46 ideas
| 16123 | Whenever you perceive a community of things, you should also hunt out differences in the group [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The rule is that when one perceives first the community between the members of a group of many things, one should not desist until one sees in it all those differences that are located in classes. | |
| From: Plato (The Statesman [c.356 BCE], 285b) | |
| A reaction: He goes on to recommend the opposite as well - see community even when there appears to be nothing but differences. I take this to be analysis, just as much as modern linguistic approaches are. Analyse the world, not language. |
| 16125 | To reveal a nature, divide down, and strip away what it has in common with other things [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Let's take the kind posited and cut it in two, .then follow the righthand part of what we've cut, and hold onto things that the sophist is associated with until we strip away everything he has in common with other things, then display his peculiar nature. | |
| From: Plato (The Statesman [c.356 BCE], 264e) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be close to Aristotle's account of definition, when he is trying to get at what-it-is-to-be some thing. But if you strip away everything the definiendum has in common with other things, will anything remain? |
| 16124 | No one wants to define 'weaving' just for the sake of weaving [Plato] |
| Full Idea: I don't suppose that anyone with any sense would want to hunt down the definition of 'weaving' for the sake of weaving itself. | |
| From: Plato (The Statesman [c.356 BCE], 285d) | |
| A reaction: The point seems to be that the definition brings out the connections between weaving and other activities and objects, thus enlarging our understanding. |
| 3005 | 'Jocasta' needs to be distinguished from 'Oedipus's mother' because they are connected by different properties [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the concept 'Jocasta' needs to be distinguished from the concept 'Oedipus's mother', that's all right because the two concepts are connected with different properties. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 84) |
| 7014 | A particle and a coin heads-or-tails pick out to perfectly well-defined predicates and properties [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: 'Is a particle and my coin is heads' and 'is a particle and my coin is tails' are perfectly well defined predicates and they pick out perfectly well defined (relational) properties of physical particles. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: (Somewhat paraphrased). This is a very nice offering for the case that all predicates are properties, and hence that 'properties' is an entirely conventional category. It strikes me as self-evident that Fodor is not picking out 'natural' properties. |
| 14329 | Some dispositional properties (such as mental ones) may have no categorical base [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: There is no a priori necessity for supposing that all disposition properties must have a 'categorical base'. In particular, there may be some mental dispositions which are ultimate. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.XI) | |
| A reaction: I take the notion that mental dispositions could be ultimate as rather old-fashioned, but I agree with the notion that dispositions might be more fundamental that categorical (actual) properties. Personally I like 'powers'. |
| 2990 | Contrary to commonsense, most of what is in the mind seems to be unlearned [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Contrary to commonsense, it looks as though much of what is in the mind is unlearned. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 15) |
| 3009 | Sticklebacks have an innate idea that red things are rivals [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: God gave the male stickleback the idea that whatever is red is a rival. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.133) |
| 3008 | Evolution suggests that innate knowledge of human psychology would be beneficial [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If I had to design homo sapiens, I would have made commonsense knowledge of homo sapiens psychology innate; that way nobody would have to spend time learning it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.132) |
| 5961 | The soul gets its goodness from god, and its evil from previous existence. [Plato] |
| Full Idea: From its composer the soul possesses all beautiful things, but from its former condition, everything that proves to be harsh and unjust in heaven. | |
| From: Plato (The Statesman [c.356 BCE], 273b) | |
| A reaction: A neat move to explain the origins of evil (or rather, to shift the problem of evil to a long long way from here). This view presumably traces back to the views of Empedocles on good and evil. Can the soul acquire evil in its current existence? |
| 2994 | In CRTT thought may be represented, content must be [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: In the Representation Theory of Mind, programs (the 'laws of thought') may be explicitly represented, but data structures (the 'contents of thought') have to be. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 25) | |
| A reaction: Presumably this is because content is where mental events actually meet up with the reality being considered. It may be an abstract procedure, but if it doesn't plug into reality then it isn't thought, but merely activity, like that of the liver. |
| 15494 | We can't use propositions to explain intentional attitudes, because they would need explaining [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It's not clear what the point would be of an explanation of the intentionality of attitudes which presupposes objects that are intentional intrinsically. Why not just say that the attitudes are? | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], Ch.3) |
| 7326 | Intentionality doesn't go deep enough to appear on the physicists' ultimate list of things [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue of ultimate and irreducible things, with the likes of spin, charm and charge. But aboutness won't be on the list; intentionality simply doesn't go that deep. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], 4 Intro) | |
