Okay, so here's the thing. Pretty much everywhere in the world where I could conceivably live is effed up right now or could soon be, in one way or another. Maybe this has always been the case, but I'm only starting to notice it.
Any suggestions for happy places to live?
North America:
The United States: The opposition party is offering up the likes of Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich. Really?? That's who the Republicans are okay with? I hope Obama wins; but if he doesn't, I am screwed for the next 4 years. Unless Romney has been, as I suspect, running his campaign on buckets of lies and ends up somehow winning and actually being kind of a wishy-washy oily moderate. That would be less horrible, if rather bizarre.
Mexico: Stuck between a right-wing nutjob, a left-wing nutjob, and a dirty-ass politico leech. I really wouldn't be happy with any of them. Also I'm pretty sure all of them are considering rigging the elections. Ick, ick, ick.
Canada: So many things are wrong with Canada that should not be wrong with Canada. Healthcare? Unbelievable. Copyright law? Incredible. How slow their Internet connections are? Dealbreaker. Sorry, Canada.
South America:
Argentina: I guess Argentina's doing okay, but I can't understand anything they say anyway.
Venezuela: Hugo Chavez.
Chile: I wish they wouldn't have elected Pinera. He's like Silvio Berlusconi crossed with Carlos Slim.
Europe:
Berlusconi in Italy, Greece in a mess, the north is too expensive, the south's in distress; Russia's a headache, the UK's a snob; I guess I could move to Ireland or Denmark or ... Borisov?
No, but see, Belarus has major socio-political issues, like most of Eastern Europe. Still in danger of ethnic cleansing, invasion by foreign powers, or the collapse of civilization as we know it. (I'm exaggerating, but you know).
Ireland has lots of issues too.
Denmark and the Netherlands - I could do those. If I could afford it. Or Switzerland? I guess? If I was 50 years older and on a hefty pension...
Asia:
China? No.
Guess maybe I could live in South Korea or Japan. Maybe. It'd be insane, but yeah. Or Singapore?
Africa:
North, Central, and Southern Africa are all a mess and a half, but in different ways. Just hearing about it makes me whimper and be grateful for Mexico.
Australia & Oceania:
NOW we're talkin'. I could do New Zealand. Live in a hut with some sheep. There's the life.
Antarctica:
No.
So I have realized I'm super-picky and I guess that means I should try to eke out my life wherever I end up, because eventually those problems will be my problems, and hey, I want to be involved in my country's politics, wherever that ends up being. Even if it means I'll fight a losing battle.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Frege's Puzzle
Okay, so philosophy of language was a mess and a half in the 20th century. (We could probably say it is still a mess and a half - even two messes). I don't want to blame it on any one guy, but I think there was a point in time when we all got sidetracked and lost in this use/mention debacle*. We might have found our way again, but I'm not that far into the history of the 20th century to know for sure. I'll get back to you. So far I think we haven't.
* (Don't get me wrong - use/mention is super-important to differentiate! Cartwright would have wanted me to uphold the Great Standards of Ye Olde Analytic Philosophie, and well I will; he's right. It's just that it complicates phil'o'lang a whole lot. Fortunately, what we will be discussing today is wholly related to use/mention, and though it might confuse us (or me) more, it will be good for everybody in the long run).
For more on this problem, Wikipedia is a godsend. (Don't judge me - it's good because it's brief).
So. Reference!!! Frege seems driven to make this distinction between sense (the *way* a term refers to something) and reference (the particular object referred to or denoted).
This is because it annoys the crap outta him when we get sentences like:
(1) a = a and
(2) a = b.
Because, if the only things names have are references (this is what is often called the Direct Reference View), it seems like a = a is saying exactly the same thing as a = b -- namely, you're substituting in an object (say the reference of both "a" and "b" is my cat Luna) and then making the statement. "Luna is Luna" would be what is meant by *both* expressions. But wait, *that* doesn't seem right; it's not even particularly informative.
What if we take each statement to be saying something about the name itself? Then, though (1) would be okay (the name a is the name a), (2) would be clearly false (the name a is the name b? What?).
