Idea

See   Concept.

Idealism

Idealism is the claim that the in the study of reality it is of primary importance to consider the representation of reality as opposed to the reality itself which produces the representation.

Identity and equivalence

Identity is equivalence with substitution. It is a valid relation in formal logic and in mathematics. However, the attempt to apply the relation of identity to reality other than logic and mathematics gives way to the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals and consequently it is inapplicable. The most that the world tolerates is the relation of equivalence which can but need not licit substitution. This might seem like leaving logical gaps, and in fact knowledge as a whole is subject to a certain degree of uncertainty. It would be hard to put a percentage figure on it, but a great much of our knowledge or what passes for knowledge and probably is knowledge is mere interpretation and probability and its validation is more a matter of collective historical "judgements" than of cognitive processes in themselves.

Is there any significant difference in the operations of the relation of identity in logic or math? From the definition equivalence and subtitutivity, it would appear not. But the question can be put differently. Formal logic is not the ideal instrument for dealing with the world because the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals makes the relation of identity problematical. Yet mathematics, despite harboring in itself the relation of identity, applies smoothly to the world. How can this be? Why should numbers and math-symbols be more apt than variables and other logical symbols to grasp and express or describe the world of things? It could be that numbers are already part of the real world, or at least that they can be deduced from the existence of things. Numbers are practical in a sense in which formal logic is not. But the fundamental difference probably lies elsewhere. We are born with intuitive logic. We do not have an innate knowledge of mathematics. We derive formal logic from the self-exploration of intuitive logic. They are not identical but equivalent. We also derive math from the use of intuitive logic, but not from intuitive logic itself but from the world.

The principle of identity is different from the relation of identity. The principle of identity claims that a thing or a proposition must be identical to itself and to nothing else in the universe. It could also be related to the law of the excluded middle. In physical terms, the principle of identity states that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. The principle of identity is the guarantee that the world is logical. It could be the fundamental axiom from which all of logic can be derived. The principle of identity can be deduced directly from the diversity and specificity of reality. It is in its essence the contrary of contradiction. Hence, it could be called the princple of non-contradiction. It is as much as the relation of identity the basis of the principle of the indiscerniblity of identicals. It is also the fundamental princple of reality and as such it applies as much to time as to space, i.e., no two instants of time are identical, and it is the source of successiveness, which in turn makes possible the cause/effect relation. It could even be that the syllogism could not work in the world without the principle of identity and the relation of equivalence.

"Identity. The relation expressed in mathematics and logic by the `equals' sign, `='. The force of saying that 2+3 = 5 is that the number obtained by adding 2 and 3 is (identical with) 5...The relation of identity is an equivalence relation, but is distinguished from other equivalence relations by having the further property of licensing subtitution." (Flew)

Identity theory

Identity theory comes in two varieties: token and type. Identity theory is the claim that mental states are physical states. Type physicalism is the claim that mental states are brain states. Token physicalism does not exclude that mental states could be physical states different from brain states. Token physicalism is used by functionalists to justify the mind/machine analogy. But did token physicalism exist as such before functionalism? Putnam claims to have first launched the mind/machine analogy. Functionalism came to the fore in the 60's.

Helen Steward on Cynthia MacDonald, Mind-Body Identity Theories , London, 1990, in TLS, May 4-10 1990, p.476

"Non-reductive monism is a highly popular position which attempts to combine the view that mental events are identical with physical events with the plausible suggestion that that mental properties are neither reducible to, nor lawfully correlated with physical ones."

"Mereology is the study of the relationships between parts and wholes."

From MacDonald

"The mind-body problem...has its source in the view that that [physical and psychological characteristics] are unified under one concept, the concept of person. It is further complicated by the belief that there are causal relations between the phenomena of which these two sets of characteristics are typical. This appearance of causal interaction is evidenced in countless ways in everyday experience: surgeons perform operations on brains to change mental states, for instance; and experiences of extreme pain often issue in tears. It seems that whatever mind is, it is inextricably bound up with the body of a person. What exactly is the relation between mind and body?"

"All mind-body identity theories are physicalist at least to the extent that they are committed to the view that every phenomenon that has a mental description (i.e., a description in everyday folk-psychological terms, as do pains, itches, hopes, desires, beliefs, and the like) has a physical description (i.e., a description in the vocabulary of physics [sic]), which is to say that it is a physical phenomenon. (None of the theories that will be considered in the present study is committed to the stronger physicalist thesis that mentalistic terms and concepts are reducible to physical ones.)"

Two objections

"The first has its source in what is often referred to as the possibility of variable realization: the possibility that one and the same mental type of state--say, pain [is pain a `mental state'?]--should be realized internally in different creatures (or by the same creature at different times) by diverse physical types of state."

