著者

信原 幸弘

出版者

日本哲学会

雑誌

哲学 (ISSN:03873358)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2008, no.59, pp.97-114,L13, 2008

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Brain science attempts to understand our minds by exploring our brains. What kind of understanding of minds does brain science bring forth? Is it fundamentally different from, or just an extension of, everyday understanding of mind? The aim of this paper is to clarify the relation between these two understandings. Brain science seems to mechanize our minds. It enables us to read or control the mind by treating the brain mechanistically. What, exactly speaking, is it to mechanize the mind? It consists, we may say, in understanding the mind in nomological terms. Brain science explores lawlike relations between brain states and through it attempts to clarify the relations between mental states which correlate with those brain states. So it is the aim of brain science to understand the mind nomologically. As for everyday understanding of the mind, we usually understand it in rational terms by grasping reasonrelations between mental states, though sometimes understanding certain aspects of it nomologically or mechanistically. Here arises the question whether it is really possible to understand the mind both in rational and nomological terms? If rationality is not reducible to nomologicality as Davidson argues in his thesis “the Anomalism of the Mental”, it is not possible to understand the mind nomologically as long as the mind is what is understood in everyday terms. We had better say that brain science, in fact, does not clarify the mind. It merely clarifies the brain.