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Functionalism and Self‐Consciousness
Author(s) -
McCullagh Mark
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0017.00146
Subject(s) - functionalism (philosophy of mind) , consciousness , creatures , psychology , cognitive science , epistemology , physicalism , sentence , philosophy of mind , philosophy , metaphysics , linguistics , archaeology , natural (archaeology) , history
I offer a philosophically well‐motivated work‐around for a problem that George Bealer (‘Self‐consciousness’, Philosophical Review v. 106, 1997) has identified, which he claims is fatal to functionalism. The problem concerns how to generate a satisfactory Ramsey sentence of a psychological theory in which mental predicates occur within the scopes of other mental predicates. My central claim is that the functional roles in terms of which a creature capable of self‐consciousness identifies her own mental states must be roles that items could play within creatures whose psychology is less complex than her own.