4 ideas
| 22186 | Mental modules are specialised, automatic, and isolated [Fodor, by Okasha] |
| Full Idea: Fodor argues that mental modules have three important featuresL 1) they are domain-specific, 2) their operation is mandatory, 3) they are informationally encapsulated. | |
| From: report of Jerry A. Fodor (The Modularity of Mind [1983]) by Samir Okasha - Philosophy of Science: Very Short Intro (2nd ed) 6 | |
| A reaction: Mandatory is interesting. When I hear an English sentence I can't decide not to process it. Modules cannot be too isolated or they couldn't participate in the team. Each one needs a comms manager. |
| 18006 | Chomsky's 'interpretative semantics' says syntax comes first, and is then interpreted [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Chomsky and his followers (whose position was labelled 'interpretative semantics') claimed that a sentence is first assigned a syntactic structure by an autonomous syntactic module, and this structure is then provided as input for semantic interpretation. | |
| From: report of Noam Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax [1965]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 1.3 | |
| A reaction: This certainly doesn't fit the experience of introspecting speech, but then I suppose good pianists focus entirely on the music, and overlook the finger movements which have obvious priority. But I don't know the syntax of the sentence when I begin it. |
| 20696 | We can approach knowledge of God by negative attributes [Maimonides] |
| Full Idea: You will come nearer to the knowledge and comprehension of God by the negative attributes. | |
| From: Moses Maimonides (The Guide of the Perplexed [1190], p.86), quoted by Brian Davies - Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion 2 'Negation' | |
| A reaction: Illustrated by grasping what a ship is by eliminating other categories it might belong to. The assumption is that you have a known and finite list - something like Aristotle's categories. Maimonides fears we know too little for positive attributes. |
| 19085 | Thinking of God as resembling humans results from a bad translation of Genesis 1:26 [Maimonides] |
| Full Idea: Mistranslation of 'image' has been the cause of a crass anthropomorphism because of the verse 'Let us make man in Our image after Our likeness' (Gen.1:26). They think God has the shape and outline of man, ..with face and hands like themselves. | |
| From: Moses Maimonides (The Guide of the Perplexed [1190], I.1) | |
| A reaction: It's interesting that Michelangelo still visualises God as an old man. The idea won't go away, presumably because God is understood as a 'person', in Locke's sense, though of a very special kind. |