METHODOLOGICAL SOLIPSISM - what is it?
Bill Taylor
This term keeps on getting bandied about this newsgroup,
but it remains a bit unclear what it actually means.
Can anyone please help us out with an explanation?
N.B. Would anyone responding please answer in their own words, without
excerpts from other works, or references to other newsgroup or
journal articles. Many thanks!
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Bill Taylor W.Ta...@math.canterbury.ac.nz
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The solipsist society may have more than one member, but who's counting?
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Oliver Sparrow
mat...@math.canterbury.ac.nz (Bill Taylor) wrote:
"" This term keeps on getting bandied about this newsgroup,
"" but it remains a bit unclear what it actually means.
I second the request. This usegroup needs a FUB, or Frequently Used Buzzword,
thread.
______________________________________
Oliver Sparrow
Michael Straeubig
Bill Taylor wrote in message <6mng5u$3sr$3...@cantuc.canterbury.ac.nz>...
>This term keeps on getting bandied about this newsgroup,
>but it remains a bit unclear what it actually means.
>
A try:
Solipsism: a view, under which the person holding this view is the only
entity that exists,
the other entities (persons, objects) being solely "inhabitants" of that
persons mind.
(That view can only be stated from the first-person perspective)
Methodological: pertains to method (e.g. of scientific investigation)
thus:
Methodological Solipsism: "the point of view that the method a person uses
(e.g introspection or empirical means or a crystal ball) is the only method
that exists."
Pretty strange, though. Do methods exist ? Maybe one would rephrase it
Methodological Solipsism: "the point of view that the method(s) a person
uses
is(are) the only method(s) that is(are) valid."
>
>N.B. Would anyone responding please answer in their own words, without
> excerpts from other works, or references to other newsgroup or
> journal articles. Many thanks!
Yep.
Mike
mi...@easynet.de
"when two solipsists meet, one of them has to vanish"
David Longley
In article <6mng5u$3sr$3...@cantuc.canterbury.ac.nz>
mat...@math.canterbury.ac.nz "Bill Taylor" writes:
> This term keeps on getting bandied about this newsgroup,
> but it remains a bit unclear what it actually means.
>
> Can anyone please help us out with an explanation?
>
> N.B. Would anyone responding please answer in their own words, without
> excerpts from other works, or references to other newsgroup or
> journal articles. Many thanks!
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Bill Taylor W.Ta...@math.canterbury.ac.nz
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> The solipsist society may have more than one member, but who's counting?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
"Fragments" *begins* by contrasting methodological solipsism with what
I have called "the extensional stace" of metholdological behaviourism.
http://www.longley.demon.co.uk/Frag.htm
see
http://www.longley.demon.co.uk
for ASCII and .pdf variants.
Carnap, in seeking to implement the positivist programme of Whitehead-
Russell-Wittgenstein, and particularly inspired by the Principia and
Russell's "Our Knowledge of the External World" published "Logische
Aufbau der Welt" in 1928 (no English translation in print). This set
out to show, hoiw, in principle, and from a methodologiclaly
solipsistic stance, our knowledge of the external world could be built
out of sense-data primitives, drawing on the technology of the
Principia.
Carnap later abandoned the approach.
In more recent history, Putnam used the term, and most significantly -
Fodor published an influential paper in 1980 entitled
'Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy for
Cognitive Psychology'. In that paper he proposed that Cognitive
Psychology adopt a stance, or restricted itself to the
explication of the ways that subjects make sense of the world from
their 'own particular point of view'. This was to be contrasted with
the objectives of 'Naturalistic Psychology' or 'Evidential
Behaviourism'.
