Research On Shilik's Thoughts On The Relationship Between Mind And Matter

Moritz Schlick is the founder of logical empiricism,his thought on the relationship between the mind and matter represents the basic orientation of this school on this issue that is the pursuit of a kind of identity.Schlick thinks that discussing the mind-body problem is the need to establishing a uniform scientific world conception that is the ultimate pursuit of logical empiricism.Meanwhile,it's also the need to clarifying the concept of reality.It's inevitably that we will encounter this hard problem when we make further provision on reality.Although many previous philosophies have tried to solve this problem,there are defects and deficiencies in their thought more or less.He criticizes the theory of immanence as a retrogression for eluding the mind-body problem.He criticizes that parallelism which is based on the dualism is absolutely nothing to be absorbed.And the traditional monism,whether the monism of materialism or the monism of spiritualism,all contain truth partly.In Schlick's view,the mind-body problem is the knowledge about reality.It's both an epistemology problem and a linguistic problem.According to Shlick,there is a distinction between the intuitive reality and the non-intuitive reality.The cause of the confusion between concepts is that the concept of psychological and physical matchs with two kinds of reality wrongly.And the key to solve this problem is to defining the concept clearly,especially understanding the “space” correctly.Schlick holds that space is the fundamental factor which result in the mind-body problem,and the source of this contradiction is hiding in the relationship between psychology and physics.He divides space into mental space and physical space,the former indicates the direct given of conscious,and the latter indicates the all reality.On the basis of this division,Schlick puts forward his special way to solve the mind-body problem.That is psychophysical parallelism and mind-brain identity theory.The relationship between mind and body manifests as epistemological parallelism on the part of direct given.Because “Psychological” and “physical” are all indicate the reality,and they don't allege different kinds of reality,actually it's just a conceptual difference.So,the difference between the two is only the distinction between the two conceptual systems.And on the part of non-given,it manifests as the mind-brain identity theory.The two parts connect with each other by physiological psychology in a quantity way.Schlick believes that the biological theory in the past is not perfect enough to respond the psychological events appropriately and accurately,but we can not deny the important role the brain played in the psychological process of cognition.We can use the conceptual system of quantities in physics to indicated the objects of psychology entirely.The intuitive reality which can be matched with the conception of “psychical”sometimes can be indicated by “physical”.They are all in the conceptual space-time order.So,the physiological explanation is entirely possible.Schlick's thought on the relationship between mind and body has a great significance,it is a further developed empirical theory.It's not only rich in empirical and linguistic but also sets the tone for the logical empiricism.But there are some defects and deficiencies in his theory.On the one hand,it's more focused on the static analysis of the language or concept and ignores the dynamic development of this problem.On the other hand,there are also some contradictions in its theoretical system.