Kripke

anyway we're going to be talking about a particular philosopher today often considered the greatest American philosopher contemporary scene saul kripke and in the background of that the 1970s now in some ways I have a lot of fun in 1970s I was in college during the 70s I got married during the 70s it was a good time yeah I've got the charger but the the problem is I can't plug in both the display in the charger say haha so I can charge this if and only if I'm not showing you anything so yeah I did think to bring down but it's not as much good as I thought it would this was the Rolling Stones retrospective greatest hits of the seventies album sucking in the 70s huh and indeed for a lot of us who lived with the 70s it felt like a time of massive sucking um however it had its good aspects as well as its bad aspects and we're gonna look at Co the burger now was a time of ups and downs a u.s. president won reelection in a landslide in 1972 only to resign less than two years later US troops left Vietnam in 1970 through and in 1973 thinking the war had been won only half-cylon fall just two years later the US and the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Accords they promised non-aggression and respect for human rights but then just within three years the Soviets invaded Afghanistan also the US under President Jimmy Carter sought to craft a more positive image of the United States in international affairs but on the other hand he gave tacit support to a revolution in Iran that placed it in power of theocratic violent and profoundly anti-american regime that promptly seized the American Embassy and took its employees hostage so it was a difficult ticket now the decade of ups and downs nevertheless did from the point of view of our whole course involved something very important normativity made a major return the gap between is a not somehow seem to shrink and by 1980s leaders really across the ideological spectrum of all parties were talking and frankly normative terms we're talking about ideals talking about morality in serious ways and so there was a kind of revival of moral concepts of normative language of good and evil right and wrong in a way that had really fallen out of fashion for decades so in a certain sense of the 70s although they were a time of ups and downs a lot of difficulties nevertheless and a lot of terrible styles to echo saying I I thought I would show you for grins a photograph from the 70s now decided not to do it because it's too embarrassing um let's hope that anyway I won't say anymore since the fashions were sort of inexplicable but among them were up Lots we're back in stock well I want to start by talking about saul kripke use and if we have time we'll start looking today at the history of the 1970s we'll finish that off next time but so Kripke is somebody who really changed the philosophical landscape in fundamental ways here is one photograph of him talking to Hilary Putnam we'll get to that later Yuri is giving a lecture here is a beach now Kripke made a big name for himself in 1959 with a paper called a completeness theorem in modal logic in which he used Leibniz idea of possible worlds to explain the concept of necessity Leibniz had said that necessity is truth in all possible worlds and Kripke took that idea and developed it in a highly mathematical way to give a theory of possibility of necessity he did it in a distinctly twentieth-century way it wasn't really quite necessity as truth in all worlds but in all the accessible worlds all the worlds that you could actually see or imagine or conceive of or whatever the proper relation is here from the point of view of your own world so it went along with and was that almost contemporaneous with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and physics and the idea was think of our worlds just one of many possible worlds this one happens to be actual but the others are ways things could be or could have been and something is necessarily true if and only if it's true in all of those worlds at least all of the worlds that are relevant to the evaluation of such crimes at the time that paper came out he was still a teenager he was a high school student in Omaha um but in 1970 but and by the way Kripke is sort of an amazing case in a variety of ways he went to Harvard he was a student of Klein graduated with an undergraduate degree and was immediately hired as a professor with just a bachelor's degree um at first by Rockefeller University in New York and then at Princeton later he moved to Hebrew University in Jerusalem and now he teaches it to the City University of New York and all that without ever having gone to graduate school so he was just immediately recognized as a genius in 1970 he published naming a necessity series of talks he gave at Princeton and then a few years later outline of a theory of truth which had a comprehensive theory of paradoxes and then after that bit consign on rules in private language since then he's been giving great main talks and publishing actually very little he has a whole box filled with talks that are brilliant and few of which have ever appeared in a form in print in any case we're going to talk mostly yeah I know that we're going to talk mostly about his views has developed in naming necessity which first appeared actually as part of this collection and then came out as a book well let me take you back to Bertrand Russell on discussions you might remember that is the most boring and irrelevant lecture of the entire semester lot of you were thinking why do we why are we studying this talk of the present King of France this doesn't make any sense but remember according to Russell descriptions like that the present King of France the telephone the typewriter the 8-track player to use something from the 70s the iPad all of those things don't simply refer to an object in the world instead sentences containing those are actually general statements about the world the present King of France is bald asserts that there is one and only one present King of France and that person is bald so it's false if I say the iPad is running out of power that