Armstrong's materialism?

Question

a) What is the view that Armstrong calls “materialism”? (b) Why does Armstrong think that this
view is a synthesis of behaviorism and dualism? (c) How does Armstrong explain what
consciousness is?

Answer 1

I can see why some would suggest that Armstrong's view of materialism was not so material as he would make it seem. Armstrong takes a position (familiar to behaviourists) that the mind is whatever it is that happens to cause a certain behaviour. And while a behaviourist would stop there and not investigate further (they prototypically see the mind as a 'black box' whose function is largely irrelevant and unknowable) he goes on to assert that for human beings all those things happen in the brain.

So it's not dualist in the sense that for humans there is no special, separate material which is the 'mind' - it's all in the brain. But it's not exactly materialist in that he completely leaves open the possibility of non-human minds which operate in completely different ways... and perhaps are completely immaterial.

Consciousness, then, corresponds to a collection of brain states which are not identical for human to human any more than any two humans are identical. They are consistent within a human, if not between. To a certain extent, he doesn't elaborate a lot more than this (he doesn't pretend to be able to make all those correlations himself), instead deferring more analytical and empirical explanations to neurologists, I suppose.