Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Elements of Mind', 'The Right and the Good' and 'Rationality and Logic'

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11 ideas

12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 2. Qualities in Perception / d. Secondary qualities
Phenol-thio-urea tastes bitter to three-quarters of people, but to the rest it is tasteless, so which is it? [Crane]
     Full Idea: Phenol-thio-urea tastes bitter to three-quarters of people, but to the rest it is tasteless. Is it really bitter, or really tasteless?
     From: Tim Crane (Elements of Mind [2001], 5.44)
     A reaction: A nice reinforcement of a classic Greek question. Good support for the primary/secondary distinction. Common sense, really.
12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 4. Sense Data / a. Sense-data theory
The traditional supports for the sense datum theory were seeing double and specks before one's eyes [Crane]
     Full Idea: The traditional examples used to support the sense datum theory were seeing double and specks before one's eyes.
     From: Tim Crane (Elements of Mind [2001], 5.43)
     A reaction: Presumably, though, direct realists can move one eye, or having something wrong with a retina.
One can taste that the wine is sour, and one can also taste the sourness of the wine [Crane]
     Full Idea: One can taste that the wine is sour, and one can also taste the sourness of the wine.
     From: Tim Crane (Elements of Mind [2001], 5.42)
     A reaction: …so sense data are optional? We create sense data by objectifying them, but animals just taste the wine, and are direct realists. Tasting the sourness seems to be a case of abstraction.
12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 4. Sense Data / d. Sense-data problems
If we smell something we are aware of the smell separately, but we don't perceive a 'look' when we see [Crane]
     Full Idea: Visual perception seems to differ from some of the other senses; when we become aware of burning toast, we become aware of the smell, ...but we don't see a garden by seeing a 'look' of the garden.
     From: Tim Crane (Elements of Mind [2001], 5.40)
     A reaction: Interesting. Do blind people transfer this more direct perception to a different sense (e.g. the one they rely on most)?
The problems of perception disappear if it is a relation to an intentional state, not to an object or sense datum [Crane]
     Full Idea: The solution to the problem of perception is to deny that it is related to real objects (things or sense-data); rather, perception is an intentional state (with a subject, mode and content), a relation to the intentional content.
     From: Tim Crane (Elements of Mind [2001], 5.42)
     A reaction: Not clear. This definition makes it sound like a propositional attitude.
12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 6. Inference in Perception
If perception is much richer than our powers of description, this suggests that it is non-conceptual [Crane]
     Full Idea: The richness in information of perceptual experience outruns our modes of description of it, which has led some philosophers to claim that the content of perceptual experience is non-conceptual.
     From: Tim Crane (Elements of Mind [2001], 5.45)
     A reaction: It certainly implies that it can't be entirely conceptual, but it still may be that in humans concepts are always involved. Not when I'm waking up in the morning, though.
12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 7. Causal Perception
I prefer the causal theory to sense data, because sensations are events, not apprehensions [Ross]
     Full Idea: The sensum-theory seems to me less probable than a causal theory of perception, which regards sensuous experience as not being apprehension at all, but a set of mental events produced by external bodies on our bodies and minds.
     From: W. David Ross (The Right and the Good [1930], §IV)
     A reaction: The point is that there is no third item between the object and the mind, which has to be 'apprehended'. Sense-data give a good account of delusions (where we apprehend the 'data', but not the real object). I think I agree with Ross.
12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 8. Adverbial Theory
The adverbial theory of perceptions says it is the experiences which have properties, not the objects [Crane]
     Full Idea: The Adverbial Theory of perception holds that the predicates which other theories take as picking out the properties of objects are really adverbs of the perceptual verb; ..instead of strange objects, we just have properties of experiences.
     From: Tim Crane (Elements of Mind [2001], 5.42)
     A reaction: Promising. It fits secondary qualities all right, but what about primary? I 'see bluely', but can I 'see squarely'?
12. Knowledge Sources / E. Direct Knowledge / 2. Intuition
Intuition includes apriority, clarity, modality, authority, fallibility and no inferences [Hanna]
     Full Idea: The nine features of intuition are: a mental act, apriority, content-comprehensiveness, clarity and distinctness, strict-modality-attributivity, authoritativeness,noninferentiality, cognitive indispensability, and fallibility.
     From: Robert Hanna (Rationality and Logic [2006], 6.4)
     A reaction: [See Hanna for a full explanation of this lot] Seems like a good stab at it. Note the trade-off between authority and fallibility.
Intuition is more like memory, imagination or understanding, than like perception [Hanna]
     Full Idea: There is no reason why intuition should be cognitively analogous not to sense perception but instead to either memory, imagination, or conceptual understanding.
     From: Robert Hanna (Rationality and Logic [2006], 6.5)
     A reaction: It is Russell's spotting the analogy with memory that made me come to believe that a priori knowledge is possible, as long as we accept it as being fallible. [Hanna has a good discussion of intuition; he votes for the imagination analogy]
Intuition is only outside the 'space of reasons' if all reasons are inferential [Hanna]
     Full Idea: Intuition is outside the 'space of reasons' if we assume that all reasons are inferential, but inside if we assume that reasons need not always be inferential.
     From: Robert Hanna (Rationality and Logic [2006], 6.4)
     A reaction: I take it that intuition can be firmly inside the space of reasons, and that not all reasons are inferential.