Philosophy: books and discussion

[TimMason]

You'll find one of the essays from the Galactica book here. If you compare this with, say, Galen Strawson's 'Against Narrativity', you get some sense of the ways in which identity is a problem for philosophers. Although I find the Strawson paper more interesting, I don't think it can be denied that the Galactica paper is 'doing philosophy'.

So it may be that these pop philosophy books are taking real philosophy out into places that ordinary philosophy doesn't usually reach. That seems no bad thing, to me. In France there is a movement to do the same thing, although this movement doesn't work so much through pop figures as through pop places : philosophers hold special evenings in cafés, for example, inviting anyone to come in and join the fray.

[Sparrow]

How come my thoughts present themselves as fully formed sentences? What's the process that constructs them, and why aren't I aware of it?

I can't imagine what my thoughts would be like without language.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

How come my thoughts present themselves as fully formed sentences? What's the process that constructs them, and why aren't I aware of it?

I can't imagine what my thoughts would be like without language.

probably the same that allows us to learn our own language.

[WT Sharpe]

An extremely accomplished electrician told me he tends to think in pictures, which is why he feels he so good at troubleshooting electrical circuits. As a musician, I often think in terms of sounds and intervals between notes. It could be argued that musical mathematics is another form of language, I suppose.

I can recall the first time as a child that I became aware that I was thinking in sentences. Did I do so before that time? I can't really say. It seemed quite a revelation at the time, but I can't begin to pinpoint the time and date when it occurred.

[TimMason]

If you are interested in questions like this, a very good place to start is Steven Pinker's 'The Language Instinct'. He looks into the relationship between thought and language. Surprisingly, perhaps, you can have both thought without language and language without thought. He talks about it here.

[TGS]

I've just been doing some work on the representation of meaning and whilst Pinker has some interesting things to say he is, at bottom, a Chomskyist. There is a lot of interesting work going on at the moment on the perceptual foundation of thought - Lawrence Barsalou is one of the main proponents and one the many advantages of his Perceptual Symbol Theory is that it solves the symbol grounding problem - which is a well known difficulty for many accounts of language to explain how logical operations over arbitrary and meaningless symbols can come to mean, (well, he doesn't really solve it, it just doesn't arise on a perceptual account of meaning).

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

An extremely accomplished electrician told me he tends to think in pictures, which is why he feels he so good at troubleshooting electrical circuits. As a musician, I often think in terms of sounds and intervals between notes. It could be argued that musical mathematics is another form of language, I suppose.

I can recall the first time as a child that I became aware that I was thinking in sentences. Did I do so before that time? I can't really say. It seemed quite a revelation at the time, but I can't begin to pinpoint the time and date when it occurred.

Not only do I think in sentences, but in some cases (most?) it seems I visualize, to some extent, a written sentence. I sometimes stop in the middle of a thought to wonder about the spelling of a word (there is a tricky grammar rule in French called "la règle du participe passé" which always befuddles me).

[TimMason]

Pinker is, of course, a Chomskyist (as I'm well aware!). But although there is much to disagree with in his books and in his hairstyle, I think his 'Language Instinct' offers an interesting and highly readable introduction to language in general, and to the relationship between thought and language in particular.

I don't know Barsalou, so I'm grateful for the link.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by TimMason

If you are interested in questions like this, a very good place to start is Steven Pinker's 'The Language Instinct'. He looks into the relationship between thought and language. Surprisingly, perhaps, you can have both thought without language and language without thought. He talks about it here.

Pinker is a wonderful speaker. I posted his "Myth of Violence" TED talk at MR about a year ago. Thanks for that.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Not only do I think in sentences, but in some cases (most?) it seems I visualize, to some extent, a written sentence. I sometimes stop in the middle of a thought to wonder about the spelling of a word (there is a tricky grammar rule in French called "la règle du participe passé" which always befuddles me).

It befuddles me as well.

[TGS]

Originally Posted by TimMason

Pinker is, of course, a Chomskyist (as I'm well aware!). But although there is much to disagree with in his books and in his hairstyle, I think his 'Language Instinct' offers an interesting and highly readable introduction to language in general, and to the relationship between thought and language in particular.

I don't know Barsalou, so I'm grateful for the link.

Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought" I think is I think more interesting, not least because he seems to be less dogmatically Chomskyist and incorporates some insights from cognitive linguistics, which generally offers a more convincing story about the relationship between language and thought.

[troymc]

Originally Posted by mysweety

Please let me know when it is available.

Any of those interested in an epub version of William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell (which was brought up earlier in this thread) may find one here.

Troy

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by TimMason

If you are interested in questions like this, a very good place to start is Steven Pinker's 'The Language Instinct'. He looks into the relationship between thought and language. Surprisingly, perhaps, you can have both thought without language and language without thought. He talks about it here.

I'll check his stuff out.

[TimMason]

But it's still a mystery why "Heidegger, Heidegger, was a boozy beggar" was thought to be a funny line by most people - who presumably had never heard of Heidegger!

Perhaps they just thought it was nonsense. The line "Bonar Law has hairy ears" used to have the audience for 'Round the Horne' in stitches every time, although it's unlikely that many of them actually knew who Bonar Law ("the unknown Prime Minister") was.

But there's also the point that Monty Python was not as popular as we believe. Only about three percent of the population watched the first series. It later rose to about 8 percent, sufficient to keep it going, but hardly as popular as some other programmes, such as "Last of the Summer Wine". Most of the audience for Python would probably have been pretty well educated, and would have been likely to catch at least some of the references to philosophers.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by TGS

... But it's still a mystery why "Heidegger, Heidegger, was a boozy beggar" was thought to be a funny line by most people - who presumably had never heard of Heidegger!

Originally Posted by TimMason

Perhaps they just thought it was nonsense. The line "Bonar Law has hairy ears" used to have the audience for 'Round the Horne' in stitches every time, although it's unlikely that many of them actually knew who Bonar Law ("the unknown Prime Minister") was.

But there's also the point that Monty Python was not as popular as we believe. Only about three percent of the population watched the first series. It later rose to about 8 percent, sufficient to keep it going, but hardly as popular as some other programmes, such as "Last of the Summer Wine". Most of the audience for Python would probably have been pretty well educated, and would have been likely to catch at least some of the references to philosophers.

I think it was the booze. Not everyone knows who Heidegger was (and many of us who do are still extremely uncomfortable about his Nazi connections), but lots of folks can relate to boozy beggers!

Last of the Summer Wine was a wonderful show, as was Waiting for God. The elderly are rarely made the central figures of series in our youth-centered U.S. TV culture.