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Single Idea 3176

[filed under theme 18. Thought / D. Concepts / 4. Structure of Concepts / h. Family resemblance ]

Full Idea

Anything bears a family resemblance to a game, but obviously not anything counts as one.

Gist of Idea

Anything bears a family resemblance to a game, but obviously not anything counts as one

Source

Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.3)

Book Ref

Rey,Georges: 'Contemporary Philosophy of Mind' [Blackwell 1997], p.127


The 69 ideas from Georges Rey

The three theories are reduction, dualism, eliminativism [Rey]
Varieties of singular terms are used to designate token particulars [Rey]
Arithmetic and unconscious attitudes have no qualia [Rey]
Some attitudes are information (belief), others motivate (hatred) [Rey]
If you explain water as H2O, you have reduced water, but not eliminated it [Rey]
Animals may also use a language of thought [Rey]
Images can't replace computation, as they need it [Rey]
Is the room functionally the same as a Chinese speaker? [Rey]
Searle is guilty of the fallacy of division - attributing a property of the whole to a part [Rey]
Our desires become important when we have desires about desires [Rey]
Self-consciousness may just be nested intentionality [Rey]
If qualia have no function, their attachment to thoughts is accidental [Rey]
Are qualia a type of propositional attitude? [Rey]
Are qualia irrelevant to explaining the mind? [Rey]
If colour fits a cone mapping hue, brightness and saturation, rotating the cone could give spectrum inversion [Rey]
Why qualia, and why this particular quale? [Rey]
Is consciousness 40Hz oscillations in layers 5 and 6 of the visual cortex? [Rey]
Physics requires the existence of properties, and also the abstract objects of arithmetic [Rey]
The Indiscernibility of Identicals is a truism; but the Identity of Indiscernibles depends on possible identical worlds [Rey]
Problem-solving clearly involves manipulating images [Rey]
Dualist privacy is seen as too deep for even telepathy to reach [Rey]
Referential Opacity says truth is lost when you substitute one referring term ('mother') for another ('Jocasta') [Rey]
Can identity explain reason, free will, non-extension, intentionality, subjectivity, experience? [Rey]
Experiments prove that people are often unaware of their motives [Rey]
Brain damage makes the unreliability of introspection obvious [Rey]
Intentional explanations are always circular [Rey]
Behaviourism is eliminative, or reductionist, or methodological [Rey]
Animal learning is separate from their behaviour [Rey]
Animals don't just respond to stimuli, they experiment [Rey]
We train children in truth, not in grammar [Rey]
A simple chaining device can't build sentences containing 'either..or', or 'if..then' [Rey]
Children speak 90% good grammar [Rey]
Empiricism says experience is both origin and justification of all knowledge [Rey]
How are stimuli and responses 'similar'? [Rey]
Animals map things over time as well as over space [Rey]
Good grammar can't come simply from stimuli [Rey]
Anything bears a family resemblance to a game, but obviously not anything counts as one [Rey]
Behaviour is too contingent and irrelevant to be the mind [Rey]
Maybe behaviourists should define mental states as a group [Rey]
A one hour gap in time might be indirectly verified, but then almost anything could be [Rey]
If a normal person lacked a brain, would you say they had no mind? [Rey]
Homuncular functionalism (e.g. Freud) could be based on simpler mechanical processes [Rey]
CRTT is good on deduction, but not so hot on induction, abduction and practical reason [Rey]
Free will isn't evidence against a theory of thought if there is no evidence for free will [Rey]
If reason could be explained in computational terms, there would be no need for the concept of 'free will' [Rey]
Pattern recognition is puzzling for computation, but makes sense for connectionism [Rey]
Connectionism assigns numbers to nodes and branches, and plots the outcomes [Rey]
Connectionism explains well speed of perception and 'graceful degradation' [Rey]
Connectionism explains irrationality (such as the Gamblers' Fallacy) quite well [Rey]
The meaning of "and" may be its use, but not of "animal" [Rey]
Semantic holism means new evidence for a belief changes the belief, and we can't agree on concepts [Rey]
One computer program could either play chess or fight a war [Rey]
Simple externalism is that the meaning just is the object [Rey]
Causal theories of reference (by 'dubbing') don't eliminate meanings in the heads of dubbers [Rey]
If meaning and reference are based on causation, then virtually everything has meaning [Rey]
Physicalism offers something called "complexity" instead of mental substance [Rey]
Dualism and physicalism explain nothing, and don't suggest any research [Rey]
It's not at all clear that explanation needs to stop anywhere [Rey]
Human behaviour can show law-like regularity, which eliminativism can't explain [Rey]
Abduction could have true data and a false conclusion, and may include data not originally mentioned [Rey]
Analytic judgements can't be explained by contradiction, since that is what is assumed [Rey]
'Married' does not 'contain' its symmetry, nor 'bigger than' its transitivity [Rey]
Analytic statements are undeniable (because of meaning), rather than unrevisable [Rey]
The traditional a priori is justified without experience; post-Quine it became unrevisable by experience [Rey]
If we claim direct insight to what is analytic, how do we know it is not sub-consciously empirical? [Rey]
Externalist synonymy is there being a correct link to the same external phenomena [Rey]
The meaning properties of a term are those which explain how the term is typically used [Rey]
An intrinsic language faculty may fix what is meaningful (as well as grammatical) [Rey]
Research throws doubts on the claimed intuitions which support analyticity [Rey]