All who have patience,
Once of the classic critiques of mentalism .... the belief that behavior is
caused by events in some "inner" space called the mind ... is that it involves
a category error. The term "category error" arises from ordinary language
philosophy (I think). You made 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. To an
anti-mentalist a "feeling" is something that arises when one palpates the world
and to talk about our "inner feelings", say, is to doom ourselves to silliness.
Feelings are inherently "of" other things and to talk of "feeling our own
feelings" is, well, in a word, nutty.
As many of you know, I have been engaged in a geriatric attempt to recover what
slipped by me in my youth, the chance to understand the Calculus. As I read
more and more, it became clear to me that the differential calculus was based
on a huge "category error." To speak of a point as having velocity and
direction one had to speak of it at if it were something that it essentially
wasn't. And yet, of course, the Calculus flourishes.
Now the reason I am writing is that I am not sure where to go with this
"discovery." One way is to renounce my behaviorism on the ground that category
errors ... any category errors ... are just fine. Another way is to start to
think of the mind/behavior distinction in some way analogous to the
derivative/function distinction. That mind is just the derivative of behavior.
For instance, a motive, or an intention, is not some inner thing that directs
behavior, but rather the limit of its behavioral direction. A third way, is to
wonder about how the inventors of calculus thought about these issues. They,
presumably, were steeped in mentalism and it cannot have escaped their notice
that they were attributing to points qualities that points just cannot have.
Many of the texts have been reading have alluded to the idea that some
contemporaries ... perhaps Newton himself ... attributed to the Calculus some
sort of mystic properties. I really would like to know more about that. Any
intellectual historians out there????
So, I am hoping somebody will help me go in any, or all, of these directions.
--Nthompson 04:14, 9 July 2008 (GMT)
This noodle, and perhaps some subsequent revisions and commentary, may be found
at http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/MentalismAndCalculus
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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