92 ideas
9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The incremental progress which I envisage for philosophy lacks the drama after which some philosophers still hanker, and that hankering is itself a symptom of the intellectual immaturity that helps hold philosophy back. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], Intro) | |
A reaction: This could stand as a motto for the whole current profession of analytical philosophy. It means that if anyone attempts to be dramatic they can make their own way out. They'll find Kripke out there, smoking behind the dustbins. |
9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Even if talk of truth as correspondence to the facts is metaphorical, it is a bad metaphor for analytic truth in a way that it is not for synthetic truth. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 3.1) | |
A reaction: A very simple and rather powerful point. Maybe the word 'truth' should be withheld from such cases. You might say that accepted analytic truths are 'conventional'. If that is wrong, then they correspond to natural facts at a high level of abstraction. |
3137 | Varieties of singular terms are used to designate token particulars [Rey] |
Full Idea: We designate token particulars with singular terms, such as: proper names, numerals, definite descriptions, demonstratives, pronouns or variables. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 1.1.1) |
3143 | Physics requires the existence of properties, and also the abstract objects of arithmetic [Rey] |
Full Idea: Physics is committed to arithmetic, which seems committed to abstract objects such as numbers, and its causal explanations seem to appeal to properties, such as mass and charge. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 2.3) |
9601 | The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The debate between realism and anti-realism has become notorious in the rest of philosophy for its obscurity, convolution, and lack of progress. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], After) | |
A reaction: I find this reassuring, because fairly early on I decided that this problem was not of great interest, and quietly tiptoed away. I take the central issue to be whether nature has 'joints', to which the answer appears to be 'yes'. End of story. |
9599 | There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson] |
Full Idea: It is sometimes argued that if there is such a thing as a mountain it would be a vague object, but it is logically impossible for an object to be vague, so there is no such thing as a mountain. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 7.2) | |
A reaction: I don't take this to be a daft view. No one is denying the existence of the solid rock that is involved, but allowing such a vague object may be a slippery slope to the acceptance of almost anything as an 'object'. |
9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The constraints of common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], After) | |
A reaction: Wiliamson has described himself (in my hearing) as a 'rottweiller realist', but presumably the problem of vagueness interests a lot of people precisely because it pushes us away from common sense and classical logic. |
3145 | The Indiscernibility of Identicals is a truism; but the Identity of Indiscernibles depends on possible identical worlds [Rey] |
Full Idea: Leibniz's Law, the indiscernibility of identicals, is a truism which should not be confused with the more controversial identity of indiscernibles, which depends on the possibility of perfectly replicated universes. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 2.4) |
9598 | Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The epistemology of metaphysical modality requires no dedicated faculty of intuition. It is simply a special case of the epistemology of counterfactual thinking, a kind of thinking tightly integrated with our thinking about the spatio-temporal world. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.6) | |
A reaction: This seems to me to be spot-on, though it puts the focus increasingly on the faculty of imagination, as arguably an even more extraordinary feature of brains than the much-vaunted normal consciousness. |
16536 | Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals [Lowe on Williamson] |
Full Idea: The psychological mechanism that Williamson proposes as the supposedly reliable source of our knowledge of necessities only seems applicable to counterfactuals that are distinctively causal, not metaphysical, in character. | |
From: comment on Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007]) by E.J. Lowe - What is the Source of Knowledge of Modal Truths? 5 | |
A reaction: My rough impression of Williamson's account is that it is correct but unilluminating. We have to assess necessities by counterfactual thinking, because nothing else is available (apart from evaluating the coherence of the findings). |
9596 | We scorn imagination as a test of possibility, forgetting its role in counterfactuals [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The epistemology of modality often focuses on (and pours scorn on) imagination or conceivability as a test of possibility, while ignoring the role of the imagination in the assessment of mundane counterfactuals. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.4) | |
A reaction: Good point. I've been guilty of this easy scorn myself. Williamson gives our modal capacities an evolutionary context. What is needed is well-informed imagination, rather than wild fantasy. |
9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
Full Idea: There is extensive 'armchair knowledge' in which experience plays no strictly evidential role, but it may not fit the stereotype of the a priori, because the contribution of experience was more than enabling, such as armchair truths about our environment. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.5) | |
