Is there an "unconscious", or "subconscious", and if so why hold that such an entity exists.

I'm not sure what you mean by "unconcious". If something braodly Freudian, then I'm not in a position to answer this. But there is another notion of "unconscious" that figures heavily in comtemporary empirical psychology: It is the idea of processing or information that is inaccessible to conscious reflection. For example, the standard view in linguistics nowadays is that our ability to speak and understand our native languages depends upon all sorts of unconcious processing. The evidence for this view is the explanatory success of linguitic theory. It is possible, for example, to state an extremely general principle governing when a pronoun can be "bound by" an antecedent (that is, "refer back" to it) which will account for why the first but not the second of these can mean that John saw John in the mirror: John saw him in the mirror. John saw himself in the mirror. There are all kinds of similar contrasts that the principles explain. Compare, for example: Bill thinks it would be...

I have heard philosophers propose that thought is dependent upon language: that without language one cannot have thoughts, that we can think of thoughts as sentences, etc. There seems to be a strong correlation, in many philosophers' writings, between thoughts and sentences of a language. In some limited sense, this makes sense to me. Creatures that clearly do not have language (platypuses, say) do not seem to have thoughts; whatever goes through their heads, they do not seem to do what we do when we think. And for those of us who do have language skills, thoughts take the form of sentences in whatever language(s) we speak. But philosophers often assume that thoughts just ARE those sentences, that it is nonsensical even to say that "thoughts take the form of sentences in a language". But how can the ability to think depend on the possession of language skills? If a human baby were never taught to speak or to understand a language, and thus arrived at the age of 30 with no language skills, would...

The question what the relation is between thought and language is, to my mind, one of the most fundamental issues in contemporary philosophy. That is to say, what one's view is about this matter will profoundly shape one's views on many other topics. What one's impression is of the current state of play will, however, depend upon what one has read. There are, as you say, many philosophers would suppose that thought is somehow dependent upon language. One famous example is Donald Davidson, who argues explicitly for this conclusion in "Thought and Talk". On the current scene, John McDowell is perhaps the most visible proponent of the view. Hilary Putnam has held a version of this view in the last several years, and it can be found as well in the writings of Michael Dummett. I could easily continue. On the other hand, however, there are plenty of philosophers who reject this view and hold, as you suggest, that the ability to think does not depend upon the possession of language skills. Jerry Fodor, for...

I was perusing the site, and I came up with this weird thought: Can a person think about the thought that they are thinking? Because at first I thought no... but then I thought by posing this question I was thinking about what I was thinking... but I started to doubt my thoughts... so I thought it might be a good idea to get a second opinion.

Might the question have concerned self-referring thoughts? Viz: Is it possible for me now to think about the very thought I am now thinking? But, if you think about it, I just did. So it is. I can do it again: I think that the very thought I am now having is a true one. Is it?

If evolution is true, isn't it likely that our capacity for understanding the world is limited to what is necessary for survival? And if Christianity is true, isn't it likely that we can know only what God wants us to? It seems a reasonable bet, at least considering only these two world views, that there is cognitive closure at some point, and that McGinn, for instance is very possibly right that the hard problem of consciousness will never be solved (not that we should stop trying to solve it). Bob West

I'm not sure that either of the claims you suggest are "likely" are likely. (I'm also quite sure that the conflict you implicitly suggest exists between evolution and Christianity is a mirage, but that's another matter.) The theory of evolution in no way implies that human capacities are "limited to what is necessary for survival". Stephen J Gould and Richard Lewontin borrowed the term "spandrel" from architecture to describe what one might also call "side-effects", biological traits that were not themselves selected for but are necessary accompaniments of traits that were selected for. Any particular case will be controversial, of course, but perhaps I can mention one intriguing such question: whether female orgasm has any benefit of the sort that would lead it to be selected for. The philosopher of biology Elisabeth Lloyd has written several interesting papers on this question. There is also an answer in this same area to evolutionary arguments against the innateness of sexual orientation. ...

Given that 'mental distress' will afflict at least one in seven of us, and as many as one in four (all according to contemporary extrapolations of evidence), and that the spectrum of analyses pertaining to 'mental health' is riven with contradictory perspectives, conceptual muddles, and what even a cursory examination would reveal as potentially harmful (to an individual) prescriptions, and the crossed borders of morality, scientific objectivity and 'spiritual' domains, why is there so little on a 'philosophy of mental health', and where should such a philosophy begin?

I believe there has been a fair bit of discussion of mental health in the so-called "continental" tradition. One classic in that tradition is Foucault's Madness and Civilization . You might also want to look into the work of R.D. Laing, for example, The Politics of Experience , and the early work of Thomas Szasz, such as The Myth of Mental Illness . These are pretty radical viewpoints, and I'm not saying I agree with them, but both Laing's work and Szasz's early work are worth reading. There is a piece on mental illness in the Stanford Encyclopedia .

This is a question about Hilary Putnam's twin earth thought experiment. After I read this thought experiment I was not convinced that Oscar's and twin-Oscar's "water" concept have different meanings. But most of the philosophers' intuitions are similar to Putnam (i.e., they think that Oscar's and twin-Oscar's "water" concept have different meanings). I thought that there might be something wrong with me. So I told this thought experiment to different people with different origins but without exception all of them responded that both Oscar's and twin-Oscar's "water" concept have the same meaning. So I still do not understand, why do so many philosophers' intuitions work like Putnam's? Thank you, Deniz

It's perhaps worth saying here that there are philosophers whose intuitions are closer to those of the questioner. Gabriel Segal, a member of this panel, has written a nice book called A Slim Book About Narrow Content defending a view not that distant from the one mentioned. That said, it's important to be clear about what the intuition is supposed to be. As Lynne said (hi, Lynne), the intuition is one about what the term "water" refers to. Or again, the intuition is supposed to be that, if Oscar says, "There's water on twin earth", he speaks falsely. One doesn't have to have that intuition. Some people don't. But before you decide whether you really do, it's worth thinking hard about the fact, mentioned by Lynne, that water is supposed to be a kind of stuff just like gold. Fool's gold isn't gold, no matter how much it looks like gold, and it wouldn't be gold even if it looked a whole lot more like gold, because fool's gold isn't the same kind of stuff that gold is. What we mean by...

Physically speaking, what is memory? What is a memory? If a memory is stored as a physical structure in the brain, is it possible that the human genome codes for the formation of one or more of these physical memory structures during brain development? In other words, could the genome, which we all share, include memories that are preloaded into the human brain during the brain's growth before birth? Could this be a physical manifestation of Jung's collective unconscious? EdHead

Most of these questions seem like empirical ones, and I'm not a neuro-scientist, so I'll skip them. But let me ask a question back. Suppose Dr Jekyll performs an operation and, as a result, I seem to remember once sitting on a throne while some guy goes on about how, if I don't let his people go, there'll be plagues and pestilence and stuff. I don't see what that couldn't happen, as a matter of pure possibility. Would you want to say I remembered any of that? If all of us were born with that apparent memory, would it matter what we said to the previous question?

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