38 ideas
| 8820 | Rules of reasoning precede the concept of truth, and they are what characterize it [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: Rather than truth being fundamental and rules for reasoning being derived from it, the rules for reasoning come first and truth is characterized by the rules for reasoning about truth. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'Cog.Mach') | |
| A reaction: This nicely disturbs our complacency about such things. There is plenty of reasoning in Homer, but I bet there is no talk of 'truth'. Pontius Pilate seems to have been a pioneer (Idea 8821). Do the truth tables define or describe logical terms? |
| 8819 | We need the concept of truth for defeasible reasoning [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: It might be wondered why we even have a concept of truth. The answer is that this concept is required for defeasible reasoning. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'Cog.Mach') | |
| A reaction: His point is that we must be able to think critically about our beliefs ('is p true?') if we are to have any knowledge at all. An excellent point. Give that man a teddy bear. |
| 6548 | Physicalism requires the naturalisation or rejection of set theory [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Eventually set theory will have to be either naturalised or rejected, if a thoroughgoing physicalism is to be maintained. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 8.4) | |
| A reaction: Personally I regard Platonism as a form of naturalism (though a rather bold and dramatic one). The central issue seems to be the ability of the human main/brain to form 'abstract' notions about the physical world in which it lives. |
| 6531 | Institutions are not reducible as types, but they are as tokens [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Institutional types are irreducible, though I assume that institutional tokens are reducible in the sense of strict identity, all the way down to the subatomic level. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems a promising distinction, as the boundaries of 'institutions' disappear when you begin to reduce them to lower levels (cf. Idea 4601), and yet plenty of institutions are self-evidently no more than physics. Plants are invisible as physics. |
| 6532 | Types cannot be reduced, but levels of reduction are varied groupings of the same tokens [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: If types cannot be reduced to more physical levels, this is not an embarrassment, as long as our institutional categories, our physiological categories, and our physical categories are just alternative groupings of the same tokens. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: This is a self-evident truth about a car engine, so I don't see why it wouldn't apply equally to a brain. Lycan's identification of the type as the thing which cannot be reduced seems a promising explanation of much confusion among philosophers. |
| 6534 | One location may contain molecules, a metal strip, a key, an opener of doors, and a human tragedy [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: One space-time slice may be occupied by a collection of molecules, a metal strip, a key, an allower of entry to hotel rooms, a facilitator of adultery, and a destroyer souls. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: Desdemona's handkerchief is a nice example. This sort of remark seems to be felt by some philosophers to be heartless wickedness, and yet it so screamingly self-evident that it is impossible to deny. |
| 6529 | I see the 'role'/'occupant' distinction as fundamental to metaphysics [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: I see the 'role'/'occupant' distinction as fundamental to metaphysics. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.0) | |
| A reaction: A passing remark in a discussion of functionalism about the mind, but I find it appealing. Causation is basic to materialistic metaphysics, and it creates networks of regular causes. It leaves open the essentialist question of WHY it has that role. |
| 8822 | Statements about necessities need not be necessarily true [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: True statements about the necessary properties of things need not be necessarily true. The well-known example is that the number of planets (9) is necessarily an odd number. The necessity is de re, but not de dicto. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'Nat.Internal') | |
| A reaction: This would be a matter of the scope (the placing of the brackets) of the 'necessarily' operator in a formula. The quick course in modal logic should eradicate errors of this kind in your budding philosopher. |
| 8818 | Defeasible reasoning requires us to be able to think about our thoughts [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: Defeasible reasoning requires us to be able to think about our thoughts. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'Cog.Mach') | |
| A reaction: This is why I do not think animals 'know' anything, though they seem to have lots of true beliefs about their immediate situation. |
| 6549 | I think greenness is a complex microphysical property of green objects [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Personally I favour direct realism regarding secondary qualities, and identify greenness with some complex microphysical property exemplified by green physical objects. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 8.4) | |
| A reaction: He cites D.M.Armstrong (1981) as his source. Personally I find this a bewildering proposal. Does he think there is greenness in grass AS WELL AS the emission of that wavelength of electro-magnetic radiation? Is greenness zooming through the air? |
