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The Twin Earth argument undercuts functionalism because it undercuts the identification of the mental with the functional. But the problem is not with creating "meanings", but with capturing them faithfully. It is worth recalling that Putnam was a champion of computational functionalism back in 1960s, before he wasn't. According to functionalism human mind ...
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I suppose you are looking for reasons not to identify properties to sets.
(1) A set is a particular ( an abstract particular) , but properies are often considered as universals .
(2) A property is something an object possesses, shares; it is also the case for a set? I mean, could I say that an apple " possesses" the set of red objecs?
(3) Suppose ...
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I will focus here on the first part of the question, which pertains to Putnam's argument to the effect that "meanings ain't in the head". I take this (rather than functionalism) to be the main issue.
Putnam says that while talking about indexicals ("I", "That", "now") - intention doesn't determine extension. It seems right, because when I say "I" and when ...
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Definitely the latter.
While Marx himself and subsequent Marxists often flamboyantly revile the "bourgeois class" in what seem to be attributions of conscious intent, this absolutely must be taken as figurative or, at the very least, inconsequential. While Marx's writing style was at times wonderful, invigorating, and wholly Dickensian, my own feeling is ...
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You're overthinking this. He wants to hit the bottle. He does some stuff. He hits the bottle. Yes, it's intentional. That's what intention means.
We don't care that the "some stuff" was aiming at a different bottle, or singing the Star Spangled Banner, or using a carefully-calibrated laser sight, or praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or anything ...
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Simone Weil, whose philosophy was in part inflected by Marxism would have gone for the latter; in Oppression and Liberty, she writes:
The power which the bourgeoisie have to exploit and oppress the workers lies in the very foundations of our social life, and cannot be destroyed by any political or juridicial transformation.
And
The men who submit to ...
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The definition of life is one of the most famously difficult definitions in all of philosophy. There are many definitions. For example, science has a descriptive definition for life:
Homeostasis: regulation of the internal environment to maintain a
constant state; for example, sweating to reduce temperature
Organization: being structurally composed of one ...
3
Short answer
You helpfully clarified in the comments that your question is about using the rhetorical strategy of cherry-picking. Since it involves the conscious use of an informal fallacy and leads to unsound reasoning, I would call it a form of disingenuous or consciously fallacious reasoning.
Long answer
Since we are in the sphere of how to convince a ...
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There is a distinction between being alive and being sentient and both categories have their own criteria. Modern philosophers, particularly in the analytic and Continental traditions of philosophy rely on these scientific definitions. Whether or not a robot is alive is really not very controversial, because robots as traditionally conceived fail a number of ...
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The inverse square law is about gravity, the triangle inequality is about triangles, "the grass is green" is about grass. They sure are. But what makes them being about? A brick wall has bricks in it, but it is not about bricks, or anything. What distinguishes the three examples above from the brick wall is that they are not objects but propositions. Well, ...
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You don't have to go so far down as the laws of physics. Most classes of life exhibit intentionality without consciousness (amoebas, viruses, plants, etc...).
Daniel Dennett talks about it in many places, but I specifically read about it in his book "Kinds of Minds".
See also Dennett's intentional stance and his idea of free floating rationales (described ...
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Good question, except that the answer is worth at least one or two doctoral theses. The question is way above my own amateur level, so perhaps this should just be a comment.
However, as far as I understand it, there is fairly good agreement on the ways in which Merleau-Ponty (and nearly all later phenomenologists) broke from many characteristic (and, in my ...
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I think your objection holds, but only in a world in which the technology actually exists to put a brain in a vat and simulate a world. In that case you could presumably experience, from the outside, a vat in your pre-brain-in-vat existence, and later correctly surmise that you had been placed in just such a vat at some point in your existence.
In a world ...
answered Nov 20 '13 at 3:55
Chris Sunami supports Monica
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[S]uppose you know for a fact exactly what someone's actual goals and desires are, and then you observe them doing a certain action. Then which is more likely to be the reason why they did the action:
A) their self-reported reason for doing the action, or
B) because it was the rational thing to do, given their goals and circumstances?
Even if you ...
