Thursday, September 9, 2010

108th Philosophers’ Carnival


Welcome to the 108th edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival! I don’t know what is going on with the Carnival but the last few editions have not had very many interesting submissions and I did not get a lot of acceptable submissions for this issue…but I know that there are interesting posts out there so I scoured the internets to find the best that the philosophy blogosphere has to offer…I also checked a few other disciplines for some food for thought.

Submitted:


  1. Tuomas Tahko presents Draft: The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements posted at ttahko.net.
  2. Andrew Bernardin presents Beneath Reason: An Iceburg of Unconscious Processes posted at 360 Degree Skeptic.
  3. Eric Michael Johnson presents Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play To Reaping An Unjust Reward posted at The Primate Diaries.
  4. Terrance Tomkow presents Means and Ends posted at Tomkow.com, saying, “If your only available means of doing something are impermissible, does it follow that it is impermissible for you to do that thing? Judith Jarvis Thomson says, “yes”. Tomkow argues, “no”.”
  5. Thom Brooks presents The Brooks Blog: Thom Brooks on “A New Problem with the Capabilities Approach” posted at The Brooks Blog.


Found:


  1. Over at Conscious Entities Peter discusses Justin Sytsma’s recent JCS paper in Skeptical Folk Theory Theory Theory
  2. Over at Alexander Pruss’s Blog said blogger discusses Video Games as Art
  3. Not to long ago we had a very interesting post over at Brains on breeding pain free livestock. Anton Alterman has a somewhat polemical but interesting response at Brain Scam in Pains in the Brain: On LIberating Animals from Feeling
  4. Over at Siris we are reminded how malleable language is and the effect it has on reading past philosophers in Every Event Has a Cause
  5. Over at Practical Ethics Toby Ord asks Is It Wrong to Vote Tactically? I don’t want to spoil it for you but he thinks the answer is ‘no’
  6. Over at Evolving Thoughts John Wilkins discusses Plantinga’s argument that naturalism is self-refuting in You and Me, Baby, Ain’t Nothing But Mammals
  7. Did you know that a Quine is a computer program that can print its own code? It’s true and over at A Piece of Our Mind John Ku discusses them in Meta Monday: Ruby Quines
  8. Over at Neuroschannells Eric sums up his current views on perception and consciousness in Consciousness (13): The Interpreter versus the Scribe
  9. Over at Specter of Reason there is a discussion of Pete Mandik’s Swamp Mary thought experiment in Swamp Deviants, Part II
  10. Over at the Arche Methodology Blog Derek Ball asks Do Philosophers Seek Knowledge? Should They?
  11. Over at Philosophy on the Mesa Nina Rosenstrand wonders if Neanderthal’s raped early Humans in They Are Us? News from the Primate Research Front
  12. Is the idea that the mind in the head an a priori prejudice? Ken Aizawa thinks not in So, why does common sense say the mind is in the head?
  13. Over at Inter Kant Gary Benham discusses Free Speech and Twitter
  14. Over at The Ethical Werewolf Neil Shinhababu discusses his recent run on Bloggingheads and Hedonism
  15. Over at Logical Matters Peter Smith talks about Squeezing Arguments and comments on Fields characterization of them in Saving Truth from Paradox
  16. Over at In Living Color Jean Kazez discusses just how outrageous espousing moral realism really is in Torturing Babies Just for Fun is Wrong
  17. Over at Philosophy Talk: The Blog Ken Taylor discusses Culture and Mental Illness
  18. Over at In the Space of Reasons Tim Thornton discusses Aesthetic Self-Knowledge
  19. Over at the Philosophy North Blog Aiden McGlyn discusses The Problem of Vanishing Warrant
  20. Finally, have you heard about this Philosopher’s Football match? Virtual Philosopher has a nice report of the madness in Philosopher’s Football -Match Report from the Ref.


That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of philosophers’ carnivalusing our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival |

Containing Phenomenological Overflow

I am going to the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in Toronto to do a poster presentation of the higher-order response to Block’s phenomenological overflow argument. This is important since it is a crucial step in the argument for the naturalization of qualia. The core argument is in this video.


This shows that phenomenological overflow is no threat to the higher-order theory. Is there any reasn to prefer it? I was rereading Huxley’s On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History and I came across this very interesting passage,

If the spinal cord is divided in the middle of the back, for example, the skin of the feet may be cut, or pinched, or burned, or wetted with vitrol, without any sensation of touch, or of pain, arising in consciousness. So far as the man is concerned, therefore, the part of the central nervous system which lies beyond the injury is cut off from consciousness. It must be admitted, that, if any one think fit to maintain that the spinal cord below the injury is conscious, but that it is cut off from any means of making its consciousness known to the other consciousness in the brain, there is no means of driving him from his position by logic. But assuredly there is no way of proving it, and in the matter of consciousness, if anything, we may hold the rule, “De non apparentibus et de non existentibus eadem est ratio.”

As far as I can tell the latin phrase there means something like “things that can’t be detected don’t exist,” though my latin is rusty. If this is roughly right then Huxley seems to be making an argument similar to the one I was pushing at the Online Consciousness Conference. If the mesh argument doesn’t decide between a Blockian or a Rosenthalian view then we should decide the issue on philosophical grounds. One way of reading the Huxley passage is as a semi-verificationalist move. Since there can be no empirical test of the matter we may treat it as a meaningless hypothesis. I would read this passage differently.

A state is phenomenologically consciousness when there is something that it is like for the creature that has the state. When there is nothing that it is like for the creature then there is no phenomenal consciousness. Thus when there is no what it is likeness around we can assume that there is no phenomenal consciousness hanging about. To imagine otherwise is to imagine that there is something that it is like for me that is not like anything for me…and that sounds like a contradiction.

Importantly, none of this is to deny that unconscious pains have qualitative properties. These qualitative characters, when unconscious, do not have any phenomenal feel but they do resemble and differ other qualitative characters in the right ways and they have causal connections as usual. It is only when we are conscious of them that they have the phenomenology we associate with pain. True, this seems to violate our common sense thinking about pains, though there are some platitudes that cit the other way which just again illustrates that folk theory is often inconsistent.

As Aristotle recommended we must try to save as many of the most basic pre-theoretical platitudes as we can but it may be the case that some will have to go; perhaps the common sense idea that there are unconscious pains that are phenomenally conscious is one of them. The claim turns out to be either paradoxical or merely terminological.

Summa Contra Plantinga

I recently reread Alvin Plantinga’s paper Against Materialism and needless to say I am less than impressed. Plantinga presents two “arguments” against materialism each of which is utterly ridiculous.

The first is what he calls the replacement argument (sic). It is possible, Plantinga tells us, that one could have one’s body replaced while one continues to exist; therefore one is not one’s body. Of course the obvious problem with this argument is that it at best shows that I am not identical to a particular body but it does not show that minds are not physical for it does not show that the mind exists with out any body whatsoever. To show that Plantinga needs to appeal to disembodiment and he doesn’t.

It is also clearly possible that one could have one’s immaterial substance replaced and continue to exist; thus one is not an immaterial substance. This is because there is nothing contradictory in supposing that materialism is true and what this shows, as I have argued at length before, is that these a priori arguments are of no use to us at this point.

Now Plantinga, to his credit, realizes that these kinds of intuitions are ultimately question begging so his second argument appeals to an alleged impossibility, which turns out to be none other than the problem of intentionality. The argument turns on our ability to ‘just see’ that it is impossible that a physical thing can think. Just as the the number 7 can not weigh 5 pounds neither can a brain think. Never mind computers and naturalized theories of content, those couldn’t be belief contents. Oh, I see…wait, I don’t.

But of course the real problem here is that it is even more mysterious how an immaterial substance could think. Plantinga spends some time in the paper responding to Van Inwagen’s argument along these lines. Plantinga focuses on Van Inwagen’s claim that we can’t imagine an immaterial substance. The response should be obvious: we can’t imagine lots of stuff (like what a number looks like) but that doesn’t show that they are impossible. Van Inwagen’s second swipe at immaterial substances is that we cannot see how an underlying reality that is immaterial can give rise to thinking any more than we can see how an underlying physical reality can. Plantinga’s response to this is to claim that the soul is a simple and has thinking as an essential attribute in much the same way as an electron is said to be simple and have its charge essentially.