means there is one and only one iPad and it's running out of power now obviously this isn't quite right there's more than one iPad in the unit so we have to understand this as sort of relevant to some particular domain of discourse that we're talking about in this case well maybe the set of things I'm demonstrating are the things close to me or the things in this room do something but in any case these things are really general statements about the world and as general statements about the world they involve concepts they involve terms like typewriter or iPad or present King France and so on there are concepts that lie between us and reality so we perceive reality we can talk about it and so on but through this film of concepts through this film of things that are out that are our own mental constructions and so we don't relate the things in the world directly according to Russell we really at best only relate to things quote unquote directly when we use terms like this and that but even then we're not referring to items in the world we're referring to our own mental contents now there's a picture of that that I showed you under postmodern is a bit of eyes just as well to rustle in a sense I can't talk about the pigeon I have to talk about well at least not directly it's filtered through concepts such as pigeon now he thinks that's true proper names as well traditionally logicians haven't thought they thought statements involving proper names are singular expressions they aren't like some or all type of statements or there is exactly one or any of that sort of thing they think they relate to the world directly so if I say Nixon resigned I'm referring directly to Nixon Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher I'm referring directly to Aristotle it's about the thing but actually Russell denies that he says no all of those are really disguised descriptions and so they don't actually connect to objects directly they to connect only by way of concepts they really make general statements about the world there is an only there is one and only one person who well what but it was Aristotle who was who did the Aristotelian things who Aristotle you know as client at one point puts it okay so according to this view proper names really abbreviate description to use a proper name is really to have a description or maybe a set of descriptions in your mind for that thing aerosol for example if I say who is our städel what's the answer what's your answer might be different for different people who is there something a philosopher okay that's not very specific but we might say Arizona is the philosopher actually that's exactly the way people in the Middle Ages referred to him Aristotle was just the philosopher like none of the others really matter there's only one that anybody worries about that's Aristotle that was their idea um you might say well that's pretty vague but pop up the most famous ancient Greek philosopher or at least the the most famous student of Plato or something like that you can have a description in mind that picks out the object uniquely now a philosopher the philosopher doesn't do that but we might make it more specific at least we have a set of descriptions in some way that does that well okay so Aristotle might be short for Plato's most famous student or the tutor of Alexander the Great or the last great philosopher romantic WA T or some combination of those descriptions now I think it's interesting that actually most of the time and it's a point Kripke makes a lot most of the time people operate with names even though they can't give anything like that description for example who is Aristotle a philosopher well there are lots of philosophers right that doesn't pick up any object unique if I say actually this is one of herpes examples if I say who was Richard Fineman anybody know yeah a physicist good a physicist but that too is not uniquely picking out anybody right there are lots of physicists in the world and most people might know that Feynman is a physicist but on the other hand they might not know how to define him uniquely or characterize him uniquely the same with Aristotle the same with lots of people now we might think well yeah there's some particular image we have in mind for example here is Aristotle walking with play-doh in Raphael's famous painting the School of Athens so maybe that's the image you have in your mind that's what's really going on or maybe it's Aristotle teaching Alexander this is Alexander the Great that's our result it's Tudor or maybe it's he's the greatest the last great philosopher meant 20 Korea's being great at thinking deeply similarly with contemporaneous Richard Nixon might be short for the man who investigated Alger Hiss or Eisenhower's vice prez the man who lost to JFK in 1960 the man elected President 1968 a man reelected in 1972 and so on all of those might be taken as descriptions of Nixon so we might have this image or this one this one see I wasted a lot of time this morning gathering up these images or this one or whatever now Kripke points out what not only is this not usually true we use lots of names without being able to give uniquely identified descriptions but also it's in a way worse if that's right then there are certain things that ought to be necessarily true and they ought to be true a priori now to explain what I mean by saying that let's talk about the distinction in general Avicenna is really craps the first philosopher came up with the idea of distinguishing two kinds of statements he said cognition can be analyzed into two kinds one can be known through the intellect it's known necessarily by reasoning through itself it's known by reflection in other words the other kind is that known by intuition experience that is well whatever is known by intellect should be based on something which is known prior to the thing when that was translated into Latin the term was a priori and so philosophers ever since have talked about certain judgments we make being a priori that is to say in some sense prior to the independent of experience so there may be certain things I can know just independently of