| 8824 | No one has defended translational phenomenalism since Ayer in 1940 [Ayer, by Kim] |
| Full Idea: I know of no serious defence of 'translational phenomenalism' since Ayer's in 1940. | |
| From: report of A.J. Ayer (The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge [1940]) by Jaegwon Kim - What is 'naturalized epistemology'? 303-4+n | |
| A reaction: We can think of Ayer as a hero who explored how far extreme empiricism would go. We still have anti-realists who are singing from a revised version of the song-sheet. Personally I am with Russell, that we must embrace the best explanation. |
| 8811 | What we want to know is - when is it all right to believe something? [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: When we ask whether a belief is justified, we want to know whether it is all right to believe it. The question we must ask is 'when is it permissible (epistemically) to believe P?'. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'Ep.Norms') | |
| A reaction: Nice to see someone trying to get the question clear. The question clearly points to the fact that there must at least be some sort of social aspect to criteria of justification. I can't cheerfully follow my intuitions if everyone else laughs at them. |
| 8817 | Logical entailments are not always reasons for beliefs, because they may be irrelevant [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: Epistemologists have noted that logical entailments do not always constitute reasons. P may entail Q without the connection between P and Q being at all obvious. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'Ref.of Extern') | |
| A reaction: Graham Priest and others try to develop 'relevance logic' to deal with this. This would deny the peculiar classical claim that everything is entailed by a falsehood. A belief looks promising if it entails lots of truths about the world. |
| 8814 | Epistemic norms are internalised procedural rules for reasoning [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: Epistemic norms are to be understood in terms of procedural knowledge involving internalized rules for reasoning. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'How regulate?') | |
| A reaction: He offers analogies with bicycly riding, but the simple fact that something is internalized doesn't make it a norm. Some mention of truth is needed, equivalent to 'don't crash the bike'. |
| 8823 | Reasons are always for beliefs, but a perceptual state is a reason without itself being a belief [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: When one makes a perceptual judgement on the basis of a perceptual state, I want to say that the perceptual state itself is one's reason. ..Reason are always reasons for beliefs, but the reasons themselves need not be beliefs. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'Dir.Realism') | |
| A reaction: A crucial issue. I think I prefer the view of Davidson, in Ideas 8801 and 8804. Three options: a pure perception counts as a reason, or perceptions involve some conceptual content, or you only acquire a reason when a proposition is formulated. |
| 8813 | If we have to appeal explicitly to epistemic norms, that will produce an infinite regress [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: If we had to make explicit appeal to epistemic norms for justification (the 'intellectualist model') we would find ourselves in an infinite regress. The norms, their existence and their application would themselves have to be justified. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'How regulate?') | |
| A reaction: This is counter to the 'space of reasons' picture, where everything is rationally assessed. There are regresses for both reasons and for experiences, when they are offered as justifications. |
| 8812 | Norm Externalism says norms must be internal, but their selection is partly external [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: Norm Externalism acknowledges that the content of our epistemic norms must be internalist, but employs external considerations in the selection of the norms themselves. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'Ep.Norms') | |
| A reaction: It can't be right that you just set your own norms, so this must contain some truth. Equally, even the most hardened externalist can't deny that what goes on in the head of the person concerned must have some relevance. |
| 8816 | Externalists tend to take a third-person point of view of epistemology [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: Externalists tend to take a third-person point of view in discussing epistemology. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'Ref.of Extern') | |
| A reaction: Pollock's point, quite reasonably, is that the first-person aspect must precede any objective assessment of whether someone knows. External facts, such as unpublicised information, can undermine high quality internal justification. |
| 8815 | Belief externalism is false, because external considerations cannot be internalized for actual use [Pollock] |
| Full Idea: External considerations of reliability could not be internalized. Consequently, it is in principle impossible for us to actually employ externalist norms. I take this to be a conclusive refutation of belief externalism. | |
| From: John L. Pollock (Epistemic Norms [1986], 'Ref.of Extern') | |
| A reaction: Not so fast. He earlier rejected the 'intellectualist model' (Idea 8813), so he doesn't think norms have to be fully conscious and open to criticism. So they could be innate, or the result of indoctrination (sorry, teaching), or just forgotten. |
