Your second paper is due by the end of the day (midnight) on Tuesday Oct 19. Papers should be 1000-2000 words (typically this will be 4-6 pages).
The procedure for submitting your papers for anonymous grading is the same as last time: Compose your paper as a Google Doc (or paste it into a new blank Google Doc). The first line of the file should be your PID (not your name). The second line of the file should be the UNC Honor Pledge: “I certify that no unauthorized assistance has been received or given in the completion of this work.”
When you’re ready to submit:
All the advice from the last assignment applies even more so this time. Try to write as clearly, straightforwadly, and accessibly as you can. As I’ve suggested to you, it can help to read your papers out loud. If your words sound unnaturaly complicated or formal as spoken discourse, or it’d be hard for an audience to keep track of what you’re saying, that’s a good sign that you could probably find a simpler way to express yourself.
You need to explain any special vocabulary you’re using, even if it was introduced and explained in class. Your readers need to know precisely what you mean by those terms. Write as though your audience has never encountered the vocabulary before.
Also write as though your reader doesn’t know what the question prompts are, or which one you’re addressing. But you definitely should be addressing one of the prompts, and you should make it clear early in the paper which one.
To write a good paper, you’ll need develop a clear plan or outline for how you want your paper to go. (You might only figure this out in the process of writing; that’s okay. But by the end you should know what your paper’s plan is.) You’ll also need to write several drafts. As before, you are welcome to share ideas and drafts with each other before submitting them. Just be sure the final product represents your own developed thoughts and expression, and give others credit for how they substantially helped you achieve that.
Here is more information about the university honor code; see also honor.unc.edu. Papers submitted for this and another class (whether taken the same semester or not) must be substantially different.
As with any philosophical writing, your papers must present some reasons for or against something.
It was possible to do a fair job with the first papers without going too far beyond the lectures and readings. These questions will require you to do more independent thinking.
Here are more guidelines about philosophical writing.
Here is the grading rubric I’ll use.
Information about extensions and missed deadlines is on the course’s front webpage.
Read the topics carefully and be sure to answer the specific questions asked. Don’t try to write everything you know or think up about the topic. 1000-2000 words is not much space, so you will have to budget. What are the most important things to say? What can you leave out?
Materialists often complain that dualists can’t give a satisfactory account of how the physical and the mental causally interact. What are the materialist’s reasons for thinking they can’t give a satisfactory account of that? In your view, do dualists have any effective replies? If dualism were true, would the predictions of physics about how our bodies will move have to be incorrect somewhere? Is that a problem for the dualists?
We discussed several arguments about these issues. If you think some of them are stronger or more effective than others, then focus your attention on them. It’s not so helpful or interesting for you to just exposit an argument we discussed in class, and then not have much more to say, either against it or supporting it further.
In answering this prompt, one issue you might take up (but you don’t need to, if it doesn’t naturally fit what else you address) is whether the epiphenomenalist dualist would be as vulnerable to the arguments you discuss as is the dualist who thinks mental states do have physical effects.
Smart’s identity theory proposes that mental states are identical to brain states, but that these identities aren’t part of our mental concepts. So you could understand the concept of pain without knowing what brain state it’s identical to, or even knowing anything about brains. Identity theorists liken the relation between pain and brain states to the relation between lightning and electricity, or to the relation between water and H2O. Are these analogies persuasive? Or are those examples importantly different than the relation between mental and physical? What differences might one plausibly make a case for?
You can come down on either side of this debate in the end, but handling this prompt well will involve formulating some candidate disanologies, and then either defending them or arguing against them.
If one accepts the theory that mental states are identical to brain states, are they forced to say that a scientist with detailed neurophysiological information about your brain might be better placed than you are to know whether you’re in a given mental state (pain, feeling hungry, liking Carrboro)? If not, why not? If they are forced to say that, is that a problem for the identity theory? Is it possible for someone else to know better than you what feelings and desires and beliefs you have right now? Or do you have a kind of access to your own mental states that makes that impossible? Defend your answers.
If you wrote your first paper on privileged access, and want to answer this prompt for the second paper, take special care to ensure that your discussion and arguments in the second paper are new and different.