A reaction: Once this point is conceded we have no idea where to draw the line. Does 'if it is red it can't be green' derive from experience? I think it might. |
3172 | Empiricism says experience is both origin and justification of all knowledge [Rey] |
Full Idea: Two of the key claims of empiricism are that all knowledge must be justified on the basis of experience, and that all knowledge in fact originates in experience. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.3) |
9592 | Intuition is neither powerful nor vacuous, but reveals linguistic or conceptual competence [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Crude rationalists postulate a special knowledge-generating faculty of rational intuition. Crude empiricists regard intuition as an obscurantist term of folk psychology. Linguistic/conceptual philosophy says it reveals linguistic or conceptual competence. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], Intro) | |
A reaction: Kripke seems to think that it is the basis of logical competence. I would use it as a blank term for any insight in which we have considerable confidence, and yet are unable to articulate its basis; roughly, for rational thought that evades logic. |
20181 | When analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they present intuitions as their evidence [Williamson] |
Full Idea: 'Intuition' plays a major role in contemporary analytic philosophy's self-understanding. ...When contemporary analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they appeal to intuitions. ...Thus intuitions are presented as our evidence in philosophy. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], p.214-5), quoted by Herman Cappelen - Philosophy without Intuitions 01.1 | |
A reaction: Williamson says we must investigate this 'scandal', but Cappelen's book says analytic philosophy does not rely on intuition. |
3166 | Animal learning is separate from their behaviour [Rey] |
Full Idea: Rats and monkeys exhibit 'latent learning' (learning just for fun) which is later beneficial. They learn with no consequences, and then can't learn when the good consequences are available. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.1.1) | |
A reaction: This looks like a bit of a setback for naturalised epistemology and cognitive science, if learning can't be brought within a stimulus-response framework. |
3232 | Abduction could have true data and a false conclusion, and may include data not originally mentioned [Rey] |
Full Idea: Abduction moves from some data to a 'best explanation'. It is not deduction because the data could be true but the conclusion false, and it is not induction because the conclusion may involve data not mentioned in the premises. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], p.322) |
3128 | It's not at all clear that explanation needs to stop anywhere [Rey] |
Full Idea: It's not at all clear that explanation needs to stop anywhere. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], Int.2) |
3136 | The three theories are reduction, dualism, eliminativism [Rey] |
Full Idea: There are three main views regarding the ontology of mental phenomena: reductionism, dualism and eliminativism. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 1.1) | |
A reaction: It is precisely this picture which is rejected by Davidson and co, who want something called 'property dualism', with a unique relationship which is labelled 'supervenient'. Unfortunately there is no analogy for it. Not even beauty and a statue. |
3141 | Is consciousness 40Hz oscillations in layers 5 and 6 of the visual cortex? [Rey] |
Full Idea: Crick and Koch claim that visual consciousness is correlated with a 40Hz oscillation in layers five and six of the primary visual cortex. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 2.1) | |
A reaction: Not many people seem to have been enthused by their proposal. The target is the NCC (Neural Correlate of Consciousness), but we would only accept that location if the 'oscillations' seemed in some way special. |
3148 | Dualist privacy is seen as too deep for even telepathy to reach [Rey] |
Full Idea: The privacy that is a serious issue for the dualist is a peculiarly epistemic privacy that not even telepathy or brain fusions would seem to overcome. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 2.5.4) | |
A reaction: This is a key idea in the traditional defence of dualism. I'm inclined to think that we are faced with deep privacy not because the mind is so hidden, but because the observer is trapped in NOT being the thing observed. In that sense, rocks are private. |
3164 | Intentional explanations are always circular [Rey] |
Full Idea: There can seem to be no escape from the "intentional circle" - the use of one intentional idiom always seems to presuppose the use of another. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 3.3) | |
A reaction: The best explanation of this is Conceptual Dualism (Papineau: Thinking about Consciousness). We are locked into dualist concepts because of our long-term ignorance about the brain. |
3138 | Arithmetic and unconscious attitudes have no qualia [Rey] |
Full Idea: The contents of thoughts, beliefs and desires seem quite distinct from qualia. Arithmetic has no particular feeling attached to it, and Freud showed that many propositional attitudes have no feeling at all, as they are unconscious. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 1.1.2) | |
A reaction: I don't think we should rule out 'pre-conscious' qualia. The fact that advanced human mental capacities like arithmetic have thinned out their qualia doesn't count against qualia being essential to normal mental life. |
3142 | Why qualia, and why this particular quale? [Rey] |
Full Idea: If we allow as a brute fact that certain mental states possess conscious qualitative content, there is still the problem of explaining why they possess one content rather than another (why does this stimulus look RED?). | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 2.1) | |
