Flashcards
Philosophy
Cards in this deck (51)
- 1basic philosophical questions?- what is (the essence of)...? --> empirical observation doesn't work, so under which condition and which entity would we call..., not answerable by common sense or observation/experiment, but makes sense for us to know as human beings
- existence questions?
- very general questions concerning very general concepts (what is an event..)
- conduct of life (how to behave, what to strive for..)
- is there any good answer at all?
- questions about whether those questions make sense...
- relationship between philosophy/science/common sense (manifest image) - 2conflict manifest and scientific image?- we see table manifest itself as a solid object but scientifically seeing it is a bunch of atoms not even really touching themselves
- can we reconcile them? are they competing? --> similar to brain&mind, neuroscience&self-understanding - 3theoretical philosophy?- epistemology: knowledge
- language: reference between words/reality, what is concept/what is truth
- metaphysics/ontology: what kind of entities exist (God?..), fundamental concepts, philosophy of mind
- action: what is action (=! movement)
- science: demarcation, status of theoretical notions (like quarks), scientific explanation - 4practical philosophy?- ethics (what should we strive for for moral reasons, what ought we do, what is justice...)
- metaethics (is there moral knowledge? how can moral judgements be justified? what is good and ought?)
- applied ethics (ethical questions of medical/ecological practices...)
- political (what state form is good? status and form of social justice)
- law (relationship law/moral, is there a natural law) - 5further areas of philosophy?aesthetics, anthropology, culture, history, media, technology
- 6analytic/synthetic knowledge?analytic: knowing english is enough, you have to know the meaning of the word in question to access whether it's true or not
synthetic: you actually need some empirical observation
kant: analytic: concept contained in the sentence, synthetic: one concept is not contained in another; test: denial will lead to a contradiction - 7a priori/ a posteriori?how is knowledge (concepts) acquired?
a priori: prior to/independent from experience, you dont have to empirically check it, no experience can confirm it (maths); a posteriori: derived from experience, can be confirmed by it,
maybe there innate a priori concepts and notions predating any experience, even necessary to make any experience at all - 8conceptual analysis?don't mix it up with analytic statement, concept is not contained in the word
grasp of the concept, what elements a concept is composed of and how these elements are related, understand the meaning of the word before we can employ it
consult basic intuition (reflect your predjudice) and perform thought experiments (most important: coherence, not reality) - 9relation between philosophy and neuroscience?- what is consciousness? freedom? mental representation?
- mind and brain? what does NS mean for self-understanding? relationship between different methods? - 10arguments?- function: make someone accept your claim (conclusion) by showing that it has to be true because certain premises are true (it is rational and you dont need anything else to accept it)
- acceptance as a consequence of threat, bribing etc doesnt mean the premises were rational
- also to interpret philosophical texts
- premises need to be propositions. not all sentences are propositions
- premises should support the conslusion and it should follow from them, not just three random true sentences - 11validity?only if its rational to accept that conclusion is true under the assumption that the premises are true (if it follows logically), if all premises were true, the conclusion would also be true
necessary, but not sufficient - 12solidity?if the argument is valid and the premises are also true
another necessary but not sufficient. it also needs to be informative to be good! - 13types of condition combinations?necessary but not suficient: be 40 to be president
sufficient but not necessary: scratch a dogs belly to make it happy
both: tick all the correct answers on the test to get a perfect score
neither: put ingredients into a bowl to make a cake - 14knowledge?how? that... by acquaintance, phenomenological
epistemology: knowing that - 15classical account of knowledge?justified true belief (accidental true belief is no knowledge) you need a reason to believe that something is true and it also needs to be true
--> conceptual analysis, a lot of necessary conditions are identified to make it sufficient to be knowledge
- yet justification doesnt guarantee anything, it just makes it probable, can't go wrong easily, but still can be ustified but wrong! - 16gettier cases?you can have a justified true belief of a claim but still fail to know it (JTB not sufficient!), no genuine knowledge , coincidental justification
http://www.theoryofknowledge.info/what-is-knowledge/the-tripartite-theory-of-knowledge/gettier-cases/
- to repair the classical account through: has to guarantee? no empirical possibility; justify justificatory claims? infinite regress; justificatory claim has to be knowledge? circular;
justification may not be based on wrong premises! - 17causal theory of knowledge?- goldman
- eliminating the accident!
- belief must have a (indirect) causal relation with the truth (belief that P is caused by the fact that P OR belief that
p is causally related in the
right way to the fact that p)
- eliminating inferences that begin with a false proposition - 18truth?- ascribed to knowledge, beliefs, utterances
- 19fundamental bearer of the truth value?- what can be true can slo be false
- is it either/or or can it be neither?
