M
M

Mainstream of history

To use an analogy from the world of sport, the football world cup competition generally permits the largest and most experienced countries to get to the finals and decide the winner from amongst themselves. In this case, being "large" and "experienced" are analogues of being in the "mainstream" of our historical metaphor.

Is mainstream teleological? If history has meaning, it must be that it is going somewhere. I certainly reject the haphazardness and the fragility implicit in non-teleological "cosmologies", such as Gould's blinkered, hit-or-miss scientism (I rather incline for Gaia, and for Einstein). But where exactly it is going, I cannot say.

Mainstream likewise interprets the past, chooses from it, makes distinctions and analyses, but it does not "contrafactualize". it keeps to a minimum fundamental assumptions. it sticks to the starkest of abstract and formal concepts. it does not extrapolate from the present to the past (it claims that each stage or epoch or period must be approached with an open mind), and as to the future it merely underscores trends within a very wide framework of meaning in history. What I must try to do is to find with this tool (mainstream) certain rational principles such as will appeal to the largest possible set within the set of humanity. I cannot be absolutely sure that those principles will not be subjective to some extent, but I can have at least the reasonable certainty that they are less subjective than those interpretations of history that are based on ideological preconceptions.

What are some of the principles I derive from those tool-concepts? These principles must satisfy certain requirements. They must avoid extremist ideologies (from the principle of acceptability). They cannot be based on failed or partial movements of history (from the concept of mainstream). They must accord with the durability or persistence of historical manifestations (mainstream). Above all, they must not contain automatic sanction for what is (this contravenes the rational nature of our quest for meaning in history).

Materialism

Materialism is the doctrine that everything is either matter or can be reduced to matter. Since material processes are nomological, i.e., subject to laws, then materialism is not much different from naturalism. Both consider consciousness epiphenomenal.

Mathematics

Mathematics is about the world in various senses. It reflects the world: the dimensions of a thing are a representation of the thing as much as a proposition about the existence of the thing; it permits inferences about the world: gravity is not a visible force; it can make things be in the world: the knowledge of gravity makes possible the calculations for space flight.

Meaning

(A)
We can take one of three fundamental attitudes to meaning. Either we take meaning for granted and go on to behaviourism, physicalism, and so on, or we do not take it for granted and try to structure a theory of meaning. A possible third attitude, which is really a variant of the first, is to restrict meaning to the use of words. This is the one that Wittgenstein and Quine opted for.

(B)
Meaning is given in two senses: in the sense of awareness and in the sense of language. However, if we do not accept meaning as a given, we must have a theory of meaning. A theory of meaning has certain historical implications. It is usually a theme in analytical philosophy. As such it is eliminativist and language-based. In sum, a theory of meaning is the search in analytical philosophy for an answer to the question of how we can have meaning without cognitive processes. This entails such issues as: synonymy, translation, communication, linguistic behaviour, philosophy of language, philosophy of thought, etc.

(C)
Since awareness cannot know directly the squiggles which constitute meaning, but since undoubtedly knowledge, either as thought or perception involves squiggles, then meaning must be defined as the symbolic grasp of objects and of thought, or, assuming a difference between self and the contents of mind, as the symbolic grasp of reality. Since symbols can only arise in the mind, the symbolic grasp of reality is the mental grasp of reality: meaning is the mental grasp of reality. Since mind is part of reality, this would amount to saying that the mental grasp of reality is reality grasping itself.

Dummett claims that "truth and meaning can only be explained together, as part of a single theory". The concept of truth defeasible. Meaning is a precondition of knowledge, but it is not knowledge in any reliable sense. It is not possible to define knowledge solely in terms of meaning, although it would be necessary to have a theory of meaning in order to have a theory of the how of knowledge.

Since cognition does not necessarily distinguish between what is and what is not knowledge, meaning cannot be equivalent to knowledge. This is the same as saying that invalid propositions are meaningful. Rational processes can lead to error.

(D)
We need to posit an operative mental system of representation for any number of unobjectionable arguments. However, why should this system be a meaning-giver? This system makes thought possible. Now, thought is not brain. Thought is meaning. Perhaps brain makes meaning possible in thought. But this implies a set of describable steps, just as the liver can be defined in terms of describable functions. Therefore, since we already have an operative mental system of representations, why not assign to it the meaning-giving function of brain? What exactly does this mean (pardon the pleonasm)? It has generally been accepted that we think and that we have the world inside us as representation. But this is not something that we can gather from looking at the brain, which is matter. Over and beyond the brain, there is thought and perception, and what characterizes them is meaning. Since we have a brain-based operative mental system of representation, why create a different means for giving meaning?
Why not just assume that this system is the meaning-giver?

One of the meaningful acts of mind is perception. What we have from objects are stimuli. How can such physical magnitudes convert into recognizable images? There must be a set of instructions like the describable instructions of DNA that take the stimuli and combine them into perception. Since we have arguments for an operational system of mental representation, it is this system that must have the necessary instructions to convert these stimuli into perception, and it is in this specific sense that the system is also a meaning-giver.

We have an urban landscape with towering mountains in front of our eyes. Already something is giving meaning to the stimuli coming from everywhere in a Niagara of data. Now suppose we close our eyes. We do not have the stimuli we had before, yet we do have in the mind something like the picture we saw before, or at least, we can do a general reconstruction of the picture which is accurate in many crucial respects. Meaning then is not just in perceiving. The mind has the ability to retain the meaning of perception when the stimuli of perception are cut off. Meaning is still there. Therefore, meaning is something that mind does. Meaning is not something that the world provides.

(E)
Theories of meaning can be classified in a fairly neat manner. The most prevalent explanation of meaning throughout history has been that it is a product of mind in some form or another. This idea was disparaged in analytical philosophy as unreliable. One alternative was that use determined the meaning of words. Another alternative was that meaning derived from context, which is actually an extension of the previous alternative. Meaning is use and use is always contextual. Some philosophers proposed that meaning is intentional in the sense that expressions mean what we intend them to mean but since this is very solipsistic it needs to be complemented ~with the idea that meaning is what we manage to communicate. Semiotics claims that signs are meaning but this is a petitio principii because it assumes the tautology that meaning is defined by itself to the extent that signs are by definition meaningful. My opinion is that mind is the source of meaning. The question is: how is mind the source of meaning? Locke's answer was contradictory since he related mind and meaning yet he also postulated the doctrine of tabula rasa , which entails a denial that meaning can be derived from mind. If mind is originally empty how can it later be the source of meaning? This is the argument that Fodor used against Piaget: you cannot build a strong system of logic on a weaker one.

(F)
The bottom-line on meaning can be found in the following propositions. Awareness is meaning. But awareness is the tip of cognition. Cognition is subconscious and can be described in terms of basic-cog's. Basic-cog's are represented in squiggles, which are the source of meaning. Therefore, the subconscious is "suffused" by meaning. Dreams are a clear demonstration of this fact. Since awareness is a phenomenon of life since its inception, then ultimately life itself is what meaning is about.

(G)
Robert Cummins, Meaning and mental representation (1989)

"..."[C]ontent can function in philosophical investigation as a kind of generic term for whatever it is that underwrites semantic or intentional properties generally."

Meaning and existence

(A) He is chasing a red herring.
(B) He is on a wild goose chase.

Since both sentences mean exactly the same thing, a red herring is a wild goose. But since there is no such a thing as a red herring, there is no such thing as a wild goose
Alternatively, since there is such a thing as a wild goose, then obviously there also must exist such a thing as a red herring. There is such a thing as wild goose and therefore (B) is true. But there is no such a thing as a red herring, therefore (A) is false. The two sentences cannot mean the same thing. There is no way that you can get out of this from the assumption that language must exhibit logical relations.

A simple way out is the following ; the unit of meaning is the proposition; the two propositions (A) and (B) mean the same thing, but "red herring" and "wild goose" out of context have different meanings and fulfill different functions; "red herring" means and "wild goose" exists; concepts therefore are also constituted with the "meaning predicate".

