10 ideas
| 3509 | Externalism may be the key idea in philosophical naturalism [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Some people view an externalist approach to epistemology as the essence of philosophical naturalism. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I suspect philosophers avoid psychology and mental events, simply because they are elusive. Externalism is a theory about justification, and independent of naturalism as a metaphysic. |
| 1556 | By nature people are close to one another, but culture drives them apart [Hippias] |
| Full Idea: I regard you all as relatives - by nature, not by convention. By nature like is akin to like, but convention is a tyrant over humankind and often constrains people to act contrary to nature. | |
| From: Hippias (fragments/reports [c.430 BCE]), quoted by Plato - Protagoras 337c8 |
| 3513 | How does a dualist mind represent, exist outside space, and be transparent to itself? [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Even dualists must explain how the mind represents things, but then their mind-stuff has so many special powers already (being outside space but in time, being transparent to itself etc.) that one more scarcely seems worth worrying about. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 3.1 n1) | |
| A reaction: I share the exasperation. It is hard to see how a dualist could even begin to formulate a theory about HOW the mind does so many different things. Could Descartes get a research grant for it? Would we understand God if he tried to explain it to us? |
| 3514 | Functionalism needs causation and intentionality to explain actions [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The functionalist approach to the mind needs to invoke assumptions about what desires are for and beliefs are about, in order to infer what agents will do. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: Isn't the idea that you discover what desires are for and what beliefs are about by examining their function, and what the agent does? Which end should we start? |
| 3510 | Epiphenomenalism is supervenience without physicalism [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is a necessary condition for physicalism, but it is not sufficient. Epiphenomenalism rules out mental variation without physical variation, but says mental properties are quite distinct from physical properties. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: I take full epiphenomenalism about mind to be incoherent, and not worth even mentioning (see Idea 7379). Papineau seems to be thinking of so-called property dualism (which may also be incoherent!). |
| 3511 | Supervenience requires all mental events to have physical effects [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The argument for supervenience rests on the principle that any mental difference must be capable of showing itself in differential physical consequences. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: With our current knowledge of the brain, to assume anything less than this sort of correlation would be crazy. |
| 3515 | Knowing what it is like to be something only involves being (physically) that thing [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Physicalism does not deny that there are conscious experiences, nor that 'it is like something to have them'. The claim is only that this is nothing different from what it is to be a physical system of the relevant kind. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: The implication is that no physicalist is an extreme eliminativist about consciousness, which seems to be correct. We all concede that weather exists, but have a reductive view of it. The key question is whether mind is reducible to physics. |
| 3512 | If a mental state is multiply realisable, why does it lead to similar behaviour? [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: If functionalism implies that there is nothing physically in common among the realisations of a given mental state, then there is no possibility of any uniform explanation of why they all give rise to a common physical result. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: This is the well known interaction problem for dualism. The standard reply is to accept interaction as a given (with no apparent explanation). A miracle, if you like. |
| 20959 | Concepts are only analytic once the predicate is absorbed into the subject [Schleiermacher] |
| Full Idea: The difference between analytic and synthetic judgements is an unimportant fluid one. 'Ice melts' is analytic if it is already taken up into the concept of ice, and synthetic if not yet taken up. It is just a different state of the formation of concepts. | |
| From: Friedrich Schleiermacher (Dialektik [1833], p.563), quoted by Andrew Bowie - Introduction to German Philosophy 8 'Scientific' | |
| A reaction: [compressed] I wonder if Quine ever encountered this quotation. The idea refers to Kant's notion of analyticity, and makes the good point that predicates only become 'contained in the subject' once the situation is very familiar. |
| 3516 | The Private Language argument only means people may misjudge their experiences [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: I take the moral of the Private Language argument to be that there must be room for error in people's judgements about their experiences, not that those judgements must necessarily be expressed in a language used by a community. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 4.4 n10) | |
| A reaction: These two readings don't seem to be in conflict, and the argument must have something to say about the communal nature of thought expressed in language. Language imposes introspection on us? |