Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

As the traditional conception of mind slowly gave way to the overwhelming campaign of natural sciences, so the idea that the concept of mind was something beyond the natural, causal order began to appear inherently problematic, and definitely incapable of serving as an 'unexplained explainer'.

To say that an expression means thus and so is essentially to say that it ought to be used in a certain way. Thus, meanings are 'beyond the natural, causal order', but, at the same time, are not 'supernatural' in any abstruse or esoteric sense.

MeaningW of an expression amounts to some causal or "intentional" link between the expression and an extralinguistic thing (a real thing, a 'content of consciousness' or something like that).

In aesthetic investigation the thing we are not interested in is causal connections, whereas in psychology we are.

To name causal connections is to give an hypothesis.

In aesthetics we are not interested in causal connections but in description of a thing.

I wish to remark on a certain sort of connection which Freud cites, between the foetal position and sleep, which looks to be a causal one but which is not, inasmuch as a psychological experiment cannot be made.

The primate literature, incisively analyzed in HCF, gives us good reason to believe that some of the foundations of the human conceptual system are present in other primates, such as the major subsystems dealing with spatial, causal, and social reasoning.

That sense—in which a system’s state transitions map onto logical relationships, or, as Fodor often puts it, the components of the system have both causal and semantic properties—says nothing about binary digits, program counters, register operations, stored programs, or any of the other particulars of the machines that process our email or compute our taxes and which are improbable characterizations of a human brain.

Fodor emphasizes the idea that the representations in a computational system are syntactic: they are composed of parts in some arrangement, and the causal mechanisms of the system are sensitive to the identity and arrangement of those parts rather than to what they refer to in the world.