Shadowing Practice: Noam Chomsky on Philosophy of Mind - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Noam Chomsky is the principal architect of generative linguistics and has been the driving force in recent evolutions of the theory, including in the development of the principles and parameters framework,
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which one commentator has described as, quote, the first really novel approach to language in the last two and a half thousand years.
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Professor Chomsky has also been a key figure in the development of the cognitive sciences generally, indeed the most important figure in their development, according to Harvard's Howard Gardner.
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He is perhaps most famous for his writings and lectures on international politics and in media theory.
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It is less well known, however, that Professor Chomsky has been an important figure in Anglo -American philosophy over the last 50 years,
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and that he has been a key interlocutor with all the leading philosophers of language and mind within that tradition.
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He's had lively exchanges with, for example, Willard Van Orman Quine, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, Saul Kripke,
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John Searle, Michael Dummett, and now a new generation of philosophers.
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And I guess the first question has to be the following.
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Given everything that's on your plate, why do you bother with the philosophers?
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That's the most fascinating topic of all.
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That's what I grew up with and still I'm obsessed with.
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Why do you think other linguists are not, or in general, other scientists don't seem to be as engaged with the philosophical community?
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Well, scientists tend, I think, to be involved in their own technical problems,
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and often don't think much about, you know, what it's about.
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So, like, I mean, I've had, I, for many years, taught courses in these questions, and would have students read,
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say, Quine's papers, in which he argues that everything they're doing is complete, what he called, folly, you know, and he gives arguments saying,
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you can't possibly do it this way.
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The students will read the papers, but then go back to doing, and say, yeah, kind of interesting,
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and then go back to doing exactly the same work that they've just read is folly and can't be done, and so on and so forth.
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And I think that's not unusual.
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If you read the scientific literature, there's a lot of expressed contempt for what philosophers have to say about this.
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So you'll read somebody working on the neurophysiology of consciousness big hot topic, and there'll be an obligatory first couple of paragraphs saying,
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well, the philosophers have muddled this up for centuries, but now we'll show how it's done,
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but with no engagement in the arguments that have been given or the thinking behind it.
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Does it trouble you that, say, most other linguists don't engage philosophers on these issues?
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It troubles me.
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Not so much that, I mean, it's connected to a deeper problem.
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I think it should trouble us that we're not thinking about what we're up to.
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And those questions happen to be the domain of what philosophers pay attention to.
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Right.
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Let's turn to some of these philosophers and some of the things that they've said.
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And the first one I want to look at is the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam.
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In the mid-'70s, he wrote a paper called The Meaning of Meaning, which is very influential.
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And I guess the key slogan that came out of that is that meanings just ain't in the head.
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Agree, disagree, or is that just incoherent?
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It's incoherent without further explanation.
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First, you have to tell us what meanings are.
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You can't decide whether they're in the head or not until we know what they are.
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If, by meanings, we have in mind what people have in mind when they're using the word in English, then, sure, they're not in the head.
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They're all over the place.
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Talk about the meaning of life.
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It's not in the head.
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If you have some more technical notion in mind, you've got to explain what it is.
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And there it's a matter of choice.
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You can define the technical notion so that it's in the head or so that it's not in the head.
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When you define technical notions, you have a choice.
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The way it's done in the sciences, and the way it ought to be done, is you define a technical notion in the context of an explanatory theory.
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You don't just define a technical notion out in space.
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So let's ask what's the explanatory theory in
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which we're going to give a technical notion which will pronounce meaning or pronounce it some other way.
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And then we'll ask whether that theory is a sensible theory
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and does it.. place this technical concept in the head or not.
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But all that extra work hasn't been done.
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Why can't we say there's just a pre -theoretical notion of meaning, and what we want to do is try and elucidate or persisify it in some way or other?
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Yeah, you could do that, but there's a million ways of doing it.
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So what about the meaning of life, for example?
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That's part of the pre -theoretical notion. Is it? Is it?
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Sure it is.
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I mean, I thought people talk about the meaning of...
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What's the meaning of life all the time?
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Yeah, and you think that's the same notion of meaning as when you say, what's the meaning of the word?
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No, there's thousands.
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You know, it's a huge range of things.
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What did he mean by saying so -and -so usually has to do with what was his intention, you know, or something like that.
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So part of the pre -theoretical meaning has to do with people's intentions.
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In fact, when you talk about the meaning of a word, that's a rather English -specific locution.
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And we could focus on that if we like.
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And if you want, you can try to clarify it.
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But again, to try to clarify a pre -theoretical notion makes sense within the framework of an effort to understand something, to an explanatory account.
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Well, suppose we go with the following attempt to clarify, or at least introduction of a piece of technical terminology,
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which is philosophers will talk about the content of a mental state or the content of some sort of expression.
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Is that helpful?
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No, because content is a technical notion.
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It's not being used in the sense of the ordinary concept content.
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And by now, since Putnam, in fact, and Kripke and others, it's typically used to refer to something out there.
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So the content of expression is not in the head by definition, because we've defined it to be not in the head.
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Right.
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Then the question is, well, does that have anything to do with our notions of.. does Does
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that have anything to do with our understanding of the way language works and is used?
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Okay, that's the question.
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You can certainly...
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I think it has very little to do with it.
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Well, suppose we thought of it this way.
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Suppose we thought of the enterprise being sketched in the following way.
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There are two ways in which you might study primates, for example.
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You might study primate anatomy, in which case you're just concerned about, you know, bones and muscles and tendons and so forth.
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And then you might also study primate ecology, in which case you're studying the relation between the primate and its environment.
