Associationist Theories of Thought

Associationism is one of the oldest, and, in some form or another, most widely held theories of thought. Associationism has been the engine behind empiricism for centuries, from the British Empiricists through the Behaviorists and modern day Connectionists. Nevertheless, “associationism” does not refer to one particular theory of cognition per se, but rather a constellation of related though separable theses. What ties these theses together is a commitment to a certain arationality of thought: a creature’s mental states are associated because of some facts about its causal history, and having these mental states associated entails that bringing one of a pair of associates to mind will, ceteris paribus, ensure that the other also becomes activated.

Associationism is a theory that connects learning to thought based on principles of the organism’s causal history. Since its early roots, associationists have sought to use the history of an organism’s experience as the main sculptor of cognitive architecture. In its most basic form, associationism has claimed that pairs of thoughts become associated based on the organism’s past experience. So, for example, a basic form of associationism (such as Hume’s) might claim that the frequency with which an organism has come into contact with Xs and Ys in one’s environment determines the frequency with which thoughts about Xs and thoughts about Ys will arise together in the organism’s future.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/associationist-thought/

Assertion (SEP)

Asserting is the act of claiming that something is the case—for instance, that oranges are citruses, or that there is a traffic congestion on Brooklyn Bridge (at some time). We make assertions to share information, coordinate our actions, defend arguments, and communicate our beliefs and desires. Because of its central role in communication, assertion has been investigated in several disciplines. Linguists, philosophers of language, and logicians rely heavily on the notion of assertion in theorizing about meaning, truth and inference.

The nature of assertion and its relation to other speech acts and linguistic phenomena (implicatures, presuppositions, etc.) have been subject to much controversy. This entry will situate assertion within speech act theory and pragmatics more generally, and then go on to present the current main accounts of assertion.^[1]

By an account of assertion is here meant a theory of what a speaker does (e.g., expresses a belief) in making an assertion. According to such accounts, there are deep properties of assertion: specifying those properties is specifying what asserting consists in. There must also be surface properties, which are the properties by which a competent speaker can tell whether an utterance is an assertion, for instance that it is made by means of uttering a sentence in the indicative mood.

We shall classify accounts according to two parameters. Firstly, we distinguish between normative and descriptive accounts. Normative accounts rely on the existence of norms or normative relations that are essential to assertoric practice. Descriptive accounts don’t. Secondly, we distinguish between content-directed and hearer-directed accounts. Content-directed accounts focus on the relation between the speaker and the content of the proposition asserted, while hearer-directed accounts focus on the relations between speaker and hearer. Some theories have both normative and descriptive components. 

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/assertion/

The Definition of Art (SEP)

The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated.

There is also disagreement, at a second-order level, about how to classify definitions of art. For present purposes, contemporary definitions can be classified with respect to the dimensions of art they emphasize. One distinctively modern, conventionalist, sort of definition focuses on art’s institutional features, emphasizing the way art changes over time, modern works that appear to break radically with all traditional art, the relational properties of artworks that depend on works’ relations to art history, art genres, etc. – more broadly, on the undeniable heterogeneity of the class of artworks. The more traditional, less conventionalist sort of definition defended in contemporary philosophy makes use of a broader, more traditional concept of aesthetic properties that includes more than art-relational ones, and puts more emphasis on art’s pan-cultural and trans-historical characteristics – in sum, on commonalities across the class of artworks. Hybrid definitions aim to do justice to both the traditional aesthetic dimension as well as to the institutional and art-historical dimensions of art, while privileging neither.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/

Argument and Argumentation

Argument is a central concept for philosophy. Philosophers rely heavily on arguments to justify claims, and these practices have been motivating reflections on what arguments and argumentation are for millennia. Moreover, argumentative practices are also pervasive elsewhere; they permeate scientific inquiry, legal procedures, education, and political institutions. The study of argumentation is an inter-disciplinary field of inquiry, involving philosophers, language theorists, legal scholars, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and political scientists, among many others. 

An argument can be defined as a complex symbolic structure where some parts, known as the premises, offer support to another part, the conclusion. Alternatively, an argument can be viewed as a complex speech act consisting of one or more acts of premising (which assert propositions in favor of the conclusion), an act of concluding, and a stated or implicit marker (“hence”, “therefore”) that indicates that the conclusion follows from the premises (Hitchcock 2007).^[1] The relation of support between premises and conclusion can be cashed out in different ways: the premises may guarantee the truth of the conclusion, or make its truth more probable; the premises may imply the conclusion; the premises may make the conclusion more acceptable (or assertible).

For theoretical purposes, arguments may be considered as freestanding entities, abstracted from their contexts of use in actual human activities. But depending on one’s explanatory goals, there is also much to be gained from considering arguments as they in fact occur in human communicative practices. The term generally used for instances of exchange of arguments is argumentation. In what follows, the convention of using “argument” to refer to structures of premises and conclusion, and “argumentation” to refer to human practices and activities where arguments occur as communicative actions will be adopted.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/argument/

My opinion

Animalists identify the “I” with the human animal, religious views identify it with a soul, and many naturalists identify it with the brain. I believe that the “I” is not a source or entity at all, but a word controled by grammer. Animalism is another sort of dualism in the sense that it still treats the “I” as something that has to be located, this time in the human animal rather than in a soul or a brain. Nochrisis

Animalism

Among the questions to be raised under the heading of “personal identity” are these: “What are we?” (fundamental nature question) and “Under what conditions do we persist through time?” (persistence question). Against the dominant neo-Lockean approach to these questions, the view known as animalism answers that each of us is an organism of the species Homo sapiens and that the conditions of our persistence are those of animals. Beyond describing the content and historical background of animalism and its rivals, this entry explores some of the arguments for and objections to this controversial account of our nature and persistence.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/animalism/

