From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Wed Jan 15 2003 - 04:42:32 GMT
Matt,
>
> Scott said:
> Actually, I don't see where I am begging any question (up to the point
that
> faith takes over). I am arguing that the belief that perception (or
anything
> mental) can be derived from the non-mental requires that the non-mental be
> non-local. This implies that the Darwinist viewpoint is useless to explain
> anything mental.
>
> Matt:
> You're begging the question when you say, "the Darwinist viewpoint is
> useless to explain anything mental." The pragmatist sees that, agrees,
and
> says that's why pragmatists think that Mind, the Mental, and Consciousness
> are all pseudo-problems that lead us back to metaphysics, which is best
> avoided. The pragmatist doesn't want to explain the mental. That's part
> of why she takes the linguistic turn. We stop talking about mind and
start
> talking about sentences. Where you see a problem, the pragmatists don't.
>
Ok, I see your point, except when you say these are pseudo-problems, and by
capitalizing Mind, the Mental and Consciousness. My problem was a real one:
how to describe how people process language (I was a grad student in
Cognitive Science). From my first conclusion (that the belief that
perception (or anything mental) can be derived from the non-mental requires
that the non-mental be non-local), it turns out that it is impossible to
describe how people process language if one continues to assume that the
conventional understanding of perception, space and time is valid. In fact,
one cannot do any study of the mind (note lower case) with that assumption.
So don't you think it is a real problem that great sums of money are spent
in this hopeless pursuit? In other words, you are saying that you are not
interested in questions of the mind, the mental, or consciousness *in the
lower case sense*.
What I find disingenuous is when you say you don't want to be led back to
metaphysics. What you and Rorty are doing is assuming a metaphysical stance
as given and making points from it, and then claiming that "we don't do
metaphysics". Darwinism only makes sense from a materialist perspective.
Rorty's first third of "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" is a defense of
the mind-brain identity hypothesis, a hypothesis which is required if one is
to maintain a materialist metaphysics. He attempts to show that one does not
require an appeal to the immaterial to explain the mental. My argument shows
that -- on first approximation -- one does. Actually, what it shows is that
what makes no sense is the material, which is to say "the conventional view
of perception, space, and time". So my conclusion is that one must throw out
this conventional view if one wants to study human nature, and if we are not
going to study human nature, then we are leaving an awful lot of "things"
out of our philosophy.
- Scott
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