Re: Sellars's article
Immortalist
"andy-k" <spam.free@last> wrote in message
news:4zeHf.27666$Fy4...@newsfe4-win.ntli.net...
> "Frk" wrote:
>> I'm an italian student of philosophy. I need Wilfrid Sellars's "Abstact
>> Entities". Does anyone can help me?
>
> http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/carnap.htm
In today's science-led world there is a lot of emphasis placed on the need
for stability and continuity in order for observation to take place. Even in
our own lives, we place higher value on those who do not change their minds
all the time than those who do. Yet the fact is that there is nothing in the
world which does not change. Our bodies shed cells every day, we get new
thoughts every moment and even at the atomic level everything is in flux.
Yet if this is the case, how can we know anything when everything around us
is changing? How do we know that something is still the same as it was a
minute ago despite the fact that in some way it has changed? This is not a
modern problem as these are exactly the kind of questions Plato sought to
answer in his theory of the Forms.
Plato felt that before you could say anything about X you needed to first
answer the question "What is X?". Now the fact that X is always changing (as
we have seen), means our knowledge of X is always going to be unreliable.
Yet in order for us to know X there must be some understanding of it which
does not change and which lies beyond our immediate and limited perception.
For example, there are many different types of tree. You cannot point to an
Oak tree and say, "This is what a tree is" because your definition of a tree
cannot be limited simply to the description of an Oak tree. There are many
different types of tree (some even artificial), so by defining trees
according to an Oak tree you are in effect saying that anything other than
an Oak tree is not a tree! This is clearly ridiculous so what we need is
some broad understanding of 'tree' by which we can say an Oak tree, or a
Pine tree or any other type of tree, despite their differences, are trees
(and at the same time say why a Daffodil is not a tree). This is exactly
what the Forms are intended to do. They are eternal and changeless
understandings of everyday objects and ideas (E.g. Good or Beauty), which do
not exist in the phenomenal (everyday) realm but exist simply in a
hypothetical realm.
When something is good or beautiful, it is so because that thing partakes of
an archetypal essence of goodness or beauty that is absolute and perfect,
that exists on a timeless level that transcends its passing particular
manifestation, and that is ultimately accessible only to the intellect, not
to the senses. (Tarnas p.37)
In this respect Plato is a Realist because he believes that 'absolute
truths' exist outside our normal realm of human experience. Although people
may argue whether something is good (or not) or whether something is
beautiful (or not), if one has access to these higher truths it is logically
possible for someone to make an absolute value judgement (i.e. "This is
Good" or "This is Beautiful"). Now access to this kind of truth is clearly
not available to everyone as people constantly disagree as to what is good
or beautiful. However, Plato believed that with the right training
philosophers could make these sorts of value judgements based on pure
knowledge.
His analogy of the cave (The Republic 514b-521b) illustrates this point
well. Here Plato describes how people are trapped in a cave and forced to
watch a shadow puppet play which they think is the real world. Only if
someone leaves the cave will they learn the truth (that they are mistaking
shadows for the real world), and only if they return will they be able to
teach the others what they know. In the same way, philosophers must be
trained to see the realm of Forms beyond everyday experience to become the
'Guardians' of society.
So how has our knowledge become corrupted? Plato believed people could
understand the world in its pure form but have simply forgotten how to.
Through the labour of philosophical reflection, the human mind can bring to
birth the divine wisdom that was its former possession... education is a
process through which truth is not introduced to the mind from without, but
is "led out" from within. The mind then finds revealed within itself a
knowledge both of its own nature and of the universe, a knowledge otherwise
clouded by the obscurities of mundane existence. (Tarnas p.43)
http://www.faithnet.org.uk/Philosophy/plato2.htm
Properties are typically introduced to help explain or account for phenomena
of philosophical interest. The existence of properties, we are told, would
explain qualitative recurrence or help account for our ability to agree
about the instances of general terms like 'red'. In the terminologies of
bygone eras, properties save the phenomena; they afford a fundamentum in re
for things like the applicability of general terms. Nowadays philosophers
make a similar point when they argue that some phenomenon holds because of
or in virtue of this or that property, that a property is its foundation or
ground for it, or that a property is the truth maker for a sentence about
it. These expressions signify explanations.
