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Materialism in Australia: The Identity Theory in Retrospect

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Abstract

I suggest a historico-philosophical overview, assessment and explanation of the variety of materialism that was developed from the late 1950s onwards in Australia, primarily by U.T. Place, J.J.C. Smart, and D.M. Armstrong. These authors spoke less of “materialism” and more of an “identity theory,” that is, a theory concerning the nature of the relation between brain and mind – not matter and mind in general, notice – which they wished to show was an “identity.” In order to explain, survey and assess this intellectual episode I examine some of its roots in the Vienna Circle (its closest ‘correspondent’ in the United States was Herbert Feigl, who had been a member of the Vienna logical positivists), the way in which it reacted to behaviorism, and its ‘success’ in Anglo-Saxon philosophy of mind in the years since then. Having done so, I evaluate the pertinence and novelty of this kind of materialism in relation to philosophical materialism more broadly defined, and this will lead me to formulate some criticisms of the Identity Theory.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    With the rare exception of the British “mortalists” in the late seventeenth century, to whom Hobbes and Joseph Priestley are closest of the more canonical philosophical figures: mortalists believe in the compatibility of Christian doctrine in its Puritan reduction, with a materialist account of the human body in which the soul dies with the body (hence they are “mortalists”).

  2. 2.

    After the IT, the Australian materialists went on to produce influential work in other areas (besides, of course, returning to it and suggesting emendations over the years). Smart wrote several important essays on the philosophy of time, color, a rather premonitory book on scientific realism, and also ventured into utilitarian ethics, as well as that perennial hobby of materialist philosophers, debating with religious believers (Smart and Haldane 1996). Armstrong produced a major metaphysical theory of universals and laws of nature. But the identity theory also played a significant role in philosophy of mind and the newer field of philosophy of neuroscience in more recent decades (Polger 2011), despite, ironically, the absence of neuroscientific evidence in the IT argumentation, as discussed below.

  3. 3.

    Armstrong, “Preface to the Paperback Edition,” in Armstrong (1993), xiii. For an interesting way of extending this tension between a British ‘anti-metaphysical’ stance (of the time) and Armstrong’s monistic ontology, see Campbell (2012).

  4. 4.

    Smart (1974/2000), where Smart also makes a stab at an ‘inter-cultural’ vision, briefly surveying “Eastern Materialism”: “This historical survey has been concerned with Materialism in Western philosophy. On the whole, Materialism is contrary to the spirit of both Indian and traditional Chinese philosophy, though the Carvaka school of Materialists flourished from the 6th century BC until medieval times in India. Mention should also be made of the strong naturalistic tendency in Theravada Buddhism, as also in certain schools of Chinese philosophy that exalt ch’i (‘ether’ or ‘material force’) above principle and mind” (ibid.).

  5. 5.

    Boring (1933). See Place (1990), as quoted by Smart (2000/2007).

  6. 6.

    Smart made some contributions to utilitarian ethical theory, but specifically stressed that there was no particular connection between his ‘metaphysics’ (the IT) and his ‘morals’.

  7. 7.

    Gil (2000) attempts a political critique of the IT. For a broader claim about how McCarthyism influenced the move away from politics in analytic philosophy in the United States, see Schürmann (1994).

  8. 8.

    Polanyi (1968), 1310. For Driesch, see his (1908) and (1914) monographs.

  9. 9.

    The historical background to which he appealed was primarily that of the physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and his notion of a Bildungstrieb (formative drive) in living organisms, and secondarily that of Caspar Friedrich Wolff, who had developed an early critique of mechanistic reduction of life targeting preformationism and emphasizing the merits of the epigenetic account of embryonic development. Driesch’s appeal to these thinkers shows how embryology becomes the standard-bearer of vitalism within biology in the twentieth century.

  10. 10.

    Schlick (1953), 536. Armstrong in the 1970s reprised such points, arguing that the problem with intentionality or secondary qualities for the materialist was: do they bestow any causal power?

  11. 11.

    Alex Rosenberg is representative of this ‘instrumentalist’ view (see e.g. Rosenberg 1989).

  12. 12.

    As I note below when discussing Smart, the combination of DNA, physics and behaviorism can also be used to ‘save’ philosophy in general from Wittgensteinian scepticism.

  13. 13.

    Armstrong (1968/1993), 75–76.

  14. 14.

