Interesting paper, thanks, though I lack the background for some of the science. Still, I think I get the point. But I don't understand how anything Anderson says refutes a potentially physicalist understanding of the world. He refutes reductionism very well, but my attempt to invent a "best we can do now" version of physicalism was not meant to affirm reductionism, quite the contrary. Maybe the question I should be asking is, What is there in Anderson's paper that introduces a non-physical level of construction, or implies that there's anything "beyond the physical"?

"Sensing" is doing the work of two meanings that shouldn't be confused here.

1) Sensing- akin to "responding in a behavioral kind of way"
2) Sensing- akin to "feeling something".

Clearly we want to know how 1 and 2 are the same, or how 1 leads to 2, etc — schopenhauer1

Right. "The thermostat is sensitive to the temperature" vs. "I feel warm [sensitive to the temperature]". Either is good English, but the philosophical difference is considerable.

I suggest this, though: Hopefully, only a behaviorist believes that 1 and 2 are literally the same. Perhaps what we want to know is, first, How does "feeling something" (sense 2) lead to a physical response (the so-called problem of mental causation)? and, second, Is there a physical substrate in the brain upon which "feeling something" (sense 2) supervenes, such that the feeling is not caused by that substrate? I believe that separating grounding from causation is extremely important here, because otherwise we risk getting pushed into an explanatory situation in which a physical process causes a mysterious and elusive mental effect, despite the best efforts of science to discover it. There's no need for this if we think in terms of supervenience instead.

Yes, and if you "define down" sensing so that it becomes something a thermostat can do, then you're still minus a theory of consciousness, which now has to be defined as something else.

Think logically: if they were stimulus-response machines, who would monitor the sensors? — Wolfgang

I must be missing something. Why do you need a "who" to monitor anything? A thermostat monitors itself just fine. It receives a stimulus and responds accordingly.

you examine a human organism and find that there are sensors — Wolfgang

But to know that they were "sensors," you'd have to already be importing some idea of what it means to sense, i.e., be conscious. Otherwise, aren't the nerves just collections of stimulus-response machines, and isn't that function enough? I don't think this succeeds in avoiding the hard problem.

The hard problem is more about trying to explain how color "arises" from non-colored things, like neurons and wavelengths. — Harry Hindu

I agree. I took that to be part of asking how a "sense" of stimuli could take place.

I don't read "arises" as a type of causation. We need a verb to describe what happens when two phenomena occur at the same time, and yet one appears to ground the other. That's what I think "arises" is supposed to mean here. Causation should be reserved for things that occur sequentially in time. @Wolfgang's two levels of description are a good example. Does the presence of 22 people on a soccer field, following certain rules, "cause" a soccer game? This would be a very awkward and counter-intuitive way of putting it. Rather, we'd say that the soccer game simply is the 22 people following the rules, under a different description.

(Note, BTW, that speaking of "two phenomena" somewhat begs the question, but it's hard to find a non-question-begging way of putting it.)

There's a reason why Chalmers says "arises from" rather than "is caused by." You're assuming causation here, but that's not built into the hard problem. Have you read Jaegwon Kim? His ideas on supervenience and other grounding relations are very helpful.

This question is similar to asking why H2O is wet — Wolfgang

Can you explain why this is a tautological question? I would have said that there are non-tautological, chemical reasons that explain why H2O, at a certain temperature, is wet.

Centralization in the brain brought with it the need for a feedback mechanism that made it possible to consciously perceive incoming stimuli – consciousness, understood as the ability to sense stimuli. — Wolfgang

But that's precisely the hard problem: Whence this "ability to sense stimuli"? Why couldn't the stimuli simply do their thing (including whatever self-correction you want to build into it) without being sensed? And don't forget that the other aspect of the hard problem is to explain its modal status: Is consciousness necessarily as it is? What is it about biological life that gives rise to this phenomenon, this "feedback mechanism," rather than some other?

