Time to move beyond the mind-body split

In a recent editorial entitled ‘Time to Move Beyond the Mind-Body
Split’ (1) Bracken and Thomas argue that the mind is not inside the head
but out there in the world. They suggest that both neuroscientifically-
informed eliminative materialism and broadly functionalist views of the
mind are philosophically untenable, and conclude that whilst the signs are
encouraging that psychiatry is moving forward “the rest of medicine also
needs to get beyond the legacy of Descartes”. On the substantive
philosophical issues, like, I suspect, many who have been raised on a diet
of Donald Davidson (2), I am broad agreement with the authors. Indeed, I
even find their reliance on hermeneutics refreshing. I wish, nonetheless,
to suggest firstly that that the authors claim to have moved beyond the
mind-body split needs qualifying, and secondly that, if their view is
correct, when the implications are fleshed out they will not necessarily
be perceived as encouraging for psychiatry.

Contrary to what the title of Bracken and Thomas’ paper suggests,
placing the mind in the world will surely appear to non-philosophical
readers to make the mind-body problem even more intractable, because it
rules out once and for all the possibility of basing an account of the
mind on an account of brain function. The ultimate source of the authors
somewhat confusing claim lies in the fact that they have failed to make
explicit the distinction between two strands of ‘Descartes legacy’, which
act as the horns of a dilemma on which any potential solution to the mind-
body problem risks being impaled. These are firstly that the mind is a
thinking non-physical thing, which is the basis of the ontological
dualism, and secondly that thinking is essentially independent of the
world, which is the basis of internalism.

According to the authors,the approach which they reject avoids
ontological dualism but “keep[s] alive the essential features of Descartes
philosophy”. By this they mean internalism and in response they propose a
radical externalism, which, unfortunately, risks reintroducing ontological
dualism because it offers no account of how their admittedly non-Cartesian
mind relates to the brain. The authors’ apparatus obviously needs
supplementing and a connectionist model of brain functioning stands out as
being the obvious candidate(3). Whether or not this, or indeed any, dual
approach is a successful “move beyond the mind-body split” will however
depend precisely on the respective accounts of the mind and brain being
made to fit together in a way that avoids reduction. This, of course, is
precisely what neuroscientific eliminative materialists deny is possible.

For my own part, I think the account can be made to work but I do not
share the authors belief that the implications are likely to be
encouraging for psychiatry. The difficulties for psychiatry arise when one
tries to define exactly what the authors’ claim that meaning is social
entails. They hint that the answer will be found in the work of
Wittgenstein who is, unfortunately, so unsystematic that one is drawn to
the interpretationism of Donald Davdison for clarification. I have
elsewhere discussed the difficulties that are likely to ensue from this
(4) Essentially speaking, the process of interpretation is based on the
non-empirical idea of agreement and involves making sense of individuals
in a way that is obviously dependent on the assumption that those
individuals are similar to oneself. In other words, it is implicit in the
idea of interpretation that one is trapped inside a ‘hermeneutic circle’
where the best one can hope for is not the truth that most psychiatrists
take themselves to be aspiring to, but more fruitful interpretations.

With this in mind, by availing itself of a dual theory Bracken and
Thomas view of the mind may avoid the horns of the anti-Cartesian dilemma
mentioned above. Psychiatry itself, however, because it deals with mental
states as mental states, does not have this theoretical luxury available.
In other words, ignoring the fact that if Bracken and Thomas are wrong
then psychiatry will be subsumed by neuroscience or cognitive psychology,
if they are right psychiatric expertise will amount to a kind of wisdom
akin to that that one might expect from senior members of the judiciary,
for example. I am not, of course, suggesting that Bracken and Thomas do
not recognise this, only that most psychiatrists will not find it
“encouraging”.

1.Bracken P. and Thomas P. Time to move beyond the mind-body split:
The “mind” is not inside but “out there” in the social world. BMJ 2002;
325:1433-4.

2.Davidson D. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984.

3.Clark A. Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts and
Representational Change. Cambridge: MIT press, 1993.

4.Turner MA. Psychiatry and the Human sciences. BJPsych 2003 (forthcoming)

Competing interests:  
None declared