Do Brains Think?

Abstract

I examine the argument of Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker (B&H) that
neuroscientists are given to widespread misapplication of psychological terms and
concepts. John Searle’s critique of this argument is analysed: the charge of
criterial behaviourism is found to be unsustainable, while the demand for causal
sufficiency in theories of mind is shown to create a circularity. It is argued that
the category mistake identified by B&H’s Wittgensteinian dialectic can be located
by other means, so that not all of B&H’s ramifying conclusions need be regarded
as essential to the main thesis. It is suggested that Quinean naturalism provides the
most potent objection to there being a strict dichotomy of psychological and
neurological categories.