display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
13 ideas
| 3473 | Reduction can be of things, properties, ideas or causes [Searle] |
| Full Idea: I find at least five different senses of "reduction" in the literature - ontological (genes/DNA), property ontological (heat/mean molecular energy), theoretical (gas laws/statistics), logical/definitional (average plumber), and causal (solids/molecules). | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.II) | |
| A reaction: A useful pointer towards some much needed clearer thought about reduction. It is necessary to cross reference this list against reductions which are either ontological or epistemological or linguistic. |
| 5791 | Reduction is either by elimination, or by explanation [Searle] |
| Full Idea: One sense of 'reduction' is eliminative, in getting rid of a phenomenon by showing that it is really something else (as the earth's rotation eliminates 'sunsets'), but another sense does not get rid of it (as in the explanation of solidity by molecules). | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: These are bad analogies. You can't 'eliminate' a sunset - you just accept that the event is relative to a viewpoint. If we are discussing ontology, we will not admit the existence of sunsets, but we won't have an ontological category of 'solidity' either. |
| 5799 | Eliminative reduction needs a gap between appearance and reality, as in sunsets [Searle] |
| Full Idea: Eliminative reductions require a distinction between reality and appearance; for example, the sun appears to set but the reality is that the earth rotates. | |
| From: John Searle (The Mystery of Consciousness [1997], Concl 2.10) | |
| A reaction: A bad analogy. You don't 'eliminate' sunsets. It is just 'Galilean' relativity - you thought it was your train moving, then you discover it was the other one. You don't eliminate hallucinations when you show that they don't correspond to reality. |
| 3841 | Users of 'supervenience' blur its causal and constitutive meanings [Searle] |
| Full Idea: I am no fan of the concept of supervenience. Its uncritical use is a sign of philosophical confusion, because the concept oscillates between causal supervenience and constitutive supervenience. | |
| From: John Searle (Rationality in Action [2001], Ch.9 n5) | |
| A reaction: I don't see why you shouldn't assert the supervenience of one thing on another, while saying that you are not sure whether it is causal or constitutive. The confusion seems to me to be in understandings of the causal version. |
| 3532 | Solidity in a piston is integral to its structure, not supervenient [Maslin on Searle] |
| Full Idea: Searle's defence of causally efficacious supervenient mind won't work, because, unlike the mind, the solidity of a piston is not a distinct and separate phenomenon from its microstructure. | |
| From: comment on John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 7.6 | |
| A reaction: Searle struggles to find analogies for his position - and that, in my view, is highly significant in the philosophy of mind. If there is nothing else like your proposed theory, it is probably just human vainglory. |
| 3533 | Is supervenience just causality? [Searle, by Maslin] |
| Full Idea: For Searle the supervenience relation is just causality. | |
| From: report of John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 7.6 | |
| A reaction: 'Supervenience' seems, in that case, to be an irrelevant word, which was only used when the mind-body connection was a bit loose and mysterious. Mind is identical to brain, or a property of the brain. I like 'process of the brain'. |
| 16211 | A homogeneous rotating disc should be undetectable according to Humean supervenience [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Imagine a perfectly homogeneous non-atomistic disc. A record of all the non-relational information about the world at that moment will not reveal whether the disc is rotating about a vertical axis through. This tells against Humean supervenience. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: [Armstrong 1980 originated this, and it is famously discussed by Kripke in lectures] There will, of course, be dispositions present because of the rotation, but Lewis excludes any such modal truths. |
| 3454 | Reality is entirely particles in force fields [Searle] |
| Full Idea: One can accept the obvious facts of physics, that the world consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force. | |
| From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I agree with this proposal, with the cautious proviso that physics may discover further basic aspects to reality. The only obstacles to this view are possible divine and mental substances, neither of which is supported by adequate evidence. |
| 16219 | Non-linguistic things cannot be indeterminate, because they don't have truth-values at all [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Non-linguistic objects, properties, and states of affairs cannot be indeterminate because they cannot have determinate truth-values either. No cloud is indeterminate, just as no cloud is either determinately true or determinately false. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: If vagueness must be linguistic, this means animals can never experience it, which I doubt. Presumably 'this is a cloud' is only made vague by the vagueness of the object, rather than by the vagueness of the sentence? |
| 16223 | Maybe for the world to be vague, it must be vague in its foundations? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There is a question of whether there must be 'vagueness all the way down' for the world to be vague. One view is that if there is a base level of precisely describably facts, upon which all the others supervene, then the world is not really vague. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: My understanding of the physics is that it is non-vague all the way down, and then you get to the base level which is hopelessly vague! |
| 16226 | Epistemic vagueness seems right in the case of persons [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The epistemic account of vagueness is particularly attractive where persons are concerned. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.14) | |
| A reaction: You'll have to see her text for details. Interesting that there might be different views of what vagueness is for different cases. Or putting it another way, absolutely everything (said, thought, existing or done) might be vague in some way! |
| 16208 | Supervaluation refers to one vaguely specified thing, through satisfaction by everything in some range [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Supervaluationists take a present-tense predication as concerning a single, but vaguely specified, moment. …It is indeterminate which of a range of moments enters into the truth conditions, but it is true if satisfied by every member of the range. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: She is discussing stage theory, but this is a helpful clarification of the idea of supervaluation. Something can be satisfied by a whole bunch of values, even though you are not sure which one. |
| 16221 | Supervaluationism takes what the truth-value would have been if indecision was resolved [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A supervaluationist approach involves consideration of what the truth value of the utterance would have been if semantic indecision had been resolved in this way or that. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: At last, a lovely account of supervaluation in plain English that anyone can understand! Why don't they all do that? Well, done Katherine Hawley! ['semantic indecision' is uncertainty about what your words mean!] |