Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Parmenides', 'Representation and Reality' and 'The Universe as We Find It'

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4 ideas

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 1. Thought
You can think of tomatoes without grasping what they are [Heil]
     Full Idea: You can entertain thoughts of things like tomatoes without a grasp of what they are.
     From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 08.10)
     A reaction: Lowe seemed to think that you had to grasp the generic essence of a tomato before you could think about it, but I agree entirely with Heil.
18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 4. Folk Psychology
Can we give a scientific, computational account of folk psychology? [Putnam]
     Full Idea: The desire that grips Fodor, as it once gripped me, is the desire to make belief-desire psychology "scientific" by simply identifying it outright with computational psychology.
     From: Hilary Putnam (Representation and Reality [1988], p.7)
     A reaction: An "outright" identification looks very implausible. It seems that we should accept that belief-desire psychology is a very good guide to normal brain events, but a bad guide to unusual brain events. See Ideas 2987 and 7519.
18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 8. Human Thought
Non-conscious thought may be unlike conscious thought [Heil]
     Full Idea: Non-conscious thought need not resemble conscious thought occurring out of sight.
     From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 12.10)
Linguistic thought is just as imagistic as non-linguistic thought [Heil]
     Full Idea: Thinking - ordinary conscious thinking - is imagistic. This is so for 'linguistic' or 'sentential' thoughts as well as for patently non-linguistic thoughts.
     From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 12.10)
     A reaction: This claim (that linguistic thought is just as imagistic as non-linguistic thought) strikes me as an excellent insight.