7m11s - I would argue that Mary's experience is physical. She is experiencing the physical reaction of her eyes to colour wavelengths, and the physical reaction of her brain to that. Even if she knew the details of those reactions, language is not comprehensive enough to convey the feelings of an experience, and so academic research cannot be, either.
So, does she learn something new or not? I didn't fully understand what you said. I think you concluded that she doesn't learn something new, but I'm not sure.
The distinction between application intuitions and intuitions about the world looks correct. It doesn't look like there could ba a way forward in moral philosophy without addressing intuitions. Whereas it does look like philosophy of time and philosophy of science can do fine without intuitions - or at least without intuitions playing a key role.
Scott B Huh, I'm not convinced part of conceptual analysis is discovering the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a concept. So I guess it is world involving in that sense. That looks to be very different from some types of thought experiments in phil mind. The "Marry" thought experiment is one case yes, but it wasn't what I had in mind. Mostly, I think its a bad thought experiment that doesn't even prove what it claims to prove. The thought experiments I had in mind were the "P Zombies" and the "China Room" thought experiments. If we take philosophical zombies seriously, our intuition tells us that it is metaphysically possible to separate mental states from physical states. Therefor dualism? I deny we have any reason to suppose our intuitions have a connection to model possibility in this case. The "P Zombie" thought experiment isn't a form of conceptual analysis it asks us to directly judge whether physical state are sufficient for (causes of or identical to) mental states. I understand that intuitions about plausibility can't be dispensed with in either philosophy or science, but I do think philosophers sometimes put too much stock in them.
Scott B I'm not sure just how much we are disagreeing here. But I do want to press a few points. When I say that conceptual analysis is about finding the necessary and sufficient conditions for concept application I do acknowledge that these concepts are applied to the world. However, I want to push back against the idea that we have reformed or re-calibrated our concept because of Gettier cases as you say in paragraph 1. I think the model of reasoning looks like this. 1. We have a concept "knowledge" which we want to understand. 2. We have a hypothesis about the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge which we want to test. 3. We find a case of "knowledge" attribution which is prima facie correct - because we have to presuppose we've acquired the target concept well enough to ask the question, but yet this case challenges our definition or criteria. 4. We have modus tollens from the argument "if JTB is sufficient for knowledge then case G is knowledge." Case G is not knowledge therefor JTB is not sufficient for knowledge. In other words it is our hypothesis about the criteria for "knowledge"which changes and not the concept of "knowledge." I take it that not all concepts can be plugged into this type of argument. Some concepts are fuzzy, and we may not have strict inclusion exclusion criteria. The zombie and Mary arguments look very different. To me the arguments look something like this: 1. We have some mental model about the nature of mind we want to test. 2. We create a thought experiment about some woman in a black and white room and her experience of finally seeing "red." Or perhaps we think of P Zombies. 3. Based on this thought experiment we intuit that there is some consequence which confirms our mental model. 4. Via inference to the best explanation we conclude that our pet theory about the mental is correct. This type of reasoning looks very different from the first form. I'm concerned that some conceivability arguments smuggle in the theory of mind they are supposed to be testing in order to generate the intuitions. Whereas the Gettier cases look for disconfirming instances. P.s. I'd be interested in talking about "Mary's Room" if you want to, but I recognize you only have so much time to spend arguing on the internet.
_Mr Ian, I would love to interview you if you are interested. Are you available to talk over the phone? I feel a great wave of potency arising from your general direction, and, like a breeze on a hot day, I welcome it._
Is it possible to respond to Goldman's criticism of intuitions as a reliable source of knowledge, by referring to the evolutionary process and saying that if our intuitions were competently off-base they would not have been selected by natural selection?
Subconscious Qualms I don't specialize in philosophy of science or philosophy of biology, but I doubt it. evolution doesn't breed for an acurate perception of reality. it breeds for survival and reproduction. these are often not the same. it means you should overestimate danger and reproductive interest while underestimating things like food security
I mean if one were to adopt the Peircean theory of truth, then it seems to me that the aforementioned argument will logically follow. doesn't it? (ps. I might be completely wrong on this)
It's an interesting idea, but there are a couple of problems. First, if being disposed to have false beliefs in certain respects will improve the chance of survival and reproduction, selection will favour those false beliefs. You might want to look up psychological research on "naive physics". It turns out that our intuitions about how physics works are systematically wrong in various ways, and this possibly is a result of selection favouring a view of the world that is wrong but useful. Similarly, we might think that selection is likely to have produced misleading intuitions about philosophical cases. A good example might be moral intuitions - I discuss a popular evolutionary argument against the reliability of moral intuitions in my video on moral error theory, at about 29:45: ruclips.net/video/MbTcXDMyFrA/видео.htmlm45s Second, even if we think that selection produces reliable beliefs, many philosophers appeal to intuitions about totally bizarre cases. Philosophers will develop thought experiments that have very little relation to the day-to-day problems that were faced by our ancestors. So showing that selection produces accurate intuitions *in general* doesn't really answer the sceptical arguments - we need to show that selection produces accurate intuitions of the specific sorts that are used by philosophers.
