David Papineau Quotes

Quotes about:

• I realize that I won't have quite enough time to understand everything - but that hasn't stopped me wanting to understand as much as I can.

  David Papineau

  Enough Time, Realizing, Enough

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I say that there is nothing deficient about our current theoretical grasp of mind-brain identities. The problem is only that they are counter-intuitive.

  David Papineau

  Brain, Mind, Identity

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Nearly everybody nowadays accepts the 'causal completeness of physics' - every physical event (or at least its probability) has a full physical cause. This leaves no room for non-physical things to make a causal difference to physical effects. But it would be absurd to deny that thoughts and feelings (and population movements and economic depressions . . .) cause physical effects. So they must be physical things.

  David Papineau

  Differences, Feelings, Events

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I don't think that we can figure out what is going on in conscious colour perception just by phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms as well. We need to figure out what information is present in the mechanisms that constitute conscious colour perception.

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Perception, Brain

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• This doesn't show that there is anything wrong with our theoretical understanding, any more than the intuition that the Earth is at rest shows that there must be something theoretically wrong with Copernicanism, or the intuition that time is moving shows that there is something theoretically wrong with the block universe 'B series' view of change.

  David Papineau

  Block, Moving, Views

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Everybody agrees that a future in which you are dead is a very bad thing, and that it isn't made any better by your not being around to notice how bad it is.

  David Papineau

  Made, Agree, Bad Things

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn't care, so to speak, how the trick is done.

  David Papineau

  Done, Care, Speak

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• If neuroscientific research shows that those mechanisms only contain comparative information about colour differences, and have 'thrown away' more fine-grained information about the absolute colours of single surfaces, then that would support my position, in a way that just introspecting our colour experiences can't.

  David Papineau

  Differences, Support, Research

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• The 'phenomenal concept' issue is rather different, I think. Here the question is whether there are concepts of experiences that are made available to subjects solely in virtue of their having had those experiences themselves. Is there a way of thinking about seeing something red, say, that you get from having had those experiences, and so isn't available to a blind person?

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Issues, Red

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• My first degree was in mathematics. That was great, but it didn't help with many of the things that puzzled me. I became a philosopher because I wanted to understand everything, especially those things that didn't make sense. And that has continued to be my philosophical motivation. That's one reason I have such a roving philosophical eye - once I have figured out a philosophical topic to my satisfaction, I find myself moving on to new problems.

  David Papineau

  Motivation, Moving, Philosophical

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• After all, in supporting phenomenal concepts I am in a sense siding with introspection against the more behaviourist Wittgensteinians. But even so I don't think that introspection is powerful enough to resolve the specific issue about how many colours you can see.

  David Papineau

  Powerful, Thinking, Issues

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com.

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• The orthodox view of colour experience assumes that, when we see a colour difference between two surfaces viewed side-by-side, this is because we have different responses to each of the two surfaces viewed singly. Since we can detect colour differences between something like ten million different surfaces, this implies that we are capable of ten million colour responses to surfaces viewed singly.

  David Papineau

  Views, Two, Differences

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Of course our genes will make some capacities very much easier to learn than others, and of course our genes themselves are not learned. But the point remains that genes themselves are not cognitive capacities, and that anything worth calling a cognitive capacity will depend to some degree on learning and so not be innate.

  David Papineau

  Degrees, Calling, Genes

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a 'downwards' causal influence on the physical realm in a straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that mental, biological and social phenomena must themselves be physical, in order to produce the physical effects that they do.

  David Papineau

  Smart, Order, Way

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Of course, there remains the question of why we should find mind-brain identities so persistently counter-intuitive, if they are true. But this is a simple psychological question, and there are a number of plausible explanations. Indeed this is a topic that is quite extensively discussed outside philosophy, by developmental psychologists and theorists of religion among others, under the heading of 'intuitive dualism'. It is rather shocking that so few of the many philosophers working on 'the explanatory gap' are familiar with this empirical literature.

  David Papineau

  Philosophy, Simple, Numbers

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Again, when we view a scene fleetingly, do we consciously see all the details even though we don't retain them, or do we not see them in the first place? Neurological information is crucial to deciding these questions. After all, they are so interesting precisely because unaided introspection cannot resolve them. Rather we need to know what is going on in the brain activities that constitute visual awareness.

  David Papineau

  Views, Interesting, Brain

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I rather incline towards 'conceptualism', in line with my view of colour perception - I don't think that we can represent objects and properties for which we have no concepts, not even in perceptual experience. In this sense I differ from those who defend 'non-conceptual content' like Michael Tye and Chris Peacocke.

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Views, Perception

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• A certain kind of methodologically-minded philosopher of science is quick to read off metaphysical conclusions from features of scientific practice. Chemists don't derive their laws from fundamental physics, so reductive physicalism must be false. Biologists refer to natural numbers in some of their explanations, so numbers must exist. I think that this kind of thing makes for bad philosophy.

  David Papineau

  Philosophy, Thinking, Law

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• The relevant features of scientific practice often have mundane explanations which don't point to any deep metaphysical moral. (Thus it would simply be messy and pointless for the chemists to essay physical reductions, or for the biologists to offer number-free explanations. It's a weird kind of science-worship that views these practical considerations as clues to the nature of reality.)

  David Papineau

  Reality, Numbers, Views

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Schrödinger's cat has a 50% quantum chance of coming out of the box alive and a 50% quantum chance of coming out dead. If you got in the box with it, the same would apply to you. So you really don't want to do that.

  David Papineau

  Cat, Alive, Want

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I favour an interpretation of quantum mechanics (the 'Everett interpretation') according to which reality branches in any chancy quantum situation. On this view, Schrödinger's set-up will give rise to in two future branches of reality, one with a live cat, and one with a dead cat - and the talk of '50% chances' just indicates that the two branches are both equally real futures of the cat that originally entered the box.

  David Papineau

  Real, Cat, Views

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I don't have much use for the concept of innateness. The everyday concept incorporates a number of different notions that can come apart in in many ways, and as a result encourages a range of dangerously fallacious inferences.

  David Papineau

  Numbers, Everyday, Different

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I do have quite a lot of sympathy for Fodor's picture of concepts as information-free atomic entities which get locked onto their referents causally, and to that extent they needn't involve anything much in the way of learning. But even so it seems perverse to call them 'innate'. Here we see again the oddity of treating 'not learned' as sufficient for innate.

  David Papineau

  Oddities, Information, Way

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Even if no learning to speak of was involved in locking my mental term onto doorknobs, it is odd to say that therefore my possession of a doorknob concept is innate, just as it is odd to say that my head-injury-caused singing is innate.

  David Papineau

  Singing, Speak, Odd

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• The use of neuroscientific data to help resolve phenomenological questions is proving a common theme in much contemporary thinking about the mind. How rich are the contents of visual perception? Does vision only tell us about shapes and colours, or does it also represent higher categories like lemon or umbrella?

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Data, Mind

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 20.

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