19 ideas
| 9327 | Organisms understand their worlds better if they understand themselves [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Organisms come to better understand their worlds by coming to better understand themselves and the ways in which their own structures engage their worlds. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §III) | |
| A reaction: Van Gulick is defending a higher-order theory of consciousness, but this strikes me as a good rationale for the target of philosophy, which has increasingly (since Descartes) focused on understanding our own minds. |
| 9325 | In contrast with knowledge, the notion of understanding emphasizes practical engagement [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: In contrast with standard notions of knowledge, the concept of understanding emphasizes the element of practical engagement from the outset. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §II) | |
| A reaction: This could be the very interesting germ of a huge revolution in our approach to epistemology, which I find rather appealing. Plato's desire that knowledge should have 'logos' seems to me in the same area. It sounds rather internalist, which is good. |
| 9326 | Knowing-that is a much richer kind of knowing-how [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Knowing-that is a much richer kind of knowing-how. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §II) | |
| A reaction: This thought could rather rapidly revive the discredited notion of knowing-how. I think it might slot into an account of the mind in terms of levels, so that my internalist view of knowledge emerges at higher levels, built on more basic responses. |
| 19682 | Internalists are much more interested in evidence than externalists are [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: The notion of evidence generally plays a much more significant role in internalist epistemologies than it does in various forms of externalism. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Prop..') | |
| A reaction: I'm guessing that this is because evidence needs a certain amount of interpretation, whereas raw facts (which externalists seem to rely on) may never even enter a mind. |
| 19684 | Does spotting a new possibility count as evidence? [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Does the sudden realization of a heretofore unrecognized possibility count as evidence? | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Evid..') | |
| A reaction: [Nice use of 'heretofore'! Why say 'previously' when you can keep these wonderful old English words alive?] This means that we can imagine new evidence ('maybe the murderer was a snake'!). Wrong. The evidence is what suggests the possibility. |
| 19687 | Absence of evidence proves nothing, and weird claims need special evidence [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Two well know slogans (popularised by Carl Sagan) are 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence', ...and 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Absence') | |
| A reaction: [Sagan was a popular science writer and broadcaster] The second one is something like Hume's argument against miracles. The old problem of the 'missing link' for human evolution embodied the first idea. |
| 19688 | Every event is highly unlikely (in detail), but may be perfectly plausible [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: At a certain level of detail, almost any claim is unprecedented. How likely is 'Matilda won at Scrabble on Thursday with a score of 438 while drinking mint tea'? But there is nothing particularly unbelievable about the claim. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Extraordinary') | |
| A reaction: A striking idea, which rules out the simplistic idea that we can just assess evidence by its isolated likelihood. Context is crucial. How good is 438? What if she smoked opium? What if there is no Scrabble set on her island? |
| 19686 | Criminal law needs two separate witnesses, but historians will accept one witness [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: An ancient rule in law is that a criminal conviction needs evidence of two independent witnesses, but in history it is assumed that a document deserves the benefit of the doubt if it cannot be independently verified. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Interp..') | |
| A reaction: [compressed; McGrew's full account qualifies it a bit] A nice observation. One might even be suspicious of the two 'independent' witnesses, if there were lots of other reasons to doubt someon's guilt. A single weird document is also dubious. |
| 19680 | Maybe all evidence consists of beliefs, rather than of facts [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers have been attracted to the view that, strictly speaking, what counts as evidence is not a set of physical objects or even experiences, but rather a set of believed propositions. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Prop..') | |
| A reaction: This may be right. However, as always, I think animals are a key test. Do animals respond to evidence? Even if they did, they might need to 'make sense' of what they experienced, and even formulate a non-linguistic proposition. |
| 19681 | If all evidence is propositional, what is the evidence for the proposition? Do we face a regress? [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Taking evidence as propositional may trade one problem for another. If the bloodstain isn't evidence, but 'this is a bloodstain' is evidence, then what serves as evidence for the belief about the bloodstain? Is there an infinite regress? | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Prop..') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] I quite like evidence being propositional, but then find this. I'll retreat to my beloved coherence. I do not endorse Sellars's 'only a belief can justify a belief', because raw experience has to be part of what is coherent. |
