Comprehensive Philosophy of Mind, Ethics, Epistemology, and Language

Practice vocabulary flashcards covering the core concepts, theories, and arguments presented across all 14 lecture sources on philosophy of mind, language, ethics, pragmatism, and epistemology.

Justice as Fairness

John Rawls's theory of social justice, which generalizes traditional social contract theory to a higher level of abstraction, holding that principles of justice are the object of an original agreement chosen by free and rational persons in an initial position of equality.

Veil of Ignorance

A hypothetical condition in John Rawls's original position in which parties are deprived of knowledge of their class, social status, natural abilities, intelligence, strength, psychological propensities, and conceptions of the good, ensuring fair and unbiased choice of principles.

Difference Principle

The second part of John Rawls's principles of social justice, requiring that social and economic inequalities be arranged so that they are both to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and attached to offices and positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity.

Reflective Equilibrium

A state of affairs reached in moral deliberation when our considered convictions of justice and our chosen philosophical principles of justice coincide, achieved through a process of mutual adjustment and pruning between both ends.

Pure Procedural Justice

A form of procedural justice where there is no independent criterion for the right outcome, but instead an authentic, fair procedure exists such that whatever outcome results is just, provided the procedure has been properly followed.

Principle of Efficiency

The Pareto optimality criterion applied to institutions and the basic structure of society, stating that a configuration is efficient when it is impossible to alter the rules to raise the expectations of at least one representative person without lowering those of another.

Eliminative Materialism

The philosophical hypothesis advanced by neurophilosophers such as Patricia Churchland that our common-sense framework of 'folk psychology' (concepts like memory, attention, or belief) may undergo significant revision or total replacement by neurobiologically harmonious categories.

Reductionist Research Strategy (Churchland)

The multi-level empirical approach in neuroscience and psychology aimed at reverse-engineering the nervous system to explain macroscopic psychological properties in terms of microscopic neural network dynamics across simultaneous levels of organization.

Coupled Oscillators Hypothesis (Llinás)

Rodolfo Llinás's model proposing that visual awareness and sleep-wake-dream states arise from pairs of coupled $40\,\text{Hz}$ thalamocortical oscillators: a specific loop providing sensory content and a non-specific intralaminar loop providing integrating context.

Inquiry (Peirce)

Charles Sanders Peirce's term for the struggle stimulated by the irritation of doubt to attain a calm and satisfactory state of belief, having as its sole immediate objective the settlement of opinion.

Method of Tenacity

A method of fixing belief in which an individual deliberately clings to whatever answer they fancy, dwelling on all that conduces to that belief while contemptuously turning away from anything that might shake it.

Method of Authority

A communal method of fixing belief wherein an institution or the state uses power, perpetual repetition, indoctrination, censorship, and signal punishments or terror to enforce correct doctrines across the population.

Scientific Method (Peirce)

The method of settling belief grounded in the fundamental hypothesis that there are Real things whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions, affecting human senses by regular laws that lead any rational enquirer to one True conclusion.

The Imitation Game

An operational test devised by A. M. Turing to replace the question 'Can machines think?', played with an interrogator, a man, and a woman, wherein a digital computer replaces one human to see if it can deceive the interrogator as often as the human does.

Discrete State Machine (State Transition Table)

A system that moves in sudden jumps from one definite state to another, abstractly characterized by a finite set of internal states, input signals, output signals, and a transition table determining successive states.

Universal Machine

A digital computer with the property that, by being provided an appropriate instruction table, speed, and storage capacity, it can mimic the behavior of any discrete state machine without needing hardware redesign.

Lady Lovelace's Objection

The philosophical contention that an analytical engine or computer has no pretensions to originate anything new and can only carry out operations that humans know how to order it to perform.

Bullshit (Frankfurt)

Communication produced by agents who are neither trying to tell the truth nor deliberately lying, but who are indifferent to the truth-value of their assertions, being focused entirely on manipulating the attitudes and opinions of their listeners.

Practical Utility of Truth

Harry Frankfurt's thesis that truth possesses indispensable practical value because human survival, prudent individual action, and flourishing civilizations strictly require reliable factual information rather than ignorance or error.

Naturalistic Fallacy

G. E. Moore's term for the ethical fallacy of defining or identifying the simple, indefinable quality 'good' with some natural or metaphysical property, such as pleasure, desire, or being conducive to general happiness.

Good (Moore's Conception)

A simple, non-natural, unanalysable object of thought that cannot be defined by naming composite parts, functioning in ethics analogously to how 'yellow' functions in visual perception.

Casuistry (Moore)

The detailed, particular branch of ethics aiming to discover which actions are good whenever they occur and to quantify their relative merits, forming an indispensable ultimate goal of ethical science akin to applied chemistry or physics.

Derivative Knowledge

Bertrand Russell's term for true belief validly deduced, logically or via psychological inference, from premises known intuitively, provided there is a discoverable parallel logical connection.

Probable Opinion

Beliefs that are neither clear knowledge nor outright error, or beliefs held hesitatingly because they lack the highest degree of self-evidence, constituting the greater part of what commonly passes for knowledge.

Absolute Self-Evidence (Russell)

The infallible guarantee of truth that occurs when a person possesses direct acquaintance with the complex fact itself that corresponds to a judgment, as opposed to self-evidence that belongs merely to judgments.