7m11s - I would argue that Mary's experience is physical. She is experiencing the physical reaction of her eyes to colour wavelengths, and the physical reaction of her brain to that. Even if she knew the details of those reactions, language is not comprehensive enough to convey the feelings of an experience, and so academic research cannot be, either.
So, does she learn something new or not? I didn't fully understand what you said. I think you concluded that she doesn't learn something new, but I'm not sure.
The distinction between application intuitions and intuitions about the world looks correct. It doesn't look like there could ba a way forward in moral philosophy without addressing intuitions. Whereas it does look like philosophy of time and philosophy of science can do fine without intuitions - or at least without intuitions playing a key role.
Scott B Huh, I'm not convinced part of conceptual analysis is discovering the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a concept. So I guess it is world involving in that sense. That looks to be very different from some types of thought experiments in phil mind. The "Marry" thought experiment is one case yes, but it wasn't what I had in mind. Mostly, I think its a bad thought experiment that doesn't even prove what it claims to prove.
The thought experiments I had in mind were the "P Zombies" and the "China Room" thought experiments. If we take philosophical zombies seriously, our intuition tells us that it is metaphysically possible to separate mental states from physical states. Therefor dualism? I deny we have any reason to suppose our intuitions have a connection to model possibility in this case. The "P Zombie" thought experiment isn't a form of conceptual analysis it asks us to directly judge whether physical state are sufficient for (causes of or identical to) mental states.
I understand that intuitions about plausibility can't be dispensed with in either philosophy or science, but I do think philosophers sometimes put too much stock in them.
Scott B I'm not sure just how much we are disagreeing here. But I do want to press a few points. When I say that conceptual analysis is about finding the necessary and sufficient conditions for concept application I do acknowledge that these concepts are applied to the world. However, I want to push back against the idea that we have reformed or re-calibrated our concept because of Gettier cases as you say in paragraph 1. I think the model of reasoning looks like this.
1. We have a concept "knowledge" which we want to understand.
2. We have a hypothesis about the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge which we want to test.
3. We find a case of "knowledge" attribution which is prima facie correct - because we have to presuppose we've acquired the target concept well enough to ask the question, but yet this case challenges our definition or criteria.
4. We have modus tollens from the argument "if JTB is sufficient for knowledge then case G is knowledge." Case G is not knowledge therefor JTB is not sufficient for knowledge.
In other words it is our hypothesis about the criteria for "knowledge"which changes and not the concept of "knowledge." I take it that not all concepts can be plugged into this type of argument. Some concepts are fuzzy, and we may not have strict inclusion exclusion criteria.
The zombie and Mary arguments look very different. To me the arguments look something like this:
1. We have some mental model about the nature of mind we want to test.
2. We create a thought experiment about some woman in a black and white room and her experience of finally seeing "red." Or perhaps we think of P Zombies.
3. Based on this thought experiment we intuit that there is some consequence which confirms our mental model.
4. Via inference to the best explanation we conclude that our pet theory about the mental is correct.
This type of reasoning looks very different from the first form. I'm concerned that some conceivability arguments smuggle in the theory of mind they are supposed to be testing in order to generate the intuitions. Whereas the Gettier cases look for disconfirming instances.
P.s. I'd be interested in talking about "Mary's Room" if you want to, but I recognize you only have so much time to spend arguing on the internet.
_Mr Ian, I would love to interview you if you are interested. Are you available to talk over the phone? I feel a great wave of potency arising from your general direction, and, like a breeze on a hot day, I welcome it._
we should be skeptical about some intuitions but we shouldn`t be skeptical about the rests
Is it possible to respond to Goldman's criticism of intuitions as a reliable source of knowledge, by referring to the evolutionary process and saying that if our intuitions were competently off-base they would not have been selected by natural selection?
Subconscious Qualms I don't specialize in philosophy of science or philosophy of biology, but I doubt it. evolution doesn't breed for an acurate perception of reality. it breeds for survival and reproduction. these are often not the same. it means you should overestimate danger and reproductive interest while underestimating things like food security
I mean if one were to adopt the Peircean theory of truth, then it seems to me that the aforementioned argument will logically follow. doesn't it? (ps. I might be completely wrong on this)
It's an interesting idea, but there are a couple of problems. First, if being disposed to have false beliefs in certain respects will improve the chance of survival and reproduction, selection will favour those false beliefs. You might want to look up psychological research on "naive physics". It turns out that our intuitions about how physics works are systematically wrong in various ways, and this possibly is a result of selection favouring a view of the world that is wrong but useful. Similarly, we might think that selection is likely to have produced misleading intuitions about philosophical cases. A good example might be moral intuitions - I discuss a popular evolutionary argument against the reliability of moral intuitions in my video on moral error theory, at about 29:45:
ruclips.net/video/MbTcXDMyFrA/видео.htmlm45s
Second, even if we think that selection produces reliable beliefs, many philosophers appeal to intuitions about totally bizarre cases. Philosophers will develop thought experiments that have very little relation to the day-to-day problems that were faced by our ancestors. So showing that selection produces accurate intuitions *in general* doesn't really answer the sceptical arguments - we need to show that selection produces accurate intuitions of the specific sorts that are used by philosophers.
Wow that's a very thorough response. thanks
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