182 ideas
| 7504 | Modern science comes from Descartes' view that knowledge doesn't need moral purity [Descartes, by Foucault] |
| Full Idea: Before Descartes, one could not be impure, immoral, and know the truth. After Descartes, direct evidence is enough, and we have a nonascetic subject of knowledge; this change makes possible the institutionalisation of modern science. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641]) by Michel Foucault - On the Genealogy of Ethics | |
| A reaction: I would have thought Gassendi and the British Empiricists would be a more plausible source for this shift of attitude. Plato would relegate modern science to a lower level of knowledge. |
| 1569 | Descartes impoverished the classical idea of logos, and it no longer covered human experience [Roochnik on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes attacked and fundamentally altered classical logos. The result is an impoverished conception of reason, one that is unable to do justice to the significance and value of human experience. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641]) by David Roochnik - The Tragedy of Reason Prol. Xii |
| 2248 | Reason says don't assent to uncertain principles, just as much as totally false ones [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Reason now persuades me that I should withhold my assent no less carefully from opinions that are not completely certain and indubitable than I would from those that are patently false. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1.18) |
| 2857 | Since Plato all philosophers have followed the herd, except Descartes, stuck in superficial reason [Nietzsche on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Since Plato all philosophers have followed moral 'instinct', or 'faith', or (as I call it) 'the herd'. One might exclude Descartes, the father of rationalism, who recognised only reason - but reason is only an instrument, and Descartes was superficial. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641]) by Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil §191 |
| 2290 | Once it is clear that there is a God who is no deceiver, I conclude that clear and distinct perceptions must be true [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Once I perceived that there is a God,…and that he is no deceiver, I then concluded that everything that I clearly and distinctly perceived is necessarily true. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.70) | |
| A reaction: spotted by Arnauld |
| 3641 | It is circular to make truth depend on believing God's existence is true [Arnauld on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: How does the author avoid reasoning in a circle when he says that we are sure that what we clearly and distinctly perceive is true only because God exists? But we can be sure that God exists only because we clearly and distinctly perceive this. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.71) by Antoine Arnauld - Objections to 'Meditations' (Fourth) 214 |
| 4524 | Descartes is right that in the Christian view only God can guarantee the reliability of senses [Nietzsche on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Even Descartes had a notion that in a Christian mode of thought (where God is a good creator), only God's veracity guarantees to us the judgements of our senses. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.71) by Friedrich Nietzsche - The Will to Power (notebooks) §436 | |
| A reaction: An unusual defence of the notorious Cartesian Circle. Of course, Descartes claims that God guarantees reason (as 'clear and distinct conception'), not senses, and only reason led Descartes to God. |
| 2266 | My general rule is that everything that I perceive clearly and distinctly is true [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I now seem able to posit as a general rule that everything I very clearly and distinctly perceive is true. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.35) |
| 4301 | Someone may think a thing is 'clear and distinct', but be wrong [Leibniz on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Leibniz objected to Descartes' theory of truth, saying that people may think something is clear and distinct, and yet be wrong. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.36) by Gottfried Leibniz - works | |
| A reaction: Quite so. Descartes has misunderstood what sort of concept 'truth' is meant to be. It's the usual confusion of epistemology and metaphysics. Truth is not a feature of the human mind. |
| 10054 | Arithmetic and geometry achieve some certainty without worrying about existence [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Arithmetic, geometry and sciences of that kind only treat of things without taking any great trouble to ascertain whether they are actually existent or not, and contain some measure of certainty. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1), quoted by Alan Musgrave - Logicism Revisited §4 | |
| A reaction: This is Musgrave's earliest quotation which seems to take the if-thenist view. |
| 8729 | Intuitionists deny excluded middle, because it is committed to transcendent truth or objects [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Intuitionists in mathematics deny excluded middle, because it is symptomatic of faith in the transcendent existence of mathematical objects and/or the truth of mathematical statements. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: There are other problems with excluded middle, such as vagueness, but on the whole I, as a card-carrying 'realist', am committed to the law of excluded middle. |
| 2252 | Surely maths is true even if I am dreaming? [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Surely whether I am asleep or awake, two plus three makes five, and a square does not have more than four sides. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1.20) |
| 2430 | I can learn the concepts of duration and number just from observing my own thoughts [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: When I think that I exist now, and recollect that I existed in the past, and when I conceive various thoughts, the number of which I know, then I acquire the ideas of duration and number which I can thereafter transfer to all the other objects I wish. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.44) |
| 8763 | The number 3 is presumably identical as a natural, an integer, a rational, a real, and complex [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: It is surely wise to identify the positions in the natural numbers structure with their counterparts in the integer, rational, real and complex number structures. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 10.2) | |
| A reaction: The point is that this might be denied, since 3, 3/1, 3.00.., and -3*i^2 are all arrived at by different methods of construction. Natural 3 has a predecessor, but real 3 doesn't. I agree, intuitively, with Shapiro. Russell (1919) disagreed. |
| 18249 | Cauchy gave a formal definition of a converging sequence. [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: A sequence a1,a2,... of rational numbers is 'Cauchy' if for each rational number ε>0 there is a natural number N such that for all natural numbers m, n, if m>N and n>N then -ε < am - an < ε. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 7.2 n4) | |
| A reaction: The sequence is 'Cauchy' if N exists. |
| 8764 | Categories are the best foundation for mathematics [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: There is a dedicated contingent who hold that the category of 'categories' is the proper foundation for mathematics. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 10.3 n7) | |
| A reaction: He cites Lawvere (1966) and McLarty (1993), the latter presenting the view as a form of structuralism. I would say that the concept of a category will need further explication, and probably reduce to either sets or relations or properties. |
| 8762 | Two definitions of 3 in terms of sets disagree over whether 1 is a member of 3 [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Zermelo said that for each number n, its successor is the singleton of n, so 3 is {{{null}}}, and 1 is not a member of 3. Von Neumann said each number n is the set of numbers less than n, so 3 is {null,{null},{null,{null}}}, and 1 is a member of 3. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 10.2) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 645 - Zermelo could save Plato from the criticisms of Aristotle! These two accounts are cited by opponents of the set-theoretical account of numbers, because it seems impossible to arbitrate between them. |
| 8760 | Numbers do not exist independently; the essence of a number is its relations to other numbers [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: The structuralist vigorously rejects any sort of ontological independence among the natural numbers; the essence of a natural number is its relations to other natural numbers. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 10.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to place the emphasis on ordinals (what order?) rather than on cardinality (how many?). I am strongly inclined to think that this is the correct view, though you can't really have relations if there is nothing to relate. |
| 8761 | A 'system' is related objects; a 'pattern' or 'structure' abstracts the pure relations from them [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: A 'system' is a collection of objects with certain relations among them; a 'pattern' or 'structure' is the abstract form of a system, highlighting the interrelationships and ignoring any features they do not affect how they relate to other objects. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 10.1) | |
| A reaction: Note that 'ignoring' features is a psychological account of abstraction, which (thanks to Frege and Geach) is supposed to be taboo - but which I suspect is actually indispensable in any proper account of thought and concepts. |
| 8744 | Logicism seems to be a non-starter if (as is widely held) logic has no ontology of its own [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: The thesis that principles of arithmetic are derivable from the laws of logic runs against a now common view that logic itself has no ontology. There are no particular logical objects. From this perspective logicism is a non-starter. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: This criticism strikes me as utterly devastating. There are two routes to go: prove that logic does have an ontology of objects (what would they be?), or - better - deny that arithmetic contains any 'objects'. Or give up logicism. |
| 8749 | Term Formalism says mathematics is just about symbols - but real numbers have no names [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Term Formalism is the view that mathematics is just about characters or symbols - the systems of numerals and other linguistic forms. ...This will cover integers and rational numbers, but what are real numbers supposed to be, if they lack names? | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 6.1.1) | |
| A reaction: Real numbers (such as pi and root-2) have infinite decimal expansions, so we can start naming those. We could also start giving names like 'Harry' to other reals, though it might take a while. OK, I give up. |
| 8750 | Game Formalism is just a matter of rules, like chess - but then why is it useful in science? [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Game Formalism likens mathematics to chess, where the 'content' of mathematics is exhausted by the rules of operating with its language. ...This, however, leaves the problem of why the mathematical games are so useful to the sciences. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 6.1.2) | |
| A reaction: This thought pushes us towards structuralism. It could still be a game, but one we learned from observing nature, which plays its own games. Chess is, after all, modelled on warfare. |
