Martha Farah has posted Neuroethics and the Problem of Other Minds: Implications of Neuroscience for the Moral Status of Brain-Damaged Patients and Nonhuman Animals at Penn's ScholarlyCommons paper repository. The paper appears to be printed in the January 2008 issue of Neuroethics, making it the first article from the new Neuroethics journal that I have seen published. Here is the abstract:
Our ethical obligations to another being depend at least in part on that being's capacity for a mental life. Our usual approach to inferring the mental state of another is to reason by analogy: If another being behaves as I do in a circumstance that engenders a certain mental state in me, I conclude that it has engendered the same mental state in him or her. Unfortunately, as philosophers have long noted, this analogy is fallible because behavior and mental states are only contingently related. If the other person is acting, for example, we could draw the wrong conclusion about his or her mental state. In this article I consider another type of analogy that can be drawn between oneself and another to infer the mental state of the other, substituting brain activity for behavior. According to most current views of the mind–body problem, mental states and brain states are non-contingently related, and hence inferences drawn with the new analogy are not susceptible to the alternative interpretations that plague the behavioral analogy. The implications of this approach are explored in two cases for which behavior is particularly unhelpful as a guide to mental status: severely brain–damaged patients who are incapable of intentional communicative behavior, and nonhuman animals whose behavioral repertoires are different from ours and who lack language.
The recursive embededness of intentions (mental states) and actions lead to the fact that the very same intention can cause mamny disparate actions ,and viceversa, that one action can be caused by many different intentions.
When i read Anita Avramides´book "Other Minds" for the first time, i met with the perspectives and thoughts of many philosophers about the problem of other minds and the classical argument, called, the argument from analogy use by Mill and Hume to infer mental life in other beings, even nonhuman animals.
It is true that the argument form analogy it can be flawless: from the fact that others have bodies too, and body its a prerequisite of my feelings and i know that my feellings are an antecedent of my actions... it´s true.. we cannot predict with confidence that others have the same mental life like me, the same epistemic content (intention, belief, desire...)
My view, is that Farah´s wisdom conflates the classical philosophical problem of other minds that in actual terms it is express in primatology, developmental psychology and philosophy of mind with the question of how we can know the mental states of others, say, their intentions, beliefs and other epistemic states (see the dispute between Tomassello´s group and Povinelli´s goup), with the problem of wether others have conscious mental states.
To me it is not the same problem how we can know the mind of others, their epistemic states (mindreading, theory of mind...) and the problem of wether others have conscious mental states (conciousness studies).
Consciousness precedes complex cognition, and the problem of other minds orbit aound the phenomenon of complex cognition.
Consciouness its a first-order phenomenon and the other mind problem its a second-order phenomenon related to the the issue of how we represent either the behaviour or the mental states of others.
Posted by: Anibal | 02/14/2008 at 06:38 AM
The recursive embededness of intentions (mental states) and actions lead to the fact that the very same intention can cause mamny disparate actions ,and viceversa, that one action can be caused by many different intentions.
When i read Anita Avramides´book "Other Minds" for the first time, i met with the perspectives and thoughts of many philosophers about the problem of other minds and the classical argument, called, the argument from analogy use by Mill and Hume to infer mental life in other beings, even nonhuman animals.
It is true that the argument form analogy it can be flawless: from the fact that others have bodies too, and body its a prerequisite of my feelings and i know that my feellings are an antecedent of my actions... it´s true.. we cannot predict with confidence that others have the same mental life like me, the same epistemic content (intention, belief, desire...)
My view, is that Farah´s wisdom conflates the classical philosophical problem of other minds that in actual terms it is express in primatology, developmental psychology and philosophy of mind with the question of how we can know the mental states of others, say, their intentions, beliefs and other epistemic states (see the dispute between Tomassello´s group and Povinelli´s goup), with the problem of wether others have conscious mental states.
To me it is not the same problem how we can know the mind of others, their epistemic states (mindreading, theory of mind...) and the problem of wether others have conscious mental states (conciousness studies).
Consciousness precedes complex cognition, and the problem of other minds orbit aound the phenomenon of complex cognition.
Consciouness its a first-order phenomenon and the other mind problem its a second-order phenomenon related to the the issue of how we represent either the behaviour or the mental states of others.
Posted by: Anibal | 02/14/2008 at 06:39 AM