- assertoric sentences (stating a fact without evaluation)
- utterances (when people say the same sentence it's two different utterances of the same type. utterance = sentence token --> two (sentence) tokens of the same type
- judgements and beliefs: if two people believe the same we have two different mental events of the same belief/judgement
- propositions: content (can express same proposition in different languages/ways), abstract object to be grasped by different subjects
- disputation: propositions seem to win because they explain how people formulating stuff differently still believe the same thing) BUT same sentence (=same proposition) can be true/false at different time points --> favors beliefs/judgements BUT different languages would have worked as well...->maybe propositions have time and place as their parts; some candidates fit better with different theories (beliefs --> coherence) - 20correspondance theory of truth?- realist theory
- relation/correspondance between the bearer of truth-value
and an existing fact which is independent of anyone's beliefs
- truth: relational property
- intuitive: truth needs to have some ties to reality
- semantic condition: parts of the truth bearer stand for the parts of the fact
- identical condition: parts have the same order
- condition(s) concerning the relation of the respective parts
- negative facts? how can we break down facts? inaccessibility of the
correspondence relation - 21coherence theory of truth?- anti-realist (relation between truth bearer and some mental states = beliefs)
- only true if it fits in a set of other coherent true bearers (=beliefs), world = totality of facts
- idealists like it
- relation of a belief to the set of other beliefs
- these beliefs should not contradict each other and stand in deductive and inductive relationship to each other
- difference between truth and condition of justification disappear!
- seems to be impossible that there is a single isolated truth value bearer acquired first (they are holists)
- might be coheretn in one system but not in another - 22deductive/inductive?deductive: from general to specific; inductive: from single cases to a whole
- 23Deflationary Views of Truth?- redundancy theory
- saying "its true that.." adds nothing to the truth value
- „true“ then doesn‘t ascribe the bearer of truth value a property like correspondence or coherence - 24d-n explanation?- explanandum: something that deserves explanation
- explanans: provides the explanation
- Deductive-Nomological Model of
Explanation: deductive arguments, explanans as universal law of nature which is true and explanandum following from it
- needs initial condition (gas expanding under heat), law (all gases expand under heat) and the conclusion/explanation (heated gas under constant pressure expands)
- you can predict the outcome; combines the explanatory power with predictive success
- problem: if you exchange the initial
condition with the explanandum you get a deductive argument but lose explanatory power (example???)
- we can actually construct non-explanatory cases which fit the model because the model doesnt require any sufficient conditions for scientific explanations - 25proposed explanation to d-n problems?- should causality be considered for better explanation?
- unification account: scientific explanation is a matter of providing a unified account of a range of different phenomena, reduce the number of ultimate facts (explains flagpole/shadow example)
- - 26reductive explanation?- x is can be reduced to y if x can
be reductively explained with recourse to y
- higher-level sciences reducing to lower-level ones (psychology ---> physics, can explain all macroproperties of water by behavior of molecules)
- can consciousness be reduced? depends on how conceptual analysis defines consciousness - 27basic questions of philosophy of mind?- what kind of entities are there? (metaphysics/ontology) what is physical? (everything admitted by the natural sciences, intersubjectivity, acceptable to measurement and experimentation, entities in space composed of natural entities; everything there is is physical = materialism --> either nothing mental or mental can be reduced and is secondary) what is mental? (mental state: emotions, beliefs, sensations, thoughts...) what is their relation?
- state and property: property always belongs to a subject; state: a property is instantiated, does every state require something it's a state of? "soul"?) - 28marks of mental?- nothing physical can posses them (so not a subclass of the physical)
- exclusive for mental - 29"privacy"?- of possesion and knowledge (only I can know my pain DIRECTLY and posses my pain, only I can HAVE) (people can own same car, but not the same nose??, siamese twins hand can be possesively private to different owners, the pain will be felt differently and still two times, they dont share it), specific first person perspective to own sensations, unclear whether a threat to physicalism
- 30The Epistemically Special Status or “Privileged Access”?- strictly restricted to the case of actual mental states
- not only specifically direct (private knowledge) but also special: immune to error and infallible (I feel it like this so it is feels like this to me)
- no possibilities of error in evaluating your own feelings (its more reliable, but immune to error? correct usage of memory for classification? no language mistake in play? then probably no error)
- under certain conditions there is infallability - 31location in space?- thoughts/beliefs dont have a precise location in space, are not extended and are not in a spatial relation to each other
- but: pain in the leg? thoughts being roughly where i am? moving only my body with thouhgts? what about quantum phenomena? --> not quite exclusive - 32intentionality?- all mental states are
intentional, and only mental states are
intentional, directed at something (person, object, proposition)
- not a relation because objects dont have to exist (Santa...)
