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virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« on: 2004-10-21 06:40:10 » |
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<quote>
"Suppose XYZ is the formula for Coke (I'm told they keep one in a vault
in Atlanta). So, every (actual) sample of Coke is a sample of XYZ and
vice versa. It doesn't follow that 'Coke is XYZ' is true in every
possible world. To the contrary, the Coke people could change the recipe
tomorrow if they wished to and, no doubt, there are possible worlds in
which they do. The new stuff will still be Coke if they say it is."
<end quote>
A new article (a book review, actually) by Jerry Fodor appeared in the
"London Review of Books". Before getting there, for those not in the
know, Fodor is famous for his major work in the Computational Theory of
Mind and especially the Language of Thought.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/
Fodor is also infamous for his jabs on Dennett, Pinker, E.O.Wilson and
others. One might call him an ingenious sarcastic old bastard.
Look!
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n21/fodo01_.html
The trouble with psychological Darwinism
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n02/fodo01_.html
His recent piece gets into deep waters... He reviews a book on Kripke's
revival of Analytic Philosophy. Analytic Philosophy suffered a big blow
as a result of a very infuential paper of Quine in the 50s:
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html
but Kripke's idea of "possible words" was hailed as a revival. Here is
Fodor's article:
Water's water everywhere
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/fodo01_.html
<quote>
Sometimes I wonder why nobody reads philosophy. [...] And it's mostly
Anglophone analytic philosophy that it has lost interest in. As far as I
can tell, 'Continental' philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Habermas,
Heidegger, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre and the rest) continue to hold
their market. Even Hegel has a vogue from time to time, though he is
famous for being impossible to read. All this strikes me anew whenever I
visit a bookstore. The place on the shelf where my stuff would be if
they had it (but they don't) is just to the left of Foucault, of which
there is always yards and yards. I'm huffy about that; I wish I had his
royalties.
Royalties aside, what have they got that we haven't? It's not the
texture of their prose I shouldn't think, since most of us write better
than most of them.
<snip>
I offer a very condensed account of changes, over the last fifty years
or so, in the way that analytic philosophers have explained to one
another what it is that they're up to. It is, however, less historical
than mythopoetic. The details aren't awfully reliable, but maybe the
moral will edify.
Stage one: conceptual analysis. A revisionist account of the
philosophical enterprise came into fashion just after World War Two.
Whereas it used to be said that philosophy is about, for example,
Goodness or Existence or Reality or How the Mind Works, or whether there
is a Cat on the Mat, it appears, in retrospect, that that was just a
loose way of talking. Strictly speaking, philosophy consists (or
consists largely, or ought to consist largely) of the analysis of our
concepts and/or of the analysis of the 'ordinary language' locutions
that we use to express them. It's not the Good, the True or the
Beautiful that a philosopher tries to understand, it's the corresponding
concepts of 'good' 'beautiful' and 'true'.
<snip>
Still, there was felt to be trouble pretty early on. For one thing, no
concepts ever actually did get analysed, however hard philosophers
tried. (Early in the century there was detectable optimism about the
prospects for analysing 'the', but it faded). Worse, the arguments that
analytic philosophers produced were often inadvertently hilarious.
Examples [...] First argument: the issue is whether there is survival
after death, and the argument purports to show that there can't be.
'Suppose an airplane carrying ten passengers crashes and that seven of
the ten die. Then what we would say is that three passengers survived,
not that ten passengers survived. QED.' Second argument: the issue is
whether people are identical with their bodies. 'Suppose you live with
Bob . . . who went into a coma on Wednesday . . . Suppose that a friend
calls on Thursday and says: "I need to talk to Bob: is he still in
England?" You might naturally answer: "Yes, but he's in a coma." Now
fill in the story as before, but suppose that Bob had died. When the
friend says "I need to talk to Bob: is he still in England?" would you
really answer, "Yes, but he's dead," even if you knew that Bob's (dead)
body still exists and is still in England?' Presumably not, so QED once
again.
<snip>
Stage two: Quine. In 1953, W.V. Quine published an article called 'Two
Dogmas of Empiricism'. Easily the most influential paper of the
generation, its reverberations continue to be felt whenever philosophers
discuss the nature of their enterprise. In a nutshell, Quine argued that
there is no (intelligible, unquestion-begging) distinction between
'analytic' (linguistic/conceptual) truth and truth about matters of fact
(synthetic/contingent truth). In particular, there are no a priori,
necessary propositions (except, perhaps, for those of logic and
mathematics). Quine's target was mainly the empiricist tradition in
epistemology, but his conclusions were patently germane to the agenda of
analytical philosophy. If there are no conceptual truths, there are no
conceptual analyses either. If there are no conceptual analyses,
analytic philosophers are in jeopardy of methodological unemployment.
<snip>
Stage three: Kripke. The way to save analytic philosophy from the
embarrassments Quine raised is to construct some proprietary notion of
necessity that doesn't presuppose the notion of conceptual truth. It
would be nice if there were some close connection between necessity, so
construed, and a priority. That would explain how such necessities could
be accessible with the epistemic equipment professional philosophers
have available: some common sense and three or four years of
postgraduate study. We arrive at the crux. Kripke has made major
contributions to several areas of philosophy, including the
interpretation of modal logic. (Don't ask.) He has radically revised
once standard views about the semantics of proper names. He has
sponsored a revival of an essentialist programme in metaphysics that
traces back to Aristotle and the Scholastics. There's more, but it's all
fairly technical stuff; if you're interested, you'll find readable
expositions in Hughes.
<snip>
Here's the basic idea. One drops the traditional thesis that necessary
propositions are linguistic or conceptual, and one substitutes a
metaphysical account of necessity. Philosophy is to recognise not just
the actual world that we live in but also a plethora of 'possible
worlds'. The actual world is itself possible, of course; but so, too, is
the world that's just like this one except that Mr James (a domestic
feline who's currently having a nap) is awake and chasing mice.
Similarly, there are worlds that are just like ours except that there's
nobody in them, and worlds just like ours except that everybody is in
them except President Bush. Likewise there are (brave, new) worlds in
which I get Foucault's royalties and he gets mine. And so on. Notice,
however, that there is no (possible) world in which 2+2=5; and none in
which bachelors are married; and none in which George V reigned, but for
less than a while. So, given this new ontology, we can identify
necessarily true propositions with the ones that are true in every
possible world, necessarily false propositions with the ones that are
false in every possible world, and contingent propositions with the ones
that are true in some possible worlds but not in all. Here we seem to
have a nonconceptual notion of necessity. Whereas analytic philosophy
used to be seen as tracing relations among concepts, it is now seen as
tracing relations among possible worlds.