But all of this seems to me to miss the fundamental point that Van Inwagen wants to make. The very concept of an immaterial substance is unintelligible. Attempts to make them intelligible render them into ordinary physical substances at the next level up, so to speak. And it is of course out of the question to simply say that an immaterial substance is perfectly intelligible since they are just minds (as Plantinga seems to do). It is obvious that there is thinking but it is not at all obvious that an immaterial substance could think. What would that even mean? The upshot then is that substance dualism is not a viable theory.

More HOTter, More Better

In an earlier post I outlined the case for qualia realism from the higher-order perspective as I see it. Dave Chalmers worried that one of the moves was too quick. The move in question is the move from concepts making a difference to phenomenal experience to their determining phenomenal experience. Basically the line I was pushing was that if it is the case that applying concepts changes our phenomenal experience then “perhaps it is not too crazy to think that applying concepts is what results in phenomenal feel in the first place,” but Dave is right that there is a lot more that needs to be said.

As I also said, I think that a crucial step in securing this premise in the argument is showing that there can be unconscious states with qualitative character which are not like anything for the creature that has them. If we established that then we would have evidence that it is solely applying concepts that constitutes phenomenal consciousness. There is another line of argument which might show this as well which is given by David Rosenthal in a few different places (see page 155 in Consciousness and Mind for a representative example). Basically it is a subtraction argument. Take some phenomenally conscious experience, like listening to music. We already agree that applying new concepts will change the character of the experience. So, if I were to learn what a bass clarinet was then listening to Herbie Hancock’s Chameleon will sound differently to me. Now suppose that we subtract this concept. My experience will change. More specifically it will lack the bass clarinetiness that my experience had when I applied that concept. Now we can continue subtracting out concepts one by one without altering the first-order state in any way. Since subtracting the concept produces a phenomenal experience that lacks precisely the element corresponding to the concept we can conclude that subtracting these concepts will produce phenomenal consciousness that is sparser and sparser. What are we to say when we have reached teh point where there is just one concept characteriing the first-order state? Suppose that we are at the point where we are only applying the concept SOUND to the experience. Phenomenally it will be like hearing a sound for me but not any particular sounds. Now suppose we subtract that concept. What will it be like for the creature?

The higher-order theorist says that at that point it is no longer like anything for the creature. The other side says that there is still something that it is like, though it may not be like anything for the creature) but what argument could show this? What reason is there for thinking that there is anything phenomenal left over?

The Unintelligibility of Substance Dualism

Over at Siris Brandon offers some interesting criticism of my argument against substance dualism. He distinguishes two senses in which we may say that a theory is viable. In one sense we simply mean to be asking what reasons someone might have for believing in that kind of thing. In that sense a viable theory is one which there is reason to believe. In another sense we may be asking not what the reasons are to believe it but instead what the thing in question is in the first place. A viable theory in this sense is one that can tell us what the thing is. Brandon then goes on to show that this distinction corresponds to a distinction between things that a problem for a theory and things that a problem within the theory. Brandon then goes on to argue that my complaint is not a problem for the theory that there are immaterial substances but is rather a problem within the theory of immaterial substances itself and so should be answered by more research into immaterial substance and not with a dismissal of the theory.

The picture that Brandon seems to have is this. We decide whether or not there are good theoretical/common sense reasons to believe that there are immaterial substances and if we decide that there are we then try to construct a theory of what they are. Naturally in doing so we do not know very much about the immaterial substances and so one of the projects of the theory is to say more about what they are. Given this it is a mistake to think that our lack of understanding about what immaterial substances are is any reason to think that they don’t exist.

I completely agree with the spirit of Brandon’s comments but I do not agree with his conclusions. First, to where I agree. We clearly must recognize the kind of distinction that Brandon draws. And while I disagree that there are any real reasons or evidence for immaterial substances I agree that if there were, or if one thought there were, one should then go on to try and give a theoretical account of what they are.

Let us be generous and grant that there are reasons to think that some kind of substance dualism is true. When we then ask what an immaterial substance is we get told that it is the immaterial substrate of thinking and consciousness and that it is not located in space-time as we know it. David Chalmers has offered one way of making sense of this in terms of the matrix, and I won’t rehash it here but it seems clear that this kind of move makes the immaterial substance material outside of the matrix and so isn’t really a threat. What else can we do? At this point we have no further ideas. All we can say is that it is an X we know not what which underlies thinking and consciousness. If the theory never progresses past this point then we may start to think that it is in trouble.

So, to take Brandon’s example of evolution in biology, people had proposed accounts that looked evolution-ish as far back as Democritus, who seemed to have proposed that life as we know it was built up over time from simpler parts but this was not the theory of evolution because he did not have the right mechanism (natural selection). If the theory of evolution had stayed at the level of “evolution is whatever it is that underlies speciation and isn’t God doing it” no one would care about it. So too if the best that substance dualism can do is to say that an “immaterial substance is whatever it is that underlies consciousness and thinking and isn’t physical” it seems uninteresting. One might think this shouldn’t be a problem because lots of theories have been like that in the past (gravity seems to be a notable one) but the problem is that it has been this way since its inception and not one step forward has been taken in 3,000 years. The most significant advance, if one were to call it that, has been the post-Humean nonchalance to the issue of physical/non-physical causation. If all there is to causation is constant conjunction, and the non-physical events are constantly conjoined with the physical ones then voila! mind-body problem (dis)solved!!

The upshot then is that fleshing out the theory will ultimately shed some light on the reasons for believing it. If we seem in principle unable to advance in specifying what a immaterial substance is, and we have physicalist alternatives that are relatively well understood, substance dualism starts to look impossible and we seem to loose our reason to believe it, which will in turn cause us to re-evaluate the reasons we used to have for believing it.

You Must be Joking

A few years ago I had the terrible idea of taking classic jokes and “translating” them into philosophical lingo. Some work has been done in this area on lightbulb jokes but there are so many other kinds of jokes. Some are pretty obvious…like

  • Yo mama is so fat, when she sits around the house she sits AROUND the house; in all possible worlds
  • Yo mama is so dumb she has the B relation of taking more than an hour to watch 60 minutes

Some are just plain silly,

  • Yo mama is so fat she is the truthmaker for ‘your mama is fat’
  • If you mow your lawn and find the nonbeing of four cars…you might be a philosopher
  • If you go to a psychology conference hoping to meet women…you might be a philosopher
  • If someone asks you to fill out a form and you think of Plato…you might be a philosopher
  • If you think “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is” actually was a good defense…you might be a philosopher

Some are just plain ridiculous as in

  • Yo mama is so dumb she thinks the transcendental deduction is a tax break for club kids
  • Yo mama is so dumb she thinks the T-schema was the code name for the Boston Tea Party

Others?

On an unrelated note, thanks to Netflix I just rewatched Return of the Living Dead II and I realized that whenever I am asked the name of the blog that I contribute to I should say Braaaaaiiiinnnnnsssss!

What is Philosophy that it Sucks so Bad?

Brian Leiter wants to know what philosophers think of philosophy in 75 words or less…here is my 50 word stab (longer stab here)

Philosophy is distinguished from other endeavors by its method, which is roughly this: a good argument with the conclusion that p is a reason to believe that p. Philosophers, as we say, feel the force of arguments and are compelled to either accept their conclusions or to show why one needn’t.

Commercial Free Philosophy?

I recently cam across Rick Grush’s Commercial Free Philosophy site, a movement which I am deeply sympathetic to (see below)…I have been dying to read the new paper by Michael Gazzaniga but my school is too cheap to subscribe to Science Direct so I’ll never know what the right level of mind-bran analysis is…but anyways, I noticed that there was no mention of presenting at for-profit conferences. It seems to me that the arguments which support abstaining from publishing in for profit journals would also apply to conferences.

