Showing papers on "Philosophy of mind published in 1977"
TL;DR: The other-minds problem and the justification of induction have been studied in the context of epistemological crisis as discussed by the authors, where an agent who has believed that he was highly valued by his employers and colleagues is suddenly fired; someone proposed for membership of a club whose members were all, so he believed, close friends is blackballed; and someone falls out of love and needs to know how he or she can possibly have been so mistaken in the other.
Abstract: What is an epistemological crisis? Consider, first, the situation of ordinary agents who are thrown into such crises. Someone who has believed that he was highly valued by his employers and colleagues is suddenly fired; someone proposed for membership of a club whose members were all, so he believed, close friends is blackballed. Or someone falls in love and needs to know what the loved one really feels; someone falls out of love and needs to know how he or she can possibly have been so mistaken in the other. For all such persons the relationship of seems to is becomes crucial. It is in such situations that ordinary agents who have never learned anything about academic philosophy are apt to rediscover for themselves versions of the other-minds problem and the problem of the justification of induction. They discover, that is, that there is a problem about the rational justification of inferences from premises about the behavior of other people to conclusions about their thoughts, feelings, and attitudes and of inferences from premises about how individuals have acted in the past to conclusions expressed as generalizations about their behavior, generalizations which would enable us to make reasonably reliable predications about their future behavior. What they took to be evidence pointing unambiguously in some one direction now turns out to have been equally susceptible of rival interpretations.
336 citations
158 citations
81 citations
31 citations
TL;DR: The authors defend Lewis's proposal against a criticism recently made by Donald Nute, by Kit Fine, and by Lewis G Creary and Christopher S Hill, which is represented as follows:
Abstract: Let A and B be indicative sentences, either of ordinary English (or some other natural language), or truth-functional compounds of natural-language sentences built up by means of the usual truth-functional connectives Then we call rif it were the case that A, it would be the case that B71 a regimented counterfactual sentence (RCS) (Hereinafter, we shall use ' > _' to abbreviate 'if it were the case that , it would be the case that ___') Several writers, including David Lewis,2 have proposed ways of assigning truthconditions to RCS's The proposal made by Lewis in his Counterfactuals and elsewhere viz, A > B is true3 just in the case that (i) A is necessarily false, or (ii) there is a possible world at which A & B is true that is more like the actual world than is any world at which A & B is true seems to us to be correct In this paper, we will defend Lewis's proposal against a criticism recently made by Donald Nute, by Kit Fine, and by Lewis G Creary and Christopher S Hill4 The premises of the argument for the inadequacy of the Lewis proposal may be represented as follows:
31 citations
29 citations
26 citations
[...]
TL;DR: One of the prevailing tendencies in the Anglo-American philosophy of mind holds that any elucidation of mental concepts requires attention to the public conventions and social contexts of their proper use as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: One of the prevailing tendencies in the Anglo-American philosophy of mind holds that any elucidation of mental concepts requires attention to the public conventions and social contexts of their proper use. Conceptual analysts have sought to show how the sense of such concepts must be connected to the ways in which they can be acquired by a speaker of a public language and used routinely in communicative situations. In displaying the logical grammar of our mental concepts (the occasions and modalities of their employment), analysts typically furnish examples of mundane social situations from which such concepts obtain their various senses and (which is the same thing) within which they have a part to play. When considered in abstraction from specific circumstances and forms of conduct, the so-called ‘psychological phenomena’ of understanding, intending, thinking, believing, hoping, expecting and others can so easily be pictured in theoretic reflection as purely inner states or processes.