Hi 3WD,
You wrote (apropos of my choice): > The first statement does not necessarily
lead to the conclusion in parentheses.
Well, I think that it does (the weight in my claim was on the word
'purely'). I may be arguing with a straw man on this point, but if so then
it points up an area where we need to have care with our language. I would
say that emotions (unlike oxygen) carry a cognitive burden, that is they
form part of our intellectual apparatus in themselves, they are not merely
means for supporting the intellectual apparatus. Hence my statement: "It
seems to me that there is a choice, quite a radical difference, between
acknowledging a role for emotions in our intellectual processes (and
therefore ruling out the categorising of emotions as purely biological
phenomena) and treating the intellectual level as autonomous..." If emotions
are 'purely biological' - and therefore not social and not intellectual -
then they can carry no cognitive burden. I don't really want to break into
formal logic, but it seems to me that with those background assumptions, the
conclusion in parentheses does hold. Doesn't it?
I understand the various oppositions to this (the idea that emotions carry a
cognitive burden) to involve saying that the intellectual level, primarily
focussed on logical reasoning, is emotion-free (or is defective in so far is
it is not emotion-free). I think that is a seventeenth-century illusion,
still quite current in our culture, but one whose main elements have broken
down. If that is generally accepted then clearly I have been tilting at
windmills (as I may have been with Platt...)
Sam
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