| A reaction: I totally agree with this, which I take to be a warning to John Searle against including something called 'intrinsic intentionality' into his ontology. Intentionality 'emerges' out of certain complex brain activity. |
| 9032 | Before we can abstract from an instance of violet, we must first recognise it [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: Abstraction is preceded by an earlier stage, in which we learn to recognize instances; before I can conceive of the colour violet in abstracto, I must learn to recognize instances of this colour when I see them. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.II) | |
| A reaction: The problem here might be one of circularity. If you are actually going to identify something as violet, you seem to need the abstract concept of 'violet' in advance. See Idea 9034 for Price's attempt to deal with the problem. |
| 9035 | If judgement of a characteristic is possible, that part of abstraction must be complete [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: If we are to 'judge' - rightly or not - that this object has a specific characteristic, it would seem that so far as the characteristic is concerned the process of abstraction must already be completed. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.III) | |
| A reaction: Personally I think Price is right, despite the vicious attack from Geach that looms. We all know the experiences of familiarity, recognition, and identification that go on when see a person or picture. 'What animal is that, in the distance?' |
| 9034 | There may be degrees of abstraction which allow recognition by signs, without full concepts [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: If abstraction is a matter of degree, and the first faint beginnings of it are already present as soon as anything has begun to feel familiar to us, then recognition by means of signs can occur long before the process of abstraction has been completed. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.III) | |
| A reaction: I like this, even though it is unscientific introspective psychology, for which no proper evidence can be adduced - because it is right. Neuroscience confirms that hardly any mental life has an all-or-nothing form. |
| 9036 | There is pre-verbal sign-based abstraction, as when ice actually looks cold [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: We must still insist that some degree of abstraction, and even a very considerable degree of it, is present in sign-cognition, pre-verbal as it is. ...To us, who are familiar with northern winters, the ice actually looks cold. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.IV) | |
| A reaction: Price may be in the weak position of doing armchair psychology, but something like his proposal strikes me as correct. I'm much happier with accounts of thought that talk of 'degrees' of an activity, than with all-or-nothing cut-and-dried pictures. |
| 9037 | Intelligent behaviour, even in animals, has something abstract about it [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: Though it may sound odd to say so, intelligent behaviour has something abstract about it no less than intelligent cognition; and indeed at the animal level it is unrealistic to separate the two. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.IV) | |
| A reaction: This elusive thought strikes me as being a key one for understanding human existence. To think is to abstract. Brains are abstraction machines. Resemblance and recognition require abstaction. |
| 3001 | Behaviourism has no theory of mental causation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Behaviourists had trouble providing a robust construal of mental causation (and hence had no logical space for a psychology of mental processes). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 67) | |
| A reaction: If they could reduce all mental events to stimulus-response, that seems to fall within the normal procedures of physical causation. There is no problem of mental causation if your ontology is entirely physical. |
| 2993 | Any piece of software can always be hard-wired [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: For any machine that computes a function by executing an explicit algorithm, there exists a hard-wired machine that computes the same function by not executing an explicit algorithm. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 23) | |
| A reaction: It is certainly vital for functionalists to understand that software can be hardwired. Presumably we should understand a hardwired alogirthm as 'implicit'? |
| 3011 | Causal powers must be a crucial feature of mental states [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Everybody is a functionalist, in that we all hold that mental states are individuated, at least in part, by reference to their causal powers. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.138) | |
| A reaction: I might individuate the Prime Minister by the carnation in his buttonhole. However, even a dualist must concede that we individuate mental faculties by their role within the mind. |
| 5498 | Mind is a set of hierarchical 'homunculi', which are made up in turn from subcomponents [Fodor, by Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Fodor sees behaviour as manifestations of psychological capacities, which result from the subject being a set of interconnected 'homunculi', which in turn have subcomponents, all of it arranged in a hierarchy. | |
| From: report of Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987]) by William Lycan - Introduction - Ontology p.9 | |
| A reaction: This may well miss out the most interesting parts of a mind (such as awareness, and personal identity), but it sounds basically right, especially when an evolutionary history is added to the system. Parts of my mind intrude into my trains of thought. |
| 2995 | Supervenience gives good support for mental causation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mind/brain supervenience is the best idea anyone has had so far about how mental causation is possible. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 30) | |