A quick example will show how this is supposed to work. Some years ago,
Hilary Putnam raised the following question, which analytic philosophy
has been gnawing at ever since. Suppose somebody discovered a sort of
stuff that is, to casual inspection, just like water (it's wet, it's
clear and potable, it freezes at zero centigrade, has specific gravity
1, dissolves sugar, puts out fires and so forth) but the molecules of
which have some chemical structure other than H2O ('XYZ' by convention).
You are now invited to consult your intuitions: is XYZ water? If not,
why not? The canonical intuition is that XYZ isn't water because being
made of H2O is an essential property of water; whatever is a sample of
water is ipso facto a sample of H2O, and nothing else could be. (It's an
epistemological worry for essentialists that not everybody has the
canonical intuition; in fact, some people don't have it quite
vociferously, and perhaps they're right not to. But it would ease the
exposition if you will kindly agree to ignore that. You can always
change your mind about it later.)
Interesting things follow if the intuition is granted; including, in
particular, interesting modal things. For example, if it's right that
nothing but H2O would count as water, then water is H2O in every
possible world (more precisely, in every possible world where there is
any). That is, given the modal intuitions, it's necessary that all and
only water is H2O according to the metaphysical construal of necessity.
Note further that this necessary truth is available a priori; at no
point in the course of its discovery did philosophy stir from the
armchair in which we found it. A little caution is, however, required
here. What's a priori is the hypothetical proposition: 'If samples of
water are samples of H2O, and nothing else is, then it's necessary that
water is H2O.' By contrast, it isn't a priori that samples of water are
samples of H2O; to the contrary, that's just the sort of grimy empirical
generalisation that chemists discover inductively in their laboratories,
to the accompaniment of bangs and stinks. A gratifying division of
labour is thus perceptible: the chemists do the heavy lifting and the
philosophers do the heavy thinking. It's clear from the empirical
research that water is H2O in every possible world that is compatible
with chemistry. What remains for philosophers to determine is whether
water is H2O in every possible world tout court. Presumably it's our
modal intuitions that decide this if anything does; they would seem to
be all there is that's left unaccounted for by the time the chemists
finish their investigations. It's therefore unsurprising that, in
practice, analytic philosophers take it for granted that modal
intuitions aren't fallible.
This story ramifies in all sorts of directions; Hughes will fill you in.
Once again, suffice it for our purposes to consider just the
methodological implications. The situation pre-Kripke was that
philosophers were supposed to disclose necessary, a priori truths that
they arrived at by analysing words or concepts. Quine's attack seemed to
put this project in jeopardy. If there are no conceptual truths, then, a
fortiori, there are no conceptual truths for philosophy to deliver. But
now it appears that Kripke has saved the bacon since there are, in any
case, plenty of metaphysical necessities. And, as we've seen,
metaphysical necessities can be discovered a priori by examining
philosophically relevant intuitions. These are not, however, intuitions
about relations among concepts: they're modal intuitions about what's
possible and what isn't. In effect, analytic philosophy was doing the
right sort of thing (viz, analysis) but for the wrong sort of reasons.
That being straightened out, the pangs of conscience can now be soothed
and everybody can go back to doing what he learned to do in graduate
school. General rejoicing in the philosophical community. Plus or minus
a bit, this is how Hughes sees the current methodological situation. I
think that it's probably the majority view.
But I doubt that it can be sustained. In this respect, the significance
of Kripke's work has, I think, been much overestimated. If analytic
philosophy had methodological problems pre-Kripke, it continues to have
the very same problems, and for the very same reasons. Something about
that to conclude.
A kind of question that doesn't get asked often enough is: what are
modal intuitions intuitions of? Consider, for example, the intuition
that water is necessarily H2O. How do things have to be for it to be
right? Or wrong? What's its 'truth maker', to use the philosophical
jargon? An answer springs to mind in light of the previous discussion,
but it doesn't survive reflection: 'For water to be necessarily H2O is
just for water to be H2O in every possible world. For water not to be
necessarily H2O is just for there to be possible worlds in which there's
H2O but no water (or water but no H2O). That all follows from Kripke's
account of necessity and is unproblematic. So there's nothing to worry
about.' I guess that's alright as far as it goes; it is, as remarked,
just a consequence of defining 'necessarily true' as 'true in all
possible worlds'.
But the question I was trying to raise wasn't: 'What about possible
worlds makes it necessary that water is H2O?' My question was: 'What
about water makes it necessary that water is H2O'? There must be
something about water that does because, notice, there are plenty of
kinds of stuff for which the corresponding modal claim would be false.
For example, there's Coca Cola; Coke behaves quite differently from
water in modal contexts. Suppose XYZ is the formula for Coke (I'm told
they keep one in a vault in Atlanta). So, every (actual) sample of Coke
is a sample of XYZ and vice versa. It doesn't follow that 'Coke is XYZ'
is true in every possible world. To the contrary, the Coke people could
change the recipe tomorrow if they wished to and, no doubt, there are
possible worlds in which they do. The new stuff will still be Coke if
they say it is. Likewise, mutatis mutandis, for smog. Every sample of
smog is a sample of CO2 and god knows what else; but that's only
contingently true. Perhaps tomorrow they'll find a way to pollute the
air by using XYZ. Then, ceteris paribus (according to my modal
intuitions), the right story would be that they've found a new way to
make smog, not that they've found a way to make something that seems
just like smog but isn't.
So then, what's the actual difference between water, on the one hand,
and Coke and smog, on the other, that accounts for these modal
differences? I can only think of one answer: if water is actually H2O,
then 'water is necessarily H2O' is some kind of conceptual truth. The
idea (endorsed in one form or other by many analytic philosophers) is
that 'water' is the concept of a 'material kind'. What's special about
material kinds is that what possible things of that kind there are
depends on what actual things of that kind there are. In effect, the
kind is defined by reference to its actual instances. So, water is a
material kind because every sample is ipso facto required to have the
same microstructure that actual samples do. It follows that, if water is
H2O in this world, it's H2O in every possible world. It also follows
that samples of XYZ couldn't be water samples even if they seemed to be.
