THE PLURALITY OF DESCRIPTIONS AND EXPLANATIONS IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE MENTAL

The ‘linguistic turn’ produced many significant consequences in the debate on the mbp. One of the most important is the conviction that psychophysical phenomena can, and must, be given different descriptions and explanations. Ryle had argued explicitly for the rejection of notion of knowledge founded on a single type of explanatory procedure. As regards human phenomena, we read in The Concept of Mind, two equally legitimate kinds of question may arise: those concerning “rules” and those concerning “choices”. When we observe a chess match, for example, we may ask ourselves why a particular bishop always ends up on a square of the same color, or why a player has moved his bishop in a particular way (Ryle 1949, p. 75). In the first case the question concerns the norms that objectively govern a certain system; in the second, the behavioral acts subjectively and decisionally performed by certain agents. Ryle also distinguishes two fundamental classes of explanatory models: those relative to “causes” and those relative to “reasons”. Explanations by causes tend to identify the natural, general presuppositions underlying certain actions (as well as, obviously, the causes of phenomena that are not actions); explanations by reasons tend to identify the teleological, particular motives (and in certain cases the conscious, cultural motives) of the agents of those actions (ibid., pp. 86, 109, 305).