Facts

There are certain experiences which are undoubtedly true. The book we have in front is one of these. Certain deductions are apodictic. These experiences have been tempting philosopher since the very beginnings. The analytical philosophers have been this century particularly obsessed with such truths. To their minds they are like clews which they hope to follow to absolutely certainty. Such is the origin of the philosophical use of facts. Facts constitute states of affairs. In sum, both refer to the evidence of the senses and to logic. But to designate the set of such truths with the terms reality and being will not do, because both reality and being embrace also untruths, illusions, errors, and so on.

Factuality, factual propositions

Factuality refers to necessary truths. Perceptions are factual propositions.

Fatalism

See Determinism

Fine grain, coarse grain

These paired metaphors are taken from photography. Coarse grain refers to the larger picture involving metaphysical principles. Fine-grain is akin to the bottom up strategy.

Fixation

Fixation is the self fixing upon itself as it fixes upon external objects. As such, it easily turns into anxiety because it cannot manipulate mental events in the way that the hand manipulates objects. Fixation is the quintessence of introspection in so far as it makes mental events as real as things, in the sense that things are resistant to our touch.

Fodor

(1) Fodor seems to believe that knowledge is belief when he makes it his chore to defend a strong distinction between perception and inference

Now, for one thing, belief is not a condition for knowledge

I can suspect that something is true which is indeed true, and yet I may not believe in what I suspect and the proposition which expresses my suspicion would still be valid

But my touble with his concerns goes deeper than that

It has to do with two different basic approaches to knowledge

As he sees it for something to be knowledge it must become a belief

Otherwise, why would he bother to distinguish between perception and inference, which are cognitive propositions, in terms of belief formation?

But belief in my theory is part of a propositional base underlying all propositional content

Propositional content is the product of cognitive processes

These cognitive processes can produce belief, denial or belief, a neutral, noncommittal stance, and "shades" in between these attitudes

The bases of propositiional content are always valid

Propositional content itself may or may not be valid

So, applying my theory to Fodor's mistaken approach we get the following propositions

Cognitive processes produce propositions

Propositions have propositional bases

One of these bases is the belief-proposition

Cognitive processes can determine the form of the propositional base involving belief, but they do not necessarily do so, i.e., we can have cognitive processes which produce propositions involving neither belief nor unbelief

There are cognitive processes other than perception and inference

Some propositions are self-justificatory: neither perceptual nor inferential

Some controversial propositions, which could possibly be valid, are not inferential, i.e., originate in some associative subconscious process of squiggles

Finally, to say inference without more ado leaves too much up in the air, for there are various sorts of inference, among them, just to be summary and quick about it, probabilistic inference, inductive or empirico-rational inference, and logico-mathematical inference

We must mention, in addition, that there are two types of scientific inference: a type related to inductive inference, which leads to scientific hypotheses, and lawful scientific inference, which is very much like logic-math inference

(2) I am reading a book whose contents I detest

This is a personal attitude

It implies the self, and the self is a special set of squiggles

In Fodor's view meaning is a rational process

All that mind does is to translate the contents of the book into mentalese

But the presence of affects as adjunts to meaning imply that meaning and Fodor's version of mentalese cannot account for my mind's reading of the book

More than mental meaning goes into my reading of the book

(3) I am reading a book whose contents I detest

In Fodor's view meaning is a rational process

All that mind does is to translate the contents of the book into mentalese

But the presence of affects as adjunts to meaning imply that meaning alone and Fodor's version of mentalese cannot account for my mind's reading of the book

More than mental meaning goes into my reading of the book

Fodor, The Language of Thought (1975)

Wittgenstein confused dualism with mentalism

It is possible to have mentalism without dualism

"But representation presupposes a medium of representation, and there is no symbolization without symbols. In particular, there is no internal representation without an internal language"

Infra-human organisms and the pre-verbal infant think in the sense of considered action, concept-learning, and perceptual integration

They do not know a natural language

Therefore, a natural language cannot be the medium of thought

Only computer models as representational systems can give account of non-verbal thought

"We have no notion at all of how a first language might be learned that does not come down to some version of learning by hypothesis formation and confirmation"

"Similarly, learning the truth conditions on P would be a matter (not of hypothesizing and conforming that the corresponding truth rule applies, but just) of having one's response dispositions appropriately shaped.

      "A number of philosophers who ought to know better, apparently, accept such views. Nevertheless, I shall not bother running through the standard objections since it seems to me that if anything is clear it is that understanding a word (predicate, sentence, language) isn't a matter of how one behaves or how one is disposed to behave. Behaviour and behavioural dispositions, are determined by the interactions of a variety of psychological variables (what one believes, what one wants, what one remembers, what one is attending to, etc.). Hence, in general, any behaviour whatever is compatible with understanding, or failing to understand, any predicate whatever"

Actually, there is teaching before hypothesis formation

A parent teaches words to a child

That the child later might ask is this the word that designates this object cannot be considered a form of hypothesis testing

The child is appealing to an authority

A child will fight tooth and nail for a definition it got from his parents against a stranger's version of the same word

This is not an inductive process

In this book Fodor works hand in glove with Chomsky

Chomsky holds that language universals are innate

A child supposedly tests grammars against language universals

But do not language universals as such entail a grammar?

In any event, the Fodor/Chomsky argument is that both language universals and grammars imply a mental language, which is not a natural language because it is precisely a natural language that the child is learning

Learning the semantic properties of a predicate [noun, verb, adjective, et al] is learning the extension of the predicate

This involves a truth rule for that predicate

"S learns P only if S learns a truth rule for P"

The truth rule consists in knowing what it is in the world that the predicate is true of

If we already know a language which is at least as extensive as the natural language that we learn, then obviously the language we already know must of necessity contain the real extension of all the predicates that we can learn when we learn the natural language

"But one cannot learn that P falls under R unless one has a language in which P and R can be represented. So one cannot learn a language unless one has a language in which P and R are prepresented. In particular, one cannot learn a first language unless one already has a system capable of representing the predicates in that language and their extensions. And...that system cannot be the language being learned. But first languages are learned. Hence, at least some cognitive operations are carried out in languages other than natural languages"

But I can know a predicate without knowing its full extension

And is it ever possible to know the full extension of a predicate?

Take table and table mountain

The figurative possibilities of predicates are quite unpredictable

Pegasus is a winged horse cannot be understood because there are no conditions under which this proposition would be true

Or take a dragonfly is a winged insect

How do I know that insect extends to wings?

Insect could refer exclusively to the metameres or some other insect feature not including wings

It is possible to argue that every P has a definition and that it is from the definition of P that we determine its extension

Only experience can give you the true extent of a proposition

"I will argue primarily that you cannot learn a language whose terms express semantic properties not expressed by the terms of some language you are already able to use. In formulating this argument, it is convenient to assume that the semantic properties expressed by a predicate are those which determine its extension, since, whatever its faults may be, that assumption at least yields a sharp sense of identity of semantic properties (two predicates have the same semantic properties if they apply to the same set of things)"

This of course leaves out grey areas, figurativeness, connotations, intensions, and so on

It is possible to speak of beauty in relation to art or to the world, and the meanings are different

Beauty in nature is sensuality

Beauty in art is more formal than sensual

No predicate can be exactly as extensive as another, although this is not to say that synonymy is not possible

"...what happens when a person understands a sentence must be a translation process basically analogous to what hapens when a machine `understands'...a sentence in its programing language"

"One way of describing my views is that organisms (or, in any event, organisms that behave) have not only such natural language as they may happen to have, but also a private language in which they carry out the computations that underlie their behaviour"

Fodor here deliberately sets up a phony confrontation with Wittgenstein, who denied the possibility of a private language

In Wittgenstein the primary definition of a private language is that it is one that only expresses what an individual experiences, e.g., the use of arbitrary sounds that correspond to no existing language in order to designate experiences that every one has or can have

And in this sense the mental language, if it is to make any sort of sense at all, cannot be a private language

The private language that makes learning possible has to be the same for all individuals, especially as it has to be innate

Learning is an universal process

It is not admissible that human beings should know they know if the innate system for learning they have were peculiar to each individual

However, there is another Wittgensteinian definition of a private language and that is that it is a "language for the applicability of whose terms there exist no public criteria (or rules or conventions)"

What Fodor claims he wants to prove is that this definition of a private language does not apply to his thesis of a mental language

Or to put it another way: that it is possible to use a private language coherently if not exactly according to public criteria

"Notice...that the use of a language for computation does not require that one should be able to determine that its terms are consistently employed; it requires only that they should in fact be consistently employed...The soundness of inference is not impugned by the possibility of equivocating, but only by instances of actual equivocation"

Isn't this an implicit denunciation of Gedanken?

"We must give some sense to the notion of terms in an internal representational system being used coherently and we must show how that sense is at least reasonably analogous to the sense in which the terms in public languages are coherently employed"

His argument fundamentally is that if it is conventions that make for coherence in public languages it is the facts of the world that create those conventions and the same facts can be used to demonstrate the coherence of a private language

Coherence requires a stable relation between the way terms are used and the way the speaker believes the world to be

In a natural language conventions determine such coherence

Such conventions are the rules which pair propositional attitudes like beliefs with the forms of words that express these attitudes

In a Wittgenstein private language the relation between language forms and propositional attitudes is not mediated by public conventions

The challenge that the private language argument poses to the notion of a language of thought is: show how such a relation could be mediated other than public conventions

To my way of seeing things, the question really is: how does a system of representation apply logic, make perception possible, and so on?

But no matter

Fodor's argument seems to be that an organism shows coherence if there is correspondence between its beliefs and the ways things are in the world and that for the same coherence to obtain in relation to a private language it is necessary to assign the formulae of the private language to the coherent states of the organism

"Any psychological theory...will have to ascribe a special role to the computational states for organisms, viz., the way that information is stored, computed, accepted, rejected, or otherwise processed by the organism explains its cognitive states and, particularly, its propositional attitudes"

"Finally, and this is the important [condition for the ascription of computational processes to organisms], that for any propositional attitude of  the organism (e.g., fearing, believing, wanting, intending, learning, perceiving, etc., that P) there will be a corresponding computational relation between the organism and some formula(e) of the internal code such that (the organism has the propositional attitude iff the organism is in that relation) is nomologically necessary"

In Wittgenstein inputs plus conventions produce belief

Belief is conventional

In Fodor inputs plus code language produce belief

Belief is nomologically necessary

In sum, prop-att psychology presupposes a self and awareness and representation

"There are...two things--the organism's relation to propositions and the organism's relations to formulae--and these two things are so arranged that the latter is causally responsible for the former (e.g., the organism's being in a certain relation to the formulae causes the organism to be in a certain relation to propositions). I can imagine that someone might want to resist this picture on metaphysical grounds; viz., on the grounds it takes propositions (or, anyhow, relations to propositions) as the bedrock on which psychology is founded"

There must be a computational formula for every propositional attitude is a law

But there is no difference between perceiving and perceiving that P

The act of perceiving is itself a proposition

Therefore, for every proposition there is a symbolic formula

Fearing necessarily must be fear of something

Fear without cause is not experienceable (pace Kierkegaard)

"What is required...is that there should be the right kind of correspondence between the attitudes the system bears to propositions and the relations that it bears to formulae of the language...We remarked that, in the case of natural languages, the relevant correspondence between the speaker's relation to formulae and the attitudes he bears to propositions is mediated by his adherence to the conventions that govern the language. In the case of the internal code, it is presumably determined by the innate structure of the nervous system"

"It remains an open question whether internal representation, so construed, is sufficiently like natural language representation so that both can be called representations `in the same sense'...Since public languages are conventional and the language of thought is not, there is unlikely to be more than an analogy. If you are impressed by the analogy, you will want to say that the inner code is a language. If you are unimpressed by the analogy, you will want to say that the inner code is in some sense a representationsl system but that it is not a language. But in neither case will what you say affect what I take to be the question that is seriously at issue: whether the methodological assumptions of computational psychology are coherent. Nothing in the discussion so far has suggested that they are not. In particular, nothing has prejudiced the claim that learning, including first language learning, essentially involves the use of an unlearned internal representation"

Computation and unlearned are oxymoronic

In my view propositional attitudes are the propositions themselves

When we have a proposition, be it perception, thought, or affect, we already have a propositional attitude

There can be no propositional attitudes without propositions

The so-called formulae of the code language are the propositions themselves

In Fodor the code language determines our propositional attitudes

In Wittgenstein it is the conventions of the natural language that do so

How do I justify that all mental contents are propositions?

Aristotle called sensations propositions

The thesis is implicit in Fodor

We can say yes or no to all our mental contents

We could if we had the time describe in words each and every one of the instants of mind

And if not in words it can be argued that propositions are not necessarily only verbal

The question of meaning entails a system of representation

A system of representations entails propositions

What the private language must be like

"...(E)very compound predicate is constructed from elementary predicates in some manner that the truth definition is required to make explicit...(A) truth definition for a natural language contains a list of representations  which determine the extensions of its elementary predicates and a set of rules defining its complex predicates in terms of its elementary predicates...The upshot would appear to be that one can learn L only if one already knows some language rich enough to express the extension of any predicate of L. To put it tendentiously, one can learn what the semantic properties of a term are only if one already knows a language which contains a term having the same semantic properties."

In order to learn a language one must have the means to represent its elementary predicates and to build complex predicates from them, and this implies the existence and operation of another, a previous private mental language

"...(T)here is no principled reason why the experiences involved in learning a natural language should not have a specially deep effect in determining how the resources of the inner language are exploited.

      "What, then, is being denied? Roughly, that one can learn a language whose expressive power is greater than that of a language that one already knows. Less roughly, that one can learn a language whose predicates express extensions not expressible by those of a previously available representational system. Still less roughly, that one can learn a language whose predicates express extensions not expressible by predicates of the representational system whose employment mediates the learning.

      "Now, while this is all compatible with there being computational advantage associated with knowing a natural language, it is incompatible with this advantage being, as it were, principled. If what I have been saying is true, then all such computational advantages--all the facilitatory effects of language upon thought--will have to be explained away by reference to `performance' parameters like memory, fixation of attention, etc."

"It should now be clear why the fact that we can use part of a natural language to learn another part...is no argument against the view that no one can learn a language more powerful than some language he already knows. One cannot use the definition D to understand the word W unless (a) `W means D' is true and (b) one understands D. But if (a) is satisfied, D and W must be at least coextensive, and so if (b) is true, someone who learns W by learning that it means D must already understand at least one formula coextensive with W, viz., the one that D is couched in."

