Thus far we have worked with provisional concepts of the physical and mental. In order to further the case for dualism and to defend the intelligibility of theism, it is crucial to consider in greater detail the adequacy of these concepts. In turning to this project we meet with terrain that is inhospitable to dualism as materialists argue that there are good conceptual and linguistic grounds for concluding that the dualist notion of the mental is either empty or unintelligible. In this chapter I consider the general project of how we might attain a substantive, sharper notion of the mental and physical, and then address an important materialist challenge.

THE PHYSICAL, THE MENTAL, AND THE OSTENSIVE

Until now we have characterized the physical by offering what appear to be safe examples such as the human body as a whole, brain states, and H2O, while the mental has been demarcated by examples like feeling pain, entertaining thoughts, having beliefs, desires, and so on. Reference to the physical world in more general terms has been secured by appealing to the content of contemporary natural sciences such as physics and neuroscience. The materialist and dualist strategies reviewed so far amount to debate over whether our sample of mental items can fit into such a materialist schema with its sample of physical items.