All,
I have started to reNoodle this entry based on your comments. The noo=noodle is at
Here is the first paragraph,
"Mentalism is the belief that what we do is caused by events in some "inner" space called the mind. One of the classic critiques of mentalism is that it involves a category error. The term "category error" arises from the ordinary language philosophy of Gilbert Ryle
[1]. You make a category error when you start talking about some thing as if it were a different sort of thing altogether. In other words, our language is full of conventions concerning the way we talk about things, and when we violate those conventions, we start to talk silly. For instance, what about the notion of introspection, that is so essential to mentalism: the idea that we can "feel" our own feelings. To an anti-mentalist, feeling is something that happens when one palpates the world. Thus, to talk about our "inner feelings", is to doom ourselves to silliness. Feelings are inherently "of" other things and to talk of "feeling our own feelings" violates the usage of the word."
I hear a rumor that Owen is hard at work on ANOTHER way of preserving the pearls that are scattered in the FRIAM postings.
This should be interesting.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org
Locked