And of course this all leaves out the scientific question: Exactly how did the evolutionary process occur? What happens with neurons that leads to consciousness? Fortunately, this aspect of the hard problem is not for us philosophers to solve!

Many thanks. I'll try the Heidegger lectures; always looking for entry points to MH's thought, which I find uncongenial.

But this just pushes back the theory of error one step. So these philosophers are offering fairly pained interpolations, trying to rescue nonsense? But why? Why would they be doing this?

The comparison with Mein Kampf doesn’t really work, because we do have a good theory to explain why many people were fooled by that book. What explains a Habermas scholar being fooled by Habermas? Dumb? Perverse? Doesn’t really seem to fit. What, then?

Fair enough, and of course the response of someone like you, who's clearly done his reading, makes me think I've still missed something with Derrida. This is a tall order, but if you had to name a single work by Derrida that shows him at his best, what would it be? If I haven't read it, I'll try to.

There's an ironic tradeoff there where in order to make physicalism meaningful, you pretty much have to make it wrong or at least so problematic as to be questionably worth defending. — Baden

Good point. My response to @T Clark, above, is an attempt to mount such a defense, in the spirit of charity. But you're right, it's open to a lot of questions.

it seems to me that "You just don't get it yet" is the underlying notion here — AmadeusD

Well, not quite. The response I and others are making is more like, "Keep trying." And the "keep trying" can take many forms, including asking another philosopher who admires Habermas (to pick one of your examples) to point out to you some critical sections, and/or a good commentary. Then there's this: If the Continentals are "totally unclear as to what's actually being posited or 'argued for'," then you need a very robust "theory of error" to explain how it's the case that thousands of skilled philosophers think otherwise, and spend a great deal of time discussing the ideas of Habermas et al. Yes, it's possible they're all just unintelligent, but that's not what I'd call a robust theory!

. . . And then there's Derrida. Like Janus, I've done my due diligence with him and have concluded that he's an extremely good rhetorician who discovered a "cool gig" and stuck with it. So, an exception to every rule . . . :smile:

This all makes sense. The separation of realism from conventionalism and nominalism is important, I agree. (Sider speaks about it terms of a “privileged structure” of the world.) The angle I referred to, from which perplexities can arise, involves bringing in truth as a parameter. How do we move from “evolutionarily helpful/necessary” through “pattern recognition” to truth?

A simple example would be the pattern of day and night. It was certainly important for the human species’ survival to be able to recognize this repeating pattern, and to be able to make predictions about when and how darkness would fall, for how long, etc. But when language enters the picture, we get a series of explanations that all involve the sun doing things like rising and falling. While this is accurate pattern recognition, it happens to be untrue. So . . . what is it that allows language to move beyond mere phenomena, and strive for a truth that is observer-independent?

I don’t think this is some kind of knockdown argument against evolutionary explanations, but is meant to indicate how they need expansion.

I would guess that most people who agree with the physicalist approach also agree that a reductionist approach is also correct. I think the argument could be made that they are the same thing. — T Clark

And that would be stringent or hardcore physicalism. But I'm trying to be fair to physicalism as a more general thesis (one I don't agree with, but it deserves a hearing). I have a number of friends who would, if pressed, probably deny that there's anything out there except the physical world. But nor would they claim that you can use the fundamental entities of physics to explain macro-phenomena like economic behavior. Are they simply refusing to accept the consequences of their physicalism? Not necessarily. We can construct a sort of "best we can do right now" position that would go: "Sure, we have loads of unanswered questions about how physical realities interact, and how they can be causally effective. But at the end of the (scientific) day, I'm betting that the answers will still fail to reveal anything beyond the physical. We have to wait and see, but my money is on physicalism."

I think that sort of physicalism is much harder to argue against.

This is a really useful context for exploring physicalism, thanks for posting. One question to start with: We all have an idea what physicalism is, but as you point out, there are many varieties, some more stringent than others. Your three criticisms of the central tenets suggest a good-enough definition of how you’re using “physicalism,” but I’d like to get clearer on exactly how you think of it.