This is legerdemain in various senses that can be easily demolished

What I want to get at is at the kernel of truth and the kernel of distortion

True, we have the system of representation and this system comports rules and makes possible learning processes

However, (1) we cannot limit this system to the concept of language

It is more than a language

It is a language and all the instructions and rules that the language can represent and apply

Therefore, (2) this systems embraces all cognitive processes and not just language learning

Primarily, in fact, it contains all the rules of intuitive logic, and many of the learning operations which Fodor attributes to learning a language can be explained by appealing not to a private language for learning a natural language but to the larger system of representation in which logic is embedded

Piaget's argument is that the child has a rudimentary grasp of symbols (x) which makes language acquisition possible

With language the child then improves his ability to grasp symbols, and with this he expands his ability to know and use language

Fodor negates that x can expand in this way

"It might really turn out that the kinds of representational system that children use is, in a principled sense, weaker than the kind of system that adults use, and that a reasonable account of the stages of cognitive development could be elaborated by referring to increases in the expressive power of such systems. What I think one cannot have, however, is that concept learning provides the mechanisms for the stage-to-stage transition. That is, the child's cognitive development is fundamentally the development of increasingly powerful representational/conceptual systems, then cognitive development cannot be the consequence of concept learning."

The vocabulary of internal representations

"We commenced this discussion by assuming--along with most of current linguistics, generativists and interpretativists--that there is a level of representation at which words are replaced by their defining phrases...but we ended by advocating a solution which recognizes `only' at the deepest level to which transformartions apply, and which acknowledges a richer system of cross-referencing than standard quantificational logic employs at the level for which inference is defined"

Sounds like a reference to intuitive logic

"Some properties of language of thought must, in short, be represented in the language of thought since the ability to represent representations is, presumably, a preconditon of the ability to manipulate representations rationally"

Do we manipulate cog-processes?

Or is all of mind outsourced from the subconscious?

The temporality of mind--the instantenity of awareness--inclines me to believe that all thought is produced by the subconsious

This is certainly true of the newborn

Why shouldn't it go on being true of all specific selves throughout life?

But does awareness affect the subconscious at all?

This could be argued for if we could claim, e.g., that we choose what to think about

But we can equally argue that in "choosing" what to think about we are actually responding to a subconscious cog-process

Or is choosing not a cog-process?

If we could act in a manner that is independent of cognition and cog-processes, and only in such a case, could we argue for the effects of the conscious on the subconscious

But we cannot!!!

If we can argue for the existence of intuitive logic and of rules of perception as two different sets of mental postulates, as two different sets of basic-cog's, and if we also argue for the interactiveness of the different sets of basic-cog's--and if we admit that memory has its rules, as Fodor does indeed admit, then the previous arguments must be valid, for there must be different cog-processes and these cog-processes all presuppose memory--then we have to recognize that, as Fodor puts it, the language of thought must be represented in the language of thought, or as I prefer to put it, that there are rules of squiggles different from all other sets of basic-cog's

Finally, if we assume rules of perception and if we define awareness as perception and introspection, then, since there are rules of perception, there must also be rules of introspection

But since introspection is really nothing more than our ability to represent mental contents, then the rules of introspection must be the entire set of all different sets of basic-cog's

And where does all this leave us on awareness?

Awareness is perception and introspection

Consequently awareness is nothing but the interactive operation of all basic-cog's

Doesn't this refer to introspection since the rules of introspection are the totality of basic-cog's?

It would seem so

However, since introspection is the ability to represent, then properly speaking the rules of introspection must be the rules of representation, i.e., of squiggles, and since there is some representation that is not introspectivem, then introspection can be accounted for by some but not all of the rules of squiggles

The problem is which exactly?

The working proposition is that among the rules of squuiggles must be some which determine what we shall have in the mind at any given moment that is not identical with perception

We are getting a bit twisted up here

Awareness is our ability to perceive and to introspect and to distinguish between the two and their respective contents

Is the awareness of perception or introspection different from specific acts of perceiving and introspecting?

We can distinguish between a perception and thought about a perception

Both are awareness

Thought about perception or introspection is necessarily awareness of the past

In the case of perception it is the introspection of past perceiving

In the case of introspection it is awareness of awareness

All of these particulars are constitute forms of awareness

And when we say that awareness is perceiving and introspecting and distinguihsing between the two, we are not excluding the introspection of past perception and of past introspection

Awareness is the result of the interactivess of all basic-cog's and processes

It is not the only result but it is sufficiently explained from the source of all mental contents, aware and non-aware

There are no rules necessary to explain awareness beyond basic-cog's

And what about introspection?

The same reasoning applies

But there are rules of perception?

Shouldn't there be rules of awareness and rules of introspection?

Not really!!

The interactiveness of basic-cog's is present in all of awareness

It is the interactiveness of basic-cog's and processes that accounts for awareness and consequently for introspection and perception

Since thre are rules of perception, then these rules determine awareness and also intervene in introspection

There is no such a huge gap between perception and introspection

The only difference is that perception has specific rules and introspection does not have specific rules

It could be argued then that awareness is more like introspection, but we can hardly leave perception out of any definition of awareness, can we???

Since however we can have perception without introspection, then of the trio of concepts we are defining we must admit that the least susceptible to specification is introspection

What then is introspection???

No more and no less, then awareness!!!

Conclusion: scope and limits

"At the heart of the picture, the fundamental explicandum, is the organism and its propositional attitudes: what it believes, what it learns, what it wants and fears, what it perceives to be the case...To have a certain propositional attitude is to be in a certain relation to an internal representation. That is, for each of the (typically infinitely many) propositional attitudes that an organism can entertain, there exist an internal representation and a relation such that being in that relation to that representation is nomologically necessary and sufficient for (or nomologically identical to) having the propositional attitude."

If such is the case, if one specific propositional attitude corresponds to one specific representation, then the distinction between propositional attitude and representation escapes me: they are both identical dated particulars

Why then not speak simply of propositions, of mental states as being propositions?

"Mental states are relations between organisms and internal representations, and causally related mental states succeed one another according to computational principles which apply formally to the representations."

This is the proposition that cognition is the only condition for belief, which is plain cussedness

It is probably true that mental states are caused and relate causally in sequence or succession, but to say that this occurs according to computational principles is a mere assumption, and a wrongheaded one: computational principles make no room for affects and affects are part of all individual causal chains

Fodor says that his psychology will not work unless "organisms have pertinent descriptions as instantiations of some or other formal system", and he goes on: "What pertinency requires is (a) that there be some general and plausible procedure for assigning formulae of the system to states of the organism; (b) that causal sequences which determine propositional attitudes turn out to be derivations under the assignment; (c) that for each propositional attitude of the organism there is some causal state of the organism such that (c1) the state is interpretable as a relation to a formula of the formal system, and (c2) being in that state is nomologically necessary and sufficient for (or contingently identical to) having the propositional attitude."

He admits that the requirements of pertinency can not be carried out because of certain "glaring facts about mentation which set a bound to our ambitions...It is, I think,  next thing to dead certain that some of the propositional attitudes we entertain aren't the results of computations."

The example he gives is purely physiological--"brute incursions from the physiological level", like pain--and this only alludes to the problem on its edges

However, he then broadens his perspective

"The mental life is, as Davidson (1970) suggested, gappy. (Footnote: As is the domain of any other of the special sciences. If the world is a continuous causal sequence, it can be so represented only under physical description.) Those of one's propositional attitudes that are fixed by computations form the subject matter for a science of the kind that we have been examing. But those that aren't don't, and that fact provides for the possibility of bona fide mental phenomena which a theory of cognition cannot, literally in principle, explain...On the contrary, some of the most systematic, and some of the most interesting, kinds of mental events may be among those about whose etiology cognitive psychologists can have nothing at all to say.

     "The most obvious case is the causal determination of sensation. Presumably the perceptual integration of sensory material is accomplished by computational processes of (a general sort). But the etiology of sensory material must typically lie in causal interaction between the organism and sources of distal stimulation, and such interactions have, almost by definition, no representation in the psychological vocabulary...Cognitive psychology is concerned with the transformations of representations [propositions], psychophysics with the assignment of representations to physical displays."

Let us start with a summary of Fodor

There is the organism

The organism has computational abilities, propositions, and propositional attitudes

It processes information or propositions, which then determine the propositional attitudes

The propositional attitudes are the result of the organism's computational ability

But the organism is also physical

Even though ultimately the propositional attitudes must correspond to physical states, Fodor makes a strong distinction between the two

He assumes isomorphism

The strong distinction is based on sensations, i.e., physical pain and pleasure, but also just ordinary sensory inputs

His cognitive psychology cannot account for sensation

But this proposition is nonsense, because there is no way that you can speak of an internal division between computational and non-computational mental states

You have to account for all mental events, and this includes sensations and physical pain and pleasure

I find his perplexity perplexing

Why should the relation between the perceiver and the perceived have any relevance to the process whereby sensations becomes perceptions and to the characterization of perceptions as propositions?

Would it not be possible, for instance, to construct a model of the way in which sensations come together in mind as recognizable images?

Hasn't this been attempted in various ways?

Of course psychology "knows nothing about the stimulus", but what exactly does this mean?

After all, psychology is about mind and not about the material world

Since perceptions are propositions, hence formulable in the internal code, then sensations too must have some representational value, and I should think, prima facie, that cognitive psychology would be interested in the way that sensations become perceptions, that is, how some a form of representation is turned into a more complex form of representation

Does this observation clash with my own belief that pain is not a form of representation

Is pain, or pleasure, in the same category as sensory inputs?

The causes of pain and pleasure act directly upon the nervous system, whereas sensory inputs are, as Fodor says, distal stimuli

But how about the pain of the sun directy in the eyes?

It is not the sun but emanations from the sun

Taste and physical sensation cause representations

Why should pain and pleasure be different?

We know that such is the case

We feel pain and pleasure but we do not process them

Stimuli of this sort have physical causes, whose effects can produce propositions

This logic might apply to all sensations, and it is this possibility of propositional content from sensation that seems to lie at the root of an explanation of perception

However, it is valid that sensations seem to be at the seam between mind and body

The sharp separation between psychology and "psychophysics" that Fodor posits is not tenable

Psychology can and should search for the link in the mind between sensation and representation

It could be that all that can be said is that sensations can produce representational effects, that it is a property of the human brain, in the same sense that it is a property of the brain to have a representational system

"Nothing principled precludes the chance that highly valued mental states are sometimes the effects of (literally) nonrational causes. Cognitive psychology could have nothing to say about the etiology of such states since what it talks about is at most...mental states that have mental causes."

And are so-called nonrational causes not logical?

Fodor has at least the virtue of frankness

He admits that philosophy of mind in the guise of cognitive psychology is highly restricted and not a very comprehensive picture of mind

So what then is it about?

The time it takes to solve problems?

The order in which we go about solving problems?

In general, specific and specialized hypotheses of this sort?

Other philosophers of mind leave room for nothing but such issues, e.g., Dennett, whereas Fodor admits that mind is wider

"(C)ognitive psychology is about how rationality is structured, viz., how mental states are contingent on each other...Cognitive explanation requires not only causally interrelated mental states, but also mental states whose causal relations respect the semantic relations that hold between formulae in the internal representational system. The present point is that there may well be mental states whose etiology is precluded from cognitive explanations because they are related to their causes in ways that satisfy the first condition but do not satisfy the second."

As an example of "causal-but-noncomputational relations between mental states" Fodor offers the case of a person that chooses some arbitrary sign to remind him to do something or other

He concludes that there is a connection between the two states but that it is not a logico-semantical connection

But in fact the sign chosen, although seemingly arbitrary, has a metaphorical value which is internally coded and which connects semantically with the state which is the effect he wants to achieve (be reminded of something)

"I think it's likely that there are quite a lot of kinds of examples of causal-but-noncomputational relations between mental states. Many associative processes are probably like this, as are perhaps, many of the effects of emotion upon perception and belief. If this hunch is right, then these are bona fide examples of causal relations between mental states which, nevertheless, fall outside the domain of (cognitive) psychological explanation. What the cognitive psychologist can do, of course, is to specify the states that are so related and say that they are so related. But, from the psychological point of view, the existence of such relations is simply a matter of brute fact; explaining is left to lower-level (probably biological) investigation."

Associative processes are, to my mind, prime examples of the language of thought

Affects accompany propositional states and of course have effects upon them, and vice versa propositional states have effects upon affects, e.g., I am depressed because of something that I know, I entertain a consolatory proposition, I feel better even if only momentarily: depression can return but only as a consequence of propositional content

He cannot compartmentalize mind in this manner, he cannot lawfully say that there are pure computational mental states, except on the mistaken assumption that mind can be reduced by analogy to the condition of a computational organism

"The universe of discourse whose population is the rationally related mental events constitutes, to a first approximation, the natural domain for a cognitive psychology."

FN: "I am assuming--as many psychologists do--that cognitive processes exploit at least two kinds of storage: a `permanent memory' which permits relatively slow access to essentially unlimited amounts of information and a `computing memory' which permits relatively fast access to at most a small number of items"

Fodor, Representations: Philosophical Essaqys on the Foundations of Cognitive Science (1981)

If Fodor and others are analytical philosophers of mind, then we must distinguish between two phases in analytical phil-mind: the first analytical phil-mind, which in essence is a denial of psychology; and the second analytical phil-mind, in which psychology is brought back in and with it introspection under various guises, justifications, and so on

According to Fodor, in the early 1960s dispositionalism was the analytical theory of choice against the old psychological model (the Roustan model)

The Roustan model beat dispositionalism hands down on simplicity, explanatory power, and predictive success, e.g., how could you go from headache behaviour to headache itself?

