Abstract

One of the aims of this book is to bring contemporary research in the neurological and physiological sciences into relationship with discussions in the philosophy of mind. The author does not deny the significance of ordinary talk about the mind, including talk about actions, intentions, beliefs and the like, but he wants to see how this language is compatible with evolutionary and neurophysiological accounts of man. He frequently refers to and accepts Charles Taylor's arguments that "peripheralist" or S-R behavioral theories fail to account for the intentionality of mental states and the teleology of behavior. In fact, one way of reading this book is to see it as an attempt to answer a question raised by Taylor's book: If "peripheralist" theories of behavior cannot account for intentionality and teleology, can a "centralist" or neurophysiological theory of man account for these characteristics? The key chapters of the book attempt to answer this question in the affirmative. The author thinks of the intentionalist characterization of the physical structures of behavior as a "heuristic overlay" on the extensional account of functioning. But the two descriptions, intentional and extensional, are linked together by a series of hypotheses describing the evolutionary source of the functioning. The important problem is to explain how conceptual content or information gets into the neurophysiological picture. The author attempts to deal with this as well as with other problems about the nature of mind including introspection, consciousness, imagery, reasoning, intention, action and language. His discussion of the neurophysiological background for his speculations is purposely general in order to free his conclusions from specific empirical hypotheses about the nervous system which may turn out to be false. This purposeful limitation makes his argument less convincing in some places than it might have been. But he is asking important questions and offering answers to them which deserve careful consideration.--R. H. K.