Just as an example, and since this one is coming up, take the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness,



Late Fees (after Friday 21st of May)


Student Member CA $280


Member CA $430


Non-member CA $530


Tutorials CA $60 each


Conference Dinner CA $70


Accommodation CA $94/night (or $47 shared)

$500.00 just to present a poster!?!?! On top of the money to fly there and have a room…Horseshit! Similar remarks can be made about the Tucson conferences, the SPP, the apa, and virtually every major conference out there. Now, look, I know that you need to charge something in order to offset the money put into organizing the conference (well, you don’t HAVE to (I didn’t) but I can see why one would think it was fair to do so) but these prices are ridiculous…most of us can’t afford that to present our research. It is true that the University helps offset the price but unless one is at a fancy research institution (hint: most of us aren’t) the help is negligible. So, to go to the apa in Vancouver cost me $2,500 and I got $500.00 from LaGuardia…big help. And for what? To be crammed into a session with three other papers plus commentators and five minutes scheduled for discussion? What a joke!

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Higher-Order Mental Pointing

I recently re-watched the footage of the discussion from Hakwan’s actual talk at NYU. One interesting issue that came up (there were others I may talk about later) was whether a higher-order theory can avoid the mis-match problem.

The problem is this. Suppose you have a first-order state that is a seeing of red while one has a higher-order state to the effect that one is seeing green. David R. argues that the phenomenology goes with the higher-order representation and so in this case the person would have green visual phenomenology. They would be consciously seeing green. A first-order theorist will argue that the phenomenology goes with the first-order state. Block suggests this when he says that it is just the first-order state getting above a certain thresh hold that makes it phenomenally conscious. Hakwan wants to avoid this and so adopts a pointing view. On his view we have a higher-order confidence judgement to the effect that I am such and such % sure that I am in this or that sensory state. Since the higher-order state is just pointing at the first-order state Hakwan suggests that there is no mis-match problem for his view.

But the question then arises: what is mental pointing? On my view mental pointing is just having the right causal connection. That is I have a purely causal theory of reference for higher-order thoughts. However, these are complex demonstratives and have the form I AM IN THAT-RED* STATE. Where the THAT-red* term has it’s reference fixed by the causal connection between the states (sometimes I think it might be because it has the function to do so, sometime I don’t…) but the phenomenal character is determined by the conceptual content of the complex demonstrative. What are the other candidates for mental pointing? When asked later in discussion Hakwan offers the following. Suppose that each sensory state that the brain can be in is labeled 1-n. Suppose that the state labeled ’1′ has a very good signal but something goes wrong and one has a higher-order confidence judgement that the state labeled ’4′ is true then one will hallucinate 4 and fail to consciously see 1. But what are these labels if not the kind of complex demonstratives I talked about above?

Interestingly, later in the discussion, Hakwan proposes a nice empirical test that might help to decide between the higher-order view and the first-order view. The higher-order view predicts that one can have a conscious experience of green even when one has a first-order representation of red. Given what we know about the brain this might translate into having certain kinds of activity in the pre-frontal cortex that is different from the activity is V4. Suppose that we could identify, or read-out, stimulus color from the activity in V4 and we were also able to read out the color from activity in the pre-frontal cortex. Suppose that when the stimulus was unconsciously presented we say only the activity in V4 and not in the PFC. Suppose that in the Sperling-type cases we got evidence that the stimulus was represented unconsciously (activity in V4) but in the PFC we only got the read-out told us that they only saw some letters arranged in a grid. This would do what Hakwan suggests; take a prediction that no one in the world believes, do an experiment and see what happens.

I think that until we are in a position to do these kinds of experiments, or someone thinks of a clever way to get at the issue in a different way, we cannot rule the higher-order theory out. It may turn out to be false, but it may turn out to be true. Conceptual objections cannot help us as they only serve to tell us what we find intuitive.

NY Consciousness Q-llective

So, it being summer time and all people are out and about. In town for June are Josh Weisberg and Peter Langland-Hassan, who are both veterans of NC/DC that have gone out in the world after graduating. The last time I played with them was the very first Parkside session right after the Eastern apa meeting. We got together at my place in Greenpoint Friday June 11th for an afternoon jam session with Dan Leafe (sadly not shown) featuring a nice Manhattan made with New York’s finest bourbon. It was a wonderful session. Since Josh and Pete Mandik are notorious type-q physicalists we were for that session known and the NY Consciousness Q-llective. Below is what video we captured…in reality it was one long 17 minute improv jam…Sadly the rest of the session wasn’t captured (I had my Leicra digital camera on a weird setting and the memory card filled up)…we did a kick ass version of Ain’t No Evil Demon Gonna Tell Me This Ain’t Funky…ah well…hopefully we can get together with some other people before the next Parkside show at the end of June…I heart summer!


Emotive Realism and Moral Deviance

On my view a moral judgement consists in a moral emotion or sentiment as well as a belief about the correctness of that sentiment. So to judge that slavery is wrong is to have the moral sentiment of condemnation and the belief that condemnation is the correct emotional reaction to have. I also claim that we express both of these attitudes at the same time when we say that slavery is wrong but that this is not the meaning of the sentence ‘slavery is wrong’.

Last night while having drinks with my colleague Aaron Rizzieri he brought up what he thought was a problem for my view from what I will call moral deviance. Take, for instance, someone who has a genuinely positive emotional reaction to the thought of violence against women but at the same time knows that this is the wrong way to feel. This person might say “Violence against women is wrong, and I feel the wrong way about it”. It may seem that on my view ‘violence against women is wrong’ is used to express moral condemnation of violence against women (i.e. the moral emotion of condemnation and the belief that this is correct way to feel about it), but this person does not morally condemn violence against women since they have a positive emotional response to it so it looks like he is contradicting himself, even though the sentence itself is not contradictory. However, in this case the person most likely means that they understand that moral condemnation is the appropriate attitude to take towards violence against women and is saying that the attitude that they actually have towards such violence is the wrong attitude to have. This is not a problem for my view because I only claim that we typically use these sentences to express our moral sentiments, not that we do so in every case. This person is using the sentence in a non-standard way, but we often use sentences in non-standard ways. The only claim I want to make is, as already said, that the speech acts that I am pointing out are done by us as well. And that these speech acts capture what we might call distinctively moral speech acts.

Now Aaron raised a slightly different objection from moral deviance. When our moral deviant says that violence against women is wrong he is not performing the speech act that I have called moral condemnation but is he expressing a moral judgment at all? Saying no seems implausible but if yes then it doesn’t seem like my account captures what is essential to moral judgements. It seems to me that they do make a moral judgment but that it is deformed. Deformed moral judgments seem to me common and useful. The hope is that one’s belief will eventually lead to one having the appropriate moral emotional reaction and thus to the appropriate behavior.

One might see this kind of objection pushing one towards the view that the moral judgment should be identified with the belief in question. So on this reading our moral deviant would be expressing the belief that the moral emotion of condemnation is the correct emotional response to violence against women but ultimately this just doesn’t seem right to me. Real moral judgments just seem to me to be rooted in emotional reactions.

Natural Metaphysics Blowing Through the Air

In November 2009 the Center for Ethics and Values in the Sciences at the University of Alabama Birmingham hosted a conference entitled Does Scientific Naturalism Exclude Metaphysics? The speakers were Michael Friedman, Andrew Melnyck, Ron Giere, Mark Wilson, Don Ross, Daniel Dennett, J T Ismael, James Ladyman, and Paul Humphries. The conference was video taped and the videos are now up on YouTube here courtesy of Sarah Vollmer and her graduate student Morgan Anders who are also in the process of making a short documentary film on the issues raised.

The conference focused on Ladyman and Ross’ new book Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized where they argue, first that scientism is true and second that a lot of contemporary metaphysics, even from philosophers who claim to be naturalists, physicalists, and scientismists (Armstrong is cited as an example), relies on a fundamentally misguided and outdated conception of scientific reality as consisting of little billiard balls flying around in space banging into each other, you know basically the idea that Democritus had 2,500 years ago. Scienticism is the view that science, in particular physics and the methods it employs, is the only real way to know about the world. A priori reasoning on this view is no good, especially when it is detached from science or especially when it employs this outdated model of the scientific model. They argue that the proper role of metaphysics is that of elucidating the connections between the various special sciences so that they form a unified picture of the nature of reality. This is a task that falls to no specific science and so can be called metaphysics (they cite as an example the claim that chemistry unified is physics and physics unified is metaphysics).

My own reaction is to be sympathetic to the criticism of philosophers who try to derive conclusions about the actual world from current a priori reasoning. Given the track record it is far from clear that a priori intuitions are a good guide to the nature of the actual world. They are however a fine guide to the possible worlds. A priori reasoning fills out the space of possible and impossible worlds and science then locates the actual world in that space. The “fictional world” that occupied David Lewis, David Armstrong, as well as philosophers like Locke, Hume, and Kant, is a perfectly respectable possible world and is interesting in so far as it is a live option, which roughly means that it hasn’t been ruled out by scientific inquiry. The main thrust of Ladyman and Ross can then be seen as an argument that science doesn’t bear this picture out and so naturalistically minded philosophers should stop thinking about one set of possible worlds. But nothing in the argument suggests that a priori reasoning about a different set of possible worlds wouldn’t be useful. In fact we need the a priori reasoning about possibilities to make sense of the empirical data and this is the way we will ultimately identify the the mind with the brain, for instance. .

What we get from this kind of picture is a two-dimensional view on which a priori reasoning gives us the primary intensions of statements and science gives us the secondary intensions, or to put it in more Kripkean terms, the job of science is to reduce the epistemically possible to the metaphysically possible. This is still an empiricist position broadly construed since the claim is that for beings like us the only way to know about the actual world is via empirical means. In fact i would count this as a scientismist position. This is perfectly consistent with the claim that an ideal agent who knew all of the facts would be in a position to know about the actual world in an a priori manner.

Does the Zombie Argument Rest on a Category Mistake?

re-reading Ryle’s “Descartes’ Myth” I was struck by the following passage

…the Dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical process and mental process; that there are mechanical causes of coporeal movement and mental causes of coporeal movement. I shall argue that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd…the phrase ‘there occur mental process’ does not mean the same sort of thing as ‘there occur physical process,’ and, therefore, that it makes no sense to conjoin or disjoin the two. (this is from page 37 in the Chalmers anthology)

I have always been sympathetic to the category mistake move and have viewed it as a precursor to the claim that it is simply question begging to treat mental terms as synonymous for ‘non-physical’. I also think that a lot of my complaints about the intelligibility of substance dualism originate in Ryle’s discussion of the origin of the category mistake.

Re-reading this today I started thinking that maybe one could use this kind of claim to cause problems for the Zombie argument. The first premise of the zombie argument employs the conjunction (P & ~Q) where P are all of the physical facts and process and Q is some qualitative fact like that I feel pain. If it is really logically illegitimate to conjoin these terms then the zombie argument cannot even get off the ground. So what is the response that the dualist will make here? It seems to me that all of the examples of category mistakes involve concepts that have fairly straightforward conceptual entailment relations between them. So, a pair of gloves just is a left glove and a right glove and we can tell this just by analyzing the concept of PAIR OF GLOVES. The same can be said for teh University, and the battalion. But if course it is not obvious, to say the least, that the same is true for PAIN or SEEING BLUE. To many, myself included, it seems as though there are no conceptual entailment relations between my “pure” phenomenal concept of pain and physical processes (for me the ‘seems as though’ part is especially important). But maybe it is at just this point that I myself, as well as the dualist, commit the category mistake!

Whoa…I’ll have to come back to that because now I’m off to Miguel’s CogSci talk

The New New Dualism

Yesterday I attended Miguel Angel Sebastian’s cogsci talk entitled “The Subjective Character of Experiencre: Against HOR and SOR Theories” which was very interesting. Miguel was primarily trying to show that higher-order and same-order representationist theories of consciousness cannot account for the subjective character of an experience by which he means the thing that accounts for the experience being for the subject. His main complaint seemed to be that in order to account for this we need some notion of the self and so he suggested that we need a model where we have representations of teh self interacting with representations of objects and we thus end up with a representation of the form “x for-me”. There were several interesting themes of the discussion and if I have time I will probably come back to some of them but I thought I’d start with this one.

In response to the mis-match problem David has settled on the following view. The phenomenology goes with the HOT. The sensory qualities of the first-order state play no role –other than that of concept acquisition– in determining the phenomenal character of a conscious experience. So in the case of Dental Fear the subject has a first-order state with vibration sensory qualities and a HOT that they are in pain so their conscious phenomenology is like having pain for them. The first-order sensory qualities play a perceptual role in the mental economy of the subject so having them is important but they don’t play a role as far as consciousness is concerned. In fact even if there is no first-order state at all (as may perhaps be the case in Anton’s syndrome) the phenomenology goes with the HOT. Now in the cases where there is no first-order state one still counts as being in a conscious state. The mental state that is conscious is just the one that the HOT represents oneself as being in and so in this case the conscious mental state is a notional state, which is to say that it doesn’t exist. It follows from this that there are conscious mental states that have no neural correlates. We thus end up with a dualism about consciousness of a new variety. There are some conscious mental states that exist physically in the brain and there are other conscious mental states that exist only notionally as the content of a HOT.

What should our reaction to this be? When this first became clear at David’s Mind and Language seminar it prompt Steve Stitch to shout ‘he’s worse than a dualist!’ Miguel seemed to think that at the very least this is a cost of the theory and that if you can have a theory that explains all the data without it that is preferable. David refused to say that this was even a cost for the theory, in fact he seemed to suggest that it wasn’t even counter-intuitive. His reasons seemed to be as follows. I can have a thought about things which are not present and those notional objects can have properties. So, if I think about a squirrel I might think of it as brown, and bushy even if there is no squirrel around yet the squirrel has properties; it is brown and bushy. Thus it is simply a fact about intentional states like thoughts that their contents can be notional and that those notional objects can be said to have properties. If that is right then there is nothing fundamentally mysterious about notional mental states having properties. The second step in his defense seemed to involve an appeal to hallucinations. We hallucinate regularly enough for it to be a common-place of folk psychology. Why doesn’t it make sense to say that we can hallucinate mental states? On this line the notional state is just like my hallucination of a pink elephant: it seems like it is there from my point of view but it isn’t really there. This isn’t mysterious since that just simply means that I represent myself as being in a state that I am not in. Now given various theoretical assumptions this will indeed turn out not to be counter-intuitive and since those who do find it counter-intuitive will do so because of different theoretical assumptions I suppose I can see why David thinks that this is not a cost to the theory.

But suppose that one had different theoretical assumptions? Suppose that one wanted to avoid this kind of existence dualism and so endorsed some kind of principle like this: For every conscious mental state there is a corresponding brain state. But suppose one also wanted to remain a higher-order theorist…what are the options? The most obvious option is to identify the phenomenally conscious state with the HOT. The HOT is not introspectively conscious –for that it would need to have a third order state targeting it– but it is phenomenally conscious. It is the state in virtue of which there is something that it is like for the subject and so it seems natural to identify the property of phenomenal conscious with having the HOT. Ned Block has argued that if one does this then one has falsified the higher-order theory. Why? The transitivity principle says that a conscious mental state is one which I am conscious of myself as being in but on the previous analysis we have a phenomenally conscious mental state (the HOT itself) of which we are not conscious of ourselves as being in (there is not third-order HOT) thus adopting this view falsifies the transitivity principle. But this may be too quick. This way of formulating the transitivity principle leads us to the view that the HOT transfers or confers the property of being conscious to the first-order state but as we have seen what the transitivity principle really says is that a conscious mental state consists in my being conscious of myself as being in some first-order state. That is, the transitivity principle is a hypothesis about the nature of conscious mental states. It is a mis-reading of the transitivity principle that takes it to postulate consciousness resulting in a relation between the first-order state and the higher-order state. That this is the dominant way of interpreting the transitivity principle is not in doubt; it most certainly is. However, it is misleading and cause way too many problems. I think higher-order theorists need to be more explicit about this mis-reading of the transitivity principle.

