[lit-ideas] Re: Tittles--a change of title

  • From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:25:40 +0900

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> All I can say here is that this is the kind of things psychologists might
> try to explain (inductive evidence), and not the kind of thing philosophers
> try to explain (intuition). That is, psychologists seem to be interested in
> why people behave as they do; philosophers in what it is they're doing. (I'm
> really dissatisfied with what I just said but can't think of a better way to
> say it.) Whether or not anyone accepts psychologists' explanations of
> anything is another matter.
>

I wonder if our colleagues here can come up with a more satisfying
formulation.

>
> I think here of Chomsky's devastating review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal
> Behavior, in the journal Language.  Who the scientist, who the philosopher?


Who, indeed.


>
>
> I think Plato wouldn't understand the question.


Why? Is it just that the question wouldn't have occurred to him. Or is
something else going on? (This is the kind of question the anthropologist
finds fascinating.)



> Aristotle has a theory of human action that appeals to how various aspects
> of the psyche affect one another. I don't see any reason why anything he
> says would be incompatible with someone's doing something and describing it
> as John did—as an inference that just seems right, yet could turn out to be
> mistaken. (Aristotle allows for inferences and for mistakes.)


Let's hold that thought.

About Berkeley, I have little to say. He himself thought that esse est
> percipi was compatible with ordinary human doings, described in the ordinary
> way.
>
> Locke is too tough. He has a notion of abstraction (to explain how we can
> get beyond the particular thing before us and talk about kinds of things)
> that I find difficult to present a case for. Reading Locke is like eating
> Grapenuts. I pass.


Over the side with Berkeley and Locke.

>
>
> Hume's views on the 'principle of connexion,' by means of which our ideas
> are related to one another would be worth looking at but I can't summarize
> them. Although Hume talks of other philosophers believing this or that, and
> of their being unable to explain things as well as the author of A Treatise
> of Human Nature, the distinction between philosophy and psychology
> (considered as an empirical enterprise) simply didn't exist for him, so that
> anything one might say about Hume, the philosopher, should be said with the
> understanding that philosophy encompassed far more fields of study between
> 1711 and 1776, than it now does. Still, Hume himself performed no
> experiments or observations; the form of his explanations are fairly
> Kantian: given this, there must be that, even though we experience only the
> 'this.'


Again, let's hold this thought.

>
>
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#Ass
>
> Davidson: see 'Actions, Reasons and Causes,' 1963. (I really don't expect
> anyone to.)


Over the side with Davidson, too.

>
>
> The philosopher whose investigations and burrowings deal most clearly with
> the question at hand is Wittgenstein. I'd say that if one were to rank
> philosophical predilictions in terms of fit, it would be Wittgenstein first,
> the rest nowhere. Yet Wittgenstein himself always claimed that he had no
> theory. 'Do you think I have a theory!'
>
> Why do I think Wittgenstein's thought (which really can't be paraphrased,
> summarized, or assembled in outline form) has the best fit?


Super.


We may on another occasion come back to the thread that leads from Plato to
Leibniz to Kant and then to Chomsky—predicated on the notion that sense data
must awaken, set in motion, or be organized by something, call it the X
factor, that has to be there in the first place.

At this point, however, we have reduced our list to three philosophers,
Aristotle, Hume and Wittgenstein, who may have something useful to say that
cannot be reduced to a summary. They appear to warrant a closer look.

I am happy starting with Wittgenstein and working our way backwards.

John

>
>
-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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