"The second and more serious problem has its source in the belief that mental phenomena have properties that no physical phenomenon or type of phenomenon has, This, given the evident truth of Leibniz's Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals (according to which, if, for any objects x and y, x is identical with y, then x and y share all properties), shows that no mental phenomenon or type can be identical with a physical one."

"Qualia--the throbbing of pain, the burning of an itch, the colour of an after-image, etc.--are essential features of sensations in the sense that they cannot occur without being felt. Since no physical phenomenon or type is essentially felt, no sensation can be a physical phenomenon or type."

"Hence, propositional attitudes are said to be essentially rational (or irrational) in virtue of the logical relations their contents bear to one another and to the actions they typically cause. Such constraints, being normative--they license judgements about how an agent ought to behave or to think given other of her attitudes--have no place in physical theory. Since it is not part of the essence of any physical phenomenon (type or token) that it be rational, no propositional attitude or type can be identical with any physical phenomenon or type."

Now her answer

"Chapter One examines the straightforward type-type identity theories of the sort advanced by Central State Materialists J. J. C. Smart and U. T. Place. Chapter Two and Three survery, respectively, the causal-role identity theories of D. M. Armstrong and David Lewis and the token event-identity theories of the sort advanced by Donald Davidson and Jaegwon Kim."

"First, token event-identity theories are ontologically committed to events construed as non-repeatable, dated particulars; in the absence of other mental objects, events must serve as the relata of the identity relation."

"Part Two is...concerned with not one but two issues: whether an adequate conception of events, mental or physical, is forthcoming; and whether, if one is, it is capable of consistent combination with an argument for psychological token identity in a way that skirts objections from phenomenal properties. The argument in Chapter Four is that a certain version of the property-exemplification account of events, developed by Lawrence Lombard, is intrinsically more adequate than others and capable of consistent combination with non-reductive monism in such a way as to avoid objections from phenomenal properties."

[The author classifies mental events as sensations, propositional attitudes, and emotions. Emotions do not fit the scheme here well, so she argues that they could be construed "as consisting of two distinct components". Another problem is that the version she endorses "construes events as changes as distinct from standing conditions or states; and it is unclear how this theory is to apply to the propositional attitudes", which "do not seem to last for a specific amount of time during which their subjects are consciously aware of them", in other words, they last longer. She establishes the categories of states (standing conditions), events, and particulars, but in the end what she claims is that propositional attitudes "might be treated within the theory as concatenation of events, perhaps; or as events only when manifested in something like the way the solubility of a substance might be treated as an event only when it manifests itself by dissolving in a medium" ]

"The claim here is that, however standing conditions or states are to be treated, they ought to be seen as dependent on a more fundamental conception of events as changes."

[It is not clear to me why to reach this conclusion she needs to distinguish between events and particulars, "thus undermining the claim that events constitute an irreducible category of particulars". It could be that if she identifies states as events, unless she makes events reducible, she cannot claim that propositional attitudes (a form of event) are reducible to events as changes. But before she had admitted the distinction between events as changes and as standing conditions. She seems to have said: propositions and sensations are events, but propositions last longer than events, therefore in order to explain this problem, events are shown to be reducible to sensations, which makes propositions reducible to events, which they already were. Alternatively she is saying that events can be construed as either changes or states. The construal of events as states is not justified from particulars, which means that events are reducible to changes. This must mean that states are different from events and that states are reducible to events, just as events are reducible to particulars. But this reduction can only be justified analogically.]

These arguments are also from Cynthia MacDonald

In the dualism/monism debate, functionalism sidesteps the issue by not making thought necessarily dependent on brain matter. Dennett has a conflationary approach that fuses functionalism and physicalism, which mostly sees thought as brain matter. Physicalism tends in two directions: eliminativism or eliminationism, which more or less tries to ignore mental events, and identity theory, which accepts mental events as identical to physical states. There are two versions of identity theory: type and token identities. Type identity posits a reciprocal entailment between thought and brain matter. Token physicalism assumes variable realizability. Type identity entails simultaneity, i.e., when something is thought something occurs in the brain. The denial of type identity involves sequence or precedence and "causal role identity", i.e., rather than simultaneous mental and material events occur each as either cause or effect. Causal role identity implies token identity, because a specific brain state can only produce a specific mental event. This specificity, for people in the field, seems to entail the denial that all mental events have to be realized in brain matter. However, it seems to me that what causal role implies is either than the brain state produces the mental event or the mental event the brain state and not necessrily that mental events and their realization can be separated in such a way that a mental state can only be realized in a type of matter. Furthermore, it is conceivable that a mental event could be realized in brain matter without the implication of variable realizability. There are of course computers, which is the nub of token physicalism, and the denial of simultaneity does open a gap between mental event and matter into which functionalism can enter.

In J.J.C.Smart's thought nerve stimulation can produce either pain or pleasure.