Meaning of history

History can have meaning in different senses. The most basic one is that history can be read like a novel. The most controversial sense is that history follows cycles or laws or what have you. And the more reasonable position is that the study of history and of historiography can yield some degree of anticipation. Finally, the meaning of history is implicit in the willingness of human beings to go trying to make sense of existence, for this means that they subconsciously cannot accept that their work is perishable.

Meaning and things

If we take meaning seriously, i.e., as a property of mind, we can build two columns: on one side a column with a limited number of names and on the other side an endless column built with things except those designated in the first column. The names in the first column are more or less completely these: mind, thought, intentionality, awareness, consciousness, propositional attitudes, tip of cognition, knowledge, knowing, representation, perception, concept, idea, aboutness, notion, argument, etc. In which column does language go? And symbol?

Meaning holism

An illustration of the contextuality of meaning is the expression "I know where I am going". It can mean three things: (1) I am travelling in a corridor; (2) I am heading towards that door: (3) I am going to see the person whose office lies beyond that door. It is obvious that unless I explain what I mean no one will know the meaning of the expression. Where is the context here? Evidently in my intention: the meaning of the expression will only be known either through my expressing my intention or through someone following me the rest of the day until I fall asleep, and, in this case, even then no one can really know what I meant. So it is not the verbal context that gives my expression its meaning but in fact the absence of a context, i.e., my intention. But in any event the expression has meaning: three interpretations of its possible meaning, all of which are in the category of meaningful interpretations.

Another definition of meaning holism is that all propositions function in a network of beliefs from which they obtain their meaning. But belief arises in the wider context of language, which supersedes all particular networks of beliefs. It is simply not possible to have a particular network of beliefs independent of the wider linguistic context in which all networks of belief function. All individual networks of beliefs must conform to the wider linguistic context from which they derive meaning.

Another interpretation of meaning holism refers to "belief fixation". Specific belief fixation is not a process independent of all other beliefs. The argument used to sustain this interpretation often refers to the acquisition of the meaning of words, which is not thought of as a rational process, but as a holistic process. Since language-use implies belief, belief fixation is not a rational but a holistic process. However, beliefs must be rationally connected to other beliefs. A system of beliefs must of necessity be rational. Consequently, belief fixation can be, and ideally should be, a rational process.

Meaning holism is the problem of ambiguity. But to posit the ambiguity of meaning implies a knowledge of precise meaning--as when we make a valid distinction between narrowly separated sensations such as white and yellow--and ambiguity can be considered a common aberration rather than the norm of language. To define language as being ambiguous implies knowing what precision is. Precision then can be conceived, but conceiving cannot be divorced from expression. Therefore, language must be precise at least about precision. And ambiguity must be an aberration. This is demonstrable from white and yellow. The margin between them is so narrow as to exclude ambiguity.

Meaning holism is the ultimate justification of deconstruction, structuralism, philosophy of language, and so on. There is no reason to suppose that those who practice deconstruction or who pretend to discover the "real meaning" behind other meanings are in closer commerce or contact with knowledge than the authors of the propositions they deconstruct or interpret or reinterpret. Meaning holism is a very circular proposition because it assumes that it is exempt from the very vice that it pretends to discover in all propositions. It can only lead to radical scepticism.

There is a sensible definition of meaning holism and it is that the unit of meaning is the proposition rather than individual words. This doesn't mean that words do not mean something. They do, but their meanings are arbitrary associations of sound and reference. Sentences instead have a meaning which is rational beyond the arbitrary meaning of words. Meaning holism of this sort underlies the definition of concept as a mental formula composed of symbols referring to a word joined to a form of the existential predicate, i.e., the verb "to be".

That meaning in general is holistic can be demonstrated from the fact that we can read without following the sequences of letters in words. We read entire words rather than spellings of words. If we spelled words as we read, misprints and mispellings and other errata would not be as common as they are.

Memory

Memory is the cognitive process that with logic underpins all other cognitive processes. It is constituted by the functions of storage and recall. It sustains perception and it makes possible instant-to-instant continuities. In fact, it can be argued that, physiology aside, it is possible to give a sufficient account of perception invoking memory and logic alone, i.e., without reference to specific rules of perception. Memory is a necessary result of the temporality of being. This means that memory responds to the inevitable effects of time on animate beings. Memory is one and entire in the sense that the distinction between short-term and long-term memory is spurious. Memory functions continually. If it ceased functioning, the individual would be as if dead for all intents and purposes: he would fall down, he would not be able to utter a sound, he probably might not even be able to move, and so on. In functioning, memory is constantly recurring to intuitive logic and this means it is always using logical axioms and principles and derivations in storage. Since logic is an innate capability, its use can hardly be described as short-term although it can be affected by short-termism in the sense that a part of intuitive logic could be temporarilty concealed because of the requirements of an immediate task. Every act of recognition is both logical and long-term, so much so that if perception is recognition then, as we said, perception is memory and logic. It is of course true that it is easier to recall what happened one minute ago than what happened yesterday and most likely what happened yesterday than what happened one year ago on the same date, but this is not sufficient grounds for the short-term/long-term distinction in memory, if only because it is possible to remember with more precision something that happened a decade ago than most of what happened during the entire last year. And most significantly, the interactiveness of cognitive processes means that there is no conceivable way that the memory of an instant ago can have not been affected by all that happened in all the previous years of one life. In sum, short-term/long-term is a superficial ungrounded distinction that presupposes that cognition is subject-less and that its processes are encapsulated.

I remember seeing a house on a cliff over the ocean. I am not sure whether this house was in San Francisco or in Cape Town. If in Cape Town, I must have seen it in a photograph. If in SF, perhaps I actually saw it. But I did see the house.Or did I? The same perspective can apply even to something that happened one hour ago, even to me. Was I sleeping then?

What is memory? What does memory do? How does memory do what it does? Memory is a pervasive, non-specific function of mind. It is instrumental in the workings of logic and perception. Memory is so totally interactive with other functions and properties of mind that it is difficult to separate it from them. If, e.g., perception cannot function without memory, how can we say which aspect of perception is specifically memory? And if we cannot isolate memory in perception, how can we distinguish between the two? Memory is not exactly perception and certainly not logic, but neither logic nor perception could function without memory. It is this being indispensable for all mental processes that makes memory totally interactive with them. And just as it is interactive, so memory is unitary in the sense of not being reducible to categories within itself or different from the basic concept of memory.

It has become habitual to distinguish between, at least, short-term and long-term memory. Three definitions fit long-term memory: (1) the recall of "remote" impressions; (2) frequent recall of one impression; (3) constant operativeness. Short-term memory must be sustaining memory, i.e., the memory that assures the continuity of perception. However, is it really possible to distinguish between the function of sustaining and the function of long-term recall? Memory is logical. We do not when we recall confuse a and b. We keep them separate. Logic, however, is long-term. In the case of logic, short-term and long-term memories are inextricable.

The definition of long-term memory is per se problematical. How can one tell before the fact when an impression will become a long-term memory? Long-term implies survival and survival means crucial to life. Yet some long-term memory is trivial. Underlying some trivialities that we scare up from the long past is the specific self which is the result of a life-long process of self-specification. But this means that the short-term and the long-term are interactive.

If short-term is sustaining as in perception, then short-term becomes inextricably entangled with long-term in instances of long-term recognition. In other words, short-term memory sustains the perception of a face which we recognize as having seen many years ago.

What exactly does memory do? In the case of logic memory "contains" all the principles of reason or intuitive logic. The principles of reason are not identical to the rules of memory. And logic is not functionally coextensive with memory. Memory supports logic and logic depends on memory. Memory therefore is the necessary basis without which intuitive logic could not function. In the case of perception, memory makes possible the application to sensations of the rules of perception. It stores the composite tokens of perception and it provides the basis on which perception derives the types which make recognition possible. As in the case of logic, perception has a specific function, which is recognition. Memory makes possible the specific function of perception.

Since memory is always there supporting our mental faculties, it could easily pass for the subconscious, where all cognitive processes occur. However, the subconscious itself is the functional space not only for memory but for all mental functions that are not identical to memory. Memory and the subconscious are different and have different rules. Since memory supports logic and perception, which have their own rules and principles, then conceivably the rules of the subconscious are what permit and organize the interaction between cognitive processes crucially supported by memory.

