The Metaphysics of Representation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Robert G. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Representational Content ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Degrees Of Belief ◽  
Public Language ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Final Layer ◽  
The World ◽  
Interactive Relationship ◽  
Compositional Interpretation ◽  
The One

What is representation? How do the more primitive aspects of our world come together to generate it? How do different kinds of representation relate to one another? This book identifies the metaphysical foundations for representational facts. The story told is in three parts. The most primitive layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of sensation/perception and intention/action, which are the two most basic modes in which an individual and the world interact. It is argued that we can understand how this kind of representation can exist in a fundamentally physical world so long as we have an independent, illuminating grip on functions and causation. The second layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of (degrees of) belief and desire, whose representational content goes far beyond the immediate perceptable and manipulable environment. It is argued that the correct belief/desire interpretation of an agent is the one which makes their action-guiding states, given their perceptual evidence, most rational. The final layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of words and sentences, human artefacts with representational content. It is argued that one can give an illuminating account of the conditions under which a compositional interpretation of a public language like English is correct by appeal to patterns emerging from the attitudes conventionally expressed by sentences. The three-layer metaphysics of representation resolves long-standing underdetermination puzzles, predicts and explains patterns in the way that concepts denote, and articulates a delicate interactive relationship between the foundations of language and thought.

The Mystery of Reference and Objective Representational Content

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Kenneth A. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Representational Content ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
The World

This chapter introduces the main themes and ambitions of the book and gives an overview of the content and organization of subsequent chapters. One of those ambitions is to explain how it is possible, for the vehicles of both language and thought, to be “semantically answerable” to the world—or, equivalently, to have objective representational content. In this chapter the problem, or mystery, of objective representational content is set out in some detail. The proposed explanation (“two-factor referentialism”) is outlined and contrasted with a fundamentally different rival approach. Various concomitant problems to be addressed are also articulated—e.g., concerning the relation between language and thought, the role of causation in the constitution of reference, the place of intentionality in the natural world, and the possibility of meta-cognition.

Aristotelianism, Newtonianism and the Physics of the Layman

Perception ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benny Shanon
Keyword(s):  
Physical World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

Written and visual surveys were administered in order to assess people's models of the physical world. A comparison was made between scientific theories and the layman's philosophy of nature on the one hand, and between people's conceptions and perceptions on the other hand. The findings suggest that there are discrepancies on both levels: people do not conceive the world as physicists do, and their conceptions are different from their perceptions.

Mīmāṃsā

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Taber
Keyword(s):  
Physical World ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Indian Science ◽  
The World ◽  
Basic Orientation ◽  
The One ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

The school of Mīmāṃsā or Pūrva Mīmāṃsā was one of the six systems of classical Hindu philosophy. It grew out of the Indian science of exegesis and was primarily concerned with defending the way of life defined by the ancient scripture of Hinduism, the Veda. Its most important exponents, Śabarasvāmin, Prabhākara and Kumārila, lived in the sixth and seventh centuries ad. It was realist and empiricist in orientation. Its central doctrine was that the Veda is the sole means of knowledge of dharma or righteousness, because it is eternal. All cognition, it held, is valid unless its cause is defective. The Veda being without any fallible author, human or divine, the cognitions to which it gives rise must be true. The Veda must be authorless because there is no recollection of an author or any other evidence of its having been composed; we only observe that it has been handed down from generation to generation. Mīmāṃsā thinkers also defended various metaphysical ideas implied by the Veda – in particular, the reality of the physical world and the immortality of the soul. However, they denied the existence of God as creator of the world and author of scripture. The eternality of the Veda implies the eternality of language in general. Words and the letters that constitute them are eternal and ubiquitous; it is only their particular manifestations, caused by articulations of the vocal organs, that are restricted to certain times and places. The meanings of words, being universals, are eternal as well. Finally, the relation between word and meaning is also eternal. Every word has an inherent capacity to indicate its meaning. Words could not be expressive of certain meanings as a result of artificial conventions. The basic orientation of Mīmāṃsā was pragmatic and anti-mystical. It believed that happiness and salvation result just from carrying out the prescriptions of the Veda, not from the practice of yoga or insight into the One. It criticized particularly sharply other scriptural traditions (Buddhism and Jainism) that claimed to have originated from omniscient preceptors.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Steane
Keyword(s):  
Physical World ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Complete Picture ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Major Argument ◽  
Better Than