[It is possible also to have low neural stimulation with kinesthesia, i.e., the "natural" state of well-being.]

In type identity the physical (P), i.e., neural stimulation is exactly the same as the mental (M), i.e., the awareness of pain or pleasure. Changes in P or M occur simultaneously. But simultaneity entails double causation--or else P causes M or M causes P--and two identical causes all of the time strains credulity. Additionally, awareness itself can affect pain or please, so that simultaneity again breaks down. And again, kinesthesia is a precarious equilibrium which a change in either M or P can upset, which again breaks the equivalence between identity and simultaneity

MacDonald would seem to accept the sumultaneity specification of identity. In Fodor, type identity does not seem to involves simultaneity. However, token identity with the variable realizability implication would seem to involve simultaneity. In other words, he does not make simultaneity a condition of type identity and he does not exclude simultaneity from token identity.

Another problem for identity but not for analogous monism is ghost-limb sensation. It has been observed that feelings in the leg and the cheek are related in the brain. A real leg will produce "leg-awareness". The leg/cheek relation in the brain can produce the awareness of a limb that is not there. This means that a real leg will produce the same awareness as a missing limb because of events in the brain, so that we can conclude that different physical states produce identical mental events. Identity breaks down. However, are these mental events identical? I do not really believe that identity breaks down. What does break down is rigid type identity. And this points to the need for flexibility, the flexibility that the squiggles/neurons analogy provides. Just as squiggles can represent all sorts of propositions, so the brain can adapt to all sort of situations. Token identity simply does not apply to missing-limb sensation, and this is implies its denial. Finally, type identity assumes that mental events are repeatable, i.e., that false-limb awareness is like the awareness of a real limb, but mental states are specific within their typability. This is as logical as the principles of specification and generalization. Assuming variable realizability, different material realizations of thought are disjunctions of thought. Disjunctions are Boolean operations. All physical types are analogous. However, Boolean operations do not in themselves require physical properties. They have no bearing on the identity disjunctions.

The upshot of MacDonald's thought on our own thinking can be synthesized in the questions: does physicalism necessarily validate functionalism? Or does physicalism entail awareness, qualia, and the rest of the mentalist paraphernalia? If so-called type physicalism is valid, then since brain and awareness are codependent, physicalism does entail mentalism. However, Dennett and others are physicalists/functionalists. As such, they are constrained to token physicalism and token physicalism is bunk. Curiously enough, Fodor is a token physicalist and a functionalist who believes in qualia and all the rest. Two things are clear: physicalism does not inevitably lead to functionalism and Fodor is antithetical.

Identity theory was an international trend of thought which tried to find a definitive general solution to the issue of the relation between mind and body. It is not a subject that analytical philosophers worried over, except Quine en passant and Davidson in somewhat more depth, and it is not prominent either in British philosophy of mind. On the whole, identity theory is a not very profound subject and it usually comes down either to logical nitpicking or to analogous or metaphorical argumentation. If it has had a sequel in America, it is physicalism, which is an extreme and incoherent approach to mental phenomena.

Illocutionary

Illocutionary is a term from British philosophy of language, viz., Austin, which is applied to speech and implies that speech is a form of behaviour beyond the act of speaking itself. What the concept of illocutionary acts refers to is not entirely unlike the grammatical moods: affirmative, interrogative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative.

Illusions and hallucinations

"Sense-perception-the awareness or apprehension of things by sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste-has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called 'the problem of perception', is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality?...This entry will focus on a single, central problem of perception: how to reconcile some apparently obvious truths about our experience of the world with the possibility of certain kinds of perceptual error. On an intuitive conception, perceptual experience is (what we shall call) "openness to the world". But this apparent fact of openness is threatened by the existence of certain actual or possible phenomena-typically known as illusions or hallucinations...This problem is not the same as the epistemological problem of how perception can give us knowledge of the external world. For even if one thought that this epistemological problem were solvable by adopting (for example) some reliabilist theory of perceptual warrant, what we are calling here the 'problem of perception' will remain. This is because the problem of perception is a kind of paradox or antinomy which arises independently of this epistemological issue. The structure of the problem is simple: perception seems intuitively to be openness to the world, but this fact of openness is threatened by reflection on illusions and hallucinations. Therefore perception, as we ordinarily understand it, seems to be impossible. The arguments which give rise to this problem can be divided into two: the arguments from illusion and from hallucination...An illusion here may be defined, with A.D. Smith, as "any perceptual situation in which a physical object is actually perceived, but in which that object perceptually appears other than it really is" (Smith 2002: 23). For example, a white wall in yellow light can look yellow; a sweet drink can taste sour if one has just eaten something sweeter; a quiet sound can seem loud if it is very close to you; and so on. In these cases it is not necessary that one is deceived into believing that things are other than they are; so illusion in this sense need not involve deception. One can know that one is experiencing an illusion when it is happening...A hallucination in this sense is an experience which seems exactly like a perception of a real, mind-independent object, but where there is no mind-independent object of the relevant kind being perceived. Like illusions, hallucinations in this sense do not necessarily involve deception. And nor need they be like the real hallucinations suffered by drug-users or alcoholics. They are rather supposed to be merely possible events: experiences which are indistinguishable for the subject from a genuine perception of an object. For example, suppose I am now having a visual experience of a snow-covered churchyard. The assumption that hallucinations are possible means that I could have an experience which is subjectively indistinguishable-that is, indistinguishable by the subject, "from the inside"-from a veridical perception of a snow-covered churchyard, but where there is in fact no churchyard which I am perceiving at all."

