Introduction to Further Applications of Trigonometry

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In this book Jonathan Lowe offers a lucid and wide-ranging introduction to the philosophy of mind. Using aproblem-centred approach designed to stimulate as wellas instruct, he begins with a general examination of themind–body problem and moves on to detailed examina-tion of more specific philosophical issues concerningsensation, perception, thought and language, rational-ity, artificial intelligence, action, personal identity andself-knowledge. His discussion is notably broad in scope,and distinctive in giving equal attention to deep meta-physical questions concerning the mind and to the dis-coveries and theories of modern scientific psychology. Itwill be of interest to any reader with a basic groundingin modern philosophy.E. J. Lowe is Professor of Philosophy at the University ofDurham. His publications include Kinds of Being (1989),Locke on Human Understanding (1995), Subjects of Experience(1996) and The Possibility of Metaphysics (1998). AN INTRODUCTION TO THEPHILOSOPHY OF MIND AN INTRODUCTIONTO THE PHILOSOPHYOF MINDE. J. LOWEUniversity of Durham          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom  The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, AustraliaRuiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, SpainDock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africahttp://www.cambridge.orgFirst published in printed format ISBN 0-521-65285-5 hardbackISBN 0-521-65428-9 paperbackISBN 0-511-04054-7 eBookE. J. Lowe 20042000(netLibrary)© ContentsPrefacepagexi1Introduction1Empiricalpsychologyandphilosophicalanalysis2Metaphysicsandthephilosophyofmind3Abriefguidetotherestofthisbook62Minds,bodiesandpeople8Cartesiandualism9Theconceivabilityargument11Thedivisibilityargument13Non-Cartesiandualism15Arepersonssimplesubstances?18Conceptualobjectionstodualisticinteraction21Empiricalobjectionstodualisticinteraction24Thecausalclosureargument26Objectionstothecausalclosureargument29Otherargumentsforandagainstphysicalism32Conclusions363Mentalstates39Propositionalattitudestates40Behaviourismanditsproblems41Functionalism44Functionalismandpsychophysicalidentitytheories48Theproblemofconsciousness51Qualiaandtheinvertedspectrumargument53Somepossibleresponsestotheinvertedspectrumargument55Theabsentqualiaargumentandtwonotionsofconsciousness59Eliminativematerialismand‘folkpsychology’61Someresponsestoeliminativematerialism64Conclusions66vii Contentsviii4Mentalcontent69Propositions70Thecausalrelevanceofcontent74Theindividuationofcontent79Externalisminthephilosophyofmind82Broadversusnarrowcontent84Content,representationandcausality89Misrepresentationandnormality92Theteleologicalapproachtorepresentation95Objectionstoateleologicalaccountofmentalcontent99Conclusions1005Sensationandappearance102Appearanceandreality103Sense-datumtheoriesandtheargumentfromillusion107Otherargumentsforsense-data110Objectionstosense-datumtheories112Theadverbialtheoryofsensation114Theadverbialtheoryandsense-data116Primaryandsecondaryqualities119Sense-datumtheoriesandtheprimary/secondarydistinction121Anadverbialversionoftheprimary/secondarydistinction125Docolour-propertiesreallyexist?126Conclusions1286Perception130Perceptualexperienceandperceptualcontent131Perceptualcontent,appearanceandqualia135Perceptionandcausation137Objectionstocausaltheoriesofperception143Thedisjunctivetheoryofperception145Thecomputationalandecologicalapproachestoperception149Consciousness,experienceand‘blindsight Introduction to Further Applications of Trigonometry Introduction to Further Applications of Trigonometry By: OpenStaxCollege 1/3 Introduction to Further Applications of Trigonometry General Sherman, the world’s largest living tree (credit: Mike Baird, Flickr) The world’s largest tree by volume, named General Sherman, stands 274.9 feet tall and resides in Northern California Source: National Park Service "The General Sherman Tree." http://www.nps.gov/seki/ naturescience/sherman.htm Accessed April 25, 2014 Just how scientists know its true height? A common way to measure the height involves determining the angle of elevation, which is formed by the tree and the ground at a point some distance away from the base of the tree This method is much more practical than climbing the tree and dropping a very long tape measure 2/3 Introduction to Further Applications of Trigonometry In this chapter, we will explore applications of trigonometry that will enable us to solve many different kinds of problems, including finding the height of a tree We extend topics we introduced in Trigonometric Functions and investigate applications more deeply and meaningfully 3/3 1 Introduction What is the philosophy of mind? One might be tempted to answer that it is the study of philosophical questions concerning the mind and its properties – questions such as whether the mind is distinct from the body or some part of it, such as the brain, and whether the mind has properties, such as consciousness, which are unique to it. But such an answer implicitly assumes something which is already philosophically contentious, namely, that ‘minds’ are objects of a certain kind, somehow related – perhaps causally, perhaps by identity – to other objects, such as bodies or brains. In short, such an answer involves an implicit reification of minds: literally, a making of them into ‘things’. Indo-European languages such as English are overburdened with nouns and those whose native tongues they are have an unwarranted tendency to suppose that nouns name things. When we speak of people having both minds and bodies, it would be naı ¨ ve to construe this as akin to saying that trees have both leaves and trunks. Human bodies are certainly ‘things’ of a certain kind. But when we say that people ‘have minds’ we are, surely, saying something about the properties of people rather than about certain ‘things’ which people somehow own. A more circumspect way of saying that people ‘have minds’ would be to say that people are minded or mindful, meaning thereby just that they feel, see, think, reason and so forth. According to this view of the matter, the philosophy of mind is the philosophical study of