In particular, it’s a crucial point whether physicalism has to declare by fiat that anything that exists or happens has a lawlike physical basis, thus in effect relabeling what most of us would call “non-physical” in ordinary circumstances. @Leontiskos mentioned Nagel’s The Last Word, and as usual Nagel puts it well: “I [want to] interpret the concept of ‛physics’ restrictively enough so that the laws of physics by themselves will not explain the presence of . . . thinking beings in the space of natural possibilities. Of course, if ‛physics’ just means the most fundamental scientific theory about everything, then it will include any such laws if they exist.” If that’s all physicalism amounts to, then you’re right, it adds nothing conceptually.

As we move up the hierarchies of scale, then maybe it makes sense to talk about non-physicalist answers, e.g. what is the nature of the mind. — T Clark

Here’s a fourth, related criticism I would add to your three: Understandably, when we think of physicalism, we think of something connected with the physical sciences, where it has indeed largely “worked so far.” But physicalism is not physics, and the real challenge for physicalism is to explain the lawlike behaviors, if there are such, of the entities studied in psychology, sociology, history, literature – in short, the human sciences. To say that physicalism has worked here would be news to a historian. And if you responded by telling her that her discipline did not produce objective facts and theories, was in short not scientific, she would laugh at you, I hope. My point is that there is a gargantuan explanatory gap between the sorts of things that chemistry can explain and the sorts of things that political science or economics can explain. We can wave our hands and say that “someday” we’ll have a quark-level explanation of the law of supply and demand, but 1) no one believes this, really; 2) it wouldn’t explain what needs explaining; and 3) again, this is something that has definitely not worked so far.

So in order to defend physicalism, I think a philosopher has to argue for why physicalism is not reductive in the sense just described. And this runs the risk of starting the relabeling process, with entities like “nations” construed as somehow “just physical” because we can devise theories that are lawlike to explain their behavior.

Actually, I agree with that too. If there's any perplexity here, it has to do with the role language plays in constructing our experience of the world. Is it clear that the screw precedes the screwdriver? Most of the time, I'd say yes, but the interesting philosophical questions crop up when language creation seems to bleed over into concept creation, which in turn may influence our take on what "the world" is. But you guys know all this, it's Phil 101. I'll spend some time on your longer post, Schop.

I'm not sure whether the Tractatus is quite as common-sense as you're describing it, but I'm no authority on matters Wittian. I agree that the propositions you stated as being Tractarian fit common-sense ideas about how language relates to the world.

Information theory seems to have some role to play for why "The grass is green" makes sense, AND then what it means to say, "It is true that grass is green". These are two different capabilities, possibly being conflated in this discussion, revolving around Frege. — schopenhauer1

Yes, two different capabilities. As we've seen, Kimhi wants to minimize or even eliminate what is different about them, in aid of unifying thinking and being. Glad to learn more about how information theory might apply, if you have some references.

One possible insight: The question about how language/logic corresponds to the world is rather unclear. Some philosophers seem to take "correspond" to mean "reveal formal commonalities" or even "make a picture of." Others are content with showing any kind of naming or symbolic relationship, and for them this is correspondence enough. What question are we examining here? I suggest it's about the latter kind of correspondence, since even if there is no formal or pictorial relationship between "The cat is on the mat" and 1) the idea of a cat on a mat, and/or 2) the fact of an actual cat on a mat, it's still puzzling, from a certain angle, why we can rely on language to make reliable connections of this sort.

I'll lead you to something, but first let me take the route there..

Why do you think the Tractarian vision of "states of affairs" and "true propositions" pointing to the states of affairs as anything really profound rather than common sense? That is to say, this notion that the world exists, we talk about it with statements that pick out possibly true ones. — schopenhauer1

Happy to go with you, but could you restate the question? Something off about the grammar.

:lol:

The very idea that in language we represent the world, is probably a sort of illusion, or a myth. — Srap Tasmaner

This may be getting to the heart of it, especially if we push back, even gently, on the idea that "language" and "world" are easily separable and distinct. Language, or at least some parts of it, may in fact construct the world rather than represent it.