Frege's solution is to posit these things called senses - which, if you're giving a rather inaccurate and anachronistic gloss, are sort of like mental content. Senses on his own account are essentially everything that's left in meaning when you remove the reference part of meaning. So, the sense of dog is whatever is left of its meaning when you remove its object, namely the/an actual dog. (Did that make it more confusing? Then just think of it as something like mental content, except make it as objective, intersubjective, and not merely subjective as possible - like language. The important bit here is that its 'objective' properties are primary; it is intersubjective in the sense that this objective stuff is accessible to more than one person).
Sometimes people gloss a sense as a mode of presentation of an object, but it would be more right to say that *often* senses are *tied to* particular modes of presentation, rather than saying that senses merely are these modes of presentation.
So, getting back to sentence (2), Frege would say that each term has a different sense, but the same reference; and when you put the equals sign in between them, you're saying something interesting about each independent term (namely that, despite having different senses, which might have led you to believe they referred to different objects, they in fact have the same reference).
It sounds really neat 'n' all, right? Well, it gets messy. (Doesn't everything in philosophy get messy?)
Because, well, what if you want to talk about expressions without references, i.e., empty expressions? Like, what if I want to talk about Shakespeare's Hamlet?
Then sentences like, "Ophelia drowned herself in the river," become a little controversial to gloss, given Frege's view.
There are two options for interpretation that cut across interpretive lines:
A) Ophelia has no reference, just a sense, which is what gives the sentence its meaning. The sense can be described as something other than a mode of presentation.
B) The sentence only looks meaningful; it's really not. There is no mode of presentation because there's no object. Maybe it has a 'pretend meaning', if we 'play along' with the statement, and, e.g., pretend that Ophelia denotes a person.
These different ways of glossing Frege depend on what you take Frege's account of the sense of empty proper names to be. If you take sense to be a mode of presentation, you get result B, in which there just isn't any way in which the object is being presented (since there isn't any object), though perhaps if you pretend that there is then you can still evaluate the sentence within the pretend-world.
If you take sense instead to be something like a definite description, you can get A - so if you gloss "Ophelia" as "Hamlet's object of romantic interest in Shakespeare's Hamlet", or the like, then the sentence has meaning. The problem on this account is, however, the same that comes up with any theory of definite description - for the best objections to descriptivism, we'd have to bring in Kripke. Ultimately it comes down to... well... what it comes down to.
If any name can be replaced with a description, where do names in descriptions get their meaning? And furthermore, even if you give basic concepts (er, meanings) from which all others can be derived, you still have the annoying problem of figuring out exactly WHICH definite description to use for things. Like, how do you come up with the optimal definite description such that you pick out one and only one thing that you want to talk about???
Maybe the requirements for descriptivism aren't *quite* so stringent, but the fact is that one must interpret Frege as either a descriptivist or a non-descriptivist, and I'm not sure what the most charitable interpretation actually *is*. Kripke himself lumps him together with Russell, the prime descriptivist; but many have protested that that's not at all what Frege intended.
Nonetheless, if Frege's a non-descriptivist, we get trapped with B, namely having to 'pretend' that meaningful sentences have meaning. It might not be that terrible; but it'd be a big blow to Frege. It really doesn't seem to be what he intended, either. He might have just been happier saying that the sentence *had* no truth value.
Russellians and logical positivists will have problems with *that*, but that's a topic for another day...
Point is, am I really happy with Frege's views through the mouths of other people? No.
Am I happy with Frege's views through his own mouth? ........well. No. It seems one way to save him is by allowing "sense" to just be this "mental content" stuff; but that's the last thing he wanted. He was like the #1 enemy of psychologism. So maybe we need to bite the bullet and count our losses...
* (Don't get me wrong - use/mention is super-important to differentiate! Cartwright would have wanted me to uphold the Great Standards of Ye Olde Analytic Philosophie, and well I will; he's right. It's just that it complicates phil'o'lang a whole lot. Fortunately, what we will be discussing today is wholly related to use/mention, and though it might confuse us (or me) more, it will be good for everybody in the long run).
For more on this problem, Wikipedia is a godsend. (Don't judge me - it's good because it's brief).
