In the mid-nineties, Routledge brought out The Mechanical Mind. Authored by Tim Crane, this was a readable introduction, overview and rationale for approaching the philosophy of mind from a particular outlook. Specifically, it identified and defended the core and foundational assumptions that inform mainstream analytic philosophy of mind. The book advanced a kind of ‘ideological argument’ in that its author recognized that attraction to its central idea "depends on accepting a certain picture of the world; the mechanical/causal world picture. This picture sees the whole of nature as obeying certain general causal laws — the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, etc. — and it holds that psychology too has its laws, and that the mind fits into the causal order" (Crane 1995, p. 62). Endorsement of causalism about the mind lay at the heart of this view. Thus Crane acknowledged, "the causal picture of thought is the key element in what I am calling the ‘mechanical’ view of the mind" (Crane 1995, p. 58). Mental life is, accordingly, not merely expressed or made manifest in what certain living creatures do; rather to adopt the kind of causalist understanding of the mind (that is today widely accepted) is to think of mental states as productive. They do the behind the scenes toil that brings about and reliably generates experience and thought. Thematically, it is easy to see how acceptance of this sort of functionalist characterization of the mental, as a collection of causally efficacious ‘inner states’, is linked with other standard notions that are axiomatic for analytic philosophers of mind. For example, it fits neatly with the idea that mental states are not directly perceptible but at best inferred. Typically, this last thought is combined with yet another, the claim that putative mental states are, in fact, theoretical entities of the kind that are either familiarly described by commonsense psychology or which our best scientific psychology seeks to identify. Of course, there is — as yet — no exact agreement about what our best scientific psychology is or ought to be...