I'm happy to drop either "fact" or "state of affairs," as long as it's clear that, whichever one we retain, it's the non-linguistic referent of a statement.

Yikes! But I don't think so. We need to make statements in order to talk about anything, certainly, but that doesn't mean that everything we talk about is also made of statements.

The statement describes or names a particular situation in the world. This is done using words. What I'm calling a "particular situation in the world" (aka "state of affairs") is non-linguistic. It involves things like cats and mats. That's the difference. But again, this is (to me) so uncontroversial that I'm sure I'm not yet understanding you. What is wrong with this picture? Or, to ask it a different way, what term would you rather use for stuff out in the world to which statements refer? We may just be disputing terminology.

Have you ever noticed that when someone sets out a state of affairs, they do it by setting out a statement? — Banno

Agreed, but just about no one mistakes the statement for the state of affairs. But you know this, so I realize there's something I'm not understanding here. Expand?

Ok. The statement from @frank that I was questioning is "States of affairs have the same form as thoughts." We can be more generous and change it to " . . . a similar form as thoughts." But you say that the isomorphism is a matter of the atomic proposition having a similar construction as the state of affairs. Is that really all there is to it, that allows this pictorial similarity? Does the similarity go beyond putting two things together? Animal and mat in the one case, the words "cat" and "mat" in the other? I don't even think you can get "sitting on" to be isomorphic, since the words don't do anything like that; one merely precedes the other.

I guess what I'm asking is, How is this a powerful or important theory? Thus far it seems to have very little explanatory power.

Well gosh, I opened my copy and it all looks like a bunch of words to me. Where's the cat-on-the-mat-looking part?

I know that's not what you meant.

But seriously, how do you understand Witt's explanation of "similar form" in this context? Are you referring to picture theory?

Agree. I've noticed a tendency for many people to get exercised about the so-called problem of "treating subjectivity as an object." Like you, I can't see this as a genuine problem. We're not trying to replicate it or inhabit it or experience it, we just want to think about it, much as we would any other non-objective property. In doing so, we will of course keep its unique character in mind.

This may not have any bearing on the OP. — frank

No worries, this is sort of the after-party!

States of affairs have the same form as thoughts. — frank

Well, but this is what I'm contesting. Even on the most generous interpretation of "form," a cat sitting on a mat doesn't look remotely similar to any thought or linguistic expression. So if not in appearance, where are to we to find the similar form?

If you're worried about metaphysics, you're trying to do something with language that it's not capable of. — frank

Possible but unlikely. Do you believe that Witt himself succeeded in demonstrating this?

Glancing at SEP, what I see is "States of affairs are similar to thoughts. Thoughts are true or false; states of affairs obtain or not." That's a little different. So yes, similar, but by bringing in a verb like "obtain" we are trying to move away from talk about language (such as truth values), and into the world independent of thought. It's not supposed to matter how we "think of the world." I don't think Witt meant "all that is the case phenomenologically" or "for humans" or some such, do you? Being "the case" doesn't depend on us.

Troll summary in a nutshell: Is the like like the like that likens the unlike with the like in the like and the unlike alike? — fdrake

I guess I should "like" your post. :wink:

Concretising the schematism into expression rather than making it transcendentally prior? — fdrake

That may be close to it, if by "expression" we include the act of thinking. The new part is Kimhi's confident assertion (sorry!) that what he calls the syllogisms of thinking and being cannot be connected in predicate logic. Frege might reply, But that's a good thing! whereas Kimhi sees it as a bug, not a feature.

Oversimplified, of course, but I'm trying not to dive back in!

Really appreciate your thoughts here. What you say about unity vs. duality is, I think, the best shot yet at trying to explicate Kimhi on that topic. And it reveals the head-scratching problems as well.

If someone thinks that P, the assertoric force associated with thinking that P is conceived of as part of thinking that P - and the force is not truth functional — fdrake

This is also very illuminating, and I think correct about Kimhi. Is it true? I'm still not sure.

