ABSTRACT
Cartesian dualism and logical behaviorism are very different positions. Yet the arguments that each presents have something in common: neither appeals to any scientific finding as evidence for what it maintains. The identity theory asserts that the history of science has been marked by success after success for a doctrine called materialism or physicalism. The Mind/Brain Identity Theory says that what has happened to the problem of life is in the process of happening to the problem of mind. Identity theorists offer a second reason for rejecting dualism. They claim that the identity theory is more parsimonious than dualism. In the vitalism controversy, no biologist took seriously the idea that an elan vital exists once the physical bases of life processes became reasonably clear. Rather, the conclusion was that an organism’s being alive is nothing above and beyond its having certain physical processes going on in its body.
