Functionalism views the mind very much as an engineer does: minds are mechanisms, and there is usually more than one way to build a mechanism. The Optimistic Argument, then, is a variation on the multiple realization argument discussed above; but this version does not depend on empirical facts about how our world is in fact, as the multiple realization argument does.
The Pessimistic Argument claims that the alternatives to functionalism would leave people unable to know about and explain the mental states of one another, or of other creatures. After all, if two creatures function in the same ways, achieve the same results, have isomorphic internal states, etc. The identity theory says that the justification has to do with what kinds of stuff the creatures are made of—only the one with the right kind of brain counts as having mental states.
But this flies in the face of our ordinary practices of understanding, attributing, and explaining mental states. One knows that because the speaker not only produce those noises as the behaviorist might say , but because they have internal states that function in certain ways.
One can test this, as psychologists often do, by running experiments in a laboratory or, as ordinary people do, by asking questions and observing replies. That is, we can find out how the systems function. And if functionalism is correct, that is all we need to know in order to have knowledge of other minds. But if the identity theory is correct, then those methods are at best heuristics, and the observer may yet be wrong. One cannot know for certain that the speaker has pains or beliefs unless one knows what kind of brain the speaker has.
Without knowing about brains, we can only infer that others have beliefs on the basis of the behavioral symptoms they exhibit, and we already know see above, regarding behaviorism and Super-Spartans that those can lead us astray. And that is crazy. The trouble with the Optimistic Argument is that it is question-begging. It assumes that one can create artificial thinking things without duplicating the kinds of brain states that human beings have, and that is just what the identity theory denies.
The trouble with the Pessimistic Argument is that it seems to exploits a very high standard for knowledge of other minds — namely infallibility or certainty. The objection gets its grip only if the requirement to infer facts about others minds does undermine the possibility of knowledge about those minds. But we regularly acquire knowledge by inference or induction, and there is no special reason to think that inferences about minds are more problematic than other inferences.
The multiple realization argument is much more nuanced. Its interpretation is a matter of some dispute. Although there has been increasing resistance to the argument lately, it remains the most influential reason for favoring functionalism over the alternatives. And even if the multiple realization argument is unsound, that result would only undermine one argument for functionalism and not the thesis itself.
The next two sections will consider two objections to functionalism that aim to show that the theory is untenable. Both objections assume that mental states are, as the functionalist insists, multiply realizable. The objections try to show that because of its commitment to multiple realization, functionalism must accept certain unpalatable consequences. The conclusion of each argument is that functionalism is false.
Searle then describes a scenario in which a system that carries out the program consists in some books and pieces of paper, a pencil, he himself—John Searle—all inside a room. People on the outside pass questions written in Chinese into the room. And Searle, by following the directions the program in the books, is able to produce answers to those questions.
But Searle insists that he does not understand Chinese and has no beliefs about the questions and answers. And he thinks it would be absurd to say that the room itself understands Chinese or has beliefs about the questions and answers. So, he concludes, the version of functionalism represented by Strong AI must be false.
Having the right functions, at least when they are specified only by inputs and outputs, is not sufficient for having mental states.
Since functionalism holds that being is doing, two systems that do the same things that is, that are functionally the same should also be the same with respect to their mental states. But if Searle is correct, the system including the books and himself is functionally but not psychologically identical to a person who understands Chinese. And if so, this is incompatible with functionalism. Searle considers a number of responses to his thought experiment, and offers his own replies. Probably the most serious response is that Searle begs the question when he asserts that the whole collection of stuff in the room including the books and himself, i.
In the Chinese Room thought experiment, nothing is specified about the details of instructions that Searle follows, the program. It is simply stipulated that it produces the correct outputs appropriate to the inputs. But many philosophers think that it would undermine the claim that the room understands if, for example, the program turned out to be a giant look-up table, a prepared list of all possible questions with the corresponding appropriate answer Block But some philosophers conclude that functionalism is a good theory of intentional states but that it nevertheless fails because it cannot explain other sorts of mental states—in particular, they say that it cannot explain sensations and other conscious mental states.
The whole system does not enjoy what it is doing, it does not experience sensations or emotions, and it does not feel pains or pleasures. But Searle himself does have experiences and sensations—he is a conscious being. So, the reasoning goes, even if functionalism works for intentional states, it does not work for consciousness.
This terminology was introduced by Robert Kirk , but has recently, for lack of a better expression, taken on a life of its own. The general idea is that there might be two creatures which are physically or functionally identical but that differ in the mental states in a particularly dramatic way: one has normal conscious mental states, and the other has none at all.
