s why we can’t say that his mind had a beard: having a beard is not a
cognitive property. So although it may be correct to say that Socrates’ mind was inquisitive
and wrong to say it had a beard, this does nothing to suggest that his mind was a thing
having mental but not physical properties.

The source of the trouble is the word “mind,” used in the possessive sense. This is
essential to the quick-and-dirty argument: we can’t restate it in any other way. If we replace
“Socrates’ mind” with “the thinker of Socrates’ thoughts,” for example, it breaks down: to
say that the thinker of Socrates’ thoughts had a beard would be rather stilted—it’s the sort
of thing that only a philosopher would say—but it doesn’t sound wrong, in the way that
“Socrates’ mind had a beard” sounds wrong.

The word “mind” is often used in less troubling ways where it doesn’t purport to refer to
some particular thing. We ask whether snails or insects have minds. This just means
whether they have mental lives or mental properties. Other times the word refers to the
mental in general. Consciousness, memory, belief, perception, emotions, and dreams, for
example, are mental phenomena, and we refer to them collectively as “the mind,” just as
we refer to metabolism, photosynthesis, reproduction, and other biological phenomena as
“life.” “Theories of mind” like behaviorism and functionalism are accounts of the basic
nature of mental phenomena. But none of this requires us to think of a mind as a sort of
entity that each of us has one of. We may say that frogs have minds and hats don’t, but
this is just to say that frogs but not hats have mental lives or mental properties.

When philosophers ask whether the mind is physical, they’re not asking whether a certain
thing that each of us has is physical, but simply whether mental phenomena are physical.
Many things happen in the brain: fluids circulate, hormones are secreted and absorbed,
electric currents flow, complex organic molecules are constructed and broken down. The

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question is whether some of these physical activities are dreams, thought processes, and
sensations, in the way that some human movements are dances. Are mental activities
physical activities? Or are they entirely nonphysical activities distinct from anything going
on in the brain? This question is often called the mind-body problem (though that term is
not used consistently). Our question, however, is not about mental activities, but about the
beings engaged in them—not about belief, perception, or dreaming, but about the things
that believe, perceive, and dream.

The two questions are of course connected. If mental activities are physical, then they
don’t go on in an immaterial soul, in which case there is no soul. We’ll return to this. But
our question is not about the nature of belief, perception, and other mental phenomena, or
even how mental activities relate to physical activities in the brain. It’s whether we
ourselves are material or immaterial.

So be careful with the word “mind”. No philosophical question or claim was ever made
clearer by being put in terms of this word. Whenever you come across it, it’s worth trying to
rephrase the point without using it. You’ll understand the question or claim better for
attempting this. If you find that you can’t do it, that may not be your fault: it may be the
author who’s confused.

‘The body’

The word ‘body’ as it’s used in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind is just as
dangerous as the word ‘mind’, if not more so. Again, it can easily be used to generate a
cheap argument against materialism. Consider these sentences:

Descartes’ body was a great mathematician.

Descartes’ body tried to prove the existence of God.
Descartes’ body is reading the Guardian.

They sound wrong. And they don’t just sound wrong to dualists, but to everyone. (Nor is
this peculiar to the English language: they sound just as wrong in French or German or
Mandarin.) It’s tempting to infer from this that these sentences are false. And the reason
why they’re false would presumably be that the phrase ‘Descartes’ body’ refers to
something that was not a mathematician (great or otherwise) and did not read newspapers
or construct proofs. It follows that people are distinct from their bodies, because
Descartes himself certainly was a mathematician. More strongly, our bodies cannot have
mental properties, because the sentence ‘Descartes’ body is F’ will always be false no
matter what psychological term we put in for ‘F’. And if human bodies can’t think, then
presumably no material thing can think. It looks as if we can establish substance dualism
from the very meaning of the word ‘body’. At any rate, our use of that word presupposes
dualism. It would follow that we are naturally inclined towards that view. (Even if other

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ways of speaking—our willingness to ascribe physical propertise to people in the same
way we ascribe them to inanimate objects—show an inclination against dualism, or at least
against pure dualism.)

