MMMark
August 12, 2012, 7:02pm
34
Sun. 12/08/12 20:02 EDT. post #234 Game Theory, self interest, and praxeology - #33 by zefreak ]
You seem to think of Szasz as a “dualist,” but he isn’t. You also seem to think that one must be either a “dualist” or a “materialist,” but Szasz is neither. You also use the word “mind” as a noun, which creates the illusion that there is some “thing” to which the word “mind” refers.
How dualists and materialists both err (my emphasis)
Dualists and materialists each make a mistake, and fall into conceptual confusion, when thinking about the mind-body problem. Dualists mistakenly think that there are two different entities, (mind) and body. Materialists make the mistake of identifying the mind, something that is not an entity at all but instead a set of capabilities possessed by a person, with the brain which is physical.
THE MIND IS NOT AN ENTITY
Dr. Szasz does not hold that “brain and mind are quite separate entities” because the mind is not an entity.
Morse Peckham says in his book, EXPLANATION AND POWER: The Control of Human Behavior:
“For twenty-five hundred years the struggle has been going on to decide whether or not the mind is an entity. No conclusion has been reached…”
“… there are a good many words, of which “mind” appears to be an excellent example, for which there is no something. It is an illusion that there is a something. The something that the word allegedly names does not exist.”
(google search term: “because the mind is not an entity”)
From A Lexicon of Lunacy, p. 32 :
In fact, so profound is the popular confusion about mental illness that people no longer realize that the word mind, as a noun, is itself a metaphor. We have a liver, a heart, a spleen, and a brain - but we have no mind. Only as a verb does the word mind have a literal meaning, as in phrases such as “who is minding the store?” or “mind your own business!”
from The Meaning of Mind, p. 101 (my emphasis):
From The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 30 :
Nor should this view be rejected only on ethical grounds. It also happens to be false. “Mind” is an abstraction that helps us to describe certain human experiences, in particular the experience of self-consciousness. Although we have a concept called “mind,” it does not follow that there exists a physical object or biological entity whose name it is. To believe so and hence to treat the mind as an organ is to commit a “category error.” To go further than this and consider psychiatry as the study and treatment of “diseased minds” is to transform a relatively simple category mistake into a grand system of category errors.