experience of the world what would be something like that can you think of anything I might be able to know without experience of the world but just through rational reflection you need to eat you need to eat well is that something like that could I just think hmm I've been plunked down on this human body hmm and just by reasoning alone realize I need to eat probably not right after I've experienced of hunger yeah oh I could be self-aware maybe I am I think no that's that's Descartes sales are in part I think I am anything that thinks exists and so on maybe things like that I could recognize a priori without experience can you think of anything else okay good being cold that's you know sometimes it's cold that's not something I could know ah free already that requires experience so actually Abba Sena gives this example of the flying man I think for our purposes the best equivalent to that is to think about somebody in a sensory deprivation tank imagine having been in a sensory deprivation tank your whole life is there anything you could know despite that well presumably in this tank you're not cold you're not hot so you wouldn't know things like that you might be able to know you exist maybe by purely reasoning you could know that two plus two is four for something like that so maybe mathematics is like this things that are true by definition if you somehow know a language despite having been in this sensory deprivation tank maybe you could know bachelors are unmarried some things like that but it's going to be pretty limited the other things are a posterior they depend on experience they're the things you know from experience like that you need to eat or that sometimes it gets cold or that there are people in the room etc etc most of our knowledge of the world is a posteriori it comes from experience but there might be some things that are a priori and can be known independently of experience well Jim puts it this way the a posteriori judgments he calls matters of fact they depend on experience we learn about some from experience but there are certain other things he describes as relations of ideas he says those can be known by a mere operation thought and so what he calls relations of ideas are these a priori judgments now suppose I am operating with the definition that Aristotle was Plato's most famous student then I should be able to know something about Aristotle Oscar Yuri independently of experience namely what did you restate the question yes but the fact that I made it about Aristotle makes it hard let's make it about me okay Who am I okay don't professor now good that's your definition definite description of me the professor so if that's your understanding is there anything you know about me a priori independently of experienced some of you I figure is no you're smart are all professors smart I'm educated well it's a true by definition the professor's are educated maybe here's what you know right that I'm the professor good that's just part of what defines Dan Boneh back to you and so that I'm the professor something you should be able to know a priori then anything that's true by definition of professors would be like I don't know they profess right they teach they do what professors do so maybe those things maybe their qualifications like you have to be educated and if those things are things you could know a priori then those things too you would know aa priori about me so there might be things like that well there's also the distinction we should hatch I already talked about this I'm gonna skip it given that were low low on battery yeah let's just jump to this anyway if it's true that we define Aristotle makes it Dan Boneh back and so on in terms of descriptions then sentences like this Aristotle was Plato's most famous student or aerosol tune and Alexander the Great or Aristotle was the last great philosopher of antiquity should be necessary right they should be necessarily true because it's just the definition of Aristotle you use that Aristotle was Plato's most famous student or whatever these would be just true by definition they would also be aa priori since you don't really require experience to know them they're things that you could just know independently of experience just by knowing the meaning of the term Aristotle if Aristotle just means the tutor of Alexander the Great then you should know by definition that Eversole tutor though exactly the great that would be a necessary truth no one would count as Aristotle unless that was the case but Kripke says look that's obviously wrong is that a necessary truth Arizona was the last great philosopher of antiquity well no maybe he wouldn't have gone into philosophy at all maybe he just wrote in some other possible world right the scientific treatises or maybe he just became slack and didn't do anything at all he might not have ever done any philosophy and so there's surely this isn't a necessary truth about Aristotle also one via tuned at Alexander and Alexander we've been so inspired by philosophy that he had decided to become a great philosopher then maybe Alexander the Great would be the last great philosopher of antiquity right instead of being a conqueror maybe Henry remembered as the guy who was a response most famous student well he's probably still it's but I mean the greatest philosopher with our thoughts well the same is true with the other possible definitions is that a necessary truth that Aristotle was Plato's most famous student well no he might never have studied with Plato at all right that's sort of a historical accident and Eversole might not be remembered at all in fact we remember Aristotle really through a series of remarkable historical accidents his a lot of his works were lost some of those that we retain were actually stored for more than a century in a Turkish basement somebody went down and opened this old moldy box and started looking through it and thought what are these things took it to somebody and they said piece of the works of Aristotle they've been missing for centuries okay if that person hadn't done that if they had just I don't know hired somebody else to come and