So. Reference!!! Frege seems driven to make this distinction between sense (the *way* a term refers to something) and reference (the particular object referred to or denoted).
This is because it annoys the crap outta him when we get sentences like:
(1) a = a and
(2) a = b.
Because, if the only things names have are references (this is what is often called the Direct Reference View), it seems like a = a is saying exactly the same thing as a = b -- namely, you're substituting in an object (say the reference of both "a" and "b" is my cat Luna) and then making the statement. "Luna is Luna" would be what is meant by *both* expressions. But wait, *that* doesn't seem right; it's not even particularly informative.
What if we take each statement to be saying something about the name itself? Then, though (1) would be okay (the name a is the name a), (2) would be clearly false (the name a is the name b? What?).
Frege's solution is to posit these things called senses - which, if you're giving a rather inaccurate and anachronistic gloss, are sort of like mental content. Senses on his own account are essentially everything that's left in meaning when you remove the reference part of meaning. So, the sense of dog is whatever is left of its meaning when you remove its object, namely the/an actual dog. (Did that make it more confusing? Then just think of it as something like mental content, except make it as objective, intersubjective, and not merely subjective as possible - like language. The important bit here is that its 'objective' properties are primary; it is intersubjective in the sense that this objective stuff is accessible to more than one person).
Sometimes people gloss a sense as a mode of presentation of an object, but it would be more right to say that *often* senses are *tied to* particular modes of presentation, rather than saying that senses merely are these modes of presentation.
So, getting back to sentence (2), Frege would say that each term has a different sense, but the same reference; and when you put the equals sign in between them, you're saying something interesting about each independent term (namely that, despite having different senses, which might have led you to believe they referred to different objects, they in fact have the same reference).
It sounds really neat 'n' all, right? Well, it gets messy. (Doesn't everything in philosophy get messy?)
Because, well, what if you want to talk about expressions without references, i.e., empty expressions? Like, what if I want to talk about Shakespeare's Hamlet?
Then sentences like, "Ophelia drowned herself in the river," become a little controversial to gloss, given Frege's view.
There are two options for interpretation that cut across interpretive lines:
A) Ophelia has no reference, just a sense, which is what gives the sentence its meaning. The sense can be described as something other than a mode of presentation.
B) The sentence only looks meaningful; it's really not. There is no mode of presentation because there's no object. Maybe it has a 'pretend meaning', if we 'play along' with the statement, and, e.g., pretend that Ophelia denotes a person.
These different ways of glossing Frege depend on what you take Frege's account of the sense of empty proper names to be. If you take sense to be a mode of presentation, you get result B, in which there just isn't any way in which the object is being presented (since there isn't any object), though perhaps if you pretend that there is then you can still evaluate the sentence within the pretend-world.
If you take sense instead to be something like a definite description, you can get A - so if you gloss "Ophelia" as "Hamlet's object of romantic interest in Shakespeare's Hamlet", or the like, then the sentence has meaning. The problem on this account is, however, the same that comes up with any theory of definite description - for the best objections to descriptivism, we'd have to bring in Kripke. Ultimately it comes down to... well... what it comes down to.
If any name can be replaced with a description, where do names in descriptions get their meaning? And furthermore, even if you give basic concepts (er, meanings) from which all others can be derived, you still have the annoying problem of figuring out exactly WHICH definite description to use for things. Like, how do you come up with the optimal definite description such that you pick out one and only one thing that you want to talk about???
Maybe the requirements for descriptivism aren't *quite* so stringent, but the fact is that one must interpret Frege as either a descriptivist or a non-descriptivist, and I'm not sure what the most charitable interpretation actually *is*. Kripke himself lumps him together with Russell, the prime descriptivist; but many have protested that that's not at all what Frege intended.
Nonetheless, if Frege's a non-descriptivist, we get trapped with B, namely having to 'pretend' that meaningful sentences have meaning. It might not be that terrible; but it'd be a big blow to Frege. It really doesn't seem to be what he intended, either. He might have just been happier saying that the sentence *had* no truth value.
Russellians and logical positivists will have problems with *that*, but that's a topic for another day...
Point is, am I really happy with Frege's views through the mouths of other people? No.