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And I take it that what these philosophers are talking about here
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when they talk about external content is
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that they're saying a part of talk about meaning has to be analyzed in terms of thinking about the organism,
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the human organism, in relation to its environment, right?
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It has to if you want to study the relation between the human organism and its environment.
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And that's fine.
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There's nothing wrong with studying the human organism and its environment.
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That's what sociologists are doing all the time.
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But you have to do it seriously.
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If you want to do it seriously, you ask...
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First of all, let's go back to primates.
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When you study primates in their ecology, you don't just look at the anatomy of primates.
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You look at the physiology of primates, the, you know, what you might call mental processes of primates, I mean, the way they seem to be interpreting the world,
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the perceptual abilities of primates.
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In fact, what you try to do is exploit to the extent you can what we know about an individual ape, you know, a chimpanzee.
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So you want to know what do we understand about that ape?
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And that information we will bring to bear in the study of how the ape interacts with other apes
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and with the rest of the environment and so on.
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That's the way it's done with primates or with ants or anyone else.
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And I think that's the way it ought to be done with humans.
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So we should ask, okay, well, what do we understand about the internal nature of the creature that's doing all these things?
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And to the extent that we understand something about that, we can ask sensible questions about how it interacts with the external world,
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with other people, and so on and so forth.
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Do you think that could potentially inform the sort of internalist investigation as well?
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Sure, because there's no order.
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You can study the sociology of ape communities, and that could tell you something important about the internal thinking processes of apes, or even their internal anatomy.
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And vice versa, presumably.
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Yeah, sure.
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Science goes all the ways.
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Here's another technical term that's been used, reference.
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You consider that to be incoherent as well?
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Well, until it's explained, it's incoherent.
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Once it's explained, then it becomes non -incoherent.
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You see, one thing I've never quite understood is exactly what the problem is with reference, because, I mean, I can say, well, okay, now I'm referring to this coffee cup.
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That's different.
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Okay, I can quote...
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It's quite different.
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Okay.
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You're talking about an action of referring.
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Right.
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That's a common sense notion.
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It's part of English in every language I know of.
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There's some way to talk about such actions.
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But what philosophers have introduced is a different notion, a notion that's supposed to hold between a linguistic entity and something in the world.
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Now that's not referring.
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Referring is an act that people do.
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Well, yeah, this is the point that goes back to Strassen, right?
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People pointed this out 50 years ago, but I mean it goes way back.
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And it's just a fact.
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Okay, so let's take this...
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Now, if you want to make up a technical term which you pronounce the same way, first of all, it's questionable that you should pronounce it the same way because it's misleading.
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But if you do, let's at least keep clear that it's a technical term, kind of like physicists use energy.
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You know, they don't mean it the way we do in ordinary language.
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They mean it the way they say they mean it.
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So let's take the technical term refer or denote
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or whatever you want to call it and tell us what it's supposed to,
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tell us what you mean by it and tell us what explanatory theory it enters into.
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So when a physicist defines energy, you're not interested in the definition.
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You're interested in the set of principles and assumptions and problems
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and so on within which that technical concept is introduced and then you look and see how good the theory is.
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Well, here we don't have any theory, and we don't even have an explanation of what the technical notion is, so it's impossible to talk about it.
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Yeah, I think it might be a mistake to think of it as a technical notion.
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I mean, I think it's just a sort of persistified way of describing certain basic core -level facts, right?
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So, for example, I might say, well, once you understand that people refer to things and so forth, it's not a hard step to say,
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well, okay, certain names are canonically used to refer to certain things and certain individuals.
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So the name Noam Chomsky, I mean, I can ask the people, I can ask the audience here, what person in this room does that term refer to, and no one's going to have trouble?
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What do you use that term when you refer to something in the world?
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That you can ask.
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But when you ask what the term refers to, you're assuming that there is a relation between terms and things.
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And then you have to explain what that relation is, because that's a new one.
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We don't have that in ordinary language.
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And in fact, I think it's leading us off into a wrong picture, as Wittgenstein would have called it.
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It's leading us to a picture of language, which is...we know what it's based on.
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I mean, it's based on things like Frege's, you know, the theory of arithmetic, and it's just the wrong picture for language, I think.
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Let me...I want to change directions briefly.
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We may actually end up being sucked back into this issue you.
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Donald Davidson, in a paper called A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs, said, or basically argued that there's no such thing as language.
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And I've always sort of thought that you probably, you may not want to admit it, but on some level or the other, you probably agree with that, right?
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No. In fact, I think he ended up contradicting himself.
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I think there's some discussion of it in here or somewhere.
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If you look at the end of the paper, it turns out he's presupposing that there is a notion of language in the technical sense,
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a technical sense of an internal generative procedure that relates sounds and meanings and so on.
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He says there's no notion of language in another sense, the sense of some community property or whatever.
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Well, okay, first of all, I don't even think that's true.
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It's just, it's not a scientifically usable sense.
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But I think the paper is just rife with confusions.
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I've written about it.
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So you think there are such things as languages?
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Yeah, like there's such things as the meaning of life.
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And I understand it when people ask what's the meaning of life.
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So yeah, there's such a thing as the meaning of life.
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There's such a thing as the financial crisis in Argentina.
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You know, there are all kinds of things in the world, but if you want to proceed to understand what you and I are doing, those notions just don't help.
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You've got to look at it differently, the way we look at primates, other primates, in fact.
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Well, let me read a quote from something you wrote recently, okay?
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You say, I doubt that people think that among the constituents of the world are entities that are simultaneously abstract and concrete,
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like books and banks, or that have the amalgam of properties we discover
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when we explore the meanings of even the simplest words like river, person, city, etc. et cetera.
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You think the average person doesn't believe in the city?
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That's a technical question.