clean up the basement those things would've been thrown away and nobody would know who Aristotle was so that really too is historical accident well the same thing is true of Nixon suppose we define Nixon as the guy who was elected president in 1968 then that elects that Nixon was elected president in 1968 would be a necessary truth but it's obviously not it could have lost that election so all of these things are actually contingent they're not necessary moreover they're a posterior you actually have to learn American history to find out that Nixon won the 1968 election it's not something you know just by knowing the term Nixon and the same thing is true about Aristotle we don't know any of that just because we know how to use the term Kirstin so none of those are uh priori here is crypt keys positive theory he says names are rigid designators what does that mean they pick out the same thing in every possible world okay descriptions aren't like that the present King of France denotes nothing in our world but presumably there are other possible worlds were at denote something right what about the guy who won the presidential election in 1968 in this world that refers to Richard Nixon but it could refer to Hubert Humphrey in a very nearby possible world it could refer to George Wallace in a more distant possible world it could refer to I don't know who was alive in 1968 who it could refer to Elvis right handsome more dusted puzzle world and so on and so descriptions pick out different objects in different possible worlds typically however proper names Kripke says aren't like that if I described a counterfactual scenario about Nixon I'm imagining that Nixon was that person if I say suppose Nixon had lost the 1968 election I'm supposing that Richard Nixon lost it not something else in fact if I define him as the guy who won the 1968 elections and that would be like saying suppose that the very same person both won and lost the 1968 election which would be absurd and so actually when I imagine some other scenario involving Nixon it involves Nixon the word Richard Nixon the name Richard Nixon refers to the same object every possible world so here's a way of thinking about that a description bounces around like this red line here I'm imagining nine and the number of planets okay the number of planets that's something that varies in different possible worlds in some it's nine and some it's actually in the actual world I don't know what it is because Pluto's status is controversial Pluto used to be considered a planet now it's been demoted to be a big ball of ice um but I you know hey I don't know what to say about that in any event the number of planets that bounces around from possible world a possible world but now I met to notice the same number in every possible world okay now here is his theory of how names actually work it's called the causal theory of names here's the picture somebody gives somebody a name for example Richard Nixon is born he is baptized baptized as Richard Milhous Nixon okay his parents give him that name and then well it gets passed on this is an initial baptism Ricky says where I forget the religious overtones of that the idea is just there's some kind of social ceremony where we give things names and so for people that's kind of highly stylized legal it's got all sorts of ramifications but lots of things are like that by name my cat I don't actually have to you know do anything to name my cat Zadok I can just start calling that cats a dog and you know I don't have to file legal papers there's no official ceremony I don't have to break a bottle of champagne over the cat's heads and URLs a dog but if it's a ship right I have to do that and so well anyway there's some kind of ceremony like that and you name an object person or a thing or whatever an animal in which the object takes on that name Nixon's parents for example named Richard Milhous Nixon okay and there's Nixon is a small child he's that one and then what happens other people to learn to use the name from the parents from other people who know how to use the name and so this gets passed on through a causal chain the parents say let's name him Richard and then other people say what's the baby's name ah Richard and they start describing the baby as Richard and so on and so forth and so it spreads gradually through this kind of causal chain and it can go down through centuries presumably somebody at some point named Aristotle Aristotle for actually something close to that I mean it was Greece right so something like and it's taught to these and that got passed down over time and goes gets rendered into various languages in different ways but the idea is that receivers of the name learn how to use it from somebody already knows how to use it intending to refer to the same thing that last plus is important if I name my cat Aristotle then I'm not intending to refer to the ancient Greek philosopher or once when I was in grad school a friend of mine showed me this owl and called it Aristotle okay and gave it to me for my birthday the owl was not an ancient Greek philosopher right so they weren't intending to use it in the same way but that's the general idea of the causal fear so what's the point well there is nothing conceptual involved in this there is no sort of wall of concepts separating me from the world actually there are just causal links there is a causal connection when somebody initially baptizes the baby Richard Milhous Nixon and associates that name with that thing in the world and then there are causal relationships about how the use of the name is passed on to other people but all of that involves direct causal links to the world well direct or indirect it might be through many different parts of the chain but it's all causal connections it is not conceptual connections and so in between me in reality there's a direct link okay and it's one we make every day any time I talk about Nixon I'm making a direct reference to Richard Nixon if I talk about aerosol I'm directly referring to Aristotle if you talk about Dan Boneh you're directly referring to me there's no concept involved and so we