| 8752 | Deductivism says mathematics is logical consequences of uninterpreted axioms [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: The Deductivist version of formalism (sometimes called 'if-thenism') says that the practice of mathematics consists of determining logical consequences of otherwise uninterpreted axioms. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: [Hilbert is the source] More plausible than Term or Game Formalism (qv). It still leaves the question of why it seems applicable to nature, and why those particular axioms might be chosen. In some sense, though, it is obviously right. |
| 8753 | Critics resent the way intuitionism cripples mathematics, but it allows new important distinctions [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Critics commonly complain that the intuitionist restrictions cripple the mathematician. On the other hand, intuitionist mathematics allows for many potentially important distinctions not available in classical mathematics, and is often more subtle. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 7.1) | |
| A reaction: The main way in which it cripples is its restriction on talk of infinity ('Cantor's heaven'), which was resented by Hilbert. Since high-level infinities are interesting, it would be odd if we were not allowed to discuss them. |
| 8731 | Conceptualist are just realists or idealist or nominalists, depending on their view of concepts [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: I classify conceptualists according to what they say about properties or concepts. If someone classified properties as existing independent of language I would classify her as a realist in ontology of mathematics. Or they may be idealists or nominalists. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 2.2.1) | |
| A reaction: In other words, Shapiro wants to eliminate 'conceptualist' as a useful label in philosophy of mathematics. He's probably right. All thought involves concepts, but that doesn't produce a conceptualist theory of, say, football. |
| 8730 | 'Impredicative' definitions refer to the thing being described [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: A definition of a mathematical entity is 'impredicative' if it refers to a collection that contains the defined entity. The definition of 'least upper bound' is impredicative as it refers to upper bounds and characterizes a member of this set. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: The big question is whether mathematics can live with impredicative definitions, or whether they threaten to be viciously circular, and undermine the whole enterprise. |
| 2392 | Properties supervene if you can't have one without the other [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: B-properties supervene on A-properties if no two possible situations are identical with respect to their A-properties while differing in their B-properties. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.1) | |
| A reaction: Personally I would have thought that if this condition is achieved, then we could go on to say B-properties supervene on A because A is causing them. We shouldn't be shy about this. Personally I think the Bs are necessary. |
| 2393 | Logical supervenience is when one set of properties must be accompanied by another set [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: B-properties logically supervene on A-properties if no two logically possible situations are identical with respect to their A-properties but distinct with respect to their B-properties. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the gap into which Chalmers wants to slip zombies. He's wrong. He thinks that because he can imagine Bs without As, that this makes their separation logically possible. No doubt he can imagine a bonfire on the moon. |
| 2394 | Natural supervenience is when one set of properties is always accompanied by another set [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: B-properties supervene naturally on A-properties if any two naturally possible situations with the same A-properties have the same B-properties. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.1) | |
| A reaction: Since it is hard to imagine a healthy working brain failing to produce consciousness, given the current laws of nature, almost everyone (except extreme dualists) must concede that they are naturally supervenient. I wonder why they are. |
| 2398 | Reduction requires logical supervenience [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Reductive explanation requires a logical supervenience relation. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.3) | |
| A reaction: Why can't you say that in another world there are zombies, but in this world the mind is explained by its natural supervenience on the brain (given the current natural laws)? Driving on the left in Britain is explained by current laws. |
| 16048 | Physicalism says in any two physically indiscernible worlds the positive facts are the same [Chalmers, by Bennett,K] |
| Full Idea: Chalmers says that physicalism is true in a world w just in case every positive fact that obtains in w also obtains in any world physically indiscernible from w. | |
| From: report of David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.1) by Karen Bennett - Supervenience | |
| A reaction: [Bennett summarises Chalmers' argument on pp.39-40] Chalmers says negative facts depend on the world's limits, which aren't part of the physical facts of the world. |
| 2401 | All facts are either physical, experiential, laws of nature, second-order final facts, or indexical facts about me [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Facts about the world are exhausted by physical facts, conscious experiences, laws of nature, a second-order that's-all fact, and perhaps an indexical fact about my location. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.5) |
| 2297 | If I can separate two things in my understanding, then God can separate them in reality [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: My ability clearly and distinctly to understand one thing without another suffices to make me certain that the one thing is different from the other, since they can be separated from each other (at least by God). | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.78) |
| 3628 | Substance cannot be conceived or explained to others [Gassendi on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The alleged naked, or rather hidden, substance of wax is something that we can neither ourselves conceive nor explain to others. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.31) by Pierre Gassendi - Objections to 'Meditations' (Fifth) 273 |
| 16631 | If we remove surface qualities from wax, we have an extended, flexible, changeable thing [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: After taking away what does not belong to the wax, let us see what is left: surely, it is nothing other than a thing that is extended, flexible and changeable. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], (VII:30-1)), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 08.2 | |
| A reaction: Aristotle worried about nothing being left when you 'stripped' an object, so this could be seen as a positive contribution to scholastic philosophy. Why is the substrate 'flexible'? He talks elsewhere of taking the clothes off the wax and seeing it naked. |
| 17865 | Descartes gives an essence by an encapsulating formula [Descartes, by Almog] |
| Full Idea: For Descartes in providing an essence for an item [such as God, wax, or a mathematical kind] we provide an encapsulating formula defining the phenomenon. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641]) by Joseph Almog - Nature Without Essence I | |
| A reaction: I argue that this is not what Aristotle intended be an essentialist definition, which can be quite long, like a scientific monograph. Descartes firmly rejected Aristotle's 'substantial form' as essence. |
| 16424 | Strong metaphysical necessity allows fewer possible worlds than logical necessity [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: The hypothesized modality of 'strong' metaphysical necessity says there are fewer metaphysically possible worlds than there are logically possible worlds, and the a posteriori necessities can stem from factors independent of the semantics of terms. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.4.2) | |
| A reaction: Chalmers sets this up in order to reject it. He notes that it involves a big gap between conceivability and possibility. If a world is logically possible but metaphysically impossible, then it is impossible, surely? |
| 16425 | Metaphysical necessity is a bizarre, brute and inexplicable constraint on possibilities [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Strong metaphysical necessities will put constraints on the space of possible worlds that are brute and inexplicable. That's fine for our world, but bizarre for possible worlds. The realm of the possible has no room for such arbitrary constraint. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.4.2) | |
| A reaction: He would say this, given that he wants zombies to be possible, just because he thinks he can conceive of them. Presumably he thinks a raging bonfire with no flames is also possible. His objection here is weak. |
| 16426 | How can we know the metaphysical impossibilities; the a posteriori only concerns this world [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: If some worlds are metaphysically impossible, it seems that we could never know it. By assumption the information is not available a priori, and a posteriori information only tells us about our world. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.4.2) | |
| A reaction: You need essentialism to reply to this. If you discover the essence of something, you can predict its possibilities. You discover the natures of the powers and dispositions of actuality. |
| 2301 | We know by thought that what is done cannot be undone [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Some ideas belong exclusively to the mind, such as perceiving that what has been done cannot be undone, and everything else that is known by the light of nature. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.82) |
| 13956 | Kripke is often taken to be challenging a priori insights into necessity [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: At various points in this book, I use a priori methods to gain insight into necessity; this is the sort of thing that Kripke's account is often taken to challenge. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.4) | |
| A reaction: Chalmers uses his 2-D approach to split off an a priori part from Kripke's a posterior part of our insight into necessity. |
| 13963 | Maybe logical possibility does imply conceivability - by an ideal mind [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: If we understand conceivability as conceivability-in-principle (by a superbeing?) then it is plausible that logical possibility of a world implies conceivability of the world, so logical possibility of a statement implies its conceivability. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.4) | |
| A reaction: I see nothing incoherent in the possibility that there might be aspects of existence which are utterly inconceivable to any conscious mind. Infinity might be a start, if an 'infinite' mind were impossible. |
| 3642 | Pythagoras' Theorem doesn't cease to be part of the essence of triangles just because we doubt it [Arnauld on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: You can't reason 'I know the triangle is right-angled, but I doubt Pythagoras' Theorem, therefore it does not belong to the essence of right-angled triangles that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides'. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.78) by Antoine Arnauld - Objections to 'Meditations' (Fourth) 202 |
| 2407 | One can wrongly imagine two things being non-identical even though they are the same (morning/evening star) [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Just because one can imagine that A and B are not identical, it does not follow that A and B are not identical (think of the morning star and the evening star). | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.4.1) |
