Seeing Nature as Creation

Abstract

It is time to draw together some threads from the preceding chapters. Human behavior appears to us as expressive of mind. It seems to us as if we see people acting and expressing feelings, not just bodies moving and emitting sounds. The common-sense view is that we really perceive such psychologically loaded facts. Mainstream philosophy has, however, taught us that there are serious problems with taking this picture of our epistemic relations with respect to each others’ minds seriously. One problem is that human behavior is a natural phenomenon, and as such it cannot — given the modern, disenchanted conception of nature — have any intrinsic properties other than those that figure in natural scientific descriptions of things. Expressive properties are not natural properties in this sense. So behavior, as a natural phenomenon, cannot be intrinsically expressive of mental states. Behavior can at most constitute symptoms of mental states.