[b]Jerry Fodor
…if it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying . . . If none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it’s the end of the world. [/b]
More or less as it were.
I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats. Surely, surely, no one but a relativist would drive a fiberglass powerboat.
Actually, I’ve never been on any boat at all.
If, in short, there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.
It is. Just not literally.
The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not on the way that it is related to other thoughts.
And the content of an emotion?
There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works. That’s no paradox. Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn’t the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn’t. This bears a lot of emphasis; it turns up in philosophy practically everywhere you look.
So, that means it’s turned up here.
I rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did, and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don’t imagine I’d ask someone whose credentials consist of a PhD in philosophy.
Ouch?