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Okay.
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It's a question if you try to figure out what a person's folk science is, you know, how people think the world is actually constituted of entities,
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which is not, do I talk about books?
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Of course, we talk about books.
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We talk about the meaning of life and so on.
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Right.
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But if you ask people, well, you know, how do you think the world really works?
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That's the problem of ethnoscience.
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Right.
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Like you go to some other community
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and you try to figure out what's their idea about how
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the world works like maybe the classical Greeks thought Apollo pulls the Sun through the sky
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or something that's their folk scientific picture of how the world
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works that's a hard topic you can't just do armchair philosophy
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about it that's why ethno scientists have to work you know
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and when they work what they find if I think if they worked on people like us, instead of just talking about it in a, you know, in the common room,
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they would discover that our folk science, yours and mine, does not include entities that are simultaneously abstract and concrete,
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and does not include entities like the meaning of life.
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That doesn't mean we can't talk about them.
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Sure, we talk about them all the time, but we don't, at least I don't, and I presume other people don't,
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think of them as constituents of the way the world operates these are we don't do
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that when we're talking to each other informally now
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that sounds a little bit more moderate than than what you've said elsewhere
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here's a passage from I believe this is from New Horizons
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we say in the domain where questions of realism arise in
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a serious way in the context of the search for laws
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of nature objects are not conceived from the peculiar perspectives provided by the concepts of common sense.
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That's absolutely right, but there's several different enterprises that you have to distinguish here.
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I don't think it's more or less moderate, it's about a different topic.
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When you're trying to understand something about the nature of the world, you and I, anybody, you start with some kind of what's called folk science.
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Almost every society we know has some picture of the way the world works, which is more or less commonly shared.
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If you try to do this more reflectively and carefully, and bringing in other criteria,
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and probably bringing in other cognitive faculties, we don't know that for sure, but I suspect it, then it becomes the enterprise of science,
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which is a different enterprise, and a peculiar one.
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It's not folk science.
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It's science.
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That works in other ways.
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This comment has to do with our culture in which the enterprise of science is understood, our intellectual culture.
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And in that, when we try to find out how the world works, we discard the concepts of common sense very quickly.
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But it sounds to me here like what you're saying is that the only things that are real, right, are the things that science tells us are real.
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So it sounds like what you're saying here is that, well, this table isn't real, but maybe, you know, quarks and things.
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Real is an honorific term.
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Okay.
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You can use it any way you like.
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I mean, if I say something is true and then I add, well, it's the real truth, I'm not saying there are two different kinds of truth,
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the truth and the real truth.
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I'm just emphasizing what I said.
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And the term real is basically used honorifically.
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So, yeah, you can use it honorifically in various ways.
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If we're trying to find out the way the world works and to really understand it in the manner of the sciences, we very quickly give up common sense notions.
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If we're carrying out folk science, you know, less reflectively, probably using different cognitive faculties,
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we also give up common sense notions, but in different ways.
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Well, you can say a lot of...
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I mean, claims about something being honorific, like real being honorific.
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I mean, Alan Gibbard, for example, has argued that terms like rational are honorific, or moral are honorific.
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Well, I don't agree with that.
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I think real is quite different.
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But what's the difference in these cases, then?
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Because I think rationality is something that we can understand, and morality is something real and it's part of us, and we can try to figure out what it is.
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We can try to figure out what our moral faculties are.
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We understand something about what rational action is.
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But about reality, we have to ask what we're talking about.
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I mean, if we're talking about reality in the enterprise of trying to
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discover the way the world works in a physics department or a linguistics department or whatever, common sense notions are irrelevant.
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If we're trying to explore our intuitive understanding of the way the world works, common sense notions are relevant but we discard them if you have
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if you're using it in a more informal way like is
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the meaning of life uh real yeah sure okay well look there's a there's a sort of space between ethnoscience
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and science right and common sense and all of those
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and it's been explored by philosophers for for 2 500 years and it's called metaphysics right no that's different okay that
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is a question about what ethnoscience is a branch of science right ethnoscience is the branch of science
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that tries to figure out what people's beliefs are about the way the world works.
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Metaphysics is not that.
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I understand that, but do you think that metaphysics is impossible?
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No, science is metaphysics.
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Okay, good.
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It's talking about what the world is made of.
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But then the question is, why do you think that science gets to claim what's real?
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Now, let me give you an example.
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So in the scientific image, Basvan Frasen is a scientific anti -realist.
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So he says, the things Things posited by science, quarks, et cetera, are not real, but mid -sized Earth -bound objects are real.
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Now, you've got the flip side of that, right?
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I don't have any side, because I don't think the word real is sensible enough to use.
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And they're all real in different senses.
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If you're trying to understand the way the world actually works, whether you're Bas van Fraassen or you or me, we're going to go to the scientists,
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because they tell us how the world really works.
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If we're interested in exploring people's common sense beliefs, we'll go to the ethnoscientists and see what they discover.
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What if we're interested in something like whether there are events or whether there are properties or whether there are...
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Muralogical sums or something.
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Well, let's take events, which plays a prominent role in modern semantics.
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So here you can ask a lot of different questions.
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For one thing, you can ask whether in, say, Davidsonian semantics, where there's a lot of.. or anything that developed from an event -based semantics,
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whether the things.. whether what are called events are internal to the mind or outside the head.
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Right.
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I think they're internal to the mind.
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Can't they be both?
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Well, they could, but then we're asking another question.
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Right.
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If we're asking, well, how do these things that are internal to the mind relate to something in the outside world, we'll say, okay, let's take a look at what you mean by an event.
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So, for example, is the American Revolution an event?
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Yeah, it was an important event in history.