    If this were true, we would have an irreducibly mental property. We could be ‘substance materialists’, or rather ‘substance monists’ who held that there is only one kind of substance in the world, matter and its diverse modifications; but we would be property dualists.

  15. 15.

    Feigl, “Mind-Body not a Pseudo-Problem” [1960], in Feigl (1981), 344, 347.

  16. 16.

    Smart (1959), 141.

  17. 17.

    In fact, Place himself explains that his own 1956 paper was the result of “a series of informal discussions” at the University of Adelaide “between Charlie Martin, Jack Smart and myself” (Place 1997); these articles are full of comments such as “I owe this point to Place, who made it in a conversation,” or “Armstrong first made this objection to me but has since informed me that he has abandoned it”: it is a very tightly knit community of discourse.

  18. 18.

    See my discussion in Chap. 1.

  19. 19.

    Smart (1959), 142.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 143.

  21. 21.

    Symons (2002), 19.

  22. 22.

    The specter of analytical or logical behaviorism within contemporary materialism recurs in debates between, e.g. the Churchlands and Dennett (with the former accusing the latter of being ‘just’ a behaviorist rather than a true materialist). In his book, Armstrong suggests (confusingly) that behaviorism and ‘central-state’ materialism are two species of materialism … (Armstrong 1968/1993, 54).

  23. 23.

    Feigl (1958), 390.

  24. 24.

    Smart (1959), 151.

  25. 25.

    Place (1997), 15.

  26. 26.

    Feigl (1967), 90.

  27. 27.

    Smart (1981), in (1987), 247.

  28. 28.

    Smart (1961), 407.

  29. 29.

    Smart (1963), 656. Smart’s version of the IT is thus more flexible than Place’s. No empirical claims about translating sensation statements into brain-process statements need be made (Smart 1959, 144). Just because “there must be no predicates that are not definable in a physicalist language” (Smart 1987, 225) does not mean one has to be committed to translatability (ibid., 216ff., 243–244).

  30. 30.

    “No Pot of Message” (1974), in Feigl (1981), 16.

  31. 31.

    What Norwood Hanson called the ‘dematerialization’ of matter, raises questions concerning what ‘materialism’ means in terms of the theories of microphysics.

  32. 32.

    For Smart’s argument see Smart (1981), reprinted in Smart (1987).

  33. 33.

    See Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” in Sellars (1963).

  34. 34.

    If one asks, what is the relation between the IT and AI (the artificial intelligence research programme, which is roughly contemporaneous with the IT) I would suggest a fairly limited affinity. To the extent that the IT seeks to ‘demystify’ and allow, perhaps for the future ‘quantification’ of sensory and perceptual processes, thereby locating them squarely in a causal network, it can be taken as ‘consonant’ with AI. Armstrong, who does seem more sympathetic to functionalism than the others, does say that “a materialist will see no difficulty in the notion of artificial intelligence,” since internal states have no privileged status (Armstrong, in Armstrong and Malcolm 1984, 160–161).

  35. 35.

    See Richardson (1979) for an early attempt to reintroduce reductionism.

  36. 36.

    See Smart (1963), VI, § 3, “Problem-solving ingenuity,” and Armstrong (1968/1993), 357 on the implications of ‘intelligent machines’ for the IT.

  37. 37.

    “Philosophy and our mental life,” in Putnam (1975), 291.

  38. 38.

    The C-fibres example was a prominent feature in arguments for and against the identity theory. It seems to have been introduced in Putnam’s early article “Minds and Machines” (in Putnam 1975), in reference to an exchange between Herbert Feigl and Max Black (Kaitaro 2004). It turns out, however, that the C-fibres are related only to a very specific aspect of pain transmission (Hardcastle 1997).

  39. 39.

    Bickle (2003) and Bickle and Ellis (2005).

  40. 40.

    See Romo et al. (1998), 387–388 and their (2000), 276, Liu and Newsome (2000) and Cohen and Newsome (2004), 170, 173 and the commentary in Bickle (2003), 206, 210 et 198 (thanks to John Bickle for his advice here). Additionally, see Wickersham and Groh (1998), R412-413.

  41. 41.

    * I wish to thank Dr. M.-C. Wright of the University of Leeds for providing me with a copy of U.T. Place’s paper.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Christoffer Basse Eriksen for his input here, and to Tom Polger for sharing some of his work.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Sarton Centre for History of Science Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Charles T. Wolfe

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Wolfe, C.T. (2016). Materialism in Australia: The Identity Theory in Retrospect. In: Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24820-2_7

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