Methodological Solipsism, as opposed to Methodological Behaviourism,
takes 'cognitive processes', mental contents (meanings/propositions)
or 'propositional attitudes' of folk/commonsense psychology at face
value. It accepts that there is a 'Language of Thought' (Fodor 1975),
that there is a universal 'mentalese' which natural languages map
onto, and which express thoughts as 'propositions'. It examines the
apparent causal relations and processes of 'attribution' between these
processes and other psychological processes which have propositional
content. It accepts what is known as the 'formality condition', ie
that thinking is a purely formal, syntactic, computational affair
which therefore has no room for semantic notions such as truth or
falsehood. Such computational processes are therefore indifferent to
whether beliefs are about the world per se (can be said to have a
reference), or are just the views of the belief holder (ie may be
purely imaginary). Technically, this amounts to beliefs not being
subject to 'existential or universal quantification'.
Here is how Fodor's paper was summarised in abstract:
'Explores the distinction between 2 doctrines, both of
which inform theory construction in much of modern
cognitive psychology: the representational theory of
mind and the computational theory of mind. According to
the former, propositional attitudes are viewed as
relations that organisms bear to mental representations.
According to the latter, mental processes have access
only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental
representations over which they are defined. The
following claims are defended: (1) The traditional
dispute between rational and naturalistic psychology is
plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the
computational theory of mind. (2) To accept the
formality condition is to endorse a version of
methodological solipsism. (3) The acceptance of some
such condition is warranted, at least for that part of
psychology that concerns itself with theories of the
mental causation of behavior. A glossary and several
commentaries are included.'
J A Fodor (1980)
Methodological solipsism considered as a research
strategy in cognitive psychology.
Massachusetts Inst of Technology
Behavioral and Brain Sciences; 1980 Mar Vol 3(1) 63-109
Some of the commentaries, particularly those by Loar or Rey clarify
what is, admittedly, quite a difficult, but substantial view widely
held by graduate psychologists.
'If psychological explanation is a matter of describing
computational processes, then the references of our
thoughts do not matter to psychological explanation.
This is Fodor's main argument.....Notice that Fodor's
argument can be taken a step further. For not only are
the references of our thoughts not mentioned in
cognitive psychology; nothing that DETERMINES their
references, like Fregian senses, is mentioned
either....Neither reference nor reference-determining
sense have a place in the description of computational
processes.'
B. F. Loar
Ibid p.89
Not all of the commentaries were as formal, as the following
commentary from one of the UK's most eminent logicians makes clear:
'Fodor thinks that when we explain behaviour by mental
causes, these causes would be given "opaque"
descriptions "true in virtue of the way the agent
represents the objects of his wants (intentions,
beliefs, etc.) to HIMSELF" (his emphasis). But what an
agent intends may be widely different from the way he
represents the object of his intention to himself. A man
cannot shuck off the responsibility for killing another
man by just 'directing his intention' at the firing of a
gun:
"I press a trigger - Well, I'm blessed!
he's hit my bullet with his chest!"'
P. Geach
ibid p80
The Methodological Solipsist's stance is clearly at odds with what is
required to function effectively as an APPLIED Criminological
Psychologist if 'functional effectiveness' is taken to refer to
intervention in the behaviour of an inmate with reference to his
environment. Here's how Fodor contrasted Methodological Solipsism with
the naturalistic approach:
'..there's a tradition which argues that - epistemology
to one side - it is at best a strategic mistake to
attempt to develop a psychology which individuates
mental states without reference to their environmental
causes and effects...I have in mind the tradition which
includes the American Naturalists (notably Pierce and
Dewey), all the learning theorists, and such
contemporary representatives as Quine in philosophy and
Gibson in psychology. The recurrent theme here is that
psychology is a branch of biology, hence that one must
view the organism as embedded in a physical environment.
The psychologist's job is to trace those
organism/environment interactions which constitute its
behavior.'
