185

Philosophical Books Vol. 48 No. 2

© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

When (3) is used to say the Editor of Soul thinks that he himself is a millionaire,Hector-Neri Castañeda calls ‘he’ a quasi-indicator (see H-N. Castañeda,‘Indicators and Quasi-indicators’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 4 (1967),pp. 85–100). How do we move from quasi-indicators to quasi-indexicality?To believe what (3) says, one must think of the Editor of Soul as having anindexical thought. This thinking about someone else as having an indexicalthought is what Corazza calls ‘quasi-indexicality’.

In his introduction, Corazza says, “the underlying idea and fil rouge ofthis book is that quasi-indexicality is amongst the most significant andextraordinary phenomena in the philosophy of language and mind” (p. 2).The thought seems to be that quasi-indexicality is somehow involved inattitude ascription in general, which for Corazza involves placing oneselfempathetically in the situation of the ascribee. Attitude ascription requires usto take on the thinker’s perspective, and Corazza believes that reflection onthe attribution of indexical belief (both the semantics of attitude ascriptionsand the psychological processes involved in thinking about someone else’sthoughts) will shed some light on the proper way to think about attitudeascription in general. As Corazza notes, evidence that mastery of ‘I’ inchildren comes in tandem with mastery of quasi-indicators suggests thatthinking of oneself as an intentional agent and thinking of someone else assuch go hand in hand.

This book’s many attractions include its close work on the details, its useof new research in linguistics and psychology, and its careful appraisal ofobjections. Someone seeking an informed approach to context-sensitivity inthought and language would do well to consider Corazza’s book as a startingpoint.

MindBy (Key Concepts in Philosophy)Continuum, 2005. viii + 146 pp. $45.00 cloth, £8.99 paper

Eric Matthews’s Mind: Key Concepts in Philosophy is billed on the back cover asa comprehensive, clear, and authoritative guide to the philosophy of mind,suitable for those encountering the discipline for the first time. It also has astrong argumentative thread, mounting a sustained case for a form of non-reductive materialism, derived from Ryle, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty.The book is in six chapters. The first two introduce and assess some of themajor accounts of the mind in Western philosophy, focusing on substancedualism and what Matthews calls ‘classical materialism’. Matthews discussesAristotle’s view of the mind, Cartesian dualism, type identity theory, elimina-tivism, and, briefly, functionalism. Having dealt with these positions, Matthewsuses the next chapter to set out the view he favours, which is rooted in ordinarylanguage philosophy and the phenomenological tradition. He introduces theconcepts of subjectivity and intentionality, stressing the difficulties these

186

Philosophical Books Vol. 48 No. 2

© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

features of the mind pose for reductive materialism, then goes on to give asympathetic account of Ryle’s nonreductive behaviourism and of Merleau-Ponty’s view of the mind as an embodied subjectivity. The moral is that weshould focus “not on ‘minds’, but on the beings who have minds and the rolewhich having a mind plays in their lives” (p. 69).

The remaining chapters, which look at some philosophical problemsrelating to the mind, recapitulate the dialectic of the earlier chapters. Theinadequacies of dualism and classical materialism are highlighted, and aform of non-reductive behaviourism recommended in their place. Chapter 4asks whether animals and machines can be said to have minds. Matthewsconsiders and rejects Descartes’s arguments against the existence of animalmentality, but also takes a swipe at evolutionary psychology, which, heargues, ignores the role of personal and cultural factors in the explanationof action. Moving on to machine intelligence, Matthews outlines Searle’scritique of Strong AI, buttressing it with considerations drawn from the pri-vate language argument. Machines are incapable of semantics, he maintains,because they do not participate in a society and have no purposes of theirown; again, we need to think of mentality as essentially embodied. Chapter5 looks at the problem of other minds. Matthews shows why it is particularlytroubling for dualists, before appealing to Wittgenstein and Merleau-Pontyfor a solution. Turning to the question of how we work out what others thinkor feel, Matthews argues against the ‘theory-theory’ view, on which theprocess is akin to scientific theorizing, and suggests that it requires creativeinterpretation, responsive to an open-ended set of criteria. The final chapter,‘Reasons and causes’, draws together the threads of the book. Matthewsargues that humans cannot be seen merely as biological mechanisms operat-ing in accordance with causal laws, and maintains that we must recognizethe distinctness and ineliminability of reason-based explanations of humanaction—though he insists that this need not involve a return to a dualism ofsubstances. What it means to have a mind, he concludes, is “to be an embodiedsubject: a human being, or similar creature, who is a biological organism, butwho also responds to his or her environment subjectively and intentionally”(p. 137).

