tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4511820658883381752024-03-13T19:06:42.320+09:00states of affairsBillie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.comBlogger59125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-9519195635204671532023-07-17T13:11:00.001+09:002023-07-17T13:28:44.784+09:00Principles of CBT<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Depicting_basic_tenets_of_CBT.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="610" data-original-width="633" height="308" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Depicting_basic_tenets_of_CBT.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>1. Moods are created by thoughts.<p></p><p>2. Bad moods are created by negative thoughts.</p><p>3. Negative thoughts result from irrational thinking.</p><p>Here are some fallacies that indicate irrational thinking, albeit not the ones typically discussed in CBT literature.</p><p><i>Survivorship bias:</i> overestimating one's chance of success based on the success of persons who have passed a selection process while ignoring the failure of those who did not.</p><p><i>Swimmer's body illusion:</i> confusing the factor of selection with the result, for example concluding swimmers have great bodies because they swim, rather than concluding that swimmers swim because they have bodies fit for it.</p><p><i>Clustering illusion:</i> mistaking random data for patterns.</p>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-27595100705731948672023-07-13T16:37:00.002+09:002023-07-13T16:37:58.571+09:00Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: Being-in, Disposedness pp. 169-82, 389-96<p> All right, I can dig it. We're always in a mood or other.</p><p>But anxiety is (one of?) the most basic moods? I see what he means. He's talking about that feeling we have when we stop and reflect on the fact that nothing's grounding our existence. Existential anxiety.</p><p>We're about to get to his weird stuff. He thinks by facing up to this anxiety, we get authentic.</p>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-75279696112880755452023-07-12T19:03:00.001+09:002023-07-12T19:03:02.581+09:00Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: The One pp. 149-68<p> Heidegger doesn't know where his loyalties lie. Is he a philosophical anthropologist or an existentialist?</p><p>Dasein is primarily <i>das Man</i>, he writes. One is what one does, and the one is any one, every one.</p><p>But this state of affairs is terrible, he thinks, because being any one robs us of authenticity.</p><p>I'm not saying Heidegger is wrong. In fact, I don't think he is. Truth be told, I don't even think he's wrong in moving from this descriptive claim to an evaluative claim.</p><p>This is the way things are, and from one point of view, it kind of sucks.</p>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-12283304008308156792023-07-11T20:35:00.001+09:002023-07-11T20:35:49.958+09:00Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: Spatiality pp. 134-48<p>This section of <i>Being and Time</i> is easy enough to understand. Our most basic, most immediate and familiar understanding of space and spatial orientation is relative to our involvement in the world. There's the equipment in front of me and at my periphery. There are the things behind me, and I can think about them, but essentially for Dasein, it's out of sight, out of mind. In an objective sense, there are some piece of equipment I'm making use of which are close to me but which I take for granted and which in some respects seem not even there despite their objective spatiality. My eyeglasses, for instance. They're on the bridge of my nose, but I take them for granted. My laptop and my typing hands seem more immediate to me than my eyeglasses. That's how much I take the function of the glasses for granted.</p><p>All well and good, I think, but as usual, the trouble for Heidegger is when he or the Heideggerians try to draw deep ontological conclusions from this everyday existential phenomenology. A Heideggerian might say that this understanding of space and spatiality is more "primordial" but that way of talking is just to privilege the phenomenological reading of space over a scientific understanding. I don't see a need for such privileging. That's a kind of prejudice, nothing more.</p>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-81997635479271520702023-07-10T23:13:00.001+09:002023-07-10T23:13:42.507+09:00Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: The Critique of Descartes pp. 122-34<p> As much as I'm a fan of Heidegger and his project in <i>Being and Time,</i> I think he's critique of Descartes is off the mark, that is, outside of the broad critique that anyone can make of him.</p><p>First, the broad critique. Yes, indeed, the world is not divided into mind stuff and matter stuff. Now someone who subscribes to naturalistic inquiry will tell a certain kind of story about how the world is carved up and it won't be Heidegger's but let's leave it there. That is, in general, the broad critique.</p><p>Heidegger's specific critique of Descartes is that Descartes got us off on the wrong foot in his conception of us as self-possessed subjects over against objects. I'm no great lover of Descartes but this is unfair to Descartes. Descartes was not trying to capture our everyday phenomenological experience when constructing his dualism or conceiving of the world as a world of objects in view of subjects. He was doing two other things.</p><p>First, Descartes was trying to arrive at what's really real. Right or wrong, he thought how could do this from armchair speculation beginning with some basic assumptions and a simple kind of puzzle. The puzzle was, given the flux of all these worldly phenomena, what bit of the phenomena is beyond doubt? What couldn't be doubted, he concluded, was that he was a certain kind of perceiving being, one he called a "thinking thing." All right, and from there he got all his derivations.</p><p>Another thing Descartes was doing, especially after building up his philosophy from this epistemological foundation had to do with a number of tacit assumptions he was operating under at the time, a kind of mechanical philosophy by which everything in the world seemed to move through pushing and pulling. Well, in many respects this presents another kind of puzzle. If every bit of physics is a matter of pushing and pulling, how do we account for abstract stuff like ideas or intentions and a host of other mental phenomena that do not seem to have these push-pull properties? Another way Descartes fills out his understanding of ontology, then, is to conclude that the sciences deal with the push-pull stuff of matter, but the mind is very special because it doesn't have this mechanical nature.</p><p>What Descartes did not foresee and later thinkers dead is that he need not have posited nonmaterial phenomena, mind-stuff, rather he should have broadened his understand of what counted for material or physical, and that includes a broader category of stuff than that which has to do with contact mechanics.</p><p>The fact that Heidegger has Descartes saying that being a human is a matter of us just staring at stuff is laughable. It's a strawman. Descartes said no such thing and he has left us no such legacy. Never did.