A reaction: This strikes me as the Really Hard Question. The Hard Question is merely 'why are creatures aware of their thoughts?' Personally I don't rule out finding a physical answer to the RHQ, and it is certainly not grounds for drifting into neo-dualism. |
3224 | If qualia have no function, their attachment to thoughts is accidental [Rey] |
Full Idea: If qualia are non-functionally defined objects, then their attachment to their role in my thought would seem to be metaphysically accidental. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 11.4.2) | |
A reaction: A rock at sea can cause a shipwreck without being defined as 'a shipwrecker'. It is, of course, tautological that if qualia have a 'role' in my thoughts, they must have causal powers, but 'function' is a much trickier concept. |
3227 | Are qualia a type of propositional attitude? [Rey] |
Full Idea: Qualitative experience is just a particular species of propositional attitude. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 11.6.1) | |
A reaction: This sounds very implausible. If I hear a loud and baffling noise, is a proposition instantly involved? When a subtle change of colour occurs in the sky at sunset, is that 'propositional'? Do slugs formulate propositions when they taste garlic? |
3226 | Are qualia irrelevant to explaining the mind? [Rey] |
Full Idea: Phenomenal objects and properties are no more needed to explain the workings of our mind than are angels needed to explain the motion of the planets. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 11.6.1) | |
A reaction: The question would be whether 'phenomenal properties' contained unique information, which could therefore influence behaviour. It is also a matter of exactly what you are trying to explain. |
3229 | If colour fits a cone mapping hue, brightness and saturation, rotating the cone could give spectrum inversion [Rey] |
Full Idea: If colour can be modelled as a cone, with points mapped by hue, brightness and saturation, then a rotation could be isomorphic with the hues switched, so we may all experience different hues. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 11.7.1) | |
A reaction: from Levine |
3223 | Self-consciousness may just be nested intentionality [Rey] |
Full Idea: It is tempting to think that if a system has concepts for nested intentionality and first-person reflection, it has all that's needed for self-consciousness. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 11.2.2) | |
A reaction: If there nothing more than nested intentionality in complex minds like ours, the top level of the nesting would still have a special status. And if the top level always seemed to stay the same while the lower levels changed, I'd probably call it the Self |
3162 | Experiments prove that people are often unaware of their motives [Rey] |
Full Idea: Experiments have shown (Nisbett and Wilson 1977) that people's introspective knowledge is a lot less reliable than they suppose. People are sensitive to but entirely unaware of many factors that influence their social behaviour. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 3.2.2) | |
A reaction: This type of observation rests on an overemphasis on the conscious mind. We are not conscious of liver events, or of deep buried brain events, both of which motivate us. We should only expect introspection to reveal what is fully conscious. |
3163 | Brain damage makes the unreliability of introspection obvious [Rey] |
Full Idea: The most dramatic phenomena undermining the absolute reliability of introspection are those of blindsight and "anosognosia" (unawareness of one's own brain damage). | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 3.2.2) | |
A reaction: It might depend on what you expected introspection to reveal. If you only expected it to tell you about your consciousness, it would be unreasonable to expect knowledge of blindsight information by introspection. |
3196 | Free will isn't evidence against a theory of thought if there is no evidence for free will [Rey] |
Full Idea: We don't need arguments to show that if there were free will then computational accounts of the mind would be inadequate; what is needed is good evidence that there actually exists such free will in the first place. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.6) |
3195 | If reason could be explained in computational terms, there would be no need for the concept of 'free will' [Rey] |
Full Idea: If a computational account of reasoning processes could be given, then there is no need to settle the issue of "free will", as reason could get along without it. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.6) |
3165 | Behaviourism is eliminative, or reductionist, or methodological [Rey] |
Full Idea: There are three different views concerning behaviourism - the 'radical' view, which aims at eliminativism, the 'analytical' view, which is a reductionist enterprise, and the 'methodological' view, somewhere between the two. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4) | |
A reaction: The first appears to be ontological, the second about relationships between areas of our language, and the third epistemological. You could attempt language reduction because we can only know behaviour, because that's all there is. |
3180 | Maybe behaviourists should define mental states as a group [Rey] |
Full Idea: Defining most mental states seems to requiring citing other mental states - but perhaps behaviourists can define them all simultaneously | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 5.3) | |
A reaction: This is an interesting strategy for trying to avoid the well known circularity of attempting to define mental states in behavioural terms. Behaviourism won't go away. |
3167 | Animals don't just respond to stimuli, they experiment [Rey] |
Full Idea: Animals exhibit 'spontaneous alteration' in their behaviour (e.g. varying the route to the food), or improvisation (finding short cuts instead of following training). They use mental maps, or dead reckoning, not just conditioned responses. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.1.4) | |