Compare smog. What possible samples of smog have in common with actual
samples isn't what they are (would be) made of but rather the way they
(would) affect your eyes, nose, throat and view. In short, if K is the
concept of a material kind, and if every actual thing that K applies to
is made of n-stuff, then it's necessary that every thing that K (would)
apply to is made of n-stuff. As far as I can make out, this is more or
less the view that Hughes himself holds. He says: 'If it should turn out
that only philosophers baulk at classifying XYZ as water, I am ready to
defer in my usage to the non-philosophical majority and say that
"water", like "glue", is not the name of a kind with a chemical
essence.' I guess what's going on is that, because he thinks Kripke
refuted Quine, Hughes feels free to treat the modal status of 'water is
H2O' as linguistically (or conceptually) determined. So it is, after
all, our grasp of concepts (or our mastery of language) that underwrites
the modal intuition that 'water is H2O' is necessary. It's just like the
old days, really.
It's past time to draw the moral, which I take to be that a plethora of
claims to the contrary notwithstanding, you can't escape Quine's web
just by opting for a metaphysical notion of necessity. Not, anyhow, if
the latter is grounded in intuitions about what possible worlds there
are. That's because some story is needed about what makes such
intuitions true (or false) and, as far as I can see, the only candidates
are facts about concepts. It's 'water' being a material kind concept
that vindicates the intuition that water is necessarily H2O. Well, but
if Quine is right and there aren't any such facts about concepts, then
there is nothing to vindicate modal intuitions. Accordingly, if the
methodology of analytic philosophy lacked a rationale pre-Kripke, it
continues to do so.
---
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DrSebby
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...Oh, you smell of lambs!
     
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RE: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #1 on: 2004-10-21 14:07:05 » |
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...i'm sure im being naive here but i dont see the source of the quandry
here. Coke is a brand name, Coke is a drinking beverage - so when people
think "Coke", they think of the bubbly feeling and flavor they experience
when drinking it. Water on the other hand is thought of in a more neutral
tone - such that the scientific properties are taken into account(since
water is used in a very very large number of industries and processes). so
if this new 'water' can interact equally in all respects with all matter,
just as the real water would, then it can be called 'water'...but this is
quite impossible. similarly, Coke could be put up to the same tests if one
wanted to be precise..and without knowing the formula, could determine if
the imposter were just that.
...besides, there is a substance which fits the water question perfectly
isn't there??? D2O...deuterium x 2 and an oxygen atom should get you
exactly what your puzzle stated, and yet it does not, cannot interact in the
exact same way in which normal H2O does with all things.
drsebby
----Original Message Follows----
From: rhinoceros <rhinoceros@freemail.gr>
Reply-To: virus@lucifer.com
To: virus@lucifer.com
Subject: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere
(?)
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 13:40:10 +0300
<quote>
"Suppose XYZ is the formula for Coke (I'm told they keep one in a vault in
Atlanta). So, every (actual) sample of Coke is a sample of XYZ and vice
versa. It doesn't follow that 'Coke is XYZ' is true in every possible world.
To the contrary, the Coke people could change the recipe tomorrow if they
wished to and, no doubt, there are possible worlds in which they do. The new
stuff will still be Coke if they say it is."
<end quote>
A new article (a book review, actually) by Jerry Fodor appeared in the
"London Review of Books". Before getting there, for those not in the know,
Fodor is famous for his major work in the Computational Theory of Mind and
especially the Language of Thought.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/
Fodor is also infamous for his jabs on Dennett, Pinker, E.O.Wilson and
others. One might call him an ingenious sarcastic old bastard.
Look!
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n21/fodo01_.html
The trouble with psychological Darwinism
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n02/fodo01_.html
His recent piece gets into deep waters... He reviews a book on Kripke's
revival of Analytic Philosophy. Analytic Philosophy suffered a big blow as a
result of a very infuential paper of Quine in the 50s:
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html
but Kripke's idea of "possible words" was hailed as a revival. Here is
Fodor's article:
Water's water everywhere
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/fodo01_.html
<quote>
Sometimes I wonder why nobody reads philosophy. [...] And it's mostly
Anglophone analytic philosophy that it has lost interest in. As far as I can
tell, 'Continental' philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger,
Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre and the rest) continue to hold their market.
Even Hegel has a vogue from time to time, though he is famous for being
impossible to read. All this strikes me anew whenever I visit a bookstore.
The place on the shelf where my stuff would be if they had it (but they
don't) is just to the left of Foucault, of which there is always yards and
yards. I'm huffy about that; I wish I had his royalties.
Royalties aside, what have they got that we haven't? It's not the texture of
their prose I shouldn't think, since most of us write better than most of
them.
<snip>
I offer a very condensed account of changes, over the last fifty years or
so, in the way that analytic philosophers have explained to one another what
it is that they're up to. It is, however, less historical than mythopoetic.
The details aren't awfully reliable, but maybe the moral will edify.
Stage one: conceptual analysis. A revisionist account of the philosophical
enterprise came into fashion just after World War Two. Whereas it used to be
said that philosophy is about, for example, Goodness or Existence or Reality
or How the Mind Works, or whether there is a Cat on the Mat, it appears, in
retrospect, that that was just a loose way of talking. Strictly speaking,
philosophy consists (or consists largely, or ought to consist largely) of
the analysis of our concepts and/or of the analysis of the 'ordinary
language' locutions that we use to express them. It's not the Good, the True
or the Beautiful that a philosopher tries to understand, it's the
corresponding concepts of 'good' 'beautiful' and 'true'.
<snip>
Still, there was felt to be trouble pretty early on. For one thing, no
concepts ever actually did get analysed, however hard philosophers tried.
(Early in the century there was detectable optimism about the prospects for
analysing 'the', but it faded). Worse, the arguments that analytic
philosophers produced were often inadvertently hilarious. Examples [...]
First argument: the issue is whether there is survival after death, and the
argument purports to show that there can't be. 'Suppose an airplane carrying
ten passengers crashes and that seven of the ten die. Then what we would say
is that three passengers survived, not that ten passengers survived. QED.'
Second argument: the issue is whether people are identical with their
bodies. 'Suppose you live with Bob . . . who went into a coma on Wednesday .
. . Suppose that a friend calls on Thursday and says: "I need to talk to
Bob: is he still in England?" You might naturally answer: "Yes, but he's in
a coma." Now fill in the story as before, but suppose that Bob had died.
