• Corpus ID: 192320065

The "mental" and the "physical"

@inproceedings{Feigl1958TheA,
  title={The "mental" and the "physical"},
  author={Herbert Feigl},
  year={1958}
}

• H. Feigl
• Published 1958
• Psychology, Philosophy

Taking into consideration everything we have said so far about the scientific and the philosophical aspects of the mind-body problem, the following view suggests itself: The raw feels of direct experience as we "have" them, are empirically identifiable with the referents of certain specifiable concepts of molar behavior theory, and these in turn (this was argued in the preceding subsection D) are empirically identifiable with the referents of some neurophysiological concepts. As we have pointed out, the word,"mental" in present day psychology covers, however, not only the events and processes of direct experience (i.e., the raw feels), but also the unconscious events and processes, as well as the "intentional acts" of perception, introspective awareness, expectation, thought, belief, doubt, desire, volition, resolution, etc. I have argued above that since intentionality as such is to be analyzed on the one hand in terms of pure semantics (and thus falls under the category of the logical, rather than the psychological), it would be a category mistake of the most glaring sort to attempt a neurophysiological identification of this aspect of "mind." But since, on the other hand, intentional acts as occurrents in direct experience are introspectively or phenomenologically describable in something quite like raw-feel terms, a neural identification of this aspect of mind is prima facie not excluded on purely logical grounds. Unconscious processes, such as those described in psychoanalytic theory, are methodologically on a par with the concepts of molar behavior theories (as, e.g., instinct, habit strength, expectancy, drive, etc.) and hence offer in principle no greater difficulties for neurophysiological identification than the concepts of molar behavior theory which refer to conscious events or processes (e.g., directly experienced sensations, thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc.). As we have repeatedly pointed out, the crux of the mind-body problem consists in the interpretation of the relation between raw feels and the neural processes. The questions to be discussed are therefore these: