Category Archives: Non-Fiction

Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind by Wilfrid Sellars

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This is actually a long essay, which I read in a collection of essays by Sellars called Science, Perception and Reality. But the essay has been published separately as a book, with an introduction by Richard Rorty and study notes by Robert Brandom, and since I’ve read that introduction and those notes, I’m listing Sellars’s essay as a book.

More to the point, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” is an attack on what Sellars calls the “Myth of the Given”, his term for the view that our knowledge of the world is based on basic or foundational beliefs, and that we derive such basic beliefs from what is “given” to us by sense perception. In particular, Sellars focuses on the philosophical theory that our fundamental knowledge of the world is knowledge of sense data.  Sense data are thought to be the particular impressions that we are aware of when we perceive the world. According to this theory, when I perceive a red apple, for example, I actually experience a red expanse of color, which may or may not represent an actual physical object. Philosophers who accept the sense data theory believe that our knowledge of the world rests on the foundation provided by such sense data.

Sellars criticizes this view in various ways, for example, by arguing that language about how something appears to us (like the language of sense data) is logically dependent on language about how things actually are (like the language of physical objects). Sellars also argues that the sense data theory fudges the clear distinction between non-cognitive impressions (sentience) and cognitive beliefs (sapience) — beliefs belong to the “space of reasons” and sense impressions don’t. In sum, “one could not have observational knowledge of any fact unless one knew many other things (i.e. had the relevant concepts) as well”.  In Brandom’s words, “one can’t think until one has learned to speak”, and one can’t speak until there is a community of speakers engaged in the social practice of speech (which includes giving and asking for reasons).

The last part of the essay is devoted to his own myth, which is supposed to explain how human beings came to talk about sense impressions in an intersubjective way, as theoretical entities. I didn’t find Sellars’s arguments or explanations convincing enough to rid me of the urge to take sense data or foundationalism seriously. But this is a difficult work that seems to deserve detailed study.  (10/13/10)

The Structure of Empirical Knowledge by Laurence BonJour

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BonJour presents a coherence theory of justification for empirical knowledge. What justifies our empirical beliefs is their coherence with our other beliefs, which is more than mere consistency between beliefs. Coherence involves various relations, including inferential and explanatory relations. Explaining justification in terms of coherence is also different from offering a coherence theory of truth, which he rejects in favor of the correspondence theory. BonJour also strongly argues in favor of an internalist view of justification as opposed to an externalist view.

He argues that foundationalist theories cannot explain empirical justification, which leaves coherence theories as the best alternative. However, by insisting that a coherence theory has to allow for observational input (the “Observation Requirement”), he ends up with a theory that seems almost as foundationalist as coherentist. He recognizes this fact and concedes that a “pure” coherence theory will not work. In fact, in later years, BonJour abandoned the coherence theory of justification he defended in this book. (10/10/10)

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee by Sarah Silverman

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Sarah Silverman is very funny. This book is funny too, sometimes. It’s her autobiography, which details her youthful bedwetting, what it was like to grow up Jewish in New Hampshire, her life as a stand-up comic, and her experiences being on TV. Comedy and philosophy have a lot in common and she is frequently philosophical.

But the book isn’t as funny as I expected, and she spends too much time justifying herself and complimenting the people she knows. If all the people who worked on her TV show were as brilliantly funny as she says, it would have been a much better show.

She also offers good advice, such as the idea that we should Make It A Treat, that is, don’t overindulge in the most enjoyable things in life. Keep them relatively rare and special. (7/1/10)

Philosophy of Perception: A Contemporary Introduction by William Fish

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Fish provides an overview of several current philosophical theories of perception, including arguments for and against. The theories he considers are Sense Datum, Adverbial, Belief Acquisition, Intentional and Disjunctive theories. Except for the last chapter, the discussion is almost all concerned with vision, which seems short-sighted.

He distinguishes the theories by their respective responses to three propositions: the Common Factor principle (“Phenomenologically indiscriminable perceptions, hallucinations and illusions have an underlying mental state in common”), the Phenomenal principle (“If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that quality”), and the Representational principle (“All visual experiences are representational”).

Fish tries to figure out whether the theories are better explanations of the phenomenological or epistemological aspects of perception. I found the Disjunctive theories most convincing, especially the one offered by Mark Johnston, but there wasn’t enough detail provided to form a conclusion.  (5/16/10)

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel by Rebecca Goldstein

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This is the story of Kurt Godel, considered to be the greatest logician since Aristotle and the second greatest mind of the 20th century after Einstein. The book includes discussion of the Vienna Circle, whose meetings Godel sometimes attended; Godel’s differences with Wittgenstein, whose views impressed the Vienna Circle but not Godel; and Godel’s friendship with Einstein, when both of them were at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.

Godel is most famous for proving that that any formal system that is rich enough to contain arithmetic or number theory must contain a true statement that can neither be proven nor disproven, in other words, that such a system is necessarily incomplete. A corollary of the incompleteness theorem is that any such system cannot be proven to be consistent within the system itself. Goldstein suggests that the incompleteness theorem demonstrates that there is a mathematical reality beyond the reach of any human-made formal system.

Goldstein steps through the proof of incompleteness, but I didn’t or couldn’t follow the whole proof.  The proof seems to rely on the strange consequences that result from sentences that refer to themselves, such as “This sentence is false”. Russell ruled out such sentences in his Theory of Types, and that seems like a good idea to me. It may be arbitrary, but it seems right to say that sentences that refer to themselves and sets that contain themselves should not be allowed in any formal system, given the paradoxical results that follow.  (5/11/10)