All,
I have started to reNoodle this entry based on your comments. The noo=noodle
is at
http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/MentalismAndCalculus
Here is the first paragraph,
"Mentalism is the belief that what we do is caused by events in some "inner"
space called the mind. One of the classic critiques of mentalism is that it
involves a category error. The term "category error" arises from the ordinary
language philosophy of Gilbert Ryle [1]. You make a category error when you
start talking about some thing as if it were a different sort of thing
altogether. In other words, our language is full of conventions concerning the
way we talk about things, and when we violate those conventions, we start to
talk silly. For instance, what about the notion of introspection, that is so
essential to mentalism: the idea that we can "feel" our own feelings. To an
anti-mentalist, feeling is something that happens when one palpates the world.
Thus, to talk about our "inner feelings", is to doom ourselves to silliness.
Feelings are inherently "of" other things and to talk of "feeling our own
feelings" violates the usage of the word."
I hear a rumor that Owen is hard at work on ANOTHER way of preserving the
pearls that are scattered in the FRIAM postings.
This should be interesting.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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