How does memory do what it does? Memory resides in the brain and the nervous system, its physiology and its biochemistry. The physical events associated with mind and its functions are ultimately what constitute memory. These events in themselves are meaningless unless we relate them to the recall of mental events, i.e., to consciousness. Once we establish these relations, we can actually say that memory does what it does because the brain is in such-and-such a condition or reacts in such-and-such a way. What we can say even before relating mental events and brain events is that, just as memory is pervasive and non-specific, so the events in the brain and the nervous system are never isolated from all other events not only in the brain and nervous system but also in the rest of human physiology. To understand memory we must, therefore, examine not just one but all areas of the brain. Since perception and logic are totally and absolutely dependent on memory, the above entails that perception and logic too can only be approached explanatorily as functions of the totality of the brain, its long stem, and all the other parts of the nervous system.

If these speculations are anywhere close to being right, then the future of artifificial intelligence must lie in devising a machine in which the distinctions between CPU, RAM, ROM, and so on are totally obliterated.

Are there rules of memory? It is to be presumed that since memory is not identical to logic or perception it must have its own rules. The rules of memory must be such that they cannot modify the principles of logic and perception. But since memory is the support for all mental processes, then the rules of memory must have to do with the way that it supports and makes possible perception and reason. Given that it is the specific self that reasons and perceives, the rules of memory must be intimately related to the specific self. It could be, then, that memory is ultimately what keeps the self together and that its rules are those that determine how our specific selves are structured. This is however quite a mouthful!

Mental tokens and mental types

A thought is a mental particular different from perception. A thought about perception is different from perception or a perceiving. Specific thoughts are mental particulars, but are thoughts as such a type? According to Fodor mental types are causes or non-causes and that is all there is in mind. Thoughts can be either which means that either thoughts are not or Fodor is wrong. I think it is safer to think that Fodor is wrong.

Can we speak of types of mental propositions? Propositions are inferences. Inferences can be apodictic, necessary, or probabilistic. If mental contents are propositions, then the types of mental contents must correspond to the types of inferences. Our thoughts are either apodictic, necessary, or probabilistic. Since only logico-mathematical derivations are apodictic and perception is only occasionally probabilistic, then perceptions are generally necessary inferences.

Mental tokens are mental particulars or dated particulars. Every mental token is both a specific proposition and a type of inference. Hence, we can make necessary inferences about specific situations. Mental tokens are also simply mental events. This must include the propositions of perception. Mental contents are the totality of mental events.

Mentalese

See Squiggles and Language of thought

Mentalism

Frege never shed mentalism.Propositional attitudes are mental. The linguistic turn cannot ignore mentalist terms. Quine could not do logic without intuitive logic. Perception is impossible without memoryEach instant of perception entails the memory of the previous instant, which is like making mind inevitable. If we recall a previous instant of perceiving we are doing "introspective" awareness of the past, for where else than to mind and through the awareness of memory could we look to recall anything?

See also Representationalism

Metalanguage

See Canonical notation

Metamathematics

The Fregean program of deriving math rules from logic led to the philosophy of mathematics, also known as metamathematics. In a very precise sense, metamathematics is about proof, that is, the specific question of what constitutes proof in math. In math as in any formal system operations on propositions lead to other propositions. If this is done according to rules, the derived propositions are valid, but this procedure is not in itself a proof. The proof would have to lie in showing that the procedure was logical. Since metamathematics is about the logic in numbers, then necessarily metamathematics is about proof theory.

Since metamathematics implies the reduction of one system into another, it places a premium on the concept of formal systems: different means towards the same end, which is deduction or inference. An alternate route from metamathematics to proof theory is that metamathematics is about formal systems and formal systems necessarily are about proof theory.

Now, this assumes that formal logic is the ultimate arbiter, but what justifies formal logic itself? It has to be intuitive logic. Hence, from the whole metamathematical program it would seem to be justified that proof is what a competent mathematician accepts as valid argumentation. These argumentations are part of a metamathematical current.

Like metalanguages, and all "metas", metamathematics is theory about its referent. Similarly, since a natural language can be used to analyze itself, and thus function as a metalanguage, mathematics itself can function as metamathematics. Be that as it may, there have been at least these basic attitudes towards mathematics: realism or Platonism, formalism, and constructivism. The realists or Platonists are those who believe that mathematics is out there cohesive and complete and that the task of formal mathematics is to try to encompass all possible mathematical forms and relations.

Three basic philosophical positions on math are: platonism, intuitionism, and math as tautology (H.Field).

Formalism, according to Flew, is the "view pioneered by D. Hilbert (1862-1943) and his followers, in which it was claimed that the only foundation necessary for mathematics is its formalization and the proof that the system produced is consistent. Numbers (and formulae and proofs) were regarded merely as sequences of strokes. Hilbert's programme was to put mathematics on a sound footing by reducing it (via arithmetic) to consistent axioms and derivation rules, the former being certain series of strokes, the latter ways of manipulating them. Later Gödel showed that the consistency of arithmetic cannot be proved within the system itself, thus demonstrating the impossibility of achieving part of the Hilbert programme".

Constructivism or intuitionism corresponds approximately to what later became known as anti-realism. In this view mathematics is what can be proven. It is what is justified about mathematics and not what there is to be discovered in the universe.

Logicism is the view held by Frege and Russell that math could be derived from logic. Conventionalism is the rather odd view that "true mathematical statements are true merely by convention or fiat" (Flew). Conventionalism is actually the basis of analyticity, i.e., the belief that there actually exist analytical propositions as distinct from synthetic or empirical propositions.

"Intuitionism. A system propounded by L.E.J.Brouwer, identifying truth with being known to be true, that is, proven. The main theses of intuitionism are: that a mathematical entity exists only if a constructive existence proof can be given; and that a (mathematical) statement is true only if there is a proof of it, and false only if a proof of its denial can be given. Brouwer's idealistic inclinations led him to describe mathematics as investigation of the (ideal) mathematician's `mental constructions'. The view is notable for its rejection of classical (or realist) logic, in particular the law of double negation, the law of excluded middle, and classical reductio." (Flew)

Metaphor

A metaphor is an analogy. Some believe that metaphors can be used to make valid deductions. Some argue that metaphors are only good as metaphors, i.e., stand-ins, that help to clarify or illustrate deductions. Metaphors are quite common in philosophy. They try to make concrete and comprehensible what is difficult to explain. Some philosophers actually believe that their metaphors are real.

No art is realistic, although some art is a deliberate striving to portray things as the artist perceives them. All art is metaphorical. This raises the question that life is not metaphorical, yet there is an undeniable interaction between art and life. One possible answer is that metaphors make simple and strong the facts of life. Metaphors simplify just as in painting perception is broken down into line, colour, volume, and so on. Metaphors break down complexities to get to basics and then are used to build up to complexity again. But in art it is not just having a metaphor but how the metaphor is used. Films usually have one overarching metaphor embracing many specific metaphors. Their meaning is often in the relations between the different levels of meaning.

Beyond a means to "cultivate intimacy" or "to communicate something which is different from, although related to, what the words literally mean" (v. Times Literary Supplement , March 13 1987, p.277), a metaphor is an expression of a holistic, i.e. non-reductive, proposition. "Philosophical" metaphors are rational and explanatory in the sense that they can achieve a reduction of complexity without falsifying reality. A metaphor then is a means for intellectual elaboration from a concrete basis in expression. For example, from Otto von Neurath's proposition that "we can only rebuild our intellectual ship while floating upon it at sea", we can deduce that (1) we have only our limited intellectual means in order to develop and express our beliefs, (2) we have no absolute external warranty for the justification of our beliefs, (3) it is only through the "historical testing" of our beliefs that they are validated, and so on. Of course, this metaphor does not allow us to determine unequivocally what sort of tests we can apply to our beliefs, but it leaves no room for illusions about absolute certainties, for no matter how solidly built or rebuilt a ship can always be lost in a stormy sea.

Whatever one writes or says always means something else beyond its "consensual" literalness. This tendency is elevated to method in art and as such it is called metaphor. An allegory is a plot built on serial, related metaphors. In fact, all literature is a series of metaphors. The only thing that is not strictly speaking metaphorical is the instant of perception and even here, since perception is not encapsulated, there is room for debate.