- directed under certain aspectual shape, object is presented in a certain way
- sentences giving the content generate intenSional contexts
- but what is the object of my depressed mood? - 33intensional/extensional?extensional: exchange of coreferential terms will not affect truth value (ship/boat..)
intensional: when you specify the content, exchange of coreferential terms will change the meaning (boat is... but not ship is... OR john believes... --> we dont know whether john even knows about the coreferential term)
- not only what is the belief directed towards but also in which way? - 34consciousness?- property of a being (he is vigilant and awake = conscious)
- property of a mental state (subconscious/conscious), not a feature of all mental states!
- phenomenal structure of consiousness encompasses much of the spatial, temporal and conceptual organization of our experience of the world and of ourselves as agents in it, we are uniquely aware of the mental states we experience --> those states are phenomenologically conscious
- qualia: phenomenal properties of experiences --> cant be physical properties (you can know everything about red but unless you see it you dot know completely how it feels)
- no reductive explanation
- can we make it more accessible for scientific treatment? -> if a person is conscious of this mental state with the help of a higher-order mental state (what?) - 35monism?all is of the same kind--> physicalism(materialism): everything there is physical or can be reduced to it; idealism (everything is mental), phenomenalism (physical can be reduced to the mental), neutral: both are different names for something generally underlying
- 36dualism?- all is either physical or mental, none is reducible
- substance dualism: not a big role anymore, mental states have a non physical bearer (soul)
- property: physical substance has physical and mental properties (or bundles of mental and physical states)
- what is a reasonable relation? --> motivaton for monism bc no such relation possible
- weird historical reasons (descartes: private knowledge etc / intelligent behaviour) --> our existence doesnt require anything else but thinking, res cogitans can survive... animal behavior is mechanistic, but ours is universal and non-mechanistic
today: more based on phenomenological qualia - 37pluralism?there is something else not reducible to either mental or physical (God..)
Descartes and Plato can be considered a bit
- or there are countless categories of entities not reducible to each other
- - 38further options?- aristotel's hylemorphism (matter/form), form is soul
- ordinary language philosophy (wittgenstein): philosophy shouldnt give a fuck about metaphysical debates but investigate ordinary everyday language, if we learn to talk correctly, this problem will disappear - 39relations of physical to mental in dualism?1. interactionism: both can cause each other. problem: causal closure of the physical domain (atoms, molecules, quantum..), causal relationships would contradict conservation of energy
within the physical realm
2. occasionalism: indirect causal link via god
3. psychophysical parallelism: no causal interaction at all, run like two synchronized clocks
4. Epiphenomenalism (Huxley): only physical can cause mental, but not vice versa; less implausible when only considering qualia as mental - 40historical remarks of materialism?- started pre-socratic (everything is atoms), epicur and co
- then hobbes, büchner... -> but at these times not clearly distinguished from property dualism, what they meant is that the mental is fully dependant on the physical
- - 41causal argument for mind-body identity?- conscious mental states have physical effects
- physical effects have sufficient physical causes
- physical effects of mental states arent always overdetermined meaning that it feels wrong to say it still would have happened if i only felt the pain without c-fibers firing
---> mental states are identical with their physical causes
http://www.davidpapineau.co.uk/uploads/1/8/5/5/18551740/mind_the_gap.pdf - 42logical behaviorism?- what is the meaning of the mental states/expressions? how can or should they be analyzed?
- behaviorism in psychology is only a methodological claim (not a claim about meaning): what should be analyzed? -> behaviour, introspection not relevant
--> how should we understand mental states in general? are there any? - 43Vienna circle?- unity of science -> physics as most fundamental science, a form pf physicalism, ideal account of language, psychological terminology needs to be translatable into physical language, mental terminology needs to be translated into physical behaviour, the mental or intentional refers to ways of behaving; background: verification theory of meaning aims to characterize what it is for a sentence to be meaningful, the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood (verificationist theory of meaning), if we can't verify that X has toothache (doesnt hold his cheek etc) then its senseless; claims about phenomeonological privelege and such are not scientifically accurate; they are actually concerned in how we should speak about mental states if we wanna do it in a scientifically correct way
- suppressed pain would be still seen in an MRI - 44Ordinary Language Philosophy (Ryle)?- not a from of physicalism
- support Descartes that mind is not a physical mechanism
- doesnt support descartes that mind is a ghost in the machine causing our intelligent behaviour
- to see mind as a cause for intelligent behaviour is a category mistake, we misunderstand the meaning of mind
- It is OK to use mentalistic terminology as long as we recognize how such talk, like talk of bodies, is not a claim about their reality apart from their logical status as modes of behavior or dispositions to behave
- like if he has the certain belief we mean that he is predisposed to show it = beliefs are kinda dispositional predicates that allow for different kinds of manifestations
- propositional attitudes: mental states held towards a proposition, such as having an opinion concerning it or responding emotionally to it ( I believe my ice cream is cold)
- being in an intentional states means behaving in a certain way towards something, being predisposed to certain behavioral manifestations (even towards the devil)
- no first person priveleged access - 45Ryle part 2?- why is it accepted? - why is it accepted? our knowledge about the mental depends wholly on our intersubjectively shared language (you will learn what to call pain by watching others excering certain behavior in what they call a pain situation)
- meaning of mental states is bound to behaviour, originates from it
- only thing that matters is that you use it in correct situations, not what access you have to it
- to say I have pain is just an elaborate way to say ouch
- problem: covert behaviour (MRI) doesnt play a role?