aren't separated from reality that by a cloud of concepts we contact reality directly so Kripke replaces that sort of Roselia or postmodern picture with that that's he smashes the glass okay there is no longer this window of concepts we have to look through we can look directly at reality we can talk about it right in fact that reality is independent now of our concepts it's independent of how we think and talk about it it's not constructed in any sense by our concepts neither is our reference to it there's in a direct direct and immediate connection between us in the world okay so what is the obvious target you might say well if you think in terms of philosophical parties which party loses if you move into this sort of picture the idealist party right I mean that's really the enemy he's trying to show you that idealism is wrongheaded that there aren't concepts in between us in the world that there is in a sense a given that we can actually make direct connection the things in the world we might say well here's the big picture the 19th century was the century of idealism the century in which pale announced that the world was rational what is rational is real and what is real is rational why because it's all a construction of thought and really analytic philosophy was born in an act of rebellion against that but even though tried to distance itself from idealism it just kept retaining the view that between us in the world is this wall of concepts and we can see through it kind of but we're always seeing through it indirectly concepts are always intervening and you can see how that pushes you eventually to something like a postmodern view to an idealistic view to something like lines view and so it's really something that stayed with this entire movement all throughout the anglo-american world until Kripke where that began to break down Russell after all as I've mentioned but we could refer to the world only by way of descriptions and that meant concepts quite not only x-3 instead at the point reference is not only indirect but actually completely inscrutable am I talking about rabbits under Nets rabbit parts rabbit stages rabbit hood Wow there's no fact to the matter it's completely obscure what I'm actually referring to but querque says no okay I can refer to reality directly if I'm talking about a particular rabbit I can refer to that rabbit I can call it funny or whatever name I choose to give it and that rabbit that is something I'm picking out directly it is not a question really of my having to settle her through the realm of concepts what it is I'm actually talking about now that's true who thinks not only with proper names but with natural kind terms things like water tiger I'm referring to a kind of thing there were a kind of chemical compound and so here's the picture the world consists of objects those objects fall into natural kinds some of them are molecules of water some of them are tied some of them are people and so on and no matter what we say no matter how we think that's the way the world is the world consists of objects that are independent of our minds independent of our fall they fall to the kinds that are independent of our minds an independent our thinking yeah we're just wanted back am i naming you as a person or made me naming your being and I mi name is collection of parts of each movie oh good good good good so yes the main sort of objection by people who are more sympathetic to this idealistic picture is to say wait a minute wait a minute okay go back to I mean and you're talking about me as but I have to ask are you my mother where's my food are you the one who's initially baptizing me or is it something you inherit later but let's imagine Nixon's parents baptizing him for the first time Richard Milhous Nixon what are they naming imagine Quine being there at the baptized baptism and Quine saying wait I don't understand are you naming a person are you naming unattached person parts are you naming personhood or instance a personhood are you naming a particular stage now actually there is that response would be then I don't even know what you're doing until you specify something so actually a concept is required I have to know whether you're talking about a person or an unpatched person part etc etc um yes it could apply yes for example when I was in junior high school good friend of mine nicknamed me bono kind of like the rock star and so I was known as bono from like seventh through ninth grade um and that name then died when I moved and you know I lost touch with those people and so nobody at my new school maybe called me bono so that was like a temporary name for me that was it in effect if you want to think of it this way you might say oh that was the name of a stage of Dan bond back that seventh through ninth grade stage um I don't actually think of it that way that was a name for me right and if I the guys name who was bunny Barrow who gave me that if I saw buddy Barrow today presumably it's a Botto and it was still B&E for me right he was trying to name the person he wasn't thinking I'm going to name this person from 7th to 9th grade this right that person stage now how can we tell well he'd still not call me that and so if we asked Richard Nixon's parents are you naming the person or the person stage what do they call him tomorrow is this name still Richard Milhous Nixon they say yes that's evidence that it's actually a person and not a person stage come on little buddy don't die on me I'll plug it in for a moment see if it recharges this seems hopeless but yeah so so anyway that I think that is a legitimate objection and a hard objection to assess today how do I know whether I'm referring to a person or a person stage or just a lump of molecules or whatever when I use Nixon so the thought would be the act of baptism presupposes a concept I think Kripke's response is no look things do fall into natural kinds and so we think of these acts of naming as picking out a thing of that natural kind a natural kinder is person not person stage or unattached person part or something like that yeah go ahead you're referring to self such that you