Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The edge of the system must be kept squared with experience; the rest, with all its elaborate myths or fictions, has as its objective the simplicity of laws.

Another example of a theory evidently on the right is that of an objective right and objective aesthetic values, whereas the interpretation of ethics and aesthetics on the basis of custom, upbringing, etc., belongs toward the left.

But not only is there no objective reason for the rejection of phenomenology, but on the contrary one can present reasons in its favour.

It is quite possible that the lack of analogy testifies to our ignorance of other aspects of mental function, rather than to the absolute uniqueness of linguistic structure; but the fact is that we have, for the moment, no objective reason for supposing this to be true.

In the other direction, however, we find those rules which even the most startling advances in science have not tempted us to abandon, rules which one who pays out any rope at all to the rationalistic doctrine of cognitive awareness will end by claiming to express insight into objective real connections.

Evans regards it as important to identify information-bearing states of perceptual system with states of seeming since he is anxious to avoid the traditional epistemologist's picture according to which the subject receives, through the perceptual systems, sensory data that is "intrinsically without objective content," but which forms the basis for inferences about the world that causes them.

The only events that can conceivably be regarded as data for a conscious, reasoning subject are seemings - events, that is, already imbued with (apparent) objective significance."

But information-bearing states of all kinds, even those of things that are too primitive for anything to seem to be some way to them, are imbued with objective significance.

Then it would look to O'Leary like there was a striped pig before him. This counterfactual possibility should not incline us to say that it is compatible with the way things look to O'Leary that there is a striped pig before him.) If one succeeded in purging the content of perceptual states of their environmental dependence, what would be left is sensory data, "intrinsically without objective content."

Part of Lewis's persuasive case against the hypothesis of phenomenal information was the observation that while the knowledge argument was ostensibly an argument against materialism, it made no assumptions about the content of a materialist theory; if the argument works against materialism, it works equally well against any theory, including a dualist one, that takes phenomenal facts to be features of the objective world.