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The Unconscious Mind Worry: A Mechanistic-Explanatory Strategy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2022

Beate Krickel Open the ORCID record for Beate Krickel [Opens in a new window]
Beate Krickel*
Affiliation:
Institute of History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Literature, Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany
*
Email: beate.krickel@tu-berlin.de
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Abstract

Recent findings in different areas of psychology and cognitive science have brought the unconscious mind back to center stage. However, the unconscious mind worry remains: What renders unconscious phenomena mental? I suggest a new strategy for answering this question, which rests on the idea that categorizing unconscious phenomena as “mental” should be scientifically useful relative to the explanatory research goals. I argue that this is the case if by categorizing an unconscious phenomenon as “mental” one picks out explanatorily relevant similarities to a corresponding paradigmatically mental conscious phenomenon. Explanatory relevance is spelled out in terms of mechanistic norms.

Type
Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 90 , Issue 1 , January 2023 , pp. 39 - 59
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association

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