Abstract: As far back as Descartes and Leibniz, philosophers of the West have shuddered to think that reality contains components so manifestly unlike as the mental and the physical -- with the evidently perverse consequence that, as I type this, some immaterial soul pellet exerts supernatural force over my fingers -- the Mind--Body Problem. Fortunately, Quine has introduced us to 'semantic ascent': having reasoned our way through to perverse consequences, we should re-examine the language of our premisses, in hope of finding that we have in some way misused it. A prominent form of conclusion of semantic ascent, prompted most famously by anxiety that the physical should share reality with the *evaluative*, is 'expressivism': announcing, for instance, 'it is wrong to steal' merely expresses a distaste for theft, and does not depict reality at all. So -- might the Mind--Body Problem likewise fall to expressivism?

 
Hosts:
Center for Traditional and Scientific Metaphysics, National Taiwan University 國立臺灣大學傳統與科學形上學研究中心
Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University 國立陽明交通大學心智哲學研究所