48 ideas
| 2463 | A standard naturalist view is realist, externalist, and computationalist, and believes in rationality [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There seems to be an emerging naturalist consensus that is Realist in ontology and epistemology, externalist in semantics, and computationalist in cognitive psychology, which nicely allows us to retain our understanding of ourselves as rational creatures. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 6675 | The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 423 (277)) | |
| A reaction: This romantic remark has passed into folklore. I am essentially against it, but the role of intuition and instinct are undeniable in both reasoning and ethics. I don't feel inclined, though, to let my heart overrule my reason concerning what exists. |
| 2435 | Psychology has to include the idea that mental processes are typically truth-preserving [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A psychology that can't make sense of such facts as that mental processes are typically truth-preserving is ipso facto dead in the water. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.3) |
| 2442 | Inferences are surely part of the causal structure of the world [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Inferences are surely part of the causal structure of the world. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §3) |
| 13952 | Essentialism says some of a thing's properties are necessary, and could not be absent [Cartwright,R] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism, as I shall understand it, is the doctrine that among the attributes of a thing some are essential, others merely accidental. Its essential attributes are those it has necessarily, those it could not have lacked. | |
| From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.149) | |
| A reaction: The problem with this, which Cartwright does not address, is that trivial and gerrymandered properties (such as having self-identity, or being 'such that 2+2=4') seem to be necessarily, but don't seem to constitute the essence of a thing. |
| 13954 | The difficulty in essentialism is deciding the grounds for rating an attribute as essential [Cartwright,R] |
| Full Idea: I see no reason for thinking essentialism unintelligible, but a chief perplexity is the obscurity of the grounds on which ratings of attributes as essential or accidental are to be made. | |
| From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.158) | |
| A reaction: In that case some of us younger philosophers will have to roll up our sleeves and tease out the grounds for essentialism, starting with Aristotle and Leibniz, and ending with the successes of modern science. |
| 13955 | Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic [Cartwright,R] |
| Full Idea: Apparently those who think essentialism unintelligible see support for their position in the doctrine that necessary truths are all analytic. Only relative to some mode of designation does it make sense to speak of an object as necessarily this or that. | |
| From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.158) | |
| A reaction: He has in mind Quine and his mathematician-cyclist (Idea 8482). Personally I have no problems with the example. No one is essentially a cyclist - that isn't what essence is. Two-legged people can be cyclists. |
| 13953 | An act of ostension doesn't seem to need a 'sort' of thing, even of a very broad kind [Cartwright,R] |
| Full Idea: For an ostension to be successful it is surely not necessary that I gather what sort of object it is you have indicated, such as being a horse or a zebra. I may even gather which thing you have indicated without knowing that it is a mammal or even alive. | |
| From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.157) | |
| A reaction: This nicely articulates the objection I have always felt to Geach's relative identity. 'Oh my God, what the hell is THAT???' is probably going to be a successful act of verbal reference, even while explicitly denying all knowledge of sortals. |
| 22011 | The first principles of truth are not rational, but are known by the heart [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through that latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 110 p.58), quoted by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 04 n4 | |
| A reaction: This resembles the rationalist defence of fundamental a priori principles, needed as a foundation for knowledge. But the a priori insights are not a feature of the 'natural light' of reason, and are presumably inexplicable (of the 'heart'). |
| 2462 | Control of belief is possible if you know truth conditions and what causes beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Premeditated cognitive management is possible if knowing the contents of one's thoughts would tell you what would make them true and what would cause you to have them. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I love the idea of 'cognitive management'. Since belief is fairly involuntary, I subject myself to the newspapers, books, TV and conversation which will create the style of beliefs to which I aspire. Why? |
| 2454 | We can deliberately cause ourselves to have true thoughts - hence the value of experiments [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A creature that knows what makes its thoughts true and what would cause it to have them, could therefore cause itself to have true thoughts. …This would explain why experimentation is so close to the heart of our cognitive style. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2455 | Interrogation and experiment submit us to having beliefs caused [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You can put yourself into a situation where you may be caused to believe that P. Putting a question to someone who is in the know is one species of this behaviour, and putting a question to Nature (an experiment) is another. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2460 | Participation in an experiment requires agreement about what the outcome will mean [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: To be in the audience for an experiment you have to believe what the experimenter believes about what the outcome would mean, but not necessarily what the outcome will be. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2461 | An experiment is a deliberate version of what informal thinking does all the time [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Experimentation is an occasional and more or less self-conscious exercise in what informal thinking does all the time without thinking about it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2458 | Theories are links in the causal chain between the environment and our beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Theories function as links in the causal chains that run from environmental outcomes to the beliefs that they cause the inquirer to have. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2443 | I say psychology is intentional, semantics is informational, and thinking is computation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I hold that psychological laws are intentional, that semantics is purely informational, and that thinking is computation (and that it is possible to hold all of these assumptions at once). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: When he puts it baldly like that, it doesn't sound terribly persuasive. Thinking is 'computation'? Raw experience is irrelevant? What is it 'like' to spot an interesting connection between two propositions or concepts? It's not like adding 7 and 5. |
| 2453 | We are probably the only creatures that can think about our own thoughts [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I think it is likely that we are the only creatures that can think about the contents of our thoughts. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a major idea. If you ask me the traditional question - what is the essential difference between us and other animals? - this is my answer (not language, or reason). We are the metathinkers. |
| 2445 | Semantics v syntax is the interaction problem all over again [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The question how mental representations could be both semantic, like propositions, and causal, like rocks, trees, and neural firings, is arguably just the interaction problem all over again. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Interesting way of presenting the problem. If you seem to be confronting the interaction problem, you have probably drifted into a bogus dualist way of thinking. Retreat, and reformulate you questions and conceptual apparatus, till the question vanishes. |
| 2446 | Cartesians consider interaction to be a miracle [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The Cartesian view is that the interaction problem does arise, but is unsolvable because interaction is miraculous. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: A rather unsympathetic statement of the position. Cartesians might think that God could explain to us how interaction works. Cartesians are not mysterians, I think, but they see no sign of any theory of interaction. |
| 2464 | Type physicalism equates mental kinds with physical kinds [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Type physicalism is, roughly, the doctrine that psychological kinds are identical to neurological kinds. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], App A n.1) | |
| A reaction: This gets my general support, leaving open the nature of 'kinds'. Presumably the identity is strict, as in 'Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus'. It seems unlikely that if you and I think the 'same' thought, that we have strictly identical brain states. |
| 2447 | Hume has no theory of the co-ordination of the mind [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: What Hume didn't see was that the causal and representational properties of mental symbols have somehow to be coordinated if the coherence of mental life is to be accounted for. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Certainly the idea that it all somehow becomes magic at the point where the brain represents the world is incoherent - but it is a bit magical. How can the whole of my garden be in my brain? Weird. |
| 2440 | Propositional attitudes are propositions presented in a certain way [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Propositional attitudes are really three-place relations, between a creature, a proposition, and a mode of presentation (which are sentences of Mentalese). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about 'really'! Why do we need a creature? Isn't 'hoping it will rain' a propositional attitude which some creature may or may not have? Fodor wants it to be physical, but it's abstract? |
| 2450 | Rationality has mental properties - autonomy, productivity, experiment [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mentalism isn't gratuitous; you need it to explain rationality. Mental causation buys you behaviours that are unlike reflexes in at least three ways: they're autonomous, they're productive, and they're experimental. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: He makes his three ways sound all-or-nothing, which is (I believe) the single biggest danger when thinking about the mind. "Either you are conscious, or you are not..." |
| 2437 | XYZ (Twin Earth 'water') is an impossibility [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There isn't any XYZ, and there couldn't be any, and so we don't have to worry about it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: Jadeite and Nephrite are real enough, which are virtually indistinguishable variants of jade. You just need Twin Jewellers instead of Twin Earths. We could build them, and employ twins to work there. |
| 2441 | Truth conditions require a broad concept of content [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We need the idea of broad content to make sense of the fact that thoughts have the truth-conditions that they do. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be (as Dummett points out) a potential circularity here, as you can hardly know the truth-conditions of something if you don't already know its content. |
