Lecture 1 Flashcards
conceptual analysis
philosophy informing us about relationships between world views
manifest world view
everyday world view (Wilfrid Sellars)
- seeing a glass of water
scientific world view
provided by scientific research
- mollecules that make up water particles
conceptual clarification
you ask someone what they mean by their concept of something (e.g their concept of attention)
the science of validity
considers scientist’s use of concepts such as causality
- are often used without asking questions about them
- but, are these concepts well applied? is this a valid use of the concept? can we draw these inferences?
taking the mind seriously
different experiences, such as liking different things and feeling emotions are examples of mental states that together form the conscious mind
- these cannot be denied, therefore we have a conscious mind
phenomenal experiences
refer to the subjective, qualitative aspects of consicous mental states, such as perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and sensations
- how something feels and how it is experienced
what-it-is-likeness
used to describe phenomenal experiences
- coined by Thomas Nagel
qualia
the qualitative aspects of phenomenal experiences
cognitive states
can be characterized as having intentionality
- they are about something (aboutness)
propositional attitudes (PA)
mental states with intentionality
- discrete entities
- the meaning of a sentence
emotions
contains both what-it-is-likeness and aboutness
the unconscious mind
can become conscious, given the right circumstances
- memory
the mind-body problem
how the conscious mind fits into the physical world
- phenomenal experiences
- cognitive states
cognition
refers to mental states that have aboutness
consciousness
refers to the phenomenal states of the mind
metaphysics
the discipline within philosophy that goes beyond physics
- chooses fantasy over methodological ways to gain knowledge
the separability thesis
the mind can function and exist separately from the physical world
- Rene Descartes
substance dualism
there are 2 distinct kinds of substances in the universe, mental substances and physical substances
- they exist independently of each other and interact in the human person
- res cogitans (essential property of the thinking substance)
- res extensa (essential property of the physical substance)
the interaction problem
how can the physical body and the non-physical mind interact with each other?
- Princess Elizabeth and Patick Swayze
causal closure (CC)
there is no energy getting in or out of its system
- every physical event has a physical cause
occasionalism
God is the sole cause of any event
- an occasional cause is an event that is an occasion for God to cause another event
- does not provide any clear answers to the interaction problem
parallelism
the body and the soul run parallel to each other and this will to move depends on a supreme designer who has made them in a way so that they run parallel to each other
- the supreme designer is God
- does not provide any clear answers to the interaction problem
dualism
mental phenomena and physical phenomena are fundamentally distinct and irreducible to each other
- carries an important problem and has no empirical support
- unable to explain the interaction problem
- takes the mind very seriously but does not take science seriously
