Abstract
In this chapter I introduce and defend verbialism, a metaphysical framework appropriate for accommodating the mind within the natural sciences and the mechanistic model of explanation that ties the natural sciences together. In a mechanistic explanation, the behaviour and features of a whole are explained in terms of their organized parts and the organized activities they engage in, and explaining the mind is explaining how it is composed out of brain parts and their activities (Bechtel 2005, 2008). Verbialism is the view that mental phenomena belong in the basic ontological category of activities (a term I use to refer to any type of occurrent).1 The name verbialism derives from the fact that activities are the referents of verbs and their linguistic forms or relatives (e.g., gerunds, nominals, and verbed nouns, such as to google or to hood). By intention it also brings to mind adverbialism, a theory of perceptual content that originally aimed to explain illusory perception. But verbialism is not a theory of perceptual content; it is not a theory of content at all. It is a metaphysics that prescribes that our theories of perceptual and cognitive content alike be consistent with the fact that mental phenomena are activities.2 If minds are what brains do, explaining the mind is explaining how it occurs (Anderson 2007), and the ontology of mind is verbialist.
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© 2014 Carrie Figdor
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Figdor, C. (2014). Verbs and Minds. In: Sprevak, M., Kallestrup, J. (eds) New Waves in Philosophy of Mind. New Waves in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137286734_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137286734_3
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