When properties are introduced to help explain certain philosophically
puzzling phenomena, we have a principled way to learn what properties are
like: since they are invoked to play certain explanatory roles, we can ask
what they would have to be like in order to play the roles they are
introduced to fill. What, for example, would their existence or identity
conditions need to be for them to explain the (putative) modal features of
natural laws or the a priori status of mathematical truths?
Perhaps the deepest question in ontology is when (if ever) it is legitimate
to postulate the existence of entities (like possible worlds, facts, or
properties) that are not evident in experience. Some philosophers insist
that it never is. Others urge that at least some entities of this sort, in
particular properties, have no explanatory power and that appeals to them
are vacuous or otherwise illegitimate (e.g., Quine, 1961, p. 10; Quinton
1973, p. 295).
The more heavy-handed dismissals of properties and other metaphysical
creatures have often been based on faulty accounts of concept formation
(which led Hume to counsel consignment of metaphysical works to the flames)
or defective theories of meaning (which led many positivists to view
metaphysics as a series of pseudo explanations offered to solve pseudo
problems). Wittgenstein takes a more subtle approach, trying to show us that
'our disease is one of wanting explanations' (1991, Pt VI, 31) and striving
to cure us of it. Swoyer (1999) has attempted some defense of explanation by
postulation in ontology, but the issues are difficult ones that are not
amenable to proof or disproof. Fortunately the present task is not to defend
explanation in ontology, but it will be useful to briefly note two general
views about such explanations.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties/
Empiricists are in general rather suspicious with respect to any kind of
abstract entities like properties, classes, relations, numbers,
propositions, etc. They usually feel much more in sympathy with nominalists
than with realists (in the medieval sense). As far as possible they try to
avoid any reference to abstract entities and to restrict themselves to what
is sometimes called a nominalistic language, i. e., one not containing such
references.
However, within certain scientific contexts it seems hardly possible to
avoid them.
In the case of mathematics some empiricists try to find a way out by
treating the whole of mathematics as a mere calculus, a formal system for
which no interpretation is given, or can be given. Accordingly, the
mathematician is said to speak not about numbers, functions and infinite
classes but merely about meaningless symbols and formulas manipulated
according to given formal rules.
In physics it is more difficult to shun the suspected entities because the
language of physics serves for the communication of reports and predictions
and hence cannot be taken as a mere calculus. A physicist who is suspicious
of abstract entities may perhaps try to declare a certain part of the
language of physics as uninterpreted and uninterpretable, that part which
refers to real numbers as space-time coordinates or as values of physical
magnitudes, to functions, limits, etc. More probably he will just speak
about all these things like anybody else but with an uneasy conscience, like
a man who in his everyday life does with qualms many things which are not in
accord with the high moral principles he professes on Sundays.
Recently the problem of abstract entities has arisen again in connection
with semantics, the theory of meaning and truth. Some semanticists say that
certain expressions designate certain entities, and among these designated
entities they include not only concrete material things but also abstract
entities e. g., properties as designated by predicates and propositions as
designated by sentences.
Others object strongly to this procedure as violating the basic principles
of empiricism and leading back to a physical ontology of the Platonic kind.
...Are there properties classes, numbers, propositions? In order to
understand more clearly the nature of these and related problems, it is
above all necessary to recognize a fundamental distinction between two kinds
of questions concerning the existence or reality of entities. If someone
wishes to speak in his language about a new kind of entities, he has to
introduce a system of new ways of speaking, subject to new rules; we shall
call this procedure the construction of a linguistic framework for the new
entities in question. And now we must distinguish two kinds of questions of
existence: first, questions of the existence of certain entities of the new
kind within the framework; we call them internal questions; and second,
questions concerning the existence or reality of the system of entities as a
whole, called external questions. Internal questions and possible answers to
them arc formulated with the help of the new forms of expressions. The
answers may be found either by purely logical methods or by empirical
methods, depending upon whether the framework is a logical or a factual one.