| 3114 | Concepts aren't linked to stuff; they are what is caused by stuff [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the words of 'Swamp Man' (spontaneously created, with concepts) are about XYZ on Twin Earth, it is not because he's causally connected to the stuff, but because XYZ would cause his 'water' tokens (in the absence of H2O). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], App B) | |
| A reaction: The sight of the Eiffel tower causes my 'France' tokens, so is my word "France" about the Eiffel Tower? What would cause my 'nothing' tokens? |
| 2452 | Knowing the cause of a thought is almost knowing its content [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If you know the content of a thought, you know quite a lot about what would cause you to have it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure where this fits into the great jigsaw of the mind, but it strikes me as an acute and important observation. The truth of a thought is not essential to make you have it. Ask Othello. |
| 2432 | Is content basically information, fixed externally? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I assume intentional content reduces (in some way) to information. …The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not the way that it is related to other thoughts. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2) | |
| A reaction: Does this make Fodor a 'weak' functionalist? The 'strong' version would say a thought is merely a location in a flow diagram, but Fodor's 'mentalism' includes a further 'content' in each diagram box. |
| 2438 | In the information view, concepts are potentials for making distinctions [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Semantics, according to the informational view, is mostly about counterfactuals; what counts for the identity of my concepts is not what I do distinguish but what I could distinguish if I cared to (even using instruments and experts). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: We all differ in our discriminations (and awareness of expertise), so our concepts would differ, which is bad news for communication (see Idea 223). The view has some plausibility, though. |
| 2439 | Semantic externalism says the concept 'elm' needs no further beliefs or inferences [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the essence of semantic externalism that there is nothing that you have to believe, there are no inferences that you have to accept, to have the concept 'elm'. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: [REMINDER: broad content is filed in 18.C.7, under 'Thought' rather than under language. That is because I am a philospher of thought, rather than of language. |
| 2457 | If meaning is information, that establishes the causal link between the state of the world and our beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the causal connection between the state of the world and the contents of beliefs that the reduction of meaning to information is designed to insure. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not clear why characterising the contents of a belief in terms of its information has to amount to a 'reduction'. A cup of tea isn't reduced to tea. Connections imply duality. |
| 2451 | To know the content of a thought is to know what would make it true [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If you know the content of a thought, you thereby know what would make the thought true. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: The truthmaker might by physically impossible, and careful thought might show it to be contradictory - but that wouldn't destroy the meaning. |
| 2433 | For holists no two thoughts are ever quite the same, which destroys faith in meaning [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If what you are thinking depends on all of what you believe, then nobody ever thinks the same thing twice. …That is why so many semantic holists (Quine, Putnam, Rorty, Churchland, probably Wittgenstein) end up being semantic eliminativists. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2b) | |
| A reaction: If linguistic holism is nonsense, this is easily settled. What I say about breakfast is not changed by reading some Gibbon yesterday. |
| 2436 | It is claimed that reference doesn't fix sense (Jocasta), and sense doesn't fix reference (Twin Earth) [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that Frege cases [knowing Jocasta but not mother] show that reference doesn't determine sense, and Twin cases [knowing water but not H2O] show that sense doesn't determine reference. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.3) | |
| A reaction: How about 'references don't contain much information', and 'descriptions may not fix what they are referring to'? Simple really. |
| 2434 | Broad semantics holds that the basic semantic properties are truth and denotation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Broad semantic theories generally hold that the basic semantic properties of thoughts are truth and denotation. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2b) | |
| A reaction: I think truth and denotation are the basic semantic properties, but I am dubious about whole-hearted broad semantic theories, so I seem to have gone horribly wrong somewhere. |
| 2459 | Externalist semantics are necessary to connect the contents of beliefs with how the world is [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You need an externalist semantics to explain why the contents of beliefs should have anything to do with how the world is. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Since externalist semantics only emerged in the 1970s, that implies that no previous theory had any notion that language had some connection to how the world is. Eh? |
| 6681 | We only want to know things so that we can talk about them [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 77 (152)) | |
| A reaction: This may be right, but I wouldn't underestimate it as a worthy end (though Pascal, as usual, calls it 'vanity'). Good talk might even be the highest human good (how many people like, more than anything, chatting in pubs?), and good talk is knowledgeable. |
