If it could be made to work, materialism would be attractive simply on grounds of parsimony. We all agree that entities, or rather categories of entity, ought not be multiplied beyond necessity. There are those who will intone this Ockhamite principle with great earnestness as if they are advancing the discussion when of course they are not: the real issue concerns what is needed (necessary) for explanatory purposes. If you agree that philosophers are in the business of explanation, then I hope you will agree that a good explanation must be categorially parsimonious but not at the expense of explanatory adequacy.
So we ought not introduce irreducibly mental items and/or abstracta if we can get by with just material items By 'get by' I mean explain in adequate fashion all that needs to be explained: consciousness, self-consciousness including self-reference via the first-person singular pronoun, qualia, intentionality, conscience, mystical and religious experience, the applicability of mathematics to the physical world, the normativity of logic, normativity in general, the existence of anything in the first place, the emergence of life . . . .
My main interest is negative: in showing that materialism doesn't work. Please don't respond by saying that some other theory (substance dualism, say) doesn't work either. For the issue is precisely: Does materialism work? If theory T1 is explanatorily inadequate, its deficiencies cannot be made good by pointing out that T2 is also inadequate. This is an invalid argument: "Every alternative to materialism is inadequate; therefore we should embrace materialism despite its inadequacies." Wouldn't it be more reasonable under those circumstances to embrace no theory?
One more preliminary point. If materialism is explanatorily adequate, then we ought to embrace it, and dispense with God, the soul, and the denizens of the Platonic menagerie. For if materialism were adequate, there would be no reason to posit anything beyond the material. But if materialism is not adequate, then we do have reason for such posits.
The following argument is my interpretation of remarks made by Edward Feser in his Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction (One World, 2005), pp. 156-159)
1. Consider a representation such as a picture. You draw a picture of your mother. The picture represents her: it is of or about her, and it would remain about her even were she to cease to exist. The picture is a physical object with physical properties: the paper is of a certain size and shape and texture, the ink of a certain chemical composition, the lines have a definite thickness, etc. Now I would insist that these physical features cannot be that in virtue of which the picture represents your mother: they cannot be that in virtue of which the physical item is a representation. For it makes no sense to ascribe intrinsic semantic or intentional properties to merely physical items. But even if I am wrong about this, there remains a problem for a materialist theory of representation.
2. Suppose a 'copycat' comes along and makes an EXACT copy of your picture of your mother. The copycat's intention is not to represent your mother; his intention is merely to represent your representation of your mother. Now there are two pictorial representations, call them R (the original) and R' (the copy). The question arises: Is R' a representation of your mother, or is R' a representation of R? Suppose a second copycat comes along and produces a second copy R''. Does R'' represent R' or R or your mother? The situation is obviously iterable ad infinitum.
3. Clearly, there is a difference between saying that R' represents your mother, a human being, and saying that R' represents R, a nonhuman drawing of your mother. The reference is different in the two cases. But the reference is indeterminate if we go by the physical properties of the representations alone. Suppose I hand you two drawings of your mother, one an exact copy of the other, but you do not know which is the orignal and which is the copy. You cannot, by inspection of these drawings, tell which is which. Thus you cannot determine the reference from the physical properties.
4. The point is generalizable to other types of representations. Suppose I say 'cat' to refer to a cat and my copycat brother says 'cat' simply to copy me. If my brother mimics me perfectly, then it will be impossible from the physical properties of the two word-sounds to tell which refers to a cat and which does not.
Please do not say that we are both referring to a cat. For my copycat brother is a mere copycat: his intention is merely to reproduce the word-sound I made. To make it even clearer, replace my brother with a parrot who happens to be a perfect mimic. No one will say that the 'cat'-token produced by the parrot refers to a cat. The parrot is just an animate copy machine.
The same goes for any physical representation. Suppose a pattern of neural firings is taken to be a representation of X. An exact copy of that pattern needn't be a representation of X; it could be a
representation of the original pattern. In general, no material representation of X is such that its physical properties suffice to make it a representation of X as opposed to a representation of a
representation of X.
5. Here is the argument:
P1. All thoughts have determinate objects.
P2. No purely material representation has a determinate object.
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C. No thought is a purely material representation.
6. Let's consider an objection. "Granted, material representations on their own lack determinate reference, but that can be supplied by bringing in causal relations. Thus what makes a tokening of 'cat' refer to a cat rather than to a word is the fact that there is a causal chain starting with a furry critter and terminating with an utterance of 'cat.'"
But causal connections cannot secure determinacy of reference, as Hilary Putnam appreciates (Renewing Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1992, p. 23):
One cannot simply say that the word "cat" refers to cats because
the word is causally connected to cats, for the word "cat," or
rather my way of using the word "cat," is causally connected to
many things. It is true that I wouldn't be using "cat" as I do if
many other things were different. My present use of the word "cat"
has a great many causes, not just one. The use of the word "cat" is
causally connected to cats, but it is also causally connected to
the behavior of Anglo-Saxon tribes, for example. Just mentioning
"causal connection" does not explain how one thing can be a
representation of another thing, as Kant was already aware.
Related Post: Representation and Causation, With Some Help from Putnam
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