</p>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-56397138671316368022023-07-07T14:13:00.001+09:002023-07-07T14:13:48.920+09:00Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: The Worldhood of the World pp. 102-22<i>World</i> is what we colloquially call context. <i>Equipment </i>is all the stuff around us. Heidegger uses the word equipment to point up the fact that most of the things in our environment have an instrumental function. As I write this, I have a paperback copy of <i>Being and Time</i> resting on my belly, and though I'm not using it to read, it is a thing at-hand, ready to be used, whether to read or swat a mosquito.<div><br /></div><div>Our world is already in advance full of equipment imbued with significance, and we take this environment and these things mostly for granted. That's our nature. Only when the stuff malfunctions do I tend to take notice.</div>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-53653706255678248532023-07-06T19:54:00.000+09:002023-07-06T19:54:04.698+09:00Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: Being-in-the-world pp. 78-102A digression, because many of these pages are boring.<div><br /></div><div>Heidegger investigates the obvious and unnoticed on the one hand and the disguised on the other. These are two different modes of hermeneutic investigation: the hermeneutics of everydayness and the hermeneutics of suspicion. The latter is far more interesting.</div><div><br /></div><div>A hermeneutics of suspicion uncovers disguised truths. This is what Marx is up to in <i>Capital</i>, Freud in <i>Interpretation of Dreams, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, </i>and so on, Beauvoir in <i>The Ethics of Ambiguity</i>, and Heidegger in Division II of <i>Being and Time,</i> in his appeal to our call to conscience.</div>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-15715696425631710782023-07-05T14:23:00.002+09:002023-07-05T14:23:39.534+09:00Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: Dasein pp. 32-5, 67-77Dasein is the special name Heidegger designates for human being. He uses this word for two reasons. One, it estranges us from other concepts designating the human being, concepts about which we already have assumptions and which if Heidegger uses there will be several risks for misunderstanding. But a second reason Heidegger uses the concept is because of the wordplay of the German Da and Sein, in conjunction literally "being there." Heidegger wants to say that something about this wordplay serves as a clue to the basic constitution of our being. We are beings already "there," that is, already situated in a world.<div><br /></div><div>Even though we're using a special term, Heidegger believes we're still at risk of misunderstanding of our nature because of our inherited self-understanding which, in the Western tradition, comes from ancient Greece and medieval Christianity. Folks like Plato formulated an understanding of being and folks like Thomas Aquinas formulated the theological understanding.</div><div><br /></div><div>We are also at risk, Heidegger believes, of looking to preexisting fields in order to understand the human constitution, but Heidegger says this is no help for the philosophical project. The example he uses is the ethnologist who studies so-called primitive civilizations as a clue toward understanding, say, early humanity and by implication some of the basic characteristics of human nature. Heidegger wants to say this will not get to the philosophical root because a field like ethnology already has built-in assumptions that will cloud the investigation whereas a broader philosophical project, Heidegger thinks, will disabuse of certain of these presuppositions.</div>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-59306936457717570782023-07-04T19:25:00.001+09:002023-07-04T19:25:29.859+09:00Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: Being pp. 24-8<p>I'm not convinced by Heidegger's reasoning that in order to investigate the nature of being we must investigate the being for whom the issue of being is a question, namely the human being. It's not at all apparent that by investigating the existential constitution of a human being we can learn about being in the abstract. Furthermore, it would appear there are several category errors Heidegger is making by conflating the 'meaning' of being with an investigation into the nature of being. It's a conflation of semantics with ontology.</p><p>Obviously I'm not a mind-reader, but I can't help but assume that Heidegger and Heideggerians like to wallow in these various ambiguities and word slippages, because then to question Heidegger's assumptions is to show you're part of the problem. Can't you see that Heidegger is out for a complete destruction of metaphysics? How can he destroy metaphysics if he has to to trade in familiar, 'theoretical' concepts. The critics are by default guilty of being slave to traditional metaphysics, which Heidegger, fortunately, is not.</p><p>Criticisms withstanding, I think Heidegger in <i>Being and Time</i> has created a brilliant framework of our everyday human existential phenomenology. That can be true and still has starting point can be trash, no?</p>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-14911779131923931112023-05-07T16:44:00.001+09:002023-05-07T16:44:45.884+09:00Anselm's ontological argument<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Anselmus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="635" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Anselmus.jpg" width="254" /></a></div><br /><div>The following is my last favorite kind of argument in philosophy because it is so divorced from reality. This kind of argumentation has been endlessly scrutinized and rightly so. But let's play around with it anyway. Here's Anselm's ontological argument. It goes a little something like this.</div><div><br /></div><div>(0) God is a perfect being.</div><div>(1) It's possible for us to think about God.</div><div>(2) What we can think about exists in our minds. (?)</div><div>(3) So God exists in our minds.</div><div>(4) God exists only in our minds or he exists in our minds plus in reality.</div><div>(5) If something exists only in our minds, then it's not perfect. (?)</div><div>(6) So if God exists only in our minds, he's not perfect.</div><div>(7) But God is perfect.</div><div>(8) So God doesn't exist only in our minds.</div><div>(9) So God must exists in our minds plus in reality.</div><div><br /></div><div>This argument can be attacked on two grounds. Peep the question marks next to the above propositions.</div><div><br /></div><div>The first attack can be waged against the second premise. Saying that something "exists in our minds" is an interesting piece of sophistry. When I think about a piece of cow entrail, does it really exist in our mind? An odd locution! Toss it to the flames.</div><div><br /></div><div>The second attack can be waged against proposition five. Suppose we forget about whether or not something "exists in our minds." What does it mean to say that the thing that exists only in our minds is not perfect? This assumes "existence" is something like a property one can possess. But huh? I don't know what it would mean to say that something is not perfect because it doesn't exist. I might wish for many things to exist that don't exist but to call a nonexistent something-or-other imperfect on those grounds is just to play with words.</div><div><br /></div><div>I wish I had some lasagna.</div>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-50901971753823668092023-04-28T22:29:00.001+09:002023-04-28T22:29:32.062+09:00Is the idea of personal identity exhausted by the views of physicalism and dualism?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Paul_Klee_WI_(In_Memoriam)_1938.