| 6676 | Painting makes us admire things of which we do not admire the originals [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 40 (134)) | |
| A reaction: A lesser sort of painting simply depicts things we admire, such as a nice stretch of landscape. For Pascal it is vanity, but it could be defended as the highest achievement of art, if the purpose of artists is to make us see beauty where we had missed it. |
| 6680 | It is a funny sort of justice whose limits are marked by a river [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: It is a funny sort of justice whose limits are marked by a river; true on this side of the Pyrenees, false on the other. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 60 (294)) | |
| A reaction: Pascal gives nice concise summaries of our intuitions. Legal justice may be all we can actually get, but everyone knows that what happens to someone could be 'fair' on one side of a river, and very 'unfair' on the other. |
| 6677 | Imagination creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the supreme good [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the world's supreme good. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 44 (82)) | |
| A reaction: Compare Fogelin's remark in Idea 6555. I see Pascal's point, but these ideals are also responses to facts about the world, such as human potential and human desire and successful natural functions. |
| 6678 | We live for the past or future, and so are never happy in the present [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: Our thoughts are wholly concerned with the past or the future, never with the present, which is never our end; thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 47 (172)) | |
| A reaction: A very nice expression of the importance of 'living for the moment' as a route to happiness. Personally I am occasionally startled by the thought 'Good heavens, I seem to be happy!', but it usually passes quickly. How do you plan for the present? |
| 20732 | If man considers himself as lost and imprisoned in the universe, he will be terrified [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: Let man consider what he is in comparison with what exists; let him regard himself as lost, and from this little dungeon the universe, let him learn to take the earth and himself at their proper value. Anyone considering this will be terrified at himself. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], p.199), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction Pref 'What? | |
| A reaction: [p.199 of Penguin edn] Cited by Aho as a forerunner of existentialism. Montaigne probably influenced Pascal. Interesting that this is to be a self-inflicted existential crisis (for some purpose, probably Christian). |
| 6682 | Majority opinion is visible and authoritative, although not very clever [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: Majority opinion is the best way because it can be seen, and is strong enough to command obedience, but it is the opinion of those who are least clever. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 85 (878)) | |
| A reaction: A nice statement of the classic dilemma faced by highly educated people over democracy. Plato preferred the clever, Aristotle agreed with Pascal, and with me. Politics must make the best of it, not pursue some ideal. Education is the one feeble hope. |
| 6679 | It is not good to be too free [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: It is not good to be too free. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 57 (379)) | |
| A reaction: All Americans, please take note. I agree with this, because I agree with Aristotle that man is essentially a social animal (Idea 5133), and living in a community is a matter of compromise. Extreme libertarianism contradicts our natures, and causes misery. |
| 7455 | Pascal knows you can't force belief, but you can make it much more probable [Pascal, by Hacking] |
| Full Idea: Pascal knows that one cannot decide to believe in God, but he thinks one can act so that one will very probably come to believe in God, by following a life of 'holy water and sacraments'. | |
| From: report of Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 418 (233)) by Ian Hacking - The Emergence of Probability Ch.8 | |
| A reaction: This meets the most obvious and simple objection to Pascal's idea, and Pascal may well be right. I'm not sure I could resist belief after ten years in a monastery. |
| 7457 | Pascal is right, but relies on the unsupported claim of a half as the chance of God's existence [Hacking on Pascal] |
| Full Idea: Pascal's argument is valid, but it is presented with a monstrous premise of equal chance. We have no good reason for picking a half as the chance of God's existence. | |
| From: comment on Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 418 (233)) by Ian Hacking - The Emergence of Probability Ch.8 | |
| A reaction: That strikes me as the last word on this rather bizarre argument. |
| 7456 | The libertine would lose a life of enjoyable sin if he chose the cloisters [Hacking on Pascal] |
| Full Idea: The libertine is giving up something if he chooses to adopt a pious form of life. He likes sin. If God is not, the worldly life is preferable to the cloistered one. | |
| From: comment on Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 418 (233)) by Ian Hacking - The Emergence of Probability Ch.8 | |
| A reaction: This is a very good objection to Pascal, who seems to think you really have nothing at all to lose. I certainly don't intend to become a monk, because the chances of success seem incredibly remote from where I am sitting. |
| 6684 | If you win the wager on God's existence you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: How will you wager if a coin is spun on 'Either God is or he is not'? ...If you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (Pensées [1662], 418 (233)) | |
| A reaction: 'Sooner safe than sorry' is a principle best used with caution. Do you really 'lose nothing' by believing a falsehood for the whole of your life? What God would reward belief on such a principles as this? |