understand please saying if you're in pain perception of anything such that fairly new so in Excel right okay good that's a very interesting question imagine me in the sensory deprivation tank and I'm naming myself right I should be able to do that if de cartes right I think I am I would like a name to call me okay and so I give myself a name in that setting right it's weird because I'm baptizing myself but I realize I'm a person I need a name for me and so I call me Guido David now when I do that you know I'm naming something what is that something I might not yet we have the concept of a person right all I have is really this concept of a consciousness of the me and so is it clear what I'm naming all the information we have about natural kinds you might say we're getting a posteriori and so do I have any idea what I'm actually referring to suppose we find this person in the tank and we're the jungle linguist in this case who is saying well okay he talks about guida referring to himself what exactly does we to refer to a person a mere consciousness this the soul the mind yeah I think it might be hard for us to sort that out and that yeah that's that's really interesting I don't know how to answer that a lot of questions you guys asked I can think who there's a big literature that one there's not a big literature on I think that's a fascinating question okay well oh yeah is that a name or a description College University of Texas at Austin that sounds like a description right there is good there's one and only one University of Texas in Austin that's it um if you're comfortable business that sounds like a name yeah to disclose is also name though well yeah yeah I mean the mere fact that there's a thaw in it doesn't mean so suppose I say yeah imagine a world where the University of Texas at Austin actually gets moved right in fact we're opening up a branch in Dubai the University of Texas at Austin at the by suppose eventually that grows and Austin you know dwindles and eventually people think oh the University of Texas in Austin that's this Arab University in Dubai well um I guess it could be right which is a sign that it's a name and not a description because we wouldn't want to say in fact if you think in terms of description the one not only one University of Texas in Austin in Dubai that seems incoherent um so you're probably right but it actually these days used as a proper name even though it might have started as a description we started this university it was in Texas people to come build University of Texas and then it was like oh well now there are bunch of them so we have to say the University of Texas at Austin for it to be a uniquely identifying description but then we start thinking well we can if University of Texas at Austin at Dubai and then it's like yeah now now it doesn't make any sense as the description at all okay well now cookie actually has used this to argue for some surprising conclusions and here's one of them he's reviving traditional metaphysics first decades people thought of talk of necessity and possibility and so on is just nonsense but he refines more than that here we have this image of well a soul leaving a body before the trains race it no by the way that's a really clever artwork it's really a super imposition of like three photographs but I think it's very nicely done anyway here's his idea identity statements are necessary if Hesperus is phosphorus ie Venus as viewing the morning Venus you needing then that's necessarily true necessarily Cicero is Tully the nickname for Marcus Tullius Cicero or necessarily water is h2o etc those are really necessary identities and here's the picture if we've got descriptions like morning star and the evening star they can vary across both worlds in what they refer to so if they happen to refer to the same thing in our world well no need for them to refer the same thing in other words however if names are definite descriptions then they pick out the same thing at every possible world so if I named the morning star phosphorus for example in the evening sparks are desperate then they're the same thing in this world but they're the same thing every world because they're both just names of Venus ok Hesperus is Venus let's say and so B this is the same thing in every possible world so identity statements if they're true at all are necessarily true oh there's Cicero there's a water droplet yeah yeah yeah now he uses this to argue in favor of duals dualism is the view okay that the mental and the physical differing kind maybe they overlap let's leave that question under undecided for the moment but anyway there are two different kinds of things there are mental things there are physical things there are mental properties there are physical properties this can take a number of different forms maybe there are mental events there are physical events these different kind says the duelist the materialist of course says no everything is really just matter everything is physical and so the mental is really physical so we can think the mental in the physical is being an interactive relationship the mental is just a subset of the physical some physical events like this they're just physical events there's nothing mental but some of them are brain events and those might turn out to be mental events as well that's the materialist ninety the idealist reverses actually everything depends on the mind so everything is ultimately mental the physical is really mental you think you're referring to a desk but actually yeah it's just your idea of a desk or your image of the desk or something you can never really get outside your own mind and then there is another possible view it was Russell's view for a while it's also I think the Buddhist view ultimately neutral monism the mental and the physical earth well both of Kydex but we don't know what that is if that bet that was Russell's idea yeah my body it's not like the body is the mind the mind isn't the body but there something I know not what okay now here's grippies argument you might imagine materialism is depending on certain mind-body relationships for example here's one