Abstract

Although minds are not distinct things from brains, mental property instances are often thought distinct from physical property instances, and as Thomas Nagel argues, mental facts different from neurophysiological facts. I argue that these are indeed legitimate distinctions that render any identity theory unlikely. It is argued that functionalism, despite its success in overcoming many phenomenal property objections, falls short of supporting the robust materialism that many philosophers think is within our grasp. ;By explicating a version of functionalism , I show that the increasingly popular claim that the mental is supervenient upon the functional results in a materialist theory which suffers from the same problems as did Descartes' claim that the mental supervenes on the neuroanatomical. It is argued that, in fact, the former supervenience claim is but the latter under a new guise. ;When I have pressed my intuitively based disquiet concerning this standard materialism, I have been met with two typical responses. First, a somewhat obscure reference to the Private Language Argument concatenated with a topic-neutral reference-fixing account. I have sought and failed to find how that argument makes Materialism plausible; its motivation is clear enough. Another typical response, a response which leads me to believe the third-person, topic-neutral tradition of the last twenty-five years is a tradition gone wild, has been in the form of a question: what more do you want, what is the data not accounted for? I answer this question. ;Central to my argument is the claim that the backing of descriptions the Materialist seeks to associate with mental terms such as "my pain at t," cannot be happily understood as topic-neutral reference-fixing heuristics. Tied to this is my claim that functionalist intuitions about the nature of experience cannot be made phenomenologically plausible by use of the adverbial theory of sensing. I argue that the ball is back in the Materialist's court--just what is their argument for Naturalism? Motivation is not enough