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...