Am I happy with Frege's views through his own mouth? ........well. No. It seems one way to save him is by allowing "sense" to just be this "mental content" stuff; but that's the last thing he wanted. He was like the #1 enemy of psychologism. So maybe we need to bite the bullet and count our losses...
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Personal Identity Across Possible Worlds
Does your personal identity extend across possible worlds? It seems that typically metaphysicians take it to be the case that a person can have a counterpart in a different possible world - for example, I, Sofia at the actual world (@), might have a counterpart in possible world w, who is exactly like me in all respects except she didn't start this blog post. Is that Sofia also me?
The answer I will give you is the complex, "yes and no". Some metaphysicians will say "yes" without batting an eyelash, while others will growl, frown, and give you the evil eye for even asking.
The following thought experiment is meant to help disentangle these fundamental disagreements at the most hair-splitting level (in the tradition of the best analytic philosophy, which is typically anal-retentive like nobody's business).
Imagine an animal cell in the midst of Prophase. It is living its typical animal cell life, absorbing nutrients through its cell membrane, maintaining homeostasis, and getting fatter. Simultaneously, its DNA copying proteins are hard at work, making a nucleotide-by-nucleotide replica of its existing genetic data.
Now imagine this cell - let's call him Sparky, for fun - doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same ways in exactly the same physical location, but in different possible worlds. So we have Sparky at w1, Sparky at w2, Sparky at w3, and so on, and all of these Sparkies are undergoing DNA replication. Before someone protests that I'm begging the question about Sparky's identity across worlds already, I will make a concession and call Sparky at w1 Sparky1, and Sparky at w2 Sparky2, and so on. It's like the metaphysical version of terrible chatroom names. They could be different individuals, or they could be the same one; but because they're in the same place at the same time doing the same thing, I've given them similar names to make them easier to refer to when we're comparing their relative fates.
So, as cells do, all of these Sparkies will go on to split into two different daughter cells, neither of which will be the original Sparky, but each of which will have the same or roughly the same (depending on how replication goes in the particular world) genetic information.
To make this easier for ourselves, let's establish an (equivalent) point of reference in each world relative to each Sparky, and call the resulting daughter cells either Lefty or Righty, depending on their relative location to us. Thus, we'll have Lefty1 and Righty1 at w1, Lefty2 and Righty2 at w2, and so on, and each LeftyN and RightyN will be the daughter cells that result from the split of SparkyN at wN.
Now, no claims about identity across possible worlds have been made yet. I have simply named everyone in a way that will make everybody easier to pick out.
[...to be continued]
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Dan Dennett and the Framing Problem
I'm reading Dennett's article, "Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI."
The frame problem is, in the context of computer science and the study of artificial intelligence, a bit of a programming riddle. Basically, the big question is - how do you get a robot to filter out unnecessary information reliably and efficiently, in a manner that actually resembles what we call intelligence, when planning out its actions?
The issue is that if you program a robot to do seemingly simple in-world problem-solving, the robot will run into a number of problems when planning its actions. For example: if it wants to get into a room to take something out, it will often have to figure out all sorts of things that seem simple to us, like how hard to push the door, what the likelihood of finding certain items in the room is, whether it will have to execute particular actions or go particular distances to maneuver into and out of the room, and even updating its memory stores (delete from one place, add to another) whenever any item is moved, etc. It will also have to compute what sorts of conclusions (to use Dennett's example, that there is no elephant in the room) to deem irrelevant to the task at hand.
One way to pseudo-solve the problem is to equip the robot with a bunch of "experience" (read: program a bunch of information into it in the form of axioms that it can derive more information from) relevant to the task at hand. A programmer *could* simply program a robot to do the exact same thing given a set of constants and a variable or two. Nonetheless, it still seems like if you try to give a robot a novel problem to solve, it may have to start making some calculations about what kind of information it needs to use, and then it seems like, in ruling out the infinite things it could do but shouldn't, it will never get going.
At least, that's roughly the way Dennett put it.
Ultimately, this is a combination of a storage problem (how much information is enough, and what is the most efficient way to store it?) and an attention problem (given vast stores of available data, what sort of information is actually relevant to the task at hand, and can you pull it out / conclude deductions quickly enough to be useful?).
