Locke and Port-Royal on Affirmation, Negation, and Other Postures of the Mind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurent Jaffro
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Port Royal ◽  
The Mind ◽  
One Act ◽  
The Way

The chapter claims that in order to understand Locke’s doctrine of assent, his philosophy of mind needs to be seen in conjunction with his philosophy of language, which in turn gains from being compared with Port-Royal’s logic and grammar. It points out two conflicting facts in Locke’s account of affirmation and negation in the Essay. First, Locke entrusts affirmation and negation with the task of signifying both the assertion by which we manifest our assent to a proposition and the junction or separation of the ideas constituting the proposition. The other fact is that Locke accepts a great variety of ways of considering a proposition. This diversity of ‘postures’ is poorly expressed by the limited number of syncategorematic terms, ‘particles’. The first fact fosters a one-act view of the assent we give to propositions. The second opens the way to a multiple-act view.

scholarly journals Language Acquisition in the Light of Rationalist Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 303-315
Author(s):  
Halina Święczkowska ◽  
Beata Piecychna
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Speech Acquisition ◽  
The Way

Abstract The present study deals with the problem of the acquisition of language in children in the light of rationalist philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. The main objective of the paper is to present the way Gerauld de Cordemoy’s views on the nature of language, including its socio-linguistic aspects, and on the process of speech acquisition in children are reflected in contemporary writings on how people communicate with each other. Reflections on 17th-century rationalist philosophy of mind and the latest research conducted within the field of cognitive abilities of human beings indicate that between those two spheres many similarities could be discerned in terms of particular stages of the development of speech and its physical aspects.

The Fragmented Mind

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Implicit Attitudes ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Belief State ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

Mental fragmentation is the thesis that the mind is fragmented, or compartmentalized. Roughly, this means that an agent’s overall belief state is divided into several sub-states—fragments. These fragments need not make for a consistent and deductively closed belief system. The thesis of mental fragmentation became popular through the work of philosophers like Christopher Cherniak, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker in the 1980s. Recently, it has attracted great attention again. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the topic of mental fragmentation. It features important new contributions by leading experts in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Opening with an accessible Introduction providing a systematic overview of the current debate, the fourteen essays cover a wide range of issues: foundational issues and motivations for fragmentation, the rationality or irrationality of fragmentation, fragmentation’s role in language, the relationship between fragmentation and mental files, and the implications of fragmentation for the analysis of implicit attitudes.

Intentionalität und Bewusstsein in der frühen Neuzeit

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Barth
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Essential Feature ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Salient Features ◽  
Mental Acts ◽  
The Mind

How are we to explain the fact that we can refer to objects by means of mental acts? And what accounts for our being conscious of mental acts? René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz provide fascinating answers to these two central questions of the philosophy of mind. In this study, the concepts of both authors are analyzed in detail, compared with each other and related to current positions. The analyses show that Descartes represents a deflationary conception of consciousness (conscientia). Consciousness is "only" an aspect of intentionality that constitutes the essential feature of the Cartesian mind. The analyses of Leibniz unveil that he represents a far more complex and demanding conception of the mind in comparison to Descartes, which makes for a higher connectivity with contemporary convictions. The salient features of his position are the structural conception of intentionality and the distinction between two forms of consciousness (apperception and conscientia) that correspond to the phenomenal consciousness and the reflexive self-consciousness. In contrast to Descartes, Leibniz also assigns consciousness to non-rational animals in the form of apperception. Conscientia, on the other hand, is reserved for rational substances.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Star
Keyword(s):  
Distinctive Feature ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The Way

The purpose and plan of the Handbook is described herein. Key concepts in the contemporary literature on reasons and normativity are introduced, and the forty-four chapters that make up the main body of the Handbook are each summarized. In the process, important connections between the chapters are highlighted. A distinctive feature of the Handbook is said to be the way in which it surveys work on normative reasons in both ethics and epistemology, focusing, when appropriate, on issues concerning unity or lack of it in different domains. It is noted that discussions of reasons and normativity in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics are also surveyed in the Handbook.

Metaphysics of Mind

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darragh Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Mental States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
Metaphysics Of Mind

