46 ideas
| 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. |
| 13047 | It is knowing 'why' that gives scientific understanding, not knowing 'that' [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: Knowledge 'that' is descriptive, and knowledge 'why' is explanatory, and it is the latter that provides scientific understanding of our world. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I agree, but of course, knowing 'why' may require a lot of knowing 'that'. People with extensive knowledge 'that' things are so tend to understand why something happens more readily than the rest of us ignoramuses. |
| 13065 | Understanding is an extremely vague concept [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: Understanding is an extremely vague concept. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: True, I suppose, but we usually recognise understanding when we encounter it, and everybody has a pretty clear notion of an 'increase' in understanding. I suspect that the concept is perfectly clear, but we lack any scale for measuring it. |
| 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? |
| 13054 | Correlations can provide predictions, but only causes can give explanations [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: Various kinds of correlations exist that provide excellent bases for prediction, but because no suitable causal relations exist (or are known), these correlations do not furnish explanation. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: There may be problem cases for the claim that all explanations are causal, but I certainly think that this idea is essentially right. Prediction can come from induction, but inductions may be true and yet baffling. |
| 13067 | For the instrumentalists there are no scientific explanations [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: There is a centuries-old philosophical tradition, sometimes referred to by the name of 'instrumentalism', that has denied the claim that science has explanatory power. For the instrumentalists there are no scientific explanations. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: [He quotes Coffa] Presumably it is just a matter of matching the world to the readings on the instruments, aiming at van Fraassen's 'empirical adequacy'. If there are no scientific explanations, does that mean that there are no explanations at all? Daft! |
| 13055 | Good induction needs 'total evidence' - the absence at the time of any undermining evidence [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: Inductive logicians have a 'requirement of total evidence': induction is strong if 1) it has true premises, 2) it has correct inductive form, and 3) no additional evidence that would change the degree of support is available at the time. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 2.4.2) | |
| A reaction: The evidence might be very close at hand, but not quite 'available' to the person doing the induction. |
| 13046 | Scientific explanation is not reducing the unfamiliar to the familiar [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: I reject the view that scientific explanation involves reduction of the unfamiliar to the familiar. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], Pref) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle sometimes seems to imply this account of explanation, and I would have to agree with Salmon's view of it. Aristotle is also, though, aware of real explanations, definitions and essences. People are 'familiar' with some peculiar things. |
| 13058 | Why-questions can seek evidence as well as explanation [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: There are evidence-seeking why-questions, as well as explanation-seeking why-questions. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: Surely we would all prefer an explanation to mere evidence? It seems to me that they are all explanation-seeking, but that we are grateful for some evidence when no full explanation is available. Explanation renders evidence otiose. |
| 13064 | The three basic conceptions of scientific explanation are modal, epistemic, and ontic [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: There are three basic conceptions of scientific explanation - modal, epistemic, and ontic - which can be discerned in Aristotle, and that have persisted down the ages. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 4.1) |
| 13050 | The 'inferential' conception is that all scientific explanations are arguments [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: The 'inferential' conception of scientific explanation is the thesis that all legitimate scientific explanations are arguments of one sort or another. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to imply that someone has to be persuaded of something, and hence seems a rather too pragmatic view. I presume an explanation might be no more than dumbly pointing at conclusive evidence of a cause. Man with smoking gun. |
| 13059 | Ontic explanations can be facts, or reports of facts [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: Proponents of the ontic conception of explanation can say that explanations exist in the world as facts, or that they are reports of such facts (as opposed to the view of explanations as arguments, or as speech acts). | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] I am strongly drawn to the ontic approach, but not sure whether we want facts, or reports of them. The facts are the causal nexus, but which parts of the nexus provide the main aspect of explanation? I'll vote for reports, for now. |
| 13049 | We must distinguish true laws because they (unlike accidental generalizations) explain things [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: The problem is to distinguish between laws and accidental generalizations, for laws have explanatory force while accidental generalizations, even if they are true, do not. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: [He is discussing Hempel and Oppenheim 1948] This seems obviously right, but I can only make sense of the explanatory power if we have identified the mechanism which requires the generalisation to continue in future cases. |
