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On Behalf of the Materialist1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Glenn Pearce
Glenn Pearce*
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
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Extract

Suppose we are able to transplant Jones's pain centres into Smith's brain. Half way through the operation we test the pain centres by stimulating them electrically in vitro. Would there be pain? Roland Puccetti argues that there would not be. Because (a) pains must have owners and (b) the only available candidate for that role — the excised tissue — is logically unfit to play it. He concludes that the firing of such centres in a normally functioning brain cannot be pain either and that, therefore, materialism is false.

So far as I can see, Puccetti's “refutation” is a series of nonsequiturs from start to finish, and that is what I mainly want to show. It will not follow, of course, that materialism is true. Indeed, I think the view which Puccetti attacks under that name is too naive to be taken seriously by anyone.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 163 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1978

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was given at the 1976 meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association. At the same session, I also gave a second commentary, “On Behalf of the Agnostic,” in response to another paper. I have retained this title for historical reasons, but it is misleading to the extent that it suggests I endorse the view here called ‘materialism.’

References

2 In “The Refutation of Materialism,” this journal, 8(1978), pp. 157–162. Page references in the text are to this paper.

3 Everyone talks about her car; this is a blow against car chaùvinism.

4 I owe this particular analogy to Robert Binkley.

5 Puccetti says “owned,” following Strawson. I fall in with that usage hereafter.

6 Well, it isn't that obvious, but I concede the point out of laziness.

7 It is also evidence against identifying pain with specifically cortical events; but, as already indicated, this provides no scope for the anti-materialist.

8 Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959) pp. 95–100.

9 Ibid., pp. 96–97.

10 Actually, any semantic explanation of the illusion might be counted as an explanation in terms of contingent fact, given Strawson's view that explicitly semantic statements are statements about linguistic use, and hence contingent.