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Does that event include the fact that the man who the indigenous population called the town destroyer
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took off a little time in the middle of the revolution to destroy the Iroquois civilization? civilization.
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Is that part of the event called the American Revolution?
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Well, not when you study it in school.
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You want to find out about that event, you've got to, probably the Iroquois remember, the ones who were left, or you've got to look at serious scholarly history.
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Then you find out that one part of what was going on in the event
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that we call the American Revolution was a side operation in 1979 to wipe out the Iroquois civilization
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so that colonies could expand if they got rid of the British.
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Well, is that part of the event or isn't it?
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Well, you know, here come hard questions about what we're really going to call events in the outside world.
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And those questions don't have answers because they are, you know, they're highly dependent on our interests,
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our perspective, our goals, you know, all kinds of factors.
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So I don't think we're going to find external events in
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any sense worth pursuing for investigation Why can't these external events just be complicated objects?
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It can be anything you like, but is the town destroyers exploit part of the American Revolution, or isn't it? That event?
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Well, you know, it's your choice.
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There's no answer to that.
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Yeah, but now it sounds like you're saying that, well, I have representations of events.
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Right.
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The representations are real.
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No, I have representations.
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You have representations.
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I have representations, some of which we informally call events.
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Right.
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Right.
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But now one might ask, what on earth is a representation that's not a representation of something?
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Well, see, that's a mistake that comes from a philosophical tradition.
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The way the term represent is used in the philosophical tradition, it's a relation between an internal object and an external object.
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Exactly.
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It's not the way it's used either in ordinary speech or in the sciences.
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So when a perceptual psychologist, say, talks about an internal representation of, you know, a cube or something,
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there doesn't have to be any cube there.
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They're talking about something that's going on in the head.
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In fact, what they may be studying, and usually are studying, is a relation between things like tachystoscopic presentations and internal events.
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There's no cube.
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But nevertheless, they talk about it as an internal representation.
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I mean, the concept internal...there's a long discussion of that in here.
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The concept internal representation is used in the sciences, and I think that's ordinary speech too,
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in ways which don't involve a relation between an internal thing and an external thing.
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I mean, that derives from a particular interpretation of the theory of ideas, which said, well, ideas represent something out there.
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I should interject here.
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Incidentally, I should say that that's not the interpretation of the theory of ideas were given by the people who used it.
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So like, say, Hume, for example.
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I quote him in there.
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He raises a serious empirical question.
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He says, it's about the nature of, the terms he uses, the identity that we ascribe to things,
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meaning how do we individuate things.
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And he asks the question, well, is this a peculiar nature common to the thing
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or is it what he calls fictitious a construction of the mind right
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and he says fictitious there is no entity there is no
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common nature there's no nature common to the thing there is a construction of the mind
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which we used to talk about the world
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but he's not many things I mean he was not an
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idealist he was not an idealist not here he's saying we
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interact he believes there's an external world out there there's a coffee cup on the table
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and so on but he says that the he's talking about the individuation of things, how we organize things, how we construct our picture of the world.
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And that involves the way our minds work.
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And that doesn't mean the world isn't there, you know.
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It's just what his predecessors called our cognoscative powers, which use the data of sense to construct an account of the world.
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And he's saying, well, you want to look at the identity of things, the identity that we ascribe to things, like what makes us call something a book or an event and so on.
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He's saying, well, it's fictitious in the sense that it's a construction of the mind based on the dative sense.
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That's not an idealist position.
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In fact, that's the position of modern science.
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Because people will call you a crypto -idealist.
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Well, then they're misunderstanding what idealism is.
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There's an issue that I wanted to get to here,
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and this involves the thing we mentioned about representations and whether representation requires there being something that it is a representation of.
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Now, in a very important and somewhat influential book by Saul Kripke, there's a revival of the sort of Wittgensteinian argument about rule following.
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Let me just read the relevant passage here.
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So in that book, Kripke says, if statements attributing rule following are neither to be regarded as stating facts nor to be thought of explaining or behavior,
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it would seem that the use of the idea of rules
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and competence in linguistics needs serious reconsideration even if these notions are not rendered meaningless.
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I know you've written on that in Knowledge of Language.
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The crucial word is if, and the fact is that in the sense in which the term rule is used for thousands of years,
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in fact, in the study of language, it's not the kind of rule he had in mind.
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So if you read a book, you know, you study Latin, let's say, or you studied it a thousand years ago,
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they would have a rule that tells you when to use the ablative case or something.
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That's not a rule in Wittgenstein's sense.
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It's a description of a part of the language.
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So the questions about rule following just don't arise.
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But we don't need to get hung up on rules and so forth.
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Well, but that's what he's talking about.
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I understand that.
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But in a certain sense, he's talking about any sort of computational state.
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So take just a computer.
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Forget about human beings for a second.
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See, computers are a different story.
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Let's take an insect.
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Why aren't these questions asked about insects?
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I mean, insects, when you study insects, you attribute to them computational states.
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Is that a problem?
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I mean, is it not real?
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Like, if you say
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that an insect is determining the position of the sun as a function of the time of year and time of day,
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and here's the computation it's using, why isn't that science?
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That would be, but the argument would be
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that the reason you can get away with that is
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because you're talking about the representations that you're attributing to the insect are externalistically anchored.
387
That is, you couldn't do it unless you had an embedded system.
388
That's not true.
389
You could do it in an experimental situation in which you have a light, and in fact, if you knew how to do it, you could do it by stimulating the external sensory organs of the insect.
390
It would all be interior.
391
There doesn't have to be a sun there.
392
It's just that, yeah, you're talking about the way it happens actually in the real world, But the same thing, you would say the same thing in an experimental setting where you don't have an external world.
