From: Jim Pryor To: X Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 8:58 AM (4 minutes 10 seconds ago) On Mon, Oct 21, 2013, at 12:53 PM, X wrote: > I have the following questions about today's lecture: > > 1. So when the martini glass melts into a flat piece of glass, and the > glass piece breaks, is it considered as the same output that the martini > glass breaks? To a behaviorist, is the disposition of fragility of the > martini glass still the same after it melts into a flat piece of glass? Hi X, I was talking about melting the martini glass so that after I melted it, that martini glass would no longer exist---so during its entire life it never broke. The lump of glass at the end is not the martini glass. Whether it breaks or not is irrelevant to the question whether the martini glass will or would or did break when struck. > 2. About categorical basis, were you saying that a hardware is like a > categorical basis, the program that hardware is running is like a > disposition, and the output we get from running the program is like the > manifestation of the disposition? Yes, that's exactly right. > 3. I'm kind of confused about the difference between behaviorism and > functionalism. My current understanding is, both of them are talking > about a mental process like > Input --> program/software on some hardware --> output. That's true. The most important difference is that the behaviorist thinks we can define or talk about the input/output dispositions one-by-one. Whereas the functionalist thinks we have to simultaneously define a whole package of states, that are mapped in a complex way between each other and the inputs and outputs. > But behaviorists think a certain input is a trigger that stimulates a > certain disposition of whatever hardware it is, and the manifestation is > the output that hardware shows. That's true. > Whereas functionalists think that to say > something has intelligence there doesn't have to be any of those > definitions like disposition, manifestation or trigger; instead all we > need > is a hardware and a software that runs on that hardware and gives the > right output that shows evidence of being intelligent. Is this conclusion > correct? Not quite. > Also, is functionalism kind of like type physicalism? Because it agrees > that there is a mental state, but it argues that this mental state, or > this > software, is just neurons working in our brain, which means the fact that > there is a mental state can be reduced to a scientific explanation. This is a good question. The answer is complicated. One factor is that OFFICIALLY, functionalism doesn't HAVE TO say that the hardware is physical. They just require there to be some hardware or other. But in fact most functionalists do of course think OUR hardware is physical. Let's call this view "physicalist functionalism." A second complicating factor is that people use the name "type physicalism" differently. The way I've been using it, physicalist functionalism is A FORM OF type physicalism. It's not just analogous to it. It's ONE WAY TO BE a type physicalist. But other people use the name "type physicalism" to mean a kind of identity theory. The identity theorist thinks the hardware details matter. The functionalist thinks they don't. There just has to be some (physical?) hardware or other, that is running the right program. I hope that helps.