Assuming mental interaction--perception and memory or logic, logic and memory, and so on--it did not necessarily manifest itself in physical behaviour

Behaviorism and dispositionalism could in no way or manner or form constitute a wholesale refutation or denial of psychology

There are two forms or versions of physicalism

Type physicalism necessarily implies that mental states could only be realized in the brain

Token physicalism admitted the possibility of multiple realization

The argument ran somewhat like this: a specific pain was the same as a specific brain state, but another specific pain could have its realization in a brain of another sort of material

[This argument is wrong-headed

The specificity of a pain or a qualia cannot be argument for that machines can feel

Further, a specific pain necessarily implies the type pain and, as per Fodor, this precludes multiple realization]

Type physicalism leads directly to neurophysiological theories of mind

But in this respect it is necessary to distinguish between those that hold to identity, in one version or another, without giving up the autonomy of mental processes, and those that posit eliminativism or reductionism

But let us proceeed with Fodor's argument

Since mind is not identified with a specific type of brain, then mind is cognition

Token physicalism leads directly to cognitive processes

Cognitivism agreed with the physicalist position on the ontological autonomy of mental particulars

On the other hand, cognitivism and behaviorism agreeed on the relational nature of mental events

The assumption here is that behaviorism assumes a relation between mind and body

What was needed to bring these two strands together within cognitivism was funcionalism or the mind/machine analogy

Functionalism then embraced autonomous cog-processes and the relational property of mind

Functionalism was cognitivism as a fusion or combination of the best features of physicalism and behaviorism

Functionalism finally managed the reconciliation of cognitivism and materialism

Fodor seems to recognize that Putnam indeed proposed the functionalist analogy in his article "Minds and Machines" (1960)

We must assume that cognitivism was born and bred in psychology, i.e., that it was a branch of psychology

Functionalism has three defining features

It is relational in two senses: in the sense of the interaction of mental states and in accepting propositional attitudes as a relation of a belief and a proposition

Belief of course implies self

Functionalism holds that mental particulars are causes

"The intuition that underlies functionalism is that what determines which kind a mental particular belongs to is its causal role in the mental life of the organism"

The reasoning here is that psychology necessarily entails categories

Functionalism claims that it is only as causes that mental events can be categorized

The only psychological properties are functional properties, i.e., those that have effects

Finally and crucially, because without this the whole program founders, cog-processes can be realized and studied in mechanisms other than the human brain

This means basically that if we study the way a computer reasons, we can elicit information on the way the mind works

Fodor, however, is critical of pure functionalism, and this is important because what he is driving towards in thse essays is a vindication of folk psychology

"And while it is arguable that what makes a belief--or other propositional attitudes--the belief that it is, the pattern of (e.g. inferential) relations that it enters into, many philosophers (I am among them) find it hard to believe that it is relational properties that make a sensation pain rather than an itch, or an after-image a green after-image rather than a red one"

Let us put our ducks in a row as per Fodor

The old traditional psychology--what I call the Roustan model--is that mind is constituted by propositional attitudes

Propositional attitudes have contents and are causes, i.e., we act on what we know

Propositional attitudes are the essence of awareness

"By saying that propositional attitudes have semantic properties, I mean to make the unpretentious point that beliefs (for example) are the kinds of things that can be true or false, and that there is typically an answer to the question of who or what a given belief is true or false of (who or what it is a belief about). By saying that propositional attitude contexts are opaque (intensional), I mean to make the familiar point that such principles of inference as existential generalization and substitutivity of identicals apparently do not apply to formulae occuring unembedded"

What Fodor is trying to do is to reconcile propositional attitude psychology and functionalism

For the first analytical theory of mind propositional attitudes were a dirty phrase

You could not avoid them, but they made introspection useless

We knew what we believed but what we believed could be perfectly illogical

I myself call this the awareness problem, and I shall get to that

Fodor's argument is that propositional attitudes have content and are semantical and intensional

Similarly, functionalism is both semantical and intensional

Since functionalism entails symbol-manipulation, then we can infer that mind is also symbol-manipulation

But mind also has contents, i.e., awareness

Awareness or contents are causes in prop-att psychology

However, functionalism does not posit awareness and is neutral about causes

Cognitivism is psychological, hence partial to the identification of prop-att's and causes

Functionalism seems then useless to cognitivism

What Fodor wants to prove is that functionalism does provide a theory of mental contents, i.e., of awareness and prop-att's

"Here's where we've got to: what we need--and what functionalism tolerates but does not, per se, provide--is a theory of what it is for mental states to have propositional content"

"This is the theory:

(a) propositional attitudes are relational.

(b) Among the relata are mental representations (often called `ideas' in the older literature).

(c) Mental representation are symbols: they have both formal and semantic properties.

(d) Mental representations have their causal roles in virtue of their formal properties.

(e) Propositional attitudes inherit their semantic properties from those of the mental representations that function as their objects."

"Questions like the following are in the forefront: If there are mental representations, where--ontogenetically speaking--do they come from? If mental representations have both semantic and causal properties, how do the two connect? If we are going to take the notion of propositional content seriously, how will that affect what we say about the position of psychology among the other sciences? And so on."

"If the present views can be sustained, then it is mental representations that have semantic properties in, one might say, the first instance; the semantic properties of propositional attitudes are inherited from those of mental representations and, presumably, the semantic properties of the formulae of natural languages are inherited from those of the propositional attitudes that they are used to express. What we need now is a semantic theory for mental representations; a theory of how mental representations represent"

Let us take stock here

What Fodor has done is to recover mind for philosophy

But mind in the guise of cog-processes organized according to scientific cause-and-effect symbolic sequences

This is not exactly the Roustan model, but it is closer to it than behaviorism or dispositionalism

The first analytical phil-mind retained propositional attitudes from the Roustan model until Wittgenstein simply got rid of them

Fodor also retains them but, whereas propositional attitudes were the source of the intensionality of mind in the first analytical phil-mind, in Fodor propositional attitudes are determined cognitive processes or the result of them

Functionalism applies to the analysis of propositional attitudes

And in addition, Fodor admits the existence of qualia, which is definitely psychological

Fodor claims that to explain propositional attitudes means to explain cog-processes such as perception

And since perception is awareness, then perception implies that we are aware and we can derive knowledge from introspection

Propositional content determine propositional attitudes

And if propositional attitudes are psychological, the propositional content are also the object of psychology

The crux of the matter is that functionalism is about symbols

How can mind know the symbolic processes of functiionalism?

Fodor's answer is that symbols are representations

What we have in mind are not images but symbols

We have a language of symbols in mind

"Now here is one story about the frequency effect. There is in your head a mental lexicon: a list of such of the words in your language as you know. When you are asked whether a letter string is a word you know, you search for the letter string in this mental lexicon...(T)he words in the mental lexicon are listed in order of their frequency and they are searched in the order in which they are listed"

Fodor, "Observation reconsidered" (1984)

According to Quine and to Churchland via Quine, observation is not theory neutral

Quine argues in Fodor's words: "It is thus unclear how two theories could dispute the claim that P (since the claim that P means something different in a theory that entails that P than it does in, say, a theory that entails its denial)"

Non-theory-neutrality means that perception is inferential

Fodor claims a strong distinction between inference and observation

Inference implies attachment to theory whereas observation implies attachement to the world

In arguing against Quine/Churchland Fodor as usual appeals to ignoratio elenchi, as do all philosophers

"What happens in perceptual processing, according to this account, is that sensory information is interpreted by reference to the perceiver's background theories"

This can be read as that specific memory is a theory

Further he argues that if perception were dependent on theory, then knowing an illusion or the cause of an illusion we wouldn't entertain it, but in fact "knowing that they are illusions doesn't make them go away" (in specific reference to Müller-Lyer)

In sum, theories make little difference to how we perceive

And then his main argument: the "idea that perception is a kind of problem solving does not, all by itself, imply the theory-dependence of observation...To get from a cognitivist interpretation of perception to any epistemologically interesting version of the conclusion that observation is theory dependent, you need not only the premise that perception is problem solving, but also the premise that perceptual-problem solving has access to ALL (or, anyhow, arbitrarily much) of the background information at the perceiver's disposal", which doesn't square with what he calls "perceptual implasticities"

Fodor argues: "sensation is responsive solely to the character of proximal stimulation and is noninferential. Perception is both inferential and responsive to the perceiver's background theories...Sensory processes can't be inferential because they have, by assumption, no access to background theories in light of which the distal causes of proximal stimulation are inferred...to split the difference...you need to postulate a tertium quid; a kind of psychological mechanism which is both encapsulated (like sensation) and inferential (like cognition)..."

He ends up with a modular theory in which perception is both inferential and encapsulated, but is not continuous with cognition

Cognition connotes theory-laden or non-theory-neutrality

Fodor in this article is committed to a compartmentalized understanding of mind for the sake of the objectivity of observation and perception as opposed to their sensitivity to beliefs other than those for which they provide grounding

Interestingly, he does agree to a distinction between observation and belief-fixation, based once again on Müller-Lyer

"Belief-fixation, unlike the fixation of appearances--what I'm calling observation--is a conservative process; to a first approximation, it uses everything you know"

And you can start the work of critique from here: modules so-called do not work if they do not work synchronously with all basic-cog's

Try as he might Fodor cannot come up with a solution to the distinction he himself makes: "modules offer hypotheses about the instantiation of observable properties of things, and the fixation of perceptual belief is the evaluation of such hypotheses in light of the totality of background theory"

Additionally, he had written: "it may be that some of (the) semantic properties (of sentences) are determined by the character of their attachment to the world (e.g., by the character of the causal route from distal objects and events to the tokening of the sentence or the fixation of belief)"

He was preparing the way for the distinction, which is not easily inferrable in his other writings

What he in effect is saying is just the contrary of what he started with: that seeing is believing

Fodor, "Fodor's Guide to Mental Representation: The Intelligent Auntie's Vade-Mecum (1985)

This essay is about functionalist psychology

It is about how mind thinks, how knowledge is possible, how our beliefs are formed, and so on

From Representations (1981):

"The intuition that underlies functionalism is that what determines which kind a mental particular belongs to is its causal role in the mental life of the organism"

But were this so, we could only classify mental particulars as either causes or non-causes, and this is patently untrue given that we know a perception from a thought from an affect

Fodor defines himself as a realist about prop-att's

He accepts what is sometimes called prop-att psychology

There is also something called standard realism (SR)

This is what he first tries to describe

SR involves two distinct networks

There is a network of beliefs/causes

These are mental states

The other network is the semantical inferential network in which propositions emerge as the objects of propositional attitudes

On semantical see Representations

In sum, SR posits propositional attitudes and propositions with semantical content

Propositional attitudes are causal networks

Propositions originate in inferential systems

There are isomorphisms between the causal network and the inferential system

"Notice, however, that while this gives a Functionalist sense to the indviduation of propositional attitudes, it does not, in and of itself, say what it is for for a propositional attitude to have the propositional content that it has. The present proposal is to remedy this defect by reducing the notion of propositional content to the notion of causal role"

"In short we can make non-arbitrary assignments of propositions as the objects of propositional attitudes because there is this isomorphism between the network generated by the semantic relations among propositions and the network generated by the causal relations among mental states...Now, though they are usually held together, it seem clear that these claims are orthogonal. One could opt for monadic mental states without functional-role semantics; or one could opt for functional-role semantics together with some nonmonadic account of the polyadicity of the attitudes"

What Fodor pretends to give is an explanation of how prop-att's are mapped on to inferential processes and what the inferences are made of

Roughly, this is referring to the relation between thought and brain, mind and matter

SR apparently does not contemplate the intermediation of representations

His own explanation is the representational theory of mind or RTM

"Acccording to the canonical formulation of (RTM): for any organism O and for any proposition P, there is a relation R and a mental representation MP such that: MP means that (expresses the proposition that) P; and O believes that P iff O bears R to MP...As compared with SR, RTM assumes the heavier burden of ontological commitment. It quantifies not just over such mental states as believing that P and desiring that Q but also over mental representations; symbols in a `language of thought'"

What Fodor introduces with RTM is representation

Representation is mising in SR

I presume that what he means is that SR does not have a clear notion of mental content

It does not in itself as a theory argue for words, images, or what have you

From here on in his arguments are for a language of thought which is symbolically represented in mind

How can thought be so productive?

Fodor recurs to the speech acts/mental acts analogy I have seen in Searle

Language is productive because its assertions are symbolical

We can assume that mind is productive because it works with a language of mental symbols

The next argument has to do with the process of thought and how it connects with propositional attitudes

Propositional attitudes necessarily involve a theory of thought

This is where Fodor offers a mind/matter bridge, supposing that prop-att's are mental states and mental states are brain states

Before he gets there Fodor does some simplistic historical speculation

The philosophy of mind of British empiricism was a form of RTM

It assumed prop-att's related to mental images "the latter being endowed with semantic properties in virtue of what they resembled and with causal properties in virtue of their associations. Mental states were productive because complex images can be constructed out of simple ones"

However, associationism is not rational, which Kant criticized

And that is why, Fodor says, everybody went behaviorist

And what he claims he is trying to do is to connect prop-att's with rational processes

"Computers show us how to connect semantical with causal properties for symbols...You connect the causal properties of a symbol with its semantic properties via its syntax. The syntax of a symbol is one of its second-order physical properties...Because, to all intents and purposes, syntax reduces to shape and because the shape of a symbol is a potential determinant of its causal role, it is failry easy to see how there could be environments in which the causal role of a symbol correlates with its syntax...But...we know from formal logic that certain of the semantic relations among symbols can be, as it were, `mimicked' by their syntactic relations; that, when seen from a very great distance, is what proof-theory is about. So, within certain famous limits, the semantic relation that holds between two symbols when the proposition expressed by the one is implied by the proposition expressed by the other can be mimicked by syntactic relations in virtue of which one of the  symbols is derivable from the other...(C)omputers...are environments in which the causal role of a symbol token is made to parallel the inferential role of the proposition that it expresses...Computers are a solution to the problem of mediating between the causal properties of symbols and their semantic properties. So if mind is a sort of computer, we begin to see how you can have a theory of mental processes that succeeds where associationism (to say nothing of behaviorism) abjectly failed; a theory which explains how there could regularly be nonarbitrary content relations among causally related thoughts.

      "But patently, there are going to have to be mental representations if this proposal is going to work. In computer design, causal role is brought into phase with content by exploiting parallelisms between the syntax of a symbol and its semantics. But that idea won't do the theory of mind any good unless there are mental symbols; mental particulars possess semantic and syntactic properties. There must be mental symbols because, in a nutshell, only symbols have syntax, and our best available theory of mental processes--indeed, the only available theory of mental that isn't known to be false--needs the picture of mind as a syntax-driven machine"

Let us do a rehash

Propositional attitudes necessitate representation

Representations are symbolic

Symbols entail syntax and syntax is physical

The physicality of syntax provides the bridge between propositional attitudes and the symbol-using cognitive system which provides the objects of prop-att's

All of this means that what he calls a theory of thought is also a theory about the mind/matter relation

Can we really make grand claims about mind from the way we have computers work?

How do we know that the computer syntax is like the syntax of squiggles?

Does the computer explain anything that cannot be explained without the computer?

I will grant that the computer analogy provides "leads" but not "grounds"

Finally, any full-blooded functionalist must of necessity be a believer in and a partisan of artificial intelligence, for it is only in the belief that machines can be entirely like mind that we can infer anything about mind from machines

"...(T)he question of the extent to which RTM must be committed to the `explicitness' of mental representation is one that keeps getting raised...According to RTM, mental processes are transformations of mental representations. The rules which determine the course of such transformations may, but needn't, be themselves explicitly represented.  But the mental contents (the `thoughts', as it were) that get transformed must be explicitly represented or the theory is simply false"

None of the above guarantees that thought will be truthful or error-free

"I remarked above that the two characteristic tenets of SR--that the attitudes are monadic and the the semanticity of attitudes arises from isomorphisms between the causal network of mental states and  the inferential network of propositions--are mutually independent. Similarly for RTM; it's not mandatory, but you are at liberty to combine RTM with FR semantics if you choose"

So it turns that RTM does not correct at least one fundamental deficiency of SR

"Functionalism guarantees that mental states are individuated by their causal roles; hence by their position in the putative causal network. But nothing guarantees that propositions are individuated by their inferential roles"

"Individuate" could mean explain, classify, or determine

Take your pick

"Quantify over" is to give a material or "extensional" explanation

FR posits that logic determines propositional attitudes but "everybody is at least a little irrational"

This argument is to say the least too humble by half and show the essential vacuity of Fodor's abstract verbiage

He also has a more abstract argument

The beliefs P and [P v (Q v ~Q)] are different, but logically the propositions P and [P v (Q v ~Q)] are equivalent

In sum the fact that logic recommends both propositions does not necessarily mean that they are beliefs in any one

Hence, RTM dos not necessarily involve or include FR

Finally, then, we have a "syntactic theory of mental operations...But a theory of the intelligence of thought does not, in and of itself, constitute a theory of thought's intentionality...If RTM is true the problem of the intentionality of the mental is largely--perhaps exhaustively--the problem of the semanticity of mental representations. But of the semanticity of mental representations we have, as things now stand, no adequate account"

Folk psychology

See   Dualism

Formal language

"An uninterpreted system of signs. The signs are typically of three sorts: (1) variables, for example, sentence letters p, q, r, s; (2) connectives, for example, V, &, -->, by which signs are joined together; and (3) punctuation devices, such as brackets, to remove ambiguity. There are also formation rules telling how to string signs together to form well-formed formulae, and transformation rules telling how to transform one string of signs into another...[If] the transformation rules are made deduction rules, then the formal language has been interpreted as a system of logic.