When the friend says "I need to talk to Bob: is he still in England?" would
you really answer, "Yes, but he's dead," even if you knew that Bob's (dead)
body still exists and is still in England?' Presumably not, so QED once
again.
<snip>
Stage two: Quine. In 1953, W.V. Quine published an article called 'Two
Dogmas of Empiricism'. Easily the most influential paper of the generation,
its reverberations continue to be felt whenever philosophers discuss the
nature of their enterprise. In a nutshell, Quine argued that there is no
(intelligible, unquestion-begging) distinction between 'analytic'
(linguistic/conceptual) truth and truth about matters of fact
(synthetic/contingent truth). In particular, there are no a priori,
necessary propositions (except, perhaps, for those of logic and
mathematics). Quine's target was mainly the empiricist tradition in
epistemology, but his conclusions were patently germane to the agenda of
analytical philosophy. If there are no conceptual truths, there are no
conceptual analyses either. If there are no conceptual analyses, analytic
philosophers are in jeopardy of methodological unemployment.
<snip>
Stage three: Kripke. The way to save analytic philosophy from the
embarrassments Quine raised is to construct some proprietary notion of
necessity that doesn't presuppose the notion of conceptual truth. It would
be nice if there were some close connection between necessity, so construed,
and a priority. That would explain how such necessities could be accessible
with the epistemic equipment professional philosophers have available: some
common sense and three or four years of postgraduate study. We arrive at the
crux. Kripke has made major contributions to several areas of philosophy,
including the interpretation of modal logic. (Don't ask.) He has radically
revised once standard views about the semantics of proper names. He has
sponsored a revival of an essentialist programme in metaphysics that traces
back to Aristotle and the Scholastics. There's more, but it's all fairly
technical stuff; if you're interested, you'll find readable expositions in
Hughes.
<snip>
Here's the basic idea. One drops the traditional thesis that necessary
propositions are linguistic or conceptual, and one substitutes a
metaphysical account of necessity. Philosophy is to recognise not just the
actual world that we live in but also a plethora of 'possible worlds'. The
actual world is itself possible, of course; but so, too, is the world that's
just like this one except that Mr James (a domestic feline who's currently
having a nap) is awake and chasing mice. Similarly, there are worlds that
are just like ours except that there's nobody in them, and worlds just like
ours except that everybody is in them except President Bush. Likewise there
are (brave, new) worlds in which I get Foucault's royalties and he gets
mine. And so on. Notice, however, that there is no (possible) world in which
2+2=5; and none in which bachelors are married; and none in which George V
reigned, but for less than a while. So, given this new ontology, we can
identify necessarily true propositions with the ones that are true in every
possible world, necessarily false propositions with the ones that are false
in every possible world, and contingent propositions with the ones that are
true in some possible worlds but not in all. Here we seem to have a
nonconceptual notion of necessity. Whereas analytic philosophy used to be
seen as tracing relations among concepts, it is now seen as tracing
relations among possible worlds.
A quick example will show how this is supposed to work. Some years ago,
Hilary Putnam raised the following question, which analytic philosophy has
been gnawing at ever since. Suppose somebody discovered a sort of stuff that
is, to casual inspection, just like water (it's wet, it's clear and potable,
it freezes at zero centigrade, has specific gravity 1, dissolves sugar, puts
out fires and so forth) but the molecules of which have some chemical
structure other than H2O ('XYZ' by convention). You are now invited to
consult your intuitions: is XYZ water? If not, why not? The canonical
intuition is that XYZ isn't water because being made of H2O is an essential
property of water; whatever is a sample of water is ipso facto a sample of
H2O, and nothing else could be. (It's an epistemological worry for
essentialists that not everybody has the canonical intuition; in fact, some
people don't have it quite vociferously, and perhaps they're right not to.
But it would ease the exposition if you will kindly agree to ignore that.
You can always change your mind about it later.)
Interesting things follow if the intuition is granted; including, in
particular, interesting modal things. For example, if it's right that
nothing but H2O would count as water, then water is H2O in every possible
world (more precisely, in every possible world where there is any). That is,
given the modal intuitions, it's necessary that all and only water is H2O
according to the metaphysical construal of necessity. Note further that this
necessary truth is available a priori; at no point in the course of its
discovery did philosophy stir from the armchair in which we found it. A
little caution is, however, required here. What's a priori is the
hypothetical proposition: 'If samples of water are samples of H2O, and
nothing else is, then it's necessary that water is H2O.' By contrast, it
isn't a priori that samples of water are samples of H2O; to the contrary,
that's just the sort of grimy empirical generalisation that chemists
discover inductively in their laboratories, to the accompaniment of bangs
and stinks. A gratifying division of labour is thus perceptible: the
chemists do the heavy lifting and the philosophers do the heavy thinking.
It's clear from the empirical research that water is H2O in every possible
world that is compatible with chemistry. What remains for philosophers to
determine is whether water is H2O in every possible world tout court.
Presumably it's our modal intuitions that decide this if anything does; they
would seem to be all there is that's left unaccounted for by the time the
chemists finish their investigations. It's therefore unsurprising that, in
practice, analytic philosophers take it for granted that modal intuitions
aren't fallible.
This story ramifies in all sorts of directions; Hughes will fill you in.
Once again, suffice it for our purposes to consider just the methodological
implications. The situation pre-Kripke was that philosophers were supposed
to disclose necessary, a priori truths that they arrived at by analysing
words or concepts. Quine's attack seemed to put this project in jeopardy. If
there are no conceptual truths, then, a fortiori, there are no conceptual
truths for philosophy to deliver. But now it appears that Kripke has saved
the bacon since there are, in any case, plenty of metaphysical necessities.
And, as we've seen, metaphysical necessities can be discovered a priori by
examining philosophically relevant intuitions. These are not, however,
intuitions about relations among concepts: they're modal intuitions about
what's possible and what isn't. In effect, analytic philosophy was doing the
right sort of thing (viz, analysis) but for the wrong sort of reasons. That
being straightened out, the pangs of conscience can now be soothed and
everybody can go back to doing what he learned to do in graduate school.
General rejoicing in the philosophical community. Plus or minus a bit, this
is how Hughes sees the current methodological situation. I think that it's
probably the majority view.
But I doubt that it can be sustained. In this respect, the significance of
Kripke's work has, I think, been much overestimated. If analytic philosophy
had methodological problems pre-Kripke, it continues to have the very same
problems, and for the very same reasons. Something about that to conclude.