A reaction: If we can't even get a decent behaviourist account of animal behaviour, presumably the chances for humans look even less good. 'Black box' behaviourism, rather than the eliminativist version, might allow internal mechanisms to modify responses. |
3173 | How are stimuli and responses 'similar'? [Rey] |
Full Idea: Radical behaviourists say animals emit "similar" responses to "similar" reinforcements, but that is empty without specifying in what respect there is a similarity. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.3) | |
A reaction: The point is that when you try to specify the similarity you are (supposedly) forced to use mental language to make the distinctions, thus contradicting behaviourism. It is not, though, self-evidently impossible to give a behaviourist specification. |
3179 | Behaviour is too contingent and irrelevant to be the mind [Rey] |
Full Idea: The two main anti-behaviourist intuitions are that mind and behaviour only relate contingently, and that for much mental life (thinking, emotion) the resulting behaviour seems unimportant. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 5.3) | |
A reaction: Attractive intuitions, but not unquestionable. Since no two states of mind are ever fully identical, we can never test whether the resulting behaviour arises contingently or necessarily. The second point underestimates the physicality of mental life. |
3186 | If a normal person lacked a brain, would you say they had no mind? [Rey] |
Full Idea: If many otherwise ordinary people turned out to have skulls which were empty or filled with oatmeal, would that mean that they didn't have minds? | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 7.1.4) | |
A reaction: That's a John Locke sort of question, implying that 'persons' are logically independent of their implementation. Personally I would search for a radio receiver, because oatmeal is implausible as a thinker. |
3127 | Dualism and physicalism explain nothing, and don't suggest any research [Rey] |
Full Idea: Neither dualism nor physicalism provides much serious explanation of any mental phenomena, or even much in the way of a program of research. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], Int.2) | |
A reaction: I'm not sure if people who demand an "explanation of mental phenomena" are quite clear about what it is they want. God might just say "Mental phenomena are just brain events from the brain's point of view". |
3188 | Homuncular functionalism (e.g. Freud) could be based on simpler mechanical processes [Rey] |
Full Idea: So-called 'homuncular functionalism' (such as Freud's or Plato's internal struggles of the soul) needn't lead to an infinite regress if eventually the homunculi become so stupid they could be replaced by a machine. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 7.2.2) | |
A reaction: from Fodor |
3216 | Is the room functionally the same as a Chinese speaker? [Rey] |
Full Idea: The question for a computational-representation theory about the Chinese Room is: is what is happening inside the room functionally equivalent to what is happening inside a normal Chinese speaker? | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 10.2.1) | |
A reaction: Certainly the Room lacks morality ('how can I torture my sister?'). It won't spot connections between recent questions. It won't ask itself questions. It will take years to spot absurd questions. |
3220 | Searle is guilty of the fallacy of division - attributing a property of the whole to a part [Rey] |
Full Idea: You should no more attribute understanding of Chinese to this one part of the system than you should ascribe the properties of the entire British Empire to Queen Victoria. This is the fallacy of division. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 10.2.3) | |
A reaction: This very nicely pinpoints what is wrong with the Chinese Room argument (nice analogy, too). If you carefully introspect what is involved when you 'understand' something, it is immensely complex, though it feels instant and simple. |
3206 | One computer program could either play chess or fight a war [Rey] |
Full Idea: It is always possible to provide incompatible interpretations of formal theories, so that a computer could use the same program one day to play chess, the next to fight a war. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 9.1.3) | |
A reaction: This seems to present a huge gulf between human chess players (who 'understand' what they are doing) and machines, but I don't accept it. Giving the machine cameras and multi-level software would fix it. |
3140 | If you explain water as H2O, you have reduced water, but not eliminated it [Rey] |
Full Idea: Reduction is not the same as elimination; if chemists reduce water to H2O, or biologists reduce life to a complex chemical process, they have not shown that they don't exist. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 1.2.1) | |
A reaction: Depends what you mean by 'elimination'. It is important to be clear whether you are eliminating something from life, or from strict philosophical ontology. Ontologists never mention mountains. |
3134 | Human behaviour can show law-like regularity, which eliminativism can't explain [Rey] |
Full Idea: There is clear evidence against eliminative materialism in the law-like correlations found among millions of answers in standardised school tests, for which it can give no explanation. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], Int.3) | |
A reaction: Not very persuasive. If neural networks got involved in complex competitions with one another, you would expect them to evolve similar tactics. |
3199 | Connectionism assigns numbers to nodes and branches, and plots the outcomes [Rey] |
Full Idea: In connectionism, each node is given an activation level, and each branch a weight, according to possible degree of effect. This results in 'excitatory' and 'inhibitory' connections. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.8) | |
