Constituents of Thought

© 2017 Richard John Kosciejew. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 09/22/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5462-1016-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-1015-3 (e)

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 — CARRIERS OF INTEREST

CHAPTER 2 — MUTUAL MEASURES

CHAPTER 3 — IDENTIFICATION

CHAPTER 4 — CONTROVERSIAL MEASURES

CHAPTER 5 — COMPATIBILITY

CONSTITUENTS OF THOUGHT

RICHARD J.KOSCIEJEW

If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to a higher level of plexuity, and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a singular point of significance, as a whole that evinces the ‘progressive principal order’ of the complementarity within the intercourse of its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts (Quanta), one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the grounds for all emergent plexuities. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain or mind, and since this brain, like all physical phenomena can be viewed as an emergent property of that whole. It is reasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms, at least, that the universe is conscious of ‘us’ and that we, as living within the ponderous paradigms of consciousness is awaiting for its call.

CHAPTER ONE

CARRIERS OF INTEREST

RICHARD J.KOSCIEJEW

Broadened and becoming broader, the problem of scientific change is to give an account of how scientific theories, propositions, concepts or activities over history. Must such changes be accepted as brute products of guesses, blind conjectures, and genius? Using to place of that which is an unspecified or direct setting of rules according to which, at least some new ideas introduced and ultimately accepted or refused to consider. Would such rules be codified into a coherent system, a theory of ‘the scientific method’? Are they more like the rule of thumb, subject to exceptions whose character may not be specifiable, not necessarily leading to desired results? Do these supposed rules themselves change over time, if so, do they change in the light of the same factors? Does science progress toward an advance to achieve? And if so, more substantive scientific beliefs, or independent of such factors, or attainment of truth, or a simple or coherent account of truth, or a simple coherent account (true or not) of experience, or something else?

Controversy exists of directing in possession to reference to, or relating on whose concerning features that include the explanation about what a theory of scientific change should be a theory of the change of. Philosophers long assumed that the fundamental objects of study are the acceptance or rejection of individual beliefs or propositions, change of concepts, propositions, and theories being derivative from that. More recently, some have maintained that the fundamental units of change are theoretical, and the kinds of factors with adequate theories of scientific change should consider, are far from evident. Change in kinds should, and among other various factors said to be relevant is observational data; The accepted background of theory, higher-level methodological constraint and psychological, sociological, religious and causal factors as influencing decisions made by scientist’s about what to accept and what to do.

Many philosophers of science during the past century have preferred to talk about ‘explanation’ than causation. According to the covering-law model of explanation, something is explained if it can be deduced from premises that include one or more laws. As applied to the explanation of particular events this implies that a particular event can be explained if it is linked by a law to another particular event. However, while they are often treated as separate theories, the covering-law account of explanation is at bottom little more than a variant of Hume’s constant conjunction account of causation. This affinity shows up in the fact at the covering-law account faces essentially the same difficulties as Hume: (1) In appealing to deduction from ‘laws’, it needs to explain the difference between genuine laws and accidentally true regularities: (2) Its omission by effects, and effects by causes, after all, it is as easy to deduce the height of the flag-pole from the length of its shadow and the law of optics: (3) Are the laws invoked in explanation required to be exceptionalness and deterministic, or is it acceptable to say, that to appeal to the merely probabilistic fact that smoking makes cancer more likely, in explaining why some particular person develops cancer?

Nevertheless, one of the centrally obtainable achievements for which the philosophy of science is to provide explicit and systematic accounts of the theories and explanatory strategies exploitrated in the science. Another common goal is to construct philosophically illuminating analyses or explanations of central theoretical concepts invoked in one or another science. In the philosophy of biology, for example, there is a rich literature aimed at understanding teleological explanations, and there has been a great deal of work on the structure of evolutionary theory and on such crucial concepts as fitness and biological function. By introducing ‘teleological considerations’, this account views beliefs as states with biological purpose and analyses as their truth conditions specifically as those conditions that are biologically supposed to covariance, varying with another variable or relating to covariant theory. Nonetheless, the principle that the laws of physics have the same form regardless of the system of co-ordinates, which are expressed in a statistical measure of the variable of two random variables that are observed or measured in the same mean time period. This measure is equal to the product of the deviations of corresponding values of the two variables from their respective means.

To maintain that time is discrete would require not only abandoning the continuum but also the density property as well. Giving up either conflicts with the intuition that time is one-dimensional and physics literatures contain speculations about a discrete time built of ‘chorions’ or ‘temporal atoms’, but thus far such hypothetical entities have not been incorporated into a satisfactory theory.

In a scholium of the Principia, Newton declared that ‘Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, ‘flows equably’ without relation to anything ‘external’. There are at least five interrelated senses in which time was absolute for Newton. First, he thought that there was a frame-independent relation of simultaneity for events. Second, he thought that there was a frame-independent measure of duration for non-simultaneous events. He used ‘flow equably’ not to refer to the above sort of mysterious ‘temporal becoming,’ but instead to note the second sense of absoluteness and partly to indicate of two supplemental kinds of absoluteness and partly to indicate upon the further kinds of absoluteness. To appreciate the latter, note that ‘flows equably’ not to refer to the above sort of mysterious ‘temporal becoming’ in the second sense of absoluteness and other kinds of further kinds of absoluteness. To appreciate its notation that ‘flows equably’ is modified by ‘without’ relation to anything external. Here Newton was to assert (third sense of absolute) that the lapse of time between two events would be what it is even between two events would be what it is even if the distribution of motions of material bodies were different. He was presupposing a related form of absoluteness (fourth senses) according to which the metric of time is intrinsic to the temporal interval

