[Wittrs] Re: Dualism Cooties: A Linguistic Reduction
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:17:07 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Joseph Polanik <jPolanik@...> wrote:
> SWM wrote:
>
> >No one has "dualism cooties". That is a ridiculous locution since we're
> >talking about having ideas not having entities, even little buggy ones.
>
> until we establish that 'dualism' is more than a pejorative term, there
> is no evidence that philosophers who accuse each other of 'dualism' are
> doing anything more than playing the 'cooties game' with a grown-up
> philosopher's vocabulary.
>
> Joe
I don't consider "dualism" a pejorative term and have been quite explicit on
that score. What is negative about it is to embrace it while denying embracing
it, as I have argued Searle does. If he is, indeed, doing that then he is in
self-contradiction and that means his thinking is confused, his thesis wrong.
But it's not a personal comment on the man, just on some of his ideas. You may
have noticed that I don't criticize Chalmers or Galen Strawson (though I'm not
in agreement with them either). Chalmers is a self-acknowledged dualist while
Strawson claims to be a panpsychist monist who claims that, whatever
consciousness is, it must be present at every level of reality right down to
the atomic level and to whatever lies below that (which one might take as
having dualist implications as well). -- SWM
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