A reaction: Whether such a system could ever be 'conscious' is not the only interesting question. What could such a system do? Could it ever be good at philosophy? |
3201 | Connectionism explains well speed of perception and 'graceful degradation' [Rey] |
Full Idea: Connectionism is better than other AI strategies at capturing the extraordinary swiftness of perception, and of degrading in a 'graceful' way. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.8) | |
A reaction: A good theory had better capture the extraordinary swiftness of perception. Also the swiftness of recognition. Compare seeing a surprising old friend in a crowd, and recognising the person you are looking for. |
3202 | Connectionism explains irrationality (such as the Gamblers' Fallacy) quite well [Rey] |
Full Idea: Connectionism offers promising accounts of irrational behaviour, such as people's bias towards positive instances, and their tendency to fall for the gamblers' fallacy. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.8) | |
A reaction: That is strong support, because the chances of a computational robot having such tendencies is virtually nil, but all humans have the biases referred to (even philosophers). |
3200 | Pattern recognition is puzzling for computation, but makes sense for connectionism [Rey] |
Full Idea: Connectionism is a way of capturing the holism of pattern recognition, as stressed by many critics of computational theories of mind. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.8) | |
A reaction: I am drawn to the idea that arithmetic derives from pattern recognition, and the latter is basic to all minds (a kind of instant unthinking induction), so this seems to me a win for connectionism. |
3150 | Can identity explain reason, free will, non-extension, intentionality, subjectivity, experience? [Rey] |
Full Idea: Eight properties of mind are problems for the identity theory: rationality, free will, spatiality, privacy, intentionality, essential mentality, subjective content, and the explanatory gap. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 2.7) | |
A reaction: The list could go on: poetry, creativity, love, normativity... Actually, these are problems for every theory. |
3129 | Physicalism offers something called "complexity" instead of mental substance [Rey] |
Full Idea: In physicalism the "ghost in the machine" is merely replaced by the "complexity" in it. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], Int.2) | |
A reaction: This is nonsense. No one thinks that mere complexity generates consciousness. The assumption is that we would begin to understand the mind only if we could somehow map the connections of the brain. |
3139 | Some attitudes are information (belief), others motivate (hatred) [Rey] |
Full Idea: Propositional attitudes divide into two broad types: neutral informational ones (belief, suspicion, imagining), and directional ones which motivate an agent (preference, desire, hate). | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 1.1.2) | |
A reaction: Since suspicions are motivating, and preferences are informational, this is not a very sharp distinction. An alternative would be to say that there is one type, and sometimes the will gets involved. |
3171 | Children speak 90% good grammar [Rey] |
Full Idea: Ninety percent of most young children's utterances are grammatical. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.2.4) | |
A reaction: This is good evidence for some sort of innate element in the grammar of language. But the accurate grammar is not in a particular language. Good communication must be the driving force in all this. |
3174 | Good grammar can't come simply from stimuli [Rey] |
Full Idea: Grammatical sensitivity is in no way a physical property of the stimulus, and we can't imagine how to build a device which would produce grammatical structures in response to the environment. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.3) | |
A reaction: You could try to program it with a set of (say) Aristotelian categories, and mechanisms to sort the environment accordingly. It then has to query its database, in response to practical needs. A doddle. |
3170 | We train children in truth, not in grammar [Rey] |
Full Idea: Very young children have been shown (Brown and Halon 1970) to be 'reinforced' not for their grammar but for the informational content of what they say. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.2.1) | |
A reaction: This is what you would expect. It doesn't follow that the grammar comes from innate mechanisms, because the pressure to get the information right could impose increasing accuracy in grammar. |
3213 | Animals may also use a language of thought [Rey] |
Full Idea: The language of thought need not only be confined to creatures which speak a natural language. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 10.1.1) | |
A reaction: I take it as axiomatic that our brains are no different in principles and fundamental mechanics from the lowliest of creatures. See Idea 7509. |
3215 | Images can't replace computation, as they need it [Rey] |
Full Idea: Processing of images and mental models seems to require, and therefore is unlikely to replace, computation and representation. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 10.1.2) | |
A reaction: A good point. If you are a fan of mental imagery, you still have to explain how we can hold an image, or recall it, or manipulate it. I always, I don't know why, wince at the thought of 'computations' among neurons. |
3194 | CRTT is good on deduction, but not so hot on induction, abduction and practical reason [Rey] |
Full Idea: The computational/representational theory of thought has given a good account of deduction, but mechanical theories of induction, abduction and practical reason are needed in order to make a machine which could reason. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.5) | |
