PHIL 450

Logic

-T1 does not self-contradict,but T2 self-contradicts

-And I assume for now that it is restricted to avoiding the most obvious impossibilities no-matter-what. Rather than ones due to necessary but obscure or controversial metaphysical factors

Observation

data" "support" T1 more than T2.

-Controversial complications: Which methods best supply data? What makes some data better than others? Which methods best measure support? What makes some kinds of relations better support than others?

Theory

a group of beliefs and assumptions, all accepted at the same time by the same thinker, or team of thinkers.

Beliefs

-are subjected to a meritocratic ideal

-The more successful a candidate belief is in meeting accepted standards (whatever those are), the more influence it is allowed.

Working assumptions

-are nonmeritocratic, or significantly less meritocratic. They are allowed influence in use and in testing. But confessedly on the basis of very inadequate support for belief. Or even no support at all.

SAPIENCNe

Self-confidence

Axiom lightness

Parsimony

Integratable

Efficiency

Nice

Conserving

epistemic

Self-confidence

keeps some hope alive for highest epistemic aims

-that one exists and has skills that keep hope alive for more-and-more earning of more-and-more truth.

-rarely useful

Axiom lightness

-T1 is structurally simpler than T2. ↓+↑ The key method. T1 has fewer "basic" component beliefs/guesses ("axioms").

-"Simplicity" is a matter of lower counts. Maybe not necessarily of lower difficulty (or greater efficiency, three rungs below). This method primarily counts a theory's "basic" component beliefs/guesses

-most useful

Parsiminous

-T1 is referentially simpler than T2. ↓+↑ T1 posits(assumptions of theories) fewer things

-This method counts things posited by a theory (bits of subject matter the theory strictly would need to exist, in order to be true).

Integratable

-More non-cherry-picked and non-rigged potential data can support T1. If tied, T1 can be supported by potential data that are more abundant, more variably gathered, and more widely shared without collusion

-This method measures several aspects of good data-testing of a theory. It primarily measures candid testing (vs. cherry-picking) and automatic testing (vs. rigging). It secondarily measures varied testing (in disunified ways), abundance of data, and independent springing across minds (vs. collusion).
    Integrat- or test- "ability" vs. integrat- or test- "edness" allows the method to apply even in the blind absence of telltale data.

Efficient

-T1 is: clearer; quicker or easier to test; more diverse (across competing researchers in social contexts); more suggestive of analogous theories and predictions

-This weighs the speed, ease, and cheapness (loss of valuable material) of applying a method, and the gains from adopting the theories the method supports.

-For short: being clear, diverse, fecund.

Nice

-T1 is pragmatically better than T2

-his scores theories based on general-purpose (approximately "all-around") aims. These are applied to approximately all things (with the aims' relative all-around weights or ranks).

Conserving

-T1 is more conserving or conforming than T2

-more similar to old or other theories

-measures similarity with others' theories. These are weighed by efficiency, for the choice among specific rival theories.

Aims

-"aims" are like desires or policies, or maybe like natural functions. Instead of themselves being true-or-false like theories/beliefs/guesses are

TREAts

True

Resilient

Efficient

All-purpose

Theo(rie)S

True

-let's aim for more-and-more truth (accepting a theory that p, while p). This also covers for aiming for fewer-and-fewer false theories.

Resillient

-Let's aim for more-and-more earning(e.g., through skillful and reasoned control—of truth)

-Degree of resilience commonly connotes success despite increased degrees of bad luck (hindrance). Decreased good luck is a kind of increased bad luck. So resilience also covers success despite decreased degrees of good luck (help).
    To the degree that minds succeed despite decreased help, by controlling their success, they earn their success. (This applies not only to individual minds but to groups of minds, and to mental processes within minds.)