Leibniz’s philosophy of time placed him in agreement with Newton as regards to the first two senses of ‘absolute’ which assert the non-relative or frame-independent nature of time. However, Leibniz was very much opposed to Newton on the forth sense of ‘absolute’. According to Leibniz’s relational conception of time, any talk about the length of a temporal interval must be unpacked in terms of talk about the relation of the interval to an extrinsic metric standard. Furthermore, Leibniz used his principles of sufficient reason and identity of indescernibles to argue against a fifth sense of ‘absolute’, implicit in Newton’s philosophy in which physical events are situated. On the contrary, the relational view holds that time is nothing over and above the structure of relations of events.

Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity have a direct bearing on parts of these controversies. The special theory necessitates the abandonment and duration. For any pair of space-like related events in Minkowski space-time there is an inertial frame in which the events are simultaneous, another frame in which the first event is temporally a prior, and still a third in which the second event is temporally a prior. And the temporal interval between two timelike related events depends on the world time connecting them. In fact, for any Î > 0, no matter how small, there is a world time connecting the events whose proper length is less than Î, (This is the essencity of the so-called twin paradox.) The general theory of relativity abandons the third sense of absoluteness, since it entails that the metrical structure of space-time covaries with the distribution of mass-energy in a manner specified by Einstein’s field equations. But the heart of the absolute-relational controversies-as focussed by the fourth and fifth sense of ‘absolute’ -is not settled by relativistic considerations. Indeed, opponents from both sides of the debate claim to find support for their positions in the special and general theories.

Space-time is known of a four-dimensional continuum combining the three dimensions of space with time in order to represent motion geometrically. Each point is the location of an event, all of which together represent ‘the world’ through time; paths in the continuum (world lines) represent the dynamical histories of moving particles, so that straight world lines correspond to uniform motion; three-dimensional sections of constant time value (‘space like hypersurfaces’ or ‘simultaneity slices’) representing the entirety of space, at a give time.

The idea was foreshadowed when Kant represented ‘the phenomenal world’ as a plane defined by space and time as perpendicular axes (Inaugural Dissertation, 1770), and when Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1814) referred to mechanics as ‘the analytic geometry of four dimensions,’ But classical mechanics assume a universal standard of simultaneity, and so it can treat space and time separately. The concept of space-time was explicitly developed only when Einstein criticized ‘absolute simultaneity’ and made the velocity of light a universal constant. The mathematician Hermann showed in 1908 that the observer-independent structure of special relativity could be represented by a metric space of four dimensions; observers on relative motion would disagree on intervals of length and time, but agree on a four-dimensional interval combining spatial and temporal measurements. That which Minkowski’s model has made the possibility as the advent for an open to a closed condition, as the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space and time in the presence of mass and the paths of falling bodies as the straightest world lines within the curvilinear efficiency of space-time.

A property of the carriers, or space-time paths, of well-behaved objects called spatiotemporal continuity, such like that of a space-time path in a series of possible spatiotemporal positions, each represented (in a selected coordinate system) by an ordered pair consisting of a time (its temporal component) and a volume of space (its spatial component). Such a path will be spatiotemporally continuous provided it is such that, relative to any inertial frame selected as a coordinate system, (1) for every segment of the series, the temporal components of the members of that segment form a continuum temporal interval, and (2) for any two members and of the series that differ in the temporal components (ti and tj), if Vi and Vj (at least macroscopic objects of familiar kinds) apparently cannot undergo discontinuous change of place, and cannot have temporal gaps in their histories, and therefore the path through space-time traced by such an object must apparently be spatiotemporally continuous. More controversial is the claim that spatiotemporal continuity, together with some continuity with respect to other properties, is sufficient as well as necessary for the identity of such objects-e.g., that if a spatiotemporally continuous path is such that the spatial component of each member of the series is occupied by a table of certain descriptions at the time that is the temporal component of that member that is, then is a single table for that description that traces that path. Those who deny this claim sometimes maintain that it is further required for the identity of material objects that there be causal and counterfactual dependence of later states on earlier ones (ceteris paribus, if the table had been different yesterday, it would be correspondingly different ‘now’). Since it appears that continuous path, it may be that insofar as spatiotemporal identity, this is because it is required for transtemporal causality.

It has become apparent that something such as a mind is a product of mental activity that has in itself an ‘idea’. Human history is in essence a history of ideas, as thoughts are distinctly intellectual and stresses contemplation and reasoning. Justly as language is the dress of thought. Ideas, as eternal, mind-independent forms, or prototypical archetypes of the things in the material world. Neoplatonism made thoughts in the mind of God who created the world. The much criticized ‘new way of ideas,’ so much a part of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy, began with Descartes’ (1596-1650), the conscionable extension of ideas to cover whatever is in human minds an extension, of which, Locke (1632-1704) made much use. But are they like mental images, of things outside the mind, or non-representational, like sensations? If representational, are they mental objects, standing between the mind and what they represent, or are they mental acts and modifications of a mind perceiving the world directly? Finally, are they neither objects nor mental acts, but dispositions? Malebranche (1632-1715) and Arnauld (1612-94), and then Leibniz, famously disagreed about how ‘ideas’ should be understood, and recent scholars disagree about how Arnauld, Descartes’, Locke and Malebranche in fact understood them.