If functionalism is true, it is not possible for me to have a zombie twin, i. There are several differences between the premises of the zombies argument and those of the earlier argument against behaviorism. P2 makes a very weak claim, because mere behavior—movement, rather than what some philosophers would call action—is relatively easy to generate.
It seems to suggest that the zombie could be not just behaviorally identical but also functionally identical in any arbitrary sense of function and in as much specificity as one might want. But this is quite controversial. In this variation, the twins would be physically identical creatures, one of whom has conscious mental states and the other of whom lacks consciousness altogether.
Functionalism must be specified in terms of functions inputs and outputs that are sufficiently general to allow for multiple realization of mental states, but sufficiently specific to avoid attributing mental states to just about everything. This is tricky. Is there any way to navigate between this Scylla and Charybdis? This is the big unanswered question for functionalists. At this point two clarifications are in order. These clarifications reveal some ways in which functionalism comes in stronger or weaker versions.
The first clarification pertains to the varieties of functionalism. As noted in Section 2, there are many versions of functionalism. Here the focus has been on metaphysical versions. But the variations described earlier metaphysical, intentional, semantic, explanatory, methodological, and theoretical represent only one dimension of the ways in which various functionalisms differ. Functionalist theories can also be distinguished according to which mental phenomena they are directed toward.
The standard way of classifying mental states is as intentional such as beliefs and desires or conscious or qualitative such as sensations and feelings. Of course some philosophers and psychologists believe that all mental states turn out to be of one sort. Most commonly they hold that all kinds of mental states are intentional states of one sort or another. But that need not be a factor here, for the classification is only for expository purposes.
Specifically, one can hold that functionalism is a theory of intentional states, of conscious states, or of both. The strongest claim would be that functionalism applies to all mental states. William Lycan seems to hold this view. One of the difficulties that concerned the functionalists was how to reconcile the objective, scientific nature of psychology with its focus on consciousness, which by its nature is not directly observable. Although psychologists like William James accepted the reality of consciousness and the role of the will in people's lives, even he was unable to resolve the issue of scientific acceptance of consciousness and will within functionalism.
Other functionalists, like John Dewey , developed ideas that moved ever farther from the realm that structuralism had created. Dewey, for example, used James's ideas as the basis for his writings, but asserted that consciousness and the will were not relevant concepts for scientific psychology. Instead, the behavior is the critical issue and should be considered in the context in which it occurs.
For example, a stimulus might be important in one circumstance, but irrelevant in another. A person's response to that stimulus depends on the value of that stimulus in the current situation. Thus, practical and adaptive responses characterize behavior, not some unseen force like consciousness. This dilemma of how to deal with a phenomenon as subjective as consciousness within the context of an objective psychology ultimately led to the abandonment of functionalism in favor of behaviorism , which rejected everything dealing with consciousness.
By , very few psychologists regarded psychology as the study of mental content—the focus was on behavior instead. As it turned out, the school of functionalism provided a temporary framework for the replacement of structuralism, but was itself supplanted by the school of behaviorism. It can thus be regarded as providing implicit definitions of the mental state terms of the theory.
An individual will have those mental states just in case it possesses a family of first-order states that interact in the ways specified by the theory. Though functionalists of course acknowledge that the first-order states that satisfy the functional definitions may vary from species to species — or even from individual to individual — they specify that, for each individual, the functional definitions be uniquely satisfied. This makes it clear that, in the classic formulations of functional theories, mental states are intended to be characterized in terms of their relations to stimulations, behavior, and all the other states that may be permissibly invoked by the theory in question, and thus certain functional theories may have more resources for individuating mental states than suggested by the crude definitions used as examples.
The next three sections will discuss the potential of various sorts of functionalist theory for giving adequate characterizations of experiential and intentional states—and also for specifying the inputs and outputs of the system.
So, for example, the experience of a very reddish-orange could be partially characterized as the state produced by the viewing of a color swatch within some particular range, which tends to produce the judgment or belief that the state just experienced is more similar to the experience of red than of orange. Analogous characterizations, of course, will have to be given of these other color experiences.
The judgments or beliefs in question will themselves be partially characterized in terms of their tendencies to produce sorting or categorization behavior of certain specified kinds.
This strategy may seem fatal to analytic functionalism, which restricts itself to the use of a priori information to distinguish among mental states, since it's not clear that the information needed to distinguish among experiences such as color perceptions will result from conceptual analysis of our mental state terms or concepts. However, this problem may not be as dire as it seems. There are limits to this strategy, however see Section 5.