      "Distinction must be made between formal languages (uninterpreted systems of marks) and artificial languages which are, however, not natural languages as vernacular English is)." (Flew) 

Formal system

 "Formal system (or theory). Any set of axioms and/or rules of inference written in some specified formal language L. The axioms will be closed wffs of L, and rules of inference (or transformation rules) are rules according to which proofs can be constructed out of wffs of L." (Flew)

Formalization

Whereas to specify means to individualize in explaining, to formalize is explain by means of relations like similarity and contrast.

The propositional calculus

Rules (either formation or inference): if x and y are wffs, then the following propositions are also well formed
(1) denial of x
(2) x and y
(3) x or y
(4) if x then y

Now from the above (without assuming that x and y are wffs)
(5) if (2), x and y are wffs;
(6) if x and (x-->y), then y (modus ponens);
(7) if x then y, when not x then not y (modus tollens);
(8) If not x and not y, then not x or y;
(9) if x or y, when not x then y.

Obviously, then, the propositional calculus has nothing to do with the linguistic equivalent of strings, because if "this is a chair" is the linguistic equivalent of a wff, then it cannot be that "this is not a chair".

As the derivation of formal logic from the application of intuitive logic to itself, logic is the use of variables in lieu of propositions and the formulation of axioms and rules to apply to variables. As the application of formal logic to propositions, logic is mainly the conversion of propositions into variables and the application of axioms as rules either to derive variables which in turn can be converted into propositions or to determine whether propositions conform to logical rules. Finally, logic is also the derivation of formulæ from the application of formal logic to itself, that is, the use of variables and rules to derive different valid combinations of variables (wffs).

How formal logic operates

Formal logic represents terms and relations. Operations are propositions which affect representations.

Representation

Assuming a proposition, an operator can deny, but there is no specific symbol for affirmation: it is expressed in formal logic as a variable, although a case could be made for the existential quantifier as essentially an affirmation in which the concept is made explicit. In other words: concept is: "there is chair", "there are chairs". "this is a chair". The existential quantifier says: "there is an x such that if there is an object with chair-properties it is x".

Representation/operation

In relation to complex propositions, logical operators function in two ways: (a) they represent logical relations within propositions; (b) they allow intuitive logic to determine whether the relations within existing propositions are logical or not.

Operations

Formal logic is a system of notations which includes variables and rules. The rules are expressed as operators or functions. Operators permit the derivation of propositions, simple or complex, from other propositions. They also serve to determine the relations between propositions.

"Operator. That which effects a [logical] operation. In logic it is usually expressed as a symbol. Corresponding to each function on objects there is a symbolic operation effected by the symbol for that function...The truth-functional operators and quantifiers are termed logical operators. The truth-functional operators are also called sentential operators because when applied to sentences, they yield another sentence." [Flew]
 

[The reference seems to be to the distinction between intuitive and formal logic. Formal logic works with intuitive logic and symbols, as in inferring that conjunction and exclusive disjunction cannot be applied to the same pair of propositions.]

In making a statement logical operators are at work. This is self-evident in that affirmations or propositions are logical operations: various symbolizable or notational operations go to making an affirmation or formulating a proposition. In formal logic, operators determine what are wffs and not wffs. The rules of deductive systems permit the elaboration of wffs. But there is some questions as to whether wffs are true in the epistemic sense. I cannot grasp the idea of a wff that is not also valid.

Affirmation and negation and in-between stances apply to simple propositions and to complex propositions. Simple propositions are usually concepts: propositions which say that something is or is not, although concepts can also be definitions, such as "justice is fairness for all" or "democracy is one person/one vote". Complex propositions involve relations between entities and properties. Complex propositions also establish relations between simple propositions, between simple and complex propositions, and between complex propositions. Logical rules apply to all the types of complex propositions.

Since propositions have truth values, then it can be said that operators establish truth-values and can derive truth-values. Therefore, operators can be termed truth-functional operators. Operators are means of justification and criteria of validation. All the propositions that apply to operators apply equally well to the concept of basic-cog's in intuitive logic.

Formal system

Todo sistema formal para hacer inferencias o deducciones consta de símbolos y de reglas. En el supuesto de que las operaciones dentro de este sistema se puedan hacer de manera automática con sólo percibir los símbolos y sus posicions respectivas, se puede decir que son reglas tipográficas, según Hofstadter. Pero entonces, en cuanto anteponer un no a una expresión en un lenguaje natural equivale a su negación, también podríamos describir a la gramática como reglas tipográficas. El concepto de "reglas tipográficas" puede servir para subrayar el carácter mecánico de la lógica, pero no es, a mi entender, muy apropiado. Es hasta de dudarse que las llamadas reglas tipográficas funcionen de la manera vacía y automática que les atribuye Hofstadter.

Con los dos elementos de todo sistema se pueden producir teoremas o cuerdas (strings). En las matemáticas, teoremas son proposiciones verdaderas (válidas). Un axioma es una cuerda que se presupone o con la que se arranca para derivar otras cuerdas. Un axioma por ende es un teorema elemental. Aplicando las reglas o axiomas a los axiomas se logran más cuerdas que se llaman derivaciones. Entre los axiomas los hay que excluyen ciertas derivaciones.

Todo sistema deductivo implica la existencia de un `procedimiento decisorio' (decision procedure) para determinar la validez de los teoremas. `Procedimiento decisorio' viene entonces siendo lo mismo que `prueba' o `método de prueba'. El procedimiento decisorio básico de cualquier sistema se puede expresar de la manera siguiente: suponiendo la cuerda `x' y suponiendo un sistema `s' que contiene o puede producir un número determinado de cuerdas o teoremas, si la cuerda `x' es una de las cuerdas del sistema `s', entonces `x' es un teorema del sistema `x', y a la inversa: si la cuerda `x' no es parte del sistema `s', entonces no es un teorema del sistema `s'.

Foundationalism

Foundationalism is that all philosophical thought comes down to abstract choices from basic alternatives about fundamental issues. Since such choices are neither apodictic nor necessary, they can be considered equally rational. Some foundational claims are: that rational statements can be reliable even if no wholly accurate definition of reason exists; that science gives or does not give an accurate account of nature; that mathematics are a fallible but basic tool of science; that the unity of self is a bundle of perceptions or that it is an intuitive fact that cannot be pinned down in awareness; and that despite the inaccuracy of language, we can rely on it for our everyday transactions, for scientific communication, and for the work of philosophy.

A possible definition of foundational concepts or propositions is that they are undecidable. Instances of the propositions are:
--self comes before world or world before self;
--being precedes and determines knowledge or knowledge defines being;
--God exists or God does not exist;
--we are free or we are determined;
--behaviour includes thought or thought is not a form of behaviour.
In other words, we can take either option for there is no way that either option can be refuted.

Foundationalism is the claim that it is valid to choose between un-decidable propositions concerning circular concepts.

Frege

(A) From M. Dummett's Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993)

Pages 5-6:

"An epistemological enquiry (behind which lies an ontological one) is to be answered by a linguistic investigation.

      "No justification for the linguistic turn is offered in Grundlagen: it is simply taken as being the most natural way of going about the philosophical enquiry. And yet, as his philosophy developed, Frege became more and more insistent that thoughts, and not the sentences that express them, formed his true subject-matter. Natural language came to appear to him more of an obstacle than a guide in logical and philosophical enquiries. Especially was this so after his realisation that he had after all no satisfactory solution to Russell's paradox, and that he had failed...to set number theory...on indisputably firm foundations. This occurred in August 1906; and he thereafter rejected his whole former conception of logical objects, including classes (extensions of concepts), blaming language for the illusion of their existence generated by the possibility of forming apparent singular terms of the form "the extension of the concept F". Thus, in November 1906 he wrote to Husserl that "The main task of the logician consists in liberation from language", and in the article "Erkenntnisquellen", completed the last year of his life, he said that "a great part of the work of the philosopher consists in...a struggle with language".

Pages 6-7:

Frege: "The sentence can be regarded as an image of the thought in that to the relation between the part and the whole within the thought there by and large corresponds the same relation between the part of the sentence and the sentence"

Dummett: "The discernment of constituent senses as parts of a thought is parasitic upon the apprehension of the structure of the sentences expressing it"

"The thought is grasped in grasping the semantic properties of the sentence: to speak of the structure of the thought is to speak of the semantic interrelation of the parts of the sentence"

[But we can understand unstructured sentences

Therefore, thought has nothing to do with grammatical structure]

Pages 8-9:

"Frege held that it is the thought that is primarily said to be true or false, the sentence being called true or false only in a derivative sense; and, since for Frege the reference of the sentence is its truth-value, this means that it is the sense of the sentence that primarily has the reference, and the sentence only derivatively...In practice, however, Frege never conformed to this order of priority when expounding the distinction between sense and reference. He never first introduces the notion of sense, subsequently explaining reference as a feature of senses: he speaks first of the expression as having reference, and proceeds either to argue that it also has a sense or to say something about what its sense consists in. This order of exposition is actually demanded by his conception of the sense of an expression as the way in which its reference is given: for it follows from this conception that the notion of sense cannot be explained save by appeal to that of reference, and so we must have first the notion of reference. Now if we have the notion of reference before we have that of sense, we cannot construe reference as a property of the sense, but only of the expression. It follows that Frege's thesis that it is the sense to which the reference is primarily to be ascribed is incorrect."

[This argument seems to be saying: Frege held thesis x and he held thesis y, thesis x contradicts thesis y and thesis y is incorrect, therefore Frege is wrong, but in fact both theses are Frege's so he is both right and wrong]

Pages 15-6:

"Hence, in asking the question, `What, in general, render a proposition true?', we are presupposing that the meanings of sentences can be taken as given in advance of a knowledge of what renders them true or false"

[In point of fact there is no `general' answer to what renders a proposition true, and it seems obvious that we must know what a proposition means before we can qualify it as true, false, valid, or whatever

If I hear someone say "the white horse ran over the cliff edge" I grasp the meaning of a sentence which may or may no be true and in grasping its meaning I am also grasping the conditions for it to be true, and that is that!!!]

Page 23:

"On Frege's view, thoughts and their constituent senses form a `third realm' of timeless and immutable entities which do not depend for their existence on being grasped or expressed.

      "The practical consequence of this ontological doctrine was the rejection of psychologism. If thoughts are not mental contents, then they are not to be analysed in terms of individual mental operations. Logic and theories of thought and of meaning are thus to be sharply demarcated from psychology. Although Frege asrrived at this position quite independently, he was far from from unique in holding it. Bolzano had drawn a distinction between the subjective and the objective in almost the same terms are Frege, and had anticipated his complaint that Kant fails to maintain a clear distinction between them. He had made the same distinction as Frege between subjective and ibjectiver ideas, or ideas possessed and ideas in themselves: this is precisely Frege's distinction between ideas and senses. He had likewiswe distinguiashed between propositions as being thought and propositions in themselves, crediting Leibniz and Herbart with having previously made a parallel distinction."

Page 36-7

"Frege, during his early period, that is to say, up to 1890, drew no distinction between signification and thing signified; he used the term `indifferently' for both. He therefore drew the consequence that when an empty singular occurred in a sentence, that sentence was devoid of content: if a part lacks content, the whole must lack content, too. From 1891 onwards, however, he distinguished sense and reference within his former undifferentiated notion of content; henceforward he had this distinction by means of which to explain the matter. An empty name, though it lacks a reference, may still possess a sense. A sentence containing it cannot be true or false, since, if a part lacks reference, the whole must lack reference, and the reference of a sentence, on Frege's theory, is a truth-value; but the sentence will still express a thought if the name has a sense. There is thus no simple answer to the question whether a speaker who uttered such a sentence would thereby have said anything: he expressed a thought, but he said nothing either true or false."

Page 53:

"Since the sense of an expression is in all cases the way in which its referene is given, deciding what, and what kind of thing, constitutes the reference of a given expression is a crucial first step towards characterising its sense, which is required to take the form of a means by which that reference may be given to a speaker of the language"

[These statements contradict the argument on page 36

They also seem partly to contradict pages 8-9]

Pages 58-9

"Frege would not have said that the sentence (the King of France is bald) was nonsense, but that it had sense, and so expressed a thought. But he would also not have said that it was false, since he would have regarded the absence of reference for the constitutent "the King of France" as depriving the whole of reference, and thus of truth-value; the thought expressed was neither true nor false."

"Frege called what is expressed by a sentence a `thought', and held that truth and falsity are predicated of thoughts absolutely: a thought could not, for him, be true at one time and false at another, or true for one subject and false for another, but it is simply true or simply false."

On page 59:

Sentences can have or not have sense

It is assertions that are true or false

For Husserl and Frege sentences can have different senses but the same reference, as in the phrases "the victor at Jena" and "the loser at Waterloo"

It is not the sense of these phrases that matter but their reference

Page 63:

"Frege believed that the only access we human beings have to thoughts is through their verbal expression; so the question how we grasp thoughts resolves into the question of how we understand sentences...The sense of an expression is the way its reference is given to us; the reference of the words in a sentence together serve to determine its truth-value, so that to grasp the thought it expresses is to grasp the condition for it to be true"

Page 81:

"[Frege] believed that natural language contains expressions possessing sense but lacking reference: but he believed also that this is a grave defect of natural language, which requires correction before we have at our disposal a language within which we can reason with an assurance of the validity of our inferences"

Page 81:

"Russell plainly believed that, once he had distinguished between sense and reference, Frege was powerless to counter an attach from idealism"

Page 96:

"The `third realm' [is the realm] of thoughts and their constituent senses, which is...accessible to all in common, but whose contents are immutable and immaterial, and do not act on the senses or on each other, but which we can grasp"

There are then three realms: the inner world of ideas, the external world, and the `third realm'

The sense of thought is the third realm, which is timeless and immutable

Psychology cannot reveal thought

There is an opposition between psychology and logical thought

Mind contains ideas which are subjective and incommunicable, whereas thought is objective and communicable

The stream of thought is constituted by ideas

[In connection with the idea that thoughts are unchanging, Dummett states that according to Frege: "They do not act causally upon other objects"

I am not clear as to what he means

If thoughts are logical, then they must interact

Ideas are communicable

Suppose two persons disagree on an impression

There has to be a transaction of one sort of another: perhaps Quine's notion of marginal "sacrifices"

Otherwise there is no communication, but this would be irrational

It happens that such irrationalities transpire, but this is even more damning for any meaning/language theory]

Page 98:

"As for whether perception involves judgement, or only the apprehension of a thought without judging it to be true, that depends on whether perception yields knowledge or not, since Frege explicitly...held that knowledge issues in judgements; since he also accepted sense-perception as a source of knowledge, the natural conclusion is that, at least in the normal case, perception involves judging some state of affairs to obtain, rather than merely entertaining the thought that it does"

Page 103:

"But it is difficult to see how it can be maintained that no occurrent notion of understanding is required: for it is possible to be perplexed by a sentence on first hearing, through a failure to take in its structure, and to attain an understanding of it on reflection"

And Frege writes:

"When we use the word `integral', for example, we are always conscious of everything that belongs to the sense of this word?"

