Herbert Feigl, The "Mental" and the "Physical": The Essay and a Postscript (1967).
I. A Preliminary Survey of Some Perplexities and Their Repression Tough-minded scientists tend to relegate the mind-body problem to the limbo of speculative metaphysics. Perhaps after trying a bit but with questionable success to square themselves with the puzzle, they usually take one or the other of two attitudes. Either the puzzle is left to the philosophers to worry about, or else it is bluntly declared a pseudoproblem not worth pondering by anybody. Yet, the perplexities crop up again and again, often quite unexpectedly, if not in central issues of substantive scientific research, then certainly and at least in connection with the attempts to formulate adequately and consistently the problems, the results, and the programs of scientific inquiry. The disputes regarding the very subject matter and definition of psychology furnish a poignant illustration. Is it mental experience or is it behavior?
The behaviorist revolution in psychology, as well as its opposite philosophical counterpart, the phenomenalistic point of view in epistemology, each in its way, tried to obviate the problem. But all sorts of perplexities keep bedeviling both parties. The problem may be repressed, but repression produces symptoms, logical symptoms such as paradoxes or inconsistencies in this case. The behaviorist psychologist assimilates his method to that of the "objective" natural sciences. Scientific psychology, as the well known saying goes, having first lost its soul, later its consciousness, seems finally to lose its mind altogether. Behaviorism, now after more than forty years of development, shows of course many signs( of mitigation of its originally rather harsh and radical position. It has availed itself of various clothings from the storehouse of philosophical garments. But despite the considerably greater scientific and logical sophistication in recent treatments of the issue, it is somewhat depressing to note that the main philosophical positions still are these: materialism, mentalism, mind-body interactionism, evolutionary emergence theories, psychoneurophysiological parallelism (epiphenomenalism, isomorphism, double aspect theories), and neutral monism. Characteristically, the phenomenalist and the behaviorist positions, refined descendants or variants respectively of the mentalistic and the materialistic philosophies, have been most forcefully advocated by the posi-tivists of the last and of the present century. Positivism, more distinctly than any other point of view, with its notorious phobia of metaphysical problems and its marked tendency toward reductionism, was always ready to diagnose the mind-body puzzle as a Scheinproblem. Small wonder then that phenomenalism (or neutral monism) on the one hand, and physicalism on the other, have been the favored positions in various phases of the history of the positivistic outlook.
In the philosophy of the enlightenment of the eighteenth century we find the outspoken and clear-headed phenomenalism of Hume, but also the equally explicit, though more "simpliste" French materialism, especially of Baron d'Holbach. The German positivists of the nineteenth century, led by Mach and Avenarius, were essentially Humeans. And so was Bertrand Russell in one of the earlier phases of his epistemological odyssey. It was the combined influence of Russell's phenomenalism (or neutral monism) and of the logic of Principia Mathematica which led Carnap in his early work Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928) to elaborate in considerable detail and with remarkable precision a logical reconstruction of the relation between psychological and physical concepts. He chose as a basis for this reconstruction a set of neutral experiential data and showed how the concepts of various scientific disciplines can be constituted as logical constructions erected on a basis of concepts which refer to elements and relations of that (subjectless) raw material of immediate experience. Carnap's attempt was thus a culminating point in the series of positivistic-phenomenalistic epistemologies. But certain grave objections and difficulties soon made Carnap abandon this scheme and replace it by another, different in basis and structure. His new reconstruction is physicalistic in that the basic elements and relations are the designata of an intersubjective observation language (viz., the physicalistic thing-language). The difference in logical structure is due mainly to the recognition that the Russellian hierarchy of types does not adequately explicate the category mistakes which undoubtedly give rise to some (though by no means all) mind-body puzzles.