To quote Minsky:
Sounds like a tough nut to crack.
"What is needed is a system that genuinely ignores most of what it knows," says Dennett in this article. Precisely! That's why I called it partly a problem of attention. Attention helps one focus on what *is* important, and devote as few resources as possible to that which is not (ie, ignore what's not important). That's not to say that giving a label to the thing we need is any solution to the problem, mind. As Dennett points out, we know what we need at the 'phenomenological level', but not at the nuts-and-bolts level.
One interesting thing to note is the important role boredom plays in human reasoning. If we couldn't get bored (as computers don't) we really *would* follow arguments to irrelevant conclusions all the time - if we weren't bored or frustrated, perhaps we'd never be driven to creativity. Hofstadter (1982), I've been told, has a book out on the importance of boredom to memory and creativity.
Back to the framing problem - apparently equipping a system with a set of stereotypes (basic assumptions about the structure of the world and relations of things in it) helps a little bit. Nonetheless, it seems to have its limitations, with very antagonistic environments producing what Dennett calls "insectlike behavior", namely the dumb repetitiveness of a non-intelligent system trying to solve a problem the same way it has tried to solve it before.
If you ask me, I'm with Gibson on this one - the perceptual systems of the human animal (and animals in general) are the place to get clues. Dennett waves off Gibson's 'affordances' as a postulation of "miracle tissue" - attributing those properties to the visual system is still not quite solving the problem of how those properties emerge from their component parts.
Ladies and gents, do I hear trumpets in the distance?! This is where I come in. I'm going to do a little dance with Monsieurs Prinz and Barsalou and come up with something good; maybe even something better!
The frame problem is, in the context of computer science and the study of artificial intelligence, a bit of a programming riddle. Basically, the big question is - how do you get a robot to filter out unnecessary information reliably and efficiently, in a manner that actually resembles what we call intelligence, when planning out its actions?
The issue is that if you program a robot to do seemingly simple in-world problem-solving, the robot will run into a number of problems when planning its actions. For example: if it wants to get into a room to take something out, it will often have to figure out all sorts of things that seem simple to us, like how hard to push the door, what the likelihood of finding certain items in the room is, whether it will have to execute particular actions or go particular distances to maneuver into and out of the room, and even updating its memory stores (delete from one place, add to another) whenever any item is moved, etc. It will also have to compute what sorts of conclusions (to use Dennett's example, that there is no elephant in the room) to deem irrelevant to the task at hand.
One way to pseudo-solve the problem is to equip the robot with a bunch of "experience" (read: program a bunch of information into it in the form of axioms that it can derive more information from) relevant to the task at hand. A programmer *could* simply program a robot to do the exact same thing given a set of constants and a variable or two. Nonetheless, it still seems like if you try to give a robot a novel problem to solve, it may have to start making some calculations about what kind of information it needs to use, and then it seems like, in ruling out the infinite things it could do but shouldn't, it will never get going.
At least, that's roughly the way Dennett put it.
Ultimately, this is a combination of a storage problem (how much information is enough, and what is the most efficient way to store it?) and an attention problem (given vast stores of available data, what sort of information is actually relevant to the task at hand, and can you pull it out / conclude deductions quickly enough to be useful?).
To quote Minsky:
Even if we formulate relevancy restrictions, logistic systems have a problem using them. In In any logistic system, all the axioms are necessarily "permissive" - they all help to permit new inferences to be drawn. Each added axiom means more theorems; none can disappear. There simply is no direct way to add information to tell such a system about kinds of conclusions that should not be drawn... If we try to change this by adding axioms about relevancy, we still produce all the unwanted theorems, plus annoying statements about their irrelevancy. (Minsky, 1981, p. 125)
Sounds like a tough nut to crack.
"What is needed is a system that genuinely ignores most of what it knows," says Dennett in this article. Precisely! That's why I called it partly a problem of attention. Attention helps one focus on what *is* important, and devote as few resources as possible to that which is not (ie, ignore what's not important). That's not to say that giving a label to the thing we need is any solution to the problem, mind. As Dennett points out, we know what we need at the 'phenomenological level', but not at the nuts-and-bolts level.