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Both "belief" and "intentional act" are ambiguous terms, so the answer may depend on specific meanings, even for the same author. Ordinary factual beliefs, as in Plato's "knowledge is justified true belief", are typically not considered to be freely chosen, and therefore not intentional on the common meaning of "intention" (but see the last paragraph). They ...
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The following account of Husserlian phenomenological reduction might make clearer what is involved in the reduction. Some of Husserl's characterisations of the reduction come close to examples; and in the References there are suggestions for further reading in which examples are to be found:
We must begin by rehearsing, once again, Husserl's descriptions ...
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A related idea in epistemology is this. Suppose you want to believe that X is true. Is there any strategy that could guarantee that you would be rational to believe that X is true, regardless of what X is?
Here's an example. Suppose I want to believe that people like me, whether or not it is true. But I also want to believe it rationally, in a way that is ...
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I believe it could be said to be alive, even if it isn't conscious, i.e. it is a zombie. John Searle discusses part of this in the Chinese Room argument. It is mentioned somewhere in Searle: Philosophy of Mind lectures. In Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence (ISBN 978-0-521-69191-8) there is a section Artificial Life by Mark A. Bedau with more ...
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I covered defining life & intelligence here. Drawing a hard line between life & non-life is not tenable, or useful. 'Thinking' is a bit of a weasel word, because it can contain a raft of hidden assumptions about what it implies. I suspect what you have in mind is self-awareness.
The real questions are about capacity to suffer, and moral value ...
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First, there is no absolute definition of life. Any definition that you might find, might probably be applied to a rock, so a rock is a living entity.
For example, taking the concept from another answer:
homeostasis: a rock is able to restructure its molecules to avoid breaking when it is submitted to a tension or heat (believe it or not: molecules might ...
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It sounds like your reaction when the robot was pushed over was important in forming your question. Its importance is perhaps due to the activity of your mirror neurons (and other brain events) encouraging a kind of empathy in your mind— since if a robot has a mind it might experience some kind of pain, as you might, when pushed over.
And so, beyond the ...
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There is a familiar way to "salvage" intentionality of non-existing objects, as a real (metaphysical) relation. But first, let's briefly describe the core problem. Metaphysics is supposed to describe reality as it is. And reality is supposed to consist of existing things, and just of them. Real properties are supposed then to exemplify existing things. Real ...
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In psychology, I learned in a class that there's a principle of choice that divides choice into two classes: conscious choices and subconscious choices.
In my Buddhist training, I was taught that belief is nothing more than the result of our interpretations of experiences. People believe in science, for example, because science offers concrete and ...
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No, there can not be intentionality without an intentionalistic agent, nor can there be intending without an intender.
Anthropomorphizing rain and snow does not support the notion that because there can be snowing without a "snower", then there can be thinking without a thinker. The cause of snow and rain do not involve volition; these phenomena are the ...
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I'm not sure how you get to your neo-Cartesian proof of self from the fact that intention requires an intender, without begging the question. The word intention is used in our language to describe that to which we ascribe some property of self or will, but that it is used as a term doesn't prove it's existence. Time-travelling, needs a time-traveller to do ...
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To answer the second part of your question about relating self-deception to Searles's example of the intentional/unintentional homicide. I think the problem would be that such a simplistic interpretation as Searle's presumes that there is only one final intention in the brain, or that at least all competing intentions must eventually be resolved. It is , ...
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A first reference is SEP:
Concerning intentionality see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/
Accordingly
Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs.
Concerning meaning see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/
Accordingly meaning is a property of words, ...
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I don't know if there is a term for this "cut", but it seems to me that it doesn't have to be a "cut"; it could be simply the boundary of an object. I take the term "cut" to imply something more ontologically significant than boundary, like a separation between things of different nature, but here the agent and its environment are both physical systems. You ...
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A baby when growing up learns to make a cut between his body and his environment. In order to establish this cut it is of fundamental importance that the baby explores the world not only by seeing and hearing but also by acting - not only sensing but also acting as agent.
Those objects where I can act upon and get a sensual feedback, they form my body. I ...
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Regular earth guy is pointing at a glass of H20
Opposite earth lady points at a glass of XYZ
They both say this is water.
Let us shelve the question of if this is merely a naming issue for now, as well as the question of if things have the same (equal in all regards other than position) properties, they fall under the same class. Though I find these ...
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