To switch, however, would be to give up the benefits if any of a theory that offers meaning-preserving translations of our mental state terms. There has been significant skepticism, however, about whether any functionalist theory — analytic or scientific — can capture what seems to be the distinctive qualitative character of experiential states such as color perceptions, pains, and other bodily sensations; these questions will be addressed in section 5. Strawson , Horgan and Tienson , Kriegel , and Pitt , who suggest that intentional states have qualitative character as well.
We can begin by characterizing beliefs as among other things states produced in certain ways by sense-perception or inference from other beliefs, and desires as states with certain causal or counterfactual relations to the system's goals and needs, and specify further how according to the relevant common sense or empirical theory beliefs and desires tend to interact with one another, and other mental states, to produce behavior.
Once again, this characterization is crude, and needs more detail. Moreover, there are some further questions about characterizing intentional states—particularly belief— that have emerged in recent discussions. Once is whether a subject should be regarded as believing that p if there is a mismatch between her avowals that p and the characteristic behaviors associated with believing that p in standard circumstances: do avowals outweigh behaviors, or vice versa—or are there pragmatic factors that determine what the answer should be in different contexts?
See Gendler, , and Schwitzgebel, See Staffel, , and the many contributions to Huber and Schmidt-Petri, , and Ebert and Smith, , for further discussion.
Functionalism, at least arguably, can accommodate a number of different answers to these questions, but the project of characterizing beliefs may not be straightforward.
In dependently of these questions, functionalists need to say more outright or not about what makes a state a particular belief outright or not or desire, for example, the belief — or desire — that it will snow tomorrow. This permits differences and similarities in the contents of intentional states to be construed as differences and similarities in the propositions to which these states are related.
But what makes a mental state a relation to, or attitude toward, some proposition P? And can these relations be captured solely by appeal to the functional roles of the states in question? The development of conceptual role semantics may seem to provide an answer to these questions: what it is for Julian to believe that P is for Julian to be in a state that has causal and counterfactual relations to other beliefs and desires that mirror certain inferential, evidential, and practical action-directed relations among propositions with those formal structures Field ; Loar ; Block This proposal raises a number of important questions.
One is whether states capable of entering into such interrelations can must? Another is whether idiosyncracies in the inferential or practical proclivities of different individuals make for differences in or incommensurabilities between their intentional states. This question springs from a more general worry about the holism of functional specification, which will be discussed more generally in Section 5.
Twin Earth, as Putnam presents it, is a hypothetical planet on which things look, taste, smell and feel exactly the way they do on Earth, but which have different underlying microscopic structures; for example, the stuff that fills the streams and comes out of the faucets, though it looks and tastes like water, has molecular structure XYZ rather than H 2 O. Similar conclusions, they contend, can be drawn for all cases of belief and other intentional states regarding natural kinds.
The same problem, moreover, appears to arise for other sorts of belief as well. Tyler Burge presents cases in which it seems intuitive that a person, Oscar, and his functionally equivalent counterpart have different beliefs about various syndromes such as arthritis and artifacts such as sofas because the usage of these terms by their linguistic communities differ.
If these cases are convincing, then there are differences among types of intentional states that can only be captured by characterizations of these states that make reference to the practices of an individual's linguistic community. These, along with the Twin Earth cases, suggest that if functionalist theories cannot make reference to an individual's environment, then capturing the representational content of at least some intentional states is beyond the scope of functionalism. See Section 4.
On the other hand, the externalist individuation of intentional states may fail to capture some important psychological commonalities between ourselves and our counterparts that are relevant to the explanation of behavior. Considerations about whether certain sorts of beliefs are to be externally individuated raise the related question about how best to characterize the stimulations and behaviors that serve as inputs and outputs to a system.
Should they be construed as events involving objects in a system's environment such as fire trucks, water and lemons , or rather as events in that system's sensory and motor systems? On this view inputs and outputs may be better characterized as activity in specific sensory receptors and motor neurons.
In addition, this option would not be open to analytic functionalist theories, since generalizations that link mental states to neurally specified inputs and outputs would not, presumably, have the status of conceptual truths. Perhaps there is a way to specify sensory stimulations that abstracts from the specifics of human neural structure enough to include any possible creature that intuitively seems to share our mental states, but is sufficiently concrete to rule out entities that are clearly not cognitive systems such as the economy of Bolivia; see Block b.