One interesting thing to note is the important role boredom plays in human reasoning. If we couldn't get bored (as computers don't) we really *would* follow arguments to irrelevant conclusions all the time - if we weren't bored or frustrated, perhaps we'd never be driven to creativity. Hofstadter (1982), I've been told, has a book out on the importance of boredom to memory and creativity.
Back to the framing problem - apparently equipping a system with a set of stereotypes (basic assumptions about the structure of the world and relations of things in it) helps a little bit. Nonetheless, it seems to have its limitations, with very antagonistic environments producing what Dennett calls "insectlike behavior", namely the dumb repetitiveness of a non-intelligent system trying to solve a problem the same way it has tried to solve it before.
If you ask me, I'm with Gibson on this one - the perceptual systems of the human animal (and animals in general) are the place to get clues. Dennett waves off Gibson's 'affordances' as a postulation of "miracle tissue" - attributing those properties to the visual system is still not quite solving the problem of how those properties emerge from their component parts.
Ladies and gents, do I hear trumpets in the distance?! This is where I come in. I'm going to do a little dance with Monsieurs Prinz and Barsalou and come up with something good; maybe even something better!
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Paraconsistent Logic
So, this is just going to be a sort of mental note to myself, but I've recently been interested in the following problem:
Can you convince a person, of any given thing, if they show no commitment to logical consistency?
Let me give an example. For this example, let us assume that "if Z, then X" is actually the case in this world; that is, X really follows from Z. Your interlocutor has granted to you that Z is true, but fails to acknowledge X.
You tell a person, "Oh, but that's not right, the truth is actually that X. See, it follows naturally from 'if Z, then X'."
The person replies, "No, it is the case that not-X."
"But," you say, "You have previously acknowledged that not-X is in direct contradiction of this other belief that you have, Z. And you also acknowledge that if Z, then X. I have given you, and you accept, Z. Why won't you accept X? Isn't that inconsistent?"
And they reply, "Oh I know it's inconsistent, but I really don't care about that."
How would you reply to this person? Would you characterize them as irrational, or just arational?
If they do not at all care about consistency, the whole logical apparatus falls apart. If they're okay with inconsistency, it means that " P & not-P " can be the case. Usually this would work to produce a reductio ad absurdum, but if your interlocutor is unperturbed, well, by golly! what was the point of trying to convince them in the first place?
As it turns out, there are a couple of people (most notably in Australia) working on something called Paraconsistent Logic, which is logic that can deal with contradictions.
I wonder, though, for this logic -
a) Does *everything* follow from P & not-P? Or how do you go about discriminating about what should and should not follow?
b) Would it still work for convincing someone who doesn't care about consistency?
This is an area to look into.
Can you convince a person, of any given thing, if they show no commitment to logical consistency?
Let me give an example. For this example, let us assume that "if Z, then X" is actually the case in this world; that is, X really follows from Z. Your interlocutor has granted to you that Z is true, but fails to acknowledge X.
You tell a person, "Oh, but that's not right, the truth is actually that X. See, it follows naturally from 'if Z, then X'."
The person replies, "No, it is the case that not-X."
"But," you say, "You have previously acknowledged that not-X is in direct contradiction of this other belief that you have, Z. And you also acknowledge that if Z, then X. I have given you, and you accept, Z. Why won't you accept X? Isn't that inconsistent?"
And they reply, "Oh I know it's inconsistent, but I really don't care about that."
How would you reply to this person? Would you characterize them as irrational, or just arational?
If they do not at all care about consistency, the whole logical apparatus falls apart. If they're okay with inconsistency, it means that " P & not-P " can be the case. Usually this would work to produce a reductio ad absurdum, but if your interlocutor is unperturbed, well, by golly! what was the point of trying to convince them in the first place?
As it turns out, there are a couple of people (most notably in Australia) working on something called Paraconsistent Logic, which is logic that can deal with contradictions.
I wonder, though, for this logic -
a) Does *everything* follow from P & not-P? Or how do you go about discriminating about what should and should not follow?
b) Would it still work for convincing someone who doesn't care about consistency?