minded things just insofar as they are minded. The things in question will include people, but may well also include non-human animals and perhaps even robots, if these too can 1 An introduction to the philosophy of mind2 be minded. More speculatively, the things in question might even include disembodied spirits, such as angels and God, if such things do or could exist. Is there some single general term which embraces all minded things, actual and possible? Not, I think, in everyday language, but we can suggest one. My suggestion is that we use the term ‘subject’ for this purpose. There is a slight inconvenience attached to this, inasmuch as the word ‘sub- ject’ also has other uses, for instance as a synonym for ‘topic’. But in practice no confusion is likely to arise on this account. And, in any case, any possible ambiguity can easily be removed by expanding ‘subject’ in our intended sense to ‘sub- ject of experience’ – understanding ‘experience’ here in a broad sense to embrace any kind of sensation, perception or thought. This agreed, we can say that the philosophy of mind is the philosophical study of subjects of experience – what they are, how they can exist, and how they are related to the rest of creation. 1 EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS But what is distinctive about the philosophical study of subjects of experience? How, for instance, does it differ from the sort of study of them conducted by empirical psychologists? It dif- fers in several ways. For one thing, the philosophy of mind pays close attention to the concepts we deploy in characterising things as being subjects of experience. Thus it is concerned with the analysis of such concepts as the concepts of percep- tion, thought and intentional agency. The philosophical ana- lysis of a concept is not to be confused with a mere account 4 Mental content We came to the conclusion, in the previous chapter, that mental states really do exist and can properly be invoked in causal explanations of people’s behaviour. Thus, for example, it is perfectly legitimate to cite John’s belief that it is raining amongst the probable causes of his action of opening his umbrella as he walks to work. In this respect, it seems, the commonsense judgements of ‘folk’ psychology and the explanatory hypotheses of ‘scientific’ psychology are broadly compatible with one another, whatever eliminative material- ists may say to the contrary. However, when we try to under- stand more fully how propositional attitude states can be causally efficacious in generating bodily behaviour, some ser- ious difficulties begin to emerge. So far, we have described propositional attitude states – ‘attitudinal states’, for short – as involving a subject’s ‘attitude’ towards a proposition. The proposition in question constitutes the state’s propositional con- tent. And the attitude might be one of belief, desire, hope, fear, intention or whatnot. The general form of a statement ascribing an attitudinal state to a subject is simply ‘S φs that p’, where ‘S’ names a subject, ‘φ’ stands for any verb of pro- positional attitude, and ‘p’ represents some proposition – such as the proposition that it is raining. An example is pro- vided by the statement that John believes that it is raining and another by the statement that John fears that he will get wet. Now, it seems clear that the propositional content of an attitudinal state must be deemed causally relevant to what- ever behaviour that state may be invoked to explain. When one cites John’s belief that it is raining in causal explanation 69 An introduction to the philosophy of mind70 of his action of opening his umbrella, it is relevant that the cited belief is a belief that it is raining rather than, say, a belief that two plus two equals four. It is true that, as we noted in the previous chapter, one and the same action could be explained as proceeding from many different possible beliefs, depending upon what other attitudinal states we are prepared to ascribe to the agent. Someone who opens his umbrella while walking to work need not do so because he believes that it is raining and desires not to get wet: he might do so, for instance, because he believes that he is being spied upon and desires to hide his face. Even so, these different possible explanations of the agent’s behaviour all make essential reference to the con- tents of the agent’s putative attitudinal states and presume that those contents are causally relevant to the behaviour in question. However – and this is where the real difficulties begin to arise – when we consider that propositions appear to be abstract entities, more akin to the objects of mathemat- ics than to anything found in the concrete realm of psycho- logy, it seems altogether mysterious that states of mind should depend for their causal powers upon the propositions which allegedly constitute their ‘contents’. For abstract entit- ies themselves do not appear to possess any causal powers of their own. Some of the questions which we shall need to address in this chapter are the following. How do the contents of mental states contribute to the causal explanation of behaviour? Can the contents of mental 3 Mental states In the previous chapter, we focused on two important meta- physical questions in the philosophy of mind. One was the question of whether persons or subjects of experience are identical with their physical bodies, or certain parts of those bodies, such as their brains. The other was the question of whether the mental states of persons, such as thoughts and feelings, are identical with certain physical states of their bodies, such as states of neuronal activity in their brains. Many materialists would endorse positive answers to both of these questions, although later in this chapter we shall encounter a species of materialism which denies that mental states, as we ordinarily conceive of them, really exist at all. But before we examine that position, it is worth remarking that, so long as one is a realist about mental states – that is, so long as one considers that states of thinking and feeling really do exist – one can, for many purposes, afford to remain neutral with regard to the