Clearly, the issues here mirror the issues regarding the individuation of intentional states discussed in the previous section. The previous sections were by and large devoted to the presentation of the different varieties of functionalism and the evaluation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. There have been many objections to functionalism, however, that apply to all versions of the theory.
Some of these have already been introduced in earlier discussions, but they, and many others, will be addressed in more detail here. One difficulty for every version of the theory is that functional characterization is holistic. Functionalists hold that mental states are to be characterized in terms of their roles in a psychological theory—be it common sense, scientific, or something in between—but all such theories incorporate information about a large number and variety of mental states.
Thus if pain is interdefined with certain highly articulated beliefs and desires, then animals who don't have internal states that play the roles of our articulated beliefs and desires can't share our pains, and humans without the capacity to feel pain can't share certain or perhaps any of our beliefs and desires.
In addition, differences in the ways people reason, the ways their beliefs are fixed, or the ways their desires affect their beliefs — due either to cultural or individual idiosyncracies — might make it impossible for them to share the same mental states. These are regarded as serious worries for all versions of functionalism see Stich , Putnam Some functionalists, however e. Shoemaker c , have suggested that if a creature has states that approximately realize our functional theories, or realize some more specific defining subset of the theory particularly relevant to the specification of those states, then they can qualify as being mental states of the same types as our own.
Quine , Rey For example, if pain is realized in me by some neural state-type, then insofar as there are purely physical law-like generalizations linking states of that type with pain behavior, one can give a complete causal explanation of my behavior by citing the occurrence of that neural state and the properties by virtue of which it figures in those laws.
And thus, some have argued, the higher-level role properties of that state—its being a pain—are causally irrelevant. There have been a number of different responses to this problem. Some e. Instead, some argue, causation should be regarded as a special sort of counterfactual dependence between states of certain types Loewer , , Fodor , Block , or as a special sort of regularity that holds between them Melnyk If this is correct, then functional role properties along with the other macroscopic properties of the special sciences could count as causally efficacious but see Ney for dissent.
However, the plausibility of these accounts of causation depends on their prospects for distinguishing bona-fide causal relations from those that are clearly epiphenomenal, and some have expressed skepticism about whether they can do the job, among them Crane , Kim , Jackson , Ludwig , and McLaughlin , forthcoming. On the other hand, see Lyons for an argument that if functional properties are causally inefficacious, this can be viewed as a benefit of the theory.
Yet other philosophers argue that causation is best regarded as a relation between types of events that must be invoked to provide sufficiently general explanations of behavior Antony and Levine , Burge , Baker Though many who are moved by the exclusion problem e. Kim, Jackson maintain that there is a difference between generalizations that are truly causal and those that contribute in some other merely epistemic way to our understanding of the world, theorists who advocate this response to the problem charge that this objection, once again, depends on a restrictive view of causation that would rule out too much.
Another problem with views like the ones sketched above, some argue Kim , , is that mental and physical causes would thereby overdetermine their effects, since each would be causally sufficient for their production.
And, though some theorists argue that overdetermination is widespread and unproblematic see Loewer , and also Shaffer, , and Sider , for a more general discussion of overdetermination , others contend that there is a special relation between role and realizer that provides an intuitive explanation of how both can be causally efficacious without counting as overdetermining causes.
For example, Yablo , suggests that mental and physical properties stand in the relation of determinable and determinate just as red stands to scarlet , and argues that our conviction that a cause should be commensurate with its effects permits us to take the determinable, rather than the determinate, property to count as causally efficacious in psychological explanation.
Bennett suggests, alternatively, that the realizer properties metaphysically necessitate the role properties in a way that prevents them from satisfying the conditions for overdetermination. Yet another suggestion Wilson, , , and Shoemaker, is that the causal powers of mental properties are included among or are proper subsets of the causal powers of the physical properties that realize them. See also Macdonald and Macdonald , Witmer, , Yates, , and Strevens, , for related views.
There has been substantial recent work on the causal exclusion problem, which, as noted earlier, arises for any non-reductive theory of mental states. See the entry on Mental Causation, as well as Bennett , and Funkhouser , for further discussion and extensive bibliographies. If pain is functionally defined either by an a priori or an empirical theory as the state of being in some lower-level state or other that, in certain circumstances causes wincing, then it seems that the generalization that pain causes wincing in those circumstances is at best uninformative, since the state in question would not be pain if it didn't.
And, on the Humean view of causation as a contingent relation, the causal claim would be false. Davidson b once responded to a similar argument by noting that even if a mental state M is defined in terms of its production of an action A, it can often be redescribed in other terms P such that 'P caused A' is not a logical truth.
