Place distinguishes between mental concepts where some sort of "inner process story" is unavoidable [consciousness/sensation], and mental concepts [cognitive/volitional] where some sort of inner process story is avoidable, and an analysis of the concepts can be provided in terms of dispositions to behave. Is there anything to this distinction? Why would a behaviorist be inclined to maintain it? Would psychologists/philosophers make a similar distinction nowadays between these mental concepts (thought not in terms of dispositions to behave)? Did behaviorists deny that cognitive/volitional mental concepts can be analyzed in terms of brain processes? If so, isn't it weird that the identity theory came first for consciousness/sensation (which seem, to me, prima facie harder to analyze in terms of brain processes), and only later for cognition/volition?
Place's initial worry is that accepting inner processes entails dualism. Historically, is this because at the time inner processes were seen as mysterious, especially perhaps in the heyday of behaviorism?
Logic, ontology, and meaning:
Place points out two ways in which people have mistakenly dismissed the identity theory on logical grounds alone. I think I understand Place's argument for the mistake in the first way: (I don't think I'm setting this up any differently than Mike did, but I'll set it up again in case I made a mistake here that contributes to why I don't understand Place's argument for the mistake in the second way)
The mistake is in failing to distinguish between the 'is' of definition and the 'is' of composition. If we fail to make that distinction, then we have 2 (rather than 3) cases involving 'is':
1) 'x is y and nothing else' makes sense.
2) 'x is y and nothing else' is nonsense.
The mistake occurs in thinking that if x and y are logically independent, it can't be the case that 'x is y and nothing else' makes sense. Furthermore (here's where ontology kicks in), if 'x is y and nothing else' is nonsense, then x and y are ontologically distinct.
Once we make the distinction, we see that there are two ways for 'x is y and nothing else' to make sense. So even if we show that "consciousness" and "brain process" are logically independent, it can still be the case that "consciousness is a brain process and nothing else" makes sense.
But I am puzzled by the second way in which Place claims that people have mistakenly dismissed the identity theory on logical grounds alone. The second way involves the argument from the logical independence of two expressions to the ontological independence of the entities to which they refer. Place maintains that the argument works when Rule A (as Mike calls it) works, yet Rule A doesn't always work.
But I don't understand the role of Rule A in Place's argument. Place begins his article by stressing that "consciousness is a brain process" is definitely not a thesis about meaning. If so, we shouldn't be worried about cases where the expression used to refer to x doesn't entail the expression used to refer to y, right?
Mabye he's trying here to demonstrate why he is adamant about his article not being a thesis about meaning, but if so, what does this have to do with operations of verification? That is, I thought he already explained that "a cloud is a mass of tiny particles" contains an "is" of composition rather than definition, and this (rather than non-simultaneous verification) is why "there is nothing self-contradictory in talking about a cloud which is not composed of tiny particles in suspension." So, when it comes to clouds, lightning, and consciousness, it seems to me that these cases involving identity aren't breaking Rule A. Rather, these are simply cases involving the "is" of composition rather than definition.
So: What Place really seems to be worried about is how to maintain an identity statement in light of verification conditions that not only differ- as in the case of "cloud" and "mass of tiny particles"- but differ without continuity of observation. Am I wrong to think that this would appear to be an insoluble problem by behaviorists, and would be a motivation for them to focus entirely on behavior? And am I wrong to think that Place's solution (by ingenious analogy to lightning)- establish identity by showing that "introspective observations reported by the subject can be accounted for in terms of processes which are known to have occured in his brain"- lays a crucial foundation stone for post-behaviorist cognitive science?
If so, I conclude that Place's article is both messier (in terms of argument structure) and more important than I originally thought.
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Danny, this is tight. Like you point out, Place is touching on something crucial here, which comes back up with a vengeance in Kripke (back to that later). I read the Place article years ago and coming back to it after having looked a little at Kripke, Putnam, and (especially) Quine, it seems especially seminal. I can’t put my finger right on it yet, but the analytic/synthetic distinction, in all it’s guises and in related issues in analytic philosophy (contingent identity/necessary identity; meaning/reference; intension/extension) is under the surface here. You can see behaviorism and functionalism looming. I’ll try comment on some of your comments here:
I think Place’s worry is not so much accepting inner processes as accepting the ontological reality of ‘inner’ objects. After images, for instance, are not to be construed as real objects in a phenomenal field/inner-space; they’re the result of inner (material) processes that would normally be produced in the presence of the necessary external stimuli under normal conditions. Real ‘inner’ objects would seem to support dualism in a way that illusory ones generated by reproducible neural processes do not.
The A-rule thing is puzzling. Place puts it out in one sentence that reads like it’s 75 words long. It’s worth looking at more closely, because it concerns future considerations about identity relations. As I took it, the A-rule just emphasizes the fact that some concepts are analytic and necessarily so by definition. Red is a color, for example; we can know this without ever seeing red. This would be an example of the analytic a priori: colors are colors, the phenomena we see on the surfaces of objects, and red is one of them; tell me that some objects appear to be red and I can tell you that red is a color (maybe even if I’m blind). But ‘lightning is the motion of electric charges’, now that’s synthetic a priori, requiring sophisticated verification. But once we know it, once we verify it, we know something about every lightning bolt that’s really a lightning bolt. It may be contingently true, since we might have found out otherwise, but it quantifies universally nonetheless. (This is why the ‘is’ of composition allows us the luxury of saying things like ‘lightning is the motion of electric charges and nothing else’; of course Quine brings this kind of claim into serious question).
So anyway, as he points out in his reply to Smart, there is a logical battle to be fought, which revolves around establishing adequate logical criteria for the identity of two processes that have independent verification conditions. What makes x and y the same thing? Kripke famously has an answer to this that seems to be consistent with dualism. Since Kripke’s view is so very popular, I think we should have a look at that. Kripke, as I read him so far, wants to argue that identity relations are necessary ones, verification conditions be damned. I mean, Kripke is compelling, of course, but I think he kind of straw-man’s what motivates the identity theory in the first place. To be fair, really spartan identity theories are subject to Kripke-type criticisms, since strict identity (like the necessity of identity, I suspect) might be too clean. But there’s lots of room to talk about other kinds of relations between the nervous system and mental states, and exploring other possibilities here without resorting to dualism. We’ll get to epiphenomenalism and, emergentism, which I think is particularly interesting. I think you’re right though, and I haven’t often heard it pointed out that there is a sense in which the identity theorists can be seen as laying pavement for cognitivism, and heralding a split between psychological behaviorism and philosophical varieties. So, more on behaviorism, then functionalism.
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