A kind of question that doesn't get asked often enough is: what are modal
intuitions intuitions of? Consider, for example, the intuition that water is
necessarily H2O. How do things have to be for it to be right? Or wrong?
What's its 'truth maker', to use the philosophical jargon? An answer springs
to mind in light of the previous discussion, but it doesn't survive
reflection: 'For water to be necessarily H2O is just for water to be H2O in
every possible world. For water not to be necessarily H2O is just for there
to be possible worlds in which there's H2O but no water (or water but no
H2O). That all follows from Kripke's account of necessity and is
unproblematic. So there's nothing to worry about.' I guess that's alright as
far as it goes; it is, as remarked, just a consequence of defining
'necessarily true' as 'true in all possible worlds'.
But the question I was trying to raise wasn't: 'What about possible worlds
makes it necessary that water is H2O?' My question was: 'What about water
makes it necessary that water is H2O'? There must be something about water
that does because, notice, there are plenty of kinds of stuff for which the
corresponding modal claim would be false. For example, there's Coca Cola;
Coke behaves quite differently from water in modal contexts. Suppose XYZ is
the formula for Coke (I'm told they keep one in a vault in Atlanta). So,
every (actual) sample of Coke is a sample of XYZ and vice versa. It doesn't
follow that 'Coke is XYZ' is true in every possible world. To the contrary,
the Coke people could change the recipe tomorrow if they wished to and, no
doubt, there are possible worlds in which they do. The new stuff will still
be Coke if they say it is. Likewise, mutatis mutandis, for smog. Every
sample of smog is a sample of CO2 and god knows what else; but that's only
contingently true. Perhaps tomorrow they'll find a way to pollute the air by
using XYZ. Then, ceteris paribus (according to my modal intuitions), the
right story would be that they've found a new way to make smog, not that
they've found a way to make something that seems just like smog but isn't.
So then, what's the actual difference between water, on the one hand, and
Coke and smog, on the other, that accounts for these modal differences? I
can only think of one answer: if water is actually H2O, then 'water is
necessarily H2O' is some kind of conceptual truth. The idea (endorsed in one
form or other by many analytic philosophers) is that 'water' is the concept
of a 'material kind'. What's special about material kinds is that what
possible things of that kind there are depends on what actual things of that
kind there are. In effect, the kind is defined by reference to its actual
instances. So, water is a material kind because every sample is ipso facto
required to have the same microstructure that actual samples do. It follows
that, if water is H2O in this world, it's H2O in every possible world. It
also follows that samples of XYZ couldn't be water samples even if they
seemed to be. Compare smog. What possible samples of smog have in common
with actual samples isn't what they are (would be) made of but rather the
way they (would) affect your eyes, nose, throat and view. In short, if K is
the concept of a material kind, and if every actual thing that K applies to
is made of n-stuff, then it's necessary that every thing that K (would)
apply to is made of n-stuff. As far as I can make out, this is more or less
the view that Hughes himself holds. He says: 'If it should turn out that
only philosophers baulk at classifying XYZ as water, I am ready to defer in
my usage to the non-philosophical majority and say that "water", like
"glue", is not the name of a kind with a chemical essence.' I guess what's
going on is that, because he thinks Kripke refuted Quine, Hughes feels free
to treat the modal status of 'water is H2O' as linguistically (or
conceptually) determined. So it is, after all, our grasp of concepts (or our
mastery of language) that underwrites the modal intuition that 'water is
H2O' is necessary. It's just like the old days, really.
It's past time to draw the moral, which I take to be that a plethora of
claims to the contrary notwithstanding, you can't escape Quine's web just by
opting for a metaphysical notion of necessity. Not, anyhow, if the latter is
grounded in intuitions about what possible worlds there are. That's because
some story is needed about what makes such intuitions true (or false) and,
as far as I can see, the only candidates are facts about concepts. It's
'water' being a material kind concept that vindicates the intuition that
water is necessarily H2O. Well, but if Quine is right and there aren't any
such facts about concepts, then there is nothing to vindicate modal
intuitions. Accordingly, if the methodology of analytic philosophy lacked a
rationale pre-Kripke, it continues to do so.
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RE: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #2 on: 2004-10-22 11:35:04 » |
|
Quote from: DrSebby on 2004-10-21 14:07:05
...i'm sure im being naive here but i dont see the source of the quandry
here. Coke is a brand name, Coke is a drinking beverage - so when people
think "Coke", they think of the bubbly feeling and flavor they experience
when drinking it. Water on the other hand is thought of in a more neutral
tone - such that the scientific properties are taken into account(since
water is used in a very very large number of industries and processes).
|
It isn't that straightforward to put Coke and water into separate categories. How would you classify Dasani, the Coca Cola company's bottled water product? Is the composition of Dasani the same in all possible worlds (like water) or possibly different (like Coke)? If I understand the original article I'm with Quine and (surprisingly) Fodor on this one, definitions are not objective facts.
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Re: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere
(?)
« Reply #3 on: 2004-10-22 10:59:06 » |
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<quote>
"Suppose XYZ is the formula for Coke (I'm told they keep one in a vault
in Atlanta). So, every (actual) sample of Coke is a sample of XYZ and
vice versa. It doesn't follow that 'Coke is XYZ' is true in every
possible world. To the contrary, the Coke people could change the recipe
tomorrow if they wished to and, no doubt, there are possible worlds in
which they do. The new stuff will still be Coke if they say it is."
<end quote>
[Dr Sebby]
> ...i'm sure im being naive here but i dont see the source of the quandry
> here. Coke is a brand name, Coke is a drinking beverage - so when
> people think "Coke", they think of the bubbly feeling and flavor they
> experience when drinking it. Water on the other hand is thought of in a
> more neutral tone - such that the scientific properties are taken into
> account(since water is used in a very very large number of industries
> and processes). so if this new 'water' can interact equally in all
> respects with all matter, just as the real water would, then it can be
> called 'water'...but this is quite impossible. similarly, Coke could be
> put up to the same tests if one wanted to be precise..and without
> knowing the formula, could determine if the imposter were just that.
>
[rhinoceros]
You are right, of course. The quandary was in the analytic philosopher's
attempt to arrive at reasoning free of empirical matters. The example
brings up a case of different modal contexts (chemistry vs brand name).