Although ideas give rise to many problems of interpretation, but between them they define the space of philosophical problems. Ideas are that with which we think, or in Locke’s term, ‘Whatever the mind may be employed about in thinking,’ looked at that way, they seem to be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presences. Ideas provided the way in which objective knowledge can be expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. Plato’s theory of ‘forms’ is a launching celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin. This doctrine, notably in the ‘Timaeus’, opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other worldly aspect, until after Descartes’ ideas became assimilated to whatever it is that lies of conveys to the mind is ascertained by any thinking being.

Together with a general bias toward the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like images, and a belief that thinking is well explained as the manipulation having no real existence but existing in fancied imagination. It is not reason but ‘the imagination’ that is found to be responsible for our making the empirical inferences that we do. There are certain general ‘principles of the imagination’ according to which ideas naturally come and go in the mind under certain conditions. It is the task of the ‘science of human nature’ to discover such principles, but without itself going beyond experience. For example, an observed correlation between things of two kinds can be seen to produce in everyone a propensity to expect a thing to the second sort given an experience of a thing of the first sort. We get a feeling, or an ‘impression’, when the mind makes such a transition and that is what led us to ascribing the necessary relation between things of the two kinds, there is no necessity in the relations between things that happen in the world, but, given our experience and the way our minds naturally work, we cannot help thinking that there is.

A similar appeal to certain ‘principles of the imagination’ is what explains our belief in a world of enduring objects. Experience alone cannot produce that belief, everything we directly perceive is ‘momentary and fleeting’. And whatever our experience is like, no reasoning could assure us of the existence of something as autonomous of our impression which continues to exist when they cease. The series of constantly changing sense impressions presents us with observable features which Hume calls ‘constancy’ and ‘coherence’, and these naturally operate on the mind in such a way as eventually to produce ‘the opinion of a continued and distinct existence’. The explanation is complicated, but it is meant to appeal only to psychological mechanisms which can be discovered by ‘careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which results form [the mind’s] different circumstances and situations’, and this belief too can be explained only by the operation of certain ‘principles of the imagination’. We never directly perceive anything we call ourselves: The most we can be aware of in ourselves are our constantly changing momentary perceptions, not the mind or self which has them. For Hume, there is nothing that really binds the different perceptions together, we are led into the ‘fiction’ that they form a unity only because of the way in which the thought of such series of perceptions works upon the mind: ‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance, … there is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different: Whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitutes the mind.

The appending presumptions that are based on the fundamental principles whose assertive assumptions presented in the surmising constrainment to the one-to-one correspondence as having to exist between every element and elements of psychological reality and physical theory, this may serve to bridge the gap between mind and world for those who use physical theories. But, it also suggests that the Cartesian division is inseparably integrated and structurally real, that is to say, as impregnably formidable for physical reality as it is based on ordinary language that explains in not a small part why the radical separation between mind and world as sanctioned by classical physics and formalized by Descartes’ persists, as philosophical postmodernism attests, one of the most persuasive features of Western intellectual life.

The history of science reveals that scientific knowledge and method did not spring from a fully-blooming blossom for which the minds of the ancient Greeks did any more than language and culture emerged fully formed in the minds of Homo sapient. Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometric and numerical relationships. We speculate that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece, as opposed to Chinese or Babylonian culture, partly because the social, political, and an economic climate in Greece was more open to the pursuit of knowledge with marginal cultural utility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigation. However, it was true that of our inherent perceptions of the world are, yet that Greek philosophy was agreeing to some essential features of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.

The Greek philosophers that we now acknowledged and recognized as the originators of scientific thought were mystics who probably perceived their world as replete with spiritual agencies and forces. The legendary mystification or mysteries for which, in some way are prescribed by whose ancestral heritage has been lost, as the variousness of Greek myths in lacking a factual basis or historical validity. The Greek religious heritage has made it possible for these thinkers to coordinate in the attemptive efforts to coordinate diverse physical events within a framework of immaterial and unifying ideas. The action toward one’s actual existence but cannot be confuted for servicing practicability, might that of assembling some equalities that state of its quality or state for being accidentally vicinitized to a closer pretension. Such that, presuppositional foundations are taken by or based on succeeding self realizations - might that, deferential dismissiveness is taken to be of something that is taken for granted or as some true existent, especially as a basis for action or reasoning. Nonetheless, these of the affirming of fact, in that of something that is taken for granted or advanced as fact, e.g., decisions based on assumption about the nature of society, generate the conjecture that there is a persuasively influential underlying substance out for which everything emerges and into which everything returns, are attributive to Thales of Miletos, as something that is done. Thales, was apparently led to this conclusion out of the belief that the world was full of gods, and his unifying substance, water, was similarly charged with spiritual presence. Religion in this instance served the interests of science because it allowed the Greek philosophers to view ‘essences’ underlying and unifying physical reality as if they were ‘substances’.

The last remaining feature of what would become the paradigm for the first scientific revolution in the seventeenth-century is attributed to Pythagoras. Like Parmenides, Pythagoras also held that the perceived world is illusory and that there is an exact correspondence between ideas and aspects of external reality. Pythagoras, however, had a different conception of the character of the idea that showed this correspondence. The truth about the fundamental character of the unified and unifying substance, which could be uncovered through reason and contemplation, is, claimed, mathematical in form.

