21 ideas
6161 | Structuralism is neo-Kantian idealism, with language playing the role of categories of understanding [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: Structuralism is a form of neo-Kantian idealism, in which the job of creating Kant's phenomenal world has been taken over by language instead of forms of sensibility and categories of the understanding. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.3) | |
A reaction: A helpful connection, which explains my aversion to any attempt at understanding the world simply by analysing language, either in its ordinary usage, or in its underlying logical form. |
21548 | The null class is the class with all the non-existents as its members [MacColl, by Lackey] |
Full Idea: In 1905 the Scottish logician Hugh MacColl published a paper in which he argued that the null class in logic should be taken as the class with all the non-existents as its members. | |
From: report of Hugh MacColl (Symbolic Reasoning [1905]) by Douglas Lackey - Intros to Russell's 'Essays in Analysis' p.95 | |
A reaction: For the null object (zero) Frege just chose one sample concept with an empty extension. MacColl's set seems to have a lot of members, given that it is 'null'. How many, I wonder? Russell responded to this paper. |
6163 | If bivalence is rejected, then excluded middle must also be rejected [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: If you reject the principle of bivalence (that a proposition is either determinately true or false), then statements are also not subject to the Law of Excluded Middle (P or not-P). | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.3) | |
A reaction: I think Rowlands is wrong about this. Excluded Middle could be purely syntacti, or its semantics could be 'True or Not-True'. Only bivalent excluded middle introduces 'True or False'. Compare Idea 4752. |
6155 | Supervenience is a one-way relation of dependence or determination between properties [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: Supervenience is essentially a one-way relation of dependence or determination, …which holds, in the first instance, between properties. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
A reaction: This definition immediately shows why supervenient properties are in danger of being epiphenomenal (i.e. causally irrelevant). Carefully thought about the notion of a 'one-way' relation will, I think, make it more obscure rather than clearer. |
6154 | It is argued that wholes possess modal and counterfactual properties that parts lack [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: Some have argued that a mereological whole should not be identified with the sum of its parts on the grounds that the former possess certain properties - specifically modal and (perhaps) counterfactual properties - that the latter lacks. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
A reaction: I am not convinced that modal and counterfactual claims should count as properties. If my pen is heated it melts (a property), but if my pen were intelligent it could do philosophy. Intelligence is a property, but the situation isn't. |
6157 | Tokens are dated, concrete particulars; types are their general properties or kinds [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: Tokens are dated, concrete, particular occurrences or instances; types are the general properties that these occurrences exemplify or the kinds to which they belong. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
A reaction: It might be said that types are sets, of which tokens are the members. The question of 'general properties' raises the question of whether universals must exist to make kinds possible. |
6159 | Strong idealism is the sort of mess produced by a Cartesian separation of mind and world [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: Neo-Kantian idealism, and the excesses of recent versions of it, are precisely the sort of mess one can get oneself into through an uncritical acceptance of the dichotomizing of mind and world along Cartesian internalist lines. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.3) | |
A reaction: I am unconvinced that internalism about the mind (that its contents can be defined without reference to anything external) leads to this disastrous split. We don't have to abandon the links between an internal mind and the world. |
6152 | Minds are rational, conscious, subjective, self-knowing, free, meaningful and self-aware [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: The apparent features of mind which are not obviously physical include: rationality, thought, consciousness, subjectivity, infallible first-person knowledge, freedom, meaning and self-awareness. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
A reaction: A helpful list, some of which can be challenged. Ryle challenges first-person infallibility. Hume challenges self-awareness. Quine challenges meaning. Lots of people (e.g. Spinoza) challenge freedom. The Churchlands seem to challenge consciousness. |
6173 | Content externalism implies that we do not have privileged access to our own minds [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: Content externalism threatens the idea of first-person authority in all its forms, and does so because it calls into question the idea that the access we have to our own mental states is privileged in the way required for such authority. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.7) | |
A reaction: I am inclined to respond by saying that since we clearly have privileged access to our own minds, that means there must be something wrong with content externalism. |
6174 | If someone is secretly transported to Twin Earth, others know their thoughts better than they do [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: If someone knew that a thinker had, without realising it, been transported to Twin Earth, they would almost certainly be a higher authority on the content of the thinker's thoughts than would the thinker. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.8) | |
A reaction: They would certainly be a higher authority on the truth of the thinker's thoughts, but only in the way that you might think I hold a diamond when I know it is a club. If the thinker believes it is H2O, the fact that it isn't is irrelevant to content. |
3488 | Freud treats the unconscious as intentional and hence mental [Freud, by Searle] |
Full Idea: Freud thinks that our unconscious mental states exist as occurrent intrinsic intentional states even when unconscious. Their ontology is that of the mental, even when they are unconscious. | |