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (website)

Impredicativity

Impredicativity refers to the specific claim that there are properties or predicates that do not define classes. Russell's paradox showed that there is such a property, i.e., non-self-membership. In order to plug the hole he banned from set theory talk of self-reference, i.e., classes of classes.

Inclusion

Inclusion defines set and set implies similarity but inclusion can embrace entirely dissimilar things. Inclusion therefore is hardly a concept that would yield apodictic and only apodictic inferences. See also Co-dependence.

Indiscernibility of identicals

Leibniz used this expression to indicate that in "reality" the mathematical relation of identity does not hold. If two objects are identical, they cannot be distinguished from one and another. Alternatively, it is an expression of the identity principle: a cannot be b or c or d and so on ad infinitum. The indiscernibility of identicals entails that formal logic, where the relation of identify is currently used, is not adequate to grasp "reality". Logic applied to "reality" can only work with the relation of equivalence.

Induction

No factual proposition can be transferred to the inferential, apodictic domain, i.e., logic per se cannot provide explanations of events in reality, although this is not to say that intuitive logic is not always involved in such explanations. We could not function in any domain without logic. But the necessary recourse to experience means that induction or inductive reasoning is involved. This is not a different cognitive process, just as predictability is not a specific cognitive process: it is not different from factual or probabilistic propositions and, as in the case of all acts of cognition, it does not involve only one cognitive process.

Induction is frequently taken to refer to a specifically scientific method, but it is wider than that. In experience we are constantly elaborating hypotheses, e.g., this happened because of that; or, if that happened, it is because something else must have happened before; and so on and on. This is what a scientist does, if in a vastly more complex manner. Both in science and in our everyday lives we elaborate hypothetical explanations from experience. From a hypothesis we go back to experience, e.g., we ask, or we wait and see, and so on, and we discover that either our hypothesis was correct or that it was incorrect. In no conceivable situation could we elaborate a hypothesis first and then go to experience to have it factually confirmed. Presumably in science the search for explanations involves a more profound or a more comprehensive quest for related factual propositions and the hypotheses rely on mathematical means to a greater extent than in everydayness, but the pattern "experience to hypothesis to experience" is invariable. Induction is universal.

Since experience is always "partial", i.e., no one can have total knowledge of any phenomenon, on the trip from hypothesis back to experience, science can find itself in error. How does science escape the danger of error from the partialness of experience? This is probably somewhat like the problem that Quine calls the underdetermination of theory. The only way to escape the circularity implicit in the partialness of experience, as every disciplined scientist knows, is merely to go back to experience and elaborate another hypothesis until in the course of justifying propositions from experience, the scientific effort comes up with a hypothesis such that, when applied once again to experience, it permits the elaboration of predictive propositions, e.g., a body with a certain mass at a certain speed will either fall towards another body with a certain mass or will drift away from it.

Induction is a form of inference. We know three types of inference: apodictic, necessary, and probabilistic. Since induction is the method whereby science develops hypotheses and hypotheses are probabilities, induction is of the type of probabilistic inferences. According to G.Harman and Peter Lipton induction is "inference to the best explanation." (See Lipton, Inference to the best explanation , The Higher , September 13 1991.) Assuming then other explanations, induction is the inferential process that leads to the most probable explanation. "Causal explanations, [Lipton] argues, typically answer contrastive questions: a different cause may be relevant to explaining why someone went to the cinema rather than going to the theatre than is relevant to explaining why he went to the cinema rather than staying at home." Admittedly, contrastive thought is pervasive, but is it inevitable? I would certainly not feel comfortable with one philosophical view on a certain problem. On the other hand, I do not need to contrast my belief in subconscious cognitive processes with other views in order to consider that I have made a necessary inference.

Does nature have only specific explanations or does it admit of different laws for the same event? The macro/micro distinction would seem to be in favour of the latter. But in fact the micro does not explain the macro and macro has no answers for micro-events. How they relate is a physics issue of its own, close to the speculative (the universal theory). The point is that they are not different theories for the same events. Consequently, nature admits of only one set of laws for each series of events and induction cannot be "inference to the best explanation", a definition that only applies to hypotheses. But it can never apply to actual scientific or descriptive laws. Scientific induction is inference to the only explanation, with the necessary proviso that valid explanations go through a probabilistic stage before they give rise to necessary inferences.