To me the second is the best option. However, lots of people seem to think that of one adopts a same-order theory one can avoid these kinds of issues. Since one takes the conscious mental state to be a complex of a first-order content and a second-order content that represents the first-order content we don’t have to worry about notional states. Bit it is far from obvious that this theory has any advantages over the HOT theory. First it is unclear why the higher-order content cannot occur without the first-order content. This seems like an empirical issue that can’t be settled by definitional fiat (I guess I think Anton’s syndrome might be a problem here). Second, even if it turns out that you can’t have one with out the other it is still not clear why there cannot be a content mis-match. Why can’t a red first-order state be coupled with a higher-order content that represents the first as green?

Dream a Little Dream

One of the other issues that came up at Miguel’s cogsci talk was that of the empirical testability of the HOT theory. Miguel suggested that we might have the following argument against HOT. Experimental evidence suggests very strongly that the dorsal lateral pre-frontal cortex is likely to be the home of HOTs. David has said several times that if we did not find activity in the DLPFC when we had evidence that there were conscious mental states about this would be very bad for the HOT theory. So t if we think that we have conscious mental states in our dreams and we accept the evidence that shows that the DLPFC is deactivated during REM sleep this would seem to count as evidence against the HOT theory. David seemed to think that there were basically two plausible responses to this argument. One copuld deny that there are conscious mental states during dreaming or one could argue that the HOTs have a summer home that we haven’t found yet. A lot of the discussion centered on whether or not we had any evidence that dreams are conscious in the way we think they are. David argued that we didn’t Miguel that we did.

David’s argument seemed to me to be the following. The evidence we have that dreams are conscious are the reports that people make when they are awake and remembering the dream. But it is equally consistent with this that the dreams were all unconscious and only seem to be conscious when we reflect on them in the morning. Miguel seemed to think that it was obvious that dreams were conscious. I suggested that perhaps the kind of work that Eric does on dreams suggests that our naive views about dreams are wrong. Pete suggested that we had good experimental evidence that dreams were conscious from teh kind of studies where subjects are given instructions of the sort that if they see a flashing object in the dream they should clap five times. During the discussion the phenomenon of lucid dreaming came up and David reported that in lucid dreaming the DLPFC was active and so lucid dreams count as conscious mental states.During REM sleep subjects then can be seen to make clapping motions. But is it clear that this counts as a report in the relevant sense? This activity could be the result of unconscious dreams just as well as the result of conscious dreams. In David’s terminology we can ask whether the clapping is an expression of their mental states or whether it is a report. If it truly counts as a report and there is no activity in the DLPFC then David’s view would be in trouble.

This got me to thinking; how could we devise an actual empirical test of these kinds of issues? Hakwan suggested an interesting conceptual approach earlier which led me to think about binocular rivalry. If you could just have subjects in a scanner looking at stimuli that are known to induce binocular rivalry without having the subjects do any kind of reporting we could then look at the DLPFC and see if the activity there reliably correlates with the conscious percept. A quick search on this led me to this article which seems to get results that line up with HOT theory very nicely, though with scalp EEG and with a button push which is a confound…

Explaining Consciousness & Its Consequences

Yesterday I presented Explaining Consciousness and its Consequences at the CUNY Cognitive Science Speaker Series which was a lot of fun and a very fruitful discussion. I have a narrated powerpoint rehearsal of the talk and those that are interested can look at that at the end of this post but here I want to discuss some of the things that came up in the discussion yesterday.

The core of the puzzle that I am pressing lies in asking why it is that conscious thoughts are not like anything for the creature that enjoys them. My basic claim is that if one started with the theory of phenomenal consciousness and qualitative character and came to understand and accept it but one hadn’t yet thought about conscious thoughts one would expect that the theory would produce cognitive phenomenology. Granted it wouldn’t be like the phenomenology of our sensations –seeing blue consciously is very different from consciously thinking that there is something blue in front of one– but why is it so different that in one case there is nothing that it is like whatsoever while in the other case there is something that it is like for the creature? The only difference between the contents of HOTs about qualitative states and HOTs about intentional states is that one employs concepts of mental qualities whereas the other employs concepts about thoughts and their intentional contents yet in one case conscious phenomenology –which is to say that there is something that it is like for the creature to have those conscious mental states– in all its glory is produced while in the other case nothing happens. As far as the creature is concerned it is a zombie when its has conscious thoughts. But what could account for this very dramatic difference? It looks like we haven’t really explained what phenomenal consciousness is, all we have done is re-locate the problem to the content of the higher-order thought. This is because no answer can be given to my question except “that how phenomenal concepts work” and so we have admitted that they are special.

Now one thing that came up in the discussion, by David Pereplyotchik, was what I meant by ‘special’ in the above. David P. suggested that qualitative properties may be distinctive without being special. I agree that they are distinctive and that is the reason that thinking that p and seeing blue are different. We move from distinctive to special when we deny that conscious thought have a phenomenology because we can’t explain why they don’t.

One detail that came out was that the way I formulated the HOTs and their contents was misleading. Instead of “I think I see blue*” the HOT has the content “I am in a blue* state”

At some point David said that when he had a conscious thought what it was like for him was like feeling one was about to say the sentence which would express the thought. So when one thinks that there is something blue in front of one what it is like for that creature is like feeling that they were about to say “there is something blue in front of me”. When I said ‘aha, so there is something that it is like for you to have a conscious mental state’ he responded “what does that mean?” This challenge to my use of the phrase “what it’s like for one” was a main theme of the discussion. A lot of the time I ask whether or not there is something that it is like for one to have a conscious thought and if not why not but David objected that the phrase is multiply ambiguous and is used to confuse the issue more than anything else. One way this came out was in his challenging me to explain what was at stake. What difference is made if we say that there is something that it is like for one to have a conscious thought and what is lost if we deny it? I responded that it is obvious what the reference of the phrase ‘what it is like for one’ is. It is the thing that would be missing in the zombie world. David responded that the zombie world was impossible, which I agree with at the end of a long theoretical journey but we can still intuitively make sense of the zombie world even if only seemingly. That is even if it is the case that zombie are inconceivable we still know what it would mean for there to be zombies and that still helps us zone in on what the explanatory problem is. I take it that the whole point of the ambitious higher-order theory is that it tries to explain how this property, the one we single out via the phrase ‘what it is like for one’ and the zombie and mary cases, could be a perfectly respectful natural property. So what is at stake is whether or not I really am like a zombie when I have a conscious thought and what that means for the higher-order thought theory. If we cannot account for the difference between intentional conscious states and qualitative conscious states then we have not explained anything.

David’s main response to my argument seemed to be to appeal to the different ways in which the concepts that figure in our HOTs are acquired. In the case of the qualitative states we acquire the concepts that figure in our HOTs roughly by noticing that our sensations misrepresent things in the world. So, if I mistakenly see some surface as red and then come to find out that it isn’t red but is, say, under a red light and is really white, this will cause me to have a thought to the effect that the sensation is inaccurate and this requires that I have the concept of the mental quality that the state has. In the case of intentional states the story is different. We are to imagine that there is a creature that has concepts for intentional states but only applies them on the basis of third person behavior. This creature will have higher-order thoughts but they will be mediated by inference and will not seem subjectively unmediated. Eventually this creature will get to the point where it can apply these concepts to itself automatically at which point it will have conscious thoughts. This difference is offered as a way of saying what is different about the concepts that figure in HOTs about qualitative states and those that figure in HOTs about intentional states. It amounts to an elaboration of David Pereplyotchik’s suggestion early on that the qualitative properties are distinctive without being mysterious. They are distinctive in the way that concepts are acquired. But as before how can this be an answer to the question I pose? I agree that there is this difference for the sake of argument. What seems to me to follow from this is what I said before; namely that the phenomenology of thought and the phenomenology of sensations is not the same…but this should be obvious already. So, the claim is not that having a conscious thought should be like seeing blue for me or feel like a conscious pain for me only that it should be like something for me. Basically then, my response is that this will make a difference in what it is like for the creature but doesn’t explain such a drastic difference as absence of something that it is like for one in one case.