Anaphora

Anaphora is sometimes characterized as the phenomenon whereby the interpretation of an occurrence of one expression depends on the interpretation of an occurrence of another or whereby an occurrence of an expression has its referent supplied by an occurrence of some other expression in the same or another sentence.^[1] However, these are at best very rough characterizations of the phenomena, since things other than anaphoric expressions satisfy the first characterization and many cases of anaphora fail to satisfy the second. For example, in some sense of “interpretation”, the interpretation of the expression “bank” in the following sentence depends on the interpretation of other expressions (in particular, “of the river”):

1. John is down by the bank of the river.

But no one would say this is an example of anaphora. And as to the second characterization, though all agree that the following is an example of anaphora (and “he” is an anaphoric pronoun here on one reading of the sentence), it is not a case of the referent of one expression being supplied by another expression, (since “he” is not a referring expression on the reading in question):

2. Every male lawyer believes he is smart.

Hence, rather than attempting to characterize anaphora generally and abstractly, we shall begin with some examples. There is generally thought to be many types of anaphora, though in some cases there is disagreement as to whether to classify those cases as anaphora or not.^[2]

Pronominal anaphora:

3. John left. He said he was ill. (The antecedent is “John” and the anaphoric expression is “he”.)

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anaphora/

The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction

“Analytic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are doctors,” have historically been characterized as ones that are true by virtue of the meanings of their words alone and/or can be known to be so solely by knowing those meanings. They are contrasted with more usual “synthetic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are rich,” (knowledge of) whose truth depends also upon (knowledge of) the worldly fortunes of pediatricians. Beginning with Frege, many philosophers hoped to show that the truths of logic and mathematics and other apparently a priori domains, such as much of philosophy and the foundations of science, could be shown to be analytic by careful “conceptual analysis” of the meanings of crucial words. Analyses of philosophically important terms and concepts, such as “material object,” “cause,” “freedom,” or “knowledge” turned out, however, to be far more problematic than philosophers had anticipated, and some, particularly Quine and his followers, began to doubt the reality of the distinction. This in turn led him and others to doubt the factual determinacy of claims of meaning and translation in general, as well as, ultimately, the reality and determinacy of mental states. There have been a number of interesting reactions to this scepticism, in philosophy and linguistics (this latter to be treated in the supplement, Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics); but, while the reality of mental states might be saved, it has yet to be shown that appeals to the analytic will ever be able to ground “analysis” and the a priori in quite the way that philosophers had hoped.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/

Analysis

Analysis has always been at the heart of philosophical method, but it has been understood and practised in many different ways. Perhaps, in its broadest sense, it might be defined as a process of identifying or working back to what is more fundamental by means of which something, initially taken as given, can be derived, explained or reconstructed. The derivation, explanation or reconstruction is sometimes conceived as the corresponding process of synthesis, but it is more often counted as part of the analytic project as a whole. This allows great variation in specific method, however. The aim may be to get back to basics and elucidate connections, but there may be all sorts of ways of doing this, each of which might be called ‘analysis’. The dominance of ‘analytic’ philosophy in the English-speaking world, and its growing influence in the rest of the world, might suggest that a consensus has formed concerning the role and importance of analysis. But this assumes that there is agreement on what ‘analysis’ means, and this is far from clear. Throughout the history of philosophy there have also been powerful criticisms of analysis, but these have always been to specific forms of analysis, which has only encouraged the development of newer forms. If we look at the history of philosophy, and even at just the history of (recent Western) analytic philosophy, we find a rich and extensive repertoire of conceptions and techniques of analysis which philosophers have continually drawn upon and modified in different ways. Analytic philosophy is thriving precisely because of the range of conceptions and techniques of analysis that it involves. It may have fragmented into various interlocking subtraditions and, increasingly, is now being ‘backdated’ and widened in scope to include earlier and contemporaneous traditions, but those subtraditions and related traditions are held together by their shared history and methodological interconnections. There are also forms of analysis in traditions clearly distinct from Western analytic philosophy, and these also need to be recognized and brought into debates about analytic methodologies, to open up new approaches and perspectives. It is the aim of this article to indicate something of the range of conceptions of analysis in the history of philosophy and their interconnections, as well as their role in understanding the history of philosophy itself, and to provide a bibliographical resource for those wishing to explore analytic methodologies and the philosophical issues they raise.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/

Medieval Theories of Analogy

Medieval theories of analogy were a response to problems in three areas: logic, theology, and metaphysics. Logicians were concerned with the use of words having more than one sense, whether completely different, or related in some way. Theologians were concerned with language about God. How can we speak about a transcendent, totally simple spiritual being without altering the sense of the words we use? Metaphysicians were concerned with talk about reality. How can we say that both substances (e.g., Socrates) and accidents (e.g., the beardedness of Socrates) exist when one is dependent on the other; how can we say that both God and creatures exist, when one is created by the other? Medieval thinkers reacted to these three problems by developing a theory which divided words into three sorts. Some were univocal (always used with the same sense), some were purely equivocal (used with quite different senses), and some were analogical (used with related senses). Analogical terms were thought to be particularly useful in metaphysics and theology, but they were routinely discussed in commentaries on Aristotle’s logic and in logic textbooks. The background to the discussion was given by what is often called the analogy of being or metaphysical analogy, the doctrine that reality is divided both horizontally into the very different realities of substances and accidents and vertically into the very different realities of God and creatures, and that these realities are analogically related. Nonetheless, the phrase “medieval theories of analogy” as used here will refer to semantic analogy, a set of linguistic and logical doctrines supplemented, at least from the fourteenth century on, by doctrines about the nature of human concepts.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval/