From: SMTP%"ghrosenb@phil.indiana.edu" 6-MAR-1996 16:30:52.18 To: STAPP CC: Subj: Re: Reply to Hayes 4 From: "Gregg Rosenberg" Subject: Re: Reply to Hayes 4 To: phayes@cs.uiuc.edu (Pat Hayes) Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 19:28:39 -0500 (EST) Cc: STAPP@theorm.lbl.gov, klein@adage.berkeley.edu, phayes@cs.uiuc.edu, A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk, keith@imprint.co.uk, mckee@neosoft.com, brings@rpi.edu, patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au, ghrosenb@phil.indiana.edu (Gregg Rosenberg) In-Reply-To: <199603062314.RAA01050@tubman.ai.uiuc.edu> from "Pat Hayes" at Mar 6, 96 05:18:35 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 6053 Hi Pat, Thanks for the note. The kind of argument we are having lends itself to these kinds of misunderstandings, but I don't think we are really being tripped up on them. For clarification, I was using: P = the phenomenal facts F = the functional facts

= the description of the phenomenal facts in phenomenal terms = the description of the functional facts in functional terms I normally don't bother with

and , since I am happy to speak of facts entailing facts. I was under the impression that you wanted to treat entailment as a linguistic relation, so I was just trying to conform to what I thought your usage was. > arguing across a use/mention misunderstanding. In the discussion with > Henry, I was using the symbols 'F' and 'P' (or was it 'E' ?) to be > schematic stand-ins for the relevant descriptions, not as *names* for sets > of facts *about* anything. Thus, the claim that P=F is (shorthand for) the > claim that the neural event (itself) is identical to the experience > (itself), both understood de re. OK. This is what I thought you were claiming, and what I was arguing against. > This is what (I think!) Henry and I have > been arguing about. You however are taking these capital letters to refer > to the descriptions (in neural-event-language and > subjective-phenomenal-language) of something (or things). No, I was taking P and F to refer de re. I am claiming that not(P=F) because =/=>

. > If that's what > 'P' and 'F' mean, then of course not(P=F), trivially, just as a matter of > syntax. (How could you take me to be so stupid as to be claiming that? :-) I didn't; really I didn't. How could you take me to be so stupid as to think that you were so stupid? :-) > For example, you say: > > >So I claim: if =/=>

, then not P=F. > > which to me seems illformed:

and are descriptions, not assertions, > so it is meaningless to put an implication sign between them. I'm not sure the description/assertion distinction really makes a difference here. What matters is that and

are sets of propositions, with meanings derived from the concepts involved. As such, they contain information (in particular, they contain information about the facts they designate). If the information in does not imply the information in

, then the facts designated by them cannot be identical. Is that clearer? I'm sorry for the confusion. > Let me explain my usage.Things exist,and relations hold between them. To > claim that a relation holds between things, using names for the relations > and the things, is to make an atomic assertion. We allow quantifiers and > other logical constructs to make more complex assertions and descriptions > which refer to things. A particular assertion, or set of them, uses a > particular vocabulary of names and relation names. The same thing may be > correctly described in different vocabularies. The identity sign is used > between two descriptions to assert that the two descriptions describe the > same thing. > > I don't think this is at all controversial or unusual. Right. I don't think we've been at cross-purposes though. > Now, where in this do 'aspects' fit? One natural interpretation is that an > aspect of something is a (perhaps incomplete) description of it in some > vocabulary. But from your left/right side example, an aspect would seem to > be a *part* of a thing (or am I taking this too literally?) Right. I take an aspect to be something like a mode of presentation. As such, it is ontological. Aspects may be described, but they are not descriptions. Different names may accrue to the same thing via different aspects. This is what happens, I take it, with the Evening Star and the Morning Star -- they are different aspects of Venus, these aspects involving its relations to observers here on earth. In cases like that, the aspect becomes part of the prior identification conditions on what the name designates, giving the name its prior sense. Any argument that the name identifies the same thing as some other name, such as MS=ES, must satisfy some conditions. Among these conditions is that the facts about the identified thing entail that it has the aspect that gave the o riginal name its sense. Here is how it works in the Evening Star and Morning Star example. First, we derive the facts about Venus. We note that these facts entail that Venus satisfies the identification conditions, the sense, of the Evening Star -- that is, it occupies the right position in the sky, at the right time, with the right luminosity, etc. Fine, the entailment condition is satisfied, and Venus is the Evening Star. Next, we note the same thing about Venus and the Morning Star. Fine, the entailment condition is satisfied and Venus is the Morning Star. By the transitivity of identity, ES=MS. At every step, though, the entailment condition was satisfied. The problem with F and P is that the proper entailments can't hold between the concepts which designate them. Consequently, those concepts carry different information. Consequently, the differences in and

imply that F and P are not identical. The cleanest way to resolve the problem is to hold that F and P are both aspects of our mental systems, but not the same aspect. I think further argument along the same lines demonstrate that P is not physical in even a broad sense, and therefore P is a non-physical aspect of us. I think this is very interesting, and worthy of investigation, and, as I said, I don't see the threat to science or avenues of research that you seem to. > I'd appreciate some clarification. I hope this helped some. I'm going to be leaving town in the next couple of days (weather permitting), so you may not hear from me again for awhile. --Gregg -- Honesty in academia _____ / \ | | Gregg Rosenberg | --)(-- C _) D'ohh! Will philosophize for food. | ___\ / | / __) /_ \__/ / \ / \