[Wittrs] [C] Re: The World According to Wittgenstein I and Wittgenstein II

From: "walto" <walterhorn@xxxxxxxxx>
To: WittrsC-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 01 Aug 2010 12:45:55 -0000
Hi Sean.

Just thought I'd mention that the post below was not actually written by any 
"BruceD".  It was lifted, without citation, from a review by Dennis Patterson 
of Rutgers University that appeared in 'Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews' in 
2003."

Way too much of that sort of thing, IMHO.

W


--- In WittrsC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "BruceD" <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
>
>
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "gabuddabout" <wittrsamr@> wrote:
>
> > Hacker thinks that both involve a mereological fallacy. And what is
> such a thing.
>
> In Chapter 3 of Part I - "The Mereological Fallacy in Neuroscience" -
> Bennett and Hacker set out a critical framework that is the pivot of
> the book. They argue that for some neuroscientists, the brain does all
> manner of things: it believes (Crick); interprets (Edelman); knows
> (Blakemore); poses questions to itself (Young); makes decisions
> (Damasio); contains symbols (Gregory) and represents information
> (Marr). Implicit in these assertions is a philosophical mistake,
> insofar as it unreasonably inflates the conception of the 'brain' by
> assigning to it powers and activities that are normally reserved for
> sentient beings. It is the degree to which these assertions depart
> from the norms of linguistic practice that sends up a red flag. The
> reason for objection is this: it is one thing to suggest on empirical
> grounds correlations between a subjective, complex whole (say, the
> activity of deciding and some particular physical part of that
> capacity, say, neural firings) but there is considerable objection to
> concluding that the part just is the whole. These claims are not
> false; rather, they are devoid of sense.
>
> Wittgenstein remarked that it is only of a human being that it makes
> sense to say "it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is
> conscious or unconscious." (Philosophical Investigations, § 281). The
> question whether brains think "is a philosophical question, not a
> scientific one" (p. 71). To attribute such capacities to brains is to
> commit what Bennett and Hacker identify as "the mereological fallacy",
> that is, the fallacy of attributing to parts of an animal attributes
> that are properties of the whole being. Moreover, merely replacing the
> mind by the brain leaves intact the misguided Cartesian conception of
> the relationship between the mind and behavior, merely replacing the
> ethereal by grey glutinous matter. The structure of the Cartesian
> explanatory system remains intact, and this leads to Bennett and
> Hacker's conclusion that contemporary cognitive neuroscientists are
> not nearly anti-Cartesian enough. Much more of the Cartesian
> conceptual scheme needs to be rejected.
>
> Philosophers of mind are themselves prone to similar conceptual
> errors. Consider John Searle on pain and the role of the brain:
>
> 'Common sense tells us that our pains are located in physical
> space within our bodies, that for example, a pain in the foot is
> literally inside the area of the foot. But we now know that is false.
> The brain forms a body image and pains, like all bodily sensations,
> are part of the body image. The pain-in-the-foot is literally in the
> physical space of the brain. '(Searle, J., The Rediscovery of the
> Mind, MIT Press, 1992: p. 63.)
>
> Bennett and Hacker object on grounds of logical grammar: one does not
> have pains "in the brain." Pains (other than headaches) are not "in
> the head." If there is a locus of pain it is a distributed feature of
> the whole experience, the brain being only one physical part of it.
> For the experiencing subject, of course, "His pain is located where he
> sincerely suggests it is" (p.123) (phantom pains being in need of
> special explanation). This is not to deny that in the absence of a
> proper functioning brain, one would feel no pains. But that does not
> license the claim that pains "are felt either in or by the brain" (p.
> 122). What hurts when one breaks one's leg is typically one's leg, not
> one's head.
>
> Part III ("Consciousness and Contemporary Neuroscience: An Analysis")
> considers the leading work on consciousness as well as neuroscientific
> efforts to explain the "mystery" of consciousness. McGinn, Dennett,
> Searle, Chalmers and Nagel are just a few of the many philosophers
> whose arguments Bennett and Hacker scrutinize with care.
> Neuroscientists such as Blakemore, Crick, Damasio, Edelman, as well as
> psychologists such as Baars and Weiskrantz, are given equal treatment,
> especially their attempts to make the case that the brain is a
> conscious organ. Absent the brain, of course, there is no
> consciousness, but ascribing consciousness as such solely to the brain
> is philosophically suspect.
>
> When it comes to consciousness, no topic will invite more discord than
> that of qualia. When Nagel asks "What is it like to be a bat?,"
> Bennett and Hacker answer that the question proceeds from a
> philosophical confusion. Qualia - the idea that mental states have
> qualitative characteristics - is but another example of philosophers
> bewitched by a philosophical pseudoproblem.
>
> These are some of the ideas that Bennett and Hacker are eager to
> refute:
>
> There is a specific way it feels to hear, smell or "to have mental
> states" (Block);.
>
> Every conscious state has a certain qualitative feel (Searle);
>
> Each differentiable conscious experience presents a different