Pythagoras established and was the central figure in a school of philosophy, religion, and mathematics: Pythagoras was apparently viewed by his followers as semi-divine. For his followers the regular solids (symmetrical three-dimensional forms in which all sides’ have aligned themselves as by their use in the same regular polygon) and whole numbers became revered essences or sacred ideas. In contrast with ordinary language, the language of mathematical and geometric forms seemed closed, precise, and pure. Providing one understood the axioms and notations. The meaning conveyed was invariant from one mind to another. The Pythagoreans felt that the language empowered the mind to leap beyond the confusion of sense experience into the realm of immutable and eternal essences. This mystical insight made Pythagoras the figure from antiquity most revered by the creators of classical physics, and it continues to have great appeal for contemporary physicists as they struggle with the epistemological implications of the quantum mechanical description of nature.

Progress was made in mathematics, and to a lesser extent in physics, from the time of classical Greek philosophy to the seventeenth-century in Europe. In Baghdad, for example, from about AD. 750 to AD. 1000, substantial advancement was made in medicine and chemistry, and the relics of Greek science were translated into Arabic, digested, and preserved. Eventually these relics reentered Europe via the Arabic kingdom of Spain and Sicily, and the work of figures like Aristotle and Ptolemy reached the budding universities of France, Italy, and England during the Middle Ages.

For much of this period the Church provided the institutions, like the teaching orders, needed for the rehabilitation of philosophy. Nevertheless, the social, political, and an intellectual climate in Europe was not ripe for a revolution in scientific thought until the seventeenth-century. The continuative progressive succession had entered into the nineteenth century. The works of the new class of intellectuals we call scientists were more avocations than vocation, and the word scientist did not appear in the English until around 1840.

Copernicus would have been described economics and classical literature, and, most notably, a highly honoured and placed church dignitary. Although we named a revolution after him, this conservative man did not set out to create one. The placement of the Sun at the centre of the universe, which seemed right and necessary to Copernicus, was not a result of making careful astronomical observations. In fact, he made very few observations while developing his theory, and then only to ascertain in his prior conclusions seemed correct. The Copernican system was also not any more useful in making astronomical calculations than the accepted model and was, in some ways, much more difficult to implement, What, then, was his motivation for creating the model and his reasons for presuming that the model was correct?

Copernicus felt that the placement of the Sun at the centre of the universe made sense because he viewed the Sun as the symbol of the presence of a supremely intelligent and intelligible God in a man-centred world. He was apparently led to this conclusion in part because the Pythagoreans identified this fire with the fireball of the Sun. The only positive support to favour activity in the face of opposition was to supply what is needed for sustenance and maintain to hold in position by the serving as a foundation or base for that which Copernicus could offer for the greater efficacy of his model was that it represented a simpler and more mathematically harmonious model of the sort than the Creator would obviously prefer.

The belief that the mind of God as Divine Architect permeates the workings of nature was the principle of the scientific thought of Johannes Kepler. Consequently, most modern physicists would probably feel some discomfort in reading Kepler’s original manuscripts. Physics and metaphysics, astronomy and astrology, geometry and theology commingle with an intensity that might offend those who practice science in the modern sense of what word. Physical laws, wrote Kepler, ‘lie within the power of understanding of the human mind. God wanted us to perceive them when he created ‘us’ in his image so that we may take part in his own thoughts … Our knowledge of numbers and quantities are the same as that of God’s, at least insofar as we understand something of it in this mortal life’.

Believing, like Newton after him, in the literal truth of the word of the Bible, Kepler concluded that the word of God is also transcribed in the immediacy of observable nature. Kepler’s discovery that the planets around the Sun were elliptical, as opposed perfecting circles, may have made the universe seem a less perfect creation of God in ordinary language. For Kepler, however, the new model placed the Sun, which he also viewed as the emblem of a divine agency, more at the centre of a mathematically harmonious universe than the Copernican system allowed. Communing with the perfect mind of God requires, as Kepler put it, ‘knowledge on numbers and quantity’.

By the later part of the nineteenth-century attempts to develop a logically consistent basis for number and arithmetic not only threatened to undermine the efficacy of the classical view of correspondence debates before the advent of quantum physics. They also occasioned a debate about epistemological foundations of mathematical physics that resulted in an attempt by Edmund Husserl to eliminate or obviate the correspondence problem by grounding this physics in human subjective reality. Since, to that place is a direct line as dissenting from Husserl to existentialism to structuralism to constructionism, the linkage between philosophical postmodernism and the debate over the foundations of scientific epistemology is more direct than we had previously imagined.

A complete history of the debate over the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics should probably begin with the discovery of irrational numbers by the followers of Pythagoras, the paradoxes of Zeno and Gottfried Leibniz. Both since we are more concerned with the epistemological crisis of the later nineteenth-century, beginning with the set theory developed by the German mathematician and logician Georg Cantor. From 1878 to 1897, Cantor created a theory of abstract sets of entities that eventually became a mathematical discipline. A set, as he defined it, is a collection of definite and distinguishable objects in thought or perception conceived as a whole.

Cantors attempted to prove that the process of counting and the definition of integers could be placed on a solid mathematical foundation. His method was repeatedly to place the element in one set into ‘one-to-one’ correspondence with those in another. In the apparent realization of integers, Cantor showed that each integer (1, 2, 3, … n) could be paired with an even integer (2, 4, 6, … n), and, therefore, that the set of all integers was equal to the set of all even numbers.

