APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Book Reviews

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Rocco J. Gennaro, Mind and Brain: A Dialogue on the Mind-Body Problem
Hackett Publishing Co., 1996. 75 pp. $5.95 paper, $24.95 cloth.

Reviewed by Jerry Kapus
University of Wisconsin-Stout

In structuring a course in introduction to philosophy, we typically start out with several basic considerations: whether the course should take a historical or problem-centered approach and whether the readings should emphasize primary or secondary sources. Each combination of these considerations has its advantages and disadvantages. For the last several years, I have structured my course in introduction to philosophy around a problem-centered approach using secondary sources. Gennaro's Mind and Brain-part of the Hackett Dialogue Series-fits very well into this type of course structure. Mind and Brain provides beginning philosophy students with an accessible and engaging introduction to the major historical and contemporary debates centered on the mind-body problem. Gennaro begins with a brief introduction that explains the overall aims of the book and summarizes its contents. Similar to other books in the Dialogue Series, the format of the book is a conversation that is divided into three parts, each part taking place on one of three consecutive nights. After the dialogue, Gennaro has a concluding section with study questions organized around each night's conversation. This is followed by a short bibliography of primary sources, notes, and an index of key terms.

As an aid to the reader, key terms and the names of arguments are highlighted in bold in the body of each night's conversation, and the first letter of the name of each of the characters identifies his or her overall philosophical position, e.g, Mary is the materialist.

The first night's dialogue covers the arguments for materialism and dualism. The conversation begins with a brief discussion of immortality that Gennaro uses to engender interest in the debate concerning the relationship between the mind and the brain. The conversation then moves on to focus on the reasons for accepting materialism: our evolutionary relationship to other animals, the fact that materialism provides us with a testable theory for explaining how the mind functions, and considerations of ontological parsimony. Gennaro provides a very good explanation of the reasons for accepting materialism, but this brief section could have been strengthened and made more interesting for students through reference to specific examples from neuroscience, e.g., how brain chemistry is related to mental illnesses or how different regions of the brain perform different cognitive functions.

The second night's conversation examines the problems involved in providing an in-depth explanation of dualism and materialism. The conversation explores the problems involved in interactionism, e.g., that it appears to violate the principle of the conservation of energy, and epiphenomenalism, e.g., that it does not provide an adequate explanation of why certain mental and physical events are correlated. The conversation then continues to consider type-type and token-token identity theory. The second night concludes with a discussion of the problem that materialism faces in trying to make sense of consciousness from the first person point of view. The problem for materialism is that a person could know all of the neurophysiological facts associated with a given mental event without knowing what it is like to experience that mental event. For example, a person who has been blind from birth could learn all of the neurophysiological facts about perceiving the color red, and yet not know what it is like from the first-person perspective to experience the color red. Thus, materialism is inadequate as an explanation of a subject's experience of consciousness. In the analysis of this argument, Gennaro points out its similarity to the argument from introspection. Both arguments rely on differences between what we can and cannot know about the mind and the brain. However, given the intensional contexts created by knowledge claims, these epistemological differences do not show that the metaphysical claim of materialism is false.

The second night's conversation has many well-chosen examples and provides a balanced exposition of the debate. Gennaro's clear exposition in the dialogue format allows students not only to appreciate how the dialectic is an integral part of the process involved in developing the philosophical positions of dualism and materialism, but also to appreciate how this process is a natural part of the conversation typically entered into in our pursuit of solutions to any philosophical problem.

Night three shifts the primarily metaphysical focus of the first two nights towards epistemological questions. Specifically, the last night of the dialogue discusses the problem of other minds and the problem of knowing the specific phenomenal character of a particular state of another mind. Four considerations are proposed as relevant for judging the presence of other minds: brain structure, nonverbal behavior, linguistic ability, and evidence of creativity. The wisdom of appealing to these considerations is explored by looking at various cases that pose difficulties for their application, viz., the cases of apes, bees, and machines. The dialogue concludes with a brief discussion of the inverted spectrum problem, i.e., the problem that two people could behave in similar ways in similar circumstances and yet have different color experiences associated with their behavior.

As in the conversations of the first two nights, here, too, Gennaro provides an accessible and engaging overview of the major arguments. The issues raised in the third night's conversation will probably be of greatest interest to students. It might therefore have been wise for Gennaro to have expanded on his explanations in this section, and to have brought out more prominently the connections between the issues covered in night three and those of the previous nights. Gennaro does briefly discuss the idea that a materialist could decide whether another creature has a mind by determining if it has a brain structure similar to our own. Still, the issue of how materialism and dualism might allow us to respond to the questions raised in night three should have been developed more fully. (For those instructors who want to focus primarily on issues of consciousness as it pertains to animals, humans, and machines, it should be noted that Hackett's Dialogue Series contains two dialogues focused entirely on different aspects of these issues: Can Animals and Machines Be Persons? by Justin Leiber, and Mind, Man, and Machine by Paul Sagal.)