| 2390 | We attribute beliefs to people in order to explain their behaviour [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Belief is something of an explanatory construct: we attribute beliefs to others largely in order to explain their behaviour. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.1.3) |
| 20190 | Belief is not an intellectual state or act, because propositions are affirmed or denied by the will [Descartes, by Zagzebski] |
| Full Idea: Descartes claimed that belief is not purely an intellectual state or act, since it is not the intellect that affirms or denies a proposition proposed for its consideration, but the will. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], IV) by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski - Virtues of the Mind 4.2 | |
| A reaction: This is the canonical idea of 'doxastic voluntarism' - that we choose what to believe or not believe. In modern times this view has become deeply unfashionable. I don't we should wholly reject the possibility of choosing to believe something. |
| 1585 | Descartes tried to model reason on maths instead of 'logos' [Roochnik on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes rejects logos because it does not achieve the certainty he craves. He replaces it with his own model of rationality, one modelled essentially on mathematics. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1) by David Roochnik - The Tragedy of Reason p.76 |
| 2256 | Maybe there is only one certain fact, which is that nothing is certain [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: If I suppose that everything I see is false. Nothing I remember actually existed. I have no senses, and body, shape, extension, movement and place are all chimeras. What then is true? Perhaps just the single fact that nothing is certain. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.24) |
| 1582 | Labelling slightly doubtful things as false is irrational [Roochnik on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: To declare that which is the least bit dubious as absolutely false is to declare war on logos. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1.17) by David Roochnik - The Tragedy of Reason p.72 |
| 2258 | I must even exist if I am being deceived by something [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Doubtless I exist if I persuade myself of something. But there is some powerful and cunning deceiver who is deliberately deceiving me. Then too there is no doubt that I exist, if he is deceiving me. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.25) |
| 3160 | The Cogito is a transcendental argument, not a piece of a priori knowledge [Rey on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The Cogito is a transcendental argument; Descartes doesn't claim that it is a priori that he exists, but that any doubt or denial that he exists would presuppose his existence. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Georges Rey - Contemporary Philosophy of Mind 3.2.1 |
| 2259 | "I am, I exist" is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: "I am, I exist" is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.25) |
| 3849 | "I think therefore I am" is the absolute truth of consciousness [Sartre on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: "I think therefore I am" is the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2) by Jean-Paul Sartre - Existentialism and Humanism p.44 |
| 6929 | Modern philosophy set the self-conscious ego in place of God [Descartes, by Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Modern philosophy set the thinking being, the ego, and the self-conscious mind in the place of the merely ideated being, in place of God. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641]) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §37 | |
| A reaction: Descartes would be shocked by this interpretation, but God comes third in his logical priorities, after the existence of his ego, and its reliance on what is clear and distinct. |
| 2260 | If I don't think, there is no reason to think that I exist [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It could be that if I were to cease all thinking I would then utterly cease to exist. …I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing; that is, a mind, or intellect, or understanding, or reason. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.27) |
| 6914 | Descartes transformed 'God is thinkable, so he exists' into 'I think, so I exist' [Descartes, by Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Descartes transformed the proposition 'because God is thinkable, therefore he exists' into the proposition 'I think, therefore I am'. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 2) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §18 | |
| A reaction: This implies that Descartes' foundation is the Ontological Argument rather than the Cogito. It certainly shows how a priori synthetic thinking is basic in Descartes - that views of existence derive from pure thought. Was Descartes an idealist? |
| 4641 | In the Meditations version of the Cogito he says "I am; I exist", which avoids presenting it as an argument [Descartes, by Baggini /Fosl] |
| Full Idea: Descartes may have been aware of the danger of begging the question (in claiming "I think therefore I am") because in 'Meditations' he says "I am; I exist", which is not presented in the form of an argument. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 2) by J Baggini / PS Fosl - The Philosopher's Toolkit §3.22 | |
| A reaction: Certainly the word 'therefore' cries out for a strict analysis of what is being inferred from what, but presenting the Cogito as a self-evident intuition for the 'natural light' has its own problems. |
| 5360 | The thing which experiences may be momentary, and change with the next experience [Russell on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It might be that the something which sees a brown colour is quite momentary, and not the same thing which has some different experience the next moment. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Bertrand Russell - Problems of Philosophy Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This has become one of the standard objections to the Cogito. Note that Descartes himself was aware of the problem (Idea 1400). Sometimes experiences make no sense if there isn't something connecting them to previous experiences. |
| 2870 | 'I think' assumes I exist, that thinking is known and caused, and that I am doing it [Nietzsche on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The sentence "I think" contains a series of unprovable assertions; for example, it is I who think, that it must be something at all which thinks, that thinking is by an entity thought of as a cause, that an 'I' exists, and that I know what thinking is. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil §16 |
| 5188 | A thought doesn't imply other thoughts, or enough thoughts to make up a self [Ayer on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The fact that a thought occurs at a given moment does not entail that any other thought has occurred at any other moment, still less that there has occurred a series of thoughts sufficient to constitute a single self. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by A.J. Ayer - Language,Truth and Logic Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the main objection to the Cogito. It doesn't refute it, but simply recommends cautious restraint in what is being claimed as its conclusion. I can't make much sense of a thought which has no thinker at all. |
| 3624 | That I perform an activity (thinking) doesn't prove what type of thing I am [Hobbes on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: From the fact that I am thinking it follows that I exist, since that which thinks is not nothing. But when he adds 'that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect', a doubt arises. ..You might as well say 'I am walking, therefore I am a walk'. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Thomas Hobbes - Objections to 'Meditations' (Third) 172 |
| 3120 | Autistic children seem to use the 'I' concept without seeing themselves as thinkers [Segal on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It really does not seem (as a result of research into autism) that when one thinks of oneself with one's 'I' concept, one must thereby represent oneself as a thinker. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Gabriel M.A. Segal - A Slim Book about Narrow Content 4.2 |
| 4526 | The Cogito assumes a priori the existence of substance, when actually it is a grammatical custom [Nietzsche on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes' Cogito posits as 'true a priori' our belief in the concept of substance, but the idea that when there is a thought there has to be something 'that thinks' is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Friedrich Nietzsche - The Will to Power (notebooks) §484 | |
| A reaction: This anticipates the sort of thing Ayer and the logical positivists said. It is not clear that Descartes does think the mind is a substance, but this pinpoints a possible presupposition in Descartes. |
| 5579 | How can we infer that all thinking involves self-consciousness, just from my own case? [Kant on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It seems strange that the condition under which I think is to be valid for everything that thinks, and that on an empirical-seeming proposition we can presume to ground a universal judgement, that everything that thinks has self-consciousness. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason A346 | |
| A reaction: Kant is not bothered by this, and says we know it a priori. If it is indeed an empirical proposition, it becomes an induction with one instance, which is the notorious weakness of the 'argument from analogy' to other minds. The Cogito is not empirical. |
| 5580 | My self is not an inference from 'I think', but a presupposition of it [Kant on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The simplicity of my self is not inferred from the proposition "I think", but rather the former lies in every thought. 'I am simple' is an immediate apperception, just as the Cogito is tautological, since 'cogito' immediately asserts the reality. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason A355 | |
| A reaction: This is why Kant thinks the self is the result of a transcendental deduction, rather than of a direct observation of the self-evident. Personally I side with Descartes. I do not 'observe' my self, but I am acutely aware of its presence and actions. |
| 5587 | We cannot give any information a priori about the nature of the 'thing that thinks' [Kant on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: If anyone asks me: What is the constitution of a thing that thinks? I do not know how to answer a priori, because the answer ought to be synthetic (for an analytic answer explains thinking, but gives no cognition of that on which thinking rests). | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason A398 | |
| A reaction: This has always seemed a problem with Descartes' very thin account of his 'res cogitans', but then what exactly does Kant want to know? Is it a metaphysical disaster if we think of the self as having no more identity than a geometrical point? |
| 5588 | The fact that I am a subject is not enough evidence to show that I am a substantial object [Kant on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The fact that I am a subject ..does not signify that as object I am a self-subsisting being or substance; the latter goes too far, and hence demands data that are not encountered at all in thinking. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason B407 | |
| A reaction: This is a key problem with the Cogito - that so little can be said about the 'I' of which the existence has been proved that it is not clear that anything has been proved at all - certainly not that there is a continuous and stable Ego. |