An external question is of a problematic character which is in need of
closer examination.
The world of things . Let us consider as an example the simplest kind of
entities dealt with in the everyday language: the spatio-temporally ordered
system of observable things and events. Once we have accepted the thing
language with its framework for things, we can raise and answer internal
questions, e. g., "Is there a white piece of paper on my desk?" "Did King
Arthur actually live?", "Are unicorns and centaurs real or merely
imaginary?" and the like. These questions are to be answered by empirical
investigations. Results of observations are evaluated according to certain
rules as confirming or disconfirming evidence for possible answers. (This
evaluation is usually carried out, of course, as a matter of habit rather
than a deliberate, rational procedure. But it is possible, in a rational
reconstruction, to lay down explicit rules for the evaluation. This is one
of the main tasks of a pure, as distinguished from a psychological,
epistemology.) The concept of reality occurring in these internal questions
is an empirical scientific non-physical concept. To recognize something as a
real thing or event means to succeed in incorporating it into the system of
things at a particular space-time position so that it fits together with the
other things as real, according to the rules of the framework.
From these questions we must distinguish the external question of the
reality of the thing world itself. In contrast to the former questions, this
question is raised neither by the man in the street nor by scientists, but
only by philosophers. Realists give an affirmative answer, subjective
idealists a negative one, and the controversy goes on for centuries without
ever being solved. And it cannot be solved because it is framed in a wrong
way. To be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the
system; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the system
itself. Those who raise the question of the reality of the thing world
itself have perhaps in mind not a theoretical question as their formulation
seems to suggest, but rather a practical question, a matter of a practical
decision concerning the structure of our language. We have to make the
choice whether or not to accept and use the forms of expression in the
framework in question.
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/carnap.htm
Science, Language, and the Reconstruction of Philosophy: Sellars' Critique
of Carnap in "Empiricism and Abstract Entities"
In "Empiricism and Abstract Entities," Wilfrid Sellars says that Carnap's
work in syntax and semantics provides for the first satisfying empiricist
understanding of mind and knowledge. However, Sellars' praise is given
against the backdrop of a criticism of Carnap's idea of the natures of pure
and descriptive syntax and semantics and their relations. Underlying that
criticism is a disagreement over the notions of "prescription" and
"description". In interpreting these criticisms, it is important to note
that Carnap's ideas of pure and applied syntax and semantics are in the
service of his conception of philosophy as a formal science and as a
subdiscipline of "metascience". As such, these ideas concern both the way in
which philosophy is to become "scientific" and the way in which reasoning in
science can be rationally reconsructed and its rational content exhibited.
Sellars' criticism of Carnap thus has significant import for how such
reconstruction should proceed and what it can accomplish.
In this paper, I will examine this moment in the intertwined histories of
philosophy of science and the philosophies of mind and language, focusing in
particular on two aspects of Sellars' essay. First, I will examine Sellars'
complaint against the analogy Carnap draws between pure and descriptive
syntax and semantics, and pure and physical geometry. Second, I will examine
Sellars' discussion of games and statements about rules in games that
precedes and sets the stage for this complaint. "Normativity" and its
connected concepts, like "prescription", are currently of great interest in
philosophy, and I hope that my analysis of this episode between Sellars and
Carnap helps shed some light on the history of those notions in mid-20th
century analytic philosophy and thus, also, on how those notions have shaped
our current debates.
Robert J. Deltete
http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/marquisj/hopos/images/abstracts.htm
Sellars's functionalism was as much a response to problems in metaphysics as
it was to problems in the philosophy of mind. For Sellars, one of the
challenges was to explain what it could mean to say such things as,
"'Dreieckig' (in German) stands for triangularity" without positing the
existence of such things as triangularity. His solution was to interpret
such sentences, which apparently refer to abstract objects, as really making
claims about functional roles. Thus, "'Dreieckig' stands for triangularity"
tells us, in effect, that "Dreieckig" in German plays the same functional
role as "triangular" plays in English..