Aunque no se trata necesariamente de una norma deductiva, puesto que la lógica es inconcebible sin la experiencia, inducción es una forma de deducción, y a la inversa. De hecho, en el mundo, la lógica siempre es inductiva, siempre es razón. Por lo tanto, si el mundo es racional, si en el universo todo tiene sus razones, también se puede decir del mundo que siempre es lógico.

Inference

Inference is the fundamental logical operation. Inference is derivation from premises. An inference yields propositions. It does not transform propositions. Abstract inference is the logical form of inference. All logical forms are inferential. Logical forms are abstract expressions of inferences.

Inferences are of three types:
(1) apodictic, when the derivations or conclusions or deductions are inescapable, i.e., they cannot be otherwise than as they are, regardless of the material circumstances;
(2) necessary, when inferences yields necessary truths such as perception or scientific calculations, or when they are based on empirical premises and allow only one conclusion;
(3) probabilistic, when inferences are neither apodictic nor necessary, which means that they are not necessarily true, i.e., they can be true or false.

The logical form of inference applies to all types of inferences. The difference is in the premises. However, the logical form of inference is virtually the same thing as apodictic inference. It is because such inferences are, so to speak, preordained, that Wittgenstein held that logic is tautological. But to restrict logic to its logical forms is to deny it to the rest of reality, including experience, and there is reason to believe that everything is necessarily logical, e.g., that perception is logical and that even irrational behaviour is also logical.

Induction is as inferential and logical as any cognitive operation. However, induction does not necessarily yield valid propositions. Induction initially yields hypotheticals. If these hypotheticals then yield necessary inferences, we can say that induction is necessary inference. Therefore, induction covers both necessary and probabilistic inferences. Probabilistic inferences can also be called hypothetical.

Inferences are also about one, some, and all. Terms function under the umbrella of the quantifier "all". "All" is implicit in terms. But "all" is hardly ever a component of inference. It is possible to go from all to one in deduction and retain truth on the assumption of true premises. It is possible to go from any of these quantifiers to another provided certain conditions are met. It is even possible to go from one to all, if the syllogism is attached to a qualifier to the effect that one is a valid representative of all. But the syllogism or inference hardly ever comes singly. Reasoning involves concatenations of syllogisms (sorites), from the first of all which is that if inference worked once before it should be able to work repeatedly, to the final event in a chain involving main and subsidiary syllogism, ex ante and post hoc syllogisms, straight sequences of syllogisms, and so on.

Christopher Hookway on Peter Lipton, Inference To The Best Explanation  (Routlegde) The Higher, September 13 1991

"He follows a number of philosophers, notably Gilbert Harman, in arguing that inductive reasoning is `inference to the best explanation': we should accept hypothesis which provide the best explanations of the experiences that serve as `evidence' for them...Causal explanations, he argues, typically answer contrastive questions: a different cause may be relevant to explaining why someone went to the cinema rather than going to the theater than is relevant to explaining why he went to the cinema rather than staying at work." Nonsense: explaining, e.g. tides, does not always involve contrastive considerations.

"Inference, rule of. A rule for the construction of arguments which says what may be inferred from one or more statements whose logical structure is specified...The attempt to embody all rules of inference in axioms leads to an infinite regress, as was observed by Lewis Carroll in his `What the Tortoise said to Achilles'." (Flew)

Infinite

See Paradox

Infinite regress

See Circularity

Infinity

Infinity is a derivation from numbers. It does not exist and cannot be shown. Infinity could be a derivation of eternity, which is a religious concept. The axiom of infinity means that there is a set with an infinite number of members. It also entails that there are more sets than numbers. If every object is a class and there is a class of non-objects, then there are more classes than objects.

"In the 19th century, Cantor and Dedekind dispelled much confusion surrounding the infinite by noting that talk of an infinite property, substance, etc., can be reduced to talk of an infinite number, numbers themselves being regarded as certain classes. Thus Cantor's theory of the actual infinite was a theory of infinite classes." (Flew)

Intensionality

Mind is intensional, which can mean different things but which basically refers to the variability of meaning from the subjectivity of the use of language. Would mind be less intensional or not intensional at all without affects? It is to be doubted that the intensionality of mind is only a result of its affectivity--there is, e.g., the intellective strength of each person, the extent of knowledge, associative powers, and so on--but undoubtedly affects do play a part, do have some influence on the way we recall, reason, understand, communicate, and so on.

