Breaking new ground in the debate about the relation of mind and body, David Armstrong's classic text - first published in 1968 - remains the most compelling and comprehensive statement of the view that the mind is material or physical. In the preface to this new edition, the author reflects on the book's impact and considers it in the light of subsequent developments. He also provides a bibliography of all the key writings to have appeared in the materialist debate.

I think it is important to try to make sense of these thoughts concerning the justificatory role of experiences, for I suspect that we are losing the ability to see why philosophers have traditionally been attracted to such thoughts. Coherentism and reliabilism, perhaps the two most currently popular theories of epistemic justification, appear simply to reject the idea that experiences can justify beliefs. Thus according to coherentism, the view that ‘a belief is justified by its coherence with other beliefs one (...) holds,’ it is only other beliefs, not experiences, that can justify beliefs. Although there is little consensus as to how the notion of coherence should be explicated, it is generally agreed that experiences are not the sort of thing that can cohere with beliefs. Reliabilism, by contrast, holds that ‘a belief is justified if and only if it is “well-formed,” i.e., it has an ancestry of reliable and/or conditionally reliable cognitive operations.’ In other words, according to reliabilism beliefs are justified, not by experiences, but by being caused by reliable belief-forming processes. Experiences may be formed in the course of such processes, but they need not be, and even when they are, they make no contribution to the justification of the beliefs that are formed as the result of those processes. What makes a belief-forming process justification-conferring, according to reliabilism, is simply that it is reliable, not that it gives rise to experiences. So neither coherentism nor reliabilism seems to allow any room for the traditional thought that experiences justify beliefs. (shrink)

A belief must have justification if it is to count as knowledge. And it is a commonplace thought that in certain circumstances experiences can serve as justifications for beliefs. Moreover, many have thought that there is something distinctive about the wayin which experiences justify beliefs, and that there is something distinctive about experiences which accounts for the distinctive way in which they justify beliefs. In this paper, I seek to elucidate views about experience and justification that can make sense of (...) these thoughts and that can show us why so many have been attracted to them.I think it is important to try to make sense of these thoughts concerning the justificatory role of experiences, for I suspect that we are losing the ability to see why philosophers have traditionally been attracted to such thoughts. Coherentism and reliabilism, perhaps the two most currently popular theories of epistemic justification, appear simply to reject the idea that experiences can justify beliefs. (shrink)