time and again neoclassical adopts an intentional stance vis himself and lilburne, he can’t stop himself ! Teleology is tough to wriggle out of when in an argument with a person.
Do, or do not. There is no ‘try.’" -
– Jedi Master Yoda neoclassical
Nir, could you explain more about “intentional stance” and “teleology”?
[MOD EDIT: PLEASE STICK TO THE RULES.]
the ‘intentional stance’ is modern terminology for adopting a teleological interpretation vis a subject.
teleology comes from the Greek tradition of determining what purpose things are aimed at; but for our purposes this is more straightforwardly the presupposition that agents are precisely agents because they have all this stuff called ‘believing’ ‘acting’ ‘trying’ etc.
Methodological dualism means nothing more than just relying on the mechanistic method for questions concerning the physical sciences, and adopting the alternative strategy of a teleological method for those questions concerning purposeful agents.
Neoclassical: “If you attempt to define “trying” or “choice” as I asked, you might start grappling with the problem I am addressing. Your plea that “but you must know what I mean!” doesn’t work.”
OK, I believe I see the problem now: Neoclassical does not understand the nature of words. A word is nothing more than a communication device. It is a signal that the speaker can only hope is interpreted by the listener as the same concept (or pattern of firing synapses, as it were) that it corresponded to in the speaker’s mind (or same pattern of firing synapses).
One can only suppose others have subjective experiences like one’s own. Having supposed that, one can only try to use words to get the listener to reference those same subjective experiences in themselves. What can be done in the unfortunate situation where the listener either (a) does not experience those particular subjective experiences, or (b) sincerely has no idea which subjective experience the words refers to? I don’t know, maybe just give up, try to use different words, whatever. By if Neoclassical sincerely can’t identify any subjective private sensation that could possiblt correspond with the word “trying,” he’s either being stubborn or is severely confused by words.
It all comes back to the fact that he simply doesn’t seem to understand what words are. Words are not thoughts. Even Pinker, who would say the same, doesn’t in fact fully understand this because he posits “mentalese.” No, thoughts are not any kind of “-ese,” because thoughts - unlike words - are not communication devices for other humans. They have no need to take on a linear-syntactic form. Thoughts have no inferential gap between people to cross.
sigh
Can I please jump in? I hate being misunderstood!
You can incorporate it into the debate posts.
Nope, you can’t!
Neoclassical: “I simply don’t conceive of “trying” the same way you do: as a motivational umph possessed by a self-determining being that acts apart from the causal world.”
I may have been unfair above. What Neoclassical seems to have done instead is imagine that Mises’s theory posits or necessitates anything like “motivational umph”. This kind of misunderstanding of Mises’s ideas seems almost universal. At some point Mises complained that similar notions had “not been understood at all.” What Mises is getting at is indeed very, very subtle. Very hard to explain in words without seeming to imply other things not intended.
Disclaimer: I’m far from being an expert on epistemology or even philosophy in general. Please be gentle. 
Aren’t we just going circles around the idea of “demonstrated preference” at this point?
It seems to me some people might be thinking “Since people value things, they act.” But really, isn’t it the other way around? “Since people act, they demonstrate that they have a preference”. In this sense, something like trying is impled by action.
EDIT: The following cross-out portion was based on a misreading of what Neoclassical wrote, so I retract it. I leave the post below because I believe it will still likely be relevant to the debate. Nevermind, I wasn’t unfair above. Neoclassical seems firmly in the “thoughts are based on propositions” camp. He says he agrees with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_attitude
Verbal propositions are communication devices. Thought cannot be, or be based on, propositions or words at all. It can operate in tandem with words, but that is a different thing entirely. Words are just a habit in most people’s thought. They don’t have enough content to be thoughts, as should really be obvious when you look at it. It’s the interpretation, not the words themselves, that people evaluate when evaluating a proposition.
Light fishes last.
Is this saying that fishes that don’t weigh very much have a long shelf life? Or is it saying that light is an entity that always waits for everyone else to finish their fishing before it starts? Or is it just three words thrown together randomly?
Certainly we can take one meaning (that is, one thought in our own mind that we suppose this string of words corresponds to) and evaluate whether it follows from our beliefs or not. But in the end we cannot help but evaluate a proposed thought or notion, not a proposition.
We speak in terms of propositions for obvious reasons of convenience (we can’t see each other thoughts!), and because it’s often possible to phrase things clearly enough to get most listeners to reliably reproduce a thought that corresponds with what we actually intended to convey.
There have been black dogs in the world.
There is some room for misinterpretation, but by and large we can safely assume that in a sufficiently non-rigorous context people will all think of the same idea when encountering this sentence. When the context gets very fundamental, like we are taking about basic questions of epistemology, all sorts of new ways to misinterpret this sentence arise. At some deep enough level of analysis, words become extremely patchy in their ability to cross the inferential gap separating speaker and listener.
Words are not thoughts. Thoughts are not words. Propositions are only evaluable as interpretations, not as “words.” I have said this many times before, but if it has not been understood I will keep saying it until it is understood. There is nothing more important to understand for a prospective philosopher or political theorist than this.