| 6543 | Intentionality comes in degrees [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Intentionality comes in degrees. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: I agree. A footprint is 'about' a foot, in the sense of containing concentrated information about it. Can we, though, envisage a higher degree than human thought? Is there a maximum degree? Everything is 'about' everything, in some respect. |
| 6537 | Teleological views allow for false intentional content, unlike causal and nomological theories [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: The teleological view begins to explain intentionality, and in particular allows brain states and events to have false intentional content; causal and nomological theories of intentionality tend to falter on this last task. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: Certainly if you say thought is 'caused' by the world, false thought become puzzling. I'm not sure I understand the rest of this, but it is an intriguing remark about a significant issue… |
| 6546 | Pain is composed of urges, desires, impulses etc, at different levels of abstraction [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Our phenomenal experience of pain has components - it is a complex, consisting (perhaps) of urges, desires, impulses, and beliefs, probably occurring at quite different levels of institutional abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be true, and offers the reductionist a strategy for making inroads into the supposed irreducable and fundamental nature of qualia. What's it like to be a complex hierarchically structured multi-functional organism? |
| 6547 | The right 'level' for qualia is uncertain, though top (behaviourism) and bottom (particles) are false [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: It is just arbitrary to choose a level of nature a priori as the locus of qualia, even though we can agree that high levels (such as behaviourism) and low-levels (such as the subatomic) can be ruled out as totally improbable. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.6) | |
| A reaction: Very good. People scream 'qualia!' whenever the behaviour level or the atomic level are proposed as the locations of the mind, but the suggestion that they are complex, and are spread across many functional levels in the middle sounds good. |
| 6527 | If energy in the brain disappears into thin air, this breaches physical conservation laws [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: By interacting causally, Cartesian dualism seems to violate the conservation laws of physics (concerning matter and energy). This seems testable, and afferent and efferent pathways disappearing into thin air would suggest energy is not conserved. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: It would seem to be no problem as long as outputs were identical in energy to inputs. If the experiment could actually be done, the result might astonish us. |
| 6528 | In lower animals, psychology is continuous with chemistry, and humans are continuous with animals [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Evolution has proceeded in all other known species by increasingly complex configurations of molecules and organs, which support primitive psychologies; our human psychologies are more advanced, but undeniably continuous with lower animals. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: Personally I find the evolution objection to dualism highly persuasive. I don't see how anyone can take evolution seriously and be a dualist. If there is a dramatic ontological break at some point, a plausible reason would be needed for that. |
| 6554 | Two behaviourists meet. The first says,"You're fine; how am I?" [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Old joke: two Behaviourists meet in the street, and the first says,"You're fine; how am I?" | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], n1.6) | |
| A reaction: This invites the response that introspection is uniquely authoritative about 'how we are', but this has been challenged quite a lot recently, which pushes us to consider whether these stupid behaviourists might actually have a good point. |
| 6545 | If functionalism focuses on folk psychology, it ignores lower levels of function [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: 'Analytical functionalists', who hold that meanings of mental terms are determined by the causal roles associated with them by 'folk psychology', deny themselves appeals to lower levels of functional organisation. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: Presumably folk psychology can fit into the kind of empirical methodology favoured by behaviourists, whereas 'lower levels' are going to become rather speculative and unscientific. |
| 6541 | Functionalism must not be too abstract to allow inverted spectrum, or so structural that it becomes chauvinistic [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: The functionalist must find a level of characterisation of mental states that is not so abstract or behaviouristic as to rule out the possibility of inverted spectrum etc., nor so specific and structural as to fall into chauvinism. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: If too specific then animals and aliens won't be able to implement the necessary functions; if the theory becomes very behaviouristic, then it loses interest in the possibility of an inverted spectrum. He is certainly right to hunt for a middle ground. |
