On Thinking About the Mental and the Physical

Abstract

Some phenomenalists, taking what is immediately presented in experience to exist, rejected material objects as objects of direct experience and, hence, as anything more than “constructions” out of phenomena. This led some to a form of idealism. The pattern and the arguments leading to phenomenalistic-idealism are familiar, if not always clear. Physicalists reject phenomenal entities but can give no corresponding reasons, in the sense of basing their view on what is supposedly immediately experienced. Consequently some materialists deny that there is a given or what is directly experienced, in the sense Moore, Russell and Broad used such phrases—the contents of conscious acts as well as the acts themselves. One need only recall W. Sellars’ attack on the purported “Myth of the Given” and Quine’s arguments that phenomena are not basic objects of experience but “hypothetical” objects—“myths” like the “gods of Homer.” For Quine, ordinary macro-physical objects were also myths, along with the theoretical objects of science, that can only be justified by the theory that involves them.¹ This leads to a familiar claim made by physicalists (materialists).