This is an area to look into.
Lewis and Radical Interpretation
Briefly: Lewis wants to know what, given P (where P is the totality of facts about Karl, his subject, as a physical system), would enable us to solve for the rest of Karl's psychological makeup: his beliefs, desires, the meaning of his statements, and anything else that could be said following these things.
Put another way, Lewis wants to know how beliefs, desires and meanings are normally related to one another, and to sensory input and behavioral output. He believes it is possible to construct a theory that adequately accounts for all of these, given P.
"It must amount to nothing more than a mass of platitudes of common sense," he says of the theory. Why must this be the case? Because Lewis is convinced that the fundamental principles of our common-sense theory of persons (that's a mouthful) already implicitly define belief, desire and meaning.
Perhaps it is just a case of weeding these implicit definitions out and making them explicit?
He does believe that this is the case. Nonetheless, the first formulation of the method he has in this paper, even by his own admission, places too much emphasis on language as a vehicle for belief, and not enough on language as a social practice or behavior as a manifestation of belief. I agree heartily on this latter account. He goes on and gives two more methods of discovery that depend less on these sorts of things, the second of which I believe to be most like the way we naturally go about trying to determine belief.
Agustín Rayo has asked us: "Lewis thinks there is a tight connection between folk psychology and rationality, and accuses his critics of not paying enough attention to this connection. Is he right?"
Perhaps he is partly right. Perhaps the kind of theory he wants is one that science would not necessarily give us, but that would be a systematization of the way we ordinarily go about ascribing belief. Nonetheless, I'm not quite sure why he needs such a systematization in the first place. Is it that the concepts of belief, desire and meaning are so important that, even if science were to break them up into component parts that did not remotely resemble the conception of them in the human mind, we ought to stubbornly find a way to keep using them? What justification is there for this view of his?
And a further question: why challenge people to systematize a method we all use for purely socially beneficial purposes? Why does there have to be a science to belief ascription?
Sept. 18th enmendation:
Lewis' paper (or section) called "Reduction of Mind" is quite brilliant in its discussion of the failures of contemporary philosophy to address narrow content. I also like most of what he has to say about beliefs. If any of you are interested, it is worth a read.
Put another way, Lewis wants to know how beliefs, desires and meanings are normally related to one another, and to sensory input and behavioral output. He believes it is possible to construct a theory that adequately accounts for all of these, given P.
"It must amount to nothing more than a mass of platitudes of common sense," he says of the theory. Why must this be the case? Because Lewis is convinced that the fundamental principles of our common-sense theory of persons (that's a mouthful) already implicitly define belief, desire and meaning.
Perhaps it is just a case of weeding these implicit definitions out and making them explicit?
He does believe that this is the case. Nonetheless, the first formulation of the method he has in this paper, even by his own admission, places too much emphasis on language as a vehicle for belief, and not enough on language as a social practice or behavior as a manifestation of belief. I agree heartily on this latter account. He goes on and gives two more methods of discovery that depend less on these sorts of things, the second of which I believe to be most like the way we naturally go about trying to determine belief.
Agustín Rayo has asked us: "Lewis thinks there is a tight connection between folk psychology and rationality, and accuses his critics of not paying enough attention to this connection. Is he right?"
Perhaps he is partly right. Perhaps the kind of theory he wants is one that science would not necessarily give us, but that would be a systematization of the way we ordinarily go about ascribing belief. Nonetheless, I'm not quite sure why he needs such a systematization in the first place. Is it that the concepts of belief, desire and meaning are so important that, even if science were to break them up into component parts that did not remotely resemble the conception of them in the human mind, we ought to stubbornly find a way to keep using them? What justification is there for this view of his?
And a further question: why challenge people to systematize a method we all use for purely socially beneficial purposes? Why does there have to be a science to belief ascription?
Sept. 18th enmendation:
Lewis' paper (or section) called "Reduction of Mind" is quite brilliant in its discussion of the failures of contemporary philosophy to address narrow content. I also like most of what he has to say about beliefs. If any of you are interested, it is worth a read.
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