32 ideas
| 4986 | A weaker kind of reductionism than direct translation is the use of 'bridge laws' [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: If multiple realisability means that psychological terms cannot be translated into physics, one weaker kind of reductionism resorts to 'bridge laws' which link the theory to be reduced to the reducing theory. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §3.8) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me that reduction is all-or-nothing, so there can't be a 'weaker' kind. If they are totally separate but linked by naturally necessary laws (e.g. low temperature and ice), they are supervenient, but not reducible to one another. |
| 8780 | Attributes are functions, not objects; this distinguishes 'square of 2' from 'double of 2' [Geach] |
| Full Idea: Attributes should not be thought of as identifiable objects. It is better to follow Frege and compare them to mathematical functions. 'Square of' and 'double of' x are distinct functions, even though they are not distinguishable in thought when x is 2. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §11) | |
| A reaction: Attributes are features of the world, of which animals are well aware, and the mathematical model is dubious when dealing with physical properties. The route to arriving at 2 is not the same concept as 2. There are many roads to Rome. |
| 11910 | Being 'the same' is meaningless, unless we specify 'the same X' [Geach] |
| Full Idea: "The same" is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean "the same X", where X represents a general term. ...There is no such thing as being just 'the same'. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §16) | |
| A reaction: Geach seems oddly unaware of the perfect identity of Hespherus with Phosphorus. His critics don't spot that he was concerned with identity over time (of 'the same man', who ages). Perry's critique emphasises the type/token distinction. |
| 5001 | Maybe we should see intentionality and consciousness as a single problem, not two [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: Many philosophers today have adopted the view that we can achieve an enormous simplification by reducing the two components of the mind-body problem - intentionality and consciousness - into one; ...consciousness is no more than representations. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §8.4) | |
| A reaction: One would then see subjective experience and informational content as two consequences of a single mental activity. This strikes me as the correct route to go. We do, after all, learn BY experiencing. Hence concepts are tied in with qualia. |
| 4993 | If a bird captures a worm, we could say its behaviour is 'about' the worm [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: When a bird pulls a worm from the ground, then swallows it piece by piece, there is a sense in which its behaviour can be said to be about the worm. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §5.4) | |
| A reaction: This is preparing the ground for a possible behaviourist account of intentionality. Reply: you could say rain is about puddles, or you could say we have adopted Dennett's 'intentional stance' to birds, but it tells us nothing about their psychology. |
| 5000 | Behaviourism says intentionality is an external relation; language of thought says it's internal [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: The conflict over whether intentionality is a matter of behavioural relations with the rest of the world, or of the internal states of the subject, is at its most dramatic in the contrast between behaviourism and the language of thought hypothesis. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §7.10) | |
| A reaction: I just don't believe any behaviourist external account of intentionality, which ducks the question of how it all works. Personally I am more drawn to maps and models than to a language of thought. I plan my actions in an imagined space-time world. |
| 8775 | A big flea is a small animal, so 'big' and 'small' cannot be acquired by abstraction [Geach] |
| Full Idea: A big flea or rat is a small animal, and a small elephant is a big animal, so there can be no question of ignoring the kind of thing to which 'big' or 'small' is referred and forming those concepts by abstraction. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §9) | |
| A reaction: Geach is attacking a caricature of the theory. Abstraction is a neat mental trick which has developed in stages, from big rats relative to us, to big relative to other rats, to the concept of 'relative' (Idea 8776!), to the concept of 'relative bigness'. |
| 8776 | We cannot learn relations by abstraction, because their converse must be learned too [Geach] |
| Full Idea: Abstractionists are unaware of the difficulty with relations - that they neither exist nor can be observed apart from the converse relation, the two being indivisible, as in grasping 'to the left of' and 'to the right of'. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §9) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to see how a rival account such as platonism could help. It seems obvious to me that 'right' and 'left' would be quite meaningless without some experience of things in space, including an orientation to them. |
| 4982 | Dualism implies some brain events with no physical cause, and others with no physical effect [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: If the mind causes brain events, then they are not caused by other brain events, and such causal gaps should be detectable by scientists; there should also be a gap of brain-events which cause no other brain events, because they are causing mind events. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §2.5) | |
| A reaction: This is the double causation problem which Spinoza had spotted (Idea 4862). Expressed this way, it seems a screamingly large problem for dualism. We should be able to discover some VERY strange physical activity in the brain. |
| 4991 | Behaviourism seems a good theory for intentional states, but bad for phenomenal ones [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: For many kinds of mental states, notably intentional ones such as beliefs and desires, behaviourism is appealing, ..but for sensations and experiences such as pain, it seems grossly implausible. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §5.1) | |
| A reaction: The theory does indeed make a bit more sense for intentional states, but it still strikes me as nonsense that there is no more to my belief that 'Whales live in the Atlantic' than a disposition to say something. WHY do I say this something? |