A good example of a metaphor is the Chinese room argument against extreme claims for artificial intelligence. In this gedanken a non-Chinese speaker in a room shifts characters to English expressions. He is translating but he does not know what he is doing. Likewise, Searle argues, in a computer. The analogy points to the reality of awareness: it is a knowing that a machine cannot ever have. The Chinese room is an imagined physical set up. It is a bridge between the denial of the claims of artificial intelligence and the justification of this denial. It is a justification which cannot be easily verbalized.

Alastair Fowler on Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages (N.Y.: Cornell University Press), in TLS, August 31-September 6, 1990, p. 920

"Angus Fletcher's conclusion that `the experience of the labyrinth is that of thought experiencing itself'."

"She tries to arrive at ultimate dualities, opposites, or contradictions."

How about my use of "mainstream"? It is difficult to put into a proposition that is easy evoked the concept of the "movement" of universal history, hence the use of mainstream, which has certain analogies with history. But here again a physical thing stands for a difficult abstract concept. Sally McFugue (whoever she is) argues as follows: it is difficult to get from S to X, but if it is possible to find an equivalence between X and Y, we can use Y to get to X. Again what we have here is a bridging function in which Y is the metaphor. This is happening on an abstract plane. Y can be anything as long as the bridge between S and X is established. Hence, we can say that an abstract idea which we can express can serve to express an abstract idea which is difficult to express.

In sum, a metaphor fills a void between a concept and its justification. It is a means of justification. It supplies the means to explain where explanations are difficult if not impossible, as in the use of correspondence to explain truth, vox historiæ to explain valid belief, and mainstream to explain history. These metaphors fill the hiatus between belief and its justification, between, say, historicist semantics and its explanation.

How does metaphor stand in relation to the propositionality of mind? I can only compare it to contrastive thought. But this does not clarify much. We must return to this issue after the complete examination of the types of propositions.

List of philosophical metaphors

Socrates: majeutic
Plato: eidolon, cave
Boethius: the whole of time
Aristotle: golden mean
Augustine: city of God
Descartes: res cogitans
Hobbes: social contract, Leviathan
Locke: tabula rasa
Hume: bundles
Leibniz: monads
Kant: noumenon
Hegel: universal spirit
Frege/Dummett: extrusion of thought
Nietzsche: overman, Zarathustra
Russell: logical atomism
Analyticity: language
Vienna Circle: protocol sentences
Ryle: dispositions
Nagel: water
Physicalism: identity
Quine: Yatagai
Functionalism: computer
Fodor: modules, mentalese
Searle: Chinese room
Dennett: homunculi, Martians, multiple drafts
senile woman
twin Earth
Frege/Russell/Quine: intensional word games
Dennett: inverted qualia
Wittgenstein: state of affairs
CRF: squiggles, vox historiae

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the quintessence of philosophy. Analytical philosophers abhor metaphysics, but in claiming that knowledge is sensory they are assuming a metaphysical position. Metaphysics is about the most general and abstract questions, which means that we can have no confirmation for its claims from the specificity of our experiences. This is not to say that metaphysics is aprioristic. Nothing is aprioristic. Basic-cog's are innate, but they cannot exist in a vacuum. It is in experience that they become manifest. Among basic-cog's, logic is the handmaiden of metaphysics.

Ultimately, metaphysics is about the specification of reality. It is not explanatory in the sense of physics or chemistry. The central issue in the specification of reality is whether it is monistic or dualistic. As a very broad rule, idealism is a dualistic metaphysical attitude and realism tends to be a monistic metaphysical attitude. But realism has not been able to find a solution to the problems that idealism raises, including the problem of the mind/matter relation.

Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that deals with the question of being. Since being encompasses everything it can hardly be said to be a specific question. Ontology then is in the same level of abstraction as the rest of metaphysics and it also relies on logic rather than experience for its deductions. Monism and dualism as well as realism and idealism involve corresponding attitudes about being. Idealism gives greater weight to the representation of being than to being itself, but in doing so it does not affirm a denial of being--there can be no such thing--but transfers the full weight of ontology to the representation of being. The contrary is true of realism, in which being is principally an attribute of the world and the representation of being an offshoot of material reality. This does not mean that realism is necessarily incompatible with dualism. It is a matter of emphasis and the emphasis of realism tends to be on materialistic monism. In sum, even though ontology can stand on its own, i.e., it can skip its metaphysical grounding as in Lucretius, ontological thought usually follows upon metaphysical arguments.

Epistemology as the study of the means towards knowledge, such as logic, is not of metaphysics as such, but if epistemology is made biconditional to a fundamental description of reality, then it too partakes of metaphysical thought. Analyticity, which is quintessentially epistemological, claims to eschew metaphysics. But when philosophical thought claims that knowledge originates only in sensory evidence or in formal logic, then it too, not excluding analyticity, is metaphysical, whatever its pretensions to scientific reliability and truth. Similar considerations apply to ethics. From this perspective, Marxism, despite, or more credibly, because of its commitment to materialism, is an eminently metaphysical system.

"A central element in Western philosophy from the Greeks onwards, `metaphysics' has meant many different things. It can be an attempt to characterize existence or reality as a whole, instead of, as in the various natural sciences, particular parts or aspects thereof. Materialism and idealism, Spinoza's monism, and Leibniz's monadology, are examples of metaphysics in this sense. It can also be an attempt to explore the realm of the suprasensible, beyond the world of experience; to establish indubitable first principles as foundation for all other knowledge; to examine critically what more limited studies simply take for granted; or to compile an inventory of what sorts of things ultimately, or in the last analysis, there are...[I]n our natural sciences (and even in our most practical relationships with the world) we use an extensive apparatus of concepts, principles, etc., that it is no part of the function of science to examine or establish. And, from Kant onwards, many philosophers have held that the proper outlet of the metaphysical impulse lies in the systematic study, not of reality, but of the fundamental structure of our thought about reality. Kant tried to show that there was a fixed conceptual framework that every rational mind as such must adopt. Later thinkers held that the framework might vary from one time or culture to another. Thus R.G.Collingwood in his Essay on Metaphysics (1940) saw metaphysics as the explication of the `absolute pre-suppositions' underlying the characteristic thought of this or that period of history. And P.F.Strawson, in his Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959), distinguishes between descriptive metaphysics, which `is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world', and revisionary metaphysics, which `is concerned to produce a better structure'." (Flew)

Metaphysics and physics

It is conceivable that physics and astrophysics involve metaphysical thinking. The following are some astrophysical questions that seem to partake of metaphysics: the original nucleus of the universe before the big bang; the shape/form/configuration of the universe; the way matter in the universe is clustered; why the universe holds together (dark matter); why the universe does not collapse unto itself (infinite expansion thesis); why none of these theories is probably true; the possibility of intelligent life outside the Earth. Since in many if not all of these cases the answers depend on fundamental choices, e.g., does the universe have a beginning and an end?, this is a version of metaphysics.

By way of contrast: the influence of gravity on light is not really metaphysical: it is a strictly mathematical issue from the assumption that light and gravity are forms of energy. It can be argued that dark matter et al are also products of calculation. However, one thing is for something to be imagined or hypothesized as subject to calculation, e.g., the gravitational deflection of light, and another to be a deduction from calculations, e.g., the mass of visible matter and dark matter, so that even in these apparently purely scientific issues metaphysical or fundamentally principled thought is very likely involved. The concept of light and gravity as forms of energy were, originally metaphysical concepts, they were deductions from calculations or they were "intuitive" concepts that permitted certain calculations.

"Metas"

All thought about thought is philosophical: metahistory, metamathematics, metalinguistics, metalanguage. Metalanguage more properly refers to an instrument of thought about thought. Metaphysics of course is another matter: it was the place occupied by a treatise by Aristotle after his treatise on physics. Metaphysics is about basic first principles--e.g., monism or dualism--and it answers the questions that ontology asks. It is explicitly or implicitly systemic.

J.S. Mill

Alan Ryan on John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill, London 1990, in TLS, April 13-19 1990, p.399

"Mill's naturalism allows political philosophy to be a respectable part of philosophy, to be taken seriously as such; Russell's repudiation of the very idea of political philosophy left him little to fall back on save his feelings--and they were notoriously changeable. Mill may be excessively judicious; Russell is sentimental."