He says he agrees with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_attitude
i don’t see how he can believe in that since " In being a type o fattitude they imply that a person can have different mental postures towards a proposition, for example, believing, desiring, or hoping, and thus they imply intentionality."
and yet he explicitly denies that there is meaning to the concepts referred to by such things as believing, desiring, or hoping.
I should think that ‘agreeing’ would be beyond him as well.
I dunno, I just saw him say, “I agree totally!”
It is both. They are “logically connected”, not “temporally” connected, if you know what I mean. One doesn’t precede the other; they are just two levels of description of the same thing.
its starting to annoy me when neoclassical demands to know what Grayson ‘believes’, having laughed at the notion as the premise of his position.
He probably thinks the terms of what he calls “folk psychology” aren’t scientific, not also that they aren’t useful as conveniences of ordinary language.
well, if it is perfectly servicable and tractable to forgo such conveniences when searching for truth… surely now is a good time as any to prove it, since he is searching for truth.
(he is not searching for truth. that would be to ascribe an intentional stance to him. )
Neoclassical’s philosophy of eliminative materialism does seem to underpin his thinking and writing, so anyone interested may want to read or skim this article he linked http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/ [Edit: Neoclassical says he’s an eliminative materialist about propositional attitudes. Given that wording, I cannot say whether the following applies to his views.]
Below is an excerpt. To me, this just shows how the whole idea is based on confusing propositions for thoughts, or as being the basis for thoughts. When you do that, you get all sorts of weird paradoxes, like the liar paradox, Curry’s paradox, Moore’s paradox, etc. Kick the word habit and these paradoxes evaporate. Excerpt from the link:
One final argument against eliminative materialism comes from the recent writings of a former supporter, Stephen Stich (1991, 1996). Stich’s argument is somewhat complex, but it can be presented in outline form here. Earlier we saw that eliminative materialism is committed to the claim that the posits of folk psychology fail to refer to anything. But as Stich points out, just what this claim amounts to is far from clear. For example, we might think that reference failure occurs as the result of some degree of mismatch between reality and the theory in which the posit is embedded. But there is no clear consensus on how much of a mismatch is necessary before we can say a given posit doesn’t exist. Stich offers a variety of reasons for thinking that there are fundamental difficulties that will plague any attempt to provide principled criteria for distinguishing cases of reference success from cases of reference failure. Consequently, the question of whether a theory change should be ontologically conservative or radical has no clear answer. Because eliminative materialism rests on the assumption that folk psychology should be replaced in a way that is ontologically radical, Stich’s account pulls the rug out from under the eliminativist. Of course, this is a problem for the folk psychology realist as well as the eliminativist, since Stich’s skeptical argument challenges our grounds for distinguishing the two.
Concluding Remarks
Eliminative materialism entails unsettling consequences not just about our conception of the mind, but also about the nature of morality, action, social and legal conventions, and practically every other aspect of human activity. As Jerry Fodor puts it, “if commonsense psychology were to collapse, that would be, beyond comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species …” (1987, p. xii). Thus, eliminative materialism has stimulated various projects partly designed to vindicate ordinary mental states and establish their respectability in a sophisticated account of the mind. For example, several projects pursued by philosophers in recent years have attempted to provide a reductive account of the semantic content of propositional attitudes that is entirely naturalistic (i.e., an account that only appeals to straightforward causal-physical relations and properties). Much of the impetus for these projects stems in part from the recognition that eliminative materialism cannot be as easily dismissed as earlier writers, like C. D. Broad, had originally assumed.
Of course, some claim that these concerns are quite premature, given the promissory nature of eliminative materialism. After all, a pivotal component of the eliminativist perspective is the idea that the correct theory of the mind, once discovered by psychologists, will not reveal a system or structure that includes anything like common-sense mental states. Thus, for eliminative materialism to get off the ground, we need to assume that scientific psychology is going to turn out a certain way. But why suppose that before scientific psychology gets there? What is the point of drawing such a drastic conclusion about the nature of mentality, when a central premise needed for that conclusion is a long ways from being known?
One response an eliminativist might offer here would be to consider the broader theoretical roles eliminative materialism can play in our quest for a successful theory of the mind. Various writers have stipulated necessary conditions that any theory of the mind must meet, and on some accounts these conditions include the explication of various mental states as understood by common sense. According to this view, if a theory doesn’t include states that correspond with beliefs, or provide us with some sort of account of the nature of consciousness, then it needn’t be taken seriously as a complete account of “real” mental phenomena. One virtue of eliminative materialism is that it liberates our theorizing from this restrictive perspective. Thus, the relationship between eliminative materialism and science may be more reciprocal than many have assumed. While it is true that eliminative materialism depends upon the development of a radical scientific theory of the mind, radical theorizing about the mind may itself rest upon our taking seriously the possibility that our common sense perspective may be profoundly mistaken.
I’m going to go out drinking, so I won’t be able to debate or comment for a while. This is the most compelling set of discussions I’ve been in for a long time. Great fun, everyone discussing is really smart, pretty patient, and understands the need to define terms. Only thing is I feel like an addict, clicking “Show Unread Posts” compulsively with bloodshot eyes.
Off to the bars with me!!