| 13923 | Descartes' claim to know his existence before his essence is misleading or absurd [Descartes, by Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Descartes claimed to know that he existed before he knew what he was - before he grasped his own essence. This is either disingenuous or intended non-literally, if it is not to be dismissed as incomprehensible. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 2) by E.J. Lowe - Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence 2 n32 | |
| A reaction: If something comes at you from the mist, you can know that it exists before you know what it is. How could you understand the essence of something if you hadn't first encountered its existence? Lowe has it the wrong way round. |
| 6930 | Modern self-consciousness is a doubtful abstraction; only senses and feelings are certain [Feuerbach on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The self-consciousness of modern philosophy is only a being ideated and mediated through abstraction and thus a doubtful being; certain and immediately assured is only that which is an object of the senses, perception and feeling. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 2) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §37 | |
| A reaction: This seems to agree with Hume's empirical doubts about the self (Idea 1316). The comment that 'abstraction' is involved in the Cogito argument is interesting. Descartes said the Cogito was a 'simply intuition of the mind' (Idea 3622). |
| 1117 | The Cogito proves subjective experience is basic, but makes false claims about the Self [Russell on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The Cogito argument proves that subjective experience is the most reliable, but it makes unjustified claims about the certainty of the Self. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Bertrand Russell - Problems of Philosophy Ch 2 |
| 2873 | Maybe 'I' am not the thinker, but something produced by thought [Nietzsche on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: In the past one said 'I' is the condition, 'think' is the predicate and conditioned - thinking is an activity which the subject causes; but maybe the reverse is true - and 'I' is only a synthesis produced by thinking. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil §54 |
| 1369 | It is a precondition of the use of the word 'I' that I exist [Ayer on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: In the Cogito the work is all done by the demonstrative word 'I', because it is a precondition of the use of such a word that the thing to which it points has to exist. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by A.J. Ayer - The Problem of Knowledge Ch 2 (iii) |
| 3623 | The Cogito only works if you already understand what thought and existence are [Mersenne on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: In order to be certain that you are thinking you must know what thought or thinking is, and what your existence is; but since you do not yet know what these things are, how can you know that you are thinking or that you exist? | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Marin Mersenne - Objections to 'Meditations' (Sixth) 413 |
| 2261 | My perceiving of things may be false, but my seeming to perceive them cannot be false [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I now see a light, I hear a noise, I feel heat. Perhaps these things are false, since I am asleep. Yet I certainly do seem to see, hear, and feel warmth. This cannot be false. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.29) |
| 2257 | I myself could be the author of all these self-delusions [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I myself could be the author of all these self-delusions. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.24) |
| 2279 | A triangle has a separate non-invented nature, shown by my ability to prove facts about it [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: A triangle has a determinate nature, which I did not fabricate, and which does not depend on my mind. This is evident from the fact that various properties can be demonstrated regarding it, such as that its three angles are equal to two right angles. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.64) |
| 2397 | 'Perception' means either an action or a mental state [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: 'Perception' can be used to refer either to the act of perceiving, or the internal state that arises as a result. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.2) |
| 6490 | For Descartes, objects have one primary quality, which is geometrical [Descartes, by Robinson,H] |
| Full Idea: Descartes denies any similarity between the physical world and ideas, as matter possesses only geometrical properties; Locke allows more primary qualities, but follows Boyle and the atomists in treating secondary qualities as creations of sense. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641]) by Howard Robinson - Perception 1.5 | |
| A reaction: The interesting point to note here is that Descartes' geometrical view of objects (they are defined purely by 'extension') is the view that they have one minimal primary quality. I prefer Locke's view, of which the history (given here) is interesting. |
| 2422 | The structure of the retina has already simplified the colour information which hits it [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: In vision three varieties of cones abstract out information according to the amount of light present in various overlapping wavelength ranges. Immediately, many distinctions present in the original light wave are lost. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 3.8.3) |
| 2295 | Why does pain make us sad? [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Why should a certain sadness of spirit arise from a sensation of pain? | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.76) |
| 2263 | The wax is not perceived by the senses, but by the mind alone [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The perception of the wax is neither a seeing, nor a touching, nor an imagining. Rather, it is an inspection on the part of the mind alone. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.31) |
| 3627 | Dogs can make the same judgements as us about variable things [Gassendi on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: A dog certainly makes similar kinds of judgement to your perceiving men by their hats and cloaks when they see their master's hat or clothes, …and they can recognise their master even if he is standing, sitting, lying down, or crouching. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.32) by Pierre Gassendi - Objections to 'Meditations' (Fifth) 272 |
| 2264 | We don't 'see' men in heavy clothes, we judge them to be men [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Were I to look out of my window and observe men crossing the square, I would ordinarily say that I see the men themselves. But what do I see but hats and clothes, which could conceal automata? Yet I judge them to be men. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.32) |
| 8725 | Rationalism tries to apply mathematical methodology to all of knowledge [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Rationalism is a long-standing school that can be characterized as an attempt to extend the perceived methodology of mathematics to all of knowledge. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Thinking About Mathematics [2000], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: Sometimes called 'Descartes's Dream', or the 'Enlightenment Project', the dream of proving everything. Within maths, Hilbert's Programme aimed for the same certainty. Idea 22 is the motto for the opposition to this approach. |
| 2265 | We perceive objects by intellect, not by senses or imagination [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Bodies are not, properly speaking, perceived by the senses or by the faculty of imagination, but by the intellect alone. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.34) |
| 2247 | To achieve good science we must rebuild from the foundations [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Once in my life I had to raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1.17) | |
| A reaction: This sentence is the beginning of the Enlightenment. The project of proving absolutely everything, and in a foundational way, is now met with much scepticism. I will never abandon the project! |
| 2255 | Only one certainty is needed for progress (like a lever's fulcrum) [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Archimedes sought but one firm and immovable point in order to move the entire earth. Just so, great things are to be hoped for if I succeed in finding just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshaken. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.24) | |
| A reaction: The classic foundationalist difficulty is that you may find something totally certain, but is it a fulcrum? Or is it just minimal, boring and useless? |
| 2251 | Even if my body and objects are imaginary, there may be simpler things which are true [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps even though general things like eyes could be imaginary, still one must admit that certain other things that are even more simple and universal are true. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1.20) |
| 6347 | Descartes can't begin again, because sceptics doubt cognitive processes as well as beliefs [Pollock/Cruz on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes' strategy of starting over will not work, because the skeptic is not just questioning our beliefs, he is also questioning the cognitive processes by which we arrive at our beliefs, and if we start all over again we use the same processes. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1) by J Pollock / J Cruz - Contemporary theories of Knowledge (2nd) | |
| A reaction: Scepticism comes in degrees, so there is not one strategy employed by sceptics. It is certainly true, though, that nothing can resist extreme scepticism. The most extreme view is to refuse to accept the meaningfulness of all belief language. |
| 2296 | If pain is felt in a lost limb, I cannot be certain that a felt pain exists in my real limbs [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I have heard it said by people whose arm or leg has been amputated that they still sensed pain in the lost limb. Thus it does not seem certain that one of my bodily members causes me pain, even though I sense pain in it. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.77) |
| 3620 | We correct sense errors with other senses, not intellect [Mersenne on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Owing to refraction a stick which is in fact straight appears bent in water. What corrects the error? The intellect? Not at all; it is the sense of touch. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1.18) by Marin Mersenne - Objections to 'Meditations' (Sixth) 418 |
| 3619 | The senses can only report, so perception errors are in the judgment [Gassendi on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Although there is deception or falsity, it is not to be found in the senses; for the sense are quite passive and report only appearances, which must appear the way they do owing to their causes. The error or falsity is in the judgement or the mind. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1.18) by Pierre Gassendi - Objections to 'Meditations' (Fifth) 332 |
| 2249 | It is prudent never to trust your senses if they have deceived you even once [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The senses are sometimes deceptive, and it is a mark of prudence never to place our complete trust in those who have deceived us even once. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1.18) |
| 2254 | To achieve full scepticism, I imagine a devil who deceives me about the external world and my own body and senses [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I will suppose an evil genius, supremely powerful and clever, who has directed his entire effort at deceiving me. I will regard all external things as devilish hoaxes, and myself as not possessed of a body or senses, but falsely believing these things. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1.22) |