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="732" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Paul_Klee_WI_(In_Memoriam)_1938.jpg" width="293" /></a></div>There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.<div><br /></div><div><i>Personal identity</i> has been proposed as a concept to account for the nature of the identity of a person over time, but apart from math, terms like <i>identity </i>lack clear definition, and a term like <i>person</i> has no place in an advanced science. It is not, nor can it be, a natural kind.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nonetheless, let's tentatively regard the term <i>personal identity</i> as an idea, a philosopher's idea, one that is best to eschew, but which meanwhile philosophers have used as an umbrella term to be able to talk about a loose set of related ideas that actually do have a bearing on practical matters. Follow me down this rabbit hole.</div><div><br /></div><div>We ask if there is more to our existence than this, our three score years and ten, and of course we do not know, but erring on the conservative side, many of us conclude that since there is no evidence of life after death that there is no life after death. Still others, for various reasons (no doubt optimism being one driver), wish to believe that there is life after death. In order to conclude as much, such people often posit souls, something immaterial which we are said to be really or essentially.</div><div><br /></div><div>Does one have to posit the existence of a soul in order to believe in life after death? I don't think so. Not enough someone believes in reincarnation, that is. What do I mean? How would reincarnation work without souls? Well, it could be the case that the specific physical constitution that gives me this first-personal feeling of what of what's like to be could be or could have been constituted or reconstituted functionally so that this exact same first-personal feeling is replicated in another being. There would be, then, something of what it feels like to be me now and also at a former or later time.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now you may ask how could an entirely different human body generate the same first-personal feeling? The answer to that question would be just as mysterious, I assume, as it is to account for something as immaterial as a soul. And of course there's no evidence for it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Also, you know, it would be a very funny cosmic irony for the universe to replicate beings that have identical first-person feelings and yet these beings would have no idea that they have been here before or might be here again. You could easily see how the entertaining of such an idea might seem like a kind of hell, and it would help make sense of the Buddhist idea about trying to break this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.</div><div><br /></div><div>But as I said, there's no evidence for these extravagant claims. In the interests of rationality, therefore, it's best to err on the side that all there is is this three score years and ten. However, I wouldn't want to rule out irrational and yet pragmatic reasons for why one would want to believe in life after death. For some who have lost loved ones, the idea can be a comfort. And for those who are about to die, the idea can be a comfort. It's not always best to disabuse people of their irrational beliefs, ourselves included.</div>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-33067279015891837472023-04-09T17:35:00.000+09:002023-04-09T17:35:18.097+09:00Thales<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Illustrerad_Verldshistoria_band_I_Ill_107.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="526" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Illustrerad_Verldshistoria_band_I_Ill_107.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>There's an urban legend that says that Thales was such the absentminded philosopher that one night while he was staring at the stars, he tripped and fell into a well, sending a nearby slave girl into hysterical laughter. And yet this was the same man who predicted not only a solar eclipse but a boom year for the olive harvest. With respect to that harvest, he was so enterprising that he bought up all the olive presses in the area so that he would have a monopoly on olive oil. And he did it.<div><br /></div><div>Thales was born in 626 BCE and died in 548 at age 78. He spent most of his professional life as a statesman in a town in Asia Minor called Miletus, famous for its trade in wool, and rich. Fortunately for history, this world gave Thales enough time to philosophize. Unfortunately for us, we know very little of his actual philosophy, and this for the first known philosopher.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here are two pieces of Thales' philosophy we know about. One is that he believed water was fundamental for life. This view anticipates our contemporary view of water's necessity for life. We don't know how Thales arrived at his conclusion. Perhaps he observed his very own civilization's proximity to water or people's reliance on potable water, or perhaps he watched the growth of plants and crops and thought that their growth generalized to the rest of life. We just don't know.</div><div><br /></div><div>But we do know about this other piece of philosophy, and this through Aristotle. Thales noticed the effects of magnetism and concluded that there must be some particles within the objects that created these effects of attraction and repulsion. He called these souls. He posited that all things were full of souls. This isn't exactly modern particle theory or our understanding of force fields but this careful observation, using the vocabulary of his day, surely presages modern scientific conceptions of how subatomic particles operate in force fields.</div>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-5176068913408798462023-03-28T18:26:00.003+09:002023-03-28T18:26:48.046+09:00The origin of Western philosophy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Anaximander_Mosaic_(cropped%2C_with_sundial).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="367" height="375" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Anaximander_Mosaic_(cropped%2C_with_sundial).jpg" width="367" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Let us go back to the beginning of philosophy.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">To Thales? No!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Thales who said that all was water left little behind, and besides a claim as fatuous as his is nowhere to begin. There's nothing to grasp on.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Let us return to Anaximander who in 7th-century BCE sought the source of all things in the Infinite.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Was this a mistake, to seek the nature of all entities in an Infinite Source? Is it premature to ask the question? Or does the question now come too late? Would any answer to the question posed now be irrelevant?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">And what is this Infinite Source? Is it a being itself, the Being par excellence? We with Anaximander cannot say. What it is, we know not what.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Anaximander conceived the Infinite Source as endless, limitless, primordial, free of age and decay and yet infinitely and perpetually yielding the Elements, from which everything in the known world is derived.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">The Elements make matter through interaction, combinations, reconstitution. When the Elements dissolve, they return to the Source.