Holy illegible type Batman! The new Philosopher's Carnival is up and it's up in bright green on a dark background. Now I grew up on the old VT-100 terminals and my Apple ][+ and its green monitor. Those at least limited their text to 80 columns of big text. But this is really hard to read. Ouch. Guys. There's a reason we read back type on white backgrounds. Am I the only one who found this amazingly painful to try and read? I skipped around a bit and found a few posts to comment on.
I confess there weren't quite as many posts I liked this time around. I'm contributing to the discussion over at Kevin's blog on phenomenology but which ends up in a discussion of what it means for logic to be "foundational." I'm still a bit unclear on it all and may make a post here with some quotes from the eminent logician C. S. Peirce who actually thought through a lot of this issues. (And kept in mind vagueness and three-order logic: things often neglected in these discussions)
One of my favorite blogs, Guide to Reality, had a nice discussion on physicalism and materialism. The issue of strong emergence appeared as did the question of whether they were acceptable to materialism. My own view is that the moving target of theoretical physics makes the material question difficult if not impossible. That is we have a vague term that can't be given a more full definition by philosophers, despite their attempts. That's because of the historic connection between materialism and science (especially physics). This is not, as in the comments of Polger that Steve quotes, suggesting that physics be the source of our conceptions. I suspect any eventual physics will still be highly ambiguous in meaning. But it clearly must be dealt with in terms of what the properties are. That is what does it mean to be an occurent being?
There's one interesting post about Is Quantum Indeterminacy Necessary for Free Will? I think not, although not for the reasons some might. I simply think that it isn't at all clear what we mean by quantum indeterminacy. It is a notion itself undetermined. I think that Libertarians clearly require an open future. But it seems to me that one could reject quantum indeterminacy and still allow for an open future. Indeed I think that quantum indeterminacy is problematic for Libertarian free will if one rejects ontological emergence. Randomness doesn't allow the sort of freedom a Libertarian espouses any better than determinism does. The more interesting issue is roughly the Penrose idea of quantum indeterminacy being a kind of quasi-mind. I admit that I like that idea even if most people find trouble with Penrose's arguments and views. (I confess I've not read them although I am thinking about getting his latest book one of these days)
I enjoyed the overview of Robert Brandom's pragmatism. (It sounds more like Wittgenstein though) It's nice though that there are some pragmatists out there not following in Putnam's particular strain. (Of course the Peirceans are making a bit of a comeback in some arenas) Brandom's treatment of modality is interesting, although I'll fully confess I've not read enough about the debates in modality to really have any useful opinion on it all. There was a bit of discussion of category theory as well. That's all the rage right now and seems a kind of cool intersection of set theory and abstract algebra. Sadly I'm a tad rusty in both and busy as all get out. But it's definitely something I want to pick up a textbook on. Lots of blogs have been discussing it of late though. It's even been discussed relative to Peirce on Peirce-L.
One other entry I liked but didn't have time to read closely is on Meaning Zombies. That is can a person pass usage tests, "[have] phenomenal experience, [have] a mind etc, but, his words, even when they are the same as mine, have no meaning." I'd be inclined to say not. But this raises the interesting question of what it is to mean.
I may add a few comments later when I can reread some of the entries with a clearer head.
I read through the Zombie post some more. I think from a more Peircean perspective there is an interesting way to deal with this. Meaning is what the differences the proposition makes in terms of its force. That is meaning is wrapped up in making a difference. Now one should note that there are, perhaps, a few problems with Peirce's pragmatic maxim here. The issue is resolved by noting Peirce doesn't limit meaning to human minds. (You can see this in the quote I gave earlier today) That is we can't limit meaning to what a person means by something. Rather we have a general semiotics where signs have objects and "interpretants" which are thought-like activities they product. But that "like" is fairly significant for Peirce since he saw thought-like properties throughout nature.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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