Constitution

I feel like most philosophical attempts to understand mental states and their relations to other kinds of states (biological, physical, etc.) have involved some attempt or another to identify mental kinds with some other non-mental kind. Hence, Fodor’s dictum that “if beliefs are real, they must really be something else.” Functionalism, for instance, doesn’t identify mental kinds with physical kinds, but it does identify them with functional kinds.

I want to defend the possibility of a totally acceptable scientific theory of the mental, and other kinds (biological, chemical, whatever), where we do not need to engage in any kind of identification in order to legitimize the kind. But that does require some account of how different kinds relate to each other. If mental kinds like belief aren’t identical to physical kinds, or functional kinds, or anything else–if a good psychological theory can bottom out in beliefs–then what is the relationship between beliefs and the physical? I wonder whether we can appropriate talk of “constitution” from metaphysics.

The idea is that there can be two coincident entities (the statue, David, and the piece of clay out of which it is made) where one entity (the clay) constitutes, but is not identical to, the other (David). The entities are distinguished by, for instance, their persistence conditions: whereas taking a hammer to the statue will destroy it, the hunk of clay will survive the smashing. Here’s Lynne Rudder Baker’s conditions for constitution (“The Very Idea of Material Constitution”): x constitutes y at t =_df

1. x and y are spatially coincident at t; and
2. x is in D at t; and
3. It is necessary that: z[(F*zt \& z is in D at t) u(G*ut \& u is spatially coincident with z at t)]; and
4. It is possible that: (x exists at t \& w[G*wt \& w is spatially coincident with x at t]).
5. y has no nonspatial parts at t unless x has nonspatial parts at t.

Statue-Favorable Circumstances

F is the primary kind of x, where an individual’s primary kind determines its main causal powers. G is y’s primary kind. D is the set of “G-favorable circumstances” under which something is a G. For example, David is a statue, and among the statue-favorable circumstances are being appreciated as art, being sculpted by someone intending to display it as art, etc. When the piece of clay is in statue-favorable circumstances, it constitutes a statue–where the statue itself is genuinely distinct (has different modal properties) from the piece of clay. Some things in some circumstances constitute other things. But we don’t need to go outside of statue-theory, defining statues in functional terms or clay-terms, in order to talk about how statues relate to pieces of clay.

It strikes me that this kind of relation hasn’t really been posed as a way to understand the relation between the physical and the mental, except, notably, by Baker herself. (NB: the above definition of constitution can be modified to apply to properties and, hence, to states.) But, if the constitution relation is a genuine metaphysical relation, it looks like it is the best candidate for a thoroughly non-reductionist account of how the physical relates to the mental. You can see that the definition of constitution given above does not require us to identify x or y with anything else, and likewise with their primary kinds, F and G. Beliefs don’t have to be anything other than beliefs. We might construe the task of psychology, then, as being to investigate beliefs and belief-favorable circumstances. In hooking up neuroscience with psychology, we try to find certain states of the organism that are capable of constituting beliefs when belief-favorable circumstances obtain. But we don’t need to say that beliefs are anything other than beliefs. No need for reduction or ramsification.

Is this constitution approach–which doesn’t rely on supervenience, realization, or identity–a legitimate possibility for a completely nonreductionist (but not dualist) theory of mind, or does it just give a name to the problem without really explaining it?