| 2253 | God may have created nothing, but made his creation appear to me as it does now [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: How do I know that God did not bring it about that there is no earth or heavens, no extension, shape, size or place, and yet that all these things appear to me precisely as they do now? | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1.21) |
| 2305 | Waking actions are joined by memory to all our other actions, unlike actions of which we dream [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Dreams are never joined by the memory with all the actions of life, as is the case with those actions that occur when one is awake. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.89) |
| 2294 | I can only sense an object if it is present, and can't fail to sense it when it is [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Perceptions come upon me without my consent, to the extent that, wish as I may, I could not sense any object unless it was present to a sense organ, nor could I fail to sense it when it was present. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.75) |
| 2396 | Reductive explanation is not the be-all and the end-all of explanation [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Reductive explanation is not the be-all and the end-all of explanation. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.2) |
| 4862 | Can the pineal gland be moved more slowly or quickly by the mind than by animal spirits? [Spinoza on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I am in ignorance whether the pineal gland can be agitated more slowly or more quickly by the mind than by the animal spirits. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.82) by Baruch de Spinoza - The Ethics V Pref | |
| A reaction: Is this the earliest statement of the problem of double causation? It is a classic difficulty for dualists, highlighted by Ryle, among others. Avoidance of double causation is a classic reason for moving to monism about mind. |
| 3850 | We discovers others as well as ourselves in the Cogito [Sartre on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It is not only oneself that one discovers in the Cogito, but those of others too. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2) by Jean-Paul Sartre - Existentialism and Humanism p.45 | |
| A reaction: The analytical tradition requires a bit more than an instant perception of others in oneself. The problem of 'other minds' must at least be mentioned. However, the way to get to know a universal is to fully study a single instance. |
| 2302 | Faculties of the mind aren't parts, as one mind uses them [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The faculties of willing, sensing, understanding and so on cannot be called "parts" of the mind, since it is one and the same mind that wills, senses and understands. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.86) | |
| A reaction: It is best here to say that Descartes has confused the 'mind' with the 'person'. These faculties make (I think) no sense without a person to perform them, but the 'mind' surely includes these conscious activities, and many fringe events as well. |
| 2426 | Why are minds homogeneous and brains fine-grained? [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: The 'grain problem' for materialism was raised by Sellars: how could an experience be identical with a vast collection of physiological events, given the homogeneity of the former, and the fine-grainedness of the latter? | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 3.8.5) | |
| A reaction: An interesting question, but it doesn't sound like a huge problem, given the number of connections in the brain. If the brain were expanded (as Leibniz suggested), the 'grains' might start to appear. We can't propose a 'deceived homunculus' to solve it. |
| 2391 | Can we be aware but not conscious? [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is always accompanied by awareness, but awareness as I have described it need not be accompanied by consciousness. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.1.5) | |
| A reaction: One should consult Chalmers, but he is stretching the English word 'awareness' rather far. This road leads to saying that thermostats are 'aware', and information is aware of its content, which is probably very wrong indeed. Compare Idea 2415. |
| 2412 | Can we explain behaviour without consciousness? [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: However the metaphysics of causation turns out, it seems relatively straightforward that a physical explanation of behaviour can be given that neither appeals to nor implies the existence of consciousness. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.5.2) | |
| A reaction: Chalmers needs this to support his idea that zombies are possible, but it strikes me as implausible. I find it inconceivable that our behaviour would be unchanged if we retained 'awareness' but lost consciousness. Try visiting an art gallery. |
| 2386 | Hard Problem: why brains experience things [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: The Hard Problem is: why is all this brain processing accompanied by an experienced inner life? | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], Intro) | |
| A reaction: The word 'accompanied' is interesting. A very epiphenomenal word! The answer to this neo-dualist question may be: if you do enough complex representational brain processing at high speed, it adds up to some which we call 'experience'. |
| 2416 | What turns awareness into consciousness? [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Given the necessity of awareness, any candidate for an underlying law will have the form "Awareness plus something gives rise to consciousness" (…but simplicity suggests leaving out the 'something'). | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 3.6.5) | |
| A reaction: You can't leave out the 'something' if you think awareness without consciousness is possible. The phenomenon of blindsight suggests that a whole extra brain area must come into play to produce the consciousness. It may not have a distinct ontology. |
| 2423 | Going down the scale, where would consciousness vanish? [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Moving down the scale from lizards to slugs, there doesn't seem much reason to suppose that phenomenology should wink out while a reasonably complex perceptual psychology persists….and if you move on down to thermostats, where would it wink out? | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 3.8.4) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't seem much of an argument, particularly if its conclusion is that there is phenomenology in thermostats. When day changes into night, where does it 'wink out'? Are we to conclude that night doesn't exist, or that day doesn't exist? |
| 2403 | Nothing in physics even suggests consciousness [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Even if we knew every last detail about the physics of the universe, that information would not lead us to postulate the existence of conscious experience. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.3.1.3) | |
| A reaction: I find this a very strange claim. Given that the biggest gap in our physical knowledge is that concerning the brain and consciousness, Chalmer is no position to say this. Why shouldn't a physical revelation suddenly make consciousness inevitable? |
| 2400 | Is intentionality just causal connections? [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Intentional properties should be analyzable in terms of causal connections to behaviour and the environment….so there is no separate ontological problem of intentionality. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.5) | |
| A reaction: There could only be no ontological problem if intentional states were purely physical. Everything is made of something (I presume). |
| 3151 | Descartes put thought at the centre of the mind problem, but we put sensation [Rey on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes confined his dualism to problems of reason and language. Sensation and even imagination seemed to him physically unproblematic. Nowadays it is the reverse: thinking seems easy - but feeling? | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 2) by Georges Rey - Contemporary Philosophy of Mind 2 n16 | |
| A reaction: Thinking only 'seems easy' if it can be done without consciousness, and that is beginning to look like a dubious assumption. The most interesting and promising area is the borderline between a chess-playing machine and a human chess player. |
| 2419 | Why should qualia fade during silicon replacement? [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: If parts of the brain are gradually replaced, perhaps by silicon chips, ...the most reasonable hypothesis is that qualia do not fade at all. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 3.7.3) | |
| A reaction: As it stands this could either assert dualism or functionalism. Personally I think the most reasonable hypothesis is that qualia would fade. Chalmers needs more imagination (or less?). What is it like to experience Alzheimer's Disease? |
| 2389 | Sometimes we don't notice our pains [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: What of the fact that we speak of pains that last for a day, even though there are times that they are not conscious? | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.1.3) | |
| A reaction: This is hardly proof that there are non-conscious pains. Otherwise we might say we have a pain even after it has left us for good (because it might return), which seems daft. Not a crucial issue. The word 'pain' has two uses… |
| 2402 | It seems possible to invert qualia [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: It seems entirely coherent that experiences could be inverted while physical structure is duplicated exactly. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: Strange how what seems 'entirely coherent' to a leading philosopher strikes me as totally incoherent. I would have thought it was only coherent to a dualist. I don't believe God makes the physics on Thursday, and adds experiences on Friday. |
| 2415 | In blindsight both qualia and intentionality are missing [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: In blindsight, the information does not qualify as directly available for global control, and subjects are not truly aware of the information. The lack of experience corresponds directly to a lack of awareness. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 3.6.3) | |
| A reaction: Blindsight patients give correct answers about objects in their visual field, and you need 'global control' to speak the truth, even if you lack confidence in what you are saying. Philosophers should not be frightened of blindsight. Cf Idea 2391. |
| 21800 | Descartes mentions many cognitive faculties, but reduces them to will and intellect [Descartes, by Schmid] |
| Full Idea: Although Descartes accepted a variety of cognitive faculties like the intellect, will, power of judgement, imagination, memory, and perception, he took them all to be ultimately reducible to different operations of the will and intellect. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 4) by Stephan Schmid - Faculties in Early Modern Philosophy 2 | |
| A reaction: In Med 4, it is most clear, when he reduces 'judgement' to will and intellect, which enable his to assent to an idea. Nietzsche saw Descartes' view as simplistic. |
| 1399 | Imagination and sensation are non-essential to mind [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: This power of imagination which is in me, in so far as it differs from the power of conceiving, is in no way necessary to my nature or essence. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.73) | |