from 1970s neuroscience pain is see fiber firing it's a particular kind of physical event in the brain okay in the nervous system there are certain fibers see fibers but when they're stimulated people experience pain so that was the idea they're gonna be identity identities like that you should refer to well he says look we can take des cartes traditional argument and manipulate a little bit to make it a better arm Descartes had argued this way it's possible for the mind to exist without the monocle or for that matter for the body to exist one of the mind therefore the mind isn't identical to the body the idea is this the mind could exist without the body but the body can't exist without the body so they have different properties right the mind has this property of being something that could exist without the body the body does not have that property so they must be different and the same thing here at the body can exist without the mind existing well if that's true then the body has a property the mind doesn't namely being able to exist with money okay okay so they can't be the same thing now however you feel about that let's see cookies very suppose that P is a pain and C is a brain state a C fiber firing for example or whatever it might be that you want to identify with that okay well you might say well being a pain is essential to P it is necessarily felt as a pain but it isn't essential to this C fiber firing or whatever that neuro physiological event is so the pain is not the same as that fiery is not the same as that neuro physiological event it has a property that the neurophysiological that doesn't namely being essentially felt as a hey so here's one way of thinking about pain is meant it's something we experience it's essentially felt as a pain but there are worlds in which see fiber firings aren't felt as pain so here is now the fancy modal part this is why I talked about the possibility and necessity stuff okay there are worlds right there are possible worlds where pain isn't the same as see fiber firing we can say yes what a pain is always essentially necessarily felt the pain but as a see fiber firing essentially necessarily felt as a pain maybe not maybe there's a possible world there where pain isn't see fiber fiber right and c5 ever firing isn't pain but wait a minute identity statements are necessary if pain is see fiber firing in one world it is in old or in other words if there's even one world where it's not then it isn't in any ok so so that you don't get to see my pretty picture where now all of them get filled in with that non identity but that's really the idea ok now how is it different from other things Hilary Putnam talks about an example of Twinner involving water imagine that there's a world just like our world where we go and there's something that looks just like water but then we do a chemical analysis of it and we find out that it is not h2o it's something else in the paper you just calls it XYZ it's something else now is that stuff water are we in a world where water is not a shoe oh no we're in a world where stuff that looks a lot like water it's not aged well right but you go down other planet let's say you come back you say I thought I'd found water but it turns out it's not water it's X Y Z okay it's not the same thing as water that's what we would say we wouldn't say oh we found out that water is in fact not a shoe oh it's just that there's this stuff that feels a lot like water so suppose you had the same analysis of the pain case we'd say oh yes in this other possible world where people experience something like pain but without that neuro physiological state we wouldn't say there's a world where something really felt a lot like pain but I wasn't paying that's ridiculous right all of this would be a pain has he felt his pain what's pain that okay so we felt like that and it's not a question of any determinant sort of real essence of that thing underlying it that if I said is pain but with water we think it does water is h2o if we find something that looks a lot like water and tastes a lot like water and smells a lot like water and so on and so it's worth but isn't h2o it's not water however if we find that something feels a lot like pain but it turns out it's not see fiber firing well then gosh it's still pain I said and so that in fact proves the pain is not see fiber firing now yeah I've actually taken us to within three minutes at the end here and we haven't talked about this tree of the 70s at all so we'll just do that next time and I'll pause and ask well uh yes there's one slide I really wanted to show you this way we've been talking for watch of course about two level theories that have this sort of structure right here's the manifest image here's the scientific image and there are certain connections in between and in particular the way this is often been identified this is the level of madam this is the level of body if you want to think of that way the mind is up here at this link well the materialist or in a different way the idealist and so on ends up saying look these are really identified right there is some close relationship between two other what is criminally doing he's breathing down a part he's saying no they can't be identified but that also means that the manifest image can't be identified with some manifestation of the scientific in there can't be that kind of close connection there's an independence to mind so suddenly there's an independence of the manifested it and so in terms of the course here the significance of crooky is in part that he's really saying look there's something wrong with that conception of a two-level theory this level really does have an independence of that level the love the theorists that we've been talking about deny so the typical two level theorist says really there is a kind of termination relationship here cookies saying no things that this level can't be identified with me

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

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Id: sM2XviTFNis

Length: 44min 26sec (2666 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2013