And:

If we tried to recall everything belonging to the sense of this word, we should make no headway"

[It seems to me that all these statements involve introspection

Awareness is not introspection: it is the presence of the world or of thought to mind

When the self is explicit in awareness, then awareness is consciousness. and it seems to me that in these cases the self is made explicit]

Page 107:

Sense, but not reference, can be grasped directly

"We need to know what exactly it is to grasp a sense, because sense is distinguished from reference prercisely by the fact that it can be grasped--can be apprehended directly, rather than in one or another particular: were it not so, there would be no place for a notion of sense, as distinct from reference, at all...Our grasp of sense consists, therefore, not in the ability to determine the truth-values of sentences, or to recognise them as having one or other truth-value, but in the knowledge of what renders them true or false.

      "We thus cannot, after all, extract from Frege a clear account of what it is to grasp a sense; and we need to know this, in particular, in order to assess the thesis that sense-perception involves the grasp of a thought or sense...But it is only a theory that anything resembling meaning plays a role in the perception of a physical object: to support that theory, it has to be argued that a grasp of meaning is an ingredient in the (psychological) process of perceiving"

Page 110:

"What can be Frege's ground for holding that sense-perception involves the grasp of a sense? It is, presumably, that sense-perception normally requires the awareness of one or more object, and that we cannot ever simply be aware of an object, in the sense that our state of awareness can be completely described by indicating the object of which we are aware: that object must be given to us in some particular way, and the way in which it is given is always a sense which can be a thought-constituent. The sense-impression may be of the object, in the sense that the object gave rise to it, but, being a mere content of consciousness, does not of itself have the capacity to point beyond itself to the object: only a sense--a thought-constituent--has such a capacity to point to something as its referent."

[This quote implies a distinction between consciousness and sense

But sense or meaning is precisely what defines awareness

A sense is nothing: an ability, a use, a grasping, and so on, in other words, nothing, at most a practice

So when Dummett says that sense-perception involves a sense, he is saying nothing at all

He could escape this empty doctrine by defining mental contents as propositions

Perception is a proposition to the extent that a proposition requires assent or dissent and we are constantly accepting perception as reliable, we are constantly making judgements about perception, which is proven by our ability to sense small or instantaneous changes in perceptions

We can be neutral about propositions, and we can be neutral about perception as when we see reflection on a wall and we do not know its source or what it is

Finally, if our thought is propositional, since propositions, as in perception, do not come to us expressed in linguistic terms, its form cannot be that of natural language, and since we mainly either think in words or in other symbols, we must think in other symbols

Sense then has to be the grasp of symbols, more than a practice, which does not tells us much

Symbols are not easily forthcoming either, but at least there is here a territory that can be covered in different ways, not just logic or logic and language, which is a myth anyway]

The sense of a perception is the grasp of a sense

Since perception always involves reference, the grasp of sense includes its reference

Thoughts are either true or false

Thought and reference determine the truth value of sentences

The sense of a sentence is dependent on thought]

Page 115:

"Frege's theory [of sense-perception] is hobbled by his commitment to the thesis that thoughts are accessible to us only through language. If this means that we can grasp thoughts only by understanding sentences expressing them, we obtain  a very implausible theory of sense-perception; but, if we set any such contention aside, we are left with no explanation of how we grasp those thoughts that open up the external world to us in perception. But Husserl's theory is not in better but in worse case. His notion of meaning was not, indeed, connected at the outset with the senses of words, and so can be thought to be detachable; but that only underlines the lack of any substantial account of what it is...We do not know why all noematic sense are capable of being expressed in language; and, although it is clear that they are detachable from language, we do not know how we grasp them, or, hence, what exactly the noematic ingredient in an act of sensory perception is..."

Pp.127-8

"If we identify the linguistic turn as the starting-point of analytical philosophy proper, there can be no doubt that, to however great an extent Frege, Moore and Russell prepared the ground, the crucial step was taken by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus of 1922. We have been concerned, however, with the preparation of the ground. Before the philosophy of language could be seen, not as a minor specialised branch of the subject, but as the stem from which all other branches grow, it was first necessary that the fundamental place should be accorded to the philosophy of thought. That could not happen until the philosophy of thought had been disentangled from philosophical psychology; and that in turn depended upon the step that so perplexed Brentano, the extrusion of thoughts from the mind and the consequent rejection of psychologism. The step was taken by Frege and by the Husserl of the Logische Untersuchungen, who had been so deeply influenced by Bolzano, if not, as many have argued, by Frege himself. Frege was the first philosopher in history to achieve anything resembling a plausible account of the nature of thoughts and of their inner structure. His account depended upon his conviction of the parallelism between thought and language...[H]is strategy for analysing thought was to analyse the forms of its linguistic or symbolic expression. Although he continued to reiterate that it is inessential to thoughts and thought-constituents that we grasp them as the senses of sentences and their parts respectively, it is unclear that his account of the senses of linguistic expressions is capable of being transposed into an account of thoughts considered independently of their expression in words. When philosophers consciously embraced the strategy that Frege had pursued, the linguistic turn was thereby decisively taken.

     "Once the linguistic turn had been taken, the fundamental axiom of analytical philosophy--that the only route to the analysis of thought goes through the analysis of language--naturally appeared compelling. Acceptance of that axiom resulted in the identification of the philosophy of thought with the philosophy of language, or, to give it a grander title, with the theory of meaning."

[Dummett agrees with both Frege and Russell that sense is not a product of a psychological process

But if such is the case, how can we know what we mean when we say something?

Where would meaning be if not in mind as an attribute of mind?

Communication, if the meaning of thought were not a content of mind, would have to rest on some kind of faith about what belief we can ascribe to someone else

A person could say anything, but in the absence of belief-ascription, which implies a specific mental content/process, we would have no basis on which to ascribe belief

Unless I assume he has qualified a proposition as belief, I have no way of knowing whether he means what he says or not

If his proposition implies belief, then we are into how the qualification was made

If not, then what are we left with?

Just the ability to use the proposition and this does not imply belief

Dummett argues that the use of a common language suffices to establish meaning, but this to my mind is skirting the issue

"The crucial question", he says, "is whether we should take the public language or the private understanding of it to be primary"

Still, in what does the grasp of language by an individual consist?

Dummett says that the individual understanding of a language is an idiolect (from an analogy with dialect)

The common language could consist of overlapping idiolects

This respects the priority of language over thought

Quine subscribes to a view of this sort

But Dummett insists that the common language is the primary reference]

Page 130:

"As Frege perceived, a complete thought is to be characterised as that which it makes sense to qualify as true or as false: the connection between sense and truth-value has to be made from the outset if any plausible answer to the question, `What is thought?', is to be given"

Page 131:

"The extrusion of thought from the mind initiated by Bolzano led to what is often termed `Platonism', as exemplified by Frege's mythology of the `third realm'"

The sense of thought is the third realm, which is timeless and immutable

Psychology cannot reveal thought

There is an opposition between psychology and logical thought

Mind contains ideas which are subjective and incommunicable, whereas thought is objective and communicable

The stream of thought is constituted by ideas

Pages 132-3:

"...[U]nderstanding a word as expressing a certain concept cannot be explained as consisting in the word's calling up in his mind a concept with which he has come to associate it, since there is no such process as a concept's coming into anyone's mind: a tune, a name, a remembered scent can come into the mind, but a concept is not the sort of thing of which this can be intelligibly said."

[This argument is based on the proposition that to have a concept is to know how to apply it: it make no difference whether, when it is applied, anything comes into the mind in the manner in which a tune might do so

But it is possible to not have a concept: to have it yet not know all its different intensions or connotation]

p.134

"It is because concepts...cannot be spoken of as coming into the mind as ideas can that they cannot be described as contents of consciousness; and it is precisely this that gives the strongest grounds for believing the fundamental axiom of analytical philosophy, that is, that the analysis of thought both can and must go via the analysis of the linguistic expression."

Pages 135-6

"How, then, can we get from the premiss that concepts are not contents of consciousness to the conclusion that thoughts are not contents of consciousness...[A] concept cannot exist on its own, nor, therefore, come into the mind on its own, but only as a constituent of a thought, which, perhaps, can come to mind...But, as we saw, on Frege's theory it is not merely that a thought which I am entertaining is not a content of my mind, but a constituent of an immaterial reality external to it; it is, further, that my apprehension of the thought is not mediated by anything in my mind: it is, rather, preesented to my mind directly--and yet it is not a content of my mind. And this conception is not consistent."

Page 136:

"But as we saw, on Frege's theory it is not merely that a thought which I am entertaining is not a content of my mind, but a constituent of animmaterial reality external to it; it is, further, that my apprehension of the thought is not mediated by anything in my mind: it is, rather, presented to my mind directly--and yet it is not a content of my mind. And this conception is not consistent"

[An analysis of the previous arguments suggests that Skorupki's thesis, in the sense that for Frege the primary philosophical issue is thought and not language, is probably correct]

Page 139:

"The true ground for Frege's doctrine, shared by Bolzano and by Husserl, that thoughts and their constituent senses are not mental contents thus lies in their categorial difference from mental images and sense-impressions, rather than where Frege located it, in the objectivity of thought and the subjectivity of the mental."

Page 139:

"A judgement is...an `advance from a thought to a truth-value'. Judgements, and therefore knowledge, are accordingly subject to the same constraints as thoughts: if thoughts are intrinsically communicable, then judgements must be intrinsically communicable, and hence any knowledge we can have must be communicable"

[If knowledge were intrinsically communicable, then the myriad components of our everyday experience would not be knowledge, for in practice it is not possible to communicate those experiences

However, Frege's concept of judgement would seem to correspond to what I call the qualification of propositions

Within his own nomenclature, judgement would have to correspond to the determination of reference from the meaning of thought

Therefore, we grasp reference from sense with or through judgement]

Page 140:

"Frege was right to say that, for me, the first-person pronoun `I' represents a way in which I am given to myself in which I cannot be given to anyone else."

(B) Hamlyn

"Frege was opposed to what he called `psychologism'--the interpretation of logic in psychological terms. Logic is concerned with propositions, and it is therefore important to be clear what propositions are and what is the status of the terms that make them up. In Foundations of Arithmetic he laid down that one should ask for the meaning of a word only in the context or nexus of a proposition. It is propositions that constitute the fundamental units of meaning. He was later to say that the sense of a proposition is a thought, so that it is thoughts, in the form of judgements, which are the starting point for any theory of meaning." (p.291)

"In his paper `On Sense and Reference' Frege goes further into questions concerning meaning. He starts from the observation that `The morning star is the the evening star' and `The morning star is the morning star' are both true identity statements; the terms in each refer to the same thing. Frege suggests that one can explain this only by distinguishing  between the sense and reference of expressions. The sense of a compete proposition is a thought; its reference must be True or False, that is, its truth-value...Since propositions have the primary role as units of discourse and their reference is the True or the False, this gives truth and falsity an important place in the theory of meaning put forward." (Pp.291-2)

(C) [Frege said let's get to thought from language leaving psychology to one side

Wittgenstein said let's just look at language and assume it is thought

From Frege's view there is a parallel between the structure of sentence and the structure of thought

Words per se do not express thought: if anything thought is what gives words their meaning

Likewise, thought implies truth or falsehood, which is not the case of words

Since the question of philosophy is knowledge and knowledge is about what is true and what is false, then evidently thought is the main question of philosophy

There are of course many questions on thought

What is it to have a thought?

What is the structure of thought?

What is it to have a thought of a particular thing?

What is a concept and how is it a component of thought?

In the Frege/Dummett canon, a concept corresponds to a word, a sentence to a thought, and so it goes]

[In 1884 Frege believed that sense and reference were inseparable

This implies an equivalence between meaning and truth

After 1891 he distinguishes between sense and reference

In either instance of his thinking, thought is subject to and manifests logic

In the first period language and logic were coreferential references to thought

In the second period he separates language from logic, but he retains the thought/logic relation

Since truth involves logic and reference, this implies a strong connection between thought and reference: whereas language can have sense without reference, it is not possible to have thought without reference, and language consequently is not an infallible guide to thought]

(D) D. W. Hamlyn, The Penguin History of Western Philosophy, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1987

Gottlob Frege (1848-1925)

Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (The Foundations of Arithmetic, 1884) attempted to show that arithmetic could be derived from the laws or axioms of a system of formal logic; this involves the so-called logistic thesis that arithmetic, and thereby mathametics in general, could be derived from logic." (p.289)

"In any case, in 1931 Kurt Gödel proved that mathematics is incomplete and that there are arithmetical truths which are unprovable within any consistent logical system. However, the philosophical insights that came with the attemp[ts to develop that programme remain.

