McGraw-Hill OnlineMcGraw-Hill Higher EducationLearning Center
Student Center | Instructor Center | Information Center | Home
Chapter Objectives
Issues and Applications
Theories
Philosophers
Glossary
Feedback
Help Center


Doing Philosophy: An Introduction Through Thought Experiments, 2/e
Theodore Schick, Muhlenberg College
Lewis Vaughn

The Mind-Body Problem

Glossary

absent qualia objection  The objection to functionalism based on the belief that a functional state could have all the functional properties of a mental state without having any of its qualitative content.
behavioral disposition  A tendency to respond to certain stimuli in certain ways
Cartesian dualism  The doctrine that mental states are states of an immaterial substance that interacts with the body.
causal closure of the physical  The principle that everything that happens can be explained in purely physical terms.
double aspect theory  The doctrine that the mind and the body are two aspects of a single underlying substance.
dualism  The doctrine that reality contains both mental and material things.
eliminative materialism  The doctrine that there are no mental states.
emergent property  A property that comes into being (emerges) when things which lack that property interact in certain ways.
empiricism  The epistemological theory that the only source of knowledge about the external world is sense experience.
epiphenomenalism  The doctrine that the mind is an ineffective by-product of physical processes.
functionalism  The doctrine that mental states are functional states.
idealism  The doctrine that all that exists are minds and their contents
identity theory  The doctrine that mental states are brain states.
indiscernibility of identicals  The principle that if two things are identical, then they must both possess the same properties
intentionality  The property of mental states that makes them of or about something.
inverted spectrum problem  The problem of accounting for the fact that people’s color experiences could be very different even though they are functionally equivalent
logical behaviorism  The doctrine that mental states are behavioral dispositions
logical positivism  The philosophical movement based on the assumption that to know what a sentence means is to know what observations would make it true.
materialism  The doctrine that all that exists are material objects
occasionalism  The parallelist theory of the mind that claims the correlation between mental and physical events is produced on each occasion by God.
of meaning  The doctrine that the meaning of a statement is its method of verification
olk psychology  Our common-sense theory of mind that explains people’s behavior in terms of beliefs and desires.
parallelism  The doctrine that the mind and the body are two separate things that do not interact with one another.
preestablished harmony  The parallelist theory of mind that claims that the correlation between mental and physical events was established by God at the beginning
primitive property  A property that cannot be reduced to or analyzed in terms of any more basic property.
problem of other minds  The philosophical problem of explaining how it is possible to know that there are other minds in the world.
property dualism  The doctrine that mental states have both physical and nonphysical properties.
qualitative content  The felt quality of certain mental states
semantics  What a symbol means.
solipsism  The view that there is only one mind in the universe, namely, one’s own.
syntax  How a symbol can be combined with other symbols to form a sentence.