The analytical specifiction of the intensionality of mind is its propensity to error. This is demonstrated in the work of Frege, Russell, Quine and others, through logico-linguistic acts which yield erroneous inferences. These errors underlie the analytical and proto-analytical distrust of psychologism. They also serve to set the agenda of analyticity in the sense of placing knowledge and the recognition and correction of error at the top of its concerns. The intensionality of mind is therefore the maninstay of the analytical disqualification of mentalism. Intensionality defines mind. Intensionality produces error. Hence, mind is error-prone and unreliable. "Intensional" means connotative and connotative is ambiguous and subjective. Intensionality is related to the opacity of mind. Flew defines opacity and transparency in these terms: "Terms used in theories of reference...and modal logic, which are used to explain cases where the principle of the substitutivity of identicals apparently breaks down."

It may be best to start by defining intensionality ostensively or illustratively. The evening star is the morning star. Sir Walter Scott is the author of Waverly. Tully is Cicero. But poor old John might not know any of these equivalences and with this in mind it is possible to express a series of errors and paradoxes, such as that Tully did not denounce Catillina or that George the III knew and did not know Sir Walter Scott. These exercises are supposed to show either that (1) mind is opaque or (2) language is unreliable as a cognitive instrument. Another instance of intensionality is "Copernicus believed that the planetary orbits were round", which is both true and false. The transparent absurdity of these arguments makes them almost laughable. Searle took them so seriously that he went about refuting them. His argument is that intensional propositions are extensional to the extent that they refer to beliefs, i.e., other propositions. However, how can you make belief extensional in the sense of measurable and demonstrable? On the question of belief you go blind. It can be said though that whether someone does or does not believe in something any belief statement is necessarily true because if he is not lying it is true that he believes and if he is lying since belief is necessarily true it doesn't make any difference what he really believes.

Ultimately, intensionality refers to the paradox of awareness. Supposedly intensionality is the illusion of mind that accepts what it knows to be real knowledge. How can it be that what I know as well or as better than anything else can be not knowledge but error? Searle takes care of intensionality by explaining that so-called intensional propositions are those that refer to other propositions and as such are as susceptible to verification as extensional propositions. My own solution is that all mental propositions have bases and contents. The bases are necessarily true, i.e., no one can demonstrate that what I believe is false. The contents of propositions can be true or false. Russell's word games refer to propositional bases. They have no relevance at all to the knowledge of the world.

Extensional sentences or expressions involve truth-value. Intensional sentences or expressions involve probability or matters of opinion. Belief and opinion are different. You can believe a valid proposition, but all opinions are probabilities.

Flew posits an extensional proposition to the effect that "The author of Mysticism and Logic was a Cambridge don" and an intensional proposition to the effect that "Tycho Brahe believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe". But how about a proposition that expresses this thought: "The concept of justice is utilitarian" and one that says: "J.S.Mill believed that the concept of justice is utilitarian"? No amount of tinkering will confer a truth-value on the first proposition. Hence, it is not the form of the proposition that defines intensionality and extensionality, but its contents. Consequently, as Searle claimed, there is no reason not to suppose that the proposition about Tycho Brahe can be just as extensional as the proposition about whoever wrote Mysticism and Logic [was it Russell?].

Let us assume that mind is intensional because we cannot verify all our beliefs. Let us use again the proposition "The concept of justice is utilitarian". This is an interpretation. All propositions are ascribable. As an ascribable belief it can be expressed as "Someone believes that justice is utilitarian". This does not mean that all beliefs are necessarily interpretations. And it does not mean either that all propositions are necessarily beliefs. Thus it is possible to just say that "someone has the proposition that justice is utilitarian", in fact, myself and any one who reads the proposition. The having the proposition is in itself true. There is nothing intensional about my having such a proposition. And as to the contents of the proposition they are debatable, but not intensional if by intensional is meant a belief. You can of course have such a belief, but it would not be intensional. Whether as a belief or as just meaning no debateable or controversial proposition is intensional. Consequently, intensionality, except as connotation, does not exist.

Mind is not intensional. Propositions are not intensional or extensional. Propositions can be classified according to a typology. The extension/intension distinction is spurious.

Intention and action

The relation of intention to behaviour is like the relation of cause to effect, in which however the cause can be a background condition or just a possible cause. In sum, an intention need not become an act, but if it does, it is the cause of the act. Intention is mental. Behaviour is physical. But it is difficult to establish the limit between the intention and the act. Consequently, the physical "imbricates" on the mental. The mental partakes of the physicality of the act. The squiggles shade off into neurons and vice versa. To explain the intention I appeal to the squiggles but to translate the intention into action I must involve the neurons. But where do squiggles end and neurons begin and vice versa? Were neurons not active when I was appealing to squiggles and did squiggles not continue operating even as neurons produced physical action?