- do others know better because they can observe better?
- - 46the classical type identity theory?- mental events grouped into types, correlated with types of physical events in the brain;one type of mental event,
"mental pains" will, be describing one type of physical event (like C-fiber firings)
- sensations and perceptions are brain states or more generally:
consciousness is a brain state
- (contingent truth represents a true statement whose negation does not imply a contradiction in reality, such that the negation could have been the case)
- empirical contingent truths a posteriori;
- philosophy cant prove the truth because its not an empirical science but it can show that there are no philosophical objections to this theory
- identity claims are proven by empirical research
- a certain type of events is IDENTICAL with another type of events (even all unobserved tokens need to be identical)
- in case with Merkel we need to follow her path through space and time
- what leads us from correlation to certainty? -> place: identification allows us to explain all properties of one type by another type; smart: simple and elegant, occams razor - 47identity claims and reduction?- identity relation is symmetrical
- but its weird if you reverse it (brain states are sensations)
--> asymmetry of explanation (we dont learn anything new by saying h2o is water, but do learn in the other direction, get more unified world view)
- reduction is asymetrical
- symetrical nature of identity and asymetrical nature of reduction/explanation
- reduction makes sense if: if on the one side is a part of a more powerful explanatory theory OR if the expression on one side is the only one from a powerful explanatory theory - 48identity theory and marks of mental?privacy of knowledge: our brains are not connected
priveleged access: brain science is not advanced enough
intentionality: not really adressed - 49black's objection three?- ALL properties of sensations need to have correspondant physical properties, otherwise property dualism! are mental properties identical to brain properties? distinct properties we recognize physical/mental event by
- there are some distinct properties which makes it not the same (yellow flash for the lightning)
- venus has two distinct properties associated with every of its identities
- https://books.google.de/books?id=Q0Lqu9eiizcC&pg=PT88&lpg=PT88&dq=max+black+identity+theory+-indiscernibles&source=bl&ots=S6p-IJmCTa&sig=Mx9MBGPXHKdC-zgpju1UE8jNLxI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiZsPu1z8PNAhVJeSYKHZtmD8sQ6AEINDAD#v=onepage&q=max%20black%20identity%20theory%20-indiscernibles&f=false
- neutral characterization of sensation properties allow to identify them with brain states - 50kripke?- identities are not contingent!
- no clear dualism in apriori/ a posteriori etc
- before: all neccessary thruths are a priori, all a posteriori are contingent
- Kripke: no generalization, they tell us different things
- science: necessery truths a posteriori! they have to be necessary because they are rigid designators
- possible worlds
- rigid designator: referring expression
which refers in every possible world to the
same individual or thing (also water...)
- we can be epistemically wrong but it doesnt mean the truth becomes less necessary
- if its true, then its possible to explain away the contingency
- his main problem is with contingency, because if there are rigid designators it has to be necessarily true! but our brain/sensation thing seems to be more contingent - 51kripke 2?if we have on the left hand side of our identity statement an expression referring to a type of mental
state rigidly, and on the right hand side, an expression referring to a type of brain state rigidly, then the statement, if true, would have to be necessarily true. Thus, if pains really were identical
with C-fiber stimulations, then the statement, "Pain = C-fiber stimulation," would have to be
necessarily true, if it were to be true at all. But, it is clearly not necessarily true. For even if there
is a strict correlation between pains and C-fiber stimulations, all the same, it is easy to imagine
that a pain might exist without a C-fiber stimulation existing, and a C-fiber stimulation might exist
without a corresponding pain. But, if that is so, then the identity statement is not necessarily true,
and if it is not necessarily true, it cannot be true at all. Therefore, it is false.
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- Flashcards on Philosophy, created by Lisa Ka on 24/06/2016.
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