"As Skorupski says, `Mill's position is Kant's without the transcendentalism', and the crucial issue is whether such a position exists. Mill identifies freedom with rational autonomy, with a capacity to recognize and respond to good reason, and yet he thinks that it must be possible to give a naturalistic account of our capacity to do so. Kant, of course, placed the realm of reason-giving and reason-accepting outside the realm of cause and effect and credited us with a noumenal self able to enter into that realm."

Mind

How do we know mind? We know we are aware. We can give a simple account of awareness involving perception, mental events except perception, and the implicit ability to distinguish between the two. We can makes deductions about mind from language as the expression of representation and from language in itself. From language as the expression of representation we can accept what it says about mental events as types, e.g., memory, logic, perception, etc. If there is consensus about perception, there is at least what appears to be a consensus about types of mental events. We can make deductions from the existence of language itself. We can also make deductions about cognition from the temporality of mind. There is much more evidence on mind. The only propositions about mind that we must be distrustful about are those that refer to mental tokens or to the specifics of propositional contents. Propositional bases are in fact types. In my work I make very little use of tokens or specifics.

Is mind relational? Brentano proposed that the mental act consists of a subject in relation to an object. This thesis was accepted by Husserl and Russell. In Russell the relation is between propositional attitudes and propositions. Fodor today subscribes to a dyadic relational view of mind. This is the general tenor of the thesis that the mind is relational.

The mental dyadic relation entails an ego, who is the carrier or the possessor of propositional attitudes. Propositions are products of cognitive processes. But what about this ego and its propositional attitudes? What is it? Can it really be distinguished from the objects of its attitudes?

If we accept the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals all human beings are specific. No nervous system is like another. It stands to reason therefore that all propositions that humans hold are specific to each human being. The specificity of propositions is the basis of selfhood. There is no need to posit an ego or a self beyond the specific propositions that individuals have. The self therefore is the sum of its specific propositions and there is no need or justification for a distinction between propositional attitudes and their objects. Since all propositions are specific to each individual human being the self suffuses every specific proposition. This does not necessarily mean that we believe every proposition that we have. But it makes the relational character of mind and the question of propositional ascription superfluous.

Mind can be defined extensionally as the totality of mental states. It can be identified referentially with brain. It can be defined directly or associatively as awareness. Awareness is the presence of the world and thought to mind. Even though it is as legitimate as the identification of mind and brain, awareness is not as extensional because mind includes both awareness and non-awareness.

Mind must be something. Let us assume that the something that mind is is propositions. There are propositions in general and linguistic propositions. It is only with linguistic propositions that we can actually grasp the propositions that constitute mind. Therefore, ultimately the something that mind is are linguistic propositions about mind.

Mind/matter

There are situations in which the mind/body interaction "glares". The indissolubility of the mental and the physical is in nothing more evident than in basic-cog's. If basic-cog's are innate, as we claim and as we have arguments for claiming, then their innateness implies matter, because the newborn who applies basic-cog's must have them in the brain, which is palpably the only thing he inherits of a mental nature

The continuity of thought is predicated on memory. Since we do not have all our thoughts in awareness, then self-evidently the matter of our thoughts, and in particular the basic-cog's, have to be in memory, and what is memory if not brain-matter? Otherwise we must posit that basic-cog's and all past thought go into some ethereal region outside of ourselves.

Pain is physical. Our awareness of physical pain is propositional but this awareness is not the pain itself. Affects can only exist propositionally. However, affects can have physical symptoms. Anxiety is an effect that seems to straddle the mental and the physical. It is propositional in origin, i.e., it is strong affect, but it has very clear physical symptoms.

If mind is a purely physical phenomenon, then the absence of awareness cannot mean that mind ceases to operate. If we were in pain, then we must have unconscious pain, which is absurd. Mind then appears to be physical and to have attributes, such as awareness, which are not physical. If mind can be specified as its attributes, then mind is not a fully physical phenomenon, which is also absurd. Identity issues are purely verbal. Experimental psychology and brain science are legitimate and useful. But the identification of philosophy with brain science is neither legitimate nor useful.

There are physical and there are mental causes. They act or function in parallel, although occasionally we can make connections between the two sets, as when we believe that emotions take place in certain areas of the brain.

We can surmise that awareness "means" a specific activation in the brain and the production of a further specific activation. We know that our choice to be aware of something has a cause, but it is not a cause that we can explain physically. And the activation in the brain is only likely to cause a further specific activation, yet we know that because of the specific mixture of the mental contents we can only expect one specific result. Couldn't we argue that the mental mixture has one and only one corresponding physical "cocktail"? Yes, but with one important proviso (and there surely are many more). It is not to be expected that the mental mixture is analyzable because, among other things, it includes the chanciness of perception, where as the physical can be subjected to precise formulation. So then what we have is a strong contrast, at least, between the mental and the physical.

Is it then one substance with different attributes? One substance with different structures? One substance with different laws? Or is it two substances? Many substances? Science does not need to choose between these propositions in order to advance. And whether it is one or the other, will have little or no bearing on the definition of basic concepts such as consciousness and knowledge. Even if I were inclined to believe in one substance, as for the sake of simplicity I surely would be, it will make not a whit of difference to my belief in consciousness or knowledge. Since there is no unifying principle, and not likely to be one, and since knowledge advances in an irregular and unpredictable manner, then I am rationally inclined towards many substances. But my innermost conviction is that we eliminate talk of substances and of attributes and properties, except on an ad hoc or ad libitum basis. It is possible to do so if we maintain consistency in our definitions and if we can muster valid arguments against other contentions. What we would be doing by eliminating talk of substance and attributes is doing away with arguments such as the ontological proof and the Kantian refutation of it.

"Sensation...is an effect of body on mind." And if I choose to turn my head and look at the mountain instead of at the keyboard? Is that not an effect of mind on sensation? Am I not "choosing" the sensation? The statement is meaningless.

Modality

We have three versions of modality. One strand tries to circumscribe an area within formal logic: the area of subjunctives. But can this really be done? I doubt it.

The other strand emerges from quantum physics as the possibility of other universes, or what David Lewis calls "plurality of worlds". Briefly put, the macro-physical laws of gravity do not apply to the micro-world of the particles which constitute matter. In the macro-world objects can be located in space and time and, given the necessary information, their trajectories can be traced. But in the quantum world the position of particles can only be specified by a wave function, which indicates not one unique position but the different positions that a particle can occupy in a specified time. From this peculiarity of particle physics, the physicist Hugh Everett in 1957 reasoned that "the wave function should be taken literally. According to him it was not a mere set of possible states, of which a quantum particle would end up in just one, but a set of actual states that the particle was in simultaneously." ( The Economist , November 2 1996)

Finally, modality constitutes a logical grounds for counterfactual reasoning. We base this argument on reviews of Geoffrey Hawthorn's Plausible Worlds: Possibility and understanding in history and the social sciences (1991). In logic the past must be identical to the past whatever we may or may not know for sure about it. Could the past have led to a different past than the one we know and research? Only if we assume that we can toy with the ontological chain, for if we could do so anything could have happened and anything can happen and there is no possibility of a rational understanding of history.

Rationality is causality and if causality founders then rationality vanishes. If the ontological chain is vulnerable, gedanken are more than mere logical possibilities and counterfactuals are perfectly justified in reasoning. We can say, e.g., that given such an antecedent, the consequence need not have been what it actually was. Modality is also, therefore, an argument for free will. The problem with all these propositions is that the ontological chain cannot be toyed with and if you could change a little bit here and there you are going to get a radically different world from the one we know here and now. And if this is so, then there is no point at all in counterfactual reasoning about the real world, for once we accept counterfactuality, this world is theoretically not the real world.

In regards to historiography, Hawthorne's method, if it were valid, would constitute an indictment of British practice: discrete divisions as short as they possibly can be made, precise definition of issues, reason from facts and from at most strong probabilities, stick close to your sources, reach the least possible number of categorical conclusions. With our critique of counterfactuality, are we making a defense of the British style? Not really. Counterfactuality is nonsense, but British "stickiness" is not the only way to do history

Ultimately, modality is the theory that somehow what is logical necessarily must be.