Here’s a summary of the argument:

1. We cannot, in ordinary contexts, correctly utter sentences like ‘Descartes’ body is

thinking’.
2. Thus, Descartes’ body is a thing that is not thinking. (Or at least this is presupposed in
the rules of English.)
3. If Descartes’ body doesn’t think, no material thing can think.
4. Thus, no material thing can think. (Or at least this is presupposed in the way we think
and speak.)

I’m not aware of anyone who has explicitly like this, but I’m sure it’s been influential in
people’s thinking. Here’s a grave objection to it. Consider these sentences:

Descartes’ body is is five feet, nine inches tall.

Descartes’ body has the flu.
Descartes’ body has a beard.

They sound just as wrong as ‘Descartes’ body is thinking’, and wrong in a similar way.
(This goes for Swinburne’s own example as well: ‘My body weighs 15 stone’.) But if the
incorrectness of ‘Descartes’ body is thinking’ is due to the fact (or the universal belief) that
Descartes’ body is a thing that doesn’t think, the incorrectness of these sentences must be
due to the fact (or the belief) that Descartes’ body is a thing that isn’t five feet, nine inches
tall, doesn’t have a beard, and so on. By contrast, we can say things like ‘Descartes’ body
is riddled with disease’ or ‘Descartes’ body is 70% water by volume’. But we can hardly
say that Descartes’ body is a material thing that has no height and cannot suffer from any
specific illness or have a beard, but which can be diseased or have a material
composition.

So there’s something very peculiar about the way we use the word ‘body’, or more
specifically possessive constructions like ‘Descartes’ body’. The rules for using this word
are complex and seemingly rather arbitrary. It looks like a mistake to draw metaphysical
conclusions from them, or even conclusions about what metaphysical view we tacitly
accept. They don’t embody any coherent metaphysical picture.

Related point: it can sound a bit shocking to say, ‘People are just bodies’ or ‘You are
nothing more than your body’. That sounds like a tough-minded view. I can remember
finding that claim, put that way, very repellent when I was an undergraduate. By contrast,
it doesn’t sound shocking or tough-minded to say that we are biological organisms. In fact
that can sound pretty obviously true. But what’s the difference between these two claims?

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Does the first have implausible implications that the second doesn’t have? They look
rather like two different ways of saying the same thing. Yet one sounds much more
attractive than the other. That again shows the malevolent power of the word ‘body’.

A different sort of worry is that it’s very hard to define the term ‘body’, or more precisely
‘Descartes’ body’ or ‘my body’. (The problem is not with the word ‘body’ meaning simply a
material thing, but with the words ‘human body’ or ‘body’ in the possessive sense: the body
of someone or something.) How should we complete the formula

x is y’s body iffdf…x…y…?

In particular, can we do it in a way that doesn’t tendentiously presuppose dualism or

materialism? It ought to be possible, because dualists and materialists use the word in
more or less the same way.

Van Inwagen quotes a definition from a 19th-century theologian:

By ‘the body’ is to be understood the mass of matter which we carry about with us, with
all the animal properties that belong to it.

He notes that there is unlikely to be any mass of matter that Descartes (for example)
always carries about with him from cradle to grave; but if there were, it’s likely to be a
piece of jewellery or a good-luck charm. Such a thing would have no ‘animal’ properties;
but if someone always carried about, say, a mouse, then it would count as his body by this
definition. (Or maybe a long-lived parasite.) Obviously this is not the intention: the phrase
‘carried about with’ has to be understood metaphorically. But it’s not clear how to state the
proposal nonmetaphorically.

We might try:

x’s body =df the mass of matter—or more generally, the material thing—that is the
bearer of all of x’s physical properties.

