type identity theory

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the physicalist thesis that each type of mental state — for example, pain or the belief that it is raining — is identical with a particular type of physical brain state, so that mental properties just are physical properties of the brain; type identity theory, associated with U.T. Place, Herbert Feigl, and J.J.C. Smart, offers a reductive materialist account of mind that aims to eliminate dualism by demonstrating that mental kinds reduce to neural kinds; the theory faces the multiple realizability objection: if the same mental state type can be realised by very different physical substrates across species or artificial systems, it cannot be identified with a single physical type