[lit-ideas] Re: the first lines are the argument referred by
- From: Julie Krueger <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2011 06:49:49 -0500
Can someone refer me to a site to the basics of (or beginning) symbolic
logic? My Dad was heavily into it and as a child we played Woof N Proof,
and he taught me alot about symbolic logic, but then that was (I don't want
to count how many) decades ago. I definitely need to brush up.
Julie Krueger
On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 6:38 AM, Adriano Palma <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> the argument is a straight application of identity (in either
> formulation you like, for informal purposes take it as a 2nd order one)
>
> 1. x=y then , for all properties/predicates P(y) IFF P(x) — [I use the
> strongest for simplicity]
>
> 2. {from 1, by contrap} if P(y) & not-P(x), THEN y isn't identical to x
> 3. apply to "x is a thought" and "y is a brain state", conclude y isn't
> identical to x
>
> qed
>
> that is the argument
>
>
> >>> Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> 11/4/2011 1:31 PM >>>
> *From:* Adriano Palma <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
> **
>
> >it seems essentially correct (up to and excluding physics) Descartes
> does have a real argument (see e.g. J. Perry on pre-conceived naturalism)
>
> This is not enough to key me into what that "real argument" is? Or even
> whether "real" here means valid - or something less?
>
> >most of what you say is rather well known
>
> Is this to imply it is therefore uncontroversial (or just that we've all
> heard it all [or nearly all] before)? If "uncontroversial" that would seem
> remarkable in this field.
>
> It seems unlikely that some of Popper's key points were anything like
> accepted (never mind uncontroversial) at the time of his writing, and afair
> at least one academic review of TSAIB took it as defending Cartesian
> Dualism. A subsequent introductory text like Colin McGinn's "The Character
> of Mind", which attempts to reflect contemporary thinking (though Popper is
> not found important enough to bear consideration in this field), seems to
> take it that dualism implies a Cartesian mental 'substance' [though, and
> hardly consistently, McGinn does not assume a physical monism equally
> implies a Cartesian physical substance] and that the problem of causation
> is at the root of the problems of dualism. These are both contra Popper's
> contentions that dualism need not imply a mental 'substance' and that
> problems of causation do not afford a strong argument against dualism as
> problems of causation attend understanding even the interaction of
> different kinds of physical entity [e.g. physical monism].
>
> > (I myself did not notice the Rylean claim that Descartes is original and
> new in his dualism, do you have a quote somewhere supporting the claim you
> made?)
>
> Here I would suggest that it is perhaps "rather well known" that
> Descartes' specific account of dualism was "original and new". This
> leaves open, of course, whether Descartes was "original and new in his
> dualism" in the sense of being anything like the first dualist, rather than
> merely the first Cartesian. He wasn't, says Popper, anything like the first
> dualist.
>
> This leaves open what Ryle thought. I have no "The Concept of Mind" to
> hand, so will confine myself to amplifying what Popper says vis-a-vis Ryle,
> which admittedly falls short of claiming that Ryle claims Descartes was the
> first dualist of any stripe. Ryle does, however, refer expressly to the
> "Cartesian myth" and sees this as a "fairly new fangled legend" [Ryle at
> p.77 of The Physical Basis of Mind]. The "Cartesian myth" Ryle rejects is
> actually, according to Popper, the "popular ancient legend" of the psycheas a
> shade that may survive the body - a legend that Descartes in fact,
> says Popper, "most clearly rejected".
>
> Ryle has 16 page references in the TSAIB's "Index of Names", and there is
> a whole section, P5-30, titled "The Ghost in the Machine", where Popper
> refers to "Gilbert Ryle's views in his most remarkable book, The Concept
> of Mind."
>
> Now, in my view, it is useful to see Popper's comments on Ryle as
> indicating that Ryle's position is, in Popper's view, something of a fudge
> as to the actual metaphysics at stake, a fudge that Popper's own specific
> theory of World 12&3 is designed to avoid. For example, Popper writes
> that,"Taking Ryle's book as a whole, there seems to be a general tendency
> to deny the existence of most subjective conscious experiences, and a
> suggestion that they should be replaced by sheer physical states - by
> dispositional states, by dispositions to behave. However, there are many
> places in Ryle's book in which it is admitted that we may genuinely feel these
> states." [Possible fudge, as to whether these feels are sheer
> physicalstates]. And while Ryle notes that the general trend of The
> Concept of Mind "will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatized as
> 'behaviourist'" [p.327], Popper comments (drily imo), "Yet Ryle is
> decidedly not a materialist (in the sense of the principle of physicalism).
> Of course, he is no dualist; but he is definitely not a physicalist or
> monist." So what is he? Something of a metaphysical fudger perhaps, and
> perhaps because his school of thought still subscribes to the
> anti-metaphysical stance of the empiricist/positivistic tradition from
> which it emerged (and to which it remains indebted, as is indicated by
> Ryle's views on self-knowledge and self-observation, which for Popper
> retain the imprint of flawed positivistic thinking in line with the
> traditional empiricism we can trace back to Locke and Hume, where all
> knowledge is derived from sense-based observation). This kind of fudge is
> indicated again by the following quotation from Ryle, which, depending on
> taste, might seem the height of philosophical good sense or simply
> high-sounding evasiveness of the underlying metaphysical issues: "Man need
> not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a
> machine...There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis
> that perhaps he is a man." Some might reply that the supposedly hazardous
> hypothesis that "Man...is a man" is 'rather well known' (and not much
> disputed), and this hypothesis does not tell us (but simply fudges) to what
> extent man is a machine or what is the extent and character of the
> non-machinistic aspects of man.