From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900]) by John Searle - The Rediscovery of the Mind Ch. 7.V | |
A reaction: Searle states this view in order to attack it. Whether such states are labelled as 'mental' seems uninteresting. Whether unconscious states can be intentional is crucial, and modern scientific understanding of the brain strongly suggest they can. |
5689 | Freud and others have shown that we don't know our own beliefs, feelings, motive and attitudes [Freud, by Shoemaker] |
Full Idea: Freud persuaded many that beliefs, wishes and feelings are sometimes unconscious, and even sceptics about Freud acknowledge that there is self-deception about motive and attitudes. | |
From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900]) by Sydney Shoemaker - Introspection p.396 | |
A reaction: This seems to me obviously correct. The traditional notion is that the consciousness is the mind, but now it seems obvious that consciousness is only one part of the mind, and maybe even a peripheral (epiphenomenal) part of it. |
6158 | Supervenience of mental and physical properties often comes with token-identity of mental and physical particulars [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: One often finds a supervenience thesis concerning the relation between mental and physical properties combined with a token identity theory concerning the relation between mental and physical particulars. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
A reaction: This brings out the important clarifying point that supervenience is said to be between properties, not substances. The point is that supervenience will always cry out for an explanation, preferably a sensible one. |
23950 | Freud said passions are pressures of some flowing hydraulic quantity [Freud, by Solomon] |
Full Idea: Freud argued that the passions in general …were the pressures of a yet unknown 'quantity' (which he simply designated 'Q'). He first thought this flowed through neurones, …and always couched the idea in the language of hydraulics. | |
From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900]) by Robert C. Solomon - The Passions 3.4 | |
A reaction: This is the main target of Solomon's criticism, because its imagery has become so widespread. It leads to talk of suppressing emotions, or sublimating them. However, it is not too different from Nietzsche's 'drives' or 'will to power'. |
6168 | The content of a thought is just the meaning of a sentence [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: The content of the thought that the sky is blue is simply the meaning of the sentence "The sky is blue". | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.5) | |
A reaction: This seems to imply that it is logically impossible for a non-language-speaker, such as a chimpanzee, to think that the sky is the same colour as the water. If we allow propositions, we might be able to keep meanings without the sentences. |
6167 | Action is bodily movement caused by intentional states [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: An action is a bodily movement that is caused by intentional states such as beliefs, desires and so on. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.5) | |
A reaction: A useful definition, and clearly one that has no truck with attempts at giving behaviourist definitions of action. The definition of a 'moral action' needs to be built on this one. Particular types of belief and desire, presumably. |
6177 | Moral intuition seems unevenly distributed between people [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: The faculty of moral intuition seems to be unevenly distributed between people. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.11) | |
A reaction: This would be a good argument if it was thought that the source of moral intuitions was divine, but people vary enormously in their intuitions about maths, about character, about danger. If you believe in any intuition at all, you must accept its variety. |
22344 | Freud is pessimistic about human nature; it is ambivalent motive and fantasy, rather than reason [Freud, by Murdoch] |
Full Idea: Freud takes a thoroughly pessimistic view of human nature. ...Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and fantasy is a stronger force than reason. Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings. | |
From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900], II) by Iris Murdoch - The Sovereignty of Good II | |
A reaction: Interesting. His view seems to have coloured the whole of modern culture, reinforced by the hideous irrationality of the Nazis. Adorno and Horkheimer attacking the Enlightenment was the last step in that process. |
6156 | The 17th century reintroduced atoms as mathematical modes of Euclidean space [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: The seventeenth century revolution reintroduced the classical concept of the atom in somewhat new attire as an essentially mathematical entity whose primary qualities could be precisely quantified as modes or aspects of Euclidean space. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
A reaction: Obviously this very abstract view of atoms didn't last, once they began to identify specific physical atoms, such as oxygen. This view fits in with Newton's use of pure (abstract) points such as the 'centre of gravity'. |
6170 | Natural kinds are defined by their real essence, as in gold having atomic number 79 [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: Part of what it means to be a natural kind is that they are defined by a real essence, a constitution that marks them out as the substance they are (as water is essentially H2O, and gold essentially has atomic number 79). | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.6) | |
A reaction: A 'real essence' would be the opposite of a 'conventional essence', which is just a human way of seeing things. |
6178 | It is common to see the value of nature in one feature, such as life, diversity, or integrity [Rowlands] |
Full Idea: In recent environmental philosophy it is common to see the value of nature identified with one or another natural feature of the environment: life, diversity, ecosystemic integrity and so on. | |
From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.11) | |
A reaction: This thought seems to be asking for the Open Question argument. What is so good about life, or diversity? Our strongest intuition must be that the survival of the ecosystem, and whatever makes that possible, is the highest value. |