| A reaction: This is my candidate for the biggest blunder ever made by a great philosopher. But it was thanks to his mistake that I began to realise how totally central imagination is to the very act of thinking. Thank you, René. |
| 1400 | Some cause must unite the separate temporal sections of a person [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Because the entire span of one's life can be divided into countless parts, each one wholly independent of the rest, it does not follow from the fact that I existed a short time ago that I exist now, unless some cause creates and preserves me each moment. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.49) | |
| A reaction: How could I 'prove' that this computer is the same computer as it was five minutes ago, even after I have accepted the straightforward existence of the computer? This is the Enlightenment Project, the mad desire to prove absolutely everything. |
| 2414 | When distracted we can totally misjudge our own experiences [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: If one is distracted one may make judgements about one's experiences that are quite false. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.5.5) | |
| A reaction: Of course, when one is distracted one can make mistakes about anything. This does imply that if there is indeed infallible knowledge to be had from introspection, it will at least require full concentration to achieve it. Cf Idea 8883. |
| 1401 | Since I only observe myself to be thinking, I conclude that that is my essence [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Since I do not observe that any other thing belongs necessarily to my nature or essence except that I am a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists in this alone, that I am a thinking thing, or substance whose essence is thinking. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.78) | |
| A reaction: This actually appears to be my favourite confusion - of episemology with ontology. Compare 'whenever I see him he is smiling, so he must be happy'. Personally I am happy to say that my essence is thinking, as long as it needn't be conscious. |
| 2299 | I can exist without imagination and sensing, but they can't exist without me [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I can understand myself without the faculties of imagining and sensing, but not vice versa; I cannot understand them without me - a substance endowed with understanding. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.78) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a fundamental and important error on Descartes' part. The idea that understanding is possible without imagination (and even sensation) is wrong, and it leads to the misleading concept of 'pure' reason. |
| 6907 | For Descartes a person's essence is the mind because objects are perceived by mind, not senses [Descartes, by Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: For Descartes the essence of corporeal things is not an object of the senses, but only of the mind; and hence it is not the senses but the mind that is the essence of the perceiving subject, that is, of man. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 2) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §17 | |
| A reaction: This, of course, is why Descartes' approach can lead to idealism and solipsism, whereas the other approach leads to empiricism and animalism (Idea 6669). |
| 2283 | Our 'will' just consists of the feeling that when we are motivated to do something, there are no external pressures [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The will consists solely in the fact that when something is proposed to us by our intellect either to affirm or deny, we are moved in such a way that we sense we are determined to it by no external force. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §4.57) |
| 2282 | My capacity to make choices with my free will extends as far as any faculty ever could [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I experience that the will or free choice I have received from God is limited by no boundaries whatever, …indeed it is so great in me that I cannot grasp the idea of any greater faculty. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §4.56) |
| 2276 | The mind is a non-extended thing which thinks [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: My concept of the human mind is a thinking thing, not extended in length, breadth or depth, and having nothing else from the body. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §4.53) | |
| A reaction: But he admits (in Med 6) that the mind is so closely integrated with the body that they seem inseparable. Perhaps he shouldn't trust his own concept of the thing, because he is too close to the subject matter. You can't count a crowd if you are in it. |
| 2298 | Mind is not extended, unlike the body [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Since I am clearly a thinking thing and not an extended thing, and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of a body, as merely an extended thing and not a thinking thing, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.78) | |
| A reaction: How can he be 'certain' for this reason? This is a classic confusion of ontology and epistemology. Given that the mind is a special case, he should be asking WHY his thinking is clear to him, but his body isn't. Maybe it is because of his viewpoint. |
| 3423 | Descartes is a substance AND property dualist [Descartes, by Kim] |
| Full Idea: Descartes' dualism combines substance dualism and property dualism; two disparate domains of substances, and two mutually exclusive families of properties. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.78) by Jaegwon Kim - Philosophy of Mind p.211 | |
| A reaction: I would have thought that substance dualism entailed property dualism. How would you distinguish two substances from one another except by their properties? There seems a merely logical possibility that God gives two substances the same properties. |
| 2303 | The mind is utterly indivisible [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: There is a great difference between a mind and a body, in that a body, by its very nature, is always divisible, but the mind is utterly indivisible. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.85) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being simply false. I don't just mean that surgeons can split the mind in half. We should think of the mind as a team of conscious and non-conscious processes, which are held together by a self in normal healthy people. Selves change. |
| 6153 | Interaction between mental and physical seems to violate the principle of conservation of energy [Rowlands on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It is often argued that any interaction between the physical and the mental - as defined by Descartes - would require a violation of the first law of thermodynamics, the principle of conservation of energy. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641]) by Mark Rowlands - Externalism Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This would be because consciousness is adding energy to the system (in order to generate movement) without it having come from anywhere else in the physical system. A good objection, which only a miracle could overcome. |
| 2409 | Maybe dualist interaction is possible at the quantum level? [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: The only form of interactionist dualism that has seemed even remotely tenable in the contemporary picture is one that exploits certain properties of quantum mechanics. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.4.4) | |
| A reaction: I think he is bluffing. No doubt quantum mechanics offers many intriguing possibilities, such as the interaction of many worlds within the mind, but I am not aware that anything non-physical is ever postulated. Physicists don't deal in the non-physical. |
| 2411 | Supervenience makes interaction laws possible [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: There is an objection to dualism that it cannot explain how the physical and the nonphysical interact, but the answer is simple on a natural supervenience framework - they interact by virtue of psychophysical laws (…which are as eternal as physics). | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.4.6) | |
| A reaction: There are different sorts of laws. What Chalmers is hoping for would be a mere regularity, like the connection of cancer to smoking, but the objection is that the discovery of causal mechanisms, to give truly explanatory laws, is simply impossible. |
| 2424 | It is odd if experience is a very recent development [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: It would be odd for a fundamental property like experience to be instantiated for the first time only relatively late in the history of the universe, and even then only in occasional complex systems. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 3.8.4) | |
| A reaction: The assumption of this remark is that experience is 'fundamental', which seems to claim that it is a separate ontological category. Maybe, but experience doesn't seem to be a thing. 'Process' seems a better term, and that is not a novelty in the universe. |
| 2413 | If I can have a zombie twin, my own behaviour doesn't need consciousness [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: The explanation of my zombie twin's claims does not depend on consciousness, as there is none in his world. It follows that the explanation of my claims is also independent of the existence of consciousness. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.5.2) | |
| A reaction: Epiphenomenalism says my accounts of my consciousness are NOT because of my consciousness (which seems daft). Chalmers here gives a very good reason why we should not be a friend of philosophical zombies. |
| 3625 | The 'thinking thing' may be the physical basis of the mind [Hobbes on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It may be that the thing that thinks is the subject to which mind, reason or intellect belong; and this subject may thus be something corporeal. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.27) by Thomas Hobbes - Objections to 'Meditations' (Third) 173 | |
| A reaction: Of course, Descartes goes on to reject this view. Presumably he is suggesting that mind etc. might be properties of something corporeal, rather than being identical with it. Descartes was well aware of materialism in Hobbes and Gassendi. |
| 2552 | Knowing different aspects of brain/mind doesn't make them different [Rorty on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Why should an epistemic distinction reflect an ontological distinction? Why should our epistemic privilege of being incorrigible about how things seem to us reflect a distinction between two realms of being? | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.78) by Richard Rorty - Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 1.2 | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being one of the most important ideas in philosophy, mainly as a corrective to a lot of bad philosophy, rather than as wisdom offered to non-philosophers (for whom Rorty's thought is probably common sense. How is it? How do we know? |
| 4305 | Descartes gives no clear criterion for individuating mental substances [Cottingham on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes gives no clear criterion for individuating mental substances. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.78) by John Cottingham - The Rationalists p.86 | |
| A reaction: Presumably I can individuate my own mind by the 'natural light' of reason, and the implications of the Cogito. The minds of others do seem to be a problem. Why should they coincide with bodies, and not overlap or blend or swap? |
| 4861 | Does Descartes have a clear conception of how mind unites with body? [Spinoza on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: What does Descartes understand by the union of the mind and the body? What clear and distinct conception has he got of thought in most intimate union with a certain particle of extended matter? | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.82) by Baruch de Spinoza - The Ethics V Pref | |
