5 ideas
7880 | If a blind persons suddenly sees a kestrel, that doesn't make visual and theoretical kestrels different [Papineau on Jackson] |
Full Idea: An ornithological Mary might know everything theoretical about kestrels, but be blind from birth, then have her sight restored. She now knows "That bird eats mice", so visual kestrels must be ontologically distinct from theoretical ones. | |
From: comment on Frank Jackson (Epiphenomenal Qualia [1982]) by David Papineau - Thinking about Consciousness 6.3 | |
A reaction: A nice reductio, and I think this pinpoints best what is wrong with the knowledge argument. Knowledge, and the means of acquiring it, are two distinct things. When I see x, I don't acquire knowledge of x, AND knowledge of my seeing x. |
7378 | No one bothers to imagine what it would really be like to have ALL the physical information [Dennett on Jackson] |
Full Idea: That Mary "has all the physical information" is not readily imaginable, so no one bothers. They just imagine she knows lots and lots - perhaps everything known today - but that is just a drop in the bucket. | |
From: comment on Frank Jackson (Epiphenomenal Qualia [1982]) by Daniel C. Dennett - Consciousness Explained 12.5 | |
A reaction: I certainly don't see how we can rule out a priori the possibility that someone who really had all the physical knowledge might be able to infer the phenomenal properties of colour. |
7377 | Mary learns when she sees colour, so her complete physical information had missed something [Jackson] |
Full Idea: It seems obvious that Mary will learn something about the world when she is released from her black-and-white room; but then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete; she had all the physical information, so there is more to have. | |
From: Frank Jackson (Epiphenomenal Qualia [1982], §1) | |
A reaction: This is Jackson's famous 'knowledge argument', which seems to me misconceived. Since I don't think phenomenal colours are properties of objects (Idea 5456), Mary learns more about herself, and about her means of acquiring knowledge. |
8693 | An 'abstraction principle' says two things are identical if they are 'equivalent' in some respect [Boolos] |
Full Idea: Hume's Principle has a structure Boolos calls an 'abstraction principle'. Within the scope of two universal quantifiers, a biconditional connects an identity between two things and an equivalence relation. It says we don't care about other differences. | |
From: George Boolos (Is Hume's Principle analytic? [1997]), quoted by Michèle Friend - Introducing the Philosophy of Mathematics 3.7 | |
A reaction: This seems to be the traditional principle of abstraction by ignoring some properties, but dressed up in the clothes of formal logic. Frege tries to eliminate psychology, but Boolos implies that what we 'care about' is relevant. |
468 | Musical performance can reveal a range of virtues [Damon of Ath.] |
Full Idea: In singing and playing the lyre, a boy will be likely to reveal not only courage and moderation, but also justice. | |
From: Damon (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B4), quoted by (who?) - where? |