The capacity test: a court declining to define the mind and defining a decision instead.
Mind
The domain of thought, feeling and awareness - and the question of where its boundary falls.
- Theme
- Mind, self and consciousness
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term
- νοῦς · nous
- Term fixed
- c. 450 BC
In plain terms
Everyone knows roughly what the word covers - thinking, feeling, remembering, wanting - and almost nobody can say what those have in common that a digestion does not.
Three candidates keep coming up. Mental states are about things, in a way that stomachs are not. They are known from the inside in a way nothing else is. And they seem to resist description in purely physical terms without something being left out.
Each candidate excludes cases we would want to include and includes cases we would not. Unconscious processes are mental and not known from the inside. Pains are felt and are not about anything. So the category is real, universally used, and has no agreed boundary - which is a problem for philosophy and also for anyone who has to decide, in practice, whether a mind is present.
As a philosopher would put it
Descartes makes mind a substance whose whole essence is thinking, distinct from body and known more certainly than it. The alternatives divide over what is basic: behaviourism identifies mental states with behavioural dispositions, and Ryle's charge is that the Cartesian picture is a category mistake, treating mind as an occult mechanism when it is a way of describing what a person does. The identity theory makes mental states brain states; functionalism makes them functional roles, so that what matters is what a state does rather than what realises it.
Two problems resist all of these. Intentionality - how a state can be about something - and consciousness, the fact that there is something it is like to be in some of them. Functionalism handles the first well and the second badly.
Other traditions cut differently. Buddhist citta is a stream of momentary events with no owner. Chinese xin is heart-mind, refusing the separation of thought from feeling that European philosophy takes as given, and no classical Chinese text has to argue for the union because the language never divided them.
Where you meet it
The Mental Capacity Act 2005 requires English courts to decide whether a particular person can make a particular decision at a particular time. The test is functional: can they understand the information, retain it, weigh it, and communicate a choice.
What is striking is what the test refuses to do. It does not ask whether the person is conscious, has a self, or is rational in general. Capacity is decision-specific and time-specific - someone may lack it for a property sale and have it for a medical refusal, and may have it on Tuesday and not on Thursday. A person is assumed to have it until the opposite is shown, and an unwise decision is not evidence against it.
That is a legal system declining to define the mind and defining a capacity instead, because the general question could not be made to work in a courtroom. Judges have to decide something, and what they decide is narrower and more operational than anything philosophy has agreed.
What is actually disputed
Whether the mental is a genuine kind.
Eliminativists argue that beliefs and desires belong to a folk theory that neuroscience will replace, as phlogiston was replaced, and that the category will not survive the explanation. Against that, the intentional vocabulary predicts behaviour with an accuracy nothing else approaches, which is evidence that it tracks something real even if it does not carve at neural joints.
A separate dispute concerns where a mind stops. The extended-mind thesis holds that a notebook used as reliably as memory is part of the cognitive system, and that skull and skin are not principled boundaries. The objection is that this confuses a tool with a mind, and that the reason the boundary looks arbitrary is that we have not yet said what makes something mental in the first place.
Commonly confused with
- Consciousness 1641 Much of the mental is unconscious on any account. Consciousness is one feature of some mental states, not the category itself.
- Soul c. 330 BC Soul carries a claim about survival and about value. Mind is a functional and epistemic category and carries neither.
Defined against
- Matter The pair the whole modern problem is built on, and the reason there is a mind-body problem at all
Philosophers
- Anaxagoras of Clazomenae Nous as the ordering principle of the cosmos
- René Descartes Mind as a substance whose essence is thought
- Aristotle Soul as the form of a living body rather than a thing inside it
- Edmund Husserl Consciousness as always consciousness of something
- Buddha A stream of mental events with no owner behind them
Works
- Meditations on First Philosophy The mind as better known than the body
- The Concept of Mind The charge that the Cartesian picture is a category mistake
- Logical Investigations Intentionality as the mark of the mental
- Abhidharmakosa The most systematic classification of mental events in any tradition
- Phenomenology of Perception Mind as embodied rather than housed
Schools
- Cartesianism Mind as a separate substance
- Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism) Soul as form, not occupant
- Phenomenology Mind approached through its directedness
- Ordinary Language Philosophy The dissolution of the Cartesian picture
- Early Theravada Buddhism Mind as a classified stream of events
Related concepts
Consciousness 1641 · Intentionality 1901 · Self 1694 · Mind–body problem 1641 · Embodiment 1945
Anaxagoras makes nous a cosmic ordering principle around 450 BC; Descartes narrows it to the individual thinking thing, and the modern subject inherits that narrowing rather than the older sense.