Quine's first argument against analyticity was exactly against the
belief that there is "some fundamental cleavage between truths which are
_analytic_, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and
truths which are _synthetic_, or grounded in fact."
http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html
I'll add one more example which somehow clarifies the point. It is a
case where one should ask "why do you ask" or "what are you getting at"
before even starting to address the question.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/#4
<quote>
"A particularly vivid way to feel the force of Quine's challenge is
afforded by a recent case that came before the Ontario Supreme Court
concerning whether laws that confined marriage to heterosexual couples
violated the equal protection clause of the constitution (see Halpern et
al 2001). The question was regarded as turning in part on the meaning of
the word 'marriage', and each party to the dispute solicited affidavits
from philosophers, one of whom claimed that there was a sense of the the
word that was analytically tied to heterosexuality, the other that there
wasn't. Putting aside the complex socio-political issues, Quine's
challenge can be regarded as a reasonably sceptical request to know
precisely what the argument is about, and how on earth any serious
theory of the world might settle it. It certainly wouldn't seem to be
any help to hear philosophers simply claim that they know marriage
is/isn't necessarily heterosexual on the basis of 'an act of rational
insight [into] the propositional content itself,' or because they found
the inference from marriage to heterosexuality 'primitively compelling'!"
<end quote>
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Re: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #4 on: 2004-10-22 16:31:11 » |
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Greetings.
I hated reading the article. That said, I did not quite understand
everything. Not at all. I will continue trying, though, and thanks for the
links, anyway.
All I know is I recognized some similarities to things I have tried to
understand earlier on. Just tell me if I'm wrong.
First, as paraphrased in a later post,
<snip>Quine's first argument against analyticity was exactly against the
belief that there is "some fundamental cleavage between truths which are
_analytic_, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and
truths which are _synthetic_, or grounded in fact.</snip>
refers to the early scholastic debate about the universals (realists vs.
nominalists), doesn't it?
Now, Fodor's attempt to combine these positions, all this talk about
possible worlds etc. sounds exactly like Wittgenstein, doesn't it? Too bad I
surrendered to the Tractatus around proposition 3.331 (and you don't want to
see the mind map I drew so far).
I will do some more reading, but at least tell me if I'm on the right
track...
Björn
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Re: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #5 on: 2004-10-23 00:13:32 » |
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[hell-kite]
Greetings.
I hated reading the article. That said, I did not quite understand
everything. Not at all. I will continue trying, though, and thanks for the
links, anyway.
All I know is I recognized some similarities to things I have tried to
understand earlier on. Just tell me if I'm wrong.
First, as paraphrased in a later post,
<snip>Quine's first argument against analyticity was exactly against the
belief that there is "some fundamental cleavage between truths which are
_analytic_, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and
truths which are _synthetic_, or grounded in fact.</snip>
refers to the early scholastic debate about the universals (realists vs.
nominalists), doesn't it?
[rhinoceros]
No, I don't think it has anything to do with the old question of what is "yellowness" and what is "triangularity." It was about a philosophical line which has been trying to single out useful "analytic" propositions, i.e propositions which are true no matter what the facts. This is easy to do if we stay within the domain of mathematics and logic, but many problems arise anywhere else because of the intricacies of the concepts of definition and synonymy. This link that I already gave explains things pretty well.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/
[hell-kite]
Now, Fodor's attempt to combine these positions, all this talk about
possible worlds etc. sounds exactly like Wittgenstein, doesn't it? Too bad I
surrendered to the Tractatus around proposition 3.331 (and you don't want to
see the mind map I drew so far).
[rhinoceros]
Fodor expressed his scepticism regarding the success of analyticity to produce useful true "fact-free" sentences.
The issue does seem somehow related to Wittgenstein. For one, analyticity is an offspring of logical positivism with which Wittgenstein's early work (the "Tractatus") was associated. Like the analytic philosophers (and many others) he believed that our concepts define our experience which we understand only through words (although he was not looking for meaning). He also believed that all the big philosophical questions were nothing but misuse of the language and would dissolve if we restated them properly.
It is very interesting that in "Tractatus" Wittgenstein believed that language corresponds to facts (and that the world itself consists of facts -- not objects), while in his later work (published as "Philosophical Investigations") he revised this view and he supported that language is in fact a series of games that people play, each with its own rules. In a way, this brings him further away from the analytics who try to pin down immutable truths in language.
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Re: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #6 on: 2004-10-23 05:10:40 » |
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Thanks for the clarification, rhino.
Definitely have to do some more reading... I have the "Philosophical
Investigations" lying around, too, but since the foreword says it somewhat
builds on the "Tractatus" I postponed reading it (even though I hear it is
easier). Would you nevertheless recommend reading it, not having finished
W.'s first work?
I have more questions, but I rather refer to a philosophy overview instead
of abusing you for one...
Thanks anyway!
Björn
p.s.: I've seen Passion o t Christ yesterday, and was surprised to find it
far less outrageous than I expected. The Jews and the Romans get away pretty
bad, of course, but still, I think it is a dangerously - memetically -
powerful movie. All due respect to the HOW it was made, but obviously forget
about the WHAT are its contents.
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RE: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #7 on: 2004-10-23 05:44:52 » |
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rhinoceros
Sent: 21 October 2004 12:40 PM
<snip>Fodor is famous for his major work in the Computational Theory of
Mind and especially the Language of Thought. </snip>
[Blunderov] A most hearty welcome home to our prodigal horned one!
As usual with a Rhinoceros post, I find myself with a lot of neglected
reading to catch up on and so it is with some trepidation that I venture
the question(s); does the computational theory of mind offer an account
of emotion? Do emotions compute?
I have heard it said that we never have 'a thought' without first having
an emotion. I wonder (and I admit that I am only now just beginning to
find out about Wittgenstein) if this, if true, does not support (what I
understand to be) his contention that there are no philosophical
'problems' but only 'puzzles'. IF the well-spring of thought does not
compute, then perhaps all this jumping through the hoops of reason is
really no more than a circus entertainment. Let me hasten to add that I
am not comfortable with this suspiciously solipsistic musing and will be
delighted if it turns out that emotion does in fact 'compute'.
Or is this all totally off-beam? Gosh, but this stuff is hard to do!
Best Regards and calloo callay.
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Re: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #8 on: 2004-10-23 07:37:55 » |
|
Good Morning South Africa!
With the due and never-to-be-neglected caution of the questionable validity
of ANYTHING (even the words & thoughts behind this), emotions do compute as
far as evolutionary psychology says, don't they? (cf.
