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Philosophy of mind

Early identity theories of mind in the 1950s and '60s were based on the work of Ullin Place, Herbert Feigl, and J. J. C. Smart. While earlier philosophers such as the Logical Positivists, Quine, Wittgenstein, and Ryle had all used some form of behaviorism to dispense with the mental, they believed that behaviorism was insufficient in explaining many aspects of mental phenomena. Feigl argued that intentional states could not be thus explained. Instead, he espoused externalism. Place meanwhile argued that the mind could be reduced to physical events, while Feigl and Sense agreed they were identical. Functionalism in contrast argued that the mind was defined by what it does, rather than what it is based on. To argue against this, John Searle developed the Chinese room thought experiment. Davidson argued for anomalous monism, which claims that while mental events cause physical ones, and the all causal relations are governed by natural laws, there are however no natural laws governing the causality between mental and physical events. This anomaly in the name was explained by supervenience.

In 1970, Keith Campbell proposed a "new epiphenomenalism ", according to which the body produces the mind that does not act on the body, a process which he claims is destined to remain mysterious. Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland argued for eliminative materialism, which claims that understanding the brain will lead to a complete understanding of the mind. This was based on developments in neuroscience. However, physicalist theories of mind have had to grapple with the issue of subjective experience raised by Thomas Nagel in What Is It Like to Be a Bat? and Frank Cameron Jackson's so-called knowledge argument. David Chalmers also argued against physicalism in the philosophical zombie argument. He further noted that subjective experience posed the hard problem of consciousness. The inability of physicalist theories to explain conscious feeling has been termed the explanatory gap. In contrast, Daniel Dennett has claimed that no such gap exists as subjective experiences are a 'philosophical fiction'.