15 ideas
| 9327 | Organisms understand their worlds better if they understand themselves [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Organisms come to better understand their worlds by coming to better understand themselves and the ways in which their own structures engage their worlds. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §III) | |
| A reaction: Van Gulick is defending a higher-order theory of consciousness, but this strikes me as a good rationale for the target of philosophy, which has increasingly (since Descartes) focused on understanding our own minds. |
| 11211 | If a sound conclusion comes from two errors that cancel out, the path of the argument must matter [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If a designated conclusion follows from the premisses, but the argument involves two howlers which cancel each other out, then the moral is that the path an argument takes from premisses to conclusion does matter to its logical evaluation. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], II) | |
| A reaction: The drift of this is that our view of logic should be a little closer to the reasoning of ordinary language, and we should rely a little less on purely formal accounts. |
| 11210 | Standardly 'and' and 'but' are held to have the same sense by having the same truth table [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If 'and' and 'but' really are alike in sense, in what might that likeness consist? Some philosophers of classical logic will reply that they share a sense by virtue of sharing a truth table. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000]) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard view which Rumfitt sets out to challenge. |
| 11212 | The sense of a connective comes from primitively obvious rules of inference [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: A connective will possess the sense that it has by virtue of its competent users' finding certain rules of inference involving it to be primitively obvious. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], III) | |
| A reaction: Rumfitt cites Peacocke as endorsing this view, which characterises the logical connectives by their rules of usage rather than by their pure semantic value. |
| 9325 | In contrast with knowledge, the notion of understanding emphasizes practical engagement [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: In contrast with standard notions of knowledge, the concept of understanding emphasizes the element of practical engagement from the outset. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §II) | |
| A reaction: This could be the very interesting germ of a huge revolution in our approach to epistemology, which I find rather appealing. Plato's desire that knowledge should have 'logos' seems to me in the same area. It sounds rather internalist, which is good. |
| 9326 | Knowing-that is a much richer kind of knowing-how [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Knowing-that is a much richer kind of knowing-how. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §II) | |
| A reaction: This thought could rather rapidly revive the discredited notion of knowing-how. I think it might slot into an account of the mind in terms of levels, so that my internalist view of knowledge emerges at higher levels, built on more basic responses. |
| 2602 | What experience could prove 'If a=c and b=c then a=b'? [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Please tell me what the corporeal motion is that is capable of forming some common notion to the effect that 'things which are equal to a third thing are equal to each other'. | |
| From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.366) |
| 9319 | Is consciousness a type of self-awareness, or is being self-aware a way of being conscious? [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Is consciousness just a special type of self-awareness, or is being self-aware a special way of being conscious? | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This is a really good key question, which has hovered over the debate since Locke's definition of a person (as 'self-aware'). I take the self to be a mechanism of most brains, which is prior to consciousness. Maybe the two are inseparable. |
| 9320 | Higher-order theories divide over whether the higher level involves thought or perception [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Higher-order thought (HOT) models treat metastates as thought-like, and higher-order perception (HOP) models regard them as at least quasi-perceptual and resulting from some form of inner monitoring or inner sense. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §I) | |
| A reaction: I would understand 'thought' to at least partially involve judgements. The HOT theory (Carruthers) seems to suit epistemological foundationalists, who want truth to enter on the ground floor. This pushes me towards the HOP model (Lycan) as more plausible. |
| 9321 | Higher-order models reduce the problem of consciousness to intentionality [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Higher-order models would effectively reduce the problem of consciousness to that of intentionality. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §I) | |
| A reaction: This gives the bigger picture - that higher-order theories are the cutting edge of attempts to give a naturalistic, reductivist account of consciousness. That seems to be the only way to go, so we should encourage them in the enterprise. |
| 9322 | Maybe qualia only exist at the lower level, and a higher-level is needed for what-it-is-like [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Some higher-order theorists say we have qualitative but unconscious mental states of color or pain (qualia), but there is nothing it is like to be in such a state, which needs higher-order awareness. The meta-states are devoid of qualia. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §I.5) | |
| A reaction: He calls this the 'stranded qualia' problem. Clearly one begins to sharpen Ockham's Razor at this point, if the higher-level state isn't contributing something. I don't rule out unconscious qualia. The strength of a real pain is distorted in a dream. |
| 2600 | The mind's innate ideas are part of its capacity for thought [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I have never written or taken the view that the mind requires innate ideas which are something distinct from its own faculty of thinking. | |
| From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365) |
| 2601 | Qualia must be innate, because physical motions do not contain them [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The ideas of pains, colours, sounds etc. must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions. | |
| From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365) | |
| A reaction: Simple and brilliant! We know perfectly well that there is no redness zooming through the air from a tomato (or the air would be pink!). Redness occurs when the light arrives, so we add the redness, so it is innate. |
| 11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that affirming not-A is more complex than affirming the atomic sentence A itself, with the latter determining its sense. But we could learn 'not' directly, by learning at once how to either affirm A or reject A. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], IV) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems fairly anti-Fregean in spirit, because it looks at the psychology of how we learn 'not' as a way of clarifying what we mean by it, rather than just looking at its logical behaviour (and thus giving it a secondary role). |
| 9324 | From the teleopragmatic perspective, life is largely an informational process [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: From the teleopragmatic perspective, life itself is largely an informational process. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006]) | |
| A reaction: From the cynical perspective a human is just 'blood and foul smell in a bag', but that may not give you whole story. The point here is that the informational view will cover both the genetic and the mental levels of human life. True but unilluminating? |