Phil 101: Study Sheet of Concepts and Principles

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

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?

• the “continuity of nature” argument for materialism

• What does Huxley mean by saying animals are “conscious automata”?

• your actions/choices/decisions, versus things that “merely happen” to you

• difference between your arm’s moving and you raising your arm on purpose/intentionally

• bringing an outcome about on purpose/intentionally, versus bringing it about unintentionally (though perhaps knowingly)

• doing A by doing B

• What is the “Kantian” intuition about moral luck?

• reasons-responsive mechanisms

• necessary/essential properties, versus contingent/“accidental” properties

• conceptual definitions versus scientific identities

• types of laptops/events versus particular token instances of those types

• difference between “intensional” and “intentional”

• a priori versus a posteriori knowledge

• examples where an X continues to exist but is no longer an X (so wasn’t essentially an X)

• what does it mean for a relation to be “transitive”?

• what does it mean for a relation to be “one-one”?

• what does it mean for a relation to be “one-many” or “allow branching”?

Created by jimpryor@unc.edu

URL: https://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/courses/phil101/notes/review.html

2026-08-19 14:21 EDT