| 4994 | Behaviourism offers a good alternative to simplistic unitary accounts of mental relationships [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: There is a temptation to think that 'aboutness', and the 'contents' of thoughts, and the relation of 'reference', are single and unitary relationships, but behaviourism offers an alternative approach. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §5.5) | |
| A reaction: Personally I wouldn't touch behaviourism with a barge-pole (as it ducks the question of WHY certain behaviour occurs), but a warning against simplistic accounts of intentional states is good. I am sure there cannot be a single neat theory of refererence. |
| 2567 | You can't define real mental states in terms of behaviour that never happens [Geach] |
| Full Idea: We can't take a statement that two men, whose overt behaviour was not actually different, were in different states of mind as being really a statement that the behaviour of one man would have been different in hypothetical circumstances that never arose. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §3) | |
| A reaction: This is the whole problem with trying to define the mind as dispositions. The same might be said of properties, since some properties are active, but others are mere potential or disposition. Hence 'process' looks to me the most promising word for mind. |
| 4992 | In 'holistic' behaviourism we say a mental state is a complex of many dispositions [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: There is a non-reductive version of behaviourism ( which we can call 'global' or 'holistic') which says there is no more to having mental states than having a complex of certain kinds of behavioural dispositions. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §5.2) | |
| A reaction: This is designed to meet a standard objection to behaviourism - that there is no straight correlation between what I think and how I behave. The present theory is obviously untestable, because a full 'complex' of human dispositions is never repeated. |
| 4990 | The inverted spectrum idea is often regarded as an objection to behaviourism [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: The inverted spectrum idea is often regarded as an objection to behaviourism. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §4.5) | |
| A reaction: Thus, my behaviour at traffic lights should be identical, even if I have a lifelong inversion of red and green. A good objection. Note that physicalists can believe in inverted qualia as well a dualists, as long as the brain states are also inverted. |
| 2568 | Beliefs aren't tied to particular behaviours [Geach] |
| Full Idea: Is there any behaviour characteristic of a given belief? | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §4) | |
| A reaction: Well, yes. Belief that a dog is about to bite you. Belief that this nice food is yours, and you are hungry. But he has a good point. He is pointing out that the mental state is a very different thing from the 'disposition' to behave in a certain way. |
| 4984 | All meaningful psychological statements can be translated into physics [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: All psychological statements which are meaningful, that is to say, which are in principle verifiable, are translatable into propositions which do not involve psychological concepts, but only the concepts of physics. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §3.8) | |
| A reaction: This shows how eliminativist behaviourism arises out of logical positivism (by only allowing what is verifiable). The simplest objection: we can't verify the mental states of others, because they are private, but they are still the best explanation. |
| 4998 | Instead of representation by sentences, it can be by a distribution of connectionist strengths [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: In a connectionist system, information is represented not by sentences but by the total distribution of connection strengths. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §7.6) | |
| A reaction: Neither sentences (of a language of thought) NOR connection strengths strike me as very plausible ways for a brain to represent things. It must be something to do with connections, but it must also be to do with neurons, or we get bizarre counterexamples. |
| 4985 | If mental states are multiply realisable, they could not be translated into physical terms [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: If psychological states are multiply realisable it is hard to see how they could possibly be translated into physical terms. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §3.8) | |
| A reaction: Reductive funtionalism would do it. A writing iimplement is physical and multiply realisable. Personally I prefer the strategy of saying mental states are NOT multiply realisable. If frog brains differ from ours, they probably don't feel pain like us. |
| 8781 | The mind does not lift concepts from experience; it creates them, and then applies them [Geach] |
| Full Idea: Having a concept is not recognizing a feature of experience; the mind makes concepts. We then fit our concepts to experience. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §11) | |
| A reaction: This seems to imply that we create concepts ex nihilo, which is a rather worse theory than saying that we abstract them from multiple (and multi-level) experiences. That minds create concepts is a truism. How do we do it? |
| 4997 | It seems unlikely that most concepts are innate, if a theory must be understood to grasp them [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: It is widely accepted that for many concepts, if not all, grasping the concept requires grasping some theory, ...which makes difficulties for the view that concepts are not learned: for 'radical concept nativism', as Fodor calls it. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §7.3) | |
| A reaction: Not a problem for traditional rationalist theories, where the whole theory can be innate along with the concept, but a big objection to modern more cautious non-holistic views (such as Fodor's). Does a bird have a concept AND theory of a nest? |
| 8769 | If someone has aphasia but can still play chess, they clearly have concepts [Geach] |
| Full Idea: If a man struck with aphasia can still play bridge or chess, I certainly wish to say he still has the concepts involved in the game, although he can no longer exercise them verbally. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §5) | |
| A reaction: Geach proceeds thereafter to concentrate on language, but this caveat is crucial. To suggest that concepts are entirely verbal has always struck me as ridiculous, and an insult to our inarticulate mammalian cousins. |
