14 ideas
| 2590 | Dispositions need mental terms to define them [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The chief difficulty with the behaviour-disposition account is the virtual impossibility of specifying a disposition except as a 'disposition of x to behave as though x were in pain'. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.57) | |
| A reaction: This has become the best-known objection to behaviourism - that you can't specify a piece of behaviour clearly unless you mention the mental state which it is expressing. The defence is to go on endlessly mentioning further behaviour. |
| 2591 | Total paralysis would mean that there were mental states but no behaviour at all [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Two animals with all motor nerves cut will have the same actual and potential behaviour (i.e. none), but if only one has uncut pain fibres, it will feel pain where the other won't. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.57) | |
| A reaction: This is a splendidly literal and practical argument against behaviourism - if you prevent all the behaviour, you don't thereby prevent the experience. Clearly we have to say something about what is inside the 'black box' of the mind. |
| 2588 | Is pain a functional state of a complete organism? [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: I propose the hypothesis that pain, or the state of being in pain, is a functional state of a whole organism. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.54) | |
| A reaction: This sounds wrong right from the start. Pain hurts. The fact that it leads to avoidance behaviour etc. seems much more like a by-product of pain than its essence. |
| 2589 | Functionalism is compatible with dualism, as pure mind could perform the functions [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The functional-state hypothesis is not incompatible with dualism, as a system consisting of a body and a soul could meet the required conditions. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.55) | |
| A reaction: He doesn't really believe this, of course. This claim led to all the weak objections to functionalism involving silly implementations of minds. A brain is the only plausible way to implement our mental functions. |
| 2592 | Functional states correlate with AND explain pain behaviour [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The presence of a certain functional state is not merely 'correlated with' but actually explains the pain behaviour on the part of the organism. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.58) | |
| A reaction: Does it offer any further explanation beyond saying that it is the brain state that causes the behaviour? The pain is just a link between damage and avoidance. I wish that is all that pain was. |
| 2587 | Temperature is mean molecular kinetic energy, but they are two different concepts [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The concept of temperature is not the same as the concept of mean molecular kinetic energy. But temperature is mean molecular kinetic energy. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.52) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard analogy for mind-brain identity, and it seems fair enough to me. The mind is the activity of the brain. It is rather unhelpful to think of weather in terms of chemistry, but it is actions of chemicals. |
| 6376 | Neuroscience does not support multiple realisability, and tends to support identity [Polger on Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Putnam was too quick to assert neuroscientific support for multiple realizability; current evidence does not reveal it, and there is some reason to think the enterprises of neuroscience are premised on the hypothesis of brain-state identity. | |
| From: comment on Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968]) by Thomas W. Polger - Natural Minds Ch.1.4 | |
| A reaction: I have always been suspicious of the glib claim that mental states were multiply realisable. I see no reason to think that octupi see colours as we do, or experience fear as we do, even though their behaviour has to be similar, for survival. |
| 2330 | If humans and molluscs both feel pain, it can't be a single biological state [Putnam, by Kim] |
| Full Idea: Mental states have vastly diverse physical/biological realizations in different species and structures (e.g. pain in humans and in molluscs), so no mental state can be identified with any single physical/biological state. | |
| From: report of Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968]) by Jaegwon Kim - Mind in a Physical World n p.120 | |
| A reaction: But maybe mollusc and human nervous systems ARE the same in the respects that matter. We don't know enough about pain to deny that possibility. |
| 24008 | Reference to a person's emotions is often essential to understanding their actions [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: The reference to a man's emotions has a significance for our understanding of his moral sincerity, not as a substitute for or addition to how he acts, but as, on occasion, underlying our understanding of how he acts. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Morality and the emotions [1965], p.223) | |
| A reaction: Williams aims to rescue emotion from the emotivists, and replace it at the centre of traditional modes of moral judgement. I suppose we could assess one rogue robot as behaving 'badly' in a community of robots. |
| 24009 | Moral education must involve learning about various types of feeling towards things [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: If moral education does not revolve around what to fear, to be angry about, to despise, and where to draw the line between kindness and a stupid sentimentality - I do not know what it is. (Though there are principles, of truth-telling and justice). | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Morality and the emotions [1965], p.225) | |
| A reaction: He cites Aristotle as the obvious source of this correct idea. The examples of principle both require us to place a high value on truth and justice, and not just follow rules in the style of arithmetic. |
| 24007 | Emotivism saw morality as expressing emotions, and influencing others' emotions [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: Emotivism held that there were two purposes of moral judgements: to express the emotions of the speaker, and to influence the emotions of his hearers. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Morality and the emotions [1965], p.209) | |
| A reaction: I take Ayer to be typical of the first project, and Hare of the second. The theory is much more plausible when the second aim is added. Would we ever utter a moral opinion if we didn't hope to influence someone? |
| 24010 | An admirable human being should have certain kinds of emotional responses [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: One's conception of an admirable human being implies that he should be disposed to certain kinds of emotional response, and not to others. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Morality and the emotions [1965], p.225) | |
| A reaction: So are the good emotions an indicator of being a good person, or is that what their goodness consists of? The goodness must be cashed out in actions, and presumably good emotions both promise good actions, and motivate them. |
| 24012 | Kant's love of consistency is too rigid, and it even overrides normal fairness [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: There is a certain moral woodenness or even insolence in Kant's blank regard for consistency. It smacks of Keynes's Principle of Unfairness - that if you can't do a good turn to everybody, you shouldn't do it to anybody. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Morality and the emotions [1965], p.226) | |
| A reaction: He says it also turns each of us into a Supreme Legislator, which deifies man. It is clearly not the case that morality consists entirely of rules and principles, but Williams recognises their role, in truth-telling for example. |
| 8433 | There are few traces of an event before it happens, but many afterwards [Lewis, by Horwich] |
| Full Idea: Lewis claims that most events are over-determined by subsequent states of the world, but not by their history. That is, the future of every event contains many independent traces of its occurrence, with little prior indication that it would happen. | |
| From: report of David Lewis (Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow [1979]) by Paul Horwich - Lewis's Programme p.209 | |
| A reaction: Lewis uses this asymmetry to deduce the direction of causation, and hence the direction of time. Most people (including me, I think) would prefer to use the axiomatic direction of time to deduce directions of causation. Lewis was very wicked. |