Home
1269 items | 1 visits
-
LRB · Jerry Fodor · Where is my mind?
-
The mark of the mental is its intensionality (with an ‘s’); that’s to say that mental states have content; they are typically about things. And (with caveats presently to be considered) only what is mental has content. It’s thus unsurprising that considerations about content are most of what drives intuitions about what’s mental.
-
The mark of the mental is its intensionality (with an ‘s’); that’s to say that mental states have content; they are typically about things. And (with caveats presently to be considered) only what is mental has content. It’s thus unsurprising that considerations about content are most of what drives intuitions about what’s mental.
- 11 more annotations...
-
-
On Ideology [Long] « how not to win a war
-
This was a time that was noteworthy for epoch-ending triumphalisms: arguably, starting with Daniel Bell’s “End of Ideology” thesis, reaching an (anti-)climax with Fukuyama’s “End of History”. Yet today, there are signs of a revival of interest in the areas of overlap between translation in philosophy and ideology in politics.
-
the first chapter of Raymond Geuss’s “The Idea of a Critical Theory” and apply it to key readings in the Frankfurt School. I will draw attention to the notion of ideology as it is used in critical theory, and describe the manner that Geuss believes the concept is most usefully deployed in relation to other conceptions of ideology.
- 10 more annotations...
-
-
Rationality, Subjectivity, and 'Reality'
-
The troubling aspect of the subject/object divide is the same problem as we run up against when using such terms as 'mind/body', 'nominal/real', 'mental/material', 'consciousness/physical'. Unlike most philosophers I don't think that the left-side of these inequalities are very problematic. We know what the 'mental' looks like and can define it; we know what 'mind' looks like and can define it. We may not know what 'consciousness' is, but we can easily point to what we call intentionality and reference, etc. In other words we recognize consciousness when we see it. But do we recognize everything that is physical when we see it? We are able to define the left-side of these inequalities because we live with those notions form within our own intimate selves. This is what I think is the real problem, it is a sort of human narcissism, which is hard to get beyond with our imagination. We somehow have the idea that our consciousness is 'special.' an exception within nature, without realizing that we run into all the same theoretical problems when studying insects as we do when we study those aspects of reality that we call our subjectivity. In fact we run into most of the same problems (minus notions of intentionality) when studying subatomic processes. This is because the real and intractable problem is how we define the right-side of these 'inequalities.' It is 'body', 'reality', the physical, and 'matter' that we are unable to define. Chomsky is correct, that this has been so ever since Newton's theory of gravity became well known and accepted. It is hard to understand why most philosopher's have not come to terms with the news but in fact everytime I read another article about 'consciousness and the physical' it is obvious that most philosophers just don't understand basic physics. They absurdly assume that they know what the physical is and then just as absurdly define the 'problem' as why consciousness, intention, qualia, cannot be reduced to the physical. I will lea
-
-
Social Epistemology
-
Social epistemology is the study of the social dimensions of knowledge or information. There is little consensus, however, on what the term "knowledge" comprehends, what is the scope of the "social", or what the style or purpose of the study should be. According to some writers, social epistemology should retain the same general mission as classical epistemology, revamped in the recognition that classical epistemology was too individualistic. According to other writers, social epistemology should be a more radical departure from classical epistemology, a successor discipline that would replace epistemology as traditionally conceived. The classical approach could be realized in at least two forms. One would emphasize the traditional epistemic goal of acquiring true beliefs. It would study social practices in terms of their impact on the truth-values of agents' beliefs. A second version of the classical approach would focus on the epistemic goal of having justified or rational beliefs. Applied to the social realm, it might concentrate, for example, on when a cognitive agent is justified or warranted in accepting the statements and opinions of others. Proponents of the anti-classical approach have little or no use for concepts like truth and justification. In addressing the social dimensions of knowledge, they understand "knowledge" as simply what is believed, or what beliefs are "institutionalized" in this or that community, culture, or context. They seek to identify the social forces and influences responsible for knowledge production so conceived. Social epistemology is theoretically significant because of the central role of society in the knowledge-forming process. It also has practical importance because of its possible role in the redesign of information-related social institutions.
-
-
Law and Ideology
-
Law and Ideology
If law is a system of enforceable rules governing social relations and legislated by a political system, it might seem obvious that law is connected to ideology. Ideology refers, in a general sense, to a system of political ideas, and law and politics seem inextricably intertwined. Just as ideologies are dotted across the political spectrum, so too are legal systems. Thus we speak of both legal systems and ideologies as liberal, fascist, communist, and so on, and most people probably assume that a law is the legal expression of a political ideology. One would expect the practice and activity of law to be shaped by people's political beliefs, so law might seem to emanate from ideology in a straightforward and uncontroversial way.
However, the connection between law and ideology is both complex and contentious. This is because of the diversity of definitions of ideology, and the various ways in which ideology might be related to law. Moreover, whilst the observation about law's link with ideology might seem a sociological commonplace, the link between law and ideology is more often made in a critical spirit, in order to impugn law.
At issue is an understanding of ideology as a source of manipulation. Law as ideology directs its subjects in ways that are not transparent to the subjects themselves; law, on this view, cloaks power. The ideal of law, in contrast, involves a set of institutions that regulate or restrain power with reference to norms of justice. Thus the presence of the ideological in law must, in some sense, compromise law's integrity. Not only is the view of law as ideology at odds with a lot of mainstream thinking about law, it seems difficult to reconcile with the central philosophical positions on the nature of law, e.g. a positivist conception of law as a set of formal rules, or a natural law conception where law is identified with moral principles.