This book has many virtues. Matthews is a clear writer, and he explainsphilosophical positions well, setting them in their historical context. Hispresentation of arguments and objections is often brief (inevitable in a shortvolume of this kind), but it is always clear and level-headed. In arguing forhis own views, Matthews illustrates how philosophical debate is conductedand makes a good case for an important position. However, as the precedingsummary makes clear, it is somewhat misleading to describe this book ascomprehensive and authoritative. It is, in fact, a selective and highly partisanwork, which some philosophers will regard as old-fashioned. His adherenceto a non-reductionist position leads Matthews to ignore the considerable bodyof work produced over the last thirty years or so by those seeking to integratefolk psychology with science and to formulate reductive explanations (if nottype reductions) of mental phenomena. Consequently, many topics that arenow seen as central to the discipline—functionalism, the representational

187

Philosophical Books Vol. 48 No. 2

© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

theory of mind, computationalism, theories of content, connectionism, thehard problem of consciousness—are either omitted by Matthews or dealt withperfunctorily. (Functionalism is treated as a response to eliminativism and getsjust four pages.) Of course, from Matthews’s point of view much of this workis misguided and can be written off a priori. But this just emphasizes the needfor a less partisan approach if one is to get a full idea of what is happeningin the subject today. This is, then, a good but partial work. If a person wereto read just one introduction to philosophy of mind, then I don’t think itshould be this one; but if they were to read two or three, then this shoulddefinitely be among them. 482Book reviews

ETHICS

Animal Rights and Moral PhilosophyBy . Columbia University Press, 2005. x + 152 pp. $32.00

With the exception of theories put forward by David DeGrazia and MarkRowlands, Franklin offers critical insights into all the leading recentattempts to increase, and decrease, the moral standing of nonhumananimals. As well as being a useful survey of the field, Animal Rights and MoralPhilosophy offers an original attempt to attribute significant moral status tononpersons without positing contentious metaphysical concepts such as‘inherent value’ or ‘sanctity of life’. For Franklin, nonpersons like foetuses,newborn infants, cognitively impaired human beings and nonhumananimals deserve inclusion into the ‘kingdom of ends’ in virtue of theirsentience alone. This aspect of the book sees Franklin addressing the impor-tant question of what it means to use a nonperson ‘merely as a means’ buthe does not, in my view, offer a convincing answer. By the book’s end, we aretold it is seriously wrong simply to use animals for our own ends, even thoughno argument is offered that they have the kind of preferences that couldrender intelligible the claim that animals object to being ‘used as means’in the Kantian sense.

It is important to be clear about the substantive question that is at stake inthe debate over using nonpersons merely as means. At issue, is not only thatit might be wrong to kill or cause animals, or any other nonpersons, to sufferunnecessarily; instead, the question is whether it is wrong to appropriatenonpersons for our purposes for reasons, other than side-effects, that areindependent of any deleterious impact such use may have upon their experi-ential welfare. In other words, the key question is, ‘Is it wrong to use them,period?’ It is a bold theorist who answers this question in the affirmative,without first employing metaphysically contentious concepts of the kindusually invoked by deontological defenders of nonpersonhood. With con-cepts like ‘inherent value’ or ‘sanctity of life’ in their theoretical arsenal,philosophers can argue that using a nonperson merely as a means is wrong

Philosophical Books Vol. 48 No. 2 April 2007 pp. 187–192

Philosophical Books Vol. 48 No. 2

© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA