weekend reading

In case you have time to kill online.

I mentioned Oliver Sacks. Here is a nice review of his latest book about music and the brain by a well-known philosopher.

And this is a piece from the New York Times about evolution and sociability (in hyenas ).

PS: Feel free to share with us (online) stuff that you find interesting - please write your recommendations under the ‘asides’ category.

summary of 2nd class

In the last post there were some of the side issues from the last class. Time for a tentative summary, since we were pretty deep in abstract-land.

1.       Structure of concepts

There is a difference between thinking of something red, and thinking of a red apple. ‘Red’ and ‘red apple’ are different, but they also seem to have something in common. How are we to explain such features of thought? Notice how common this is: we can always build more complex or more specific concepts. We can think of red apples, but also of the red apples that we bought yesterday, or the red apples that we bought yesterday from the NoName supermarket etc.

We discussed two ideas about structure: one, containment, says that complex concepts are literally made of simpler concepts – somewhat like Russian dolls; the other, inference, says that the relations between complex and simple[r] concepts are logical: if you say that you bought some red apples, you will probably accept that you bought some apples – it is not that the simpler concept – ‘apple’ – is inside the complex one – ‘red apple’. The relation between them is a stable pattern of inference. Once you accept one, you accept the other.

2.       Definitions

Let’s assume that people usually try to express what they think. They utter words that stand for whatever is in their minds. Suppose someone says she wants some coffee. She says that in English, in German, and in Romanian (this is to point out that we’re not talking about words). But, for some reason, the people around have no idea what coffee is. How could she make herself understood? And what is it that she knows – and understands – and they don’t?

One idea is that she knows something like that: ‘coffee is a drinkable liquid that contains caffeine’. When she talks about her desire for coffee, her word ‘coffee’ is a label for this definition. The definition shows the content and the structure of her coffee concept. She could try to explain what she means by making her knowledge explicit – by telling the definition to the ignorant crowd.

What is a definition? The usual way to define stuff is to give necessary and sufficient conditions. For example, the hypothetical person mentioned above would have to say something like this: ‘X is coffee if and only if X is a drinkable liquid, and X contains caffeine.’ The ‘if’ captures the fact that the conditions listed are (jointly) sufficient, while the ‘only if’ says that they are necessary. Whatever satisfies all conditions is coffee, whatever misses even one is not.

Of course the definition above does not work. Coke or tea are not coffee. But you get the picture: it was supposed for a really long time by many smart people that whatever we know and can express in language(s) can be captured by – or simply IS – a set of definitions. Concepts just are definitions. Their structure is definitional structure – conditions. One immediate problem is that when you define things, you need to stop somewhere. Where do you stop, so that your stopping point is not arbitrary?

You are free to define coffee in terms of liquid, drinkable, and caffeine if you wish. But then you must know what THOSE terms mean – that is, what concepts THEY express. What is a liquid? Suppose you say: ‘matter that flows’. What is matter then? You have an answer ready: ‘something that occupies space’. And what is space? Things get tricky soon enough.

The solution was thought to be available in the fact that we can – and must – ultimately rely on our senses. This is called empiricism in philosophy. So the basis of definitions – the primitive concepts – would be concepts of sensory impressions: patches of color, kinds of sounds or tactile stimulations etc. You can ask yourself if this can be done.

It is not necessary though to assume an empiricist line here – this is not really said in what we’ve read, so it’s worth mentioning. If one adopts the alternative to empiricism – rationalism – one can say that some primitive concepts are just innate. Our minds are never tabula rasa – we never see the world as a blur, even as infants. To come back to the example above, there might be no need to define space in terms of sensory concepts, since space might be a primitive building block of perception to begin with.

Note how this is connected with knowledge. What is the ultimate source of our knowledge? Our senses or our reason? Which if any can give us certainty? Do you know what Descartes had to say about this?

Note also how it is connected with the possibility and scope of communication. Is there a level at which we can clarify all misunderstandings that can be clarified? Is this level sensory? Can we tell what we really mean by appeal to what the senses give us?

It is, I think, in a sense true that we cannot communicate what we don’t understand quite well ourselves. But does that mean that we have definitions for what we understand? How often do we need to be VERY precise? If definitions are all or nothing (as they are in the logical sense), could  this be a realistic model of what we achieve in communication? Could it be that we have, at least within a culture, similar concepts, but different or no definitions?

3.       So why definitions?

Because we want some things from a theory of concepts and definitions seem to fulfill at least some of those desiderata (at a cost, of course). You have the list of motivations from the text – and at least we managed to say a few words last time.

We want to understand how we learn or acquire concepts. Definitions can be learned within a theory (the child supposedly develops a theory of the world – a view of how things are) by summation of conditions or features.

We want to explain why we see the world as made up of distinct objects and stuffs. We have categories and we place things into them. How do we do that? How do we classify something as coffee? Easy: check if it’s liquid, check if you can drink it, check if it has caffeine. There is another interesting question here: there is structure in our minds; but is it the structure of the world, or just an illusion? Plato wanted proper knowledge to cut nature ‘at its joints’.

We want to know why thoughts are systematic and generally consistent – why there is logic and argumentative structure in how we think about the world and ourselves. Well, definitions capture logical structure and logical relations.

Whatever the content of our concepts is, we want it to determine what the concepts are about. Say our concept of coffee is a kind of mental symbol. There must be something that connects that symbol with real, hot, nice coffee. Definitions suggest that it is a check-procedure. Reference determination – i.e. targeting what you are talking about – is done by satisfaction of the conditions specified in a definition. This is supposed to secure reference.

And so on.

Some of these ideas might seem interesting, some other might not alter you pulse at all. Try giving a thought to those that fall in the first category.

4.       What else?

The objections to the Classical theory, i.e. to concepts being definitions are on you. Take another look at the reading, but better think of your own intuitions and examples.

We’ll say a few words about Frege next time. It’s important that we understand the sense/reference distinction – and we will eventually. But mostly it’s gonna be Wittgenstein.

Cheers. 

a few thoughts about the second meeting

This is not the summary – I will write that soon enough. I’m not so sure in fact what this is .

Today, I thought, we were not very organized. Things could have been clearer. Sorry for that. I’m waiting for your reactions to estimate the damage done. I will come back to the central issues about definitions in the summary. And let’s see what you have to say about the problems faced by the ‘classical theory’. Don’t be shy.

It is not a problem if we get carried away in discussions. But we shouldn’t overdo it. Anyway, here are some of the things that came up today.

1. The question about colorblind people having color concepts:

> Oliver Sacks wrote a book called ‘The Island of the Colorblind’. Here is a review. I have the book - if any of you is really interested, let me know. The linked review will also tell you some things about Knut Nordby, the colorblind color scientist. And this is the island in question.

> In 1982 Frank Jackson wrote a famous paper called ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’. The paper is famous mostly for the story [i.e. thought experiment] of Mary. What would happen if someone that was never exposed to colors sees something red? Suppose that person knows all the science of color already. Will the person learn something new? Btw, David Lodge uses this scenario in one of his novels – ‘Thinks…’. Can’t tell you much, I haven’t read it. Here is a review.

> My green is your red; we use the same names for colors, but they ‘feel’ different. How could we ever tell? This kind of example is called ‘inverted spectrum’ in philosophy. Read about it here. What about pain?

2. Neural networks [this is not directly relevant for what we're doing at this point, but we might talk about such things in the future]

> Basic stuff on Wikipedia

A nice weekend & many martisoare!

reading for next time: also online

Reminder: you need to read sections 1 & 2 [pp 3-27] of the first chapter in M&L. We copied the material, but since some of you were not in class it might be easier to read online.

The google book is here. Pages 3-27, ok?

summary of 1st class

We spent some time on introducing ourselves and on administrative matters – the structure of the course, evaluation etc. See Evaluation and Syllabus above; see also the previous posts on this blog.

We also tried to spell out what this course is about. Of course, since in this course we ask, among other things, what are concepts, we cannot start with a definition of concepts. So we implicitly started with words – since, intuitively at least, words stand for, or express, concepts.

What we tried was to grasp some of the problems raised by concepts by looking at some historical examples. In the Meno, Socrates says that we first need to know what is virtue before we can know if it can be taught. In Euthyphro we see the same pattern – what is piety is now the question.

This kind of question – ‘what is X?’ – seems to imply something like this: X is a kind of thing. There are many X-s around [e.g. many different virtuous acts], but, to the extent that they are Xs, they all have something in common. What they have in common can be captured by a definition. What the definition will specify is, in fact, our concept of X. Something is an X if and only if it satisfies the conditions given by the definition.

At the very roots of Western philosophy – of Western thought in fact - we find this effort to define fundamental concepts. Fundamental in different respects – for thought [what is knowledge? what is truth?], for society and social life [what is good? what is value? what is virtue?] or for art [what is beauty?].

This question came up quickly in the class: can we really define these fundamental concepts? If we leave that aside for a moment, we can ask: can we define any concept at all? It seems that we can, at least in logic or mathematics. But what about something as simple as ‘table’? Surely we know what tables are? But what is it that we know? Is it a definition?

The point is not that we can be seriously skeptical about tables and our knowledge thereof. The point is that in a simple move we question what tradition taught us about thought, about how the mind meets and understands the world.

More on definitions next time.

PS to first meeting

 First thing first: We will meet every Friday at 4 20 PM in room # 113!

Second: Thank you Diana, Ana, and Alex for coming today on such a short notice. There will be another post soon summarizing the little that we managed to talk about during the first class. We also remind you what we plan to do next [btw, see 'First class' below - that's pretty much the plan for next time].

 Read the part of introduction we gave you for next time. After that, you can make your own copies of the reader, which you will find in the library early next week [try Tuesday, just to be sure it's there].

George mentioned two examples from Plato this first time. Here’s where you find them:

 Plato - Euthyphro

Plato - Meno

For next time, in addition to the Intro, you can try [but we don't require you to]:

SEP entry on concepts [section 1]

SEP entry on Frege

… and if you’re brave enough:

Frege’s On Sense and Reference - the original in German is here

Third: do explore this website if you haven’t done that yet.

first meeting!

We meet tomorrow [Friday] at 4 PM outside the teachers room [cancelarie! ].  

Students that cannot take the course for credit but want to audit are welcome to talk to us about participating in the class.

update

The reader will only be available in the library the day of the first class. Sorry for the delay.

First class

We will probably have the first meeting on February 22nd – but make sure to check this site for updates. We will also let you know about the place. Below there’s a sketch of what we intend to do. Don’t worry if it sounds unfamiliar – the role of what follows is to give you some rough idea about the class, not to be a substitute for the class. Time allowing, we will do this for every class – a pre-class sketch or plan, and maybe some follow-up notes.

Every class will consist of two sessions, around 50 minutes each. For the first class, we will spend most of the first session discussing general issues: the topic, structure, and goals of the course, evaluation and grading, study materials etc. Our secret hope is to get over these things quickly and then spend some time on making sure we all have some pre-theoretic grasp of what concepts could be and why they matter. 

We will see that, psychologically, what we aim at belongs to a theory of mental representation. Philosophically, it belongs to semantics, or the theory of meaning. These things are important as they stand, but one special way of capturing their role is to point out that they are foundational ingredients in a mature theory of communication. We’ll have to navigate between points of view and disciplines often – and maybe shifting perspectives will make things clearer.

In the second session we will approach a particular conception of how language works – Frege’s distinction between sense [Ger. Sinn] and reference [Ger. Bedeutung] – and, against the author’s anti-psychologism, we will consider the question if his theory of language can be extended into a theory of concepts.

There are no readings assigned for the first class, since we want you to believe we’re nice. Being nice however doesn’t stop us from recommending a quick glance at the following materials (feel free to be superficial – just skip what you can’t follow):

> section 1 from the SEP entry on Concepts

> SEP entry on Frege

> Frege’s original paper [well, one of the En versions] ‘On Sense and Reference’

Once we’ll have the reader ready, there might be more. To be clear: none of this is mandatory, but redundancy, its reputation to the contrary, does not hurt. For the mandatory stuff, check the syllabus – we’ll also remind you here what’s next, since there might be minor changes as we proceed with the course.

update – for foreign students

Try ‘Survive Bucharest’ [above]. It might help you to prepare for your stay in Bucharest.

We’ve just started working on the page – Romanian students could help us with this, by the way…