Interpretation And The Nature Of Mind

Philosophy study should focuses on the most important problems and takes innovation as its soul.The critical method of innovation is dialogue and interpretation.This dissertation attempts to promote the dialogue between Maxist Philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind by analysing Dennett's thoughts,and puts forward a new interpretation of nature of mind.The characteristic of Dennett's philosophy of mind is as follow.First of all,reconciling science and commonsense is the masterstroke of his philosophy of mind,and the subject of mind is the forcus of his study.He accelerates the movement of naturalism by rebuting the errors in traditional mental ideas and by penetrating into the essense of intentionality,consciousness and qualia,etc.Secondly,he exerts intentional system theory to illuminate all mental phenomena.The two main topics in his philosophy of mind are content (ie.intentionality) and consciousness.As the title of his first book,Content and Consciousness (1969) suggested,that is the order in which they must be addressed:first ,a theory of content or intentionality and then,building on that foundation, theory of consciousness.In fact,he takes intentional system theory as the headstone of his theory edifice,and applies it to such topics as self,religion,free will,etc.Thirdly,Darwin's evolution theory is the ultimate foundation of his thoughts.He claims that Darwin's idea bears an unmistakable likeness to universal acid:it eats through just about every traditional concept,and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view,with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.Along the ladder of evolution,he explores all three courses of mind evolution respectively:genetic evolution,evolution in brain,and memetic evolution. Fourthly,Dennett himself is convinced that his stories or intuition pumps make his views more determinate than could be done with traditional method of definition and formal argument,so he prefers to using them to make philosophical points.Taking Daniel Dennett as the target of dialogue has three reasons.For one thing,he selects the middle-road as his approach to mind.From his study,we can get a complete picture of contemporary philosophy of mind.Secondly,the topics that Dennett pays attention to are also the topics of Maxist theory of consciousness,so we can find common subjects of dialogue between them.Lastly,Dennett makes use of fruits of many disciplines in his research,such as AI,cognitive psychology,biology,etc., which will help the dialogue between philosophy and science in our nation.This dissertation constitutes by seven parts.The purpose of its reserch is laid in Part I (including preface and introduction),where the problems of folk psychology and the challengs faced by Maxist theory of consciousness are expounded.Part II (Chapter 1) explores the methodology of mind study,especially Dennetts heteo-phenomenology.PartIII(Chapte 2) reconstucts Wittgensein's, Ryle's and Dennett's semantical theory of mental language.Part IV(including Chapter 3-6) mainly explores concrete topics of mind.Chapter 3 examines Dennett's interpretationism.Chapter 4 explores Dennett's theory of content. Chapter 5 attempts to describe his Mutiple Drafts Model of consciousness. Chapter 6 is about his deconstruction of qualia.Part V (Chapter 7) discusses the ontological status of mind.PartVT(Chapter 7) concerns the evolution of mind.The last part(Epilogue) answers the question of how should we talk about mind.This dissertation claims that when we talk about mind,we should distinguish four concepts from each other:mental reality,mental phenomena,mental ideas and mental language.