| A reaction: This is the classic, original and strongest objection to Cartesian dualism - that mind and body are held to be too different to interact. Spinoza may have overreacted a bit when he saw the only solution as the total identity of the two things. |
| 6540 | Even Descartes may concede that mental supervenes on neuroanatomical [Lycan on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Even Descartes may have conceded that the mental supervenes on the neuroanatomical. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 6) by William Lycan - Consciousness 5.2 | |
| A reaction: This is true (early in Meditation Six) despite his later suggestion of the pineal gland as the linking point. It proves nothing, but I have heard John Cottingham suggest that Descartes might well be a materialist if he came back today. |
| 7733 | Superman's strength is indubitable, Clark Kent's is doubtful, so they are not the same? [Maslin on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes's claim that mind and body are separate because the first is necessary when thinking and the second isn't, is like arguing 'Superman's strength is indubitable; Clark Kent's strength is widely doubted; so Clark Kent is not Superman'. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], p.156) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 2.7.1 | |
| A reaction: I've heard people defend Descartes on this, and Kripke is interesting on the subject, but Descartes had better not be following this pattern of argument, or else a great philosopher would really be presenting an absurdity. |
| 2417 | Does consciousness arise from fine-grained non-reductive functional organisation? [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: I claim that conscious experience arises from fine-grained functional organisation….. we might call it 'non-reductive functionalism'. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 3.7.1) | |
| A reaction: This is Chalmers' final position. If consciousness is 'emergent' and cannot be reduced, what has fine-grained got to do with it? I take 'fine-grained' to be a hint at why the brain becomes conscious. Fine-grained functions cause something. |
| 2428 | Maybe the whole Chinese Room understands Chinese, though the person doesn't [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Opponents typically reply to Searle's argument by conceding that the person in the room does not understand Chinese, and arguing that the understanding should instead be attributed to the system consisting of the person and the pieces of paper. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 4.9.4) | |
| A reaction: Searle himself spotted this reply. It seems plausible to say that a book contains 'understanding', so the translation dictionary may have it. A good Room would cope with surprise questions. |
| 2418 | The Chinese Mind doesn't seem conscious, but then nor do brains from outside [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: While it may be intuitively implausible that Block's 'mind' made of the population of China would give rise to conscious experience, it is equally intuitively implausible that a brain should give rise to experience. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 3.7.2) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like good support for functionalism, but I am more inclined to see it as a critique of 'intuition' as a route to truth where minds are concerned. Intuition isn't designed for that sort of work. |
| 2406 | H2O causes liquidity, but no one is a dualist about that [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Searle argues that H2O causes liquidity, but no one is a dualist about liquidity. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.4.1) | |
| A reaction: Good! |
| 2405 | Perhaps consciousness is physically based, but not logically required by that base [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: It remains plausible that consciousness arises from a physical basis, even though it is not entailed by that basis. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.4.1) | |
| A reaction: Personally I find this totally implausible. Since every other property or process in the known universe seems to be entailed by its physical basis, I don't expect the mind to be an exception. |
| 2395 | Zombies imply natural but not logical supervenience [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: It seems logically possible that a creature physically identical to a conscious creature might have no conscious experiences (a zombie)…so conscious experience supervenes naturally but not logically on the physical. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.1) | |
| A reaction: "It seems possible" isn't much of an argument. This claim by Chalmers has been a great incentive to reassess what is or isn't possible. Can a brain lack consciousness? Can a tree fall over silently? Can cyanide stop poisoning us? |
| 9318 | Phenomenal consciousness is fundamental, with no possible nonphenomenal explanation [Chalmers, by Kriegel/Williford] |
| Full Idea: In Chalmers's non-reductive theory, phenomenal consciousness is treated as a fundamental feature of the world, that cannot be explained in nonphenomenal terms. Theory is still possible, in the regularities of interaction. | |
| From: report of David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996]) by U Kriegel / K Williford - Intro to 'Self-Representational Consciousness' n2 | |
| A reaction: I can't make much sense of this view without a backing of panpsychism. How could a 'fundamental' feature of reality only begin to appear when life evolves on one particular planet? But 'panpsychism' is a warning of big misunderstandings. See Idea 2424. |
| 2404 | Nothing external shows whether a mouse is conscious [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: It is consistent with the physical facts about a mouse that it has conscious experiences, and it is consistent with the physical facts that it does not. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.3.1.4) | |
| A reaction: No. It is consistent with our KNOWLEDGE of a mouse that it may or may not be conscious. I take this to be the key error of Chalmers, which led him to the mistaken idea that zombies are possible. The usual confusion of ontology and epistemology…. |
| 2429 | Temperature (etc.) is agreed to be reducible, but it is multiply realisable [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Many physical phenomena that are often taken to be paradigms of reducibility (e.g. temperature) are in fact multiply realizable. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], n 2.20) | |
| A reaction: So multiple realisability isn't such a big problem for physicalism. I take it, though, that all hot things have some physical type of event in common (a level of molecular energy). Finding the level of commonality is the challenge. |
| 5686 | In some thoughts I grasp a subject, but also I will or fear or affirm or deny it [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Other thoughts are different from ideas, as when I will, or fear, or affirm, or deny, there is always some thing that I grasp as the subject of my thought, yet I embrace in my thought something more than the likeness of that thing. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.37) | |
| A reaction: Note that the class of mental events we call 'propositional attitudes' had already been identified by Descartes. His categories of thinking in Med. Three might be one of his most important contributions, because that is what matters in the mind. |
| 4017 | Descartes created the modern view of rationality, as an internal feature instead of an external vision [Descartes, by Taylor,C] |
| Full Idea: Rationality is now an internal property of subjective thinking, rather than its consisting in (according to Plato) its vision of reality. This view of Descartes' has become the standard modern view. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641]) by Charles Taylor - Sources of the Self §8 | |
| A reaction: Greek 'logos' actually seemed to be both internal and external. We have certainly lost the idea that the universe is rational, even though it is ordered. |
| 2284 | I make errors because my will extends beyond my understanding [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: My errors are owing simply to the fact that, since the will extends further than the intellect, I do not contain the will within the same boundaries, but extend it to things I do not understand. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §4.58) |
| 18403 | Indexicals may not be objective, but they are a fact about the world as I see it [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Even if the indexical is not an objective fact about the world, it is a fact about the world as I find it, and it is the world as I find it that needs explanation. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.5) | |
| A reaction: Chalmers treats them as important, whereas the way he expresses it could make them eliminable, if the world seen by him is eliminable. |
| 5685 | True ideas are images, such as of a man, a chimera, or God [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Some of my thoughts are like images of things; to these alone does the word 'idea' properly apply, as when I think of a man, or a chimera, or the sky, or an angel, or God. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.37) | |
| A reaction: Descartes is obviously aware of a problem with the application of the word 'idea'. This definition seems rather narrow (and visual), but it is certainly confined to concepts, and does not expand to include propositions. |
| 3629 | All ideas are adventitious, and come from the senses [Gassendi on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I would go further than you and note that all our ideas seem to be adventitious - to proceed from things which exist outside the mind and come under one of our senses. ..The idea of a giant is a man of ordinary size which the mind enlarges at will. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.38) by Pierre Gassendi - Objections to 'Meditations' (Fifth) 280 | |
| A reaction: A classic early statement of modern empiricism. Gassendi needed to think about logic, maths, and necessities to make his case more secure. Where did his idea to 'enlarge' the giant come from? |
| 2285 | I can think of innumerable shapes I have never experienced [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I can think of countless geometrical figures, concerning which there can be no suspicion of their ever having entered me through the senses. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.64) |
| 2273 | The ideas of God and of my self are innate in me [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The idea of God is innate in me, just as the idea of myself is innate in me. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.51) |
| 2286 | The idea of a supremely perfect being is within me, like the basic concepts of mathematics [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The idea of God, that is, the idea of a supremely perfect being, is one discovered to be no less within me than the idea of any figure or number. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.65) |
| 14708 | Rationalist 2D semantics posits necessary relations between meaning, apriority, and possibility [Chalmers, by Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: Chalmers seeks a rationalist interpretation of the 2D framework, situated in the tradition which posits a golden triangle of necessary constitutive relations between meaning, apriority, and possibility. | |
| From: report of David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996]) by Laura Schroeter - Two-Dimensional Semantics 2.3.1 | |
| A reaction: The first prize of the project is to get some sort of apriori knowledge about these crucial relations. I suppose the superduper prize is to get apriori knowledge of the possibilities of the world, but I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that. |
