These questions are aimed to get you to think carefully and critically about the readings. The answers to each question should not take a huge amount of writing (2-3 paragraphs each should cover it in the amount of detail needed), but some of the questions are quite tricky, and require substantial thought. Most of the time taken on the homework should be spent reading and thinking about the material carefully.

1. Place begins his paper with a discussion of various uses of the word ‘is’. He distinguishes the ‘is’ of definition from the ‘is’ of composition, and distinguishes both from the ‘is’ of predication.

a. Provide your own examples of sentences containing each use of ‘is’.

There is (potentially) another use of ‘is’: the ‘is’ of identity, as in ‘Barack Obama is the President of the United States’.

a. Please describe some of the similarities and differences between this use of ‘is’, and the uses that Place describes.

b. Is the ‘is’ of identity an example of one of Place’s uses, or is it a different use altogether? If it is an example of one of Place’s uses, which one? If it is not, which one is it most like, and how does it differ? Explain your answer.

2. Place claims that part of the reason that people reject the identity theory (the claim, for which he is advocating, that mental states are brain states) is that they commit what he calls ‘the phenomenological fallacy’.

a. Please give a brief description of what this fallacy is.

This mistake seems to be related to what Ryle called ‘a category mistake’.

b. Please say a little bit about the relations between Ryle’s notion of category mistakes and Place’s notion of the phenomenological fallacy. How are they similar? How do they differ?

3. Putnam claims (p436) that total states (functional properties) are ‘neither mental nor physical’.

a. What does he mean by this?

b. Give another example of a property that is ‘neither mental nor physical’ in this sense. Explain your answer.

4. Putnam (p436) claims that the ‘brain-state theorist can save himself by making ad hoc assumptions’.

a. What does he mean by an ‘ad hoc assumption’?

Various Identity Theorists (what Putnam calls ‘brain-state theorists’) have indeed attempted to save their theories in a manner that Putnam would consider ad hoc. For example, they have attempted to restrict the coverage of mental terms, such as ‘pain’ in various ways.

b. How might such a response to Putnam’s argument go?

c. Is this response in fact ad hoc? Why or why not?