Another way I like to put the argument is in terms of mental appearances. David Rosenthal often says that what it is like for one is a matter of mental appearances at which point I argue that the HOT is what determines the mental appearances and so in the case of thinking that p it should appear to me as though I am thinking that p. In response to this David said that while it is the case that phenomenology is a matter of mental appearances it might not be the case that all mental appearances are phenomenological. At this point I have the same response as before…viz. what reason do we have to think that there are these two kinds of appearances? It looks like on is just inserting this into the theory by fiat to solve an unexpected problem. There is no theoretical machinery which explains why we have this disparity. When we ask why applying starred concepts results in appearance of qualitative phenomenology the application of intentional concepts does not so result in intentional phenomenology when we ask why? We are simply told that this is the way phenomenology works. It is as mysterious as ever.

At the close of the talk I touched briefly on Ned Block’s recent paper “The Higher-Order Theory is Defunct” which raises a new objection to the higher-order theory based on the consequences of explaining consciousness as outlined here. The problem that Ned sees is that when one has an empty HOT one has an episode of phenomenal consciousness that is real but that is not the result of a higher-order thought. David’s response seems to be to fall back on his denial that there are ever actually cases of empty higher-order thoughts. I brought up Anton’s syndrome and David responded that in Anton’s syndrome we don’t have any evidence that they actually have visual phenomenology. They don’t want to admit that they are blind but when we ask them to tell us what they see they can’t. If there are never empty higher-order thoughts then Block’s problem goes away.

My response to this problem is to identify the property of p-consciousness with the higher-order thought while still identifying the conscious mental states as the target of the HOT but at that point we adjourned to Brendan’s for some beer and further discussion.

During the discussion at Brendan’s we talked a little bit about my suggestion that we develop a homomorphism theory of teh mental attitudes. David and Myrto wanted to know how many similarities there were between sensory hommorphisms and the mental attitudes. In the sensory case we build up the quality space by presenting pairs of stimuli and noting what kind of discriminations the creature can do. What we end up doing is constructing the quality space from these kinds of discriminatory abilities. So, what kind of discriminations would happen in the mental attitude case? I suggested that maybe we could present pairs of sentences and ask subjects whether they expressed the same thought or different thoughts. Dan wanted to know what the dimensions of the quality space for mental attitudes would be. I suggested that one would be degree conviction, so that whether one doubts something or believes something firmly or just barely will be one dimension of difference but I have yet to think of any others. This has always been a project I hope to get to at some point…right now its just a pretty picture in my head…

Ok well I feel like I have been writing this all day so I am going to stop…

Jacques Derrida, and the theory of deconstruction

Deconstruction deconstruction is the most important movement of the post-structural literary criticism as well as a group the most controversial as well. Perhaps there is no theory in literary criticism has raised waves of admiration and created a state of alienation and resentment, as did the dismantling in recent years. On the one hand, we find that some of the pillars of cash (such as c. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartmann, Harold Bloom) are pioneers disassembly in both theory and practice, despite the diversity of style, enthusiasm, and on the other hand, we find that a lot of critics who lie in box Monetary traditional look dissatisfied with the dismantling have argued that ridiculous and evil and destructive. Did not affect any intellectual center in Europe and America from the controversy in the value of this new theory in cash.

Is the dismantling of a devastating right? If yes, how to be and why? If the answer is no, then why this fear? Can not answer these questions only after understanding the concepts of dismantling basic and evaluation, and perhaps the best place from which we can achieve our goal is a book in his "writing" (2) Grammatology Of who is a San dismantling ... the outstanding work done by Jacques Derrida, the philosopher and critic of France.

I believe that research that explores Derrida and his theory of deconstruction faced obstacles main points, the first created by the method of Derrida himself characterized by raising uncertainty as well as the terminology and concepts, while the other is a series of critical views which are interpretations of interpretations are inadequate or ill-interpretations misinterpretations possible, although light wielded by some of the difficult concepts that form Derrida. And I'm going to document some of these critical comments as before and evaluate the concepts of disassembly.

PM stresses. E. M. Abrams H. Abrams to highlight the part of Derrida's theory is: "1 that the transfer consideration of the language to writing, written or printed text, 2 he sees the text in a specific way unusual" (3). Abrams did not intentionally to simplify the status of Derrida as Tvkikia through Abannioyen equated with the other French, but was marred to a great extent when he tried to identify some key words in deconstructive criticism such as "writing" ecriture and "text" text. He showed that when Derrida's writing is the printed text or written that the concept of a specific text in a way unusual.

I will prove in the course of my evaluation of Derrida and my comment was that what was stated by Abrams, nothing more than a handful of bad interpretations that did not tell us what the dismantling of things, but has not been to the dismantling of an onion.

The Newton Garver, Newton Garvar is another commentator on Derrida, as it emphasizes that Derrida is one of the philosophers of language, and it emphasizes the primacy of rhetoric to logic:

Derrida subsumed under the banner of the movement that looks at the impact that play Almlfozat utterances in the speech that it represents the actual nature of language and meaning, which, because this is the logic of justification Mstenbta rhetoric (4).

The received argument that says that the dismantling of a discipline rhetorical, with the support Hillis Miller, who says: "The dismantling search legacy bequeathed by the metaphor and the concept and the narrative in each other, and this is why the dismantling of cognitive rhetorical field" (5). Murray believes Krieger Murray Krieger that Derrida's "structural cash to overcome the structural and coerced, and may have been negated as well," adding that the attack by Derrida is "a form more recent attack, the old attack Plato the poet as a creator of myths" (6). Emphasizes Frederic Jameson Fredric Jemson Derrida denies that thought they overcome metaphysics and escape from the old model for the purpose of screening new and undiscovered (7).

It is possible that these comments are a source of misleading if the enumerated data or evaluated properly to the theory of Derrida, despite its usefulness in the process of research in disassembly, we when we Derrida with the rest of the philosophers of language who think that the logic derived from the rhetoric, this means to block the possibility of awareness of modern ideas, and the equality of Derrida's Plato and emphasized that Derrida reiterates long-standing dispute with the legendary myth is an insult to the status of Derrida, and emphasized that Derrida did not do anything but to take the attention from the "speak" to "writing" Thus, the inventory of the text in the cell particular, is misinterpretation really. The one should be cautious when approaching the secondary sources to understand Derrida and deconstruction. The split critics groups ... Either they fail to understand Derrida or abuse interpret his ideas, and for this reason can not invoke Article secondary, can not we prepare roads impassable to reach the world of disassembly, but that there Other critics like Harold Bloom, Harold Bloom and Hillis Miller and Paul de Man Paul DeMan and Jeffrey Hartmann Jeoffrey Hartman, who are as far as the authenticity of Derrida, but that each one of them is almost a school and rarely explains Derrida ... great teacher for dismantlement. The understanding of Derrida's first step towards understanding the disassembly, and is no doubt that the first step requires overzealous ideas of Derrida.

Can say that the theory of deconstruction need a lot of new analysis and any attempt by any critic is trying to analyze this theory does not need to dismantle the definition necessarily because such a complex theoretical and complex that defies definition. On the contrary, one can attempt to explain the basic terminology created by Derrida to destroy the critical tradition and to facilitate the act of dismantling ... and this is the first step which I will here, and my intention After describing the terminology and analysis that came out Derrida's answer to the question to how to enable the dismantling of the re- literary criticism, and I will in the final stages of analysis that what was described as absurd is not as well but the dismantling of the contents of the spiritual.

It is worth mentioning that the "writing" and "speak" words that Axial can begin by understanding. Enjoy these words, especially in terms of traditional concepts of language, as these concepts provide for the primacy of speech and the priority over the writing, although the spoken word "voice" phone word of Foreign Affairs and has the ability to self-erasure. As you know, the spoken word as one voice (audio) and the function is invoking the concept represented by the ultrasound. Fade and the spoken word audio or image in the process of invoking the concept, which is why they put out the same as the indication in the process of demonstrating the significance of which he is more important than anything else. Can not imagine this meaning only through ultrasound, which is indicative. It is possible to note here that there is something like the Trinity in this relationship: the mind of mankind, dal (ultrasound), meaning (concept).