A reaction: This is the best analysis of rationality that I have found (four components: deduction, induction, abduction, practical reason). I can think of nothing to add, and certainly none of these should be omitted. |
3147 | Problem-solving clearly involves manipulating images [Rey] |
Full Idea: Recent experiments (Shepard 1982) suggest people have imagistic representations they inspect when solving problems. In comparing two rotated images, the time for comparison varies with the angle of rotation. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 2.5.3) | |
A reaction: This doesn't prove that they are slowly rotating something. It may just be harder to make the leap to the new shape, when it is 'further away'. Picturing a 20-sided figure, we don't add sides one-by-one. |
3175 | Animals map things over time as well as over space [Rey] |
Full Idea: To map things like food over time, animals must somehow represent events as having temporal properties, and somehow store those representations ready for later use. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.3) | |
A reaction: If the mechanisms for doing this are basic, then so is the ontology. Objects must be categorised, properties spotted, time-spans correlated etc. 'Represent' needs to be sharp to be useful. |
3207 | Simple externalism is that the meaning just is the object [Rey] |
Full Idea: The oldest version of the externalist theory of meaning is the Fido/Fido theory, according to which the meaning of a representation is the object for which it stands. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 9.2) | |
A reaction: Modern baptismal theories of reference seem to have taken us back to this, for distinct individuals such as Aristotle, or natural kinds like gold. What, though, does 'Fido' mean to me? Asthma! |
3176 | Anything bears a family resemblance to a game, but obviously not anything counts as one [Rey] |
Full Idea: Anything bears a family resemblance to a game, but obviously not anything counts as one. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.3) |
3181 | A one hour gap in time might be indirectly verified, but then almost anything could be [Rey] |
Full Idea: You couldn't directly verify that the whole universe had stopped for one hour, but you might indirectly verify it (by prediction) - but then almost anything could be very indirectly verified. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 5.4) | |
A reaction: Does indirect verification include time travel? Or perfect knowledge of quantum theory, and total knowledge of quantum states. Laplace's Hypothesis. |
3204 | The meaning of "and" may be its use, but not of "animal" [Rey] |
Full Idea: The view that the meaning of language of thought expressions is based on their conceptual role (derived from Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use), is most plausible for the logical connectives like "and", but implausible for, say, "animal". | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 9.1.2) | |
A reaction: It was the logical connectives that got LW started on this track. If it doesn't work for 'animal' then does that mean we need two different theories? |
9595 | You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Someone who acquires the word 'gob' just by being reliably told that it is synonymous with 'mouth' knows what 'gob' means without being fully competent to use it. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 4.7) | |
A reaction: Not exactly an argument against meaning-as-use, but a very nice cautionary example to show that 'knowing the meaning' of a word may be a rather limited, and dangerous, achievement. |
3205 | Semantic holism means new evidence for a belief changes the belief, and we can't agree on concepts [Rey] |
Full Idea: Semantic holism is a desperate measure. Belief content would be continually changed by new beliefs, evidence for a belief would change the target belief, and no two people would ever agree on concepts. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 9.1.2) | |
A reaction: It is far more plausible to say language is a bit on the holistic side. Total holism is mad. |
3209 | Causal theories of reference (by 'dubbing') don't eliminate meanings in the heads of dubbers [Rey] |
Full Idea: Causal histories may have some role to play in a theory of reference, but the chain of causation requires internal characterisations at each stage, and the original dubber had one thing rather than another in mind when dubbing. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 9.2.1) | |
A reaction: The modern view of direct reference seems to prefer social context rather than a complete causal chain. |
3210 | If meaning and reference are based on causation, then virtually everything has meaning [Rey] |
Full Idea: What is special about meaning? If meaning and reference are just the result of causal chains, almost everything will mean something, since almost everything is reliably caused by something. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 9.2.2) | |
A reaction: It would be insane to think that all causal events produced meanings. It is probably better not to mention causation at all when discussing meaning. |
3149 | Referential Opacity says truth is lost when you substitute one referring term ('mother') for another ('Jocasta') [Rey] |
Full Idea: Referential Opacity says you cannot preserve truth if you substitute one referring term for another ('Oedipus desires Jocasta', 'Oedipus desires his mother'). | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 2.5.6) | |
A reaction: ….That is, in the context of expressing a propositional attitude. 'Oedipus desired his mother' was true. This idea requires some ignorance on the part of the person expressing the thought. |
3169 | A simple chaining device can't build sentences containing 'either..or', or 'if..then' [Rey] |
Full Idea: Bifurcated logical particles (either/or, if/then) are in principle beyond the power of any local chaining device to build sentences. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.2.1) | |