The motivation, themes, and content of the book are introduced. The aim is to offer a better view of what science tells us about the nature of the physical world—better than the one widely assumed in our culture. Science is a rich tapestry which does not at all suggest that the world is a purposeless machine, nor does it undermine the arts and humanities. The book then engages the area of values and meaning, and shows the different type of discourse that is involved there. It offers a reply to a major argument of Hume and Dawkins, about the content of religious language. The final part of the book shows how religious response can inhabit the complete picture without awkwardness.

scholarly journals The Identity of Logic and the World in terms of Quantum Information

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasil Dinev Penchev
Keyword(s):  
Hilbert Space ◽  
Quantum Information ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Free Variable ◽  
Quantum Systems ◽  
Universal Logic ◽  
A Value ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Universe

One can construct a mapping between Hilbert space and the class of all logics if the latter is defined as the set of all well-orderings of some relevant set (or class). That mapping can be further interpreted as a mapping of all states of all quantum systems, on the one hand, and all logics, on the other hand. The collection of all states of all quantum systems is equivalent to the world (the universe) as a whole. Thus that mapping establishes a fundamentally philosophical correspondence between the physical world and universal logic by the meditation of a special and fundamental structure, that of Hilbert space, and therefore, between quantum mechanics and logic by mathematics. Furthermore, Hilbert space can be interpreted as the free variable of "quantum information" and any point in it, as a value of the same variable as "bound" already axiom of choice.

scholarly journals “Bodiliness” of thought in N.F. Fedorov’s system of views on language

2021 ◽  
pp. 72-79
Author(s):  
N.N. Smirnova
Keyword(s):  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Specific Work ◽  
Linguistic Expression ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Incomplete System ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

The article discusses the system of N.F. Fedorov's views on language, as it was immanently formulated in his various articles and notes, laconic, aphoristic and fragmentary. Architecture and scale of Fedorov's ideas along with fundamental incompleteness as a huge project open to the future are considered in the article. An important dominant of Fedorov's thought is ‘bodiliness’, on the one hand, opposed to abstraction that destroys a phenomenon, including reality of human speech, and, on the other, hypostatizing thought and language as organic being. The dominant is essential for understanding culture at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries and the first half of the XX century (for instance, to understand Vladimir Solovyov’s views on the nature of art, the work of Andrei Platonov). ‘Bodiliness’, corporality, materiality of language and thought, according to Fedorov, is the guarantee of immortality of material life. This is the explanation of Fedorov's special attraction to ideographic writing, what embodies thought in matter as “much in little”. Fedorov’s thinking is in a special way consonant with the search for a new style of thinking in Western philosophy at the turn of the 20th century. Fedorov returns to humanitarian knowledge bodily, material; humanitarian knowledge lacks this in order to break away from the surface and move on to the things themselves, which have preserved in their original being the seeds of immortality. The article emphasizes that thought and its linguistic expression are a symbolic designation of the common cause of resurrection in Fedorov’s system, and in this it is material and has concrete outlines. The organic being of thought, belonging to life itself, has no authorship, has no place in a specific work that legitimizes it. The main conclusion of the article is about the central position of the concepts of corporality, ‘bodiliness’ in Fedorov’s project, that at the same time represent, although an integral, but, like conceptual relations in language, incomplete system, where each thought appears as a fragment, a fragment of the world that needs to be recreated.