Amazingly, Cantor discovered that some infinite sets were larger than others and that infinite set formed a hierarchy of ever greater infinities. After this failed the attempt to save the classical view of logical foundations and internal consistency of mathematical systems, a major crack had obviously appeared in the seemingly solid foundations of number and mathematics. Meanwhile, many mathematicians began to see that everything from functional analysis to the theory of real numbers depended on the problematic character of number itself.

In 1886, Nietzsche was to learn that the classical view of mathematics as a logically consistent and self-contained system that could prove it might be undermined. His immediate and unwarranted conclusion was that all logic and wholes of mathematics were nothing more than fictions perpetuated by those who exercised their will to power. With his characteristic sense of certainty, Nietzsche derisively proclaimed, ‘Without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world to the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live’.

The present time is clearly a time of a major paradigm shift, but consider the last great paradigm shift, the one that resulted in the Newtonian framework. This previous paradigm shift was profoundly problematic for the human spirit. It led to the conviction that we are strangers, freaks of nature, conscious beings in a universe that is almost entirely unconscious, and that, since the universe is strictly deterministic, even the free will we feel considerations of concern, in feeling of deferential approval and liking to the account on mindful or thoughtful attention, as to the apparent movement of our bodies is an illusion. Yet going through the acceptance of such a paradigm was probably necessary for the Western mind.

The present, however, has no duration, it is merely the demarcation line between past and future. And yet we do have an awareness of periods through the intermittent intervals of time: We have an awareness of something taking a long time, and something else taking only a short time. How is such awareness possible? If that which exists, namely, the present, has no duration, how can we be aware of ‘a long time’? How can we be aware of something that not exist? St. Augustine’s response to the question is an insight into the nature of time. As we experience ‘a long time’, he writes, ‘It is not future time that is long but a long future is a long expectation of the future, the past time is not long, but a long past is a long remembrance of the past’. St. Augustine concludes: It is in my own mind, then, that I measure time, I must not allow my mind to insist that time be something objective’.

Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothingness, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a ‘social physics’ that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.

More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual.

The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with contextual representation of our understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’, did not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘existence’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, … as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche’s earlier versions to the ‘will to truth’, disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of ‘will’.

In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined. Based on the assumption that there is no really necessary correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, he deuced that we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language’. The prison as he concluded it, was also a ‘space’ where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature’ and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on ‘will’.

Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, Nietzsche says, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialists’ ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said. Is not exclusive to natural phenomenons and favours reductionistic examination of phenomena at the expense of mind? It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow and basis for the free exercise of individual will.

The mechanistic paradigms of the late nineteenth century, as when Einstein came to be favourable as when he studied physics. Most physicists believed that it represented an eternal truth, but Einstein was open to fresh ideas. Inspired by Mach’s critical mind, he demolished the Newtonian ideas of space and time and replaced them with new, ‘relativistic’ notions.

Space, is an extended manifold of several dimensions, where the number of dimensions corresponds to the number of variable magnitudes needed to specify a location in the manifold in particular, the three-dimensional manifold in which physical objects are situated and with respect to which their mutual positions and distances are defined.

Ancient Greek atomism defined space as the infinite void in which atoms move, but whether space is finite or infinite, and whether void spaces exist, have remained as a finite plenum and reduced space to the aggregate of all places of physical things. His view was preeminent until Renaissance Neoplatonism, but the Copernican revolution, and the revival of atomism reintroduced infinite, homogeneous space as a fundamental cosmological assumption.

Further controversy concerned whether the space assumed by early modern astronomy should be thought of as an independently existing thing or as an abstraction from the spatial relations of physical bodies. Interest in the relativity of motion encouraged the latter view, but Newton pointed out that mechanics presuppose absolute distinctions among motions, and he concluded that absolute space must be postulated along with the basic laws of mot ion (Principia, 1687). Leibniz argued for the relational view from the identity of indescernibles: The parts of space are indistinguishable from one another and cannot be independently existing things. Relativistic physics has defused the original controversy by revealing both space and spatial relations as merely observed-dependent manifestations of the structure of space-time.

While Kant shifted the metaphysical controversy to epistemological grounds by claiming that space, with its Euclidean structure, was neither a ‘thing-in-itself’ nor a relation of things-in-themselves, but the a priori form of outer intuition. His view was challenged by the elaboration of non-Euclidean geometries in th e nineteenth century, by Helmholtz’s arguments that both intuition and physical space are known through empirical investigation, and finally by the use of non-Euclidean geometry in the theory of relativity. Precisely what geometrical presuppositions are inherent in human spatial perception, and what must be learned from experience, remain subjects of psychological investigation.

The application through which ‘relativity’ is related is accredited to Einstein’s theories on electrodynamics (special relativity, 1905) and gravitation (relativity 1916) because both hold that certain physical quantities, formerly considered objectively, are actually ‘relative to’ the ‘states of, motion’ of the observer. They are called ‘special’ and ‘general’ because, in special relativity, electro dynamical laws determine a restricted class of kinematical reference frames, the ‘inertial frames’ in general relativity, the very distinction between inertial frames and others becomes a relative distinction.

The notion of a concept, like the related notion of meaning, lies at the heart of some of the most difficult and unresolved issues in philosophy and psychology. The word ‘concept’ itself is applied to a bewildering assortment of phenomena commonly thought to be constituents of thought. These include internal mental representations, images, words, stereotypes, senses, properties, reasoning and discrimination, abilities, and mathematical functions. Given the lack of anything like a settled theory in this area, it would be a mistake to fasten readily on any one of these phenomena, as the unproblematic referent of the term. One does better to study the geography of the area and gainfully implore upon as many ideas of how these phenomena might fit together, leaving aside for the nuance just which of them deserves to be called ‘concepts’ as ordinarily understood.

