display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 4610 | Different generations focus on either the quality of mind, or its scientific standing, or the content of thought [Heil] |
| Full Idea: One generation addresses the qualitative aspect of mentality, the next focuses on its scientific standing, its successor takes up the problem of mental content, then the cycle starts all over again… | |
| From: John Heil (Philosophy of Mind [1998], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: This pinpoints the three interlinked questions. We seem to be currently obsessed with the quality of experience (the 'Hard Question'), but the biggest questions is how the three aspects fit together. If there are three necessities here, they must coexist. |
| 4618 | If minds are realised materially, it looks as if the material laws will pre-empt any causal role for mind [Heil] |
| Full Idea: If a mental property is realised by a material property, then it looks as though its material realiser pre-empts any causal contribution on the part of the realised mental property. | |
| From: John Heil (Philosophy of Mind [1998], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: This has a beautiful simplicity about it. I can see how some very odd phenomena might suddenly appear out of a physical combination, but not how entirely new causal laws can be created. |
| 4621 | Whatever exists has qualities, so it is no surprise that states of minds have qualities [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Whatever exists has qualities, so it is no surprise that states of minds have qualities. | |
| From: John Heil (Philosophy of Mind [1998], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: If only I knew what a 'quality' was. Do combinations have qualities in addition to the qualities of the components? A pair of trees, a pile of sand, a mass of neurons. |
| 4623 | Propositional attitudes are not the only intentional states; there is also mental imagery [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers have thought that intentional states are exhausted by propositional attitudes, but what about mental imagery? You may have propositional attitudes to food, but I would wager that most of your thoughts about it are imagistic. | |
| From: John Heil (Philosophy of Mind [1998], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: Seems right. If I encounter an object by which I am bewildered, I may form no propositions at all about it, but I can still contemplate the object. |
| 4626 | The widespread externalist view says intentionality has content because of causal links of agent to world [Heil] |
| Full Idea: The prevailing 'externalist' line on intentionality regards intentional states of mind as owing their content (what they are of, or about) to causal relations agents bear to the world. | |
| From: John Heil (Philosophy of Mind [1998], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: This goes back to Putnam's Twin Earth. 'Meanings aren't in the head'. I may defer to experts about what 'elm' means, but I may also be arrogantly wrong about what 'juniper' means. |