> quale (Edelman and Tononi) (p. 274).
>
> Suppose, we ask a person who has had his sight or hearing restored
> "How does it feel to see (or hear)?" They are likely to answer "Why,
> it's wonderful." What we are asking after is the person's attitude
> toward his recovery of a faculty, now restored. But what if we ask a
> person possessed of normal faculties "What is it like to see a chair
> or a table?" Bennett and Hacker aver that the person would have no
> idea what we were talking about. Seeing tables and chairs, postboxes
> and lampposts are all different experiences. But "[t]he experiences
> differ only in so far as their objects differ" (p. 274).
>
> Some neuroscientists have themselves fallen victim to the logical
> fallacies of philosophers of consciousness. Damasio, for example,
> explains vision as the production of mental images in the brain.
> Bennett and Hacker object that this explanatory model makes no sense,
> since it raises objections of another kind; the hypothesis that mental
> images are real features instantiated in the brain would not seem
> subject to empirical verification and, even if it were, it would fail
> to illuminate vision as we know it. Of course, there is brain activity
> associated with vision. But it is unhelpful and of little value to say
> that "we" perceive the image of the apple produced in our brain. The
> question Bennett and Hacker ask, "How is it that we see it?" (p. 305)
> cannot receive philosophical illumination by the question "Where 'in'
> the brain is the image?" The reason is that that question ignores the
> all-important one: "Who, or what, is doing the seeing?" The error is
> in thinking that seeing an object is itself somehow reducible to a
> quale behind vision. But it is not. And the object of normal vision is
> not an image of any kind either. Neuroscientists may find inductive
> correlations between seeing certain items (e.g. lines, corners,
> curves) and brain activity. But finding such correlations is not the
> same as reducing one to the other. It is the reduction that leads to a
> muddle.
>
> Part IV ("On Method") has two key features. First is a sustained
> argument against the reductionist impulse of contemporary
> neuroscience. Second is an explicit articulation and defense of the
> philosophical method that informs both the critique of reductionism
> and the perspective of the book as a whole. For philosophers, this
> second aspect will be the most interesting and surely controversial.
>
> Francis Crick is one neuroscientist who wants to reduce the mental to
> the physical. His "astonishing hypothesis" that we are "no more than
> the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated
> molecules" (Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, p. 3 (1995)) is
> a good example of the sort of explanatory account of human action that
> Bennett and Hacker reject as metaphysical nonsense.
>
> In the course of reducing the mental to the physical, the normative
> dimensions of social life are lost. Consider this example. Suppose I
> place my signature on a document. The act of affixing my signature is
> accompanied by neural firings in my brain. The neural firings do not
> "explain" what I have done. In signing my name, I might be signing a
> check, giving an autograph, witnessing a will or signing a death
> certificate. In each case the neural firing may well be the same. And
> yet, the meaning of what I have done in affixing my signature is
> completely different in each case. These differences are "circumstance
> dependent," not merely the product of my neural firings. Neural
> firings accompany the act of signing but only the circumstances of my
> signing, including the intention to do so, are the significant factors
> in explaining what I have done.
>
> Bennett and Hacker conclude their book with two appendices, devoted to
> a careful study of the work of Daniel Dennett and John Searle,
> respectively. Dennett adopts the posture of Quine, specifically the
> thought that philosophical problems can be solved through a
> combination of scientific inquiry and empirical evidence (p. 414).
> Dennett's attempt to explain intentionality as an interpretive
> strategy is grounded in what he refers to as the
> "Heterophenomenological Method." Bennett and Hacker argue that the
> method is a non-starter because it is incoherent (p. 428). Similarly
> with Dennett's attempt to compare our thinking to computer programs.
>
> In the case of Searle, Bennett and Hacker find much with which they
> agree. Cartesian dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, eliminative
> materialism and functionalism are all rejected, and rightly so. Searle
> advocates "biological naturalism," the view that consciousness is a
> biological phenomenon, a proper subject of the biological sciences (p.
> 444). Bennett and Hacker serve up no objection here. It is when Searle
> claims that "mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological
> processes in the brain and are themselves features of the
> brain" (Searle, Rediscovery, p. 1) that Bennett and Hacker demur.
> Searle's claim commits the mereological fallacy discussed earlier.
> Brains are no more conscious than they are capable of taking a walk or
> holding a conversation. True, no animal could do either of these
> things without a properly functioning brain. But it is the person, not
> the brain, that engages in these activities.
>
> > I think they don't necessarily involve such a mistake.
>
> Not necessarily, but perhaps. Just what do you think?
>
> bruce
>
>
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[Wittrs] [C] Re: The World According to Wittgenstein I and Wittgenstein II

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