| A reaction: I would have thought that mind brain identity was a much better idea (see Idea 3440). Supervenience seems to prove that 'mental causation' occurs, but doesn't explain it. |
| 2991 | Hume's associationism offers no explanation at all of rational thought [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: With Associationism there proved to be no way to get a rational mental life to emerge from the sorts of causal relations among thoughts that the 'laws of association' recognised. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 18) | |
| A reaction: This might not be true if you add the concept of evolution, which has refined the associations to generate truth (which is vital for survival). |
| 3002 | If mind is just physical, how can it follow the rules required for intelligent thought? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Central state identity theorists had trouble providing for the nomological possibility of rational machines (and hence no space for a non-biological, e.g. computational, theory of intelligence). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 67) | |
| A reaction: I surmise that a more externalist account of the physical mind might do the trick, by explaining intelligence in terms of an evolved relationship between brain and environment. |
| 9033 | Recognition must precede the acquisition of basic concepts, so it is the fundamental intellectual process [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: Recognition is the first stage towards the acquisition of a primary or basic concept. It is, therefore, the most fundamental of all intellectual processes. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.II) | |
| A reaction: An interesting question is whether it is an 'intellectual' process. Animals evidently recognise things, though it is a moot point whether slugs 'recognise' tasty leaves. |
| 2992 | We may be able to explain rationality mechanically [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We are on the verge of solving a great mystery about the mind: how is rationality mechanically possible? | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 20) | |
| A reaction: Optimistic, given that AI has struggled to implement natural languages, mainly because common sense knowledge seems too complex to encode. Can a machine determine logical forms of sentences? |
| 2988 | Folk psychology is the only explanation of behaviour we have [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Commonsense belief/desire psychology explains vastly more of the facts about behaviour than any of the alternative theories available. It could hardly fail to; there are no alternative theories available. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.x) | |
| A reaction: The alternative view wouldn't expect a clear-cut theory, because it deals with the endless complexity of brain events. The charge is that Fodor and co oversimplify their account, in their desperation for a 'theory'. |
| 3010 | Belief and desire are structured states, which need mentalese [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A defence of the language of thought has to be an argument that believing and desiring are typically structured states. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.136) | |
| A reaction: A structure is one thing, and a language is another. Both believings and desirings can be extremely vague, to the point where the owner is unsure what is believed or desired. They can, of course, be extremely precise. |
| 2999 | Obsession with narrow content leads to various sorts of hopeless anti-realism [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: People who ask what the narrow content of the thought that water is wet is (for example) get what they deserve: phenomenalism, verificationism, 'procedural' semantics, or scepticism, according to temperament. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 51) | |
| A reaction: The question is whether content IS narrow. We could opt for broad content because then we wouldn't have to worry about scepticism, but I doubt whether we would then sleep well at night. |
| 3012 | Do identical thoughts have identical causal roles? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If thoughts have their causal roles in virtue of their contents, then two thoughts with identical contents ought to be identical in their causal roles. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.140) | |
| A reaction: A pencil would presumably have the same causal role if it wrote a love poem or hate mail. But a pencil is also good for scratching your back. 'Causal role' can be a rather vacuous idea. |
| 9030 | Abstractions can be interpreted dispositionally, as the ability to recognise or imagine an item [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: An abstract idea may have a dispositional as well as an occurrent interpretation. ..A man who possesses the concept Dog, when he is actually perceiving a dog can recognize that it is one, and can think about dogs when he is not perceiving any dog. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.IX) | |
| A reaction: Ryle had just popularised the 'dispositional' account of mental events. Price is obviously right. The man may also be able to use the word 'dog' in sentences, but presumably dogs recognise dogs, and probably dream about dogs too. |
| 9029 | If ideas have to be images, then abstract ideas become a paradoxical problem [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: There used to be a 'problem of Abstract Ideas' because it was assumed that an idea ought, somehow, to be a mental image; if some of our ideas appeared not to be images, this was a paradox and some solution must be found. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.VIII) | |
| A reaction: Berkeley in particular seems to be struck by the fact that we are incapable of thinking of a general triangle, simply because there is no image related to it. Most conversations go too fast for images to form even of very visual things. |