That’s at least not metaphorical. And it sounds at first a lot more promising than the first
proposal. But it’s no good at all. Either Descartes (to take a typical person) has physical
properties or he doesn’t. If he does, then the definition implies that Descartes is his body.
If he doesn’t, then there is no such thing as his body, as he has no physical properties to
be borne. Both are inconsistent with dualism. The proposal makes it true by definition that
either we are our bodies or else we have no bodies. Imagine a dualist saying, ‘Each
person is distinct from her body’. By the proposed definition, this would mean ‘Each
person is distinct from the bearer of her physical properties’. This statement is self-
contradictory: it’s a trivial verbal falsehood. It’s unacceptably tendentious.

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Swinburne proposes something completely different: my body is “the vehicle of my
agency in the world and my knowledge of the world”. I move by moving my body, and
perceive by obtaining information from my body’s sense organs. I can move my chair, but
only in a less direct way: by moving my body. So what makes something my body is
roughly that I can move it just by intending to move, and can perceive by means of it. That
can’t be quite right, because I can move my left arm just by intending to move, and
perceive by means of it, yet it’s not my body. So perhaps my body is the largest such
object. For short: my body is the largest material thing that I can move and feel.

This is better than the previous proposal. It doesn’t require me to have any physical
properties in order to have a body. It has the interesting consequence that a thing can
have a body only if it’s capable of action and perception. That would explain why it sounds
wrong to talk about the bodies of tables or trees or planets. (We might speak of a guitar’s
body, but that’s a different sense of the word, referring to a part of the thing. ‘Body’ in that
sense means something like ‘torso’.) But it doesn’t tell us why it’s wrong to say that
Descartes’ body was a mathematician. If that’s all we mean by ‘body’, there ought to be
no problem with that sentence. Dualists will of course say that it’s false, but it would be a
perfectly good sentence: it wouldn’t violate any rules of English usage. Yet it is clearly
wrong as an English sentence.

A more serious difficulty for the proposal is this. Suppose I were numb and paralyzed from
the neck down. What then would be the largest object that I can move and feel? It looks
as if it might be my head. But no one would say that in this case my head is my body—
that my body weighs just ten pounds or so. Likewise, someone under general anaesthesia
can’t move or feel anything. Swinburne’s definition would seem to imply that she has no
body at all. But perhaps we could avoid these consequences by saying that my body is
the largest thing I can move and feel in normal circumstances.

Further: many philosophers—both dualists and materialists—say that there is no one

largest material thing that I can move and feel in the way Swinburne describes. It’s often
said that there is such a thing as the mass of matter now constituting me. I have different
matter at different times (or my body does), but a mass of matter is always made up of the
same atoms. So the mass of matter and me (or my body) are different. A year ago this
mass of matter was scattered pretty widely across the earth, and a year from now it will be
again. But right now it’s a vehicle of my agency and my knowledge of the world, and not
part of any largest one. So there are two such vehicles. If my body has to be the vehicle
of my agency and my knowledge (or the largest one), then there is no such thing as my
body.

Nevertheless, this is the best definition of ‘body’ that I know of. The moral of this story is
that the word ‘body’ is just as dangerous in philosophy as the term ‘mind’, if not more so.
No philosophical question or claim was ever made clearer by being put in terms of this
word. Whenever you come across it, it’s worth trying to rephrase the point without using it.

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You’ll understand the question or claim better for attempting this. If you can’t do this, that’s
a warning that you may be confused.

Van Inwagen has no objection to ordinary, nonphilosophical uses of terms like ‘Descartes’
body’. He gives some examples:

Anatomy is the study of the physical structure of the human body.

His doctor told him he must not go on abusing his body in that way.
His body was covered with scars.
Alice told James she hungered for his body.
The force of the explosion nearly tore his limbs from his body.

These are unobjectionable. And there’s no temptation to draw controversial metaphysical

conclusions from them. What’s more, the word ‘body’ in these cases is eliminable, in that
we can easily paraphrase them in a way that doesn’t use it:

Anatomy is the study of the physical structure of human beings.

His doctor told him he must not go on abusing his health in that way.
He was covered with scars.
Alice told James she wanted to have sexual intercourse with him.
The force of the explosion nearly tore off his limbs.