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This paper discusses two basic, but fundamentally different, approaches to the philosophy of the mind: dualism and identity theory. Dualism is outlined first so as to understand the context in which the identity theory arose and the "phenomenological fallacy" is applied (Place 59). U.T. Place and J.J.C. Smart first noted the "phenomenological fallacy," which held that dualists fallaciously confuse "qualities of experiences" with "qualities experienced" (Heil 83). They thought that the recognition of this fallacy would make the identity theory a more plausible view of the mind. While the reasoning behind the "phenomenological fallacy" may be fallacious, it is still useful in bringing to light the central problem of identity theory. That is, identity theory descriptions are qualia deficient in that they are inadequate in describing the qualitative features of mental sensations. Therefore, analyses of different formulations of the "phenomenological fallacy," namely that of Place and Smart and that of Heil, will reveal the serious threat that qualia poses to identity theory.
In everyday speech, people naturally talk about thinking, believing, feeling, and other items categorized primarily as "mental" terms. In this way, common sense intuitions tend to lead people to believe in a form of dualism in which the "mental" is viewed as apart or separate from the material world. For instance, imagine the feeling of pain from a pin pricking one's skin. This pain can be described in a material way by describing the path of the pain sensations through the nervous system. However, no matter how complete such a material description, it still seems as if something is neglected, namely the feeling of the pain. Thus, the complete material description is still lacking; hence, the dualist view of the mind as distinct from the body, which describes feelings such as pain in an intuitively satisfactory way.
The identity theory of the mind stands in stark contrast to the dualist intuition. Two proponents of the identity theory of the mind are U.T. Place and J.J.C. Smart. The identity theory claims that the mind is reducible to the brain, and mental processes are nothing more than particular brain processes. In reality, "every mental property is...a material property" (Heil 76). This view was proposed in the 1950's with the hope that future research on...