Functionalism and Self‐Consciousness

Abstract

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.

Self-Consciousness and Reductive Functionalism

“…1 See his (1997, 2000, 2001, 2010). For critical commentary, see Tooley (1999) and McCullagh (2000). See also Shoemaker (2001), formerly a leading reductive functionalist,…”

Naturalizing Subjective Character

“…According to Bealer (1996), functionalism cannot account for the intentionality of second-order representations, because it must attribute to them the wrong objects, namely, the physical realizations of the first-order mental states we intuitively wish to regard as their objects. For instance, when a theory featuring a thought that one thinks that p is completely functionalized, the thought that p is identified with the a certain physical realization R, and so the thought that one thinks that p would have to be identified with a thought that one is in R. According to some critics (McCullagh, 2000, Tully 2001, however, Bealer's argument is fallacious and does not yield a genuine threat to functionalism. I am not going to discuss the matter here.…”