Wikipedia:Peer review/Mind/archive1

Mind

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I've listed this article for peer review to prepare it for a featured article candidacy. I would be interested to learn what changes are required to fulfill the featured article criteria, but I'm also open to more casual improvement ideas.

Thanks, Phlsph7 (talk) 16:36, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from PJW

Just a few notes for you on this one:

The dominant position today is physicalism, which says that everything is material: Is this term used outside of philosophy? If not, I would qualify it to say "in analytic philosophy". It would also be nice to know since when, more or less? For this is not a report on something that just happened.
The Encyclopedia of the Mind, which covers "all the major contemporary disciplines concerned with the study of the mind", has an entry called "Physicalism". The term "materialism" would be an alternative. It is better known outside academia, but some theorists see it as a more narrow term.

I made the date more concrete. Phlsph7 (talk) 17:24, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, okay. My concern was just that it might be a specifically philosophical term not employed by scholars and researchers in the other disciplines mentioned in the last paragraph of the lead (and elaborated upon in the article).

For the lead of such a general article, you could certainly drop the "analytic" I first suggested and just say "philosophical" or "in philosophy of mind". But if you think this is just contextually obvious, feel free to disregard.

I do support keeping "physicalism" over "materialism", as the latter has a long and fraught history that we do not want to go into here. Patrick (talk) 18:02, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Added. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:51, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Does the "Forms" section assume a contested representationalist theory of mind? If so, it would be good to at least acknowledge this.
It's possible that some individual formulations are problematic, but I don't think there is a general problem here. Having a short look at the first paragraph on perception, it's pretty close to what the references from psychology and philosophy say. Do you think we should replace the word "representation" with "understanding" or "experience" in this passage? Phlsph7 (talk) 17:24, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe instead of actively construct a representation of the world the article could say actively constitutes our experience of the world? — although I'm sure there are other perfectly good formulations, and it's always possible (of course!) that my associations here are idiosyncratic. But I would try to avoid language that suggests we engage with the world indirectly by way of representation rather than directly in response to our environment. Unless, of course, we're discussing that debate. Patrick (talk) 18:23, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I implemented the suggestion. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:48, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The "Mind—body problem" section would benefit from mention of the phenomenological tradition. This tradition (or a large part of it) takes itself to dissolve the problem by accounting for its appearance on the basis of a more basic unitary phenomenon, such as the lifeworld (late Husserl) or being-in-the-world (Heidegger), which I find well-synthesized by Maurice_Merleau-Ponty#Thought. This has been further developed as the study of embodied cognition, often in engagement with empirical sciences.
That's a good idea, I added a short description. Phlsph7 (talk) 18:17, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That looks good. I do still think, though, that the article would benefit (in this section or elsewhere) from additional coverage of research on embodied cognition (for instance, the role of the body schema), but this is just a general suggestion. Seems unlikely it would emerge as an issue at FAC. Patrick (talk) 18:35, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I found a way to include a discussion of embodied cognition in the paragraph explaining externalism and enactivism. Phlsph7 (talk) 13:21, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to idealists, everything is mental. This is not true (e.g., Plato, Kant, Hegel). You could maybe save it with the qualifier "subjective idealists", but I'm not sure much of anyone holds that view. Berkeley's arguments, at least, are terrible. I think you could simply remove the sentence and the one following it. (Or, if there actually are a bunch of people defending the position, it would be good to clarify that somehow.)
The problem is that most discussions of monist solutions to the mind–body problem include idealism in addition to physicalism/materialism and neutral monism. This is, for example, how Jaworski 2011 p. 5 proceeds, so leaving idealism out might seem odd. Jaworski also states that idealism ... claims that everything is mental. I guess the difficulty here is probably that the term "idealism" means slightly different things depending on the context. For now, I changed it to "metaphysical idealism" to distinguish it from Kant's transcendental idealism and Hegel's absolute idealism. "Mental monism" would be another alternative, but the term is not very common. Phlsph7 (talk) 18:17, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Are there actually philosophers who defend such a position? My guess is that the reason "mental monism" is so rare is because it is so rarely held. If sources are introducing idealism just to preserve symmetry or provide a false sense of balance, I'm not sure we need to follow them in this instance.

Also, Hegel's idealism is metaphysical and has its defenders to this day. But his definition of "thought" (in its most fundamental sense) is Aristotle's, not the psychological definition most relevant to this article. If possible, I think the article should steer clear of this conversation altogether. Patrick (talk) 18:44, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Looking at other high-quality sources, like Searle 2004 and Heil 2013, they also discuss idealism. We currently have two short sentences on idealism. I don't think this is a violation of WP:PROPORTION. It seems to me that the problem you describe is not specifically a problem with our article but concerns how sources treat the subject. Idealism is not popular today but there some defenders. I know of Bernardo Kastrup and Timothy Sprigge might also fit the description. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:14, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm...if the overview sources on this topic are at odds with expert sources, I would say we probably should not rely on them in those instances. This sentence, for example, appears to presuppose that the position it describes is false: They understand material things as mental constructs, for example, as ideas or perceptions (my emphasis). Maybe this could be fixed with something like analyze what it is to be a thing as the objectification of our experience of the object of consciousness? But that's my own technical language that likely is not supported by the source.