| 13958 | The 'primary intension' is non-empirical, and fixes extensions based on the actual-world reference [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: The 'primary intension' of a concept is a function from worlds to extensions reflecting the way the actual-world reference is fixed, ...which is independent of empirical factors. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.4) | |
| A reaction: This bit is a priori because the concept picks out something, no matter what its essence turns out to be. I take it to be a priori because it is stipulative. |
| 2399 | Meaning has split into primary ("watery stuff"), and secondary counterfactual meaning ("H2O") [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: The single Fregean intension has fragmented into two: a primary intension ("watery stuff") that fixes reference in the actual world, and a secondary intension ("H2O") that picks out reference in counterfactual possible worlds. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.4) | |
| A reaction: No one actually performs this schizoid double operation, so this is theory disconnected from life. What is the role of 'H2O' in the actual world, and 'watery stuff' in the others? |
| 13959 | The 'secondary intension' is determined by rigidifying (as H2O) the 'water' picked out in the actual world [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: The 'secondary intension' of 'water' picks out the water (H2O) in all worlds. ..It is determined by first evaluating the primary intension at the actual world, and then rigidifying it so that the same sort of thing is picked out in all possible worlds. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.4) | |
| A reaction: No wonder Soames calls 2-D semantics 'Byzantine'. If we don't actually do this psychologically, what exactly is Chalmers describing? Is this revisionary semantics - i.e. how we ought to do it if we want to talk about the world properly? |
| 13957 | Primary and secondary intensions are the a priori (actual) and a posteriori (counterfactual) aspects of meaning [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Primary intension picks out a referent in a world considered as actual; secondary considers it as counterfactual. ...(62) We can think of the primary and secondary intensions as the a priori and a posteriori aspects of meaning, respectively. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.4) | |
| A reaction: Primary intension is a priori because, it seems, it is stipulative ('water' means 'the watery stuff'), whereas the secondary intension (in counterfactual worlds) is empirical ('water' is used to refer to H2O/XYZ). We get internalism and externalism. |
| 13961 | We have 'primary' truth-conditions for the actual world, and derived 'secondary' ones for counterfactual worlds [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: 'Primary' truth-conditions tell us how the actual world has to be for an utterance of the statement to be true in that world; ....'secondary' truth-conditions give the truth-value in counterfactual worlds, given that the actual world turned out some way. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.4) | |
| A reaction: This is the reinterpretation of the truth-conditions account in terms of two-dimensional semantics. My first reaction is not very positive. Why can't we fix our references in counterfactual worlds, and then apply them to the actual (like inventions)? |
| 13962 | Two-dimensional semantics gives a 'primary' and 'secondary' proposition for each statement [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: If we see a proposition as a function from possible worlds to truth-values, then the two sets of truth-conditions yield two propositions associated with any statement. A 'primary' for those which express a truth, and 'secondary' for counterfactual truth. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.4) | |
| A reaction: This is where 2-D semantics becomes increasingly 'Byzantine'. Intuition and introspection don't seem to offer me two different propositions for every sentence I utter. I can't see this theory catching on, even if it is technically beautiful. |
| 13960 | In two-dimensional semantics we have two aspects to truth in virtue of meaning [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Both the 'primary' and 'secondary' intension qualify as truths in virtue of meaning; they are simply true in virtue of different aspects of meaning. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 1.2.4) | |
| A reaction: This is the view of two-dimensional semantics, which has split Fregean sense into an a priori and an a posterior part. Chalmers is trying to hang onto the idea that we might see necessity as largely analytic. |
| 2280 | Many causes are quite baffling, so it is absurd to deduce causes from final purposes [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: God can make unnumerable things whose cause escapes me, and for this reason alone the entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing's "end", I judge to be utterly useless in physics. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §4.55) | |
| A reaction: anti-Aristotle |
| 2272 | There must be at least as much in the cause as there is in the effect [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: There must be at least as much in the cause as there is in the effect. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.49) |
| 2269 | God the creator is an intelligent, infinite, powerful substance [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I understand by the name "God" a certain substance that is infinite, independent, supremely intelligent and supremely powerful, and created me along with everything that exists. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.45) |
| 2289 | Nothing apart from God could have essential existence, and such a being must be unique and eternal [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I cannot think of anything aside from God alone to whose essence existence belongs, and I cannot conceive of two or more such Gods. I also perceive that God must be eternal, and have other perfect qualities. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.68) |
| 2275 | It is self-evident that deception is a natural defect, so God could not be a deceiver [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It is quite obvious that a perfect God cannot be a deceiver, for it is manifest by the light of nature that all fraud and deception depend on some defect. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.52) |
| 16427 | Presumably God can do anything which is logically possible [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: Presumably it is in God's powers, when creating the world, to do anything that is logically possible. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.4.2) | |
| A reaction: I don't really understand why anyone would say that the only constraint on God is logic. Presumably no logic is breached if God places in object simultaneously in two spacetime locations, but it would be an impressive achievement. |
| 2268 | One idea leads to another, but there must be an initial idea that contains the reality of all the others [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Although one idea can perhaps issue from another, nevertheless no infinite regress is permitted here; eventually some first idea must be reached whose cause is a sort of archetype that contains formally all the reality that is in the idea. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.42) |
| 2287 | Existence and God's essence are inseparable, like a valley and a mountain, or a triangle and its properties [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Existence can no more be separated from God's essence than its having three angles equal to two right angles can be separated from the essence of a triangle, or than the idea of a valley can be separated from the idea of a mountain. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.66) |
| 2274 | The idea of God in my mind is like the mark a craftsman puts on his work [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: In creating me, God has endowed me with the idea of God, so that it would be like the mark of the craftsman impressed upon his work, although this mark need not be something distinct from the work itself. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.51) |
| 2288 | I cannot think of a supremely perfect being without the supreme perfection of existence [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I am not free to think of God without existence, that is, a supremely perfect being without a supreme perfection. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.67) |
| 3632 | We mustn't worship God as an image because we have no idea of him [Hobbes on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: We are forbidden to worship God in the form of an image, for otherwise we might think that we were conceiving of him who is incapable of being conceived. It seems, then, that there is no idea of God in us. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.65) by Thomas Hobbes - Objections to 'Meditations' (Third) 180 |
| 3633 | We can never conceive of an infinite being [Gassendi on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The human intellect is not capable of conceiving of infinity, and hence it neither has nor can contemplate any idea representing an infinite thing. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.65) by Pierre Gassendi - Objections to 'Meditations' (Fifth) 286 |
| 5036 | Descartes cannot assume that a most perfect being exists without contradictions [Leibniz on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes' error is in assuming without proof that a most perfect being does not involve a contradiction. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.67) by Gottfried Leibniz - A Specimen of Discoveries p.76 | |
| A reaction: Certainly Descartes seems obliged to grasp the concept of God 'clearly and distinctly', so there must be an absence of contradictions. But does Descartes have to prove that there are no contradictions in his concept of a triangle? Is self-evidence enough? |
| 3638 | Existence is not a perfection; it is what makes perfection possible [Gassendi on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Existence is not a perfection in God or in anything else; it is that without which no perfections can be present. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §5.67) by Pierre Gassendi - Objections to 'Meditations' (Fifth) 323 |
| 3636 | God didn't give us good judgement even about our own lives [Gassendi on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: God is not to be blamed for giving puny man a faculty of judging that is too small to cope with everything, but we may still wonder why our judgement is uncertain, confused and inadequate even for the few matters he did want us to decide upon. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §4.58) by Pierre Gassendi - Objections to 'Meditations' (Fifth) 314 |
| 2277 | Since God does not wish to deceive me, my judgement won't make errors if I use it properly [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Since God does not wish to deceive me, he assuredly has not given me a faculty of judgement with which I could never make a mistake, when I use it properly. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §4.54) |
| 2278 | Error arises because my faculty for judging truth is not infinite [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I make mistakes because the faculty of judging the truth, which I got from God, is not, in my case, infinite. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §4.54) |
| 2281 | If we ask whether God's works are perfect, we must not take a narrow viewpoint, but look at the universe as a whole [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Whenever we ask whether the works of God are perfect, we should keep in view not simply some one creature in isolation from the rest, but the universe as a whole. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §4.55) |