J. Fodor (1980) ibid. p.64
Here is how Stich (1991) reviewed Fodor's position ten years on:
'This argument was part of a larger project. Influenced
by Quine, I have long been suspicious about the
integrity and scientific utility of the commonsense
notions of meaning and intentional content. This is not,
of course, to deny that the intentional idioms of
ordinary discourse have their uses, nor that the uses
are important. But, like Quine, I view ordinary
intentional locutions as projective, context sensitive,
observer relative, and essentially dramatic. They are
not the sorts of locutions we should welcome in serious
scientific discourse. For those who share this Quinean
scepticism, the sudden flourishing of cognitive
psychology in the 1970s posed something of a problem. On
the account offered by Fodor and other observers, the
cognitive psychology of that period was exploiting both
the ontology and the explanatory strategy of commonsense
psychology. It proposed to explain cognition and certain
aspects of behavior by positing beliefs, desires, and
other psychological states with intentional content, and
by couching generalisations about the interactions among
those states in terms of their intentional content. If
this was right, then those of us who would banish talk
of content in scientific settings would be throwing out
the cognitive psychological baby with the intentional
bath water. On my view, however, this account of
cognitive psychology was seriously mistaken. The
cognitive psychology of the 1970s and early 1980s was
not positing contentful intentional states, nor was it
(adverting) to content in its generalisations. Rather, I
maintained, the cognitive psychology of the day was
"really a kind of logical syntax (only psychologized).
Moreover, it seemed to me that there were good reasons
why cognitive psychology not only did not but SHOULD not
traffic in intentional states. One of these reasons was
provided by the Autonomy argument.'
Stephen P. Stich (1991)
Narrow Content meets Fat Syntax
in MEANING IN MIND - Fodor And His Critics
and writing with others in 1991, even more dramatically:
'In the psychological literature there is no dearth of
models for human belief or memory that follow the lead
of commonsense psychology in supposing that
propositional modularity is true. Indeed, until the
emergence of connectionism, just about all psychological
models of propositional memory, except those urged by
behaviorists, were comfortably compatible with
propositional modularity. Typically, these models view a
subject's store of beliefs or memories as an
interconnected collection of functionally discrete,
semantically interpretable states that interact in
systematic ways. Some of these models represent
individual beliefs as sentence like structures - strings
of symbols that can be individually activated by their
transfer from long-term memory to the more limited
memory of a central processing unit. Other models
represent beliefs as a network of labelled nodes and
labelled links through which patterns of activation may
spread. Still other models represent beliefs as sets of
production rules. In all three sorts of models, it is
generally the case that for any given cognitive episode,
like performing a particular inference or answering a
question, some of the memory states will be actively
involved, and others will be dormant......
The thesis we have been defending in this essay is that
connectionist models of a certain sort are incompatible
with the propositional modularity embedded in
commonsense psychology. The connectionist models in
question are those that are offered as models at the
COGNITIVE level, and in which the encoding of
information is widely distributed and subsymbolic. In
such models, we have argued, there are no DISCRETE,
SEMANTICALLY INTERPRETABLE states that play a CAUSAL
ROLE in some cognitive episodes but not others. Thus
there is, in these models, nothing with which the
propositional attitudes of commonsense psychology can
plausibly be identified. If these models turn out to
offer the best accounts of human belief and memory, we
shall be confronting an ONTOLOGICALLY RADICAL theory
change - the sort of theory change that will sustain the
conclusion that propositional attitudes, like caloric
and phlogiston, do not exist.'
W. Ramsey, S. Stich and J. Garon (1991)
Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk
psychology.
The implications here are that progress in applying psychology will be
impeded if psychologists persist in trying to talk about, or use
psychological (intensional) phenomena within a framework (evidential
behaviourism) which inherently resists quantification into such
terms. Without bound, extensional predicates, we can not reliably use
the predicate calculus, and without the predicate (functional)
calculus we can not formulate lawful relationships, statistical or
determinate.
For the explicit context of familiar AI - see publications by Winograd.
