This page is meant to summarize the notions, theories, and arguments discussed in the middle weeks of class (up through the end of our discussion of Davidson).
- lawful correlations vs identical types/properties
- Ockham’s Razor
- Smart’s type identity theory (sometimes called “type physicalism”)
- conceptual definitions vs scientific identities
- Smart’s conceptual definition/analysis of having an orangish visual experience (after-image)
- What is it for an analysis to be “topic-neutral”?
- realist vs non-realist views about how far the real facts about X can come apart from our evidence/appearance of X
- logical/analytical behaviorism
- counterfactuals
- dispositions, their triggers, manifestations, and categorical bases
- Putnam’s Super-Spartans and X-Worlders
- difference between saying “polio” names a syndrome (cluster of symptoms) and saying it names an underlying virus that causes the symptoms: what is the philosophical significance of this example?
- purely physical behavior (“motions and noises”) vs mentally-loaded behavior (“greeting a friend”)
- the objection that behaviorists commit to saying single mental states by themselves determine how you will behave
- the claim that mental states are multiply realizable
- machine tables
- formal automata
- Turing Machines
- the Ramsey/Lewis method for defining terms
- the difference between a “chatbot” that just uses a lookup table, and a program following algorithms that are more complex and resemble rules that our brains use
- analytic/commonsense/conceptual functionalism vs scientific/psycho-functionalism
- role states vs realizer/implementing/hardware states
- “Dispositions and role states don’t have causal efficacy, only their lower-level realizing states do!”
- difference between identities vs laws vs accidental generalizations
- strict (exceptionless) laws vs hedged (ceteris paribus) laws
- “laws support counterfactuals”
- “laws are supported by their instances”
- “homonomic” vs “heteronomic” laws
- special sciences
- enumerative/statistical induction
- grue-like predicates and generalizations
- types of events vs particular tokens of those types (also discussed earlier in the semester)
- intentional vs unintentional actions
- your actions vs events you merely participate in
- difference between your arm’s moving and you intentionally raising your arm
- doing A by doing B
- singular vs general causal statements
- “singular causation is always backed by laws”
- Davidson’s “anomalous monism”
- identities of two types vs identities of tokens/instances of those types
- the mental supervening on the physical vs there being (strict) mental-physical laws
- counterfactual analyses of causation
- different things people mean by “materialism/physicalism”
- substance dualism vs property dualism (introduced earlier in the semester)
- different things people mean by “the mental reduces to the physical”
- emergentism/anti-reductionism (Broad)
- what’s the difference between (i) materialists who doubt that mental types “reduce to” physical types; and (ii) property dualists