   "There is, first, the definition of number. Frege's insight is that numbers belong to concepts (Russell said that they belonged to classes)...Frege asks what it is to say that the number which belongs to the concept F is the same as that which belongs to the concept G, and answers...[that]...it is to say that the extension of the concept equal to the concept F is the same as that equal to the concept G, that is, the classes that form their extensions have the same number of members. (Analogously, Russell said that five was the class [concept in Frege] of all quintets, and a number the class of all classes similar to a given class.) Frege then defines zero as the number which belongs to the concept `not identical with itself' (there being, of course, nothing which is not identical with itself). Having defined zero, then given the notion of succession, which is definable in logical terms, it is possible to determine all subsequent numbers." (p.290)

"The flaw that Russell discovered in [this account] lay in the fact that it was possible to produce a paradox over the notion of the class of all classes by asking whether the class of classes [e.g.things] which are not members of themselves [classes] is a member of itself or not; if it is then it is not, and if it is not then it is. The possibility of producing that paradox seemed to cast doubt upon the very notion of the class of all classes." (p.290)

"Frege was opposed to what he called `psychologism'--the interpretation of logic in psychological terms. Logic is concerned with propositions, and it is therefore important to be clear what propositions are and what is the status of the terms that make them up. In Foundations of Arithmetic he laid down that one should ask for the meaning of a word only in the context or nexus of a proposition. It is propositions that constitute the fundamental units of meaning. He was later to say that the sense of a proposition is a thought, so that it is thoughts, in the form of judgements, which are the starting point for any theory of meaning." (p.291)

"In his paper `On Sense and Reference' Frege goes further into questions concerning meaning. He starts from the observation that `The morning star is the the evening start' and `The morning start is the morning star' are both true identity statements; the terms in each refer to the same thing. Frege suggests that one can explain this only by distinguishing  between the sense and reference of expressions. The sense of a compete proposition is a thought; its reference must be True or False, that is, its truth-value...Since propositions have the primary role as units of discourse and their reference is the True or the False, this gives truth and falsity an important place in the theory of meaning put forward." (Pp.291-2)

(E) What in Frege is the ambiguity of language in Russell is opacity of mind

The problem of the paradox of awareness is expressed in Frege as indirect reference, e.g., Copernicus believed that the orbits of the planets were circular

For Frege numbers were concepts, i.e., they were equla to themselves yet had a crucial property in common

They all had in common their extensions

The successiveness of numbers could be established by logic starting with zero which was the only number not equal to itself since 0 equals nothing

The mathematical history sequence from Frege to Gödel starts with Frege's attempt to base arithmetic on logic

For this he used set theory, which Russell found deficient

But Russell could not achieve what Frege attempted either

Finally, Gödel showed that arithmetic was not explicable with logic because it was either inconsistent or incomplete

(F) Squiggles can help us solve the meaning/reference problem

Frege identified knowledge with reference

He distinguished between the sense and reference of public-language words

He had no problem with reference, but with sense without reference

From a squiggles theory, we can say that reference is to symbols/squiggles, which are of course the means of expressing meaning in mind, i.e., of making sense of reality

All in mind is reference: there is no question of sense without reference

However, when Frege said reference he meant existents: he did not mean reference to their representation

Therefore, for Frege knowledge meant the knowledge of existents

However, he was mistaken because reference in mind is in part to squiggles, and the grasp of squiggles is knowledge whether the squiggles mean a myth or an object

(G) Frege distinguished in propositions between concept and object, between argument and function, and between sense and reference

These distinctions have the same purpose as my own distinction between propositional bases and propositional content

To illustrate his point he used the example that to say the morning star is the evening star is exactly the same as to say that the morning star is the morning star

To understand his problem with these propositions we have to assume Frege's perspective, which was that we have access to thought only through words

Such being the case, then the two expressions mean different things and contradict each other

But thought must be logical if it is to be of any use to any one!!!

Either then thought is different from words, which Frege would not accept, or verbal expression does not lead to contradiction

The solution that Frege gives to this problem is that the propositions in question have sense and reference

Both make perfect sense and are different but both refer to the same thing

The contradiction is in the sense but the reference eliminates it

Likewise both have different concepts and arguments, but both have the same function and object

The problem as I see it is that it is possible to have the knowledge of what is not knowledge

I can believe that the morning star is not the evening star

And this proposition insofar as it is mine is necessarily valid

But since it has propositional content, it can be either valid or invalid

Does this mean that I accept Frege's thesis of the verbal extrusion of thought?

I do indeed with the proviso that the extrusion of thought necessarily involves introspection

Since introspection is always propositional, though, it almost comes to the same thing: Frege did not accept propositions about mind and I do

Awareness is knowledge is valid insofar as it refers to my belief

But it is not necessarily valid in its contents

The sense of this proposition is perfectly clear

But it has no reference, in Frege's view

Nevertheless, Frege did accept the notion of sense and sense is different from the proposition

The proposition has its meaning from its sense

Wittgenstein put a stop to this by claiming that the sense of a proposition is not derived from thought but from the context of its utterance

Frege also distinguished between direct and indirect reference

Indirect reference is what is involved in Copernicus believed that the planetary orbits are circles

Here too he made the sense/reference distinction, so that the sense of the proposition was true but the indirect reference false

However, the distinction between direct and indirect reference only makes sense if we disqualify reference to thought itself, which is what Frege called psychologism

(H) "Frege was the founding father of modern mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of language. He believed that proof in mathematics should be exhibited in a way that lays bare the deductive validity of each step, leaving nothing to unbridled intuition. The axioms from which proof starts must be as firm as possible--preferably truths of logic. To satisfy this procedure proofs must be translated into a formal language with a settled vocabulary and set modes of construction. In such a notation the construction of each sentence, hence its meaning, and hence the question of whether it follows from previous steps, are all explicit. Frege's greatest achievement in developing this idea was the invention of the quantifier and variable construction to formalize expressions of generality in natural languages" (Flew)

"Frege's first work, Begriffschrift (Concept-Writing, 1879) was an attempt to put forward a new notation for logic which would give it a much wider basis than Aristotelian logic and could be used to deal with issues in the philosophy of mathematics...Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (The foundations of arithmetic, 1884) attempted to show that arithmetic could be derived from the laws or axioms of a system of formal logic; this involved the so-called logistic thesis that arithmetic, and thereby mathematics in general, could be derived from logic.

      "This programme was carried further in his Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Fundamental laws of arithmetic, 1893-1903). Bertrand Russell attempted a similar programme in The Principles of Mathematics (1903), and carried it through more comprehensively and formally in Principia Mathematica (1910-13), written together with A. N. Whitehead. In 1902, Russell wrote to Frege pointing out a contradiction in Frege's theory...In any case, in 1931 Kurt Gödel proved that mathematics is incomplete and that there are arithmetical truths which are unprovable within any consistent logical system. This put an end to the logicist programme"

"Frege holds that numbers are objects, and the number that belongs to the concept F is, on his definition, the extension (range of application) of the concept equal to the concept F...Two sets or classes of objects ordered by the concepts F and G can be said to be equinumerous if their numbers can be brought into one-one correspondence--something that, as Frege shows, does not itself presuppose the concept of number. Frege asks what it is to say that the number which belongs to the concept F is the same as that which belongs to the concept G, and answers...it is to say that the extension of the concept equal to the concept F is the same as that equal to the concept G, that is, the classes that form their extension have the same number of members. Analogously, Russell said that five was the class of all quintets, and a number the class of all classes similar to a given class...The flaw that Russell discovered in it lay in the fact that it was possible to produce a paradox over the notion of the class of all classes ..Frege tried to deal with the problem by restricting his theory; Russel introduced a theory of types, which is similar to a theory of categories in forbidding us to put things from different types on the same level." (Hamlyn)

Freedom and determinism

The concepts of deciding, will, and so on, emerge from the implicitness of self in awareness. We have the awareness of our specificity from which we deduce the unity of self. We do not imagine ourselves as battlefields of forces, but do we consider ourselves as actual unities? Do we always spontaneously imagine ourselves in the active mood? These questions are as undecidable as freedom and determinism.

Determinism is neither decidable nor interesting. Birth is the big-bang of cognition. The specific self starts from before the big-bang. For something to be specific it must be determined by specific causes. The specific self implies determinism. If all cognitive processes were objective, then there would be universal agreement. Why does the absence of universal agreement preclude freedom? This argument can only work if we assume a chain of causes and define freedom as obedience to reason. The specificity of being means deviance from the norm. Specificity means deviance from the logical norm and deviance from the logical norm could mean non-determinism.

Given the subconsciousness of cognition, is concentration or attention possible on the assumption that it is a prolonged apparently volitional phenomenon? Each individual instant of awareness quickly passes into memory. Since awareness is instantaneous, then it cannot "cover" cognition in general. For reasoning and cognition to be possible they must occur below the threshhold of awareness. If there are instants of awareness which can be called concentration or attention, then they too must be the result of subconscious processing. But if this is the case how can we account for the durability and willfulness of concentration? Volition is a propositional event in which certain propositions predominate over other propositions. There is nothing volitional that cannot be explained propositionally, hence subconsciously, including attention. The durability of attention can be explained as the "sustaining" of perception or thought from the reinforcing power of memory.

Let's say I am writing and decide to concentrate on the view from my office window. It might have to do with a moment of awareness, but only if we ignore that the specific self has a continuous unbroken past. I chose to concentrate from a cognitive chain coterminous with my experience. We never do anything on the spur of the moment. When I say I am concentrating I am keeping before me an object of perception or thought and I am breaking down this object into details or parts. Since I am aware only an instant and awareness is a succession of instants, this breaking down has to be going on in subconscious mind. And my ability to keep this object before me and to break it down successively is the result of the continuous interaction of basic-cogs and the cog-processes they govern. Awareness is the illusion that what awareness does comes out of itself and not from below its own threshhold, or from what is happening beyond the ken of the instant of awareness. Attention is, e.g., an interaction between the rules of perception as applied to inputs and the rules of memory as affecting successive results of perception.

It is the subconscious which determines awareness and not the other way around. Even when we consciously choose to think in this or that direction, we are still under the determination of the subconscious. But in all cases there is no argument for determinism that can make us disbelieve in our ability to be free. The will of the specific self sees itself as the denial of determinism, whatever arguments we can muster for determinism. Talk of determinism always tends to trail off into free-will talk. Free will is embedded in language. Yet the very strong arguments for determinism--and the crucial one we haven't used, which is the absence of a hiatus in being--mean that compatibilism is about the only reasonable position there can exist between determinism and free will.

Success and failure have nothing to do with freedom or determinism. It is not freedom which gives us success. We are not determined towards defeat. There are rules and mechanisms in the world, and there are personal traits and attitudes, not excluding specific volition, that will determine whether we succeed or fail. If the world and history are rational and "look" towards rational goals, then if what we are doing is of value to the achievement of rational goals, we should succeed, and if what we are doing is not of value to rational goals, we will not succeed. This is about as close to determinism as we can get, and even this is unacceptable to the specific self, who refuses point blank to accept the thesis of determinism.

Behaviour is determined internally and externally but it is not possible to make a sharp distinction between forces because they are usually mixed and interactive. On the external side, two basic "axioms" are fear and imitation. Fear is coercive and imitation "voluntary". Basically, we are either forced or enticed from the outside. But external forces do not explain everything. There are also the "internal" traits proper to the specific self. There is no way that coercion or imitation can be explained without the specific self as the basis of all "axioms" of behaviour.

From the perspective of cognitive processes it is qualitatively impossible to distinguish between axioms of behaviour. And if axioms of behaviour are the same at the source, then our behaviour is more the result of our specific selves than of fear of others or the wish to imitate them. If fear, imitation, and the specific self are names for special cognitive processes, then all behaviour, being the result of cognition, necessarily partakes of these special cognitive processes, e.g., all apparently imitative or all apparently fearful behaviour is also self-specific and of course all self-specific behaviour also has imitative and coercive components. There is no point in making such distinctions. Their usefulness is another matter, but usually over time what is groundless tends to be useless.

 All behaviour is anteceded by propositions. The propositions/behaviour relation is unbreakable. We assume that knowing the propositions should allow us to predict the behaviour. Whatever principles determine the propositions are the principles of behaviour. All we can do in the matter of predictive laws is to set up a cognitive model and try to discover behavioural "trends" on the basis of specificities. Since specificities are proper to individuals, there is no question of trends in general: only of trends in individuals. To try to be precise about the prediction of behaviour we would have to have, apart from the cognitive models and its principles--for which we cannot claim more than interpretation--constant complete knowledge of all specificities of the individual mind. Such knowledge--just to give the magnitude of the problem--would have to consist in ultra-precise quantifications of pain and pleasure, of logic and memory, and so on. Cognition would have to be infinitely subdivided and each fragment of each subdivision would have to be minutely analyzed. Even animals, from this standpoint, with vastly simpler cognitive organizations, are only marginally, precariously predictable.

 The last complication is that, after all has been calculated to the most infinitesimal detail, then we have to assume that nothing unforeseen will come from the world and upset the balances we so carefully set up. In the case of, say, a gazelle being hunted by a predator, a minimal change in the atmosphere could give the prey a sudden but decisive olfactory warning. The predictive process would also have to depend on the exact knowledge of the way the world is configured at any particular moment. In sum, neither "laws" nor predictions are possible in respect to thought and behaviour. But when all is said and done to discard the possibility of laws because they can never be uncovered and formulated, is not a necessary deduction. The "laws" must exist only we cannot get at them, and even though we have precluded accessibility, we really have no basis for denying that somehow in due time these "laws" will be functionally known, i.e., known sufficiently for certain practical purposes if not for the constant prediction of action.

 Reason and will

Kant argued for reason and will. There are arguments for an object-self and objective cognition in relation to volition in Kant's writings on ethics. In Kant, deciding runs the gamut from, in effect, taking one's life to choosing how to kill the next five minutes. The process is of course psychological, but not discretely so. Into deciding enter perception, rationality, affects, currently known particulars and "things" below the threshold of consciousness, the past and expectations, and so on. They do not enter in ordered ranks, nor do they exit after examination permanently. They enter higgedly-piggedly and they come and go continually, often without our being aware of it. This is true of what to do next. But it is no less true of suicide, for suicide is a process and even if the final decision might conceivably be ghastly cold--for which there is some evidence--in the process the previous "disorderliness" must have been there most of the time. Admittedly "disorderliness" might be a matter of perspective, but it is a valid qualification as long as we do not have unimpeachable grounds for arguing that everything has a purely rational cause.

But surely, even if there were an universal order, this order could encompass some "chaos" without losing its "composure"? There may be instances of deciding from a purely rational stance. But there are other things to be observed here: one, even as we are deciding we are deciding. This is not wordplay: a decision is a temporal process and reason is biconditional with memory. Even if we could actually "lean" the process to the starkest essentials, it still requires memory and choosing between evidences and moments, and these are not subject to precise rational decisions. In the end, we may indeed have decided on a rational course for rational considerations, but this process is never accomplished without the admixture of unreason or at least of circumstances which cannot be rationally accounted for. Two, the final decision could be not to do something or to let something pass. It could be in brief a passive stance, and this can mean not choosing to recall or to move and say things, but simply allowing thought to take its own course, in other words, "doing nothing". Doing rationally, then, can be doing nothing. It is not possible to find "will" in all the above. But what we do find is the hodgepodge of the stream of thought, which may be rational, very likely is rational in the sense of the universe being rational, but which we could no more prove to be rational than we can say at precisely what moment and for precisely what reasons I decided to fulfill a moral law.

Action is always contextual and it is impossible not to consider its consequences. Duty, morality, so on, are defined and understood in terms and only in terms of obedience to a principle. Everything else--purpose, effects, goals, so on--is to be disregarded, for nothing else has to do with morality. Yet laws have purposes, so to obey the law must be in pursuance of a purpose. To this Kant can allege his distinction between laws and the principle or reason behind the laws. But this is as spurious as the attempt to obliterate all thought of consequences from ethics.

The categorical imperative has only limited applicability. "When I conceive of a hypothetical imperative at all, I do not know previously what it will contain until I am given the condition. But when I conceive a categorical imperative I know at once what it contains." This implies that the categorical imperative is not always relevant or applicable, but how can we be faithful to reason and morality and go around making all sorts of practical compromises? And additionally if the categorical imperative is only justified in certain situations, before we apply it or even think of it, we have to work our way from experience to pure reason, and Kant has expressly stated that the categorical imperative is a prioristic.