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/emotion.html)
Btw, compute means algorithmic processing, no? Input - processing - output?
(substrate dependant, of course, Mr Dennett & Dawkins, we don't want to have
the memes excluded...)
To give a personal statement, I find it very unfortunate that we are faced
with such a dichotomy in the everyday use of rationality and emotionality
(might be convenient, but it's not very precise). Reason and feeling simply
are intricately connected, this cannot be different, for emotions (well, I
use this word, some may use others, but the argument remains) constitute our
motivations to behave, and thinking rationally is behaviour, too.
Likely enough, especially for an opponent of the concept of free will as I
am, there is lots of unconscious processing going on before anything you do.
I find the concept of free will ten times as unjustified as the ten
commandments, given the working dispositions of the human biology.
So emphatically yes, there is no thought without the (e)motion to think it.
Greetings from
Björn
p.s.: Coincidentally (or not so coincidentally, given the conscious or
unconscious memetic processing we are "exposed" to), we come back to Erik's
definition of faith, which is just the same as motivation, which is grounded
on emotions. We all must have faith in what we do. The "superiority" of
science probably isn't one of qualitative difference of contents, for
scientists, too, believe and behave "irrationally"; it is one of method, for
the method implies the possibility of mistake.
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Re: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #9 on: 2004-10-23 07:40:51 » |
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post scriptum:
Oh, and out of condolence, that is, sympathy, that is, sym-pathy, that is,
suffering with you:
<snip>Gosh, but this stuff is hard to do!</snip>
You're damn right!
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Re: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #10 on: 2004-10-24 03:10:51 » |
|
I thought Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was pretty understandable, and I’ve never read his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (though I’ve seen snippets of it in articles about Wittgenstein’s philosophy—and the Tractatus is definitely on my to-do-eventually list). It’s been a few years since I’ve read the Investigations, so I should probably re-read it. But I’d definitely recommend it regardless of whether or not you’ve read any of Wittgenstein’s other writings, if only for his elucidation of ambiguities, as in the concept of “chairness”—fuzzy boundaries, family resemblances, and all that.
The sections I have marked as being the most informative about his concept of language games are 23 and 65–84 of the first part of the Investigations.
_____________
And as to The Passion of What’s-His-Face, I just got around to seeing the video a couple weeks ago, myself, and I finally wrote a brief review of it on my LiveJournal here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lenken
and crossposted it to the Atheism LiveJournal here:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/atheism/360314.html
I’m trying to raise awareness about the movie, being as how the godless lefties of the liberal media pretty much ignored it. ;-)
_____________
Gorogh <gorogh@pallowrun.de> wrote:
Thanks for the clarification, rhino.
Definitely have to do some more reading... I have the "Philosophical
Investigations" lying around, too, but since the foreword says it somewhat
builds on the "Tractatus" I postponed reading it (even though I hear it is
easier). Would you nevertheless recommend reading it, not having finished
W.'s first work?
I have more questions, but I rather refer to a philosophy overview instead
of abusing you for one...
Thanks anyway!
Björn
p.s.: I've seen Passion o t Christ yesterday, and was surprised to find it
far less outrageous than I expected. The Jews and the Romans get away pretty
bad, of course, but still, I think it is a dangerously - memetically -
powerful movie. All due respect to the HOW it was made, but obviously forget
about the WHAT are its contents.
’Tis better to have loved and lost
than never to have known what it’s like
to have sex with someone besides yourself. —LenKen
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RE: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #11 on: 2004-10-24 08:55:51 » |
|
Sent: 23 October 2004 01:38 PM
[Hell Kite]
Good Morning South Africa!
[Blunderov] Top of the morning to you too comrade. (I have got this
right I hope - Hell Kite is your nome de plume?)
[Hell Kite]
With the due and never-to-be-neglected caution of the questionable
validity
of ANYTHING (even the words & thoughts behind this), emotions do compute
as
far as evolutionary psychology says, don't they? (cf.
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/emotion.html)
[Blunderov] Thank you for this deeply important and fascinating link.
Taken together with Rhino's pointers, I am experiencing several sorts of
revelation all at once at the moment - a most gratifying state of
affairs!
[Hell Kite]
Btw, compute means algorithmic processing, no? Input - processing -
output?
(substrate dependant, of course, Mr Dennett & Dawkins, we don't want to
have
the memes excluded...)
To give a personal statement, I find it very unfortunate that we are
faced
with such a dichotomy in the everyday use of rationality and
emotionality
(might be convenient, but it's not very precise). Reason and feeling
simply
are intricately connected, this cannot be different, for emotions (well,
I
use this word, some may use others, but the argument remains) constitute
our
motivations to behave, and thinking rationally is behaviour, too.
[Blunderov] I derived much encouragement from the evolutionary
psychology link that you posted. It set me to wondering whether the
higher cognitive functions are not an adaptation to orchestrate the
emotions which are, as I learn, themselves programs for orchestrating
survival instincts into appropriate responses. (Considered in this
hierarchical light there may yet be hope for the idea of 'free will' but
let's not digress too much.)
This in turn led me to wonder whether religion is not in fact an actual
fully fledged 'emotion', or at least a complex of them. This, if true,
would go some way to explaining a number of puzzling observations. Like
why it is that religion is both so ubiquitous and so ancient. And why
the gist of it is so universal. And why it is so common for the
religious to describe their experience as something intuitive. Also the
so called 'god module' springs to mind.
It seems possible that the religious emotion (if emotion it be) may have
quite easily evolved in order to deal with one of the most enduring
threats to humans down the ages, namely and to whit, other humans. It
provides for the possibility of cohesion in very large bands of hominids
which might otherwise be hard to achieve.
Following from this, if I may presume upon the patience of those
assembled, arises the idea that the only way to persuade people to give
up their primitive notions of 'god' is to convince them that it is
actually dangerous, not only to them, but also to their children. And I
think a good case can be made for this. Historically, religion has been
a major cause of war. We can see this happening right now in both
Palestine and Iraq.(But perhaps this is a rather scant hope with persons
who do not really believe that they will die.) <sighs>
The point is that differing religions provide for conflicts which are by
definition intractable. This may not always have been too much of a
problem in the past because large pockets of humanity have usually been
separated from each other by geographical boundaries of one sort or
another. These large pockets of hominids have usually had a largely
homogenous religion, the dissenters having been systematically weeded
out.