| 6539 | The distinction between software and hardware is not clear in computing [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Even the software/hardware distinction as it is literally applied within computer science is philosophically unclear. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: This is true, and very important for functionalist theories of the mind. Even very volatile software is realised in 'hard' physics, and rewritable discs etc blur the distinction between 'programmable' and 'hardwired'. |
| 6533 | Mental types are a subclass of teleological types at a high level of functional abstraction [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: I am taking mental types to form a small subclass of teleological types occurring for the most part at a high level of functional abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: He goes on to say that he understand teleology in evolutionary terms. There is always a gap between how you characterise or individuate something, and what it actually is. To say spanners are 'a small subclass of tools' is not enough. |
| 6535 | Teleological characterisations shade off smoothly into brutely physical ones [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Highly teleological characterisations, unlike naïve and explicated mental characterisations, have the virtue of shading off fairly smoothly into (more) brutely physical ones. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: Thus the purpose of a car engine, and a spark plug, and the spark, and the temperature, and the vibration of molecules show a fading away of the overt purpose, disappearing into the pointless activity of electrons and quantum levels. |
| 6544 | Identity theory is functionalism, but located at the lowest level of abstraction [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: 'Neuron' may be understood as a physiological term or a functional term, so even the Identity Theorist is a Functionalist - one who locates mental entities at a very low level of abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a striking observation, and somewhat inclines me to switch from identity theory to functionalism. If you ask what is the correct level of abstraction, Lycan's teleological-homuncular version refers you to all the levels. |
| 6530 | We reduce the mind through homuncular groups, described abstractly by purpose [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: I am explicating the mental in a reductive way, by reducing mental characterizations to homuncular institutional ones, which are teleological characterizations at various levels of functional abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: I think this is the germ of a very good physicalist account of the mind. More is needed than a mere assertion about what the mind reduces to at the very lowest level; this offers a decent account of the descending stages of reduction. |
| 6536 | Teleological functionalism helps us to understand psycho-biological laws [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Teleological functionalism helps us to understand the nature of biological and psychological laws, particularly in the face of Davidsonian scepticism about the latter. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: Personally I doubt the existence of psycho-physical laws, but only because of the vast complexity. They would be like the laws of weather. 'Psycho-physical' laws seem to presuppose some sort of dualism. |
| 6542 | A Martian may exhibit human-like behaviour while having very different sensations [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Quite possibly a Martian's humanoid behaviour is prompted by his having sensations somewhat unlike ours, despite his superficial behavioural similarities to us. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: I think this firmly refutes the multiple realisability objection to type-type physicalism. Mental events are individuated by their phenomenal features (known only to the user), and by their causal role (publicly available). These are separate. |
| 6538 | We need a notion of teleology that comes in degrees [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: We need a notion of teleology that comes in degrees. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: Anyone who says that key concepts, such as those concerning the mind, should come 'in degrees' wins my instant support. A whole car engine requires a very teleological explanation, the spark in the sparkplug far less so. |
| 15251 | The attribution of necessity to causation is either primitive animism, or confusion with logical necessity [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: How are we to explain the word 'must' [about causation]? The answer is, I think, that it is either a relic of animism, or else reveals an inclination to treat causal connexion as if it were a form of logical necessity. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge [1940], IV.18) | |
| A reaction: The animism proposal just about makes sense (as a primitive feature of minds), but why would anyone, if they had the time and understanding, dream of treating a regular connection as a 'logical' necessity? |
| 6551 | 'Physical' means either figuring in physics descriptions, or just located in space-time [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: An object is specifically physical if it figures in explanations and descriptions of features of ordinary non-living matter, as in current physics; it is more generally physical if it is simply located in space-time. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 8.5) | |
| A reaction: This gives a useful distinction when trying to formulate a 'physicalist' account of the mind, where type-type physicalism says only the 'postulates of physics' can be used, whereas 'naturalism' about the mind uses the more general concept. |