Now, let us suppose the intention is obstructed and there is a reaction which can be a thought or an act. My intention can become or not become an action. If the action is behaviour, why should the inaction not also be a form of behaviour? And if inaction can be behaviour, then why should thought be thought of as non-behaviour because it is not visible? In reaction even though no action has taken place, it is exactly as if it had. If the reaction is another intention, then in the process from intention to action, intentions can be indistinctly causes and effects, and if effects are actions, then the causes too are actions. The point is that the physicality of action does not disqualify intention as action because it is not physical or at least visible. We do not see intentions as we see actions, but we know that intentions are there as sure as we can see actions.

The thought/action dichotomy presupposes a separation between awareness and action. We are aware one moment of our intention and we act the next moment. But in fact there is never a separation between mental events, there is no discontinuity between the intention and the action. We have the intention and when we carry out the intention the mind knows what is going on. The mental processes are as present in intending as in acting. The action is qualitatively not different from the thought of the action. Since regret is about what might have been, when we regret we necessarily imagine thought as behaviou. Similarly, when we inhibit a thought about an action, we are in fact acting upon a possible action.

The mental state of intending to act or not act results in another mental state. Acting and not acting are equivalent. The difference lies in that we went from one mental state to another. Not acting produced a mental state. Not acting is a happening and the mental state it produced is also a happening. Since a happening is an act, a mental state is an act.

The claim that thought is a form of action or behaviour has implications for:
--the specification of awareness
--the bridging of mind/matter dualism
--the attitude of analytical philosophy to mind
--the cause/effect relation in the mind.

Everything in the mind is a caused cause. However, mental events are not necessarily causes of overt behaviour. This leaves a lot of dark matter to account for. It makes it difficult to argue for mental laws, even as hypothesis. But if we assume that every mental event is a cause, whether it is translated into action or not, then we at least have theoretical grounds for mental laws.

Internal language

See Squiggles and Language of thought

Interpretation

Probabilistic inference

Intersubjectivity

We cannot know what another mind contains except through what we are told. We know the contents of our own mind. By comparing what we are told, sometimes what we see, with what we know of our own mind, we can make reliable and probable propositions, e.g., he is experiencing pain. This is the essence of intersubjectivity. It does not involve any criteria of knowledge different from those we can infer from propositions not involving intersubjectivity. It does not involve anything different from perception, reason, and logic.

If we say that there is an equivalence between self and world, e.g., somewhat like the correspondence relation, we assume a realist position. If we say that S confers being on the world through perception, we run the risk of solipsism. But it is not necessary to choose between these extremes. We can presume that just as we perceive the world others too perceive the world. But we can actually do more than presume. We could not communicate if we did not have language and we know that the use of language implies many minds. It is from this awareness of other minds that we derive the concept of intersubjectivity. When we say that something emerges from the mind/world interaction, we actually mean a process that takes place entirely within the possibilities of the propositionallity of mind.

Introspection

No thesis about mind is possible at all without introspection. Wundt, considered one of the founders if not the founder of experimental psychology, made no bones about using introspection in his research into mind. Presumably, control lay in the comparison of data. Frege's antipsychologistic attitude is probably the source of the contemporary rejection of introspection as a philosophical method. Initially Husserl shared Frege's antipsychologistic stance, but in the end he could not philosophize without appealing to introspection. His dilemmatic situation led him to steer clear of traditional psychological categories and to concentrate on the mind's cognitive abilities for which he built an abstruse set of categories.

Whether these were expressions of real mental processes or merely verbal fireworks is a question on which opinions diverge, but he certainly seemed to believe that his thought was not debilitated by the actual use of introspection, a term he did not use preferring interpreted words, such as epoké , which meant the same thing without supposedly the taint of psychologism.

Husserl's method, known as phenomenology, ultimately rests on the principle of those-in-the-know. This is also the basis of Wundtian experimental psychology. It is assumed and sometimes overtly affirmed that some individuals, usually affiliated to schools or other groups, have a more disciplined access to mental data than the run of humanity. Heidegger relied on invented words to express his privileged understanding of existence. Most phenomenological philosophers simply assume that their readers will recognize and admit their exceptionality.

The those-in-the-know stance was expressed at length by Nicholas Everitt in a review of the centenary issue of Mind: A review of philosophy ( The Higher , October 11 1991): "Is there anything in this collection for the intelligent man (or woman) in the street? The answer to that is a definite `no'. I doubt whether all of the papers would really be accessible even to someone who has just completed a first degree in philosophy. But that is probably in the nature of progress in philosophy, or any other discipline. Large vague questions can be raised which the layman finds intelligible and interesting, such as `How is it possible for what is in our minds to represent the world around us? Might our ideas simply fail to match what the real world is like? How is it that what goes on in our minds can cause our bodies to move, and to move, moreover, in ways that are appropriate to the content of our beliefs, intentions, etc?' But by the time these questions have been made precise enough to be answerable, and a detailed and intellectually satisfying answer has emerged, the limits of understanding of non-professionals has long been passed."