| 8770 | 'Abstractionism' is acquiring a concept by picking out one experience amongst a group [Geach] |
| Full Idea: I call 'abstractionism' the doctrine that a concept is acquired by a process of singling out in attention some one feature given in direct experience - abstracting it - and ignoring the other features simultaneously given - abstracting from them. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §6) | |
| A reaction: Locke seems to be the best known ancestor of this view, and Geach launches a vigorous attack against it. However, contemporary philosophers still refer to the process, and I think Geach should be crushed and this theory revived. |
| 8771 | 'Or' and 'not' are not to be found in the sensible world, or even in the world of inner experience [Geach] |
| Full Idea: Nowhere in the sensible world could you find anything to be suitably labelled 'or' or 'not'. So the abstractionist appeals to an 'inner sense', or hesitation for 'or', and of frustration or inhibition for 'not'. Personally I see a threat in 'or else'! | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §7) | |
| A reaction: This is a key argument of Geach's against abstractionism. As a logician he prefers to discuss connectives rather than, say, colours. I think they might be meta-abstractions, which you create internally once you have picked up the knack. |
| 8772 | We can't acquire number-concepts by extracting the number from the things being counted [Geach] |
| Full Idea: The number-concepts just cannot be got by concentrating on the number and abstracting from the kind of things being counted. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §8) | |
| A reaction: This point is from Frege - that if you 'abstract away' everything apart from the number, you are simply left with nothing in experience. The objection might, I think, be met by viewing it as second-order abstraction, perhaps getting to a pattern first. |
| 8773 | Abstractionists can't explain counting, because it must precede experience of objects [Geach] |
| Full Idea: The way counting is learned is wholly contrary to abstractionist preconceptions, because the series of numerals has to be learned before it can be applied. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §8) | |
| A reaction: You might learn to parrot the names of numbers, but you could hardly know what they meant if you couldn't count anything. See Idea 3907. I would have thought that individuating objects must logically and pedagogically precede counting. |
| 8774 | The numbers don't exist in nature, so they cannot have been abstracted from there into our languages [Geach] |
| Full Idea: The pattern of the numeral series that is grasped by a child exists nowhere in nature outside human languages, so the human race cannot possibly have discerned this pattern by abstracting it from some natural context. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §8) | |
| A reaction: This is a spectacular non sequitur, which begs the question. Abstractionists precisely claim that the process of abstraction brings numerals into human language from the natural context. Structuralism is an attempt to explain the process. |
| 8778 | Blind people can use colour words like 'red' perfectly intelligently [Geach] |
| Full Idea: It is not true that men born blind can form no colour-concepts; a man born blind can use the word 'red' with a considerable measure of intelligence; he can show a practical grasp of the logic of the word. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §10) | |
| A reaction: Weak. It is obvious that they pick up the word 'red' from the usage of sighted people, and the usage of the word doesn't guarantee a grasp of the concept, as when non-mathematicians refer to 'calculus'. Compare Idea 7377 and Idea 7866. |
| 8777 | If 'black' and 'cat' can be used in the absence of such objects, how can such usage be abstracted? [Geach] |
| Full Idea: Since we can use the terms 'black' and 'cat' in situations not including any black object or any cat, how could this part of the use be got by abstraction? | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §10) | |
| A reaction: [He is attacking H.H. Price] It doesn't seem a huge psychological leap to apply the word 'cat' when we remember a cat, and once it is in the mind we can play games with our abstractions. Cats are smaller than dogs. |
| 8779 | We can form two different abstract concepts that apply to a single unified experience [Geach] |
| Full Idea: It is impossible to form the concept of 'chromatic colour' by discriminative attention to a feature given in my visual experience. In seeing a red window-pane, I do not have two sensations, one of redness and one of chromatic colour. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §10) | |
| A reaction: Again Geach begs the question, because abstractionists claim that you can focus on two different 'aspects' of the one experience, as that it is a 'window', or it is 'red', or it is not a wall, or it is not monochrome. |
| 4999 | For behaviourists language is just a special kind of behaviour [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: Behaviourists regard the use of language as just a special kind of behaviour. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §7.9) | |
| A reaction: This is not an intuitively obvious view of language. We behave, and then we talk about behaviour. Performative utterances (like promising) have an obvious behavioural aspect, as do violent threats, but not highly theoretical language (such as maths). |
| 4995 | Behaviourists doubt whether reference is a single type of relation [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: To most behaviourists it seems misguided to expect there to be a single relation that connects referring expressions with their referents. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §5.5) | |
| A reaction: You don't need to be a behaviourist to feel this doubt. Think about names of real people, names of fictional people, reference to misunderstood items, or imagined items, or reference in dreams, or to mathematical objects, or negations etc. |
| 19216 | Propositions (such as 'that dog is barking') only exist if their items exist [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: A proposition about an item exists only if that item exists... how could something be the proposition that that dog is barking in circumstances in which that dog does not exist? | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Necessary Existents [2002], p.240), quoted by Trenton Merricks - Propositions | |
| A reaction: This is a view of propositions I can't make sense of. If I'm under an illusion that there is a dog barking nearby, when there isn't one, can I not say 'that dog is barking'? If I haven't expressed a proposition, what have I done? |