Now, what the place occupied by the written word in the traditional understanding of the language? Proceeding from the traditional concept of a language known written word as a representation of the written to the spoken word: In this regard, it is D the spoken word ... and so on, "the written word is D. Dahl is secondary to the spoken word" can not do the written word of anything other than the representation of the spoken word while that the spoken word is the signifier. If I wanted to evoke the concept of "flower" I should then uttering a voice, "flower" (Flowers e), and is indicative of the ultrasound image or audio. But when I write the word "flower" What is the only representation of ultrasound through the structure of written graphic structure. Are not connected with this picture in any written relevant concept, but the picture is written can not represent the concept to the structure of it visible to the visual image as non-vocal, it's something like a spectrum. Is secondary to ultrasound can be neglected, but must be neglected.

It should be noted here that the traditional arguments that were attributed to a secondary position to the written word and place of the President of the spoken word is the metaphysical and theological arguments (. Derrida wrote in his commentary on the metaphysical basis upon which the concept of the spoken word, saying:

.... The understanding of God is the other name for logos logos as self-presence. It is possible that an infinite self and present, can also be generated through voice as a self-prescription. It is an arrangement which can be indicative of the self from which to borrow from outside itself indicative of the overwhelming influence at the same time. As well as the case with the audio experience, celebrating the experience and announces itself as the exclusion of writing, in other words, the exclusion of D "outer", "significant", "spatial" which impede the self-presence (9).

Derrida stresses that the concepts of speech and writing traditional "transmitting to the outside of the meaning" (10) logocentric, and this is another important term used by Derrida to mean what metaphysics is a vector or a vector is a theological (11). To be more precise I would like to point out that the concepts of speech and writing and may be formed by Achtrtthma and controlled by metaphysics. The truth is that this "concentration on the logos" is "centered on the sound" phonocentrism .. This belief, which believes that the sound almost transcendent reality (12) transcendental. We find that the theory of Derrida's positioning on the logos, and concentration on the sound are terms different represent a single phenomenon: evolution metaphysical metaphysical genesis of the concept of speech and understanding. It focuses on the positioning of the logos, and concentration on the sound on the sound, because these two concepts Itoldan of the belief that that sound has been mediating between the human mind and the transcendent reality. It could be argued that this argument for the concept of the Indian approach to the authority of the mantras. Which could be defined as "a sound or series of votes. We believe that the voice of authority because we believe that it can raise power condescending; it due importance to the tone of the words that Nntgaha ... How can the voice of a certain word we call them" mantra "Be in possession of power? It enjoy this privilege because we believe that the sound works as an intermediary between the logos, and transcendent authority. and I'm not trying here to confirm that the traditional Western concept of private stationed on the Logos, concentration on sound is the same concept to your mantra, but I assure there are similarities.

We note in dismantling that there is another element in "concentration on writing" graphocentrism, a term important needed explanation before entering into the theory of Derrida. It is possible to begin to say that writing writing writing graphic, and Jerafim grapheme is the letter in the alphabet, or as the total letters or groups of craft that could indicate Alfonim phoneme (which can be defined as the smallest unit of speech marked Mlfoza or a word of spoken last or other word in language). And if we know that writing can therefore be written to say that Jerafim, according to what is mentioned in the traditional concept, D exchange intended to write unit does not have any connection, except it represents the ultrasound. For this reason, we can say that the intention to write about themselves in the midst is the transmission of the importance of speech to write, which represents a reversal of the concept of the traditional view that the priority of speech or the spoken word on the writing or the written word.

There are a number of critics believe that the dismantling of which was brought by Derrida is a shift from concentration on the logos to be concentrated on writing (13), and this is not the Note is innocent and must express their meaning by dragging out the explanation, I believe that the best way to clarify this issue is to try to simplify the matter by measurement. If it can be compared with writing and speaking and the concept they represent, body, spirit and the transcendent reality, then the focus is on speech is to focus on the Spirit (and focus on the speech is to focus on positioning and positioning on the sound on the logos). The focus on writing is the focus on the body (and focus on writing is the concentration on writing). If dismantling concentrated on writing, and if the concentration on writing means focusing on writing, then can be defined dismantling as a rejection of the primacy of the Spirit and the power of the medium, and it is a challenge to what is moral, it is immersion in the earthly life, it means the disappearance of the Lord ... Is it convincing to say that disassembly Nihilistic nihilistic? Can be said that these assertions are correct, the answer to the above questions is "yes" for everything he says Derrida, and all what it meant dismantling. I will return to this issue after studying the terms which are working in Derrida's Deconstruction tools.

After the presentation of Derrida's metaphysical and theological basis of the concepts of speech and writing, he proceeded to examine the issue of verbal description of the language and concepts that are trying to build the description. In fact, Derrida was a reaction to the theory of Saussure, which says that the mark linguistic sign is the unity of signifier and signified. Claims Linguistics modern, based on the concept of signifier and signified, and structural, which condemns the concept, they have made the study of language and did Monetary fields Marafien scientists, and between Derrida that this claim is to deceive as because the concept of signifier and signified in language that reached us from the linguistics is the image of of the concept of the traditional speech and writing. Derrida has noted during his presentation of the relationship between metaphysics and theology, as follows:

Always suggests the concept of the mark within the same difference between signifier and signified ... so that was appealing against that they are two sides of one coin, and for this reason, keep this concept in the heritage of the concept of concentration on the Logos, which is in fact concentrated on the sound: absolute convergence between voice and Asot and the entity being, and the voice and the meaning of Being and ideal meaning. (OG, p. 112)

For this reason, the pattern language that is said to have made a scientific linguistics and structural borrowed enthusiastically as a model for cash, is in fact the same old pattern, any pattern "logos on the concentration - concentration on the Sound," which is the product of metaphysics.

It is clear that Derrida's gathering of metaphysics and linguistics in one box and this means that metaphysics opens the way for Verbal to imagine the phenomenon of language in the light of the bipolar, meaning that the concepts of the metaphysical notion of realism and idealism, the concept of body and spirit, the concept of good and evil opens the way for verbal and enabled him to perception of language in the light of bipolarity similar. The argument for verbal gaffes, which says that the image audio conjures up the concept (ie, the signifier evokes meaning), focused on the priority of the spoken word to written word, and in this regard, linguistics, structuralism is a modified form of neglect of traditional writing, that neglect caused by the reluctance of philosophical and metaphysical of nature of the external, visual, and embodied the written word, and is therefore clear that the concept behind the traditional language, and the concept behind the brand of tongue when Saussure ambushed metaphysics in the form of conditionality strong force.

He was Derrida called "vulgar concept of writing" on the concept of writing, which neglected the concept of language, traditional and modern linguistics, and several secondary concept, ie, nothing that does not exist only for the purpose of the representation of sound embodied in writing. He adds that the belief that prevailed in the western heritage is about to write it "character" and "visual pattern" and "the body and the article" Foreign Affairs in the logos. This is a banal concept specifically. The rejection of Derrida's concept vulgar, who was brought to our understanding of the language, although we were not aware of him completely, as the face of our performance in the field of literary criticism through us to believe that everything derive meaning and gives it only when linked to an idea, which should be linked to , in contrast, the idea of another, and so forth, so that these ideas are brought together in our idea of Being condescending This is why our idea of Being transcendent function as the idea of controlling our thoughts on language, and ideas in cash ... Thus the criticism of poem discovery of meaning ... as that given by is an idea or concept can be linked to the idea again, and will consolidate the process of linking some of the other ideas in our understanding of being condescending. It should be noted that all the fragments of ideas that can be woven in the pattern of one, collected by a single center represents our idea of the transcendent Being The pattern suggests that there is likelihood of the total. Can be defined in principle the idea that the collective entity which is the creativity of metaphysics. Derrida has been trying to edit our understanding of the language and criticism of this act of collective influence exercised by metaphysics, and reached a liberalization process through the formulation of new terms is possible that the ancient medical concept of language and the way the old currency. But our minds were subjected to the requirements of the traditional understanding of language, whether we were aware of that understanding or not. When we claim we are, we formulated the new ideas we did not do, in fact, but the transformation of old ideas. For example, the linguistic terminology that was brought by Saussure, which is said to have revolutionized our understanding of the language is the product of another metaphysics; we repeat ourselves when we say that the format of the new scientific language. And the right that it is possible to generate new ideas when the mind is neutral. The intent behind Derrida's view of the metaphysical basis of language and currency is paid to the neutrality of our minds that we are fully aware that an entirely natural phenomenon an example of language to hide the seeds of metaphysics, and even a scientific explanation for the language by Saussure is in fact a victim of metaphysics. Derrida has been initiated since the introduction of metaphysical foundation upon which stand the language, terminology in the formulation of which can generate a new understanding of the language .. These two steps are dismantling the structure. Now I will start as a deconstructionist terminology and correct them.

