Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'The Problem of Empty Names', 'The Impossibility of Superdupervenience' and 'The Mental Life of Some Machines'

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6 ideas

5. Theory of Logic / F. Referring in Logic / 1. Naming / e. Empty names

18946	Unreflectively, we all assume there are nonexistents, and we can refer to them [Reimer]
	Full Idea: As speakers of the language, we unreflectively assume that there are nonexistents, and that reference to them is possible.
	From: Marga Reimer (The Problem of Empty Names [2001], p.499), quoted by Sarah Sawyer - Empty Names 4
	A reaction: Sarah Swoyer quotes this as a good solution to the problem of empty names, and I like it. It introduces a two-tier picture of our understanding of the world, as 'unreflective' and 'reflective', but that seems good. We accept numbers 'unreflectively'.

7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 3. Levels of Reality

16062	A necessary relation between fact-levels seems to be a further irreducible fact [Lynch/Glasgow]
	Full Idea: It seems unavoidable that the facts about logically necessary relations between levels of facts are themselves logically distinct further facts, irreducible to the microphysical facts.
	From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C)
	A reaction: I'm beginning to think that rejecting every theory of reality that is proposed by carefully exposing some infinite regress hidden in it is a rather lazy way to do philosophy. Almost as bad as rejecting anything if it can't be defined.

7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 5. Supervenience / c. Significance of supervenience

16061	If some facts 'logically supervene' on some others, they just redescribe them, adding nothing [Lynch/Glasgow]
	Full Idea: Logical supervenience, restricted to individuals, seems to imply strong reduction. It is said that where the B-facts logically supervene on the A-facts, the B-facts simply re-describe what the A-facts describe, and the B-facts come along 'for free'.
	From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C)
	A reaction: This seems to be taking 'logically' to mean 'analytically'. Presumably an entailment is logically supervenient on its premisses, and may therefore be very revealing, even if some people think such things are analytic.

7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 6. Physicalism

16060	Nonreductive materialism says upper 'levels' depend on lower, but don't 'reduce' [Lynch/Glasgow]
	Full Idea: The root intuition behind nonreductive materialism is that reality is composed of ontologically distinct layers or levels. …The upper levels depend on the physical without reducing to it.
	From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], B)
	A reaction: A nice clear statement of a view which I take to be false. This relationship is the sort of thing that drives people fishing for an account of it to use the word 'supervenience', which just says two things seem to hang out together. Fluffy materialism.

16064	The hallmark of physicalism is that each causal power has a base causal power under it [Lynch/Glasgow]
	Full Idea: Jessica Wilson (1999) says what makes physicalist accounts different from emergentism etc. is that each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property.
	From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], n 11)
	A reaction: Hence the key thought in so-called (serious, rather than self-evident) 'emergentism' is so-called 'downward causation', which I take to be an idle daydream.

17. Mind and Body / C. Functionalism / 2. Machine Functionalism

5495	Instances of pain are physical tokens, but the nature of pain is more abstract [Putnam, by Lycan]
	Full Idea: In machine functionalism, pain tokens (individual instances of pain) are identical with particular neurophysiological states, but pain itself, the kind, universal, or 'type', can be identified only with something more abstract.
	From: report of Hilary Putnam (The Mental Life of Some Machines [1967]) by William Lycan - Introduction - Ontology p.6
	A reaction: This is where the "what is it like?" question seems important. Pain doesn't seem like a physical object, or an abstract idea. Personally I think the former is more likely to be correct than the latter. Causation by pain is not like causation by gravity.