From Terms & Methods pages
- ambiguities, equivocating
- questions about what X consists in (its nature or essence), versus questions about the causes/mechanisms that bring X about
- a practical test or evidence to believe X is present (the epistemology of X), versus an “unpacking definition” or analysis of what we already understood by X (the metaphysics or nature of X), versus a stipulative definition of X
- What is a thought-experiment? Why are science fiction examples relevant to philosophy?
- conclusion, premises, assumptions
- deductively “valid” argument, “sound” argument, persuasive argument
- what makes it reasonable to think/expect/count something as an X, versus sufficient or necessary conditions (see below)
- What is a counter-example?
- notion of a “question-begging” argument (as philosophers use this label)
- dilemma (see Glossary page)
(The following won’t be on the first quiz.) From page on Conditionals, but we’ll discuss when we get to “Leibniz’s Law” in a few weeks:
- antecedent and consequent of a conditional
- necessary condition (what’s required to be an X), versus sufficient condition (what guarantees something is an X)
- biconditional, “if and only if” (“iff”)
- difference between converse and contrapositive of a conditional
- reductio
Other Minds
- what is a “mental state or property”? what is the difference or relation between a mental state/property and a mind?
- episodic (occurrent) versus dispositional (standing, background) mental properties
- representational (contentful/propositional/intentional) states or attitudes
- qualitative/phenomenal feelings, sensations
- different ways in which our own mental states are claimed to be “private,” or our access to them is claimed to be “special” or “privileged”
- epistemology
- proving something with certainty, versus having reasonable grounds for believing it
- something’s being necessary for having mentality, versus its sufficing for/guaranteeing the presence of mentality, versus its making it reasonable to attribute mentality
- evidence for mentality from physical makeup/structure, versus from non-verbal behavior (such as learning/solving problems), versus from use of language
Other Minds
- Turing Test: how does it work? what is passing it supposed to show?
- passing the Turing Test reliably, versus there being a trick question that will expose the candidate
- What is fundamental to being a system running some program/algorithm?
- why the same program can be implemented on various kinds of hardware
- why the same input/output pattern may be produced by different programs
- the difference between a chatbot whose program is simply a giant lookup table, versus programs that are more complex and resemble the rules our own brains use
- behaviorist versus other “pro-machine” views on the Turing Test
- reasons to challenge/doubt these claims: (a) computers can’t make mistakes unless they’re given mistaken input; (b) whatever computers do had to have been selected in advance by people who programmed them; (c) wherever their programs came from, computers can’t do anything really random or surprising, everything had to be already specified in advance by that program
- arguments about whether machines are less likely to have free will than humans
- Searle’s Chinese Room: how it works, what it’s supposed to show
- programs as abstract recipes that can sit on a shelf unused or repeated many times, versus particular ongoing processes of those recipes being performed, versus the hardware as its performing it
Mind/Body
- metaphysics/ontology, epistemology, ethics
- contrast between what’s part of the definition of some notion (for example, “mother” or “substance”), and further contentious claims about the notion (perhaps even about what’s necessarily true of it)
- abstract versus concrete
- events/states/processes, properties/relations, facts and propositions, concrete individuals/substances
- intrinsic versus extrinsic/relational properties
- substances versus “derivative or dependent” objects (like bubbles, wrinkles, wits, waves, knots, holes, hikes)
- reducing some notion to another notion, versus taking it as real but primitive/irreducible, versus having an “error-theory” about the notion
- debate between (substance) dualists about the mind/body relation and materialist/physicalists (who are one kind of substance monists)
- substance dualism versus property dualism
- mind versus soul, which can a materialist believe in?
- being a materialist but denying that “your mind” is any substance
- Leibniz’s Law (also called “the indiscernibility of identicals”)
- Does Leibniz’s Law say that if A and B have all the same properties, they are one and the same thing?
- intrinsic versus extrinsic/relational properties
- qualitative identity (being copies or duplicates of each other, at least at a given moment), versus numerical identity (being one and the same thing)
- Whether Leibniz Law says that it’s impossible for things to change their properties
- the “divisibility” (has no parts) argument for dualism
- “I know that reporter is alive right now. I don’t know whether Superman is still alive. Hence that reporter is not Superman.”
- “I have no doubts about my own existence. I do have doubts about whether my body really exists. Hence I am not my body.”
- the “continuity of nature” argument for materialism
- What does Huxley mean by saying animals are “conscious automata”?
- epiphenomenalism
- interactionism
- van Inwagen’s “remote control” argument
- the complaint that dualist interactionists have no good story about how causal influences “jump the gap” between the soul and the physical world (Princess Elisabeth)
- Kim’s “Pairing Problem” for dualist interactionists
- What does the slogan “physical events are causally closed” mean?
- relations between causal determinism and the notion of “overcausing” (sometimes called “causal overdetermination”)
- why is it unattractive/uncomfortable/implausible to say there’s overcausing everytime something mental causes a physical effect?
- Ockham’s Razor
Free Will
- relations between questions of free will and questions of moral accountability, blame, resentment, credit, gratitude
- utilitarian/consequentialist versus retributivist accounts of what justifies us in punishing people
- going through the psychological process of “making” a choice, versus having several choices really open to you
- your actions/choices/decisions, versus things that “merely happen” to you
- difference between your arm’s moving and you raising your arm on purpose/intentionally
- using probability to describe your evidence/information, versus using probability to describe how some parts of the world (such as the past) objectively settle how the rest of the world has to be
- determinism versus indeterminism; what is it for the laws of nature to be “deterministic”?
- compatibilism versus incompatibilism
- skeptical views about free will, “hard” versus “soft” determinism
- libertarianism
- “If we have no control over certain things (such as the past), then we have no control over their necessary consequences either.” (Consequence/Before-You-Were Born Argument)
- not having the ability to do something, versus not having the opportunity or motivation to do it
- “The fact that you won’t do E does not imply that you can’t do E!”
- different kinds of alleged “moral luck,” the Control Principle
- the Principle of Alternative Possibilities
- counterfactual claims
- Frankfurt-style cases (counterfactual interveners)
- “Claims about what people can do can be understood in different ways”
- “Freedom is opposed to constraint, not to causal necessity!”
- compatibilist’s analysis of “could have done otherwise”
- If all our actions are uncaused, does that show that we’re in control of them? Does it show we’re morally accountable for them?
- libertarian’s problems with “luck”, Dilemma of Determinism
- libertarian views which say that our actions are uncaused, versus agent-causation theories