"Morality is then the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, that is, to the possible general laws made by its maxims. An action that is consistent with the autonomy of the will is permissible, one that is not congruous with it is forbidden." This implies that good actions are not those which are not forbidden: all good actions must have some positive intent related to autonomy of will. There is a complex argument against this implication. Since it is not possible for the will to be always autonomous--sometimes we have to keep an eye on results--there is implicit here a whole range of behavior which is neither good nor bad, and as good is permissible and bad forbidden, but actions which are neither good nor bad are permissible, then there are good actions which are not necessarily the result of the autonomy of the will.

Kant considers some duties to see whether they can be derived from the categorical imperative and the first one he turns to is not taking one's life. But in fact he had already done this in the commonsensical part of his treatise where he defined the moral worth of a deed as consisting in its accomplishment despite adversity. Let us assume that this time he puts this duty on a more solid base by relating it to the categorical imperative. It rather seems not that the categorical imperative is justifying duties but that priorly known duties are justifying the categorical imperative. Whichever way, he had formulated the categorical imperative (or something very much like it) in the first part. We have advanced not one whit. And there's the objection that the example he uses of not taking one's own life as a manifestation of the practical application of the categorical imperative is really quite problematical.

To go on living requires nothing. It can be multiply motivated. In fact, it does not even require a maxim or a motivation. To find some sort of moral meaning in not taking one's life would require, first, that one considered the possibility of taking one's life; then, that one actually contemplated taking one's life; and thirdly, that one then decided not to take one's life. But is this a moral decision stemming from the categorical imperative? All the duties he mentioned depend for their justification on their consequences. The only real reason we cannot accept suicide as a morally permissible action is not that I cannot wish my suicide to be universal law but that if we condoned suicide we could be at the same time condoning a threat to the fabric of society. 

Robert Kane on Martha Klein, Determinism, Blameworthiness and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press), in TLS, August 31-September 6 1990, p. 927

"Her discussion of moral responsibility-entailing choice (`free-will' in Leibniz's traditional language) centres on what she calls the `U-(or ultimacy) condition for blameworthiness': `an agent's morally reprehensible decisions or choices should not be caused by factors for which he is not responsible'. If your present choice issues from past character and motives, then to be morally responsible for the choice you must be responsible for the character and motives issuing in it. This suggests a familiar regress. Must you not also be responsible for the earlier character and motives? To escape, one must assume the existence of originating, buck-stopping, choices that are `uncaused' or `undetermined' by factors that went before them."

"Emphasizing the U-condition goes against the grain of much recent debate about determinism and blameworthiness, which has focused on what Klein calls the `C-condition'--that free agents `could have done otherwise'. She correctly argues that the C-condition is not necessary for blameworthy action, and is even tempted to dismiss it altogether as irrelevant for moral responsibility."

"Klein argues that only `reasonless' (or motiveless) choices could satisfy the U-condition and that these are empirically impossible. But reasonless choices are not the only things that will satisfy the U-condition. There is a way to make sense of originating, undetermined choices which satisfy the conditions of `ultimacy' and `could-have-done-otherwise,' as well as `intentionality' and `rationality' (they are not reasonless)...Free agents can have ultimate, but not absolute (that is, complete) control over the outcome of originating free choices. Hence responsibility and blameworthiness for them is never complete (and `moral luck' is more deeply involved in the human condition than we thought). This is a concession eminently worth arguing about. So the debate will go on--but the focus will have shifted away from the idea that incompatibilist views cannot be given any coherent formulation."

Robert Kane on Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, The Dilemma Of Freedom And Foreknowledge (Oxford) and on Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason (Oxford) in TLS August 30 1991

 "The main difficulty for traditionalists like Zagzebski is that they will not allow as a solution to the problem any view which limits divine foreknowledge. By contrast recent writers like Richard Swinburne and William Hasker are ready to bite the bullet and acknowledge that God does not have foreknowledge of all future free action."

 It could be argued that he can "calculate" the future perfectly without actually having foreknowledge, but this still places God in time and this is scary. We do not have answers. We can only suppose this or that.

 "Wolf...sides with those who dismiss the libertarian view of free will as unintelligible; I think they dismiss it too hastily. The recent renaissance of interest in the subject has given us a better understanding of the libertarian view. The responsibility associated with such a view was traditionally thought to require two conditions. Ultimacy, or the U-condition, as Martha Klein has called it (`to be responsible for our actions we must be responsible for the character and motives that produced them'); and explicable (`responsible actions must be in terms of the character and reasons of the agent which precede them'). It turns out that these conditions cannot be simultaneously satisfied. If libertarian free will requires both, it is an incoherent ideal...Compatibilists react by rejecting the Ultimacy condition, which they think is the source of the incoherence because it requires indeterminism and leads to regresses and other paradoxes."

Freud

(A) Freud specified and formalized neurosis

He sought rational explanations for neurosis

He applied reason in situations so peculiar that they did not seem rational

Envy is a rational sentiment, e.g., a footsore hitchhiker who sees someone else get a ride

But is penis-envy rational?

Fear of castration is rational where the threat even just might conceivably exist, e.g., certain stunts

But is fear of castration in a child rational?

The application of reason to Freudian situations is to say the least strained

Therefore, we can say that, even though Freud did specify and formalize neurosis, some of his inferences from them were certainly far-fetched

Among those inferences were that neurosis are rational and that they can be cured through memory exercises in couch-analysis

Neurosis is more resistant to talk than he thought

The quotes here, on which the comments are based, come from these three sources:

--William W. Meissner, "Theories of Personality", in Armand M.Nicholi, jr., ed., The Harvard Guide to Modern Psychiatry, Cambridge, Mass., 1978;

--The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961, 1962, and 1964;

--David Stafford-Clark, What Freud Really Said, Schocken Books, N.Y., 1966, 1976

The presentation follows the development of Freud's thought in chronological order

William W. Meissner, "Theories of Personality", in Armand M.Nicholi, jr., ed., The Harvard Guide to Modern Psychiatry, Cambridge, Mass., 1978

The topographic model (lie of the land): early formulations of instinct theory (x compartmental or modular psychology > faculties, abalogously seas, continents, poles) (lesser ego-role)

The tripartite theory

"Freud regarded psychosis as the result of conflict between ego and reality and viewed neurosis as an intra-psychic conflict among the id, ego, and superego."

Freud was first and foremost a clinician and from this activity emerged his ideas on psychology

It cannot be asserted, however, that he broke root and branch with traditional psychology

The definition of the ego was a life-long concern with him

It went through several phases

"the first phase, ending in 1897, saw the ego as a dominant mass of conscious ideas and values distinct from the impulses and wishes  of the repressed unconscious" (122)

From the topographic to the structural viewpoint (ego-concept)

The development of the ego concept

"On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description `Anxiety Neurosis'" (1895 [1894])

V.3, p.93

"Anxious expectation is the nuclear symptom of [anxiety neurosis]. It openly reveals, too, a portion of the theory of neurosis. We may perhaps say that here a quantum of anxiety in a freely floating state is present, which, where there is expectation, controls the choice of ideas and is always ready to link itself with any mutable ideational content".

"Obsessions and Phobias: Their Psychical Mechanism and their Aetiology" (1895 [1894])

V.3, p.75

"People who doubt have many doubts at the same time or in succession. It is the emotional states which remain constant in them; the idea changes."

[conditioned awareness]

Meissner

"The second phase of the concept of ego, from 1897 to 1923, was influenced by Freud's abandonment of the seduction hypothesis and his concern with the instinctual drives, their representations, and their transformations. The concept of ego was closely linked to the ego instinct, which Freud was struggling to clarify. Defense was limited primarily to repression and consisted of an instinctual force directed against unconscious derivatives. The ego's activities followed the reality principle and secondary process and included the capacity for delay of gratification.

The Interpretation of Dreams (II) (1900)

"It is instructive to consider...the significance of a hysterical phobia or an agoraphobia. Let us suppose that a neurotic patient is unable to cross the street alone--a condition which we rightly regard as a `symptom'. If we remove this symptom by compelling him to carry out the act of which he believes himself incapable, the consequence will be an attack of anxiety; and indeed the occurrence of an anxiety-attack in the street is often the precipitating cause of an onset of an agoraphobia. We see, therefore, that the symptom has been constructed in order to avoid an outbreak of anxiety; the phobia is erected like a frontier fortification against the anxiety"--p.581

[The phobia itself produces anxiety]

David Stafford-Clark, What Freud Really Said, Schocken Books, N.Y., 1966, 1976

"The Three Essays (1901-1905) will always remain one of Freud's major works. They provide the foundation for his theory of neuroses, the explanation of the need for repression and the source of emotional energy underlying conscious and unconscious drives and behaviour which he names libido"--p.105

"This concept of the available quantity of original sexual energy (libido) being limited, and of its compulsive fixation at various levels of development short of maturity in some individuals, was to provide Freud with the basis of his general theory of neuroses"--p.115

"It was possible in Freud's day, and it is possible now, to take simple clinical examples for the main forms of neuroses. We can list them and then consider them briefly one by one:

(1) hysterical illnesses and hysterical personality

(2) states of anxiety and anxious and vulnerable personalities

(3) obsessive compulsive disorders and obsessional personalities

(4) neurotic depression and personalities specifically vulnerable to defeat and despair of this kind

(5) hypersensitive, suspicious and paranoid attitudes, and the personalities prone to them

(6) specific disorders of sexual immaturity, and personalities involved in and damaged by this"--pp.142-3

"Freud classified the neuroses in terms of their aetiology...His classification divided them into actual neuroses and psychoneuroses. Actual neuroses were disturbances of subjective well-being and physiological balance, entirely consequent upon a frustration of libidinal fulfilment or exhaustion of libidinal energy...For neither of these conditions did Freud consider psychoanalysis appropriate.

    "[The psychoneuroses] were patterns of neurotic activity entirely determined by unconscious mechanisms, in response to the various hazards to which the unconscious drive towards unconditional libidinal satisfaction must inevitably expose the developing human being. Freud divided the psychoneuroses again into two groups, the transference neuroses and the narcissistic neuroses...Anxiety neuroses, anxiety hysteria, hysterical conversion neuroses and obsessive compulsive neuroses were transference neuroses. Severe neurotic depression, paranoid states and those borderline states of disturbance which lay between personality disorders and schizophrenia were narcissistic neuroses"--p.150-2

"Underlying [neuroses], Freud saw as decisive the Oedipus complex--the threat to the infant of its inevitable desire for possession of the mother, with the inescapably concomitant risk of talion punishment from the father"--p.152

Jensen's `Gradiva' (1906-08) V.9, p.34 

The perfectly commonplace explanation that Freud gives of repression, and what it means, if anything, in the history of psychological thought

The case of Munch's Madonna

Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909) V.10, p.222

The fight against obsessions

"...they force their way into consciousness..."

"The Unconscious" (1915) V.14, p.167

"When all our latent memories are taken into consideration it becomes totally incomprehensible how the existence of the unconscious can be denied."

"In searching for the meaning of anxiety one must ask what unconscious material the patient is afraid of, and what consequences he fears, should it emerge into conscious discharge and expression.

    "What he fears is the escape from the prison of the unconscious of aggressive and libidinal crises and their derivative emotions and fantasies" p.176

Introductory Lectures (1915-17): "Obsessional neurosis is shown in the patient's being occupied with thoughts in which he is in fact not interested, in his being aware of impulses in himself which appear very strange to him and in his being led to actions the performance of which give him no enjoyment, but which it is quite impossible for him to omit. The thoughts (obsessions) may be senseless, or merely a matter of indifference to the subject; often they are completely silly, and invariably they are the starting-point of a strenuous mental activity, which exhausts the patient and to which he only surrenders himself most unwillingly. He is obliged against his will to brood and speculate as though it were a question of his most important vital problem...What is carried into action in an obsessional neurosis is sustained by an energy to which we probably know nothing comparable in normal mental life"--pp.155-6

"Freud saw obsessional neuroses as essentially a regression of the libido to the earlier infantile state of sadistic-anal organization; a stage in which the infant could not directly experience, even in imagination, the possibility of a love for the parents free from aggressive, destructive and defiant impulses. This aggression transforms normal relationships into deeply unconscious infantile ones. For the idea `I would like to love you, and to enjoy you in love', there exists in the repressed form only the idea `I should like to be strong enough to kill you'. This latter idea contains the phantasies of omnipotence which are the infant's compensation for his developing awareness of his helplessness in relation to those whom he wants to love"--pp.156-7

"...it is easier to see now what Freud was never fully to express or finally to acknowledge: namely, that what he called the narcissistic neuroses are probably not primarily psychogenic in origin"--p.162

"Transference neuroses correspond to the conflict between the ego and the id; the libidinal drive reaching the ego from the id has been frustrated, distorted, subject to inhibition or aggression, or fixated at a level short of fulfilment, because the circumstances of the ego could not competely express or tolerate it. Then narcissistic neuroses remained those in which the withdrawal of libidinal attachments or cathexis to the outside world left an overwhelming reinvestment of emotion and concern attached to the ego itself"--pp.163-4

"A man might become jealous of his wife because his repressed homosexual impulses compelled him to deny that he did not want her, and forced him to substitute the displaced projection that she did not want him and was therefore being unfaithful to him"--pp.166-7

Obsessive behaviour in the rat-man: "For example, on one occasion the woman he loved was due to leave a certain town, and he was walking along the route her carriage would take on the way to the station when he saw a stone on the road. He immediately felt compelled to remove it in case the carriage wheel should run over it and the carriage then overturn and harm her. As soon as he had removed it he was not sure whether he had not put it in a more dangerous position, or that its removal might not cause some other catastrophe. He therefore felt compelled to replace it"--p.178

Meissner

"During the third phase, from 1923 to 1937, the structural theory emerged in which the ego was defined as a structural entity and was definitely separated from the instinctual drives. Within the structural framework, the ego was a coherent organization of mental processes and functions oriented toward the perceptual-conscious system, and it included mechanisms responsible for resistance and unconscious defense" 

S. Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), chapter V: "The Dependent Relationships of the Ego", in volume 19, pp.48-59

"There are certain people who behave in a quite peculiar fashion during the work of analysis. When one speaks hopefully to them or expresses satisfaction with the progress of the treatment, they show signs of discontent and their condition invariably becomes worse"--p.49

"In the end we come to see that we are dealing with what may be called a `moral' factor', a sense of guilt, which is finding its satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the punishment of suffering"--p.49

"An interpretation of the normal, conscious sense of guilt (conscience) presents no difficulties; it is based on the tension between the ego and the ego ideal and is the expression of a condemnation of the ego by its critical agency"--p.50-1

[awareness conditioning]

"What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct, and in fact it often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time by the change round into mania"--p.53

"The super-ego arises, as we know, from an identification with the father taken as a model"--p.54

"[In obsessional neurosis] The defusion of love into aggressiveness has not been effected by the work of the ego, but is the result of a regression which has come about in the id. But this process has extended beyond the id to the super-ego, which now increases its severity towards the innocent ego"--p.55

