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On 2015-11-30 16:49, William Flynn Wallace wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">My difficulty with some philosophy, esp.
existentialism, stems from having gone to a Skinnerian grad
school. If you could not put a concept into operational terms,
then you were in the wrong department.<br>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans
ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br>
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<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans
ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Self,
perception, consciousness, awareness, essence, instinct (my
favorite ambiguity) - very difficult to define in real world
terms. </div>
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<br>
Yet the cognitive revolution overthrew behaviorism, largely because
many behaviors are more easily explained through internal concepts
(like working memory) than just referring to other behaviors. The
difference between working memory and self is that the first is
defined in terms of observable effects and can be refined through
experiments while self is a folk psychological concept that may or
may not correspond to anything cohesive and has fairly undefined
properties.<br>
<br>
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<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans
ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">I agree fully
with your last sentence. How can philosophers have meaningful
conversations with one another when they cannot agree on their
terms? I suspect that each one thinks they are right and the
others wrong. "Boohoo, nobody wants to use my definition."<br>
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From the outside it looks like philosophers don't agree on
terminology, but from the inside most recognize what definitons are
being used. It is far more common to hear "I disagree with Anders'
definition of X, and to show why it is bad, consider the following
logical argument based on it..." with me responding "Yeah, you got
me there. However, your definition implies that X is Y, and Y is Z.
Do you really think Z?"<br>
<br>
There is a brand of concept analysis that spends all effort on
refining definitions. It is useful, but not very exciting.<br>
<br>
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<div dir="ltr">Anders, what's wrong with doing your historical
research first? I thought the idea of research was to take the
ball from earlier people and then run with it your way. <br>
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<br>
In my case it was that I wanted to approach the subject from my own
angle (essentially borrowing my expertise in reasoning about risk
and uncertainty to apply to hope) and not get channeled too much
into any pre-existing standard. But once I had written down my
approach, I checked if somebody had already done the same job or
found useful ideas I had missed. <br>
<br>
(I found that Waterworth had arrived at the same rough structure but
focused on much more ordinary hopes - good terminology though; Kant
and Wittgenstein both had views on the future-oriented aspect of
hope that fitted in nicely but did ot lead very far; Nietzsche and
Camus gave me a psychological criticism of hope that I would not
normally have come up with and I will have to deal with.)<br>
<br>
Sometimes not checking what the Great Thinkers have already solved
is the road to solve problems in a new way. Although, as the saying
goes, a month in the lab can save you an hour in the library. <br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University</pre>
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