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"></div><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Whence things have their origin,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Thence also their destruction,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">According to necessity:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">What they give to each other in desert and recompense</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">In indifference they return</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">In conformity with the ordinance of time.</div></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">And that is all we know of Anaximander's metaphysics.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">ADDENDUM. In addition to his metaphysics, we know of Anaximander's philosophical method. He proposed a method to improve the collective body of knowledge, which amounts to the following: acknowledge past teachings, yes, but question them rigorously and improve upon them. No wonder Hellenes gave birth to Athens. Such thinking not only smacks of an incipient scientific method but the very nature of democracy.</div></div>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-37485764597889422032023-03-07T15:46:00.000+09:002023-03-07T15:46:18.096+09:00Excursus on psychotherapy (take two)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Freud's_couch%2C_London%2C_2004_(2).jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="637" height="251" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Freud's_couch%2C_London%2C_2004_(2).jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Lacan again.</div><div><br /></div><div>It has been alleged that in an effort to make more money, Lacan <i>qua</i> charlatan analyst introduced the <i>short session</i>, which is, as it sounds, the conducting of short sessions with patients. Instead of the usual hour—really 45 or 50 minutes—Lacan might do 15 minutes, say.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some would judge this a serious breach of therapeutic ethics. After all, if the patient pays for the hour, isn't he entitled to the hour? Not always, replies Lacan, and here's the rationale: there may be some sessions in which the analyst or patient has landed on a crucial insight, therefore any further communication may only muddy waters, occluding the insight. In such cases, it's perfectly fine to have a short session, argues Lacan.</div><div><br /></div><div>As legend has it, Lacan and his patients arrived at early crucial insights often—too often—so often that it would appear to any outsider that the man was making a money-grab.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lacan's personal ethics aside, there is still the question of whether in some instances it might be better to shorten a session if in fact the patient and the therapist have arrived at the point where they needed to be. It would seem if this is to be done, it ought to be done rarely, but there does appear to be sound justification for it, sometimes.</div>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-69985534688867518212023-02-21T17:43:00.002+09:002023-02-21T17:45:06.825+09:00Excursus on psychotherapy (take one)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e1/Lacan2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="270" data-original-width="370" height="270" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e1/Lacan2.jpg" width="370" /></a></div><p></p><p>Behold the man, Jacques Lacan himself, certainly not Freud and possibly a fraud. And yet even charlatans have insights. What were his?</p><p>The patient does not want to change. From the time he enters therapy, he's invested in return to his status quo.</p><p>Before he'd come, his symptoms had been a <i>substitute satisfaction</i> for what might really one day benefit him. At least initially, symptoms provide satisfaction of one kind or another, even though they fact may not be obvious at first blush to outsiders or even to the patient himself.</p><p>Therefore, the therapist can never rely on the patient's own desire to change. Such a desire doesn't exist. As such, much of his therapy is, for the patient, to get back to the symptom.</p><p>The patient is only there because his substitute satisfaction has failed him and he would like to return to it. Without outwardly disabusing the patient of his delusions, the therapist must represent a pure desire for the patient's presence and return, a desire for the patient to keep talking, without obviously prejudicing the patient toward one life decision or another. This is the beginning.</p><p>The beginning of therapy is with the <i>jouissance crisis</i>, the patient's failure to get a kick out of his own dissatisfying satisfaction, his own suffering, the cage he had come to love, and loves no more.</p><p></p>Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-82604070692880176292016-02-15T12:21:00.000+09:002016-02-15T12:21:52.264+09:00Problems with semantic externalism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There is no definite agreement about what semantics is, but the view <i>semantic externalism</i> supposes an answer. According to semantic externalism, the field of semantics is the study of words and their relationship to the world. If this conception is correct, the goal of semantics ought to be to discover what this relationship may be.<br />
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Semantic externalism is opposed to semantic internalism. Semantic internalists accept no such relationship as that between words and aspects of the world. As Steven Gross writes in "(Descriptive) Externalism in semantics,"<br />
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<i>Internalist</i> opponents maintain that semantics rather concerns, or ought to concern, only <i>non</i>-intentional relations among linguistic items and (other) mental structures... On their view, semantics lays out what concepts or thoughts expressions directly activate or express, <i>without</i> recourse to intentional relations to things external to the mind/brain.</blockquote>
The grand question that externalists seek to provide an answer to, Gross writes, is: "Should semantics include a characterization of intentional relations between linguistic items and aspects of the world?"<br />
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The internalist answer is no, and here it might be useful checking why. On many different grounds, internalists can be opposed to this word-world relation. Here are some examples that provide reasons to be skeptical of this conception of semantics.<br />
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If semantic externalism is true, it is unclear how we can say a river, which is supposed to have some real-world properties apart from the human mind, can dry up, be diverted, frozen over and become a road, and so on. This gives some credence to the fact that the meaning of <i>river</i> has more to do with what goes on in the head than with some external property that all rivers might have. <i>River</i> might be more a concept like <i>Texas</i>, which, if it has any properties at all, are the properties constructed by the human mind/brain and which have nothing to do with any necessary relationship between the words themselves and something in the world.<br />
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There are more examples. Take this sentence: "The book John wrote weighs two pounds." Somehow <i>the book</i> in this sentence is both an abstract and a concrete object. The concrete object weighs two pounds. The abstract object is what John wrote and may not be any <i>particular</i> book.<br />