393
Because you're talking about the internal construct computations of the insect on the occasion of sense.
394
It doesn't matter what's out there that's giving sense.
395
Notice the shift there, though, because you went from saying you don't need the sun in
396
the experimental setting to saying you could run the experiment in a world that didn't have the sun.
397
And that's a different story, right? it's not a different story.
398
The point is, if you look at what insect scientists are studying,
399
they're studying what 17th century philosophers used to call the constructions of the mind on the occasion of sense.
400
Now, it happens that in the world that they're looking at, the occasions of sense happen to be related to the fact that there's something 93 million miles away.
401
But the study could go on as if it's what Hillary called a brain in a vat.
402
And the studies are internalist.
403
because we don't want anything else to study.
404
But this is disputed, right?
405
I mean, there is this dispute about David Marr, right?
406
I mean, there's two stories on this.
407
Tyler Burge and Martin Davis, for example, argue that Marr is sort of fraught with externalists, sort of.
408
Yeah, but they're just misreading him.
409
I mean, in fact, I have to know Marr personally, but I'm sure if he was here he would say this.
410
If you look at the informal exposition in Marr, in Marr's vision, let's say, book vision, You look at the informal exposition,
411
in order to motivate what he's doing, he says, well, you know, imagine, you know, an elephant or something or anything like a stick figure.
412
And you're trying to, we want to know how that thing out there is interpreted by the visual system as, you know, some three -dimensional object.
413
However, if you look at the experiment, the experimental procedures of Maher, they didn't have elephants out there.
414
In fact, what they were using was tachistoscopes.
415
And so they were having, you know, dots on screens.
416
And if they had known how to stimulate the optic nerve,
417
they would have that when you go from the informal exposition to the actual science you see
418
that like everything else it's a study of the internal nature of the beast
419
and in fact you know
420
and they would have loved to get to the point where
421
they could tell you something about how you identify a you know an elephant
422
but they're never going anywhere near that however even
423
if they did it wouldn't matter whether the elephant is there
424
or not it would matter what sensory what's the occasion of sense Again, the 17th century formulation of this was, I think, quite appropriate.
425
On the occasion of sense, the cognoscative, it sounds archaic,
426
but the cognoscative powers of the mind construct complicated internal structures which have all sorts of properties,
427
gestalt properties, what Hume later called the identity that we ascribe to things and so on, and that looks correct.
428
And that's the way modern science looks at it.
429
The fact that the informal expositions, you know, to sort of motivate what you're doing,
430
talk about identifying objects on the outside, that's fine.
431
But you have to know how to distinguish informal expositions from the actual scientific program.
432
And if you look at the actual program, they never looked at things outside, aside from tachistoscopic images, because they're as close as you can get to the occasion of sense.
433
And it's about time to move on to our very eager studio audience here, so let's turn to them.
434
Hi, how are you?
435
You mentioned event semantics and how that's sort of been pulled into or is a part of some linguistic research,
436
and I'd like to ask a question about that and just hear more about it.
437
And the way Piotrowski uses it in the article in the book that's sitting on your table, he'll take a sentence.
438
We've been referring to this book, and I should point out it's called Chomsky and his Critics, which just came out from Blackwell's.
439
Right.
440
And the article is by Paul Piotrowski, I think.
441
And so he'll take the sentence, John boiled the water, and I'm going to ignore the sort of the larger context
442
but and and then turn that into something that's something like there was an event of
443
which john was the agent and um it was concerning a boiling
444
and the theme was water or terminated in a boiling excuse me
445
and the theme was water something like that right um
446
and then and then petrovsky tries to fit
447
that together with a syntactic account of how that can
448
and how that formal representation can turn into the sentence that you hear.
449
So you recognize in your reply that it's an open question whether that is,
450
that the subject matter of this whole analysis is in the language faculty or in the cognitive, it's something cognitive system going on.
451
It's all internal, though.
452
Yeah, absolutely.
453
So it's all syntax, in the sense that it's involved with internal computations.
454
Right, fine.
455
So, the question then is, and you say it's an empirical question, whether it's in the language faculty or in the cognitive system.
456
So, first of all, what would be some ways to determine empirically what that is?
457
And also, what would it even mean for it to be, I have a trouble understanding what it would mean for it to be in the language faculty,
458
because then it seems like our language faculty has certain event metaphysics built into it.
459
Well, not event metaphysics.
460
Well, first of all, there's no event metaphysics in the ordinary sense of event.
461
Events are things out there.
462
And all of this is formal manipulations inside.
463
And we're now asking the question, what is the architecture of the mind?
464
Which is like asking, what's the structure of some benzene molecule?
465
You want to know the structure of the benzene molecule?
466
You can't just think about it.
467
You have to have some theory that tells you how you look at such questions.
468
Well, I think there are real answers to the question what the architecture of the mind is, but they're not going to be easy to find.
469
You want to find out what the language faculty is?
470
Well, when you talk about any subsystem of an organism, say the circulatory system or the immune system or the digestive system or whatever it may be,
471
you're kind of presupposing that it makes sense to look at a complex organism as if it has components, each component.
472
having kind of an integrated character with its own properties it's worth studying in itself
473
it's not separable like you can't cut the immune system out of the body
474
but you're saying there's things it's in every cell you know
475
but you're saying look it has properties you can study by themselves you can learn things about them
476
when you put the whole picture together you hope you'll understand something about the organism well same
477
when you're studying the cognitive architecture we want to see is
478
there a component call it the language faculty we don't know what it is you have to discover it
479
and refine it and change it is there a component
480
which is critically involved in what you and I are doing in some fashion
481
which has its own intrinsic properties so is it going to turn out say
482
that it has particular interface conditions and some kind of internal recursive computational process well
483
if it does then we can the more we understand about that and how it fits into the general cognitive architecture,
484
the clearer these questions become about whether something's inside it or outside it.