Anyways, even though I don't love it, I don't see the sentence becoming an issue at FAC. It's a very minor flaw at worst. Patrick (talk) 16:07, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the article would be fine without the middle paragraph of "Mental health and disorder". Most readers will already be familiar with these disorders, and I'm not sure cataloguing them here contributes to understanding mind in general. (I like the other two paragraphs though.)
You are right that the different mental disorders do not get much coverage in philosophy. However, psychology is particularly interested in them. Overview sources like Bernstein & Nash 2006, Gross 2020 and Nairne 2011 each have a full chapter discussing the different types. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:19, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The article only just mentions the alleged problem of other minds, which seems fine. But might it benefit from a brief discussion of interaction theory, or just intersubjectivity more generally?
I'm not sure that interaction theory is important enough, but I found a way to mention intersubjectivity in relation to sociology. Phlsph7 (talk) 13:22, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Would the article benefit from a brief discussion of the enteric nervous system, sometimes called the "second brain"? It poses a serious challenge to a commonly held belief that thoughts and feelings are all contained in the brain. (From its article: More than 90% of the body's serotonin lies in the gut, as well as about 50% of the body's dopamine, which is currently being studied to further our understanding of its utility in the brain.)
I fear that this might go too much into detail. The peripheral nervous system is discussed in the subsection "Neuroscience", but the way it is divided into different subsystems is better left to more specific topics. Phlsph7 (talk) 13:40, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't re-read with this specifically in mind, but my basic concern is that parts of the article equate the mind with the brain in a way that is at odds with mainstream science—even on physicalist assumptions. But I'm not a medical doctor or any kind of scientist. Patrick (talk) 17:46, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I changed a few formulations to avoid this concern. Please let me know if I missed any. Generally speaking, the mind is primarily associated with higher capacities of the nervous system, for which the brain is responsible. For example, type identity theorists commonly associate mental states with brain states rather than with nervous system states. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:44, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I will try to carve out time to give the article another close reading from top to bottom, probably in a week or so. If I notice any such issues, I will just make changes with an appropriately descriptive edit summaries for the review of you and other editors. Patrick (talk) 16:11, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I understand why you don't want to relate the whole history of what Western philosophers have said about the mind. Two omissions did surprise me though. The first is the absence of Aristotle's On the Soul, which I believe is the earliest systematic investigation on the the nature of pysche that we have. The ancient concept differs from our modern concept of mind in interesting ways that could be commented upon briefly. The second is Descartes. Whether you think this is an invention or a discovery, mind-body and mind-world dualism only emerge as philosophical problems in the modern era. A little more historical perspective on this would be nice.
I added a sentence to cover influential contributors in the history of the philosophy of mind. Phlsph7 (talk) 14:11, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, thanks. It's always nice to provide people with credit for their contributions. My concern here, though, wasn't that the article neglected to name-check the appropriate philosophers. It is that there is a big difference between the ancient Greek and early modern concepts of mind.

The former conceives mind as a principle of animation that positions the human mind as a more sophisticated development of a principle of self-movement already present in plant life. The former severs that connection, sometimes quite radically. If memory serves, Descartes had difficulty even acknowledging the mindedness of non-human animals.

If I just missed this because the article frames it in a different way, please disregard. If not, however, I think this historical material deserves treatment. There are textbooks and general introductions to the history of philosophy organized around the contention, for instance, that we can meaningfully distinguish a characteristically "Classical mind" from the characteristic "Medieval mind" and so forth. Patrick (talk) 16:26, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I add a short passage about the contrast between Descartes' idea of the mind–body problem and earlier conceptions to the beginning of the subsection "Mind–body problem", with Aristotle's hylomorphism in a footnote. Phlsph7 (talk) 12:52, 5 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This would be more detailed in my ideal version of the article, but that version is totally imaginary and carries no weight. I don't think the issue should be disqualifying at FAC. Just as a general suggestion, though, I do think building out the historical dimension would improve the article.

I will plan on giving the article a fresh read while peer review is still open. Overall, though, it looks very good, and I appreciate your responsiveness to my suggestions.

Cheers, Patrick (talk) 21:37, 5 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Overall though, great work as always! Upon request, I can provide potential sources for most of these suggestions.

Cheers,

Hello Patrick Welsh and thanks for another helpful review of an article on a challenging topic! Phlsph7 (talk) 17:24, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]