--
David Longley (check end reply line #)
Longley Consulting London, UK
Behaviour Assessment & Profiling Technology,
Research, Data Analysis and Training Services,
Small IT Systems http://www.longley.demon.co.uk
David Longley
The other approach is essentially Quinean. Up until 1951, when
Quine published "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", it might have been
argued that the Carnap programme of classic positivism had some
defence. The latter's assumptions (or dogmas) that one could test
individual observation statements in isolation (from the rest of
the web of belief) and that there was a distinction between
analytic and synthetic statements made the Carnapian programme of
the "Aufbau" seem a viable form of scientific philosophy - but
Quine's critique of traditional empiricism/positivism in "two
dogmas" changed all of this dramatically.
What many don't seem to appreciate is that this was an argument
*within* empiricism or positivism. The abandonment of the two
dogmas results in enlightened empiricism, external (rather than
phenomenalistic) empiricism - or, what I have called 'the
extensional stance'.
A priori epistemology is replaced by naturalised epistemology - a
chapter of psychology (learning theory).
Hence, in Fodor's writings - Quine is depicted as the 'wicked
behaviourist' as opposed to the 'handsome cognitivist' - see
Fodor's own precis of 'modularity of mind' in BBS).
I doubt very much whether much of this can be properly understood
without reading *a lot* of the history.
Neil Rickert
mat...@math.canterbury.ac.nz (Bill Taylor) writes:
>This term keeps on getting bandied about this newsgroup,
>but it remains a bit unclear what it actually means.
>Can anyone please help us out with an explanation?
Most likely, everybody who uses the expression has a slightly different meaning.
Roughly speaking, it is the classical picture assumed by traditional
AI, and by most philosophers. That is, various sensory processes
convert the data to internal forms at the surface. Intelligence
(cognition, consciousness, meaning, whatever else you want to talk
about) depends primarily on what happens inside, and for all
practical purposes we can ignore the details of what happens at the
surface.
I take a position strongly opposed to that. I place significant
emphasis on how we interact with the world. Naturally, Longley
accuses me of being a methodological solipsist, while failing to see
the extent to which he adopts that position.
M...@my-dejanews.com
In article <6mng5u$3sr$3...@cantuc.canterbury.ac.nz>,
mat...@math.canterbury.ac.nz (Bill Taylor) wrote:
>
> This term keeps on getting bandied about this newsgroup,
> but it remains a bit unclear what it actually means.
>
> Can anyone please help us out with an explanation?
>
>
Its my way or the highway! ;^)
>without
> excerpts from other works, or references to other newsgroup or
> journal articles. Many thanks!
>
>
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> Bill Taylor W.Ta...@math.canterbury.ac.nz
>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> The solipsist society may have more than one member, but who's counting?
>
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>
>
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Anders N Weinstein
In article <6mng5u$3sr$3...@cantuc.canterbury.ac.nz>,
Bill Taylor <mat...@math.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>Can anyone please help us out with an explanation?
This term was introduced into analytic philosophy by Hilary Putnam in
his paper "The Meaning of Meaning" in connection with his Twin Earth
thought experiment. I believe Putnam attributes it to Rudolf Carnap,
whose basis in the _Logische Aufbau der Welt_ conformed to its
strictures. However, as I recall, Carnap there used terms translated
into English as "autopsychological" -- pertaining solely to the
contents of one's own mind considered in isolation -- and
"heteropsychological" -- pertaining to other minds.
The term was picked up in the title of a paper discussing the issue
with respect to cognitive science by Jerry Fodor, reprinted
in Haugeland's _Mind Design_.
As indicated above, "methodological solipsism" basically means that for
theoretical purposes, one should take the approach of considering only
the contents of one's own mental states, from the first person
perspective, without assuming anything about the existence of anything
other than one's own mental states. That is, for some methodological
purpose, one assumes only the existence of one's own mind and its
contents, and nothing else such as the "external" world of physical
objects or other people with minds.
This assumption of solipsism is only "methodological" in that one will
likely not want, in the end, to wind up positively asserting that one
is the only existing thing in reality. Rather, one hopes to work back
to the existence of outer things and other minds from this presumably
indubitable foundation. It is a bit like trying to prove a theorem
without using a certain supposed axiom or any proof that depends on it,
not because you don't believe the axiom is true, but because you hope
to show that you can prove everything you want from more basic ones.
