Are humans intuitive dualists? Mitch Hodge replies.

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K. Mitch Hodge

Friday, 09 January 2009

Blog Mitch Hodge's blog

Last October, a post by Paulo Sousa based upon a paper by Mitch Hodge generated much discussion on this blog. Mitch Hodge has kindly replied to the critics. I made it an independent post to avoid the comments thread to Paulo's post becoming too bulky _ Olivier.

I want to begin by apologizing for my late entry into this discussion, particularly since it is my own article being discussed. My delay should not be seen as a reflection of how important I have found the discussion thus far. Indeed, I have been following each post with interest and have been thinking about them for some time. Let me begin my post with some preliminary considerations.

While my article addresses Bloom’s conjecture that we humans are intuitive Cartesian substance dualists, many of the criticisms that I present against that position can be used against other forms of mind-body dualism. The most pressing, I think, is the growing evidence that (at least in the West) that the soul is not intuitively considered to be intensionally identical to the mind (Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8: 1-2, p. 99-115). This is important because the soul is that part which is essential to Western afterlife beliefs. What remains to be extracted from this distinction, however, is what relation the soul has to the mind and the body, for certainly it has metaphorical linguistic relations which it shares with both the mind and the body. My suspicion at this point in my research is that the soul allows for the continuation of the social identity of the individual which requires both physical and mental aspects of the individual to continue.

This brings me to what I hoped would be one of the important “take-away” messages of my article.

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