question of whether or not mental states are identical with physical states. There are many issues in the philosophy of mind which we can usefully discuss without presuming to be able to resolve that question. And this is just as well, knowing as we now do how thorny a ques- tion it is. One of these issues is that of how we can best characterise and classify the various different kinds of mental state which, if we are realists, we believe to exist. So far we have been talking about mental states quite generally, with- out differentiating between them in any significant fashion. But in a detailed description of the mental lives of persons we need to be able to distinguish, in principled ways, between 39 An introduction to the philosophy of mind40 sensations, perceptions, beliefs, desires, intentions, fears, and many other kinds of mental state: and providing a satisfact- ory account of these distinctions is no easy matter. It is to the difficulties besetting that task that we shall turn in this chapter. PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE STATES Let us begin by considering those mental states that philo- sophers like to call propositional attitude states. For brevity, I shall refer to them as ‘attitudinal states’. These include beliefs, desires, intentions, hopes and fears, to name but a few. A common feature of such states is that we may ascribe them to subjects of experience by using statements of the form ‘S φs that p’. Here ‘S’ denotes a particular subject or person, ‘p’ stands for some proposition – for example, the proposition that it is raining – and ‘φ’ represents any so- called verb of propositional attitude, such as ‘believe’, ‘hope’ or ‘fear’. Such verbs are called ‘verbs of propositional atti- tude’ because each of them is considered to express a particu- lar attitude which a subject may have towards a proposition. (What propositions are and how subjects can have ‘attitudes’ towards them are matters which we shall take up more fully in the next chapter.) Thus, the following sentences can all be used to ascribe attitudinal states to subjects: ‘John believes that it is raining’, ‘Mary hopes that she has an umbrella’, and ‘Ann fears that she will get wet’. In each case, the ‘that’ clause expresses the propositional content of the atti- tudinal state which is being ascribed. A number of 6 Perception At the beginning of the previous chapter, I remarked that perceptual states, such as an experience of seeing a tree to be in front of a house, are partly like sensational states and partly like propositional attitude states. They are like the former in that they have qualitative or phenomenal features and they are like the latter in that they have conceptual con- tent. I had a good deal to say in that chapter about the qualit- ative aspects of perceptual experiences, but not much about their conceptual content. In the present chapter I shall try to redress the balance and say more about the latter. But one of the things that we shall need to discuss is how the concep- tual content of a perceptual experience is related to its qual- itative features – for it can scarcely be supposed that these two dimensions of perceptual experience are quite uncon- nected. However, we should acknowledge that an account of the nature of perceptual experiences is only part of what is demanded of a philosophical analysis of the concept of percep- tion, which is another chief concern of this chapter. According to most contemporary philosophers, perceiving certainly involves having perceptual experiences, but is more than just that. The question is: what more? One plausible suggestion is that perceiving additionally involves some sort of causal relationship between the perceiver’s perceptual experiences and those objects which, in virtue of that relationship, the perceiver may be said to perceive. Causal theories of percep- tion are currently quite popular, but are also subject to cer- tain objections which we shall have to look into carefully. In 130 Perception 131 the light of those objections, some philosophers have advanced rival theories of perception, of which the so-called disjunctive theory of perception is perhaps the most important. Later in this chapter, I shall try to adjudicate between these two approaches. Part of the problem which confronts us here is to deter- mine what properly belongs to a philosophical analysis of the concept of perception and what properly belongs to an empir- ical theory of perception of the sort that is more appropri- ately advanced and evaluated by scientific psychologists than by philosophers. But we should not assume that these two domains are quite unrelated: indeed, they cannot be. Con- sequently, we shall find it useful to look at some of the approaches to perception currently favoured by empirical psychologists and see how they are related to philosophical treatments of the topic. Two such approaches, in particular, deserve our attention – the computational approach and the ecological approach – as the differences between them echo, to some extent, disagreements amongst contemporary philo- sophers of perception. We should also recognise that many of the empirical findings of psychologists working in the field of perception provide interesting subject-matter for philo- sophical reflection, which is apt to be one-sided if restricted to everyday and familiar examples. One recently investigated phenomenon is especially worth mentioning in this connec- tion – the phenomenon of so-called ‘blindsight’, a condition in which subjects claim not to be able to see certain objects despite clearly possessing visually-based information con- cerning them. First, however, ... tape measure 2/3 Introduction to Further Applications of Trigonometry In this chapter, we will explore applications of trigonometry that will enable us to solve many different kinds of problems,.. .Introduction to Further Applications of Trigonometry General Sherman, the world’s largest living tree (credit: Mike... height? A common way to measure the height involves determining the angle of elevation, which is formed by the tree and the ground at a point some distance away from the base of the tree This method