Phil 101: Study Sheet of Concepts and Principles

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 (Intro and Animals)

• 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

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” 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

• 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)
• Leibniz’s Law (also called “the indiscernibility of identicals”)
• Does Leibniz’s Law say that if X and Y have all the same properties, they are 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
• using “P” as a premise versus using “I know that P/I discovered that P/I think that P” as a premise
• “I know that reporter is alive right now. I don’t know whether Superman is still alive. Hence that reporter is not Superman.” — that this is an unsafe/illegitimate application of Leibniz’s Law
• “I have no doubts about my own existence. I do have doubts about whether my body really exists. Hence I am not my body.”

• interactionism
• epiphenomenalism
• 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
• compatibilism versus incompatibilism
• libertarianism
• skeptical views about free will, “hard” versus “soft” determinism
• going through the psychological process of “making” a choice, versus having several choices really open to you
• 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”?
• “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)

• different kinds of alleged “moral luck,” the Control Principle
• the Principle of Alternative Possibilities
• counterfactual claims
• Frankfurt-style cases (counterfactual interveners)

• 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!”
• “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

Other Minds (Computers)

• 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 or “large language model,” 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

Highlights Looking Back

• For someone who holds view A, the difference between: (1) view A commiting or forcing them to say some further thing B; (2) view A allowing them to say B but not committing them to it; (3) view A being incompatible with saying B
• What further claims are you committed to by being a substance dualist, as we’ve understood that view?
• What does Leibniz’s Law enable you to prove, if your other premises are true and reasonably justified? What kinds of arguments can Leibniz’s Law not be legitimately applied in?
• How do the challenges go to the dualist interactionist’s picture of soul activity causing changes in the physical world?
• Does believing in Determinism commit you to denying the existence of free will and moral accountability?
• Does being a Libertarian about free will commit you to believing in souls?