-
-
Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past
-
Cold War U.S. Interrogation Manuals Counseled "Coercive Techniques"
Cheney Informed of "Objectionable" Interrogation Guides in 1992
"Inconsistent with U.S. Government Policy"
National Security Archive Posts CIA Training Manuals from 60s, 80s, and
Investigative memos on earlier controversy on human rights abuses
-
-
Electronic Briefing Book: The CIA in Latin America
-
The CIA used two secret manuals during Terry Ward’s career to train Latin American militaries and security services in interrogating suspects, one titled “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation - July 1963,†and a updated version titled “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual -1983.†These two documents were declassified in January 1997 in response to a 1994 Freedom of Information Act request by the Baltimore Sun, and the Sun’s threat of a lawsuit under FOIA. The Sun headlined its report on the documents (27 January 1997, by Gary Cohn, Ginger Thompson, and Mark Matthews) as “Torture was taught by CIA.†The Sun’s story noted the admonition on page 46 of the 1963 manual that when planning an interrogation room, “the electric current should be known in advance, so that transformers or other modifying devices will be on hand if needed.†The Sun reported that “...this referred to the application of electric shocks to interrogation suspects.â€
-
-
Wittgenstein Solves (Posthumously) the Species Problem Philosophy Now
Science columnist Massimo Pigliucci on a longstanding problem in biology and how philosophy helps.
-
"In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein proposed the idea of cluster, or ‘family resemblance’, concepts: some terms by their nature do not admit of an essentialist definition, but are rather characterized by a diffuse network of more or less loosely interconnected properties. Any particular instantiation of the concept may draw on a subset of such threads, even though there is a limit to such conceptual ‘plasticity’. Wittgenstein’s famous example is the idea of a game: the more one thinks about it, the more it is clear that it is difficult to list a set of characteristics that are necessary and sufficient to define what we mean by ‘game’. Board games like chess or monopoly clearly have more features in common than any of them has with ball games like soccer or basketball, and yet we meaningfully refer to all of these activities as ‘games’.
To put it as the master did: “How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine that we should describe games to him, and we might add: ‘This and similar things are called games’†(P.I., para. 69). ... “But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn ... We can draw a boundary for a special purpose†(ibid).
The same holds for species. Not only special purposes (like the very different works of a paleontologist and a geneticist), but also different classes of living organisms (a bacterium vs. a reptile) may require us to think of species as concepts made of a loose cluster of characteristics, some of which turn out to be particularly useful – while some do not apply – in any given circumstance."
-
-
BBC NEWS | Business | Brazil adopts open-source software
-
Increasingly, Brazil's government ministries and state-run enterprises are abandoning Windows in favour of 'open-source' or 'free' software, like Linux.
Money saving
"The number one reason for this change is economic," says Sergio Amadeu, who runs the government's National Institute for Information Technology.
He explains that, for every workstation, the government is currently paying Microsoft fees of around 1200 Brazilian reais ($500; £270).
"If you switch to open source software, you pay less in royalties to foreign companies," explains Amadeu. "And that can count for a lot in a country like Brazil, which still has a long way to develop in the IT sector."
-
-
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, & Culture: - June 2005
Table of Contents for June
-
3rd
10:36 am: The Utopian Mask of WIlliam O. Douglas: Law and Anticipatory Illumination
4th
06:19 pm: The Public Matter of Song v. The Republic of Hypocisy: The Basement Tapes & Greil Marcus #1
6th
07:28 pm: The Policy of Torture: What is New About the U.S. Policy of Torture?
7th
10:55 pm: The Policy of Torture II: Who is Torture For?
9th
06:52 pm: The Policy of Torture III: What are the Legal Ideologists of Torture Creating? The New Civil Death
15th
02:25 pm: Best Friends of Bush: The New Saddam Hussein
-
-
SSRN-Dworkin's Fallacy, Or What the Philosophy of Language Can't Teach Us About the Law by Michael Green
-
Abstract:
Although philosophers of law display an impressive diversity of opinion, they usually agree about one thing: Their discipline is closely connected to the philosophy of language. The extent of agreement on this point can be seen in the recent flood of books and articles exploring the connections between the two fields.
In this Essay, I will argue that much of this literature is based upon a mistake. The philosophy of language generally has no jurisprudential consequences. The fact that so many philosophers of law have thought otherwise has seriously hampered progress in the field, and not just because time, effort, and paper have been wasted. Theories about the law have been accepted or rejected for the wrong reasons - on the basis of arguments about language that fail to support or undermine these theories at all.
The philosophy of language appears to have jurisprudential consequences because of a mistake, which I will call "Dworkin's fallacy" in honor of the most famous philosopher of law to have succumbed to it. This Essay will analyze the fallacy and describe its negative effects. In Part I, I will describe an example of a debate in the philosophy of language that has wrongly been thought to have jurisprudential consequences. This debate concerns realism about reference. Can words refer in ways that transcend our current beliefs? For example, can the word "law" refer to something that people do not currently believe is law? In Part II, I will provide two examples of philosophers of law - Ronald Dworkin and Michael Moore who misderive jurisprudential conclusions from this debate.
In Part III, I will describe a second example of a debate in the philosophy of language that has wrongly been thought to have jurisprudential consequences. This debate, which is inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarkable discussion of rule-following, concerns the fundamental question: How is it that we can intend to use a word in one way rather than another? How
-
List Comments
(0)
List Info
Sponsored Links
Ads by Google