But it's unclear whether any such redescriptions are available to role vs. Some theorists e. Antony and Levine have responded by suggesting that, though mental states may be defined in terms of some of their effects, they have other effects that do not follow from those definitions which can figure into causal generalizations that are contingent, informative, and true.
For example, even if it follows from a functional definition that pain causes wincing and thus that the relation between pain and wincing cannot be truly causal , psychologists may discover, say, that pain produces resilience or submissive behavior in human beings. Such claims could be affirmed, however, if as seems likely the most plausible functional theories define sensations such as pain in terms of a small subset of their distinctive psychological , rather than behavioral, effects see section 4.
A different line of response to this worry Shoemaker d, is to deny the Humean account of causation altogether, and contend that causal relations are themselves metaphysically necessary, but this remains a minority view. See also Bird, , and Latham, , for further discussion.
We seem to have immediately available, non-inferential beliefs about these states, and the question is how this is to be explained if mental states are identical with functional properties. The answer depends on what one takes these introspective beliefs to involve. Broadly speaking, there are two dominant views of the matter but see Peacocke , Ch. A full discussion of these questions goes beyond the scope of this entry, but the articles cited above are just three among many helpful pieces in the Open Peer Commentary following Goldman , which provides a good introduction to the debate about this issue.
Another account of introspection, identified most closely with Shoemaker a,b,c,d , is that the immediacy of introspective belief follows from the fact that occurrent mental states and our introspective beliefs about them are functionally interdefined. For example, one satisfies the definition of being in pain only if one is in a state that tends to cause in creatures with the requisite concepts who are considering the question the belief that one is in pain, and one believes that one is in pain only if one is in a state that plays the belief role, and is caused directly by the pain itself.
On this account of introspection, the immediacy and non-inferential nature of introspective belief is not merely compatible with functionalism, but required by it. But there is an objection, most recently expressed by George Bealer ; see also Hill , that, on this model an introspective belief can only be defined in one of two unsatisfactory ways: either as a belief produced by a second-order functional state specified in part by its tendency to produce that very type of belief — which would be circular — or as a belief about the first-order realization of the functional state, rather than that state itself.
Functionalists have suggested, however Shoemaker , McCullagh , Tooley , that there is a way of understanding the conditions under which beliefs can be caused by, and thus be about, one's second-order functional states that permits mental states and introspective beliefs about them to be non-circularly defined but see Bealer , for a skeptical response. A full treatment of this objection involves the more general question of whether second-order properties can have causal efficacy, and is thus beyond the scope of this discussion see section 5.
Yet another objection to functionalist theories of any sort is that they do not capture the interrelations that we take to be definitive of beliefs, desires, and other intentional states. Whereas even analytic functionalists hold that mental states— and also their contents— are implicitly defined in terms of their causal or probabilistic roles in producing behavior, these critics understand intentional states to be implicitly defined in terms of their roles in rationalizing , or making sense of , behavior.
This is a different enterprise, they claim, since rationalization, unlike causal explanation, requires showing how an individual's beliefs, desires, and behavior conform, or at least approximate, to certain a priori norms or ideals of theoretical and practical reasoning — prescriptions about which beliefs and desires we should have, how we should reason, or what, given our beliefs and desires, we ought to do.
See Davidson c, Dennett , and McDowell for classic expressions of this view. One can't, that is, extract facts from values. This is not to say, these theorists stress, that there are no causes, or empirical laws of, behavior. These, however, will be expressible only in the vocabularies of the neurosciences, or other lower-level sciences, and not as relations among beliefs, desires and behavior. Functionalists have replied to these worries in different ways. Many just deny the intuition behind the objection, and maintain that even the strictest conceptual analyses of our intentional terms and concepts purport to define them in terms of their bona-fide causal roles, and that any norms they reflect are explanatory rather than prescriptive.
They argue, that is, that if these generalizations are idealizations, they are the sort of idealizations that occur in any scientific theory: just as Boyle's Law depicts the relations between the temperature, pressure, and volume of a gas under certain ideal experimental conditions, our a priori theory of the mind consists of descriptions of what normal humans would do under physically specifiable ideal conditions, not prescriptions as to what they should , or are rationally required , to do.
