Prairie State College Pros and Cons of British Rule in India Paper https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1871britishrule.asp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-

Prairie State College Pros and Cons of British Rule in India Paper https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1871britishrule.asp

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36339524

Naoroji mentions “famines” in his speech. Please read this article (Links to an external site.) about one such famine that occurred in 1866 [Warning: graphic images of starvation]. Do you think the credits that Naoroji mentions in his speech outweighed the debits of famines such as this? Why or why not?

Minimium of 500 words. Please create works cited for both sources in MLA format. Ensure direct quotes supports the opinion. J. J.C . S ma r t: S e nsations a nd B rai n Processes !!!3 7 1
T E S T YO U R U N D ER STA N D I NG
1. According to Ryle, why did the Cartesian category-mistake arise?
(i)
Because theorists assumed that the mind was a complicated physical machine, whose workings were not predictable by Galileo’s mechanics.
(ii) Because theorists took the mind to be like the Average Taxpayer.
(iii) Because it reconciled the view that the mind is not physical with the view that
the mind is a sort of machine.
(iv) Because it was a consequence of Galileo’s theory of spectral machines.
2. Is it a category-mistake to think that you have never met the Average Taxpayer?
3. Does Ryle think the human mind is a complicated physical machine?
N OT E S A N D Q U ES T ION S
1. There are many mistakes that aren’t category mistakes. So it is possible to hold that
Cartesian dualism is a mistake without thinking that it is “a mistake of a special
kind . . . namely, a category-mistake.” Does Ryle give good reasons for thinking that
Cartesian dualism is a mistake of this “special kind”?
2. Ryle is usually taken to be some kind of behaviorist, although this interpretation is not
straightforward. See Julia Tanney, “Gilbert Ryle,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2009/entries/ryle/).
J.J.C. Smart (1920–2012)
Smart was an Australian philosopher known for his contributions to the philosophy of mind,
metaphysics, and ethics. His books include Philosophy and Scientific Realism (1963), Utilitarianism:
For and Against (with Bernard Williams; 1973), and Essays Metaphysical and Moral (1987).
SENSATIONS AND BRAIN PROCESSES
S
uppose that I report that I have at this moment a roundish, blurry-edged afterimage which is yellowish towards its edge and is orange towards its centre. What
is it that I am reporting? One answer to this question might be that I am not reporting
anything, that when I say that it looks to me as though there is a roundish yellowy
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orange patch of light on the wall I am expressing some sort of temptation, the temptation to say that there is a roundish yellowy orange patch on the wall (though I may
know that there is not such a patch on the wall). . . . Similarly, when I “report” a pain,
I am not really reporting anything (or, if you like, I am reporting in a queer sense
of “reporting”), but am doing a sophisticated sort of wince. . . . I prefer most of the
time to discuss an after-image rather than a pain, because the word “pain” brings in
something which is irrelevant to my purpose: the notion of “distress.” I think that “he
is in pain” entails “he is in distress,” that is, that he is in a certain agitation-condition.
Similarly, to say “I am in pain” may be to do more than “replace pain behavior”: it
may be partly to report something, though this something is quite nonmysterious,
being an agitation-condition, and so susceptible of behavioristic analysis.1 The suggestion I wish if possible to avoid is a different one, namely that “I am in pain” is a
genuine report, and that what it reports is an irreducibly psychical something. And
similarly the suggestion I wish to resist is also that to say “I have a yellowish orange
after-image” is to report something irreducibly psychical.