But now we have a global village in which all these religions have
constant contact with each other. Add to this the fact that WOMD, all
efforts to contrary notwithstanding, are proliferating. Not to mention
the scramble for increasingly diminishing resources.
Luckily, I think it can be argued, natural selection has provided us
with a mechanism that offers some chance of avoiding Armageddon, namely
the mechanism of reason.
The emotions have 'computed' very successfully for humans but evolution
is in it for the long haul and collateral damage is acceptable to
evolution. Welcomed even. Emotion does not always seem to compute that
well for hominids in the here and now and the consequences of this, in
this day and age, may well exceed the capacity of the species to survive
them. This is what reason fixes. Or might, given a chance.
Thank you for your patience. All of the above is rather clumsy and
unpolished I know.
[Hell Kite]
Likely enough, especially for an opponent of the concept of free will as
I
am, there is lots of unconscious processing going on before anything you
do.
I find the concept of free will ten times as unjustified as the ten
commandments, given the working dispositions of the human biology.
[Blunderov] Yes, In Satre's splendidly ironic phrase, 'we are doomed to
be free'.
[Hell Kite]
So emphatically yes, there is no thought without the (e)motion to think
it.
p.s.: Coincidentally (or not so coincidentally, given the conscious or
unconscious memetic processing we are "exposed" to), we come back to
Erik's
definition of faith, which is just the same as motivation, which is
grounded
on emotions. We all must have faith in what we do. The "superiority" of
science probably isn't one of qualitative difference of contents, for
scientists, too, believe and behave "irrationally"; it is one of method,
for
the method implies the possibility of mistake.
[Blunderov] I'm not sure that I entirely agree. Of course absolute
certainty is not possible, but some things are more probably true than
others. It's a matter of degree surely? A scientist who has faith that
an experiment is repeatable is (IMO) expending a great deal less of that
commodity than a person who believes that he will rise again on
judgement day.
Best Regards.
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Re: virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #12 on: 2004-10-28 18:39:20 » |
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Good evening.
Seems like all the talk about faith and motivation made me temporarily lose
mine... simply could not sit down and write these overdue lines... but now
let me answer your post, Blunderov. Looks like some thinking went into your
post...
----- Warning: Incoherent thinking ahead! Likely enough, tomorrow I will
regret to have posted it (si tacuisses...) -----
Your hypothesis regarding the function of religion is interesting - it never
occured to me that its evolution (if genetic evolution it be) might be
related to the emotion-motivation-complex and its being essential in
competition with other hominid groups. It sounds pretty
hardcore-sociobiological, but granted that there has been significant
selection pressure exerted by those "other" groups, it's thinkable.
One might refer to meme-driven evolution, too, that is, interaction of memes
and genes - or make it a plainly memetic matter. Yet, since it is imho true
that the "religious instinct" is deeply rooted in the human psyche, you
proposition has its merits. But lets get a bit more into detail...
As to the hierarchical structure of the human brain, it seems to be a
neurobiological fact, doesn't it? My mental model contains the very feasible
notion that those subcortical areas which are involved in emotional
processing (which in turn project to the even more behaviourally "primitive"
nuclei of the brain stem, the endocrine system and such) are orchestrated
mostly via inhibitive projections from the "higher" cortical areas (take out
a cat's neocortex and you get incredible outbreaks of aggressive
behaviour...).
By stating that religion is a fundamentally emotional concept, it implies
this sort of "life of its own" with only limited access through neocortex
functioning... and you are right, this in turn integrates a lot of
observations, such as religion's intuitive nature, the heavy reliance on
personal experience, the
not-being-open-to-arguments-for-they-simply-know-(read:
feel)-that-God-exists, the behavioural phenomena such as affinity to
violently contradictions etc.
Then again, we have to be careful. My critical attitude towards evolutionary
psychology in the broad sense has once more been fuelled, this time by
Fodor's revision of one Pinker's books... anyway, some more thinking on the
nature of religion (makes me wonder if this is the appropriate thread):
What is the function of religion on a more cognitive level? Isn't it that it
answers questions about the world, ESPECIALLY questions about causality and
contingency, thus somewhat satisfying our need for control? Along the lines
of your suggestion, could it not be that the "religious drive" is, more or
less, the rationalised outgrowth of basal learning processes (conditioning
and such)? These processes are - to my knowledge - supposed to work on any
level of brain hierarchy, but especially on lower levels. Also, aversive
conditioning (didn't think about the others yet) has a very high involvement
of emotional structures, especially the amygdala.
To rephrase this: Humans MUST rationalise - i.e., make explicit their
thoughts and conform them to their categories of thinking. If they MUST
rationalise, this applies not only to emotions etc., but also to the most
basic processes such as conditioning (which are, of course, fuelled by the
(evolutionary HIGHLY adaptive) "desire" to identify contingencies in one's
psychological environment). If religion answers the aforementioned questions
mostly, may it not be to a good part the rationalised, explicit form of
these processes? Do we have to translate "god" with "cause", or better,
"force that causes otherwise inexplicable effects"?
Just a thought.
The question is, of course, how differs science? It tries to explain, too,
but maybe not as intuitively; maybe it does not "use" fundamental learning
processes to rationalise them afterwards, but "uses" these rationalisations
in the first place? Religion - concrete, science - abstract? Then again, to
ask for the last causes - even if the answer be "god" - is pretty abstract,
is it not?
Just a thought.
Thanks for reading this far. Tell me if something was of value.
Incoherence taking over once more. To bed, to bed...
Björn
p.s.: "Hell-kite" is correct... nome d'mauvais would be more appropriate,
though! }:-><
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Othello. Thou dost conspire against thy friend, Iago,
If thou but think'st him wrong'd, and mak'st his ear
A stranger to thy thoughts.
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the.bricoleur
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Re:virus: Jerry Fodor on Analytic Philosophy: Water's water everywhere (?)
« Reply #13 on: 2004-10-29 04:36:37 » |
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Blunderov,
Quote:I have heard it said that we never have 'a thought' without first having
an emotion. |
I would go so far as to say that all thought is emotion.
Björn,
Quote:| The question is, of course, how differs science? |
Of course both are attempts to build models of the world. Perhaps where they differ is that science does not make claim to an absolute truth, and science has beliefs embedded with doubt which it calls ‘experiment’. The latter could just be me though.
the bricoleur
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