I too wonder if T&B is going to turn out to be a kind of unicorn, grazing in its own field, inviting awe and derision but perhaps not contributing much to philosophical discussion. And yet . . . look at us here, going on for pages and pages about it! Maybe a path for further engagement would be to take a step back from the specifically logical issues that Kimhi raises, and see what the book helps us to understand about the perennial problem of mind's special place in the world, or what Kimhi calls "the uniqueness of thinking." We shouldn't neglect that a good bit of Kimhi's project is highly "Continental," in that he's convinced that analytic dualities about thinking and being are just wrong, and misunderstand subjectivity completely.

Strange indeed. I have a friend who refers to this as "the impossible problem," for the reasons we've just laid out. The good news is that such absolute immersion in another's experience may not be necessary in order to get a wonderful sense of "what it's like" to be some other consciousness. We already have vehicles for accomplishing this in part -- fiction, films, virtual worlds, anything that invites empathy and identification. Time will tell whether we can create a technology that transfers this from an imagined to a real experience of an other.

An interesting dilemma follows from the idea of "experiencing what X [someone else] experiences." Am I having that experience, or is X? If it's me, then it would appear that I'm not experiencing what X experiences, since she surely experiences it as herself and not me. But the other horn of the dilemma is equally unappealing: If I have somehow become X when I experience what it's like to be X, then it what sense have I had this experience? Have I suddenly birthed a second identity?

The hard problem is, "Will we ever know what it is like to BE a conscious individual that isn't ourselves". — Philosophim

Just for the record, that isn't the standard way of stating the problem, and it isn't David Chalmers' way (he coined the phrase). You can listen to Chalmers describe it here: He defines the problem as "how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences in the mind." When we solve this problem (I do believe it's when, not if) we may or may not know "what it's like" to be someone else. That's a separate, though perhaps related, issue.

Well, anyway. All this was in aid of investigating whether clarity really is a hallmark of (let's call it) Anglophone philosophy, or whether the "unclarity" of some Continental philosophers is only a matter of degree of difficulty. It's hard to generalize, of course, but my own experience has taught me to be wary of dismissing a philosopher because I find them unclear or difficult to understand. After multiple rereadings and consultation with related literature, if it's still unclear . . . OK, maybe they're driveling. But more often than not, patience is rewarded. And never underestimate the obstacles that translation poses.

So is there any alternative data? A similar survey of the supposed vast ranks of continental philosophers? — Banno

Good question. Anyone know?

Yes, forgot McDowell.

OK, I spent a little time with the PhilPapers survey. You did notice that those surveyed were, by a huge majority, English-speaking (mostly US) and identified as Analytic philosophers? The lack of interest in phenomenology is hardly surprising, then.

But it's also fair to say that you might not a get a big tagging of "phenomenology" even among contemporary Continental philosophers. It's my impression that phenomenology as such -- as an actual method of inquiry -- has by now been subsumed into larger contexts, both Analytic and Continental. Not to oversimplify ridiculously, but if you're doing work that emphasizes hermeneutics and the exploration of the objective / subjective boundary, then in some important sense you are standing on the shoulders of phenomenology. Possible comparison: You might identify yourself as working within Kantianism or critical philosophy without thinking to call yourself a practitioner of a "transcendental method." The term has both dissolved and broadened, I think, which isn't necessarily a comment on its usefulness or fecundity.

Full disclosure: History of phil is not my specialty, as may be obvious. I've got no stake in being right here, so feel free to correct.

Cool, thank you.

can you think of any philosophers generally thought of as Analytic who mentioned Hegel positively, or at all, in their work? — Joshs

Arthur C. Danto is the only name that comes to mind. His early works were certainly Analytic but as he became focused more on aesthetics, his interests broadened. He remained committed to what I would call Analytic rigor, in the best sense. He openly acknowledges his debt to Hegel in his theories about "the end of art" in works like The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.

Politically, re Hegel, I think you (and Rorty) are right.