| 9031 | The basic concepts of conceptual cognition are acquired by direct abstraction from instances [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: Basic concepts are acquired by direct abstraction from instances; unless there were some concepts acquired in this way by direct abstraction, there would be no conceptual cognition at all. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.II) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be correct. A key point is that not only will I acquire the concept of 'dog' in this direct way, from instances, but also the concept of 'my dog Spot' - that is I can acquire the abstract concept of an instance from an instance. |
| 2998 | Grice thinks meaning is inherited from the propositional attitudes which sentences express [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: According to Gricean theories of meaning, the meaning of a sentence is inherited from the propositional attitudes that the sentence is conventionally used to express. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 50) | |
| A reaction: Since the propositional attitudes contain propositions, this seems like a very plausible idea. If an indexical like 'I' is involved, the meaning of the sentence is not the same as its 'conventional' use. |
| 3006 | Whatever in the mind delivers falsehood is parasitic on what delivers truth [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The mechanisms that deliver falsehoods are somehow parasitic on the ones that deliver truths. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.107) | |
| A reaction: In the case of a sentence and its negation it is not clear which one is 'parasitic', because that can usually be reversed by paraphrasing. Historically, I very much hope that truth-speaking came first. |
| 3007 | Many different verification procedures can reach 'star', but it only has one semantic value [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Verification procedures connect terms with their denotations in too many ways. Different routes to 'star' do not determine different semantic values for 'star'. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.125) | |
| A reaction: This fairly conclusively shows that meaning is not 'the method of verification' - but that wasn't a difficult target to hit. |
| 3004 | The meaning of a sentence derives from its use in expressing an attitude [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The meaning of a sentence derives from its use in expressing an attitude. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 79) | |
| A reaction: Among other things. It can also arrive from a desire to remember something. A sentence can also acquire meaning compositionally (by assembling) with no use or aim. |
| 3000 | Meaning holism is a crazy doctrine [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Meaning holism really is a crazy doctrine. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 60) | |
| A reaction: Yes. What is not crazy is a contextualist account of utterances, and a recognition of the contextual and relational ingredient in the meanings of most of our sentences. |
| 3003 | Very different mental states can share their contents, so content doesn't seem to be constructed from functional role [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It's an embarrassment for attempts to construct content from functional role that quite different sorts of mental states can nevertheless share their contents. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 70) | |
| A reaction: That is, presumably, one content having two different roles. Two contents with the same role is 'multiple realisability'. Pain can tell me I'm damaged, or reveal that my damaged nerves are healing. Problem? |
| 2996 | Mental states may have the same content but different extensions [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The identity of the content of mental states does not ensure the identity of their extensions. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 45) | |
| A reaction: Obviously if I am thinking each day about 'my sheep', that won't change if I am unaware that one of them died this morning. …Because I didn’t have the precise number of sheep in mind. |
| 283 | The question of whether or not to persuade comes before the science of persuasion [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The science of whether one must persuade or not must rule over the science capable of persuading. | |
| From: Plato (The Statesman [c.356 BCE], 304c) | |
| A reaction: Plato probably thinks that reason has to be top of the pyramid, but there is always the Nietzschean/romantic question of why we should place such a value on what is rational. |
| 282 | Non-physical beauty can only be shown clearly by speech [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The bodiless things, being the most beautiful and the greatest, are only shown with clarity by speech and nothing else. | |
| From: Plato (The Statesman [c.356 BCE], 286a) | |
| A reaction: Unfortunately this will be true of warped and ugly ideas as well. |
| 281 | The arts produce good and beautiful things by preserving the mean [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It is by preserving the mean that arts produce everything that is good and beautiful. | |
| From: Plato (The Statesman [c.356 BCE], 284b) |
| 22559 | Democracy is the worst of good constitutions, but the best of bad constitutions [Plato, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Plato judged that when the constitution is decent, democracy is the worst of them, but when they are bad it is the best. | |
| From: report of Plato (The Statesman [c.356 BCE], 302e) by Aristotle - Politics 1289b07 | |
| A reaction: Aristotle denies that a good oligarchy is superior. What of technocracy? The challenge is to set up institutions which ensure the health of the democracy. The big modern problem is populists who lie. |
| 279 | Only divine things can always stay the same, and bodies are not like that [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It is fitting for only the most divine things of all to be always the same and in the same state and in the same respects, and the nature of body is not of this ordering. | |
| From: Plato (The Statesman [c.356 BCE], 269b) |