Why do I wish to resist this suggestion? Mainly because of Occam’s razor.2 It seems
to me that science is increasingly giving us a viewpoint whereby organisms are able
to be seen as physico-chemical mechanisms: it seems that even the behavior of man
himself will one day be explicable in mechanistic terms. There does seem to be, so far
as science is concerned, nothing in the world but increasingly complex arrangements
of physical constituents. All except for one place: in consciousness. That is, for a full
description of what is going on in a man you would have to mention not only the
physical processes in his tissue, glands, nervous system, and so forth, but also his states
of consciousness: his visual, auditory, and tactual sensations, his aches and pains. That
these should be correlated with brain processes does not help, for to say that they are
correlated is to say that they are something “over and above.” You cannot correlate
something with itself. You correlate footprints with burglars, but not Bill Sikes the burglar with Bill Sikes the burglar. So sensations, states of consciousness, do seem to be
the one sort of thing left outside the physicalist picture, and for various reasons I just
cannot believe that this can be so. That everything should be explicable in terms of
physics (together of course with descriptions of the ways in which the parts are put
together — roughly, biology is to physics as radio-engineering is to electro-magnetism)
except the occurrence of sensations seems to me to be frankly unbelievable. Such
sensations would be “nomological danglers,” to use Feigl’s expression.3 It is not often
realized how odd would be the laws whereby these nomological danglers would dangle. It is sometimes asked, “Why can’t there be psycho-physical laws which are of a
novel sort, just as the laws of electricity and magnetism were novelties from the standpoint of Newtonian mechanics?” Certainly we are pretty sure in the future to come
1. Behaviorism is the view that to have a mind is simply to behave (or to be disposed or inclined to behave)
in various ways.
2. A methodological principle of parsimony in theorizing, often rendered as “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.” Named after the English philosopher William of Occam (or Ockham) (c. 1287–1347).
3. “Nomological”: relating to laws of nature. Herbert Feigl (1902–1988) was an Austrian philosopher of
science.
J. J.C . S ma r t: Se nsations a nd B rain Processes !!!3 7 3
across new ultimate laws of a novel type, but I expect them to relate simple constituents: for example, whatever ultimate particles are then in vogue. I cannot believe that
ultimate laws of nature could relate simple constituents to configurations consisting of
perhaps billions of neurons (and goodness knows how many billion billions of ultimate
particles) all put together for all the world as though their main purpose in life was to
be a negative feedback mechanism of a complicated sort. Such ultimate laws would
be like nothing so far known in science. They have a queer “smell” to them. I am just
unable to believe in the nomological danglers themselves, or in the laws whereby they
would dangle. If any philosophical arguments seemed to compel us to believe in such
things, I would suspect a catch in the argument. In any case it is the object of this paper
to show that there are no philosophical arguments which compel us to be dualists.4 . . .
Why should not sensations just be brain processes of a certain sort? There are, of
course, well-known (as well as lesser-known) philosophical objections to the view
that reports of sensations are reports of brain processes, but I shall try to argue that
these arguments are by no means as cogent as is commonly thought to be the case.
Let me first try to state more accurately the thesis that sensations are brain processes. It is not the thesis that, for example; “after-image” or “ache” means the same as
“brain process of sort X” (where “X” is replaced by a description of a certain sort of
brain process). It is that, in so far as “after-image” or “ache” is a report of a process, it is
a report of a process that happens to be a brain process. It follows that the thesis does
not claim that sensation statements can be translated into statements about brain
processes. Nor does it claim that the logic of a sensation statement is the same as that
of a brain-process statement. All it claims is that in so far as a sensation statement is a
report of something, that something is in fact a brain process. Sensations are nothing
over and above brain processes. Nations are nothing “over and above” citizens, but
this does not prevent the logic of nation statements being very different from the
logic of citizen statements, nor does it insure the translatability of nation statements
into citizen statements. (I do not, however, wish to assert that the relation of sensation statements to brain-process statements is very like that of nation statements to
citizen statements. Nations do not just happen to be nothing over and above citizens,
for example. I bring in the “nations” example merely to make a negative point: that
the fact that the logic of A-statements is different from that of B-statements does not
insure that A’s are anything over and above B’s.)
Remarks on identity. When I say that a sensation is a brain process or that lightning is an electric discharge, I am using “is” in the sense of strict identity. (Just as
in the — in this case necessary — proposition “7 is identical with the smallest prime
number greater than 5.”) When I say that a sensation is a brain process or that lightning is an electric discharge I do not mean just that the sensation is somehow spatially or temporally continuous with the brain process or that the lightning is just
spatially or temporally continuous with the discharge. . . . I wish to make it clear that
the brain-process doctrine asserts identity in the strict sense.
