[lit-ideas] Re: the first lines are the argument referred by
- From: Ursula Stange <ursula@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2011 15:39:56 -0400
Lordy, Julie. I haven't thought about Woof N Proof in a quarter century. We
used to have one in the late sixties. I think we gave it to my daughter in the
late eighties. Dark blue plastic sleeve, I seem to remember...
When I was in Teacher's College (late eighties), we had an assignment to keep a
journal about teaching someone something. I taught my daughter Venn Diagrams
and Truth Tables (she was 11 or so) and she loved it. She's now a
mathematician teaching at Stanford, but I'm not sure I could explain either of
them adequately any more...well, maybe the Venn Diagrams...
Sent from my kitchen...
On 2011-11-04, at 7:49 AM, Julie Krueger <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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 psyche as 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 physical states]. 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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