@ACB,
ACB wrote:
mickalos wrote:ACB wrote:mickalos wrote:I want to say that what differentiates somebody who does and somebody who doesn't understand the concept of a chilagon is not any particular mental state, but how they go on to apply the concept.
This is behaviourism, as propounded by Ryle in
The Concept of Mind.
Absolutely not. If you ask me whether there is a difference between pain behaviour with pain, and pain behaviour without pain, what would you expect me to say? No? That would be absurd, what greater difference could there be?
So pain is independent of pain behaviour. What, then, is this independent thing "pain", if not an inner process?
Let me make it quite clear that I do not want to reduce mental states to behaviour, but nor do I want to reduce mental states to some kind of inner mental object. I do not want to reduce anything, except the amount of misjudged reductionism in philosophy. When you see somebody thrashing around on the floor, you cannot point to the thrashing and say, "This is merely behaviour, the pain is on the inside". It is not a matter of 'here is behaviour, there is pain - they just happen to be associated', rather the thrashing is a manifestation of pain, it is integral the the concept.
Can you imagine somebody sitting down and calmly telling you, "I am in the most excruciating pain at present"? You might think them to be speaking metaphorically, but when you ask them what they mean they say, "My right arm. I didn't know such pain was possible." He then pours you a cup with his right hand. This, I think, is not an epistemic problem of being able to tell whether or not our tete-a-tete is pain-filled, but a rather a question of conceptual clarification. The person we are talking about here could no more be in pain, than somebody who falls onto a fire could be pretending to be in pain.
Quote:
mickalos wrote:However, if you were to ask me whether it would be possible that I might look outside, see everybody walking around in a perfectly normal way, and yet for them actually to be in tremendous pain, I should say, only if they were doing a very good job of suppressing their pain behaviour.
Some of them could be in mild pain. But if they are not exhibiting pain behaviour, there isn't any pain
behaviour for them to suppress. There's only the (inner) pain itself.
First of all, I'd say that mild pain has mild outward criteria (winces, touching the part of your body where the pain is, etc.), but something more fundamenally wrong suggests itself. I can't really make sense of "there is only the inner pain". If you tell me you are in pain (the avowal itself being a manifestation of your pain), and I ask you where it is, what are you to say? You might say, it is just in my mind, but you don't mean to say that you aren't really in pain, even less that you have a headache. You might tell me that you just have a general pain feeling, but you don't mean that you hurt all over.
I get the impression that you want to analyse having a pain in one's arm, for example, along the lines of there being some kind of private mental object, which then has a various effects on my arm, and perhaps other parts of my body; my vocal chords, tear ducts, etc. This just seems strange to me. Of course, do feel free to correct me.
Quote:
mickalos wrote:
How do you know it from direct experience? You most certainly not do know it from private introspection: imagine working your way through a maths textbook on your own, and then you are given a list of problems to work on, and you duly answer them. How will you know that you have understood, i.e. got the correct answers, without reference to some kind of public criterion of correctness? You cannot check your answers against your own mathematical knowledge, because whatever seems right to you is exactly what you are going to take to be right.
Certainly, one can tell when one doesn't know where to begin, but one cannot tell when one correctly understands.
But even
believing I understand a concept feels different (i.e. is a different inner state) from
believing I do not understand a concept. So my point still stands.
Do you get the feeling that you believe you understand the English language every time you open your mouth? The feeling that you believe you understand mathematics every time you shop for groceries? I certainly don't. Indeed, I have many beliefs at the moment, perhaps there are many more that I could not recall than those that I could, and yet the only feeling I have at present is the feeling of being at my computer typing (is this a mental object?!). Certainly, a feeling may accompany an avowal or manifestation of a belief, for example, an atheist may become fearful on a Sunday when he stays at home, but this feeling is hardly constitutive of the belief.
Quote:mickalos wrote:Quote:2. Suppose two people learn about a chilagon, and some time later one of them applies the concept correctly and the other incorrectly. If they are not in different (mental) states between the time of learning and the time of application, how can the difference in their application of the concept be explained?
Is learning how to do something to suddenly acquire a new mental state? When does a child who learns how to read utter his first word in his new state? Perhaps he is only pretending to read until he utters his first fifty correct words? Clearly, this would be absurd. When one is the master of a technique, one no more needs to be in a particular mental state to perform it than one needs to be in a particular mental state to successfully walk down a street.
Sorry, I do not understand how these are not mental states. There must be some objective neurological property (with both a physical and a mental aspect) that a person possesses
continuously between the time of learning a concept and successfully applying it. And this property must be lacking in someone who cannot apply the concept. Otherwise, the causal link between learning and application would be broken. There must be some continuous temporal link between cause and effect.
I don't doubt that learning certain techniques and acquiring certain abilities does involve certain physiological changes. No doubt some, if not most of these changes take place in the brain, but that does not make them mental states; our ability to breath, I assume, involves some part of the brain, but I cannot see how it could be construed as a mental state. Moreover, I would certainly disagree that the physiological aspects of ability acquisition are constitutive of having acquired that ability.
Quote:mickalos wrote:Quote:4. It may be that someone never has occasion to "apply" a particular concept they have learned. Must we then say that it is neither true nor false that they understand it?
Of course not, but if somebody does have occasion to apply a concept, and they apply it incorrectly, then they do not understand and they never did, regardless of any mental picture they have. You need
to be able to use the concepts you have learned, otherwise you clearly do not understand.
Even before they have occasion to apply the concept, it is either the case that they understand it or that they do not. (They are not in an indefinite state like Schrödinger's Cat.) So there must be some persistent physical and mental quality within them that makes this fact true.
I'm certainly not an anti-realist about understanding something. There is most definitely a fact of the matter that I understand X, but is that fact of the matter a mental state? Only if by 'mental state', you mean the whole complex of dispositions that is acquired in the process of teaching that are manifest in my practices, and certainly not if you mean some private "mental object".
).