For example, Carnap in that early work purported to give definitions by
logical construction for various concepts of external objects in terms
of a primitive basis that only made reference to one's own experiential
states. Thus the primitive vocabulary of the system, as explained, was
"methodologically solipsist" -- it did not contain any terms that would
presume the existence of anything outside one's own mind at the start,
only a flow of experiential states (sensations) and qualitative
similarities that can be apprehended between them.
The idea is that statements about enduring physical bodies in space can
be introduced by definition in terms of actual and possible sensations
that will be recieved by the subject (phenomenalism). Once that is in
placed, it is hoped that statements about other people's minds can be
defined in terms of movements and dispositions of their bodies (logical
behaviorism).
The idea of methodological solipsism lies at the root of the modern
epistemological and phenomenological traditions in philosophy. Its
origin is in Descartes' Meditations, where, for methodological
purposes, he resolves to suspend belief in all knowledge arrived at
through his senses (and so in the "external" world of material objects)
so as to arrive at a secure foundation for all his knowledge in terms
of what he can find within his own intellect. It is at work in
Kant's transcendental philosophy, which took the foundation of
knowledge to lie apriori in the structures imposed by the nature of the
individual cognizer. You find it in some of the idealisms that derive
from Kant, such as Schopenhauer's, which had a strong influence on
early Wittgenstein.
Perhaps the zenith of this tradition was in Husserl's phenomenological
program. That was based on the "phenomenological reduction" with its
attendant "epoche" -- putting in brackets -- whereby one suspends
belief in anything outside the mind while doing phenomenology. This is
supposed to isolate for study the purely *intentional* character of
mental states. As with Kant, this is supposed to distill the component
of experience whose source is in the individual "I" alone, and whose
nature is the same whatever the world. Today John Searle defends
something similar in his theory of intentionality.
Behind the idea of "methodological solipsism" as a strategy for
theorizing about the foundations of empirical knowledge or the mind is
a certain metaphysical presuppostion about the nature of mental states,
which has been labelled "individualism": the assumption that the
individual cognitive subject is entirely self-contained and autonomous,
in that the nature (classification and individuation) of the mental
states at issue is entirely independent of anything outside the
subject's mind. On this assumption the subjective states of an
individual mind could be entirely as they are even as the world outside
the mind varied, or if an external world did not exist at all, for
example, if the mind was hallucinating or a "brain in a vat" being fed
stimuli generated by a computer simulator.
A good deal of recent analytical philosophy of mind has been concerned
with considering arguments *against* the assumption of "individualism"
about the constitution of mental states in favor of the alternative
labelled "externalism" -- that the nature and individuation of an
individual's mental states crucially depends on relations to the
environment, for example to the natural kinds in the physical world
(Putnam) or to elements in the social linguistic environment (Tyler
Burge). Twin Earth style hypotheticals are supposed to win your agreement to
the idea that given different environments, creatures with the "same"
(homologous) brain states might be in different mental states.
like knowing or seeing.
In other philosophical traditions externalist ideas have also
been defended by the existential phenomenologists (Heidegger, Sartre),
by followers of Wittgenstein, by ecological psychologists such as JJ
Gibson, by "social behaviorists" in the tradition of GH Mead, and, by
Marxian and other social thinkers, who emphasize various ways in which
the individual mind is social constituted.
A nice survey introducing some of the issues with respect to
philosophy of mind is Gregory McCulloch, _The Mind and its World_.
There seems to be some controversy over whether cognitive science as
actually practiced is or is not "methodologically solipsist". Fodor's
typically quirky paper tried to make the case that it had to be to
succed. But a lot depends on what you think about the problematic role
of semantic interpretation in cognitivist explanation.