Other functionalists agree that we may advert to various norms of inference and action in attributing beliefs and desires to others, but deny that there is any in principle incompatibility between normative and empirical explanations. They argue that if there are causal relations among beliefs, desires, and behavior that even approximately mirror the norms of rationality, then the attributions of intentional states can be empirically confirmed Fodor ; Rey In addition, many who hold this view suggest that the principles of rationality that intentional states must meet are quite minimal, and comprise at most a weak set of constraints on the contours of our theory of mind, such as that people can't, in general, hold obviously contradictory beliefs, or act against their sincerely avowed strongest desires Loar See Stich , and Levin , for discussion of this question, and for a more general debate about the compatibility of normative and psychological principles, see Rey, , and Wedgwood, Nonetheless, although many functionalists argue that the considerations discussed above show that there is no in principle bar to a functionalist theory that has empirical force, these worries about the normativity of intentional ascription continue to fuel skepticism about functionalism and, for that matter, any scientific theory of the mind that uses intentional notions.
In addition to these general worries about functionalism, there are particular questions that arise for functional characterizations of experiential or phenomenal states. These questions will be discussed in the following section. Functionalist theories of all varieties — whether analytic or empirical, FSIT or functional specification — attempt to characterize mental states exclusively in relational, specifically causal, terms. The next three sections will present the most serious worries about the ability of functionalist theories to give an adequate characterization of these states.
See Searle , G. Conversely, some argue that functional role is not necessary for qualitative character: for example, it seems that one could have mild, but distinctive, twinges that have no typical causes or characteristic effects. All these objections purport to have characterized a creature with the functional organization of normal human beings, but without any, or the right sort, of qualia or vice versa , and thus to have produced a counterexample to functional theories of experiential states.
One line of response, initially advanced by Sydney Shoemaker b , is that although functional duplicates of ourselves with inverted qualia may be possible, duplicates with absent qualia are not, since their possibility leads to untenable skepticism about the qualitative character of one's own mental states.
This argument has been challenged, however Block b; but see Shoemaker's response in d, and Balog, , for a related view , and the more common response to these objections—particularly to the absent qualia objection— is to question whether scenarios involving creatures such as Blockheads provide genuine counterexamples to functionalist theories of experiential states.
For example, some theorists Dennett ; Levin ; Van Gulick argue that these scenarios provide clear-cut counterexamples only to crude functional theories, and that attention to the subtleties of more sophisticated characterizations will undermine the intuition that functional duplicates of ourselves with absent qualia are possible or, conversely, that there are qualitative states without distinctive functional roles.
The plausibility of this line of defense is often questioned, however, since there is tension between the goal of increasing the sophistication and thus the individuative powers of the functional definitions, and the goal for analytic functionalists of keeping these definitions within the bounds of the a priori though see Section 4.
A related suggestion is that absent qualia seem possible only because of our imaginative shortcomings, in particular, that it is hard for us to attend, at any one time, to all the relevant features of even the simplest functional characterization of experiential states; another is that the intuition that Blockheads lack qualia is based on prejudice—against creatures with unfamiliar shapes and extended reaction times Dennett , or creatures with parts widely distributed in space Lycan, , Schwitzgebel and commentary.
There are other responses to analogous absent qualia arguments that are prominent in the literature, but the target of those arguments is broader. Block's argument was initially presented as a challenge exclusively to functionalist theories, both analytic and empirical, and not generally to physicalistic theories of experiential states; the main concern was that the purely relational resources of functional description were incapable of capturing the intrinsic qualitative character of states such as feeling pain, or seeing red.
Indeed, in Block's b, p. But there are similar objections that have been raised against all physicalistic theories of experiential states that are important to consider in evaluating the prospects for functionalism. Angell The second paradigm of psychology was functionalism. As its name implies, the primary interest in this approach is in the function of mental processes, including consciousness. While not the creation of any single scholar, William James was clearly its most famous advocate. The functionalists tended to use the term function rather loosely.
The term is used in at least two different ways. It can refer to the study of how a mental process operates. Functionalism never really died, it became part of the mainstream of psychology.
James was the first American psychologist, he wrote the first general text book on psychology, and he remains one of the most well-liked and famous of all psychologists. While functionalism did not have a specific founder or leader, James is identified as its early spokesperson. The main contribution the functionalists made to learning theory is that they studied the relationship of consciousness to the environment rather than studying it as an isolated phenomenon.
They opposed the introspective technique of the structuralists because it was elementistic, not because it studied consciousness. The functionalists were not opposed to studying mental processes but insisted that they should always be studied in relat At the most general level, what makes a mental state mental?
Or more specifically, what do thoughts have in common in virtue of which they are thoughts? References Olson M. An introduction to theories of learning. Get Access.
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