Readings (in Philosophy in the Flesh)

Reading for Thursday, November 11, 1999: Finish Reading Chapter 21.

Reading for Tuesday, November 16, Read Chapter 22

Due at the Beginning of Class Tuesday, November 23, 1999.

Ground Rules: Discuss the exam with the members of your group. No group notes are to be taken. Write up your exams individually. They should be in 12 point type, either 1 & 1/2 spaced or double spaced, with at least 1 inch margins. No late exams.

www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~bbergen/cs108/

We suggest the following: Go to the website and download a copy of the exam. Copy the questions into a new file, and fill in your answers after each question, using a different font (e.g., put the questions in italics and the answers in roman). This way it will be clearer to the grader which answer goes with which question, and you will have an overview of all your answers to questions, one by one, at the end of the course.

Question 1: Below are some of the tenets of Cartesian philosophy. In each case, tell which of Descartes' metaphors the tenet follows from and give a very brief account of the inference path from the metaphors to the given tenet.

1. The mind can know its own ideas with absolute certainty, and hence no empirical study of ideas is necessary.
2. The mind is disembodied.
3. Thought consists of formal operations like those in mathematical calculation.
4. There are innate ideas.

Question 2: The following tenets of analytic philosophy are inherited from the earlier philosophies that we have discussed. For each tenet, tell where it came from and which metaphors in the earlier philosophy it arose from.

1. The Definition of "Definition": A concept is defined by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions on category membership.
2. Disembodied Reason: Reason is independent of perception, imagination, and feeling.
3. The Sufficiency of Rational Reflection: We have complete access to our concepts and to the structure of reason just by careful rational introspection.
4. Thought as Formal Symbol Manipulation. Thought consists of formal operations on symbols.
5. Natural Kinds: Not only do individuals exist, but kinds of individuals exist.
6. Metaphysical Realism: There are categories in the world and it is possible for our categories of mind and language to correspond directly to them.

Question 3: It is a consequence of the tenets of analytic philosophy that conceptual metaphors do not exist. How does this consequence arise, and does it arise from any metaphors implicit in analytic philosophy?

Be sure to look at Chapter 12 and the metaphors inherited from other philosophies, as well as Chapter 21.

Question 4: Which ideas and tenets of first-generation cognitive science are taken from corresponding ideas and tenets of analytic philosophy?

For each example, list the metaphors the idea or tenet ultimately derived from, either in analytic philosophy or earlier philosophies.

Question 5: (a) What is the Quine-Duhem thesis? (b) What, in Quine's philosophy, does itfollow from? (short answer) (c) How does Chomsky use it to get around apparent counterexamples to his theory of language? Briefly discuss the case of the counterexamples to the coordinate structure constraint.