22 ideas
| 7508 | Good reductionism connects fields of knowledge, but doesn't replace one with another [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: Good reductionism (also called 'hierarchical reductionism') consists not of replacing one field of knowledge with another, but of connecting or unifying them. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: A nice simple clarification. In this sense I am definitely a reductionist about mind (indeed, about everything). There is nothing threatening to even 'spiritual' understanding by saying that it is connected to the brain. |
| 19527 | We don't acquire evidence and then derive some knowledge, because evidence IS knowledge [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: When we acquire new evidence in perception, we do not first acquire unknown evidence and then somehow base knowledge on it later. Rather, acquiring new is evidence IS acquiring new knowledge. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.4) | |
| A reaction: This makes his point much better than Idea 19526 does. |
| 19528 | Knowledge is prior to believing, just as doing is prior to trying to do [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Knowing corresponds to doing, believing to trying. Just as trying is naturally understood in relation to doing, so believing is naturally understood in relation to knowing. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.4) | |
| A reaction: An interesting analogy. You might infer that there can be no concept of 'belief' without the concept of 'knowledge', but we could say that it is 'truth' which is indispensible, and leave out knowledge entirely. Belief is to truth as trying is to doing? |
| 19529 | Belief explains justification, and knowledge explains belief, so knowledge explains justification [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: If justification is the fundamental epistemic norm of belief, and a belief ought to constitute knowledge, then justification should be understood in terms of knowledge too. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.5) | |
| A reaction: If we are looking for the primitive norm which motivates the whole epistemic game, then I am thinking that truth might well play that role better than knowledge. TW would have to reply that it is the 'grasped truth', rather than the 'theoretical truth'. |
| 19530 | A neutral state of experience, between error and knowledge, is not basic; the successful state is basic [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: A neutral state covering both perceiving and misperceiving (or remembering and misrembering) is not somehow more basic than perceiving, for what unifies the case of each neutral state is their relation to the successful state. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.5-6) | |
| A reaction: An alternative is Disjunctivism, which denies the existence of a single neutral state, so that there is nothing to unite the two states, and they don't have a dependence relation. Why can't there be a prior family of appearances, some of them successful? |
| 19531 | Internalism about mind is an obsolete view, and knowledge-first epistemology develops externalism [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: A postulated underlying layer of narrow mental states is a myth, whose plausibility derives from a comfortingly familiar but obsolescent philosophy of mind. Knowledge-first epistemology is a further step in the development of externalism. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: Williamson is a real bruiser, isn't he? I don't take internalism about mind to be obsolescent at all, but now I feel so inferior for clinging to such an 'obsolescent' belief. ...But then I cling to Aristotle, who is (no doubt) an obsolete philosopher. |
| 19536 | Knowledge-first says your total evidence IS your knowledge [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Knowledge-first equate one's total evidence with one's total knowledge. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.8) | |
| A reaction: Couldn't lots of evidence which merely had a high probability be combined together to give a state we would call 'knowledge'? Many dubious witnesses confirm the truth, as long as they are independent, and agree. |
| 19526 | Surely I am acquainted with physical objects, not with appearances? [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: When I ask myself what I am acquainted with, the physical objects in front of me are far more natural candidates than their appearances. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.3) | |
| A reaction: Not very impressive. The word 'acquainted' means the content of the experience, not the phenomena. Do I 'experience' the objects, or the appearances? The answer there is less obvious. If you apply it to colours, it is even less obvious. |
| 7510 | Connectionists say the mind is a general purpose learning device [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: Connectionists do not, of course, believe that the mind is a blank slate, but they do believe in the closest mechanistic equivalent, a general purpose learning device. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This shows the closeness of connectionism to Hume's associationism (Idea 2189), which was just a minimal step away from Locke's mind as 'white paper' (Idea 7507). Pinker is defending 'human nature', but connectionism has a point. |
| 7513 | Is memory stored in protein sequences, neurons, synapses, or synapse-strengths? [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: Are memories stored in protein sequences, in new neurons or synapses, or in changes in the strength of existing synapses? | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a neat summary of current neuroscientific thinking about memory. If you are thinking that memory couldn't possibly be so physical, don't forget the mind-boggling number of events involved in each tiny memory. See Idea 6668. |
| 7509 | Roundworms live successfully with 302 neurons, so human freedom comes from our trillions [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The roundworm only has 959 cells, and 302 neurons in a fixed wiring diagram; it eats, mates, approaches and avoids certain smells, and that's about it. This makes it obvious that human 'free' behaviour comes from our complex biological makeup. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: I find this a persuasive example. Three hundred trillion neurons cannot possibly produce behaviour which is more than broadly predictable, and then it is the environment and culture that make it predictable, not the biology. |
