Donald Davidson In an earlier post I looked at an argument by Donald Davidson that supported the idea that thought depends on language. Thought is possible through learning of the concepts of true and false through interpreting another person asserting something about an object in the world. Davidson calls this “triangulation.” I suggested that the problem with Davidson’s argument is that, from an non-theistic perspective, there appears no way for a “first thought” to emerge from non-thought. It only takes one person who has language, and therefore thought, to get the ball rolling. But if there is no language and therefore no thought then there can be no first thought.…
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Can God Marvel?
God is marvelous. He causes in his worshipers a sense of wonder, awe and amazement. But does God feel the same? Can he marvel at himself? At the very least marveling implies finding something to be beyond conceptual reach. It appears to be connected with mystery. Sometimes our marveling can be because we do not have the concepts to understand what we see. A magic trick can be like this. We cannot understand how it is done even though we might be sure that, if someone explained the trick, we would understand it. A trick looses its mystery when we know how it is done. In other cases we marvel…
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Reasoning About Marriage
There are points in debates when arguments get left behind and emotions take over. Perhaps the national debate over marriage has reached that stage. It is not good when debate descends into a slagging match. There are arguments to be made and we should keep our heads. If we do this perhaps we can reason better with each other. Much has been written in the defense of traditional marriage. And I, because I agree with traditional marriage, think those arguments are good arguments. However, it is not as if those who disagree with me don’t have any arguments. They do. So, why legalize same sex marriage? As far as I…
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How Does God Know?
God is never surprised by anything, never acquires knowledge and finds playing hide and seek quite dull. God has all the symptoms of omniscience. But how does God know what he knows? What counts as knowledge for God? Does he have justification for his beliefs? The following is a sketch of some options. What exactly do we mean by omniscience? First, God’s omniscience, in a propositional sense (and let’s confine ourselves to propositions for simplicity’s sake), means that for every proposition p, if p is true, then God knows p. Entailed in this view is the further feature of omniscience such that for every proposition p, if p is false,…
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Grounding Facts About the Mental in Facts About the Physical
A physicalist wants to be able to say the following: (A) There are no mental properties. (B) S believes p. There is an apparent inconsistency in these two claims. Most physicalists consider it implausible to suggest that (B) is false and so concede that (A) is false. In order to maintain the physicalist worldview they say that mental properties are nothing over and above physical properties. This is usually stated in terms of supervenience, something like this: a set A of properties supervenes on set B of properties if for any change to A properties there is a corresponding change to B properties and in every possible world in which A properties…
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Supervenience and the Illusive Connection Between Physical And Mental Properties.
The problem of exclusion suggests that one or other of the following theses should be abandoned: all non-physical properties depend on physical properties without being reduced to physical properties and all entities that exist are physical entities. In response to the problem many physicalists have subscribed to a form of property dualism or reductive physicalism (eliminativism). Others hold that properties that are non-physical are identical to physical properties yet remain legitimate features for analysis.[1] There are some, however, who have found promising theories that draw on finding coherent ways to analyze the structural relationship between properties. Properties, on their view, are hierarchically arranged, one depending on another, being realized by…
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Things and Stuff and Dirt and Heaven
I have been thinking about things lately. Things that you can touch–physical objects. Most people in the world work with their hands. They make things, fry things, cut things, pick and sell things. And pretty much all people like things. We pick flowers, brew coffee, clean things, and display things so others can see them. A century ago in the west things were less important than ideas. Ideas were like magic – they changed everything, at least the way we understood everything. An idea could permeate every part of existence. A think was more valuable than a thing. Much of my own life has been focused on ideas–thoughts, imaginings, beliefs–or feelings,…
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Notes on James Madden’s “Mind, Matter and Nature”
Are we living in a machine? Mechanism is the view that the fundamental substance of the world exists independently of anything else. It is physical and independent of minds or other psychological properties. It is analyzed according to physical properties, causes and a like. If one is a mechanist one can either be a dualist or a materialist. Either there are entities that operate over and above the material or matter is all there is. Given the weaknesses of both positions, Madden concludes that the issue in question is whether or not mechanism should be assumed. Madden says there is a better alternative and, when applied to the philosophy of…