Was based on the concept of writing the new drafted by Derrida to three words are very complex: the difference difference and impact trace and write the original [first] (14) arche - writing. I will work on the interpretation of each term of these terms of the three broadest possible allowed by the determinants of this project, and how I will lead by these terms to do disassembly. The difference refers to the two actions actions: 1 that is different, not to be similar "differ" 2 to postpone and postpone (15) (11) "defer". It should be pointed out that the first and second spatial spatial temporal temporal. In the view of Derrida that every sign of leading this dual function: the difference and deferral, which is why the structure of the mark still required by the difference and deferral, and not through the signifier and signified, in the sense that the structure of the mark is the difference, which means that the mark is something that is similar to another sign, and something does not exist in the mark at all. This can be illustrated by example of what we said the following: we distinguish between the words three [means three] and tree [mean tree] (16) in speech and writing, they are completely different and revolutions reveal their identity. This is one of the two differences of the two in each tab. The other force in the tag is its ability to delay, ie, its ability to delay. For example, the word "rose" in the poem does not begin to disclose the meaning only when we realize that it is not a flower that we see in reality, but to have something else, something that should be detected. For this reason, the half full mark and the other half is inadequate, and this fact is necessary for the beginning of our understanding, it was not sufficient due to lack of it. As emphasized by Saussure, the tag is not a "signifier + signified" but the mark is "difference + delay". Saussure believes that the mark in the Union when he sees Derrida's difference.

Since the label is inadequate and incomplete so it should be understood as "under the cancellation [erase]" under erasure, a term coined by Derrida to point to the inadequacy of marks and the lack thereof. It is written, but with that write-offs, we Ncdobaa to point to the lack of it. For this reason, each carrying a sign that reference them. For example, the word "visible" used by the above did not carry any clear indication of it, but a sign nonetheless. But if we look at from the angle Deconstruction they will then sign written off, as follows: "visible". It should not take the idea of finishing the mark on the more literal, but in a manner suggestive only. This suggests a lack of Diagonal cut marks and inadequate, but inconclusive. There is no sign we can say about it D for something eternal, it does not have any absolute value, as it does not transmit anything transcendent .. Valalamp contextual contextual, meaning it creates a mirage, but the bulk of what you can do it send us in search of what you need is a mechanism and a reminder of what an object is not there.

Deductive and Inductive Arguments



A deductive argument is an argument in which it is thought that the premises provide a guarantee of the truth of the conclusion. In a deductive argument, the premises are intended to provide support for the conclusion that is so strong that, if the premises are true, it would be impossible for the conclusion to be false.

An inductive argument is an argument in which it is thought that the premises provide reasons supporting the probable truth of the conclusion. In an inductive argument, the premises are intended only to be so strong that, if they are true, then it is unlikely that the conclusion is false.

The difference between the two comes from the sort of relation the author or expositor of the argument takes there to be between the premises and the conclusion. If the author of the argument believes that the truth of the premisesdefinitely establishes the truth of the conclusion due to definition, logical entailment or mathematical necessity, then the argument is deductive. If the author of the argument does not think that the truth of the premises definitely establishes the truth of the conclusion, but nonetheless believes that their truth provides good reason to believe the conclusion true, then the argument is inductive.

The noun “deduction” refers to the process of advancing a deductive argument, or going through a process of reasoning that can be reconstructed as a deductive argument. “Induction” refers to the process of advancing an inductive argument, or making use of reasoning that can be reconstructed as an inductive argument.

Because deductive arguments are those in which the truth of the conclusion is thought to be completely guaranteed and not just made probable by the truth of the premises, if the argument is a sound one, the truth of the conclusion is “contained within” the truth of the premises; i.e., the conclusion does not go beyond what the truth of the premises implicitly requires. For this reason, deductive arguments are usually limited to inferences that follow from definitions, mathematics and rules of formal logic. For example, the following are deductive arguments:

    There are 32 books on the top-shelf of the bookcase, and 12 on the lower shelf of the bookcase. There are no books anywhere else in my bookcase. Therefore, there are 44 books in the bookcase.Bergen is either in Norway or Sweden. If Bergen is in Norway, then Bergen is in Scandinavia. If Bergen is in Sweden, the Bergen is in Scandinavia. Therefore, Bergen is in Scandinavia.

Inductive arguments, on the other hand, can appeal to any consideration that might be thought relevant to the probability of the truth of the conclusion. Inductive arguments, therefore, can take very wide ranging forms, including arguments dealing with statistical data, generalizations from past experience, appeals to signs, evidence or authority, and causal relationships.

Some dictionaries define “deduction” as reasoning from the general to specific and “induction” as reasoning from the specific to the general. While this usage is still sometimes found even in philosophical and mathematical contexts, for the most part, it is outdated. For example, according to the more modern definitions given above, the following argument, even though it reasons from the specific to general, is deductive, because the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion:

    The members of the Williams family are Susan, Nathan and Alexander.
    Susan wears glasses.
    Nathan wears glasses.
    Alexander wears glasses.
    Therefore, all members of the Williams family wear glasses.

Moreover, the following argument, even though it reasons from the general to specific, is inductive:

    It has snowed in Massachusetts every December in recorded history.
    Therefore, it will snow in Massachusetts this coming December.

It is worth noting, therefore, that the proof technique used in mathematics called “mathematical induction”, is, according to the contemporary definition given above, actually a form of deduction. Proofs that make use of mathematical induction typically take the following form:

    Property P is true of the number 0.
    For all natural numbers n, if P holds of n then P also holds of n + 1.
    Therefore, P is true of all natural numbers.

When such a proof is given by a mathematician, it is thought that if the premises are true, then the conclusion follows necessarily. Therefore, such an argument is deductive by contemporary standards.

Because the difference between inductive and deductive arguments involves the strength of evidence which the author believes the premises to provide for the conclusion, inductive and deductive arguments differ with regard to the standards of evaluation that are applicable to them. The difference does not have to do with the content or subject matter of the argument. Indeed, the same utterance may be used to present either a deductive or an inductive argument, depening on the intentions of the person advancing it. Consider as an example.

    Dom Perignon is a champagne, so it must be made in France.

It might be clear from context that the speaker believes that having been made in the Champagne area of France is part of the defining feature of “champagne” proper and that therefore, the conclusion follows from the premise by definition. If it is the intention of the speaker that the evidence is of this sort, then the argument is deductive. However, it may be that no such thought is in the speaker’s mind. He or she may merely believe that most champagne is made in France, and may be reasoning probabilistically. If this is his or her intention, then the argument is inductive.

It is also worth noting that, at its core, the distinction has to do with the strength of the justification that the author or expositor of the argument intends that the premises provide for the conclusion. If the argument is logically fallacious, it may be that the premises actually do not provide justification of that strength, or even any justification at all. Consider, the following argument:

    All odd numbers are integers.
    All even numbers are integers.
    Therefore, all odd numbers are even numbers.

This argument is logically invalid. In actuality, the premises provide no support whatever for the conclusion. However, if this argument were ever seriously advanced, we must assume that the author would believe that the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. Therefore, this argument is still deductive. A bad deductive argument is not an inductive argument.

See also the articles on “Argument” and “Validity and Soundness” in this encyclopedia.