Graeme Forbes on David Lewis, On The Plurality Of Worlds (Blackwell) in TLS July 18 1986

"Many of the classic problems in philosophy involve what are known as `modal' concepts, the concepts of what is possible and what is necessary, what could have been otherwise, what must be as it is, and what should have been if...Thus the problem of free will is the problem of whether, given all the antecedents of some deliberately chosen human action, there is any sense in which the agent in question could have acted otherwise. The problem of causality is the problem of whether there is any sense in which the brick's striking the glass necessitates the shattering of the glass that immediately follows, or whether all there is in the world is merely the temporal succession of two states."

"To say that something is possible is to say that there are possible circumstances (worlds) in which it is the case. To be precise, `it is possible that such-and-such' becomes `there exists a possible world where such-and-such'...Professor Lewis's startling proposal was to take the phrase `there exists a possible world' completely at face value. Among the things that exist there is the actual world...But according to Lewis, this is only a tiny part of reality (albeit one that is of more importance to us than any other part): all the other possible worlds and the things which are their parts are also to be included in what exists."

"In the first [part of his book], Lewis...argues that realism of the kind he espouses has the same kind of explanatory fruitfulness as does the positing of unobservable entities in empirical science."

See also   Other "logics"

Modern philosophy

Modern philosophy (diachronic-thematic outline and historical pointers)

Berkeleyan idealism is the doctrine that God sanctions empiricism

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)

Franz von Brentano (1838-1917)

Alexius von Meinong (1853-1920)

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

Gottlob Frege, Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884)

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

G.E. Moore (1873-1958)

J.B. Watson (1878-1958)

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970)

Alfred Tarski (1902- )

Carl Hempel (1905- )

B. Russell, Principia mathematica (with A.N. Whitehead) (1910-1913), The problems of philosophy (1912), and Introduction to mathematical philosophy (1919)

L.J.J. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logicus philosophicus (1921)

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927) and What is metaphysics? (1929)

1930s

Kurt Gödel (1931)

K. Popper, The logic of scientific discovery (1935)

B.F. Skinner, The behavior of organisms (1938)

A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (1936)

1940s

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

W.V.O. Quine, Mathematical logic (1940)

J.-P. Satre, Being and Nothingness (1943)

K. Popper, Open Society (1945)

Gilbert Ryle, The Concept Of Mind (1949)

Wittgenstein, On certainty (1949)

A.M. Turing (work on AI)

1950s

From 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."

Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations (1953)

Roland Barthes, Dégre zéro de l'écriture (1953)

P. F. Strawson, Introduction To Logical Theory (1952) and Individuals (c1959)

M. Heidegger, What is philosophy? and The end of philosophy (1956)

1960s

"When Daniel Dennett published Content and Consciousness in 1969, most professional philosophers felt that a book containing so much about brain mechanisms could not really be a work of philosophy."

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

"In the early 1960s a number of psychologists who had grown up in the behaviorist tradition came to suspect that in its thoroughgoing rejection of the conceptual scheme of folk psychology experimental psychology had thrown out the baby with the bath water...Much of the most interesting behavior, particularly in humans, just cannot be described comfortably in the behaviorist newspeak that had come to dominate experimental psychology."

Stich, From FP to Cog-Science (1983)

"Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the mind that emerged in the 1960s."

John R. Searle, The Rediscovery Of Mind (MIT) in the TLS March 5 1993

H. Putnam, "Mind and machine" (1960)

W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (1960)

J. L. Austin, How to do things with words (1962)

T.S. Kuhn, The structure of sciebntific revolutions (1962)

A. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (1965)

T. Nagel, "Physicalism" (1965)

J. Fodor, Psychological explanations (1966)

J. Derrida, Of grammatology and Writing and difference (1967)

David Papineau on Alvin I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition

"In 1967 (Goldman) suggested that a true belief counts as knowledge only if it is caused by the fact that makes it true."

D. Dennett, Content and consciousness (1969)

M. Foucault, The Archaeology of knowledge (1969)

Dummett (realism v anti-realism)

D. Davidson (physicalism/identity theory)

1970s

"During the 1970s, this flirtation with the notions of folk psychology blossomed into a fecund marriage. We now have theories of reasoning, problem solving, inference, perception, imagery, memory and more, all cast in the commonsense idiom of folk psychology." Stich, From FP to Cog-Science (1983)

C. V. Borst ed., The Mind-Brain Identity Theory (1970)

D. Dennett, "Intentional systems" (1971)

J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)

From Stephen Schiffer, Meaning (Oxford, 1972)

"Meaning aims to advance that programme in the philosophy of language that I now call intention-based semantics (IBS). IBS has two leading tenets: first, that a notion of speaker-meaning can be explicated, without reliance on any semantic notions, in terms of acting with the intention of affecting an audience in a certain way; and second, that expression-meaning, the semantic features of marks and and sounds, can be explicated partly in terms of, but without reliance on any semantic notion other than, speaker-meaning. If correct ISB explications can be achieved, and if the propositional-attitude notions relied on in those explications can in turn be explicated without reliance on the semantic notions they serve to explicate, then IBS will have succeeded in reducing the semantic to the psychological. It will have shown that all questions about linguistic representation reduce to questions about mental representation."

"The seminal IBS work...is H.P.Grice's short but profound article "Meaning" [1957], in which he defined speaker-meaning as acting with the intention of producing a certain response in an audience by means of the audience's recognition of the speaker's intention to produce that response, and then suggested that expression-meaning might somehow be explicable in terms of this notion of speaker-meaning."

"The motivation for IBS related to physicalism is that IBS inherits the motivation for physicalism."

"So, if you want to reduce the public-language semantic features of expressions to propositional-attitude properties, that reduction will have to proceed in terms of a notion of speaker-meaning itself defined in terms of the intentions displayed in communicative behaviour, and that is IBS"

"For the picture of language understanding conveyed by IBS is that a speaker utters a sentence, his audience recognizes that the sentence uttered has a certain complex feature, one whose characterization would advert to speaker-meaning practices that prevail in a population to which the speaker and the audience belong, and infers therefrom (albeit unconsciously and instantaneously) that the speaker in uttering the sentence is performing an act of a certain sort. For a feature to constitute the meaning of a sentence just is for it to play this kind of role."

Ausonio Marras, Intentionality, Mind and Language (1972)

H. Putnam, Mind, language and reality (1975)

"The computational view was itself a reaction against the idea that our matter is more important than our function, that our what is more important than our how."

Jonathan Bennett on John Cottingham, The Rationalists (Oxford: V.4 of A History of Western Philosophy) in TLS, April 28-May 4 1989, p.448

"The modern theory of the mind that perhaps best exemplifies a `dual aspect' approach is the theory, or group of theories, known as functionalism. The central idea here is that mental states are logical, organizational or functional states of the brain (or central nervous system). This approach does not aim to describe the structure of the mind in neurophysiological terms; rather it characterizes it as a kind of complex information-processing system, providing specifications both of all the relevant inputs and outputs, and of the sets of rules whereby outputs appropriate to the various inputs are generated. The most important feature of this functionalist model is that the descriptions it comes up with are purely abstract descriptions of inputs, outputs, rules of procedure, and logical connections; they are, that is to say, `software' descriptions, which are quite neutral as to the kind of hardware (copper, silicon, protoplasm, grey matter, or whatever) of which the being that instantiates these functional states is actually composed...[M]ost functionalists take it as axiomatic that the functional states they describe must, in order to operate, be realized by, or instantiated in, some organized physical system...[but]...there is an asymmetry between fuctional states and physical states: although it may turn out that for any given physical state there is a unique corresponding functional state, the converse certainly in not true (just as the function of a clock, for example, could be realized by a variety of mechanisms: calibrated candles, sets of hourglasses, rotating cogs and wheels, or modern electronic devices)."