The Ego: "By virtue of its relation to the perceptual system it gives mental processes an order in time and submits them to `reality-testing'. By interposing the process of thinking, it secures a postponement of motor discharges and controls the access to motility...All the experiences of life that originate from without enrich the ego; the id, however, is its second external world, which it strives to bring into subjection to itself. It withdraws libido from the id and transforms the object-cathexes of the id into ego-structures"--p.55

"What it is that the ego fears from the external and from the libidinal danger cannot be specified; we know that the fear is of being overwhelmed or annihilated, but it cannot be grasped analytically"--p.57

"It seems to me...perfectly correct to distinguish the fear of death from the dread of an object (realistic anxiety) and from neurotic libidinal anxiety"--p.57-8

"The fear of death in melancholia only admits of one explanation: that the ego gives itself up because it feels itself hated and persecuted by the super-ego, instead of loved. To the ego, therefore, living means the same as being loved--being loved by the super-ego, which here again appears as the representative of the id. The super-ego fulfills the same function of protecting and saving that was fulfilled in earlier days by the father and later by Providence or Destiny"--p.58

"These considerations make it possible to regard the fear of death, like the fear of conscience, as a development of the fear of castration"--p.58

Meissner

"The fourth phase of ego concept began with Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936) and culminated in the systematizing elaborations of Heinz Hartmann and David Rapaport. Hartmann's key contributions were the development of a theory of ego autonomy and emphasis on the principle of adaptation. Ego autonomy refers to the innate or acquired capacity of the ego to function independently of instinctual impulses and the influence of drive derivatives. Adaptation refers to the capacity of the organism to fit in and adjust harmoniously to the environment. The adaptational approach not only linked psychoanalytic theory with biological thinking but also laid the groundwork for elaboration of analytic principles into the framework for a general psychology of behavior" (122-3)

ADDENDA

The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

V.1:  Pre-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (1886-1897)

V.2:  Studies in Hysteria (1893-1895)

V.3:  Early Psycho-Analytic Publications (1893-1899)

V.4:  The Interpretation of Dreams (I) (1900)

V.5:  The Interpretation of Dreams (II) and On Dreams (1900-1901)

V.6:  The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901)

V.7:  A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works (1901-1905)

V.8:  Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)

V.9:  Jensen's `Gradiva' and Other Works (1906-1908)

V.10: The Cases of `Little Hans' and the `Rat Man' (1909)

V.11: Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo and Other Works (1910)

V.12: Case History of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works (1911-1913)

V.13: Totemn and Taboo and Other Works (1913-1914)

V.14: A History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (1914-1916)

V.15: Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (I & II) (1915-1916)

V.16: Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (III) (1917-1917)

V.17: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1917-1919)

V.18: Beyond the PLeasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (1920-1922)

V.19: The Ego and the Id and Other Works (1923-1925)

V.20: An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptons and Anxiety, Lay Analysis and Other Works (1925-1926)

V.21: The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works (1927-1931)

V.22: New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works (1932-1936)

V.23: Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, and Other Works (1937-1939)

V.24: Indexes, Bibliography, etc.

(B) Post-Freudian

Alfred Adler (1870-1937)

One signal feature: the will to power, which is the foundation of the dyad superiority/inferiority and the inferiority complex

Carl Jung (1875-1961)

The collective unconscious

A clinician who turned to the study of cultural and religious links to psychology

Otto Rank (1884-1939)

Birth trauma and the need for self-assertion

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957)

Character armour in dealing with conflicts over incestuous wishes

Anna Freud (1895-1987?)

Ego and its defenses

Child psychologist

Keeper of the flame

Franz Alexander (1891-1964)

"The specificity hypothesis suggested that some organic diseases have not only a specific physiopathology but also a specific psychopathology"

[eg stress --> soriasis?]

(C) The neo-Freudians

Karen Horney (1885-1952)

Less emphasis on instinct and more on the interaction between the individual and his environment

Rejection of penis complex

The "pride system": actual self (sum total of experiences), real self (healthy adaptation), idealized self (source of neuroses)

Individual factors and the here-and-now rather than the past in the origins of neuroses

"She emphasized current interaction rather than infantile derivatives operating through the repetition compulsion"

Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949)

The "self-system": away from instincts theory, and towards the concepts of security and self-esteem

Concept of significant figures in the environment

"The lack of a sense of security and self-esteem, exacerbated by an abiding sense of disapproval by the significant figures (parents), becomes a source of anxiety" (129)

"Freud regarded psychosis as the result of conflict between ego and reality and viewed neurosis as an intra-psychic conflict among the id, ego, and superego. For Sullivan, however, the basic conflict was between the individual and the human environment of significant others. Sullivan believed that intra-psychic conflicts were derived from interpersonal conflict by the internalization of external objects and conflicted relationships"

"current patterns of interpersonal interactions rather than genetic aspects of the individual's behavior"

Erich Fromm (1900- ? )

He denied the cruciality of the concepts of libido and psychic energy

"Cultural and social processes" in neurosis, which manifested "irrational methods of relating to the social group"

Character types or patterns

(D) Object-relations theorists

Michael Balint (1896-1970)

Mother-child involvement

Ronald Fairbairn (1889-1964)

"initially undivided ego"

Donald Winnicott (1897-1971)

Mother-child relation

(E) Contemporary Psychoanalytic Ego Psychology

Heinz Hartmann (1894-1970)

"primary autonomous ego functions" apart from id and environment

"Hartmann tried to shift the focus of psychoanalysis from a clinically oriented, content-based theory to a more general theory of the psychic apparatus and human behavior" (133)

David Rapaport (1911-1960)

Experimental

"general theory of psychological behavior"

Erik Erikson (1902- ? )

"basic psychosocial crises"

(F) Psychological Theories of Personality

Gordon Allport (1897-1967)

"Traits, then, are generalized predispositions to behavior that provide the basis for personality description" (134-5)

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)

Man is good

He responds to a "hierarchy of needs"

Kurt Lewin (1890-1947)

"The fundamental concept in Lewin's system is the `life space', the sum of all the facts that determine the person's behavior at a given point in time. The life space includes two primary dimensions: the psychological environment and the person himself"

Jurgen Ruesch (1909-  )

The concepts of feedback mechanisms and homeostasis

Carl Rogers (1902-  )

"Within Roger's phenomenological and organismic theory, the phenomenological field is equivalent to the totality of the individual's experience. The self is a differentiated portion of the phenomenological field consisting of the individual's image and evaluation of himself" (138)

The fundamental demarche in the discovery of neurosis was the abandonment of the mind/body pathological link: neither were physical or physiological lesions or malfunctions the cause of abnormal conduct, nor was deviant behaviour necessarily a manifestation of actual organic disorders. In explaining this "halfway house" between madness and "normalcy", Freud speculated along various convergent paths: childhood impressions, the subconscious, and instincts, especially the libido, and their disruptions.

He further extended the disassociation between objectivity and subjectivity implicit in the separation between mental states and actual physical causes, by substituting imagined traumas for actual traumatic events in the etiology of the neurotic condition. This placed psychological "research" squarely within the area of introspection. However, the elevation of introspection to a privileged methodological status, also conjured up the spectre of subjectivity. Rational categories were necessary to carry on beyond introspection, but this could not obviate the ultimate reliance on the data of individual experience.

Freud conceived a rigid scenario or schema for reducing neurosis to rationally  manageable patterns of thought and action, which presupposed the functional existence of the subconscious beyond such self-evident operations as memory and reason. The OEdipal complex, as he called it, postulated interferences in early childhood that dislocated or displaced the normal channeling of affective and in general psychological energies resulting in, among other things, emotional immaturity, obsessive thought and behaviour, specifically symbolic dreaming, and even parapraxes.

Neurosis was diagnosed as the involuntary inability of an individual to work out or to surmount the OEdipal scenario. The capping of the psychoanalytic programme was the notion of the evacuation of the neurotic syndrome through therapeutic couch-analysis, which consisted in memory exercises for the patient with the assistance of the psychoanalytic clinician.

In the psychoanalytic scheme, the castration trauma--and other similar traumas--has its effect on the situation described in the so-called topographic model of the instinctual economy of the mind

The concept of topography originates in that the traditional qualitative distinctions--intellect, volition, affectivity, "instinctuality"--are disregarded in favour of a terrain image or perspective

The instinctual economy refers to the idea that mental energy is limited--like resources in an economy--and must be shared out between different instinctual claims

The war of the instincts for predominance can lead to manifestations such as anxiety or shaking

More concretely, the repression of sex produces generalized guilt feelings and guilt in turn leads to timidity, insecurity, and so on

The effects of traumas are eventually translated into neurotic symptons such as emotional immaturity, mother fixation, impotence, homosexuality, etc.

I presume there are proto-symptons

How and why are proto-symptons transformed into symptons?

From the evolution of the individual and the change in his societal circumstances

All of this amounted to making two monumentally controversial statements: (1) on the therapeutically reducible nature of what is in effect an existential problem, and (2) on the possibility of self-knowledge from the assumption that "cure"lies in the enlightenment achieved by the patient himself.

"Cure" applied to the individual neurotic condition and did not affect the burdensome awareness of the general constraints on existence.

The summatory psychoanalytic statement on neurosis was contained in the OEdipal scenario, whose dénouement appeared to derive from the Socratic dictum: "Know thyself", but only in connection with the OEdipal scenario.

In sum, the basic failure of psychoanalysis is that to work its explanations must be internalized as belief in the individual and the scenario it constructs to explain neurosis, i.e., the OEdipus thingamajig, is simply not believable, except perhaps in the very rare cases where it happens to have taken place, or at the very least, something like it

The greatest flaw in the psychoanalytic agenda is that in its commitment to the alleviation of malaise, it faces the problem that mind can derive relief for itself from itself alone. It does not matter where that relief originates as long as mind "naturalizes" it within itself. It is not only that it is only neurosis that can know itself; it must also explain itself from itself alone. Mind in brief will not give its assent about itself to anything but its own specific cognition. No general abstract formulation will satisfy self-awareness and no external source can speak for awareness, and the OEdipal construct, with its assertion of undemonstrated, and undemonstrable, psychical energies and instinctual drives, rather than answering the appeal of self-awareness for enlightenment, seems instead to demand that mind mould itself to its own postulates.

It is possible to raise strong objections to the theoretical structure within which neurosis was originally typified. The psychoanalytic programme is built on a double helix of related perceptions: neurosis immediately as its own verbalization and the external rational interpretation of the self-perception of neurosis. On close rational scrutiny, the specific psychoanalytic perception loses force. The patterning function of the OEdipal scenario presupposes the repetition of events, e.g. the perceived threat of castration, that are accidental rather than invariant.

Fear and envy of the father-figure do not necessarily require an OEdipal attachment to the mother; they can arise from only the father/child side of the familial triangle leading to the same social symptons as are attributable to an unresolved OEdipus complex. In certain instances, so-called OEdipal manifestations, e.g. emotional immaturity, can co-exist with traits, e.g. rejection of the mother, at odds with OEdipal behaviour expectations.

Even in the crudest state of non-resolution, the OEdipus scenario should cease operating at some point in time, yet further neurotic manifestations are made dependent on its residual subconscious effects when in fact the self/environment inter-action throughout life would seem to be more influential on thought than any other set of circumstances.

To the disruptive libidinal fixations proposed by psychoanalysis can be opposed the notion of a process of sexuality through development, conditioning, or some other mechanism.

In fact, the deviation of the libido in any direction can be explained from the Freudian principle of the conservation of psychological energy without the benefit of the OEdipal construct.

Functionalism

An overview of functionalism is that it assumes that mental states are a form of behavior (computers are observable) and since behavior is caused mental states are caused. The functionalist separation between software and hardware is not easy to maintain in parallel to mind and brain. A hardware failure need not portend a software failure, although of course it could portend a software malfunction. To get over a hardware failure all you do is take the software and put it in another machine. It is difficult to assume that brain damage will not affect thought. And under the theoretical assumptions of functionalism the hardware cannot be identical to the software, for functionalism is the belief precisely that thought is autonomous and can be instantiated in substances other than brains. Given these difficulties with the analogy at the heart of functionalism, it would seem more productive to assume physicalism in the forefront and to keep functionalism in the background. In analogous monism I borrow symbolism for mind--although it can easily as well be derived from the temporality of thought--and shape to it to fit a neurological model.

Functionalism poses as many difficulties as metaphysics and folk psychology, as can be seen in Papineau's teleology, or in Dennett's intentionalism. Event-identity physicalism is at best a problematical theory. It is impossible to demonstrate either determinism or indeterminism. Circularity, which seems useless, is at the heart of rationality.

David Papineau on Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (MIT Press), in TLS, August 19-25 1988, P. 911

"The materialistic shift in recent analytic philosophy represents a remarkable turnaround. In the 1950s and 60s philosophers used to divide on whether `reasons' were `causes', with neo-positivists like A. J. Ayer maintaining that mental states caused behaviour according to general scientific laws, while hermeneuticians like Peter Winch insisted instead that the attribution of mental reasons yielded a distinctive, non-causal way of understanding human action. Strikingly absent from that agenda, however, was the question of how the mind related to the brain. Even the positivists tended to deal with the mind in its own terms, relating beliefs and desires to actions directly, without bringing in the brain as the locus of mental states."

"Now that physical discourse has its own authority, the only way to relate mind to matter is somehow to find space for the mental within the physical."

"Dennett's position on the mind-brain issue combines elements of both orthodox `functionalism' and Donald Davidson's `anomalous monism'. Functionalism is the modern physicalist version of Ayer's positivism. Like Ayer, functionalists take everyday psychology to specify general causal relations between mental states and behaviour, but then add the physicalist twist of identifying those mental states with the brain states that play the same causal roles in our physical workings. Davidson, by contrast, is the physicalist heir of Winch. While accepting the general monist principle that everything, including humans, is made of matter, Davidson resists the further inference that psychology should dance to the same scientific tune as physics. He maintains instead that psychological terminology is `anomalous', in being unsuitable for the formulation of general scientific laws, and insists, with Winch, that the point of our everyday psychological notions of belief, memory, desire, intention and so on, is to enable us to make hermeneutic sense of people's actions, not to categorize them scientifically."

"One of the issues involved here is the debate between `connectionists' and `linguistic' models in artificial intelligence. In the 1970s the fashionable theories of the mind postulated `languages of thought', consisting of sentence-like structures which the brain possessed in sequence like a conventional computer. But it has since become clear that this is too cumbersome for abilities involving pattern recognition, and the fashion is now for `connectionist' models, in which mental judgements are embodied in holistic networks of simple non-sentential elements. Dennett argues, not unreasonably, that this shift in fashion casts little doubt on folk psychology, on the ground that there was little in folk psychology to commit us to the language-of-thought picture in the first place. But this scarcely establishes Dennett's more general thesis, that folk psychology carries no implications whatsoever about internal mechanisms."

Functional-role semantics

Approximately, functional-role semantics is the theory that meaning is subject to the laws of inference, i.e., that thought is logical, and that logic is causal.