485
And those are very concrete questions.
486
I mean, take, say, anaphora, you know, what are called referential relations, relations of intended referential dependency, okay?
487
Are they inside the language faculty or outside?
488
Well, that's a substantive issue.
489
If you'd asked me ten years ago, I would have said inside, and now I think there's evidence that they're outside, right on the edge.
490
And the reason for that has to do with beliefs about how the language faculty works.
491
So if the language faculty does involve optimal computation that requires cyclic derivations,
492
and if an APHRA looks at global properties, you condition C of the binding theory, well it's outside.
493
But that's a question that you can't ask in advance.
494
You have to ask, well what does it look like, what does it seem these faculties are like?
495
The more you learn about them, the more you can formulate these questions clearly.
496
And that's the kind of question that comes up about the internal notion of event.
497
Is it in the language faculty, the semantic component of the language faculty, or is it in some other faculty that's linked to it.
498
And you can't, you know, you just can't speculate about that.
499
You have to learn about it.
500
And I guess that's my question.
501
I just, just from ignorance, have a hard time picturing what kind of empirical evidence would count in adjudicating between those.
502
If I'd known it, I would have said it.
503
I mean, I think these are the kind of questions, like, what is the empirical evidence that bears on whether an afro is on one
504
or the other side of the border of the language faculty?
505
Well, you know, the empirical evidence, in my mind at least, turns on whether in fact there's a single cyclic derivational process that goes,
506
you know, by what I call phases stepwise.
507
That's an empirical question, but you know, all kinds of things bear on it coming from everywhere.
508
And once that empirical question is sharpened, you can ask whether a global property of anaphora is inside or outside.
509
Thank you.
510
Actually, similar questions, I might say, arise on the phonetic side.
511
So take, say, prosody.
512
Prosody appears to have global properties, okay?
513
So is it inside or outside the cyclic derivation, which is forming bigger and bigger units?
514
Well, if the properties really are global, it's outside.
515
But you can't answer that, you know, and the kind of evidence that bears on that comes from everywhere.
516
It might come from chemistry, for all we know, when we try to figure out how these processes work.
517
You've made it clear that science plays a primary role in philosophy, and I was curious to know what role,
518
if any, does philosophy play in science?
519
Well, here I think it helps to look at the question in a little more historical depth.
520
If you had asked Hume, are you a scientist or a philosopher, he couldn't answer, because there was no distinction.
521
If you'd asked Kant, are you a philosopher or scientist, he couldn't have answered.
522
In fact, until the latter part of the 19th, around the middle of the 19th century, there was no really clear distinction between science and philosophy.
523
I mean, if you study science in Oxford and Cambridge, it's the Department of Natural Philosophy or Moral Philosophy,
524
because philosophy was just, you know, science was just one part of philosophy.
525
It wasn't distinct.
526
By the latter part of the 19th century, they sort of became separated.
527
And after that, it's really a matter of choice.
528
You know, disciplines don't exist.
529
I mean, we construct them.
530
So, I mean, you know, deans have to have ways of organizing departments because it's too much trouble to have everybody do everything.
531
But there's no boundary to what's in chemistry, you know, and there's no boundary to what's in philosophy.
532
It just depends what philosophers want.
533
People call themselves who come out of this tradition and want to study.
534
And a lot of what they want to study is questions in the foundations of science.
535
or say the kind of things that Basvan Frasmin is trying to clear up using the results of science.
536
These are all fine questions, and people tend to call them philosophy.
537
You could call them, parts of them at least, you could call thoughtful science, or reflective moral theory, or you could call them anything you want.
538
But there's a range of questions which have come to be in the domain of philosophy, and they can extend all over the place.
539
I mean, there are people in philosophy departments who are working on the foundation of quantum theory and making contributions to it.
540
Hello.
541
I'd like to go back to insect navigation once more.
542
And I take it that we explore insect navigation because we want to find out how insects navigate in their natural environment.
543
And you're right to point out that in an experiment we can replace the sun by an artificial light and so on.
544
But, I mean, it seems like we still, in the whole explanatory context,
545
we cannot just do without the sun and the actual objects in the real world because otherwise, I mean, an explanation of insect navigation becomes meaningless.
546
And so it seems to me that we have to have the assumption
547
that insects represent the actual sun and not just dots of light.
548
We don't have to have that.
549
In fact, the way science works, of course, you're interested in the outside world.
550
But if you're taking a physics course here, they don't use videotapes of what's happening outside the window because it's just useless.
551
It doesn't let you figure out how the world is working.
552
So you disregard that beyond the earliest stages of science.
553
I mean, at the earliest stages, yeah, you see apples falling from trees and that kind of thing.
554
But as soon as you get anywhere, you start designing artificial situations called experiments in
555
which you try to refine the evidence so
556
that it will shed light on principles which you believe will ultimately bear on what's going on outside the window, but that's not what you're looking at.
557
But when you're studying an organism, say an ant,
558
yes, you start with noticing that the ant is figuring out where the sun is as a very strange computation.
559
We can't do it as a function of time of day and time of year.
560
But as you go beyond, you ask, well, what are the actual computations going on inside that?
561
And if you could get far enough, you would set up experimental situations in which you wouldn't bother with the sun.
562
You'd figure out what those internal computations are you then find that they interact with all kinds of other things.
563
You know, they're not done in isolation.