Efficiency

-Let's aim for more-and-more efficiency (e.g., ease, speed, cheapness, stability—of resiliently earning truth)

-aiming for a theory’s popularity

All-purpose

-Let's aim for more-and-more niceness (generally-applicable pragmatic goodness—e.g., safety, health, pleasure, beauty, ethical flourishing

Introspection

-better unifies (b) more-integrated data from narrow introspection (perhaps via memory), or
is as good as T2 on a&b, & better on one

-A theory is supported by data chiefly by unifying the data—deriving them from fewer beliefs/guesses (axioms) and fewer concepts

Perception

-Nervy" data are automatic and not rigged. "Varied" covers means of gathering data. "Widespread" means shared across minds that do not collude (I use "widesprung" to capture the independence).

LIP

Logic

Introspection

Perception

Naysayers

-The author’s imagined speakers who say there are no minds or mental states and who treat their own sentences as mere reflexes of a complex biological kind. They use the mindless-language view as a skeptical rival to ordinary mental talk.

ABCDE

Aboutness

Behavioral Role

Consciousness

Disguidedness

Evaluative role

Aboutness

-Representing or being about things, apparently not by depending on separate representations

Behavioral Role

-Mediating between perceptual stimuli and behavior (or language), and modulating the behavior of other mental entities

Consciousness

-Being introspectible from the inside, and being (potentially) phenomenal, subjective, experiential, or intrinsically “like something”

Disguidedness

-The symptom that a mental thing is not obviously a physical thing located in space; mental states do not seem to be obviously located the way sentences or neurons are

Evaluative role

-Being assessable by standards: theorically (true/false, epistemic), or teleologically (by natural or artificial function). Linked to value in

Physicalism

-Minds and bodies exist, and minds are wholly constituted by physical things (e.g., brains). “Physical” can be read as spatial, or spatial and not commonsensically mental.

Dualism

-Minds and bodies exist, and minds are partly constituted by nonphysical things (e.g., souls existing with brains).

Enactivism

-The view that mind can be extended to all life by thinning the concept: minds need only value (significance), and being a source of value, not representations, introspection, or beliefs and desires

Panpsychism

-The view that mind extends widely (e.g., to plants or rocks) without thinning the concept, so these things have representations like ours or like critters’.

Reflex

-A behavior caused directly by a stimulus, without an intervening mental state.

Mental representation

-An intervening mental state with aboutness, e.g., a perception of the stimulus, posited to explain behavior

Two Paths to being mental

1. Direct: something clearly meets the condition that fits the familiar mental things (thoughts, plans, moods, memories, itches, images, guesses, feelings, desires, beliefs, etc.).

2. Reductive: something fails the direct condition but is wholly constituted by things that meet it.

Dualism vs. Physicalism

Indicative representation

-Aimed to be altered to fit the world (assertions, perceptions, beliefs). When mismatched, we assess the representation

Imperative representation

-Aimed to alter the world to fit it (commands, intentions, desires). When mismatched, we assess the world.

Token physicalism

-Ideas are physical things, but not necessarily the same physical type. Their sameness may be a shared token, a matching copyable type, or a functional type.

Language of Thought (LOT) hypothesis

-Token physicalism plus the claim that symbols have syntactic structure like sentences: complex symbols have symbol parts, and part meanings help shape whole meanings.

Wire Model

-Symbol s1 causes s2 by transferring energy along wires. No rule symbol is needed.

-connectionist

Rule Model

-A symbol R represents that s1 is a reason for s2 and helps explain the s1→s2 transition. So s1 and R jointly cause s2.

Wire-rule view

-Wires are rule symbols, in whatever full-blooded sense the bulbs are symbols. Not that they represent rule symbols, but that they are them.

Worries of Wire rule

-Regress: If every thought process needed a represented rule, rules would need further rules to apply, forever. So some processes must occur without applying rules.

-Plasticity: Susceptibility to change or rewriting. Proposed (and rejected) as a mark of rule symbols vs. wires.

-Readability: A symbol’s ability to be “read,” loosely: to lead to semantically sensible effects.

-Explicitness: The author’s specificity account: an explicit content of a symbol is its maximally specific content; less specific contents it necessitates are implicit.

Propositional attitudes

-(belief that sugar is white, desire for white teeth, intention to eat more sugar, fear of the dentist) are always available in systematically related families: if we can desire that p, we can believe or fear that p.

wire vs rule

CYC

Common sense knowledge base by doug lenant