BAKER, LYNNE RUDDER
(1944–)

Lynne Rudder Baker was born in Atlanta, Georgia, received her PhD in philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 1972, and teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Her philosophical work provides a powerful critique of reductive accounts of minds, persons, and artifacts. Her writings in the philosophy of mind are directed against three distinct but related views. The first is that one's meaning something specific by a symbol can be naturalized, that is, reductively explained, in terms of some set of nonsemantic, nonmental, causal properties lawfully instantiated in nature. The second view is that folk psychology is, at best, a second-class prototheory of human behavior that only has instrumental value or, at worst, a discredited theory whose mental posits do not exist. The third view, what Baker calls "the Standard View," shared by dualists, materialists, and functionalists, says that beliefs are states of some proper part of persons, be it material (the brain) or immaterial (the soul).

All three views share two themes. First, we think of ourselves as sentient, sapient agents endowed with states that have referential content and causal efficacy. Second, if this conception is to be correct, it must reductively fit with our best scientific theories of nature, which have the right story (or much of it, at any rate) about things; otherwise, it must be rejected as false or treated as a useful but quaint myth. Baker accepts the first claim but rejects the second in Saving Belief (1987) and in Explaining Attitudes (1995). In the latter work, she defends practical realism, the view that beliefs are global states of a whole person, not of any proper part of the person. Although beliefs are not entities, they are real (contra eliminative materialists), since they make a genuine causal difference in the world in virtue of their contents (contra epiphenomenalists). Beliefs have an explanatory role, but not in virtue of their being identical to, constituted by, or supervening on brain states, since beliefs do not stand in those relations to any brain state. Rather, their explanatory role is grounded in our shared practice of causally explaining and rationalizing our actions. Baker's practical realism places her squarely in the company of American pragmatists (from William James to Hilary Putnam) and neo-Wittgensteinians.

Baker's third book, Persons and Bodies (2000), connects her early writings in the philosophy of mind with her more recent work in metaphysics. In that book she defends the constitution view of human persons, the view that a human person is a person in virtue of having a first-person perspective and is human in virtue of being constituted by a human body. To have the first-person perspective is to have the ability to think of oneself as oneself in an irreducibly direct way without the mediation of any name or description. Constitution, in turn, is a ubiquitous relation that holds whenever new kinds of things come into existence (e.g., statues, persons), with new causal powers in virtue of other kinds of things (e.g., slabs of marble, human bodies), existing in certain types of circumstances (e.g., the art world, social institutions, and social practices). The things that constitute and the things they constitute have different persistence conditions and natures; hence, they are numerically distinct. Both share many of the same properties and causal powers, although the source of their shared properties and powers may lie with the thing that constitutes and not with the constituted thing, or vice versa. Thus, contrary to immaterialism, human persons are material beings, because they are constituted by their human bodies. However, contrary to animalism, human persons are not identical to the bodies that constitute them.

On Baker's view, although persons are constituted by their bodies and cannot exist without being materially constituted in some way, their identity over time does not depend on the particular bodies that constitute them. Nor does personal identity depend on soul identity, brain identity, or (nonbranching) psychological continuity. Rather, it depends solely on one's having a first-person perspective over time. Facts about one's first-person perspective are not reducible to any nonpersonal fact. Thus, for Baker, one's identity over time is a simple irreducible fact about oneself.

See also Identity; Mental Causation; Personal Identity; Philosophy of Mind.

Bibliography

Baker, Lynne Rudder. Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Baker, Lynne Rudder. Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Baker, Lynne Rudder. Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Meijers, Anthonie, ed. Explaining Beliefs: Lynne Rudder Baker and Her Critics. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2001.

Reinaldo Elugardo (2005)