There is a specific role that concepts are arguably intended to play that may serve as a point of departure. Suppose one person thinks that capitalists exploit workers and another that they don’t. Call the thing that they disagree about ‘a proposition’, e.g., [Capitalist exploit workers]. It is in some sense shared by them as the object of their disagreement, and it is expressed by the sentence that follows the verb ‘thinks that’ (mental verbs that take such sentence complements as direct objects are called verbs of ‘propositional attitudes.’ We won’t be concerned (here) with whether propositions are ultimate objects or whether talk of them can be reduced to talk of properties or predicates). Concepts are the constituents of such propositions, just as the words ‘capitalists’ exploit’ and ‘workers’ are constituents of the sentence. Thus, these people could have these beliefs only if they had, the concepts [capitalist], [exploit], [workers].

The truth of a proposition requires that certain properties or stand in relations. The attitude is about these objects, properties, and relations. While we can have attitudes about ourselves and even our own mental states, we have an enormous number of attitudes about other things.

Are propositional attitudes classified or individuated in a way that would put them at odds with entities countenanced by scientific psychology? Here are four prominent views on the amenability of attitudes for incorporation into scientific psychology

1. Propositional attitudes are individuated relationally, and, therefore, ill-suited for science (Stich, 1983).

2. Propositional attitudes are individuated relationally, but still are suitable for science (Burg, 1986).

3. Propositional attitudes are individuated relationally, but they have narrow contents that are suitable for science (Fodor, 1987).

4. Propositional attitudes are individuated relationally and are not, therefore, ill-suited for science (Lewis, 1983). Each of these positions remains controversial.

Jerry Fodor 1981, endorses the importance of explanation by content-involving states, but holds that content must be narrow, constituted by internal properties of an individual (1991). Motivation for narrow content is the doctrine about explanation. As sympathetic of those to narrow content is that when content is externally individuated, the explanatory principal postulates in which content-involving state’s feature will be a priori in some way that is illegitimate, For instance, it appears to be a priori that behaviour is intentional under some description involving the concept ‘water’ will be explained by mental states that have the externally individuated concept ‘water’ in their content. The externalist about content will have a twofold response. First explanations in which content-involving explanations of the subject’s standing in a particular relation to the stuff ‘water’ itself, and for many such relations, it is in no way a priori that the thinker’s so standing has a psychological explanation at all. Some such cases will be fundamental to the ascription of externalist content on treatments that in such content to the rational intelligibility of actions relationally characterized. Second, there are other cases in which the identification of its relations generates a priori truths, quite consistently, with that state playing a role in explanation. It arguably is a priori that if a gene exists for a certain phenotypical characteristic, then it plays a casual role in the production of that characteristic in members of the species in question. Far from being incompatible with a claim about explanation, the characterization of genes that would make this a priori also requires genes to have a certain causal-explanation role.

If anything, it is the friend of narrow content who has difficulty accommodating the nature of content-involving explanation. States with narrow content are fit to explain bodily movements, provided they are not characterized in environmental-involving terms. Nonetheless, how is the theorist of narrow content to accommodate this fact? That by saying, he merely needs to add a descriptive context of the bodily in movement, which ensures that the movement is in fact a movement so destined. But adding a specification of a new environmental property of an event to an explanation of that event does not give one an explanation of the event’s having that environmental property of the event’s that environmental property, let alone a content-involving explanation of the fact. The bodily movement may also be walking in the direction of Moscow, but it dos not follow that we have a radically intelligible explanation of the event as walking in the direction of Moscow. Perhaps the theorist of narrow content would at this point add further relational properties of the internal states, of such a kind that when his explanation is fully supplemented it sustains as does the explanation that mentions externally individuated contents. But such a fully supplemented explanation is not really in competition with the externalist’s account. It begins to appear that if such extensive supplementation is adequate to capture the relational explanation, It is also sufficient to ensure that the subject is in states with externally individuated contents (Peacocke, 1993). This problem affects not only treatment of content as narrow, but any attempt to reduce explanation by neurophysiological states.

One of the tasks of a subpersonal computational psychology is to explain is how individuals come to have beliefs, desires, perceptions and other personal-level contentual involvement properties. If the content of personal-level states is externally individuated then the contents, as mentioned, are subpersonal psychology, that is explanation to those personal states must also be externally individuated. One cannot fully explain the presence of an externally individuated state by citing only states that are internally individuated. On an externalist conception of subpersonal psychology, a content-involving computation commonly consists in the explanation of some externally individuated states by other externally individuated states.

This view of subpersonal content has, though, to be reconciled with the fact that the first states in an organism involved in the explanation of some particular visual experience-retinal states in the case of humans are not externally individuated. The reconciliation is affected by the presupposed normal background, whose importance to the understanding of content, as an internally individuated state, when collected together with a presupposed external background can explain the occurrence of an externally individuated state.

An externalist approach to subpersonal content also has by virtue of providing a satisfying explanation of why certain personal-level states are reliably correct in normal circumstances. If the subpersonal computations that are found to be in such states are reliably correct. The final computation is of the content of the personal-level state, then the personal-level state will be reliably correct. A similar point applies to reliable error, too, of course, In either case, the attribution of correctness condition to the subpersonal states is essential to the explanation.