564
And out of that, you expect you're going to shed some light on what's going on
565
when the occasion of sense that the insect is operating on happens to be connected to an external object,
566
like the one 93 million miles away.
567
But that's just kind of like a consequence of the investigation of the ant.
568
If I could follow up on this question, I mean, this seems to be inconsistent with what you say in this reply to Ludlow here where you're quoting Galistel, right?
569
So you say, Galistel, 1990, argues that the representations play a key role in animal behavior and cognition.
570
Here, representation is understood as an isomorphism,
571
a one -one relation between mind -brain processes and an aspect of the environment to which these processes adapt the animal's behavior.
572
It's not inconsistent.
573
He's making an empirical claim, which is a very interesting one, and which is an introduction to a couple of volumes on animal representation.
574
And his conclusion, which I quote there, is that for animals, there is,
575
in fact, a one -to -one relation and isomorphism between an internal event and some property of the external world, like an odor.
576
That's the example.
577
So the property of the external world, which particular odor, which is out there in the world all right, but you could, if you knew how to do it, you could just use the sensory organs.
578
And he says that's the way animal representation works, with this one -to -one correlation between things that are outside the animal,
579
though you can, you're really studying them at the sensory boundary, and the internal representations.
580
Well, if that's correct, that's an interesting fact about animals, and they're very different from humans in that case.
581
So then maybe he's right about it yeah it could be
582
that they take the example I mentioned there I think it's taken from him
583
that an ant some species of ants at least will
584
identify a corpse of a conspecific on the basis of a particular odor of course
585
if you give that odor and there's no conspecific around they'll do exactly the same thing
586
because according to this picture that he's saying well it's just triggered by the odor
587
which usually happens to come from a conspecific, but if you could control the odors the way you can control lights, you could get the same behavior according to him.
588
There's no conspecific.
589
Yeah, but just one more clarification question.
590
It seems to me that no scientist can claim he has explained
591
any kind of animal behavior if
592
if what we take to be its natural environment doesn't play an essential role in this explanation.
593
And so I think if the relation between an ant and the sun,
594
for example, doesn't show up in this theory, then we haven't really explained what we wanted to explain.
595
Well, it depends what you want to explain.
596
I mean, the sciences, as the modern sciences have developed since Galileo, this is something of an innovation,
597
they really are not trying to account for the phenomena of experience.
598
I mean, indirectly, that's what motivates them.
599
But what they're trying to do is discover the principles that enter into the way the world functions.
600
And if you ask the guys in the physics department here, can you explain what's going, this videotape of what's going outside the window, they won't even bother answering.
601
I mean, they can't say anything about that.
602
It's way too complicated, way too many factors.
603
And it's not even their topic.
604
Their topic is to find out the principles of nature.
605
So like when Galileo had a lot of problems with this, if you go back and look at the history, he had a lot of trouble convincing the funders,
606
the rich aristocrats, who were the funders in those days,
607
convincing them that it's worth studying something as ridiculous as a ball rolling down a frictionless plane.
608
First of all, there's no such thing.
609
Who cares anyway?
610
And it was a conceptual breakthrough to get to the point where you began to understand
611
that the phenomena of the world are of interest for the sciences insofar as they provide evidence for the principles of nature.
612
And as soon as you proceed very far, you find out that the ordinary phenomena of nature is useless for this purpose, and you do what are called experiments, and sometimes thought experiments.
613
Like you look back at Galileo, there's no reason to believe he ever dropped balls from the top of the Tower of Pisa.
614
If you look at the argument, he gives a purely conceptual argument, convincing one, to show that that's what's going to happen, and it didn't matter whether you observed it or not.
615
In fact, you don't observe it.
616
But his argument was convincing because of the logic of it, and that's true of a lot of his experiments, if you read through them,
617
you know, scholars have now determined he couldn't have carried out those experiments.
618
There was no way for him to do it.
619
Some of them he probably did, you know, some of them he was thinking about.
620
But the point is, almost none of them had to do with observations of, you know, what you just, a casual look at the world.
621
The same with the theory of perception.
622
So, for example, take an example of Descartes, which I'll adapt to this situation, but it's a Cartesian example.
623
He says, if I look out there, what I see is a lot of people sitting in a room.
624
Well, Descartes points out, literally, that's not what's hitting your eye.
625
What's hitting your eye is something that's coming from that guy's head and that guy's foot,
626
but there's nothing about people sitting in a room nevertheless what you see is people sitting in a room
627
and then he says well how does this happen
628
and then comes the whole story about on the occasion of sense the cognoscutive powers make these complicated constructions
629
which include imposing the structure of people sitting in a room of these fragmentary sensations
630
that are coming to me
631
but you don't in perceptual psychology as it proceeds you don't
632
study phenomena like people sitting in a room that's just way too complicated
633
but this isn't fair to the questioner though
634
because he's not he's not arguing against idealization i mean you could have a perfectly controlled experiment and still talk about
635
for example in a simple take an old sort of skinner
636
type experiment with a pigeon pressing a bar i mean you can describe
637
that behavior as the pigeon going moving its whatever claw
638
or whatever or you can describe it as bar pressing behavior right now uh
639
so i mean this is not it's not an It's not an issue about idealization, the questioner could easily say.
640
Yeah, but we're asking...
641
Well, at least I understood him to be asking something different.
642
If the scientist cannot give an account of my seeing people in a room,
643
they're not giving an explanation.
644
That's far too strong.
645
I mean, the scientists are giving explanations, even if they can't get anywhere near describing real -life situations, and in fact that's about all of modern science.
646
The bar pressing is an interesting thing case because Skinner did impose on it the interpretation,
647
bar pressing, and that turns out to be wrong.
