Krimel said: Holy crap this goes on and on... Matt: Ah! You've been outed as a writer-as-you-goer. Yes, indeed, you are finding out the hard way why I get made fun of for being long-winded. Basically, my technique in debate is the filibuster. People just get tired, and move on.
[Krimel] Actually I do read ahead but I just flat ran out of time on this one. Your filibuster technique really works as I have to block out time to respond to your posts. I will be snipping heavily here just to keep the ball rolling. Krimel said: But language is thought objectified. It is the summation of our interior musings rendered symbolic. Regardless of how we render our symbols, verbally, gesturally, or musically, something it lost in the rendering. Matt: The general idea is that the notion of "interior musings" is what is making you suspicious, and it is also a notion that has not always existed, so it is a notion we can dispense with. The notion of interiority you are using is what I called the shift to "experience." Now, the idea that we can dispense with it doesn't also entail that everything is wrong with it: we just need to figure out what parts are which, good and bad, useful and useless, etc. It's kinda' like figuring out how the body works. [Krimel] Perhaps "musings" was an unfortunate choice of words. I do not mean the interior dialog that Don Juan told Carlos to silence or that mediators seek to be free of. I mean the plethora of sensations and emotions and feelings and intuitions that I would say characterize the bulk of our inner life. I think language is an effort to share and communicate "about" those inner activities and that language, even "inner musings" are but a shadow of. [Matt] The trick is that Descartes had kind of made that way up himself. Since that time, I think we have learned in philosophy--through trial and error--that it hinders more than it hurts to think of an idea as both a perception and a conception, percept and concept. We need to distinguish them. [Krimel] I would say the cogito itself provides us will all the "certainty" we are like to get in this life and I am grateful to Descartes for dreaming it up. The real problem is his division of reality into mind stuff and body stuff. But I would go even further than the distinction between percept and concept. I would distinguish between sensation and perception. Sensation is the transduction of energy from the out world into electro-chemical energy in the nervous system. Perception is the organization and integration of present sensations with remembered sensations of the past. [Matt] I think you'd find a lot useful to chew on in Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty does yeoman's work in tracing out the tangled web we know of as "the mind." If you like my dashes through history, you'd love his book--he's the one that taught me all my tricks, both how and what to write. The general scientistic tenor of your writing causes me to think that you'd find much amenable in the book [Krimel] I have resisted Rorty in part because I heard him speak in a radio interview and he sounded like a guy who felt really pompous about having been able to stick his head up is own ass. I suspect that is a bit unfair and when I was in Boston recently I was looking for the book you suggest. I have downloaded lots of his stuff from the internet but I can only find a scanned copy of PMN. I guess if I am going to take Dreyfus's classes on Heidegger I might as well give Rorty a shot. Krimel said: All the talk of the sanctity of language reminds me too much of Kant's analytic truth. Truth even with a small 't' is not found in a statement. It is held as a belief. Reason is neither necessary nor sufficient to compel belief. We can divorce Truth and Belief but Justification is the modifier of Belief. Reason is only one of the faces of Justification. More often than not reason is a dash of power covering blemishes of the true face of our justifications. Why isn't belief the primitive notion? Isn't language just a distillation of symbols to communicate belief? Matt: You ask a good question, though, and I'm not certain that belief isn't a primitive notion. To put it the other way around, I'm not sure that semantics needs the notion of "belief" to function, though it might. I would go ahead with saying that semantics doesn't need a notion of "belief," but we certainly can't make much sense of life or action without one. [Krimel] Just when I thought I at least knew what "belief" means you come up with this. While I suspect it is both fundamental and critical I must admit I don't know what it is. Similarly I don't know what "meaning" means. Matt: No, and this I am fairly convinced of. The reason I would say specifically "knowledge" as opposed to "belief" is because analytic philosophy has done a decent job of noting that there is such a thing as true belief that we are not justified in (and so would not count as knowledge). [Krimel] Sticky business, this. This still seems to me to be tied up in belief, whatever it is. Your take on knowledge here still seems to be about particular kinds of belief. [Matt] My understanding of "belief" is that they are, following the pragmatists, habits of action. I think it is the case that there are many kinds of action that we have to improvise without something we would call knowledge, and that it is important to attribute beliefs as their motivation (this allows us, after the fact in reflection, to differentiate between good and bad beliefs/action-motivators). Pre-knowledge improvisation is something that James called attention to in his "Will to Believe". [Krimel] I have some sympathy to the notion of belief being manifest in action. This was productively pursued by the behaviorists for more than 50 years. But I suspect there are problems with confining belief to outward manifestations and I am more than a little suspicious of the notion of belief as motivation. I eat because I AM hungry not because I believe I am hungry. Matt: Oh, no, Rorty would agree that the difference between you and I, your pain and my pain, is neither artificial or avoidable, too. But all you need for that is a distinction between spatial locations, a distinction between nervous systems. Now, mentioning "qualitative difference," that does indeed bring up another whole nest of issues in the philosophy of mind, similar to the nest I gestured towards earlier in "interior musings." It is the same problem with this nest as the earlier: it is big. This is something that Daniel Dennett has been at the forefront of untangling. The main idea is that the idea of a qualitative difference, what philosophical jargon refers to as "qualia," is what Thomas Nagel called attention to with his very famous paper, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Nagel argues quite perspicuously that there is no way for us to ever know what it is like to be a bat, that we will never know what it is like to be a bat from a first-person point of view. [Krimel] I see all this in terms of Tomasello's claim that one of the fundamental abilities that humans possess if the ability to see things from different points of view. He shows how this ability develops at about nine months of age and allows us to share information and to engage in social learning. Nagel discusses the nature of this ability and problems with how it can be conceived at some length. Leaving the question basically unanswered he concludes: "...it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidestepping it." Tomasello's point is that while we can not know what it is to _be_ a bat we routinely imagine such thing as what it would be like for is us to be bats. That is I can imagine myself as a bat. [Matt] Indeed, following this line out, we will only ever know our own first-person point of view, and everything else is imagination, reasoning by analogy. The trouble is that philosophers on the other side of this issue see Nagel as baptizing an intractable problem, rather than solving. The only way to solve (or dissolve) this is to reconstrue what we take "mind" and "knowledge" to be. This process of redefinition is what Dennett and Rorty are involved in. This is what Dennett calls the "intentional stance." You earlier called this useful, but incorrect, but that statement is question-begging over the issue of what a mind is--you're beginning with a different one than Dennett. By Dennett's standards, his is correct, just less rooted in tradition (much like when Copernicus first suggested that the earth revolves around the sun). [Krimel] I may have this wrong but I take Dennett's claim to be that the intentional stance is metaphorical and pragmatic but it is all in the translation between ways of understanding. We can talk about computers having intention and thoughts without actually believing they have them. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
