ABSTRACT
The current functionalist, materialist paradigm in philosophy of mind resulted from adopting a Cartesian account of the causal relations between mind and action, while dropping mental substance. The causal relation then had to be accommodated within the other half of the Cartesian dualism, a mechanical body. The postulation of immaterial substance was, however, for Descartes, a response to recognizing distinctive characteristics of the mental, which he was unable to accommodate within his mechanistic physical world. The challenge to the contemporary picture is to find a way of accommodating these distinctively psychological phenomena in a way that is compatible with the paradigm outlined in the previous chapter. Such a position, that of reductive functionalism, claimed to show how psychological characteristics can intelligibly arise in a material world whose privileged articulation is given to physical science. In this chapter and the next we will be assessing this naturalizing project with respect to the interconnected characteristics of intentionality and rationality.