Nahmanides and Rashi on the One Flesh of Conjugal Union: Lovemaking vs. Duty

2009 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Inner Core ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Spousal Relationship ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

The seminal thirteenth century Geronese kabbalist, Talmudist, and exegete Moses Nahmanides (Moses b. Naḥman, 1194–c.1270) perceived the physical world as a mirror for the internal workings of the divine world. For him the Bible “relates about the lower matters and alludes to the upper,”1 rendering its apparently mundane legal, historical, and ethical dimensions a record of the inner variegated life of God. At the very inception of the world, each and every day of creation transcends its strict temporality, referring “at the inner core of the matter” () to the “sefirot which emanate from above.”2 The world's genesis unfolds along the parallel planes of the material world and the complex intradeical mechanics, the sefirot—a staple of kabbalistic thought and terminology—that are constituent of God himself. However, Nahmanides' exegetical project does not invite the escapist flight from reality that mysticism so often requires. On the contrary, his thoroughgoing kabbalistic ontology divulges a keen appreciation for and preoccupation with empirical reality and temporal history rather than threatening to overwhelm the mundane. His biblical exegesis has been characterized as exceptional within its genre for being “entirely free of the frequent kabbalistic tendency to devalue peshat [the plain sense of the text].”3 As David Novak has argued, Nahmanides, despite his kabbalistic theology, “also finds in the Torah a commitment to the reality of nature and history, even if that level of truth is transcended by the Kabbalah. Kabbalah, the highest truth, does not displace all other truths but puts them in perspective.”4 The argument that ensues in this article will demonstrate, firstly, that a prominent example of this feature of Nahmanidean exegesis pertains to the domain of interhuman relations. Here I will focus particularly on those “truths” his exegesis discloses about the spousal relationship. Secondly, Nahmanides' view of the spousal relationship is offered as paradigmatic of his kabbalistic theology, which not only does not displace its concrete social, psychological, anthropological, and juristic realia, but actually complements them. Thirdly, the case will be made that Nahmanides' narrative exegesis, with its overarching quest for the plain sense of the text, is not intended simply to sate his readers' intellectual and literary curiosity but also practically shapes his normative positions. In this particular context I will explore how his exegetical construct of a primordial composite human being, its gendered bifurcation, the definitive ideal of spousal union, the subsequent relational tensions between man and woman, and their conflict and resolution into a gendered hierarchy, all dramatized by the Garden of Eden narrative, inform his normative framework for the conduct of conjugal duties.

scholarly journals Reductions of Consciousness. From Husserl to Churchland

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-185
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Kowalska
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Physical World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Ordinary Experience ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Paul Churchland

Abstract The author juxtaposes two extreme approaches to the relationship between consciousness and the physical world: phenomenological-idealistic (represented by Edmund Husserl) and radically naturalistic (represented by Paul Churchland). These two positions are interpreted in terms of opposite if symmetrical types of reduction (on the one hand, the reduction of the world to a sense for consciousness, and on the other hand, the reduction of consciousness to an element of the physical world). They emerge as two ways of abstracting from the ambivalence of ordinary experience, in which consciousness and the physical world are both mutually entangled and non-identical with each other. In conclusion, the author argues that contemporary philosophy, which follows both the idealistic and the naturalistic path, fails to solve the problem of this relationship.

Psychology from Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic Perspectives

1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 356-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fouad A-L.H. Abou-Hatab
Keyword(s):  
Professional Identity ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Islamic Perspective ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
Western Psychology ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

This paper presents the case of psychology from a perspective not widely recognized by the West, namely, the Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic perspective. It discusses the introduction and development of psychology in this part of the world. Whenever such efforts are evaluated, six problems become apparent: (1) the one-way interaction with Western psychology; (2) the intellectual dependency; (3) the remote relationship with national heritage; (4) its irrelevance to cultural and social realities; (5) the inhibition of creativity; and (6) the loss of professional identity. Nevertheless, some major achievements are emphasized, and a four-facet look into the 21st century is proposed.

Indonesian Literature’s Position in World Literature

TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dina Amelia
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Western World ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Voice

There are two most inevitable issues on national literature, in this case Indonesian literature. First is the translation and the second is the standard of world literature. Can one speak for the other as a representative? Why is this representation matter? Does translation embody the voice of the represented? Without translation Indonesian literature cannot gain its recognition in world literature, yet, translation conveys the voice of other. In the case of production, publication, or distribution of Indonesian Literature to the world, translation works can be very beneficial. The position of Indonesian literature is as a part of world literature. The concept that the Western world should be the one who represent the subaltern can be overcome as long as the subaltern performs as the active speaker. If the subaltern remains silent then it means it allows the “representation” by the Western.

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