It is a largely unexamined assumption of late twentieth-century materialists that the concept of matter, unlike that of mind, is unproblematic. Some philosophers, however, have followed Russell and argued that the conception of the physical world given to us by science is purely functional and formal: science, that is, tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of anything, only about its behaviour and how to quantify it, and that this alone is an inadequate conception. Qualitative content is given to our conception of the world from the qualia presented in perception, and without that there would be no non-relational and non-formal content to our conception of the world. But functionalism denies that qualia are given in experience and presents the same kind of purely relational conception of experiential states as physical science does of the physical world. If functionalism is correct, we are stuck with a conception of the world which is entirely relational, with no intrinsic content to any of the relata. This may be an incoherent conception. [from the _Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy_]
Posted on: Fri, 09 May 2014 07:45:24 +0000
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