A reaction: True in natural languages, but not in formal ones? If P then either if-Q-then-R or if-S-then-T. Is that chaining? If rain, then if light then puddles, or if heavy then floods. Hm. |
3221 | Our desires become important when we have desires about desires [Rey] |
Full Idea: What gives people's desires certain moral importance is the fact that they have desires about those desires. | |
From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 11.1) | |
A reaction: from Frankfurt |
9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Given empirical evidence for the approximate intertranslatability of all human languages, and a universal innate basis of human cognition, we may wonder how 'other' any human culture really is. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 8.1) | |
A reaction: This seems to be a fairly accurate account of the situation. In recent centuries people seem to have been over-impressed by superficial differences in cultural behaviour, but we increasingly see the underlying identity. |
23125 | Most good social changes are incremental, rather than revolutionary [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: More permanent positive social change is made incrementally rather than by revolutionary transformation. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 1) | |
A reaction: This is the standard liberal response to revolution. Revolutionaries obviously consider such a claim to be very naïve, and a failure to grasp how deep the changes need to go. |
23126 | Conservatives often want peace, prosperity and tolerance, but not social fairness [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: Many conservatives want their world to be peaceful, properous, and pluralist, just as liberals do, but they don't particularly care that it be fair. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 1) | |
A reaction: Every conservative will have a sense of what is fair (such as appropriate punishments, and keeping of contracts), but they are more inclined to think that fairness must be fought for by individuals, not imposed by governments. |
23132 | Conservatives believe obedience and rank are essential to social order [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: The idea that the appearance of submission and obedience and rank are essential to order is at the heart of the conservative ideal. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 2) | |
A reaction: [He has just quoted Edmund Burke writing of Marie Antoinette] I once heard Richard Hare say that he thought social order would be best modelled on the army. A colleague once told me that obedience is a prime duty of a school teacher. |
23128 | The opposite of liberalism is dogmatism [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: The opposite of liberalism is not conservatism but dogmatism. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 1) | |
A reaction: Nice. It pinpoints the liberal opposition to both extremes of normal politics. It might make anarchists their allies, though! |
23142 | People are fallible, so liberalism tries to distribute power [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: Liberalism makes the idea of fallibility into a political practice by trying not to have too much power concentrated in one place or part of the system. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 3) | |
A reaction: There is a potential inefficiency and failure to focus on key goals implicit in this aim. It may be a good idea for a peacetime democracy, but a terrible idea for a wartime army. To stop corruption, don't let anyone do anything? |
23143 | Liberals have tried very hard to build a conscience into their institutions [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: What liberalism can say on its own behalf is that no system of power in human history has tried harder to insert a corrective conscience into its institutions. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 3) | |
A reaction: What we are learning in recent years is that wonderful liberal institutions can be quietly eroded by the forces of darkness, once those forces have sufficient control of the media to hide what they are doing. The 'rule of law' is wobbling. |
23141 | Left-wingers are inconsistent in their essentialist descriptions of social groups [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: A criticism of the left is that it is essentialist at some moments, and wildly anti-essentialist at others. We can call this opportunistic essentialism. Gender is fluid - except for transgender kids. Race is a construction - except for white races. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 3) | |
A reaction: [compressed] Interesting. Gopnik's solution seems to be to abandon all social essentialism as wicked. In this context he is probably right, but I am firmly committed to the idea that many entities in the world have essential natures. 'Bourgeois'. |
23124 | Liberal community is not blood ties or tradition, but shared choices, and sympathy for the losers [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: The liberal idea of community is not one, as it is for many conservatives, of blood ties or traditional authority. It rest on the idea of shared choices …including even a sense of sympathy for those caught on the losing side of the argument. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 1) | |
A reaction: The key point is that most liberals (other than extreme libertarians) have a strong sense of community, contrary to the standard criticisms offered by communitarians. |
23127 | Liberal community includes flight from the family, into energetic reforming groups [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: Where conservatives believe in the renewal of traditional community, liberals believe as well in the flight from family and tradition into new kinds of communal order. …It is an idea of assembling confidence and energies for reform. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 1) | |