Philosophy of mind addresses fundamental questions about mental or psychological phenomena. The question held by many to be most fundamental of all is a metaphysical one, often labeled the “mind-body problem,” which concerns the relation between minds and material or physical phenomena. Physicalists (and/or materialists) contend that mental phenomena are physical, or at least that they may be accounted for in terms of physical phenomena (brains, for example). Dualists deny this, maintaining that mental phenomena have fundamentally nonphysical natures, so that to account for minds we must assume the existence of nonphysical substances or properties. Nowadays physicalism is more widely espoused than dualism, but physicalists differ over which physical states/properties should be considered relevant, and over the precise nature of the relation between physical and mental phenomena. This is one of four bibliography entries on the philosophy of mind, and this particular entry concentrates on this metaphysical issue of the relation between mental and physical/material phenomena. Inevitably, there is a good deal of overlap between this and topics covered in the other three entries. For example, this entry includes authors who attack physicalism by arguing that it cannot account for the distinctive phenomenal qualities of conscious experiences; but that line of antiphysicalist argument features even more prominently in the entry on consciousness. Moreover, the other entries feature various issues that might perfectly properly be categorized as concerning the metaphysics of mind: for example, the debate between internalists—philosophers who hold that propositional attitudes (mental states such as beliefs and desires, which have representational contents) are intrinsic properties of minds/brains—and externalists, who think of certain attitudes as extrinsic or relational, is surely a question about the metaphysics of mind: but this is discussed in the entry on intentionality instead of here.

scholarly journals The Theory of Thinking and the Capacity to Mentalize: A Comparison of Fonagy's and Bion's Models

2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Mantilla Lagos
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Developmental Line ◽  
The Way

This paper presents a comparison of two psychoanalytic models of how human beings learn to use their mental capacities to know meaningfully about the world. The first, Fonagy's model of mentalization, is concerned with the development of a self capable of reflecting upon its own and others' mental states, based on feelings, thoughts, intentions, and desires. The other, Bion's model of thinking, is about the way thoughts are dealt with by babies, facilitating the construction of a thinking apparatus within a framework of primitive ways of communication between mother and baby. The theories are compared along three axes: (a) an axis of the theoretical and philosophical backgrounds of the models; (b) an axis of the kind of evidence that supports them; and (c) the third axis of the technical implications of the ideas of each model. It is concluded that, although the models belong to different theoretical and epistemological traditions and are supported by different sorts of evidence, they may be located along the same developmental line using an intersubjective framework that maintains tension between the intersubjective and the intrapsychic domains of the mind.

Bruteness and Supervenience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Levine
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
The Other ◽  
Robust Realism ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

This chapter first presents a framework, one that the author has defended elsewhere (Levine 2001), for understanding the notion of bruteness, its relation to modality, and the way this framework applies to the mind–body problem. Second, the chapter then turns to a problem in meta-ethics and attempts to address this problem within the framework already established. The problem is how to reconcile two views that many philosophers, including the author, are inclined to hold: on the one hand, “robust realism” or “non-naturalism” about the ethical and, on the other, the supervenience of the ethical on the non-ethical. The chapter speculates about how one might reasonably reconcile these two views.

A Fundamental Circularity: In the Mind of the Reflective Scientist

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco J. Varela ◽  
Evan Thompson ◽  
Eleanor Rosch
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Computer Model ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Field ◽  
Sense Of Direction ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mature Science

This chapter describes cognitive science. In its widest sense, the term cognitive science is used to indicate that the study of mind is in itself a worthy scientific pursuit. At this time, cognitive science is not yet established as a mature science. It does not have a clearly agreed upon sense of direction and a large number of researchers constituting a community. Rather, it is really more of a loose affiliation of disciplines than a discipline of its own. Interestingly, an important pole is occupied by artificial intelligence—thus, the computer model of the mind is a dominant aspect of the entire field. The other affiliated disciplines are generally taken to consist of linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, sometimes anthropology, and the philosophy of mind. Each discipline would give a somewhat different answer to the question of what is mind or cognition, an answer that would reflect its own specific concerns.

Colloquium 2 What Kind of Theory is the Theory of the Tripartite Soul?

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Barney
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

This paper discusses two related questions about Plato’s account of the tripartite soul in the Republic and Phaedrus. One is whether we should accept the recently prominent ‘analytical’ reading of the theory, according to which the three parts of the soul are animal-like sub-agents, each with its own distinctive and autonomous package of cognitive and desiderative capacities. The other question is how far Plato’s account so interpreted resembles the findings of contemporary neuroscience, given that this also depicts the mind as complex, partitioned, subject to conflict, and only very incompletely rational. The paper sketches the analytical reading, outlines the similarities and disanologies of the theory so understood to contemporary neuropsychology, and then steps back to consider three problems with such an interpretation. None is decisive; but they raise doubts as to whether the question of the title can really be answered in the way both the analytical reading and the modern parallel presume.


Musical Analysis: Hearing Is Believing?

1984 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Psychological Testing ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Analysis ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Perceptual Psychology ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

Written by a musician untrained in psychology, this article draws attention to problems arising from the separation of the disciplines of perceptual psychology and musical analysis. Psychologists are apt to make prescriptions about the nature of music based on a narrow and often primitive understanding of the medium. Musicians, on the other hand, are in the habit of basing analysis on sweeping assumptions about the nature of perception for which there is little experimental evidence. The author argues, however, that although it would be useful for such assumptions to be subjected to rigorous psychological testing, the assumptions themselves are not to be dismissed as evidence of the way the mind understands music.

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