A
mental property or a
mind property is a
property of a/the
mind. The term is mostly used in
philosophy of mind, without prejudice as to the
ontological status of mental properties. Examples might include general properties, such as being able to
think or
remember, or more specific actions such as "having a thought about Paris". The term is often used in the context of the
mind body problem. For (non eliminative)
physicalists, mental properties are a kind of high level property which can be understood in terms of fine-grained
neural activity.
Property dualists, on the other hand, claim that no such
reductive explanation is possible.
Eliminativists may reject the existence of mental properties, or at least of those corresponding to
folk psychological categories such as thought and memory. Some philosophers seek to find a unifying characteristic for the generally accepted mental properties: a famous example is
Franz Brentano's claim that all mental properties are characterised by
intentionality or "aboutness".