Sellars's theory of functions is presented primarily as a theory of spoken
language. The functions of an expression are to be defined in terms of three
kinds of pattern-governed behavior. These are (i) Language Entry
Transitions, which may be thought of as patterns of verbal response to
external events, (ii) Intralinguistic Moves, which are basically inferences,
and (iii) Language Departure Transitions, which are patterns of nonverbal
response to verbal imperatives.
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/sellars.html
1. The list of primitive symbols or vocabulary of the system (together
usually with a classification of the primitive symbols into categories,
which will be used in stating the formation rules and rules of inference).
2. The formation rules, determining which finite sequences of primitive
symbols are to be well-formed expressions, determining certain categories of
well-formed expressions -- among which we shall assume that at least the
category of sentence is included -- and determining (in case variables are
included among the primitive symbols) which occurences of variables in a
well-formed expression are free occurences and which are bound occurences.
3. The transformation rules or rules of inference, by which from the
assertion of certain sentences (the premisses, finite in number) a certain
sentence (the conclusion) may be inferred.
4. Certain asserted sentences, the axioms.
The Need for Abstract Entities
http://www.ditext.com/church/nae.html
The abstract entities designers need to think about divide into several main
classes, with various sub-classes, some of which Fido will think about:
1. Abstract entities whose existence does not depend on intelligent animals
or machines or anything with the capability to refer, for example;
times, time-intervals, temporal relations, and many timeless non-spatial
entities that are relevant to thinking about spatial concrete things and
processes but are not themselves spatially located, touchable, perceivable,
etc, including numbers, shapes, colours, correlations, propositions,
questions, proofs, explanations, analogies, causal relations, categories,
taxonomies, patterns, similarities and differences between shapes or other
things, .... and
2. Abstract entities that are states, processes or events in virtual
machines, for instance;
aspects of the mental state of an animal or intelligent machine (of the sort
described here.) However it is arguable that the sematic contents of those
mental states are not themselves mental. Thus someone may be puzzled by an
unanswered question, which is a mental state of that person, but the
question is not something mental and is not a part of that person's mind,
since (in almost all cases) the same question could be considered by another
individual, who may or may not be puzzled by it.
3. Abstract entities that are not parts of mental states and processes
within individuals but are products of such processes, including such things
as
virtual machines in computers, the internet, and various social and economic
entities including rules, laws, family structures, money, obligations,
rights, etc.
Abstract entities that are patterns or commonalities between components,
states, processes, in intelligent individuals, but whose existence does not
depend on the existence of such things;
Thus we can talk about the notion of having a concept as something that
refers to a wide variety of patterns of capabilities within information
processing systems, including animals and robots, without assuming that any
such things need to exist for the notion of having a concept to exist, just
as there need not be any dodecahedral physical objects for the notion of an
object having a dodecahedral shape to exist. Of course if we are talking
about concepts then that presupposes that we exist, but that's trivially
obvious. The possibility of talking about them existed, like the possibility
of intelligent animals and machines, existed before any instances existed.
Note that the various portions of space described in here including
locations, regions, boundaries, routes, etc. could also be described as
'abstract' objects. In particular they cannot be directly sensed even though
we can talk about spaces, routes, regions, etc. as being perceived.
Perceiving them depends on perceiving relationships between occupants of
space.
Fido's Non-spatial Abstract Entities
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cosy/deliverables/matrix/non-spatial-general/axs-fido-abstract-entities.html
Did Socrates "Teach New Deities"?
Or: Homer's Gods, Plato's Gods
http://www.wku.edu/~jan.garrett/pgods.htm
SELLARS FORUM
http://www.ditext.com/sellars/forum.html
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