Analytic philosophy and mental phenomena
pp. 243-265
in: J.C. Smith (ed), Historical foundations of cognitive science, Berlin, Springer, 1991Abstract
Throughout most of its history analytic philosophy has exhibited a curious prejudice against the mental. Many, perhaps most, analytic philosophers have felt that there was something especially puzzling about mental processes, states, and events, and that we would be better off if they could be analyzed away or explained in terms of something else or somehow eliminated. One sees this attitude, for example, in the persistent use of pejorative adjectives, such as "mysterious' and "occult', that analytic philosophers from Ryle to Rorty use to characterize mental phenomena naively construed.