| 19689 | Several unreliable witnesses can give good support, if they all say the same thing [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: The testimony of a number of independent witnesses, none of them particularly reliable, who give substantially the same account of some event, may provide a strong argument in its favor. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Testimonial') | |
| A reaction: A striking point. It obviously works well for panicking people in a crowd during an incident. Does it also apply to independent scientists who are known to cheat? They may not collaborate, but may all want the same result. |
| 19683 | Narrow evidentialism relies wholly on propositions; the wider form includes other items [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Evidentialism comes in both narrow and wide forms depending on whether evidence is taken to consist only of propositions or of a wider range of items. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Evid..') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Conee and Feldman for the wide view, which is not restricted to beliefs] You can hardly rely on occurrent beliefs as evidence, so we often have good knowledge with forgotten justification. But such knowledge has been 'weakened'. |
| 19685 | Falsificationism would be naive if even a slight discrepancy in evidence killed a theory [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Data do not quite speak for themselves, which speaks against a naive form of falsificationism according to which even the slightest mismatch between theory and evidence suffices to overturn a theory. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Interp..') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Robert Boyle wisely ignoring some data to get a good fit for his graph] |
| 20653 | Six reduction levels: groups, lives, cells, molecules, atoms, particles [Putnam/Oppenheim, by Watson] |
| Full Idea: There are six 'reductive levels' in science: social groups, (multicellular) living things, cells, molecules, atoms, and elementary particles. | |
| From: report of H.Putnam/P.Oppenheim (Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis [1958]) by Peter Watson - Convergence 10 'Intro' | |
| A reaction: I have the impression that fields are seen as more fundamental that elementary particles. What is the status of the 'laws' that are supposed to govern these things? What is the status of space and time within this picture? |
| 9319 | Is consciousness a type of self-awareness, or is being self-aware a way of being conscious? [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Is consciousness just a special type of self-awareness, or is being self-aware a special way of being conscious? | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This is a really good key question, which has hovered over the debate since Locke's definition of a person (as 'self-aware'). I take the self to be a mechanism of most brains, which is prior to consciousness. Maybe the two are inseparable. |
| 9320 | Higher-order theories divide over whether the higher level involves thought or perception [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Higher-order thought (HOT) models treat metastates as thought-like, and higher-order perception (HOP) models regard them as at least quasi-perceptual and resulting from some form of inner monitoring or inner sense. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §I) | |
| A reaction: I would understand 'thought' to at least partially involve judgements. The HOT theory (Carruthers) seems to suit epistemological foundationalists, who want truth to enter on the ground floor. This pushes me towards the HOP model (Lycan) as more plausible. |
| 9321 | Higher-order models reduce the problem of consciousness to intentionality [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Higher-order models would effectively reduce the problem of consciousness to that of intentionality. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §I) | |
| A reaction: This gives the bigger picture - that higher-order theories are the cutting edge of attempts to give a naturalistic, reductivist account of consciousness. That seems to be the only way to go, so we should encourage them in the enterprise. |
| 9322 | Maybe qualia only exist at the lower level, and a higher-level is needed for what-it-is-like [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: Some higher-order theorists say we have qualitative but unconscious mental states of color or pain (qualia), but there is nothing it is like to be in such a state, which needs higher-order awareness. The meta-states are devoid of qualia. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006], §I.5) | |
| A reaction: He calls this the 'stranded qualia' problem. Clearly one begins to sharpen Ockham's Razor at this point, if the higher-level state isn't contributing something. I don't rule out unconscious qualia. The strength of a real pain is distorted in a dream. |
| 9324 | From the teleopragmatic perspective, life is largely an informational process [Gulick] |
| Full Idea: From the teleopragmatic perspective, life itself is largely an informational process. | |
| From: Robert van Gulick (Mirror Mirror - Is That All? [2006]) | |
| A reaction: From the cynical perspective a human is just 'blood and foul smell in a bag', but that may not give you whole story. The point here is that the informational view will cover both the genetic and the mental levels of human life. True but unilluminating? |