4. Those who believe, following the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), that the mind and
the body are distinct things.
3 74!!! C H A P T E R 8 : I S M I N D M A T E R I A L ?
I shall now discuss various possible objections to the view that the processes reported in sensation statements are in fact processes in the brain. Most of us have
met some of these objections in our first year as philosophy students. All the more
reason to take a good look at them. Others of the objections will be more recondite
and subtle.
Objection 1.5 Any illiterate peasant can talk perfectly well about his after-images,
or how things look or feel to him, or about his aches and pains, and yet he may know
nothing whatever about neurophysiology. A man may, like Aristotle, believe that the
brain is an organ for cooling the body without any impairment of his ability to make
true statements about his sensations. Hence the things we are talking about when we
describe our sensations cannot be processes in the brain.
Reply. You might as well say that a nation of slug-abeds, who never saw the morning star or knew of its existence, or who had never thought of the expression “the
Morning Star,” but who used the expression “the Evening Star” perfectly well, could
not use this expression to refer to the same entity as we refer to (and describe as) “the
Morning Star.”6
You may object that the Morning Star is in a sense not the very same thing as the
Evening Star, but only something spatiotemporally continuous with it. That is, you
may say that the Morning Star is not the Evening Star in the strict sense of “identity”
that I distinguished earlier. I can perhaps forestall this objection by considering the
slug-abeds to be New Zealanders and the early risers to be Englishmen. Then the
thing the New Zealanders describe as “the Morning Star” could be the very same
thing (in the strict sense) as the Englishmen describe as “the Evening Star.” And yet
they could be ignorant of this fact.
There is, however, a more plausible example. Consider lightning. Modern physical
science tells us that lightning is a certain kind of electrical discharge due to ionization
of clouds of water-vapor in the atmosphere. This, it is now believed, is what the true
nature of lightning is. Note that there are not two things: a flash of lightning and an
electrical discharge. There is one thing, a flash of lightning, which is described scientifically as an electrical discharge to the earth from a cloud of ionized water-molecules.
The case is not at all like that of explaining a footprint by reference to a burglar. We say
that what lightning really is, what its true nature as revealed by science is, is an electric
discharge. (It is not the true nature of a footprint to be a burglar.)
To forestall irrelevant objections, I should like to make it clear that by “lightning”
I mean the publicly observable physical object, lightning, not a visual sense-datum7
of lightning. I say that the publicly observable physical object lightning is in fact the
electric discharge, not just a correlate of it. The sense-datum, or at least the having
of the sense-datum, the “look” of lightning, may well in my view be a correlate of the
electric discharge. For in my view it is a brain state caused by the lightning. But we
5. Smart discusses eight objections, two of which are omitted from this selection.
6. The Morning Star and the Evening Star are both the planet Venus.
7. A sense datum (plural data) is an object that (according to some philosophers) one is aware of when one
sees a physical object and that (unlike the physical object) always is as it appears to be.
J. J.C . S ma r t: Se nsations a nd B rai n Processes !!!3 7 5
should no more confuse sensations of lightning with lightning than we confuse sensations of a table with the table.
In short, the reply to Objection 1 is that there can be contingent statements of
the form “A is identical with B,” and a person may well know that something is an A
without knowing that it is a B. An illiterate peasant might well be able to talk about
his sensations without knowing about his brain processes, just as he can talk about
lightning though he knows nothing of electricity.
Objection 2. It is only a contingent fact (if it is a fact) that when we have a certain kind
of sensation there is a certain kind of process in our brain. Indeed it is possible, though
perhaps in the highest degree unlikely, that our present physiological theories will be
as out of date as the ancient theory connecting mental processes with goings on in the
heart. It follows that when we report a sensation we are not reporting a brain-process.