648
It turns out with closer look that the pigeon pecking, which is what it was doing, actually incorporates different instinctive behaviors.
649
The behavior of pecking for a seed
650
and pecking for water turn out to be different instinctual behaviors which happen to converge in this experiment, you just mislead yourself, if you call it the same thing.
651
But isn't that Skinner's mistake, is that he was an internalist, and if he'd been an externalist,
652
then you would see that pressing for a seed and pressing for water are different behaviors?
653
It has nothing to do with externalism and internalism.
654
I mean, the motivation for distinguishing seed from water comes from observing pigeons.
655
But if you want to really carry it out further, you'll find out what's going on in the pigeon's head on the occasion of scents.
656
And if you could carry out the programs far enough, you'd forget about the seed and the water, just like David Marr does.
657
He doesn't talk about external things, because he's trying to really discover what the principles are.
658
So it's nothing to do with internalism and externalism.
659
What it has to do with is giving the right idealization or the wrong idealization.
660
And we're always doing that.
661
I mean, every experiment involves all kinds of interpretation as to what you're going to think about this thing and that thing.
662
as the sciences get more refined you try very hard to not to cut it out
663
because you can't but at least be conscious consciously aware of what you're putting in
664
so you can sort of compensate for it if it's the wrong thing to put in okay
665
next question hi I think I have a much less sophisticated question than the previous one.
666
But you have characterized an I language generally as an interface of sound and meaning.
667
And at the same time, here, you've also been very critical of the various senses of the term meaning and reference.
668
So I just wanted to ask you if you could clarify, what do you mean by meaning?
669
Well, I mean, that's, again, like David Marr saying, I'm trying to figure out how you see an elephant we start with the intuitive notions of sound
670
and meaning whatever they are and you know you go back to Aristotle
671
and he describes the language is a pairing of something like sound
672
and meaning saying it in Greek the and yeah that's where we start with
673
but as we proceed we're gonna have to refine both of these notions
674
so sound as it's used here it doesn't have to do with what you and I call sound and ordinary talk.
675
And meaning will be something very special.
676
So like maybe it will be Davidsonian event semantics.
677
Maybe it will be something built on that.
678
And maybe sound will be something built on my colleague Morris Halley's conception of instructions for articulatory gestures.
679
Or it will be whatever it turns out to be as the sciences progress.
680
And it will end up having some loose relation to what we call sound and meaning,
681
but no more so than energy or work or life or any of the other concepts that are dropped in the sciences,
682
although they often keep the sounds when they talk about their new concepts.
683
So that's to be answered, not to start with.
684
Okay, thank you.
685
Okay, I guess that's it.
686
Thanks a lot.
687
Appreciate it.
688
Thank you.
689
Thank you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Noam Chomsky on Philosophy of Mind”. This video has 689 sentences and 9353 words to shadow. The speech runs for 53:55. The speaker talks at a natural 173 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| notion noun | /ˈnoʊʃən/ | Mental apprehension of whatever may be known, thought, or imagined; idea, concept. |
| representation noun | /ˌɹɛp.ɹə.zɛnˈteɪ.ʃən/ | That which represents something else. |
| faculty noun | /ˈfæk.əl.ti/ | The academic staff at schools, colleges, universities or not-for-profit research institutes, as opposed to the students or support staff. |
| philosopher noun | /fəˈlɑsəfɚ/ | A lover of wisdom. |
| insect noun | /ˈɪn.sɛkt/ | An arthropod (in the Insecta class) characterized by six legs, up to four wings, and a chitinous exoskeleton. |
| experiment noun | /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/ | A test under controlled conditions made to either demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of… |
| relation noun | /ɹɪˈleɪʃ(ə)n/ | The manner in which two things may be associated. |
| refer verb | /ɹɪˈfɜː/ | To direct the attention of (someone toward something). |
| ordinary adjective | /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/ | Having regular jurisdiction; now only used in certain phrases. |
| occasion noun | /əˈkeɪ̯ʒən/ | A favorable opportunity; a convenient or timely chance. |
| cognitive adjective | /ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/ | Relating to the part of mental functions that deals with logic, as opposed to affective which deals with emotions. |
| empirical adjective | /ɪmˈpɪɹɪkəl/ | Pertaining to or based on experience, as opposed to theory. |
| organism noun | /ˈɔɹ.ɡəˌnɪz.əm/ | A discrete and complete living thing, such as animal, plant, fungus or microorganism. |
| discover verb | /dɪˈskʌvə/ | To find or learn something for the first time. |
| principle noun | /ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pəl/ | A fundamental assumption, fundamental law or guiding belief. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. | |
| carry out verb | /ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/ | To hold while moving it out. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| point out verb | To identify among a group of similar subjects, or in a scene where the subject might not be readily seen or noticed, with a gesture of the body. | |
| give up verb | To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone). | |
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- What's the meaning of life all the time?
- You know, it's a huge range of things.
- You consider that to be incoherent as well?
- You think the average person doesn't believe in the city?
- I mean, is it not real?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if they did it wouldn't matter |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been · has described · has also been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be involved · can't be done · have been given |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | Meaning, which is · notion which will · language, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 206 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, you're, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/, bother /ˈbɑðɚ/, nevertheless /ˌnɛvɚðəˈlɛs/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: notion /ˈnoʊʃən/, representation /ˌɹɛp.ɹə.zɛnˈteɪ.ʃən/, relation /ɹɪˈleɪʃ(ə)n/, occasion /əˈkeɪ̯ʒən/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: representation /ˌɹɛp.ɹə.zɛnˈteɪ.ʃən/, philosopher /fəˈlɑsəfɚ/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, empirical /ɪmˈpɪɹɪkəl/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like notion, representation, faculty.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.