Externalisms generate its own set of issues that need resolution, notably in the epistemology of attributions. A content-involving state may be externally individuated, but a thinker does not and to check on his relations to his environment to know the content of his beliefs, desires and perceptions. How can this be? A thinker’s judgements about his own beliefs are rationally responsive to his own conscious beliefs. It is a first-step to note that a thinker’s beliefs about his own beliefs will then inherit certain sensitivities to his environment are present in his original (first-order) beliefs. But this is only the first step, for many important questions remain. How can there be conscious externally individuated states? Is it legitimate to infer from the content of one’s state to certain general facts about one’s environment and if so how and under what circumstances?

Though attitudes to others also needs further work in the external treatment. In order knowledgeably to ascribe a particular content-involving attitude to another person, we certainly do not need to have explicit knowledge of the external relations require for correct attribution of the attitudes. How then do we manage it? Do we have tactic knowledge of the relations on which content depends, or do we in some way take our own case as primary, and think of the relations as whatever underlies certain of our content-involving states? If the latter in what wider view of other ascription should this point be embedded? Resolution of these issues, like so much else in the theory content, should provide us with some understanding of the conception each one has of himself as one mind amongst many interacting with a common world which provides the anchor for the ascription of content

In as much for being done, might that we are supposed that the common objects of people’s thoughts are simply the referents of the terms, that is, the objects in the world picked out by the term or internal representations for example, in the case of ‘city’, all the particular cities in the world. (This is a view defended by some proponents of theories of ‘direct reference’) There are a number of difficulties, especially the view when placed among the generalized terminologies (or predicates) candidates for their referents: (1) The extension, or set of actual objects that satisfy the predicate (e.g., the particular cities: (New York, Paris. …). (2) The intension, or function from possible worlds to sets of possible objects that satisfy the predicate in a world (e.g., [city] would be the function that takes us in the real world to the set containing New York, Paris, and so on, and in another world to a set of possible cities, e.g., North Polis: and (3) The causally efficacious property (e.g., cityhood) that all the (possible) objects have in common. Extensional logicians like Quine (1960), eschewing all talk of non actual worlds or ontologically suspicious ‘properties’, prefer the first option, modal logicians and formal semanticists like Montague (1974), interested in an accounting for the semantics of natural languages, tend to prefer the second, and many philosophers of mind, like Dretske (1987), Millikan 1984 and Fodor, 1991). Nonetheless, one does better in the understandings among the interests in causal interactions between animals and the world tends to prefer the third.

Moreover, in addition to the referent of a general term, many have argued that there exists its ‘sense,’ or mode of presentation (sometimes ‘intension’ is used as well). After all, ‘is an equiangular triangle’ and ‘is an equilateral triangle’ pick out the same things not only in the actual world, but in all possible worlds, and so refer; in so far as they are taken to refer to any of these things at all - to the same reference; for which of intentions and (arguably from a causal point of view) the same property; but they differ in the way these referents are presented to the mind: Its on thing to think of something as an equilateral triangle, another to think of it as a trilateral equilateral (which is why the proof that they’re necessarily coextensive) For some (e.g., Peacocke, 1992) concepts might be senses so understood, but we then need a theory of senses. Some philosophers look to an ability and-or a rule that prescribes an inferential particular (or ‘conceptual’) role that a representation plays in an agent’s thought, from stimulation through intervening states to behaviour, e.g., stimuli and inferences that lead to the application of a term, and from it to the application of other terms and action, in other words, having achieved to a belief, turning readily into a desire. Then the end-totality of an action.

A broadening and widely discussed idea, for which of issues to be in a certain set of contentually impacting states is for attribution of those states to make the subject as rationally intelligible as possible, in the circumstances in one form or another. Perceptions, make it rational for a person to form corresponding beliefs. Beliefs make it rational to draw certain inferences. Beliefs and desires make rationally the formation of particular intention and the performance of their appropriate actions, but a governing ideal of this approach is that for any family of contents, there is some minimal core of rational transition to or from states involving them, The centring point that a person must respect it for his states is to be attributed with those contents at all.

To be rational, that is, reasonable in a satisfactory manner and grounded upon epistemic criticism, as of its belief and readily made decisions, in, at least that it ought to cohere with the rest of a person’s cognitive system - for instance, in terms of logical consistency and application of valid inference procedures. Rationality constraints therefore are accredited linkages among the cognitive, as distinct from qualitative mental states. The main issue is characterizing these types of mental coherence.

Insofar as it expands or transforms our understanding of cognition, connections, that is to say, that the connectionist approach had lost much of its appeal, that in part, was due to the success of the symbol processing approaches in developing plausible models of performance on higher cognitive tasks (Newell and Simon, 1972) for which will necessarily have implications for philosophy of mind.

Nonetheless, Fodor and Pylyshyn’s arguments against connectionist processing as it does not respect the formal, compositional structure of representations but, Fodor and Pylyshyn construe to the representational theory of mind. This is because connectionist routinely interprets the activations of units or groups of units as representing contents. This is most obviously the case for input and output units, in order to supply a cognitive interpretation of a network’s activity, a theorist must treat the input as a representing of a problem and the output as representing the answer. Connectionist also tends to interpret the activations of units within a network. Sometimes this is done unit by unit, as a given unit is found to be activated by inputs with certain features and so is interpreted as representing those features. Other times a more holistic analysis is used’: A cluster analysis may reveal that similar patterns of activation are generated by common features in the input. This is the representational theory of mind; each layer of units in a network generates a different representation of the input information until the output pattern is produced. (Even if connectionist networks exemplify the representational theory of mind, they are significantly different from more traditional exemplars of the representational theory.)