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Another kind of word or concept for which it is difficult to find what the real-world correlate would be is something like <i>the average American</i>. What object in the world corresponds to <i>the average American</i>?<br />
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Or take fictional creatures. It is very unclear to see how <i>Superman</i> is supposed to be any particular object in the world, and yet it is perfectly intelligible what we mean when we talk about Superman. Yet it does not seem as though there is any way to make sense of the expression, "Superman is Clark Kent," if in the world there is no Superman and no Clark Kent.<br />
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How might semantic externalists reply? We'll take that up next time.Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-37964193159383840712016-02-12T19:16:00.000+09:002016-02-12T19:16:25.460+09:00Postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Anthropologist David Harvey, invoking the thesis of another scholar, calls postmodernism "the cultural logic of late capitalism." This thesis will require some analysis and justification, starting with what <i>postmodernism</i> means. Although there is no definite agreement on the term, the term is generally used to suggest that there is a real fragmentation and ephemerality to our personhood, our society, our economic and political systems, and our era and that this ephemerality and fragmentation is therefore basic to the human condition.<br />
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To understand more clearly what this means, contrast this way of thinking with a naive view. On the naive view, there are definite answers involved in understanding what a person is, how our society operates and its institutions operate, and what our place in the world is. It might not always be easy to uncover the facts of the matter but there are definite answers, according to the naive view. The Enlightenment project from the 18th century onward was an attempt to talk about these subjects and, to the extent possible, make these subjects amenable to scientific study.<br />
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The modernism of the late 19th and early 20th century did not necessarily contradict the attempts to conduct rational or scientific inquiry, nor to challenge the possibility of creation and representation in the sciences and arts, but it did try to show the limits of rational and creative intelligibility. Still, even on the modernist view, any inconsistencies, ironies, or downright contradictions were taken to be problems of knowledge, not really to the way the world fundamentally works. The modernist project did not rule out the possibility for deep inconsistencies in the nature of reality but the burden of proof would have to be on anyone who wanted to demonstrate them.<br />
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Postmodernism, however, a movement from the 1970s onward, proposed that the ironies, inconsistencies, and contradictions of everyday life were rooted in the way the world works. According to the postmodernist project, we have a difficult time inquiring and creating because there is no fact of the matter. There is instead superficial relations that we spot. The world just is one big ball of contradiction, no matter how you slice it. So is the human being. And so is language.<br />
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Comparing modernism and postmodernism, Harvey expresses the language issue this way:<br />
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Whereas modernists had presupposed that there was a tight and identifiable relation between what was being said (the signified or 'message') and how it was being said (the signifier or 'medium'), poststructuralist thinking sees these as continually breaking apart and re-attaching in new combinations.</blockquote>
Certain contradictions appear within the postmodernist project (ironically accepted because postmodernism can admit of all contradictions!), especially involving the actions and behaviors of postmodernist thinkers and artists themselves. On the postmodernist view, if it is true that all there is in the world is this sense of loose connection and superficiality among fragments of understanding and thinking and creating, no political project is entailed. Yet several of the thinkers and artists are left-wing and call for resistance to and suspicion of what they think of as oppressive regimes and institutions. Perhaps the only consistency to the thinking among the postmodernists is that there is no end-goal any of the social or political resistance is trying to achieve.<br />
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Harvey writes:<br />
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The simple postmodernist answer is that coherent representation and action are either repressive or illusionary (and therefore doomed to be self-dissolving and self-defeating), we should not even try to engage in some global project.</blockquote>
But if this much is true, why advocate resistance at all, especially if there is no fact of the matter?<br />
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Postmodernists' theory of personality is in general the view that there is no deep self, only a success of thoughts and sensations in time. Personality traits are not real nor is there any deep sense as to what a human being is as a possessor of rights and responsibilities. Also, since there is no deep self or sense of what a person is, there can be no real oppression, on the postmodernist account, of anyone.<br />
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Continuing with Harvey:<br />
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A number of consequences follow from the domination of this motif in postmodernist thought. We can no longer conceive of the individual as alienated in the classical Marxist sense, because to be alienated presupposes a coherent rather than a fragmented sense of self from which to be alienated. It is only in terms of such a centred sense of personal identity that individuals can pursue projects over time, or think cogently about the product of a future significantly better than time present and time past.</blockquote>
Quoting another source, Harvey writes that postmodernists have transferred the acceptance of the possibility of the "alienation of the subject" to the acceptance of the "fragmentation of the subject." In other words, in past times, a person was seen as someone who has rights and freedoms, which can be given and taken away. He or she can also have meaningful work and a meaningful life, or fail to. Alienation was a possibility because a grander conception of who the person is was possible. Not so anymore, the postmodernists say. Now, all we are supposed to accept is that people are at best one lived moment after another: "The immediacy of events, the sensationalism of the spectacle (political, scientific, military, as well as those of entertainment), become the stuff of which consciousness if forged," as Harvey writes.<br />
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With the triumph and celebration of surface appearances in the world and with the self, it becomes unclear in what sense the scientific enterprise is meaningful anymore, a good life or good work is meaningful, what the importance of art is, and so on. Harvey frames the problem in the following way:<br />
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[H]ow can we build, represent, and attend to these surfaces with the requisite sympathy and seriousness in order to get behind them and identify essential meanings? Postmodernism, with its resignation to bottomless fragmentation and ephemerality, generally refuses to contemplate that question.</blockquote>
And as postmodernism as a movement has progressed, it has been very much inclined, at least more and more, to accept the status quo and to profit from it. Harvey writes that "much of postmodernism is consciously anti-auratic and anti-avant-garde and seeks to explore media and cultural arenas open to all." The artistic representations of postmodernism have been re-appropriated for corporate interests and have become part of common culture. This fragmented conception of self and society has become so generally accepted that, as Harvey writes, quoting another source, "the vaunted fragmentation of art is no longer an aesthetic choice: it is simply a cultural aspect of the economic and social fabric," citing advertising as the new popular domain of postmodernism and "the official art of capitalism."<br />
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What to make, then, of Harvey's claim that postmodernism is "the cultural logic of late capitalism"? Here he is quoting political theorist Fredric Jameson, who has written extensively on the topic of postmodernism. <i>Late capitalism</i> is the period of capitalism human beings are supposed to have entered some time since the mid-20th century onward. (It is debatable if this part of the characterization is correct.) <i>Cultural logic</i> is here meant the way in which our culture thinks of our everyday practices. To call postmodernism "the cultural logic of late capitalism" is to say that it is the way we cannot help but think about the world or create new forms.<br />
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Scant evidence has been given so far as to how this thesis can be true. More to come from Harvey's book <i>The Condition of Postmodernity</i>.Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-34799877009429352912016-02-06T19:18:00.001+09:002016-02-06T19:18:34.893+09:00Semantics: a subject in search of an object<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Semantics is a subject in search of an object. The objects of study are supposed to be <i>meaning</i> and <i>reference</i>. But these concepts are so elusive so as not to be able to warrant agreement about what they are among those who study them.<br />
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Linguists who study semantics break into largely two camps. There are what are called <i>semantic internalists</i> and <i>semantic externalists. </i>Semantic internalists believe the study of meaning involves mainly what is going on inside the heads of a language user. Semantic externalists on the other hand believe meaning has something to do with the relation between words and expressions and objects and states of affairs in the world.<br />
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Semanticists also tend to study meaning in a few different ways. Some focus exclusively on the psychological processes or properties that would have to be the case for expressions to be meaningful. Others abstract from natural languages certain sets of principles and generate idealized languages in order to determine properties of meaning. Still others focus on environmental conditions, thinking that meaning has more to do with social or environmental properties than with what is in the head or in the expressions themselves.<br />
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In the next post on semantics, I will discuss semantic externalism and the views for and against it.Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-13251423528004576482016-02-05T21:09:00.000+09:002016-02-05T21:15:53.279+09:00From modernity to postmodernity<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx512nTa0z3gRaWYzvTSHtDeD6SbbM7QbxjMGqE5ayyDYnvtswJsJW6AdD1Z0htJl6_l_UVf9HAUnYNUliLCuSvySFeJTEYFb-HQQlPBMakWhq0AU06tk1F1Vy_KKauUsLH44MB-cV_v4/s1600/PatrickHenryBrucePainting1929.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx512nTa0z3gRaWYzvTSHtDeD6SbbM7QbxjMGqE5ayyDYnvtswJsJW6AdD1Z0htJl6_l_UVf9HAUnYNUliLCuSvySFeJTEYFb-HQQlPBMakWhq0AU06tk1F1Vy_KKauUsLH44MB-cV_v4/s400/PatrickHenryBrucePainting1929.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Patrick Henry Bruce, <i>Painting</i> (1929/1930)</td></tr>
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The anthropologist David Harvey characterizes the changes that occurred during the postmodern transition around 1972 as being largely superficial in view of the social and economic changes that occurred in the 70s, and to the extent that postmodernism demonstrates social and economic progress it is more as a reaction to the changes rather than internal to postmodern thought itself. Harvey writes that the ideas of postmodernism, "when set against the basic rules of capitalistic accumulation, appear more as shits in surface appearance rather than as signs of the emergence of some entirely new postcapitalist or even postindustrial society." In order not to prejudge Harvey's conclusion it might be useful to examine the route to these new ideas and what these ideas are.<br />
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Examining the route to these ideas will be what this discussion is, and then in a later post we will examine the ideas themselves. Our trajectory begins with the Enlightenment, which originated in the 18th century. The Enlightenment was characterized by the belief that no authority by virtue of their position as authority has the right answers to the way the world works or how we ought to treat other people. We need to become our own teachers and the beliefs that we have need to be justified.</div>
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David Harvey asserts, without explanation, that the Enlightenment project "took it as axiomatic that there was only one possible answer to any question. From this it followed that the would could be controlled and rationally ordered if we could only picture and represent it rightly." Some Enlightenment figures may have asserted as much but there is nothing in the Enlightenment ideal that would make this necessarily the case. In fact, it is not even the basic mark of Enlightenment values.</div>
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Believing the caricature sketched above by Harvey makes it easier for people to perceive the Enlightenment as continuous with the emerging worldview of domination and oppression of the fascist regimes of World War II. <i>The Dialectic of Enlightenment</i> (1972) by Horkheimer and Adorno makes just such an argument. If the Enlightenment requires one correct answer to world problems, and if a group of self-appointed enlightened persons reason their way to the wrong solution, it would be possible to have a system of thought and political behaviors like fascism.</div>
