5 ideas
| 12900 | How could 'S knows he has hands' not have a fixed content? [Bach] |
| Full Idea: How can it be that a sentence like 'George knows that he has hands', even with time and references fixed, does not have a fixed propositional content? | |
| From: Kent Bach (The Emperor's New 'Knows' [2005], I) | |
| A reaction: The appeal is to G.E. Moore's common sense view of immediate knowledge (Idea 6349). The reply is simply that the word 'knows' shifts its meaning, having high standards in sceptical philosophy classes, and low standards on the street. |
| 12901 | If contextualism is right, knowledge sentences are baffling out of their context [Bach] |
| Full Idea: Contextualism seems to predict that if you encounter a knowledge attribution out of context you won't be in a position to grasp which proposition the sentence expresses. | |
| From: Kent Bach (The Emperor's New 'Knows' [2005], I) | |
| A reaction: It is only the word 'knows' which is at issue in the sentence. If someone is said to 'know' about the world of the fairies, we might well be puzzled as to what proposition was being expressed. Is the word 'flat' baffling out of context? |
| 12902 | Sceptics aren't changing the meaning of 'know', but claiming knowing is tougher than we think [Bach] |
| Full Idea: When a sceptic brings up far-fetched possibilities and argues that we can't rule them out, he is not raising the standard for the word 'know'. He is showing it is tougher than we realise for a belief to qualify as normal knowledge at all. | |
| From: Kent Bach (The Emperor's New 'Knows' [2005], III) | |
| A reaction: [Bach cites Richard Feldman for this idea] I think that what happens in the contextual account is that 'true', 'belief' and 'know' retain their standard meaning, and it is 'justified' which shifts. 'I am fully justified' can have VERY different meanings! |
| 3178 | A fast machine could pass all behavioural tests with a vast lookup table [Block, by Rey] |
| Full Idea: Ned Block proposes a machine (a 'blockhead') which could pass the Turing Test just by looking up responses in a vast look-up table. | |
| From: report of Ned Block (works [1984]) by Georges Rey - Contemporary Philosophy of Mind 5.3 | |
| A reaction: Once you suspected you were talking to a blockhead, I think you could catch it out in a Turing Test. How can the lookup table keep up to date with immediate experience? Ask it about your new poem. |
| 23282 | If all that matters in morality is motive and intention, that makes moral luck irrelevant [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: The idea that one's whole life can be immune to luck has not prevailed (e.g. in Christianity), …but its place has been taken by the idea that moral value can be immune, …if it is motive that counts, and in actions it is not worldly changes but intention. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Moral Luck [1976], p.20) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] That is, that Kant offers a way to make luck irrelevant to morality. Williams disagrees, but says at least Kant offers 'solace to a sense of the world's unfairness'. |