A reaction: He cites Greenwich Village as an example. This suggests that his vision is a little narrow. His communities are for radicals who flee to join like minds in big cities. Politics must care about community for those left behind. Pubs, sport and pets. |
23138 | Modern left-wingers criticise liberalism's control of culture [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: Most left-wing critiques of liberalism now turn more often on its cultural power and its cultural illusions. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 3) | |
A reaction: As opposed to older Marxists critiques of the exploitation of workers. This is certainly fertile ground for interesting studies of our culture. It is very hard to grasp the influence had by the endless stories we expose ourselves to. |
23129 | Right-wingers attack liberal faith in reason, left-wingers attack its faith in reform [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: The right-wing critique of liberalism is largely an attack on its overreliance on reason; the left-wing one, mostly an attack on its false faith in reform. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 2) | |
A reaction: I doubt whether sensible liberals do rely too much on reason, though they do rely of scientific evidence (after peer review!). No one can doubt that lots of reforms have occurred, so it must be frustration with the very slow process. |
23133 | Cosmopolitan liberals lack national loyalty, and welcome excessive immigration [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: Critics say liberal cosmopolitanism is indifference to national loyalty, making them easily contemplate going elsewhere and, worse still, welcoming in the world through unsifted immigration. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 2) | |
A reaction: There is certainly some truth in this. Not all liberals are so cosmopolitan, though. It is interesting to observe whether people who retire stay in their old community or move to somewhere quite new. |
23139 | Liberalism's attempt to be neutral and colour-blind erases cultural identities [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: The 'colour-blind' universe of 'neutral' liberalism is actually an attempt to erase cultural identity and history. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 3) | |
A reaction: This is the modern critique of liberalism [centred on the Intersectionality of Bell Hooks or Kimberlé Crenshaw], which analyses alienated minorities, and their emphasis on their difference in response. It can lead to 'identity politics'. |
23135 | Classic Marxists see liberalism as the ideology of the bourgeoisie [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: The classic Marxist account shows liberalism as merely the ideology of the bourgeoisie. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 3) | |
A reaction: The word 'merely' does an awful lot of work in philosohy! I suspect that 'bourgeoisie' is self-defining here - as the believers in liberalism - given that lots of Marxists emerge from the middle classes. |
23140 | Environmental disasters result not from capitalism, but from a general drive for growth [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: It is the drive for growth, not capitalism in particular, that makes environmental disasters happen. Those caused by the command economics of Eastern Europe were far greater than even the worst known in Western Europe. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 3) | |
A reaction: So the next question is whether you can have capitalism without a drive for growth. I would have thought not, given the role recycled profit plays in driving capitalism. Command economies are more easily swept away. |
23130 | Popular imperialism gives the poor the belief that their acts have world historical meaning [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: Popular imperialism is the cosmopolitanism of the poor, the lever by which the small and impotent come to believe that their acts have world historical meaning. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 2) | |
A reaction: It is not only the poor who like imperialism. The focus of this popular attitude is the armed forces, and especially the army, where personal bravery is most obvious. The army gets strong support, no matter how dubious are its activities. |
23131 | Patriots love their place, but nationalists have a paranoid ethnic hostility [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: The patriot loves his place and its cheeses; …the nationalist has not particular affection for the place, but employs his obsessive sense of encirclement and grievance on behalf of acts of ethnic vengeance. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 2) | |
A reaction: 'Vengeance' seems a bit strong. John Le Carré said nationalists are distinguished by the need to have enemies. Russia is particularly obsessed with 'encirclement'. |
23136 | Liberal free speech is actually paid speech [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: What liberals call free speech or a free press is invariably paid speech. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 3) | |
A reaction: He give this as the left-wing view of liberalism. The much-hated social media are a substantial breech in this tendency. Sales of newspapers are declining everywhere, so the battle is for television channels. |
23134 | A 'free' society implies a free market, which always produces predatory capitalism and inequalities [Gopnik] |
Full Idea: 'Free societies', as a matter of practical fact, always mean free-market societies - and free markets will never sponsor more than predatory capitalism. Inequalities always emerge. | |
From: Adam Gopnik (A Thousand Small Sanities [2019], 3) | |
A reaction: This is part of his account of left-wing objections to liberalism. The crux of the liberal view is a conviction that the worst of capitalism can be restrained. This began to look doubtful once huge multinational companies emerged. What to do? |