| 7511 | Neural networks can generalise their training, e.g. truths about tigers apply mostly to lions [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The appeal of neural networks is that they automatically generalize their training to similar new items. If one has been trained to think tigers eat frosted flakes, it will generalise that lions do too, because it knows tigers as sets of features. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This certainly is appealing, because it offers a mechanistic account of abstraction and universals, which everyone agrees are central to proper thinking. |
| 7512 | There are five types of reasoning that seem beyond connectionist systems [Pinker, by PG] |
| Full Idea: Connectionist networks have difficulty with the kind/individual distinction (ducks/this duck), with compositionality (relations), with quantification (reference of 'all'), with recursion (embedded thoughts), and the categorical reasoning (exceptions). | |
| From: report of Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: [Read Pinker p.80!] These are essentially all the more sophisticated aspects of logical reasoning that Pinker can think of. Personally I would be reluctant to say a priori that connectionism couldn't cope with these things, just because they seem tough. |
| 19534 | How does inferentialism distinguish the patterns of inference that are essential to meaning? [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Inferentialism faces the grave problem of separating patterns of inference that are to count as essential to the meaning of an expression from those that will count as accidental (a form of the analytic/synthetic distinction). | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a rather persuasive objection to inferentialism, though I don't personally take that as a huge objection to all internalist semantics. |
| 19535 | Internalist inferentialism has trouble explaining how meaning and reference relate [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The internalist version of inferentialist semantics has particular difficulty in establishing an adequate relation between meaning and reference. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: I would have thought that this was a big problem for referentialist semantics too, though evidently Williamson doesn't think so. If he is saying that the meaning is in the external world, dream on. |
| 19533 | Inferentialist semantics relies on internal inference relations, not on external references [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: On internalist inferential (or conceptual role) semantics, the inferential relations of an expression do not depend on what, if anything, it refers to, ...rather, the meaning is something like its place in a web of inferential relations. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: Williamson says the competition is between externalist truth-conditional referential semantics (which he favours), and this internalist inferential semantics. He is, like, an expert, of course, but I doubt whether that is the only internalist option. |
| 19532 | Truth-conditional referential semantics is externalist, referring to worldly items [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Truth-conditional referential semantics is an externalist programme. In a context of utterance the atomic expressions of a language refer to worldly items, from which the truth-conditions of sentences are compositionally determined. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: I just don't see how a physical object can be part of the contents of a sentence. 'Dragons fly' is atomic, and meaningful, but its reference fails. 'The cat is asleep' is just words - it doesn't contain a live animal. |
| 7505 | Many think that accepting human nature is to accept innumerable evils [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Pref) | |
| A reaction: The point is that modern liberal thinking says everything is nurture (which can be changed), not nature (which can't). Virtue theory, of which I am a fan, requires a concept of human nature, as the thing which can attain excellence in its function. |
| 5994 | Is the cosmos open or closed, mechanical or teleological, alive or inanimate, and created or eternal? [Robinson,TM, by PG] |
| Full Idea: The four major disputes in classical cosmology were whether the cosmos is 'open' or 'closed', whether it is explained mechanistically or teleologically, whether it is alive or mere matter, and whether or not it has a beginning. | |
| From: report of T.M. Robinson (Classical Cosmology (frags) [1997]) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: A nice summary. The standard modern view is closed, mechanistic, inanimate and non-eternal. But philosophers can ask deeper questions than physicists, and I say we are entitled to speculate when the evidence runs out. |
| 7516 | In 1828, the stuff of life was shown to be ordinary chemistry, not a magic gel [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: In 1828 Friedrich Wöhler showed [by synthesising urea in the laboratory] that the stuff of life is not a magical, pulsating gel, but ordinary compounds following the laws of chemistry. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Wöhler synthesised urea in the laboratory. |
| 7515 | All the evidence says evolution is cruel and wasteful, not intelligent [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The overwhelming evidence is that the process of evolution, far from being intelligent and purposeful, is wasteful and cruel. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: This is why opponents should reject evolution totally, rather than compromise with it. Stick to a 6000-year-old world, fossils sent to test our faith, and species created in a flash (with no pain or waste). |
| 7514 | Intelligent Design says that every unexplained phenomenon must be design, by default [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The originator of 'intelligent design' (the biochemist Michael Behe) takes every phenomenon whose evolutionary history has not yet been figured out, and chalks it up to design by default. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: This seems to summarise the strategy very nicely. The theory essentially exploits the 'wow!' factor. The bigger the wow! the more likely it is that it was created by God. But research has been eroding our wows steadily for four hundred years. |