Leibniz’s Law tells us that if x and y are one and the same thing, they have to have all the same properties. If they have different properties (at the same time), they can’t be one and the same thing. Here’s an example of using this principle in some natural reasoning:
Similarly:
These seem to be good pieces of reasoning. In other words, if the premises are true, it seems legitimate to infer that the conclusion will be true too. Of course, I might be fooled into accepting some of these premises when they’re not true. Maybe the butler is left-handed after all; he’s just managed to fool me into thinking he isn’t. Still, that wouldn’t show that the reasoning is bad. The reasoning wouldn’t have led me astray; it was my my being fooled into accepting the premise that did so.
Now we have to be careful when applying Leibniz’s Law. It doesn’t tell us we’re allowed to infer like this: “x is F, but y is G, so x isn’t identical to y.” Maybe x and y are both F and G. For example, suppose it’s the 1980s and I’ve just met President Reagan. Somebody asks me, Hey do you think he’s that same guy, Ronald Reagan, who acted in the old westerns we’ve been watching? I say “No way! Ronald Reagan is a famous actor. But President Reagan is a politician. So they can’t be identical.” Clearly my reasoning here is mistaken. After all, Ronald Reagan was both a famous actor and a politician. I must have been thinking that President Reagan was a politician instead of being a famous actor; that is, I must have been thinking it’s not possible for someone to be both a politician and a famous actor. But that’s wrong. This is possible. (And Reagan is not the only example.) The lesson here is that when we’re applying Leibniz’s Law, if x does have some property F, we should be checking whether y lacks that property F. The fact that y is G only helps here if its being G is incompatible with its being F.
Many arguments for dualism have the form of applying Leibniz’s Law. They say “minds can’t be physical because physical objects are … but minds are …”
The materialist will want to resist these arguments. I’ll sort the arguments for dualism into several different groups, differentiated by what kind of complaint the materialist will make about them.
First, the materialist is going to complain that some of these arguments have the same problem as our Ronald Reagan example discussed above. Here’s an example:
This argument can only succeed if being mental is incompatible with taking up space. And we haven’t yet settled that. That’s just what the dualist and the materialist are arguing about.
The dualist can attempt to argue, more explicitly:
This is an improvement, in that it’s a clear application of Leibniz’s Law. It does seem right that if the premises of this argument are true, the conclusion would have to be true too. The problem though is that the second premise is too controversial to be helpful to use in an argument for dualism. It’s similar to if I were trying to persuade you that God existed, and I argued: “God exists because the Bible says so; and nothing written in the Bible is false.” It may be that everything I’m saying is correct, but you probably wouldn’t be very impressed or moved by my argument. The premise “nothing written in the Bible is false” is just too controversial to appeal to when what we’re trying to establish is whether God exists. Only someone who was already persuaded of the conclusion we’re aiming for is likely to be ready to accept the premise. This is the kind of argument that philosophers call question-begging.
Some arguments are really obviously question-begging, in that you can just see the conclusion among the premises: “God exists, and wrote the Bible. So God exists.” In other arguments, like the one I described a moment ago with the premise “Nothing written in the Bible is false,” the conclusion might not explicitly be among the premises. Still, these arguments are going to be unpersuasive because they start from points which are argumentatively too close to the conclusions they’re trying to establish. A good, persuasive argument should instead have more of a surprising punch to it. It should make its audience see that premises that you’d think are uncontroversial, or at least much less controversial than your conclusion, when taken together in fact do force us to accept that conclusion, after all.
The “Nothing written in the Bible is false” argument wouldn’t do that. And neither would the “Minds do not take up space” argument.
Here are other arguments that have the same feel:
In each case, a materialist, or someone who was just trying to make up their mind whether to accept materialsm or dualism, wouldn’t be ready to accept the second premise. If the dualist wants to talk us into their view, they should try harder to find premises that seem plausible even to people who haven’t yet subscribed to dualism.
Another group of arguments for dualism at first seem like they might achieve that. Consider:
Here premise 1 seems to be true, at least as it’s most naturally understood. And premise 2 also seems to be true. And the rest seems to be just an application of Leibniz’s Law. So is this a good argument for dualism?
The problem here is that the sense of “in” where it seems to be clearly true that Aunt Lobelia is in my mind doesn’t seem to be the same sense of “in” where it seems to be clearly true that Aunt Lobelia is not in my brain. For the latter, let’s say “spatially inside.” Sure, Aunt Lobelia is not spatially inside my brain. But is she spatially inside my mind? Don’t think we want to say that. The sense in which she clearly seems to be “in” my mind is that I’m thinking about her, I have thoughts concerning her. It’s not at all clear that that means she is spatially inside my mind. (The dualist wouldn’t want to say she’s spatially inside my mind, anyway! Since they think minds don’t take up space.)
So this argument equivocates. Premise 1 seems plausible if we understand “in” with one meaning (“in my mind” = thinking about). Premise 2 seems plausible if we understand “in” with a second, different meaning (“in” = spatially inside). And if you don’t notice that “in” has changed meanings, it might look like the reasoning structure is correct. But for it really to be correct, we have to understand “in” consistently, with a single meaning.
The dualist may think that the argument is correct with “in” understood consistently in the sense of “thinking about her.” That is, they may accept all the premises and the conclusion of this argument:
But now we’d once again have an argument whose second premise is too controversial to be persuasive, in an inquiry about whether or not to be dualist.
Where have we gotten so far? The materialist complains that if the dualist makes sure to be explicit about what property it is that the mind has but that physical objects lack (or what property it is that physical objects have but the mind lacks), the argument is going to be question-begging. Nobody is going to find the argument persuasive unless they’ve already subscribed to dualism.
The only times so far when it’s seemed otherwise, it was because the dualist was equivocating, and switching the meaning of some word halfway through the argument. One premise sounded plausible with the word understood one way, and the other premise sounded plausible with the word understood the second way.
But it turns out there’s a group of arguments for dualism that seem to be vulnerable to neither of these complaints. These are arguments where the premises do all seem to be plausible, even to people who haven’t yet subscribed to dualism. And it’s not obvious that any words need to switch their meaning halfway through the argument, for the premises to seem obvious in this way.
The general flavor of these arguments can be summarized like this:
The specifics of these arguments will turn on how they unpack the notion of this “special access.”
We’ll discuss this more later, but briefly, here are some things philosophers say to explain what they mean here. (Many philosophers would say we have special access to our own minds in several of these senses.)
There are controversies about how “special” our access to our own minds is: in what ways it’s better and/or different from our access to facts about our brains or bodies or physical environments (and to other people’s minds). But many philosophers would agree that our access to (at least some parts of) our own minds is “special” in some of these ways. And perhaps this will support an argument by Leibniz’s Law that our minds aren’t identical to anything physical.
Other ways to formulate this strategy could look like this:
Or:
These applications of Leibniz’s Law are more challenging than the ones we considered before. It’s less clear how the materialist should respond here. What do you think?