There is much to be said for this view, but there is always the risk of philosophers donning the emperor's new clothes, especially since the claim that philosophy is a science is a demonstrable myth

Michael Dummett, The Origins of Analytical Philosophy
Page 75:

"In the case of perception, too, Husserl thought that we can, by an act of reflection, make the noema the object of our attention: but he held in this case that this is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, which only the philosopher can achieve, and that it is the fundamental task of philosophy to fasten its attention on noemata and attain a characterization of them."

Willy-nilly, in the end all philosophy of mind must rely on introspection. The vaunted reliability of folk-psychology underlies this claim. Descartes saw this and said so. The empiricists knew it also but they did not try as Descartes had to provide a method to introspect reliably. They merely assumed that they were better at it than the rest of mankind. This is also the way contemporary British philosophy of mind sees it, but it makes the superiority claim explicit. Kant proposed that introspection was a form of transcendental deduction. Husserl called it phenomenology, Dennett heterophenomenology. We incline to the empiricist point of view, but we also argue that, because of the temporality of all existents, "logically" introspection is as reliable as perception. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to ask: how can we discipline introspection? Basically, we try to keep loans to a minimum. We know that awareness is but an instant. "Squiggles" are a non-introspective deduction from introspection.

Since perception is always past perception, e.g., did I just see some one enter and leave this room?, although it can be claimed that my recent perception is very reliable, in a fundamental epistemic sense it is as reliable as factual propositions, e.g., Paris is the capital of France, for which we may have no other evidence than the perceptions of others. From this it follows that we can validate propositions other than our perceptions.

It can also be said that perception is probabilistic. But we can circumvent this characterization--and its threat to validity--from the existence of memory as a reliable source of knowledge. If we did not accept this argument, then we might as well forget about explaining cognition. Cognition necessarily implies memory. There is no knowledge without memory. Factuality entails the reliability of memory. If we assume that the direct, "intuitive" knowledge of thought, affects, and so on, is not reliable or is not really knowledge, i.e., is not valid in the sense in which perception is valid, then evidently we will not try to define meaning from what it is for something, anything, to mean something to us "intuitively" and directly.

Meaning is that we perceive rather than just register different, disparate sensations. Or it is to be able to know the difference between affects and logical thought, it doesn't matter that we may not be able to say in so many exact words what it is exactly that we feel or what it is that we are thinking. It is to be able to understand that perception can be expressed or understood as a proposition, i.e., that we can if we want to put what we perceive into words and affirm that such a proposition is valid.

To someone who accepts a version of meaning based on our direct grasp of reality, including language itself, then a theory of meaning will not be so much about language as about what underlies the grasp of reality, the use of language, and the processes of thought. The bottom-line on introspection is that if we can characterize thought as a form of behaviour--and arguments about--then introspection would be of behaviour in the same epistemological level as perception.

Intuition

In mathematics it means the gradual discovery of the field. It probably usually means just very quickly deductive. But this would make perception intuitionistic. More likely it refers to the ideas that cognition throws to the tip of cognition.

Intuitive logic

Si bien la lógica intuitiva es un fenómeno mental del cual emerge la lógica formal, esta última se independiza de la lógica intuitiva, y aunque es un fenómeno mental, lo es sólo en el sentido en que la razón es un fenómeno mental y lo es inclusive en el sentido de ser un fenómeno subjetivo y no sólo en el sentido de tener siempre un sujeto, sino también en el sentido de no ser un conocimiento estrictamente objetivo, desprovisto de las desviaciones y de las pequeñas imperfecciones que introduce el sujeto al conocimiento, de las que ni siquiera la ciencia y la tecnología más rigurosas están exentas.

La lógica intuitiva es la lógica que usamos a diario: la lógica que utilizamos sin necesidad de leer textos o seguir cursos de lógica. La razón es la aplicación de las formas deductivas de la lógica intuitiva a la realidad. La lógica formal es la que está en los textos y se aprende y se enseña en las aulas.

Podría acaso decirse que la lógica formal es un pardo reflejo de la lógica intuitiva? El ser humano, aunque la lleva adentro desde que nace, no puede asirla plenamente. En otras palabras, la razón en el mejor de los casos tiene la limitación de que no puede abarcarse a sí misma.

Puesto que nadie aprende lógica intuitiva, es de suponerse que élla nace con el ser humano y es por lo tanto un contenido de la mente. Y puesto que no hay ab origine ninguna lógica distinta a la lógica intuitiva, entonces la lógica formal tiene que ser un producto de la lógica intuitiva.

Formal logic is a form of knowledge. But by which criteria do we judge it? Only by the criteria of intuitive logic which is itself the source of formal logic. That we can speak of intuitive logic has the implication that logic is not exhausted by its historicity.