Tyler Burge argued, for example, that David Marr's approach to
explaining vision is not individualist, since it requires giving a
"computational theory" that says what representations -- with what
semantic content -- are being computed and why. But saying that depends
on constraints determined by the external environment, for example, the
assumptions under which an edge-detection algorithm actually furnishes
reliable information about edges. In a different environment, a
formally identical program might not be a reliable discrminator of
edges, but might be explained as deriving semantically different
representations, e.g. shadows.
Others have suggested in response that strictly speaking only the
formal or uninterpreted program is part of the precise content of the
theory, and that any teleological analysis of "what is being computed
and why" is merely heuristic embellishment.
Phil Roberts, Jr.
Bravo! This was a really good one, Anders.
--
Phil Roberts, Jr.
Feelings of Worthlessness and So-Called Cognitive Science
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5476
themantaking...@yahoo.com.au
Don Stockbauer
> Methodological solipsism is a strict method of sense data and experiences from the subjective experiences (for example the mental images or the emotional feelings) detected and known from the bodily senses (touch, feel, taste, smell, sight, and sound), from which conclusions are drwan that reality is an illusion, a result of a brain wired to a supercomputer, and some corrupt thing took the solipsist's brain out, preserved it, and made artificial reality the solipsist thought was real but was deceived. That would be methodological solipsism. Empirical evidence, therefore subjective impressions, are the sole proper basis of philosophy. Avoiding pain and suffering is a matter of prudence, whereas a subject could get hurt and might be a real person if pain and suffering occurs. Problems can be solved, to avoid harm, and to use this, do that, or do things this way or that way, by the use of this knowledge, from perception of his experience, which he detected.
LudovicoVan
news:9b9fd273-6144-404a...@googlegroups.com...
on the same boat. In fact, methodological solipsism is not only illogical,
as a methodology, because of its null operational value, but as well
senseless in that cognition is also and primarily a matter of judgement: in
this case between a universe that I am and a universe that We are. We have
to choose, not the destiny still the path.
-LV
LudovicoVan
news:k77pla$1oh$1...@dont-email.me...
the external world for its alterity (i.e. that the world is not just us) is
the very first step in the cognitive adventure out of the womb. Later it
becomes a rational choice.
-LV
LudovicoVan
discussion can be read here:
<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.ai.philosophy/-nSIPDLeVlY/1qoVRG-34bcJ>
Please use follow-ups appropriately.
Regard,
-LV
news:k77q4c$43r$1...@dont-email.me...
TheInquirer
> Forwarding this to the groups that may be interested. The original
> discussion can be read here:
>
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.ai.philosophy/-nSIPDLeVlY/1qoVRG-34bcJ>
>
>
> Please use follow-ups appropriately.
>
> Regard,
>
> -LV
does "methodological" mean that there is no ontological commitment to
whether other beings exist, without necessarily asserting that other
beings do not exist?
why did one netter call it "illogical" and having "null operational
value"?
isn't it true that everything that i see, touch, taste, ... etc
including this very post i'm replying to is just electrical signals
to my brain and i am so limited, and thus i don't really know that
you guys really exist?
i mean: i hope you do exist ... er ... actually no, , for some of you,
... but can i ever know for sure? all the Usenet posts can be generated
by some very clever sentient super-computer with human or super-human
intelligence, right?
--
I ask, becos I'm curious.
Just answer the damn question, not the questioner! Don't
presume. My personal matters/beliefs are none of your
business. I ask, you answer. If you think my questions
are stupid, you have already proven that you are stupid,
not me. If you don't know the answer, can you please
"pass" to more capable person(s) to answer?
Gary Forbis
> i mean: i hope you do exist ... er ... actually no, , for some of you,
> ... but can i ever know for sure? all the Usenet posts can be generated
> by some very clever sentient super-computer with human or super-human
> intelligence, right?
present something for you to think about.
How do you know you are asleep? There are times I am unconscious and
there are times I am in dream state and there are times I know I am in
dream state. If you are the same then how do you know when you are
awake?
If there is nothing outside of you then we are part of you.