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Modernism emerged during the late 19th century. The movement permeated the arts and sciences and everyday life. The mark of modernism was that the old ideas had to be discarded for novel ones and that the limits of rational and aesthetic intelligibility had to be pushed to the limits. Also, it was assumed in modernism that the proper position from which to undertake study and creativity were from the inside, examining the world from the first-person point of view. Modernism was not a political movement but this belief in novelty, subjectivity, and the limits of intelligibility required some stance toward politics. If all traditional forms are to be discarded, there arises the question of what ought to replace it. For some modernists, this meant inaugurating new traditions. For others, it meant getting comfortable with the flux. For still others, it meant creating more flux. No wonder, then, that the late 19th to early 20th century gave rise to fascist and anarchist movements, both sides of the extreme.</div>
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Postmodernism supposedly came in the wake of the Enlightenment and modernism. Yet many people think that this retelling of the history of ideas is misguided and that the Enlightenment and modernist projects never went away.</div>
Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-71520212635363742992013-01-20T02:04:00.001+09:002013-01-20T02:05:15.225+09:004.1 PerceptionA big debate about perception involves how it is we perceive anything at all. There are perhaps three stances we could take toward the issue of perception. First, we have direct access to the world outside of us through our senses. Second, we have indirect access to the world outside of us through our senses and a mediating Representation. Third, we have no access to the world outside of us but only Representations.<br><br><i>First possibility: We have direct access to the world outside of us through our senses.</i> (direct realism)<br>Consider this first possibility. It is what is often called "direct realism." So when I look at my laptop, for example, I am seeing my laptop. Sure, there's a complicated story to tell about how the brain does it, and a complicated physiological story about how my eyes work, but basically there's a one-to-one correspondence between my seeing to see a laptop and that I see a laptop. But consider the perception again. What I see isn't an object with all of its 4 dimensions. I see one aspect of what I assume to be an object. I see, for example, this side from this distance, under this light, etc. I can't see the back of the laptop nor can I see underneath it. All of this gives me some suspicion that what I see is not exactly something else directly in the world but certain aspects of what <i>could be</i> directly out there in the world.<br><br>You could say the same about optical illusions and rainbows. Optical illusions are basically the brain's failure to perceive something for what it objectively is and instead perceive patterns, distances, and directions that are not there. Rainbows seem to be objects that eventually touch the ground but the closer you are to them they recede.<br><br>Rainbows, optical illusions, and the talk of the laptop suggest the second or third possibility. So let's consider...<br><br><i>Second possibility: We have indirect access to the world through our senses and a mediating Representation</i> (indirect realism).<br>I capitalize Representation here so as to distinguish the word from at least one philosophical tradition that requires that representations are representations of some other object and to define it instead as some complex manifold of percepts, what might have to be given a better understanding through neuroscience or some of the other natural sciences.<br><br>Setting that issue aside, the view espoused here is often called "indirect realism," indirect because there is something intermediary between us and the world. Given that when I reflect on what I perceive I realize I never perceive anything in its totality. But maybe that is not exactly right. Surely I do not <i>see</i> everything in its totality only certain aspects of it, but this is to say nothing yet of the other senses. For example, it does not even seem intelligible to me to say that I did not taste a bite of food 'in its totality.' I can say, however, that I "half-heard a conversation," but regarding smell it might seem stranger to say that I 'partially' smelled it. Or regarding touch, the touch of something often appears immediate.<br><br>This diversity of perception and the way the world subsequently seems to us coupled with my reflections about what it seems appropriate to say might say more about language than it does about the five senses. Nevertheless, it seems to hint that <i>the only reason we infer the existence of objects in the world and a world outside of our perception is because we are so designed to operate as if everything we perceive is natural and so</i>. Furthermore, we can rationalize that the world is so and that objects are actually there and perdure through time because that seems to be an inference to the best explanation: If there were not a world external to the mind/brain, it would be a lot of information for little old me to carry around in his head absent some world of objects providing me with input.<br><br><i>Third possibility: We have no access to the world outside of us but only our Representations</i> (idealism).<br>Assume for the moment that I perceive that the world is such because of evolution and a kind of mental confabulation that allows me to believe that there is a world and it is a place full of persons and other entities. If this much were true, then we would have the position often called "idealism." I want to give some credence to idealism if it is properly construed.<br><br>If the claim and this whole direct-realism, indirect-realism, idealism debate is really about our epistemic limitations, then idealism looks to be correct. I mean, if this third possibility "idealism" really means "We cannot know that there is a world outside of us, only that we have Representations," that much seems to be true. If it is a claim about metaphysics, meaning "There is no world outside of us but only our Representations," that position would be more difficult to affirm.<br><br>As far as epistemology goes, we could go right on assuming that the world is metaphysically full of people and objects and so on but it is just that, an assumption. As far as the limited position we're in, we can't ever know for sure that the Representations have some reality correspondence. We just have to build theories that are intelligible and explanatory to understand how the world seems to work and modify our thinking after that.Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-56795585664625464052013-01-13T19:12:00.001+09:002013-01-13T19:12:57.478+09:003.4 Why Coherentism?First, to attack coherentism, let's consider what the foundationalists could say in the way of some basic beliefs. What about "I have a headache" or "Two plus two equals four"? Surely those beliefs are basic...<br><br>Coherentists could still say Nope. Each of those beliefs could have other beliefs given as reasons for them. Like I said previously, "I have a headache" or "Two plus two equals for" at least assumes other beliefs about how those words match to concepts. Now someone might ask, But then why don't more people ask for those reasons? And the answer I'd give is: For pragmatic reasons. If somebody says, "I have a headache," and someone else asks "How do you know?" that person would really be looked at as an odd duck. But that doesn't mean that other reasons couldn't be given, only that, practically speaking we don't ask or look for those other reasons. In those situations, we just don't do philosophy.Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-63543625104269598612013-01-13T18:55:00.000+09:002013-01-13T18:55:19.833+09:003.3 Why Foundationalism?Many people are sympathetic to foundationalism. In some respects, they think it accords with our common sense. Like this, for example. Because I'm looking at a Christmas tree in my house that has been up now past Christmas, because I have this belief, and this belief looks to me to be caused by the most immediate experiences I'm having, something like foundationalism must be true. I must have at least some basic beliefs.<br><br>Nobody is going to doubt that my perception of the Christmas tree is immediate to me. But what they very well could doubt is that any subsequent beliefs I have about the Christmas tree, even that I see it, could be supported by any number of beliefs connected to my perception of the tree.<br><br>One of the objections to any alternative to foundationalism, according to the SEP article on epistemology, is the regress argument. The argument is something as simple and stupid like: But if I need to give a reasons for my belief in terms of another belief, don't I need to give a reason for that belief in terms of another, and in terms of another, blah ditty blah blah? Therefore, foundationalism is true.<br><br>Even assuming that it somehow follows that foundationalism is true from this half an argument, the premises don't work. Like, the assumption is that each belief needs another belief to be justification for another. So, for example, B1 (belief 1) justifies B2 which justifies B3, and so on. But think about how explanation works, both formally and informally. Once we hit a certain point in our understanding, we just accept that there is no explanation past some such beliefs or we give a circular justification. That likely means that something like coherentism is true. There is always possibility for other beliefs we have that are reasons for the immediate beliefs we have, and this all go together in a kind of chain, it seems.<br><br>Another argument for foundationalism is that the alternative coherentism does not allow the possibility that our beliefs are actually in contact with the world. Foundationalism as a position does, so we're supposed to accept that. But that's malarkey because if you accept that idea that it's impossible to make the world in its totality intelligible with one's beliefs, then the most we can hope for is having the best beliefs in light of the best and most explanatory theories, formally and informally. Nothing wrong with that. Are minds are not designed such that we're guaranteed complete understanding of the world, you know.Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-44978173899172560472013-01-13T18:38:00.001+09:002013-01-13T18:38:36.151+09:003.2 CoherentismCoherentism is the belief that all our beliefs are or could be reasons for our other beliefs. So there are no basic beliefs, like the foundationalists say. There's no objective point or points to which we could point and say "Those are the foundational beliefs. Those are the basic beliefs."<br><br>Take the example with the table like in the last post. For the belief "I see a brown table," I could give any number of other beliefs for why I believe that that belief is true. If so, there aren't any basic beliefs. By default, coherentism has to be right.<br><br>End of story there.Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-87230871508388378152013-01-13T18:34:00.000+09:002013-01-13T18:34:01.561+09:003.1 FoundationalismFoundationalism is a position built around basic beliefs. A basic belief is a belief that doesn't need other beliefs for its justification. What kind of argument could you give for this position? Maybe something like this.<br><br>I see a brown table. I can't think of any other belief that could be a reason for my believing that other than that I just see a brown table. That's my belief.<br><br>This can be easily dispensed with, though. That belief could be contingent on the fact that you know how the word 'brown' functions as a concept for BROWN and you know how TABLE is another concept. So, maybe unaware to you at first, you could <i>always</i> give reasons for any beliefs you have and so no belief is basic. Foundationalism is false.<br><br>I really do think it's as simple as all that.Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451182065888338175.post-77830426387495075532013-01-03T11:27:00.000+09:002013-01-03T11:27:29.779+09:002.5 Why Externalism?Externalism is the view that the reasons for our beliefs come from sources external to the mental life we have, whether it be nature or some other physical processes that make the beliefs true and reliable. One motivating argument for this view is a challenge to internalism, which is the view that reasons for beliefs come from a person's mental states. The externalist challenges the internalist to explain how we could ever say that very young children and animals have knowledge at all without appealing to reliable processes or mechanisms external to the specific mental states. The externalist charges that the mental states of young children and animals are not sufficiently complex for them to have reasons for their beliefs. So, it follows, externalism is true.<br><br>Another argument for externalism is that what we are looking for are objective facts or objective probabilities so that we can have a guarantee for knowledge, which is supposed to be objective. The only sources that would be guarantors of objectivity would be external. So, externalism is true.<br><br>Taking each argument in turn, the argument about young children and animals relies on the children and animals having mental states complex enough for them to be able to provide reasons for their beliefs, or put another way, they would have to be able to, in principle, generate reasons for their beliefs. I contend that if this were the way mental states were to be construed, then externalism would have a case. But suppose that if 'knowledge' were given a technical sense, it would be a kind of system in the mind/brain that is made up of principles and parameters that allow for operation relative to certain domains (anything from speaking a language to doing biology). If this were what knowledge is, essentially the sum total of all knowledge systems, then a mental state relative to some domain would just be the state in which a person is in at a given time and for which is making use of a knowledge system the person has. These need not be conscious. They could be very abstract.<br><br>If this were all true, then the reasons for any given belief could be internal to the mind/brain <i>without</i> being something someone could verbally express or consciously think is a reason for the belief. If for the externalists this is close enough to their appeal to certain reliable objective external processes, then so be it. Then internalism and externalism are not so apart after all. We should be careful about our word choice, though, because sometimes externalism means a mind-world connection that is posited that we could never actually know we had if we had it.<br><br>This brings us to the next argument that what we want are objective facts and objective probabilities and an externalist view would provide for this. But given that we cannot escape our own skins, wanting a mind-world connection does not guarantee one. Inasmuch as we reason or do science, we hope we're achieving one. But this hope is something like a leap of faith. Which will have to be good enough. Even so, it could be the case that the whole world is destroyed and we never know it, and all the mental states be exactly as they are.Billie Pritchetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09975931918383394113noreply@blogger.com0