| 13051 | Deductive-nomological explanations will predict, and their predictions will explain [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: The deductive-nomological view has an explanation/prediction symmetry thesis - that a correct explanation could be a scientific prediction, and that any deductive prediction could serve as a deductive-nomological explanation. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: Of course, not all predictions will explain, or vice versa. Weird regularities become predictable but remain baffling. Good explanations may be of unrepeatable events. It is the 'law' in the account that ties the two ends together. |
| 13053 | A law is not enough for explanation - we need information about what makes a difference [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: To provide an adequate explanation of any given fact, we need to provide information that is relevant to the occurrence of that fact - information that makes a difference to its occurrence. It is not enough to subsume it under a general law. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Bromberger for this idea] Salmon is identifying this idea as the beginnings of trouble for the covering-law account of explanation, and it sounds exactly right. |
| 13061 | Flagpoles explain shadows, and not vice versa, because of temporal ordering [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: The height of the flagpole explains the length of the shadow because the interaction between the sunlight and the flagpole occurs before the interaction between the sunlight and the ground. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 3.6) | |
| A reaction: [Bromberger produced the flagpole example] This seems to be correct, and would apply to all physical cases, but there may still be cases of explanation which are not causal (in mathematics, for example). |
| 13045 | Explanation at the quantum level will probably be by entirely new mechanisms [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: My basic feeling about explanation in the quantum realm is that it will involve mechanisms, but mechanisms that are quite different from those that seem to work in the macrocosm. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], Pref) | |
| A reaction: Since I take most explanation to be by mechanisms (or some abstraction analogous to mechanisms), then I think this is probably right (rather than being by new 'laws'). |
| 13062 | Does an item have a function the first time it occurs? [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: In functional explanation, there is a disagreement over whether an item has a function the first time it occurs. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 3.8) | |
| A reaction: This question arises particularly in evolutionary contexts, and would obviously not generally arise in the case of human artefacts. |
| 13063 | Explanations reveal the mechanisms which produce the facts [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: I favour an ontic conception of explanation, that explanations reveal the mechanisms, causal or other, that produce the facts we are trying to explain. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: [He also cites Coffa and Peter Railton] A structure may explain, and only be supported by causal powers, but it doesn't seem to be the causal powers that do the explaining. Is a peg fitting a hole explained causally? |
| 13060 | Can events whose probabilities are low be explained? [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: Can events whose probabilities are low be explained? | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 3.6) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be one of the reasons why explanation must ultimately reside at the level of individual objects and events, rather than residing with generalisations and laws. |
| 13056 | Statistical explanation needs relevance, not high probability [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: Statistical relevance, not high probability, is the key desideratum in statistical explanation. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: I suspect that this is because the explanation will not ultimately be probabilistic at all, but mechanical and causal. Hence the link is what counts, which is the relevance. He notes that relevance needs two values instead of one high value. |
| 13057 | Think of probabilities in terms of propensities rather than frequencies [Salmon] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps we should think of probabilities in terms of propensities rather than frequencies. | |
| From: Wesley Salmon (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation [1989], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Coffa 1974 for this] I find this suggestion very appealing, as it connects up with dispositions and powers, which I take to be the building blocks of all explanation. It is, of course, easier to render frequencies numerically. |
| 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. |
| 5121 | Basing ethics on flourishing makes it consequentialist, as actions are judged by contributing to it [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Basing ethics on human flourishing tends towards utilitarianism or consequentialism; actions, character traits, laws, and so on are to be assessed with reference to their contributions to human flourishing. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Human Flourishing, Ethics and Liberty [1983], 9.2.2) | |
| A reaction: This raises the question of whether only virtue can contribute to flourishing, or whether a bit of vice might be helpful. This problem presumably pushed the Stoics to say that virtue itself is the good, rather than the resulting flourishing. |
| 5120 | What counts as 'flourishing' must be relative to various sets of values [Harman] |
| Full Idea: If we base our ethics on human flourishing, one implication would seem to be moral relativism, since what counts as 'flourishing' seems inevitably relative to one or other set of values. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Human Flourishing, Ethics and Liberty [1983], 9.2.1) | |
| A reaction: This remark seems to make the relativist assumption that all value systems are equal. For Aristotle, flourishing is no more relative than health is. No one can assert that illness has an intrinsically high value in human life. |
| 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. |
| 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. |