A mere ripple in cow-infested waters
I finally did my part and updated Good Sense is the Master of Human Life. The Other Paul may want to edit the latest contribution some more--I won't blame him, it's not my finest--but it feels good to not be the bottleneck any longer.
Due to my incessant complaining about the definitional assumptions about representations made in Chris's class, he made it a term paper topic. That means I've finally had the pleasure of reading some Fodor ("A Theory of Content, II: The Theory", in Stich & Warfield's Mental Representations), who I should have read a lot of a long time ago but didn't, about his theory of content, which I will tentatively decide is Rock Solid.
But rather than talk about that, I want to talk about Fodor's impressively colloquial writing style. This man does not balk at the conversational tone and whatever syntax is necessary to pull it off. I think I saw nested parentheses at one point, in addition to a double colon ("A:B:C," not "A::B"). And his use of the emphatic italics? Encouraging. Probably to the degree of being a bad influence.
And the matter-of-factness of the transitions is just brilliant.
"[A long paragraph describing why the burden of proof lies with his opponents.] So, if you want to argue with the metaphysical conclusions of this paper, you've got to construct a world where my counterfactuals are in place but where "X" doesn't mean what I say it does. Fair enough; let's see one.
OK, now to business.
To begin with, not an objection, but more of a vague discomfort..."
And he's off. Note the contraction.
Also, I wanted to mention a favorite moment of analytic philosophical Zen. One thing about philosophy that delights my inner Dadaist child is when the thought experiments and jargon take a life of their own and spin out of control and then get a little humanistic spice. I loved this passage; I think it has some real poetry to it:
It might still be said, however, that the dependence of cow thoughts on distal cows is assymetrically dependent on their dependence on disjunctions of proximal cow projections; distal cows wouldn't evoke COW tokens but that they project proximal whiffs or glimpses or snaps or crackles or . . . well, or what? Since, after all, cow spotting can be mediated by theory to any extent you like, the barest whiff or glimpse of cow can do the job for an observer who is suitably attuned. Less, indeed, than a whiff or glimpse; a mere ripple of cow-infested waters may suffice to turn the trick.
Due to my incessant complaining about the definitional assumptions about representations made in Chris's class, he made it a term paper topic. That means I've finally had the pleasure of reading some Fodor ("A Theory of Content, II: The Theory", in Stich & Warfield's Mental Representations), who I should have read a lot of a long time ago but didn't, about his theory of content, which I will tentatively decide is Rock Solid.
But rather than talk about that, I want to talk about Fodor's impressively colloquial writing style. This man does not balk at the conversational tone and whatever syntax is necessary to pull it off. I think I saw nested parentheses at one point, in addition to a double colon ("A:B:C," not "A::B"). And his use of the emphatic italics? Encouraging. Probably to the degree of being a bad influence.
And the matter-of-factness of the transitions is just brilliant.
"[A long paragraph describing why the burden of proof lies with his opponents.] So, if you want to argue with the metaphysical conclusions of this paper, you've got to construct a world where my counterfactuals are in place but where "X" doesn't mean what I say it does. Fair enough; let's see one.
OK, now to business.
To begin with, not an objection, but more of a vague discomfort..."
And he's off. Note the contraction.
Also, I wanted to mention a favorite moment of analytic philosophical Zen. One thing about philosophy that delights my inner Dadaist child is when the thought experiments and jargon take a life of their own and spin out of control and then get a little humanistic spice. I loved this passage; I think it has some real poetry to it:
It might still be said, however, that the dependence of cow thoughts on distal cows is assymetrically dependent on their dependence on disjunctions of proximal cow projections; distal cows wouldn't evoke COW tokens but that they project proximal whiffs or glimpses or snaps or crackles or . . . well, or what? Since, after all, cow spotting can be mediated by theory to any extent you like, the barest whiff or glimpse of cow can do the job for an observer who is suitably attuned. Less, indeed, than a whiff or glimpse; a mere ripple of cow-infested waters may suffice to turn the trick.