>
> Ryle, like many in the Oxford School, may be characterised as a
> 'metaphysical flat-earther' : the world is metaphysically flat, not layered
> and differentiated with different metaphysical dimensions. Being 'flat', it
> is what it is, and there is no need to give it some specific metaphysical
> character (as if there were some other metaphysical dimension it could be
> contrasted with) - rather we should guard against views that try to impute
> some specific metaphysical character to it (for example, views like
> Popper's theory of World123). This kind of anti-metaphysical stance can be
> traced at least as far back as Hume and was given later currency in the
> dogmas of sense and nonsense proposed by the Logical Positivists and the
> early Wittgenstein. In a less explicit form it still held sway in the
> school of Ordinary Language Philosophy or Oxford school and also in the
> later Wittgenstein.
>
> Despite this fudge, Ryle is clear on one thing, says Popper: "[Ryle] also
> explicitly declares (p.328) 'that the two-worlds story is a myth'.
> (Presumably, the three-worlds story is even worse)." [TSAIB p.104].
>
> Popper later observes [TSAIB p.116], "We learn to distinguish between
> bodies and minds. (This is not, as has been argued especially by Gilbert
> Ryle, a philosopher's invention. It is as old as the memory of
> mankind..)....Even the theory of the brain as the seat of the mind is at
> least 2,500 years old."
>
> Popper's criticism of Ryle here is amplified at P5 section 44, "A Problem
> To Be Solved By What Follows", which deserves better than parsing:
> "One of my main aims in writing on the ancient history of the mind-body
> problem is to show the baselessness of the doctrine that this problem is
> nothing but part of a modern ideology and that it was unknown in antiquity.
> This doctrine has a propagandist bias. It is suggested that a man who has
> not been brainwashed by a dualist religion or philosophy would naturally
> accept materialism. It is asserted that ancient philosophy was materialist
> - an assertion which, though misleading, contains a grain of truth; and it
> is suggested that those of us who are interested in the mind, and in the
> mind-body problem, have been brainwashed by Descartes and his followers.
> Something like this is suggested in the brilliant and valuable Concept
> of Mind by Gilbert Ryle...and it is even more strongly suggested in a
> broadcast in which Ryle speaks of 'the legend of the two theatres' which he
> describes as a 'fairly new-fangled legend'. He also says that 'For the
> general terms in which scientists..have set their problems of mind and
> body, we philosophers have been chiefly to blame'. For 'we philosophers'
> one must read here 'Descartes and the post-Cartesian philosophers'.
> Views like this are not only to be found in an outstanding philosopher
> (and student of Plato and Aristotle) such as Ryle, but they are
> widespread".
>
> Popper goes on to list points he wishes to argue that "indicate a very
> different view from the one which seems so widespread at present."
> "(1) Dualism in the form of the story of the ghost in the machine (or,
> better, of the ghost in the body) is as old as any historical or
> archaeological evidence reaches, though it is unlikely that prior to the
> atomists the body was regarded as a machine.
> (2) All thinkers of whom we know enough to say anything definite on their
> position, up to and including Descartes, were dualist interactionists.
> (3) This dualism is very marked, in spite of the fact that certain
> tendencies inherent in human language (which originally was, apparently,
> appropriate only for the description of material things and their
> properties) seem to make us inclined to speak of minds or souls or spirits
> as if they were a peculiar (gas-like) kind of body.
> (4) The discovery of the moral world leads to the realization of the
> special character of mind. This is so in Homer...Democritus...Socrates.
> (5) In the thought of the atomists, one finds materialism, interactionism,
> and also the recognition of the special moral character of the mind; but
> they did not, I think, draw the consequences of their own moral contrast
> between mind and matter.
> (6) The Pythagoreans, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle tried to transcend the
> 'materialist' way of talking about the mind: they recognised the non-material
> character of the psyche and tried to make sense of this new conception.
> An important speech attributed to Socrates by Plato in the Phaedo deals
> explicitly with the moral explanation of human action in terms of ends, and
> decisions, and contrasts this with the explanation of human behaviour in
> terms of physiological processes.
> (7) Alternatives to interactionism arose only after Descartes. They arose
> because of the special difficulties of Descartes' elaborate interactionism
> and its clash with his theory of causation in physics.
> ...(8) We know that, but we do not know how, mind and body interact; but
> this is not surprising since we have really no definite idea of how
> physical things interact. Nor do we know how mental events interact, unless
> we believe in a theory of mental events and their interaction that is
> almost certainly false: in associationism. The theory of the association of
> ideas is a theory which treats mental events or processes like things
> (ideas, pictures) and their interaction as due to something like attractive
> force. Associationism is therefore probably just one of those materialist
> metaphors which we almost always use when trying to speak about mental
> events."
>
> It seems then that, at least at the time of his writing, Popper's views
> were against certain widespread views and that Ryle did seem to think that
> dualism was a kind of philosopher's make-believe, with Descartes as its
> main (modern) author [hence the "Cartesian myth"].
>
> Donal
> England
>
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