The physicalist views of Lashley (192), Carnap (62, 64, 66, 67), Hempel (146), Black (37, 38), Quine (268), Ryle (294), Skinner (321), and Wilfrid Sellars (315), though differing in many more or less important respects one from another, are primarily motivated by a basic doubt about the possibility of a purely phenomenal languages The ob servation language of everyday life, we are told, is rooted in the inter-subjective terms whose usage we acquired in the learning situations of a common, public context of labeling things, properties, relations, states, events, processes, and dispositions. Subjective or "mentalistic" terms, this group of thinkers claims, are introduced and their usage learned on an intersubjective basis. Remove this intersubjective basis and not only have you deprived psychological concepts of their scientific significance, but you are left with nothing more than ineffable raw feels or with exclamations devoid of cognitive significance.
But the problems will not completely yield to this reductive approach. Introspection, though admittedly often unreliable, does enable us to describe elements, aspects, and configurations in the phenomenal fields of direct experience. When the doctor asks me whether I have a pain in my chest, whether my mood is gloomy, or whether I can read the fine print, he can afford to be a behaviorist and test for these various experiences in a perfectly objective manner. But I have (or do not have) the pain, the depressed mood, or the visual sensations; and I can report them on the basis of direct experience and introspection. Thus the question arises inevitably: how are the raw feels related to behavioral (or neurophysiological) states? Or, if we prefer the formal mode of speech to the material mode, what are the logical relations of raw-feel-talk (phenomenal terms, if not phenomenal language) to the terms and statements in the language of behavior (or of neurophysiology)?
No, matter how sophisticated we may be in logical analysis or epis-temology, the old perplexities center precisely around this point and they will not down. Many philosophical positions at least since the eighteenth century were primarily motivated, I strongly suspect, by the wish to avoid the mind-body problem. Moreover, the central significance of the problem for any Weltanschauung burdens its clarification with powerful emotions, be they engendered by materialistic, idealistic or theological prepossessions. Schopenhauer rightly viewed the mind-body problem as the "Weltknoten" (world knot). It is truly a cluster of intricate puzzles -- some scientific, some epistemological, some syntactical, some semantical, and some pragmatic. Closely related to these are the equally sensitive and controversial issues regarding teleology, purpose, intentionality, and free will.
I am convinced, along with many contemporary philosophical analysts and logicians of science, that all of these problems have been unnecessarily complicated by conceptual confusions, and to that extent are gratuitous puzzles and pseudoproblems. But I feel that we have not yet done full justice to any of them. Repression by reductionist philosophies (positivism, phenomenalism, logical behaviorism, operationism) is fortunately going out of fashion and is being replaced by much more detailed and painstaking analyses, of both the (Wittgensteinian) "ordinary language" and the (Carnapian) "reconstructionist" types.
Collingwood once said "people are apt to be ticklish in their absolute presuppositions; [they] blow up right in your face, because you have put your finger on one of their absolute presuppositions." One might add that philosophers are hypersensitive also in their repressed perplexities. A puzzle which does not resolve itself within a given favored philosophical frame is repressed very, much in the manner in which unresolved intrapersonal conflicts are repressed. I surmise that psychologically the first kind may be subsumed under the second. Scholars cathect certain ideas so strongly and their outlook becomes so ego involved that they erect elaborate barricades of defenses, merely to protect their pet ideas from the blows (or the slower corrosive effects) of criticism. No one can be sure that he is not doing this sort of thing in a particular case, and I claim no exception for myself. The best one can do is to proceed with candor and to subject oneself to ruthless criticism as often as feasible and fruitful. Techniques of self-scrutiny are nothing new in philosophy, but implemented by modern depth-psychological tools they could surely be made much more effective. In this candid spirit, I shall begin by putting my cards quite openly on the table; in the next two sections I shall indicate what I consider the sort of requirements for an adequate solution of the mind-body problems. I have no doubt whatever that some philosophers or psychologists will differ from me even in these first stages. All I can do then is to try, first to make these requirements as plausible as I can, and second, to analyze and evaluate the assets and the liabilities of some of the various proposed solutions as fully as space permits.