Reply. The objection certainly proves that when we say “I have an after-image”
we cannot mean something of the form “I have such and such a brain process.” But
this does not show that what we report (having an after-image) is not in fact a brain
process. “I see lightning” does not mean “I see an electric discharge.” Indeed, it is
logically possible (though highly unlikely) that the electrical discharge account of
lightning might one day be given up. Again, “I see the Evening Star” does not mean
the same as “I see the Morning Star,” and yet “the Evening Star and the Morning Star
are one and the same thing” is a contingent proposition. Possibly Objection 2 derives
some of its apparent strength from a “Fido” — Fido theory of meaning.8 If the meaning of an expression were what the expression named, then of course it would follow
from the fact that “sensation” and “brain process” have different meanings that they
cannot name one and the same thing.
Objection 3. Even if Objections 1 and 2 do not prove that sensations are something
over and above brain processes, they do prove that the qualities of sensations are something over and above the qualities of brain processes. That is, it may be possible to get
out of asserting the existence of irreducibly psychic processes, but not out of asserting
the existence of irreducibly psychic properties. For suppose we identify the Morning
Star with the Evening Star. Then there must be some properties which logically imply
that of being the Morning Star, and quite distinct properties which entail that of being
the Evening Star. Again, there must be some properties (for example, that of being a
yellow flash) which are logically distinct from those in the physicalist story. . . .
Now how do I get over [this] objection that a sensation can be identified with a
brain process only if it has some [irreducibly psychic] property . . . whereby one-half
of the identification may be, so to speak, pinned down?9
8. The theory (given this derogatory label by the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle [1900–1976]) that the
meaning of an expression is the thing it refers to. Thus the meaning of the name ‘Fido” is the dog, Fido.
9. In a true identity statement like “The Morning Star = the Evening Star,” the object in question, namely
Venus, has two properties corresponding to the different ways Venus is identified or picked out by the two
expressions “the Morning Star” and “the Evening Star.” These two properties of Venus are being the brightest
object in the morning sky, and being the brightest object in the evening sky. Objection 3 is that if an identity
statement like “This pain sensation = such-and-such brain process” is true, then the property corresponding
to the way the noun phrase “this pain sensation” identifies or picks out the thing it refers to cannot be a
neurophysiological property, and must instead be an irreducibly mental one.
3 76!!! C H A P T E R 8 : I S M I N D M A T E R I A L ?
My suggestion is as follows. When a person says, “I see a yellowish-orange afterimage,” he is saying something like this: “There is something going on which is like
what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me, that is, when I really see an orange.” . . . Notice
that the italicized words, namely “there is something going on which is like what is
going on when,” are all quasi-logical or topic-neutral words. This explains why the
ancient Greek peasant’s reports about his sensations can be neutral between dualistic
metaphysics or my materialistic metaphysics. It explains how sensations can be brain
processes and yet how those who report them need know nothing about brain processes. For he reports them only very abstractly as “something going on which is like
what is going on when . . .” Similarly, a person may say “someone is in the room,” thus
reporting truly that the doctor is in the room, even though he has never heard of doctors. (There are not two people in the room: “someone” and the doctor.) This account
of sensation statements also explains the singular elusiveness of “raw feels”1 — why
no one seems to be able to pin any properties on them. Raw feels, in my view, are
colorless for the very same reason that something is colorless. This does not mean that
sensations do not have properties, for if they are brain processes they certainly have
properties. It only means that in speaking of them as being like or unlike one another
we need not know or mention these properties.
This, then, is how I would reply to Objection 3. The strength of my reply depends
on the possibility of our being able to report that one thing is like another without
being able to state the respect in which it is like. I am not sure whether this is so or
not, and that is why I regard Objection 3 as the strongest with which I have to deal.
Objection 4. The after-image is not in physical space. The brain process is. So the
after-image is not a brain process.
Reply. This is an ignoratio elenchi.2 I am not arguing that the after-image is a brain
process, but that the experience of having an after-image is a brain process. It is the
experience which is reported in the introspective report. Similarly, if it is objected
that the after-image is yellowy-orange but that a surgeon looking into your brain
would see nothing yellowy-orange, my reply is that it is the experience of seeing
yellowy-orange that is being described, and this experience is not a yellow-orange
something. So to say that a brain-process cannot be yellowy-orange is not to say that
a brain-process cannot in fact be the experience of having a yellowy-orange afterimage. There is, in a sense, no such thing as an after-image or a sense-datum, thoug…
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