Jerry Fodor, The Language Of Thought (1975)

From Simon Blackburn on Crispin Wright, Realism, Meaning and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell), in TLS, February 27 1987, p. 221-2

P. F. Strawson (1976)

[Concepts ---> (self ---> world]

Simon Blackburn on Crispin Wright, Realism, Meaning and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell), in TLS, February 27 1987, p. 221-2

"It is fruitless, [P. F. Strawson] argued [in 1976], to try to wash away the rock of truth that our concepts enable us to understand ourselves as in a world which extends boundlessly beyond the fragments of which we have experience."

F. Jackson, Perception (1977)

P. M. Churchland, Scientific realism and the plasticity of mind (1979)

D. Papineau, Theory And Meaning and For Science in the Social Sciences (1979)

Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979)

1980-1985

Searle is the author of the Chinese room argument (1980)

A computer can respond Chinese questions in perfect Chinese. Put a brain in that does not know Chinese as the program executor and you can argue that a computer can never do as an explanation of mind. A mind would have to understand in order to do what the machine is doing without knowing.

R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980)

B. A. Brody, Identity and Essence (1980)

H. Field, Science without numbers (1980)

J. Fodor, Representations (1981)

Fodor, The modularity of mind (1983)

S. P. Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science (1983)

John R. Searle, Intentionality (1983)

J. C. Maloney, The mundane mental language (1984)

D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984)

P. M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (1984)

O. J. Flanagan, The science of mind (1984)

1986-1987

Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy (1986)

D. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (1986)

T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (1986)

A. Goldman, Epistemology and cognition (1987)

Stephen Schiffer, Remnants of Meaning (1987)

D. S. Clarke, Principles of Semiotic (1987)

R. Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (1987)

Edward Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (1987)

D. Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (1987)

James Griffin, Well-being (1987)

B. Berofsky, Freedom from Necessity (1987)

H. Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (1987)

M. Luntley, Language, Logic, and Experience (1987)

C. Wright, Realism, Meaning and Truth (1987)

Alvin I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Harvard University Press)

1988

Patricia S. Churchland, Neurophilosophy (1988)

T. Honderich, A Theory of Determinism (1988)

H. Putnam, Representation and Reality (1988)

D. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (1988)

J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (1988)

D. Papineau, Reality and Representation (1988)

1989

Ray Jackendoff, Consciousness and the computational mind (1989)

Robert Cummins, Meaning and mental representation (1989)

Ralph S. Walker, The Coherence Theory of Truth (1989)

P. Clayton, Explanations from Physics to Theology (1989)

G. Vattimo, The End of Modernity (1989)

R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989)

R. Cummins, Meaning and Mental Representation (1989)

G. Vision, Modern Anti-realism and manufactured truth (1989)

H. W. Noonan, Personal Identity (1989)

J. Waldron, The Right to Private Property (1989)

Shelley Kagan, The Limits of Morality (1989)

D. Seanor and N. Fotton, Hare and Critics (1989)

T.L.S. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics (1989)

F. Dretske, Explaining Behavior (1989)

A. Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind (1989)

M. Sacks, The World We Found (1989)

A. Appiah, For Truth in Semantics (1989)

1990

Pascal Engel on J. Christopher Maloney, The Mundane Matter of Mental Language (Cambridge University Press), TLS, August 17-23 1990, p. 880

"A common way of arguing in philosophy is to postulate that a certain thesis must be true, however implausible it may appear at first sight, and to defend it by defying opponents to find a coherent alternative. Such is the thesis that we think in an internal `language of thought' by manipulating mental symbols structured like the sentences of a public language...(Jerry Fodor `re-introduced' this old thesis into the philosophical literature)...Maloney also believes that there is no alternative to it once you accept the `representational theory of mind' (whereby thinking involves a relation to mental representations) and the `computer model of the mind' (according to which the brain is a `syntactic engine' which operates upon symbolic representations in much the same way as computers operate upon their symbolic languages). On this view, thinking (believing, hoping, etc.) that "the sky is blue" is to have in one's brain (stored in a `belief box', or a `hope box') a mental sentence `The sky is blue', with the same meaning."

"Maloney gives a thorough and carefully argued version of the language-of-though hypothesis (`sententialism'), though there are relevant topics one might have expected him to discuss also. First, `sententialism' is not the only game in cognitive science today: Maloney only mentions in passing the debate between those who believe that internal representations are language-like and those who want to posit other sorts of representations, like mental images; and nothing is said of the current debate between `classical cognitive science' (largely sententialist) and `connexionist cognitive science' (which disparages sententialist models)."

"Sententialism entails that all behaviour is the rational product of mental states."

"Various empirical studies suggest that much of what passes for behavior is not rational...The best reaction to these studies may be to note that the experiments fail to acknowledge that the behavior is embedded in self-correcting systems that serve to preserve the rationality of the behavior."

"Sensuous Mentalese sentences [perception] may infallibly represent. Nonsensuous Mentalese sentences [inference] are fallible, however, since their occurrences are modelled on fallible inferences."

"Sententialism, supplemented by the hypothesis that cognition is rooted in matter of a certain sort, entails that consciousness is to be located in the use of Mentalese as physically encoded. It thus implies that only creatures endowed with the right kind of matter could be conscious. Different agents can experience the same qualia only if they can have physically identical types of sensory states. Qualia, according to Sententialism, are fundamentally physical-syntactic features of sensuous Mentalese representations."

"So, computation requires symbols supplemented with a grammar. Once we recognize this, it is difficult to avoid seeing that computational processes take languages as their raw materials. What holds for computation generally must hold for mental computation particularly. The conclusion is apparently inescapable. There must be a mental language, a language in which the mind computes. Otherwise it would be folly to announce that thought is a matter of inference.

"Well, what exactly is a mental language? It probably is not any spoken language we learn. To learn a language is to solve certain problems regarding what expressions mean and how they can combine with other symbols to form complex expressions. If this is what learning a language requires, then learning a language is a matter of thinking. Hence we must already be fluent in the mental language before we learn the languages we speak. How else could we perform the mental computations necessary for learning the target language?"

"If thought is just the computational processing of linguistically encoded information, then whatsoever processes information in this manner must think."

First he went from computer-talk to mental-talk ("what holds for computation must hold for mind"), now he goes from mind to computer: it is all very circular, very verbal.

"A scientific account of mentation ought to be based on what we already know of propositional attitudes...Taking [these] seriously leads me to agree with Fodor and, with certain qualifications, Stich that thinking involves the use of a mental language. Dennett and the Churchlands have labored to expose the difficulties attendant on postulating a mental language. And Stich has cautioned against supposing that the mental language has any semantic properties or, minimally, any semantic features germane to the purpose of cognitive science...Although I argue that cognitive theory ought to rely on a language of thought, I disagree with those, including (early) Putnam and Dennett, who think that mental states are best cast as purely functional states. I am persuaded that Paul Churchland, Searle, and Dretske are right, even if for different reasons, to worry that functionalism is excessive in its characterization of the mental.

"So I suspect that the Churchlands are right in maintaining that an adequate science of the mind requires an understanding of the physical, not just the functional, properties of mental states."

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 boundup 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."

"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 she "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 necessarily 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 view nerve stimulation can produce either pain or pleasure.

[It is possible also to have low neural stimulation with cenesthesia, 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, cenesthesia 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 simultaneity specification of identity.

In Fodor, type identity does not seem to involve 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.

(B) 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, Dennet 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!!

(C) Identity theory was an international trend of thought which tried to find a definitive general solution to the ancient 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.

Sebastian Gardner on Mark Sacks, The World We Found: The limits of ontological talk (Duckworth) in TLS, March 2-8 1990, p.227

Is there a world outside of our awareness of it? Both realism and idealism claim that "there is some real world, some world which is independent of all experience".

Empirical realism: the real world is "independent of the form of all experience."

David Papineau on Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain and the Quantum: the Compound "I" (Blackwell), in TLS, February 23-March 1 1990, p.293

Is subjectivity reliable? Does it exist? Wittgenstein's argument against subjectivity was that if its yields were so self-evident then there was nothing to discover through it.

"Physicalists explain the apparent duality of mind and body by saying that conscious introspection gives us a misleading form of access to physical events in the brain. Lockwood reverses this and argues that the scientific investigation of the brain gives us a misleading form of access to events whose real nature is revealed in introspection."