All and all, the expectation that one sort of thing could serve all these tasks, for that which went hand in hand with what has come to be known as the ‘Classical View’ of concepts, according to which they have an ‘analysis’ consisting of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for their satisfaction, which are known to any competent user of them. The standard example is made, especially of simple one of [bachelor], which seems to be identical to [eligible unmarried male]. A more interesting, but problematic has been of [knowledge], whose analysis was traditionally thought to be [justified true belief].

Nevertheless, this Classical View seems to offer an illuminating answer to a certain form of metaphysical questions: In virtu e of what is some thing the kind of thing it is -, e.g., by virtue of what a bachelor is a bachelor? And it does so in a way that supports counterfactuals: It tells us what would satisfy the concept in situations other than the actual ones (although all actual bachelors might turn out to be freckled, it’s possible that there might be unfreckled ones, since the analysis doesn’t exclude that) The view also seems to waver in the answer to an epistemological question of how people seem to know a priori (or independently of experience about the nature of many things, e.g., that bachelor’s are unmarried. It is constitutive of the competency or possessional condition of a concept that they know its analysis, at least on reflection.

The Classical View, however, has always had to face the difficulty of ‘primitive’ or ‘sensory’ concept’s, that all concepts are derived from experience, that every idea is derived from corresponding impressions, of which the works of Locke, Berkeley and Hume are often thought to mean that concepts were somehow composed of compliant introspectable mentalities with, ‘images’, ‘impressions,’ that were ultimately decomposable into basic sensory parts. Thus, Hume analysed the concept of [material objects] as involving certain regularities in our sensory experience, and [cause] as involving spatio-temporal contiguity and constant conjunction.

Berkeley noticed a problem with this approach that every generation has had to rediscover, that if a concept is a sensory impression, like an image, then how does one distinguish a general concept [triangle] from a more particular one-say, [isosceles triangles] that would serve in imaging the general one. More recent Wittgenstein (1953) called attention to the multiple ambiguity of images. And, in any case, images seem quite hopeless for capturing the concepts associated with logical terms. In terminological phrasing, what is the image for ‘negation’ or ‘possibility?’ Whatever the role of such representations, as fully conceptual competence should require something more.

In addition to images and impressions and other sensory items, a full account of concepts needs to consider issues of logical structure. This is precisely what the Logical Positivists did, focussing on logically structured sentences instead of sensations and images for moulting the empiricist claim into the ‘Verification of Meaning’: The meaning of a sentence is the means by which it is confirmed or refuted, ultimately by sensory experience, the meaning or concept associated with a predicate is the means by which people confirm or refuse whether something satisfies theoretically. Our concept of material object and causation seems to go far beyond mere sensory experience just as our concepts in a highly theoretical science to go far beyond the often only meagre evidence we can adduce for them.

However, whatever the theory, e.g., empiricism, verifications, even the logical positivist, that all theories must be accepted, on whether its belief or its desirous apparency, and so on, implicates the theory, e.g., empiricism, verification’ even ‘logical positivist’, that all theories must be accepted, on whether its belief or its desirous apparency, and so on, as currently of a subsequent state for which it must be theoretically endorsed by or having an approving acceptance.

The state of science at any given time is characterized, in part, by the theories that are accepted at that time. Presently accepted theories include quantum theory, the general theory of relativity, and the modern synthesis of Darwin and Mendel, as well as lower-level (but still clearly theoretical) assertions such as that DNA has a double-helical structure, that the hydrogen atom contains a single electron, and so on. What precisely is involved in accepting a theory?

The commonsense answer might seem to be that given by the scientific realist of which to absolve the theory of means, in its gross effect, to believe it to be true (or, ‘approximately’ or ‘essentially’ true). Not surprising, the state of theoretical science, is in fact, far too complex to be captured fully by any such simple notion.

For one thing, theories are often firmly accepted while being explicitly recognized to be idealization. Newtonian particle mechanics were clearly, in some sense, firmly accepted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet it was recognized that there might well be no such thing in nature, as a Newtonian particle of the entities to which this theory was applied exactly fitted that description.

Again, theories may be accepted, not be regarded as idealization, and yet be known not to be strictly true - for scientific, rather than abstruse philosophical reasons. For example, quantum theory and relativity theory were (uncontroversially) listed as among both being strictly true. Basically, quantum theory is not a covariant theory, yet relativity requires all theories to be covariant, while quantum theory says that fundamentally everything is. It is acknowledged that what is needed is a synthesis of the two theories, as presently understood, fully intact (in view of their logical incompatibility) This synthesis is supposed to be supplied by quantum field theory, but it is not yet known how to articulate that theory fully. None of this means, however, that the present quantum and relativistic theories are regarded as having an authentically conjectural character. Instead, the attitude seems to be that they are bound to survive in a slightly modified form as limiting cases in the unifying theory of the future, and this is why a synthesis is consciously sought.

`In addition, there are theories that are regarded as actively conjectural, while, nonetheless, being accepted in some sense it is implicitly allowed that these theories might not live on approximations or limiting cases in further science. Though they are certainly the best accounts, we presently have of the related range of phenomena. This used to be (perhaps, and is) the general view of the theory of ‘quarks’: Few would put these on a par with electrons, say, but all regard them as more than simply interesting possibilities.

Finally, the phenomenon of change is an accepted theory during the development of science