Entitlement Theory

Robert Nozick's historical theory of justice in holdings stating that a distribution is just if everyone is entitled to what they possess under the principles of justice in acquisition, justice in transfer, or the rectification of past injustices.

Current Time-Slice Principles

Unhistorical principles of distributive justice holding that the justice of a distribution depends solely on structural matrices of who holds what at a given moment, treating identical distributional profiles as equally just regardless of history.

Patterned Principles of Distributive Justice

Principles of justice requiring that holdings vary along with some specific natural dimension (such as moral merit, I.Q., need, or marginal product) or a weighted sum of natural dimensions.

Wilt Chamberlain Example

Robert Nozick's thought experiment showing that voluntary agreements by individuals to pay $25\,\text{cents}$ to see Chamberlain play basketball upset a favored initial distribution ($D_1$) into an unpatterned distribution ($D_2$), proving that maintaining patterns requires continuous interference with liberty.

Language-Game (Sprachspiel)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept describing language and the actions into which it is woven as a unified whole, illustrating that the speaking of words is part of an active human form of life rather than mere abstract naming.

Family Resemblances

Wittgenstein's term for the overlapping and criss-crossing network of similarities (such as build, features, or gait in a family) that unites instances of concepts like 'game' or 'number' without any single property common to all.

Private Language Argument

Ludwig Wittgenstein's argument that a language whose words refer solely to immediate, private inner sensations—inaccessible to anyone else—is impossible because there would be no public criterion or rule to determine whether a word is used correctly.

Beetle in a Box

Wittgenstein's parable showing that if each person has a private box whose content only they can view, the object in the box cancels out of linguistic communication as irrelevant if the word is to have a functional use in the language-game.

Duck-Rabbit (Aspect Perception)

An ambiguous figure used by Wittgenstein to illustrate 'noticing an aspect' or 'seeing-as', where the visual impression alters between a duck and a rabbit without any physical change in the drawing itself.

Pragmatic Method (James)

William James's philosophical method of interpreting metaphysical and abstract concepts by tracing their respective practical consequences in actual life and experience, dismissing disputes that present no concrete difference.

Tender-Minded vs. Tough-Minded

William James's distinction between two philosophical temperaments: the tender-minded (rationalistic, intellectualist, idealistic, religious, dogmatic) and the tough-minded (empiricist, sensationalist, materialistic, irreligious, skeptical).

Pragmatic Conception of Truth

The view that true ideas are those that can be assimilated, validated, and verified through their practical 'cash-value', functioning as dependable guides into agreeable, harmonious connections with reality.

Principle of Verifiability

A. J. Ayer's criterion of factual significance stating that a putative proposition is meaningful if and only if some possible sense-experience is relevant to determining its truth or falsehood; otherwise, if not a tautology, it is literally senseless.

Weak Verifiability

Ayer's formulation of verifiability where a proposition is significant if experience can render it probable, rather than demanding strong verifiability (conclusive empirical establishment), which would render universal laws and historical claims meaningless.

Pseudo-Proposition

A statement that possesses the grammatical appearance of an assertion of fact but is neither an analytic tautology nor empirically verifiable in principle, rendering it entirely devoid of literal significance.

Gap Between Knowledge and Wisdom

Simon Critchley's characterization of the modern existential divide between natural scientific knowledge of how things are and practical philosophical wisdom concerning how one should live a good and meaningful human life.

Disenchantment of Nature

Max Weber's concept (cited by Critchley) describing how the 17th-century scientific revolution stripped nature of cosmic purpose and teleology, reducing it to impersonal, law-governed matter indifferent to human strivings.

Scientism vs. Obscurantism

The philosophical dilemma described by Simon Critchley where an uncritical infatuation with empirical science reduces humans to beasts (scientism), whereas an irrational rejection of science turns humans into lunatics (obscurantism).

Hard Problem of Consciousness

David J. Chalmers's designation for the central mystery of mind: the question of how and why physical neural processes in the brain give rise to subjective, qualitative conscious experience.

Easy Problems of Consciousness

Chalmers's term for the cognitive and behavioral functions of awareness (such as discriminating stimuli, integrating information, and reporting internal states) that can be solved by standard computational and neurobiological mechanisms.

Principle of Organizational Invariance

A proposed psychophysical law stating that systems with the same abstract functional organization will share identical conscious experiences, regardless of whether implemented in biological neurons or silicon chips.

Kanizsa Triangle

An illusory contour visual figure cited by Francis Crick and Christof Koch showing how higher visual cortical neurons produce explicit representations for perceived edges even in the absence of continuous physical lines.

Dancing Qualia

A thought experiment by David Chalmers demonstrating through reductio ad absurdum that if an artificial silicon replacement for visual cortex altered conscious experience without changing behavior, experiences would oscillate unnoticed when switched.

The Knowledge Argument

Frank Jackson's anti-physicalist argument featuring Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist raised in a black-and-white environment who knows every physical fact about color vision, yet acquires new factual knowledge of others' experiences upon first seeing red.

Qualia

The subjective, introspectively accessible qualitative aspects of conscious experiences (such as the distinct hurtfulness of pain or the experienced redness of a tomato) that cannot be deduced from complete physical descriptions alone.