J. R. Lucas, The Future (1990)

Penelope Reed Dobb, The Idea of the Labyrinth (1990)

Martha Klein, Determinism, Blameworthiness and Deprivation (1990)

S. P. Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (1990)

Kim Sterelny, The Representational Theory of Mind (1990)

Edo Pivcevic, Changes and Selves (1990)

1991

In R. Rorty's Philosophical papers (1991), commented by Jonathan Rée, there is an anti-representational denial of a structure in reality, human nature, even philosophical issues. Reality lies in the words we use. This is a denial of religion and Platonism. Nietzsche is quoted: "We are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar."

Hans Reichgelt on AI, in THES, 15.2.91

"Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the attempt to build computer programs which are able to perform tasks that, when performed by humans, intuitively seem to require intelligence. Examples are speaking a natural language such as English, diagnosing a patient, or playing a game of chess. One feature that intelligent tasks have in common is that they require the processing of information. Almost all the work in AI done to date has assumed that in order for a system tobe able to process information, it is both necessary and sufficient that the system be capable of manipulating symbols. Moreover, most of AI assumes that symbols are represented inside an intelligent system as discrete entities. The exception is the connectionist tradition in AI (also known as neural computing or parallel distributing processing) which assumes that symbols are internally represented not as discrete entities but as patterns of activity over a large number of relatively simple nodes."

Stuart Sutherland on Raymond Kurzweil, The Age Of Intelligent Machines (MIT), in THES, 15.3.91, p.23

"Perhaps the most sensational aspect of computers is their use to perform tasks that if carried out by a person would be thought to require intelligence."

"Artificial intelligence (AI) has two separate aims...It can be used to help in the construction of rigorous models of the workings of the mind by casting them in the form of programs. Alternatively, it can be a technology, intended to replace or supplement human thought processes. Kurzweil ignores the achievements of the first endeavour, although he devotes much space to the problem of whether computers could ever be conscious. Like most workers in AI, he and his contributors tend to believe that if a computer were sufficiently intelligent it would be conscious forgetting that people are not conscious of most of the mechanisms that subserve their intellect, that they have drives and emotions, and that they constantly take unintelligent and irrational decisions of a sort that are not made by existing computer programs."

David Shanks on Margaret A. Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and mechanisms (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), in THES, 1.3.91, p.21

"It is Margaret Boden's contention in The Creative Mind that the mental processes which allow people to be creative are fundamentally similar to those incorporated in computer programs like Deep Thought."

"But why is the human mind so adept at associating ideas? Boden turns to the field of `connectionism' to explain why. Connectionism is a new and very fashionable branch of cognitive science which attempts to show how networks of neuron-like elements are able to perform mental computations. One example is that if a network has seen a particular pattern, it will subsequently be able to retrieve the whole pattern when given only a small part of it as a cue. Similarly, if the network has seen a pattern in a new context, the original context may be retrieved."

"Does Deep Thought `know' it is playing chess, as opposed, for example, to running a simulation of a war in the Gulf?...If Deep Thought were connected to a television camera showing the chess board, would we still say that its internal processes were unrelated to chess?

"A second more fundamental problem derives from teh fact that, presumably, computers do not actually have conscious experiences. A computer fed some input from a camera might be able to work out that an object in front of it is a red box, but it surely doesn't `see', or have any perceptual experience of redness."

Comment

It seems that things have gotten to the point where a mere analogy for mind has usurped mind itself, and the arguments that have to be thought up are to refute the expansion of the part to the whole, of the copy to the model, of the metaphor to the reality.

H. Kelsen, General Theory of Norms (1991)

U. Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (1991)

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (1991)

Susan Wolf, Freedom within Reason (1991)

C. Peacoke, "The Metaphysics of Concepts" (1991)

P. Lipton, Inference to the best explanation (1991)

P. J. Kelly, Utilitarianism and distributive justice (1991)

N. Everitt on the centenary of Mind (1991)

I. G. McFetridge, Logical necessity (1991)

Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds (1991)

David Hodgson, Mind matters (1991)

M. Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (1991)

G. Johnson, In the Palaces of Memory (1991)

S. Shoemaker, "Qualia and consciousness" (1991)

1992

J. A. Fodor, A Theory of Content (1992)

S. L. Clark, The Mind's Sky (1992)

Nicholas Humphrey, A history of mind (1992)

J. J. E Gracia, Philosophy and its history (1992)

D. Dennet, Consciousness explained (1992)

V. Brümmer, Speaking of a personal God (1992)

1993

According to Barry Allen in Truth in philosophy (1993), there is nothing more to the "determination of truth-values than the determinability that first comes with the language-game that makes their estimation and practical possibility." This is a derivation from Wittgenstein's linguistic turn in philosophy.

L. J. Cohen, An essay on belief and acceptance (1993)

John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (1993)

P. W. Atkins, Creation Revisited (1993)

Raymond Tallis, The Explicit Animal (1993)

Modularity

The Chomsky thesis paves the way for a modularity theory of mind. The propositionality of mind could consist in different, independent modules acting in a concerted manner to achieve certain ends. We are suspicious of such a conclusion.

Are modules "grammars"? Does the modularity of mind imply the existence of different grammars? When I claim that the symbols of the mental language encompass the means for doing different operations, am I not trying to reduce the possibility of different modules to one large, flexible mental ability? And is this justified? To say that modularity implies different grammars is like saying nothing. We know very little of these processes. One alternative is as good as another. Supposing that mind were modular or propositional, we foundationally posit or do not posit different grammars.

In traditional psychology the mind has faculties. Cognitive psychology explores the possibility of modules, such as a module for language, another for math, another for music, and so on. The faculties are separate processes of mind, i.e., reason, will, affects, sensations, etc. Modularity too proposes discrete processes. But we know that faculties are not separate. Why should there be different modules for doing this and that? It is more plausible that specific modular processes are made possible from a basic set of propositional functions, i.e., intuitive logic, memory, et al, acting in different ways and in different combinations. Intuitive logic and memory certainly apply to all possible modular functions.

The same principles apply to perception as to the understanding of jumbled sentences. Ockham's razor forces us to discard the thesis of many different sets of specialized symbols with their own rules. Therefore, we can say that there is but one vast and complex set of symbols ruled by logic for all the propositional or cognitive operations of mind, and that these symbols are the means ~for perception, for language-learning, for the interaction between logic and experience, and for all the possible processes of knowledge.

Modus ponens

"Modus ponens. In its basic form, an argument that runs `if p, then q <--> p, therefore q". Consider ordered pair in this respect. An ordered pair is a logical relation such that a requires b and vice versa, and from b we can deduce a and vice versa.

Monism

Monism is the claim that there are no special laws different from the physical laws of nature. Mind is not a special area of knowledge with laws of its own.

Music

If mind is propositional, then our perception of music must be propositional. The sonata form is dramatic in essence. This musical form correlates historically with the rise of the novel. The rise of the novel eventually led to films as we know them. Hence, there might be a strong correlation between music and films.

Mind has affects. Pain and pleasure are affects. They are physical. But we also say that music gives us pleasure. Now, from certain arguments I can say that the pleasure that music provides is not of the physical type and that it is instead related to propositions. Not every one gets pleasure from music. Differences in musical tastes are vast and profound. The pleasure that certain music gives me can be explained in terms of certain propositions, e.g., those that express my personality, my inclinations in areas other than music, and so on. One need not know the specific musical-language symbols to follow music, to interpret music, to feel music, in sum, to understand music. The musical-language symbols are analogous to the symbols of the common, communicative, public language. Therefore, it is necessary to posit two levels of affectivity: one level which is physical and non-propositional and the other level which is basically propositional.

Music does not come naturally, or at least west European music does not. Bach explored the possibilities of harmonious sounds in the western musical scale. This led to establishing certain harmonies and intervals as particularly pleasing. But is this what makes music pleasurable? The pentatonic scale is more pleasing than Mozart to other cultural ears. It also seems to come more naturally than the 12-tone scale. Therefore, the appreciation of western classical music is learned. Yet one does not have to listen to Bach to enjoy Beethoven. The enjoyment of Beethoven seems to come naturally.

Mutual entailment

See Codependence

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