David Papineau Quotes - Page 2

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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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• Philosophers sometimes also use 'reductionist' more strictly, to mean 'type-identities' between mental and physical categories, and to exclude 'non-reductive physicalisms' like metaphysical functionalism.

  David Papineau

  Mean, Identity, Use

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

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• Kripke says that physicalists like me can't explain the 'apparent contingency' of mind-brain identities. He maintains that, if I really believed that pains are C-fibres, then I ought no longer to have any room for the thought that 'they' might come apart. His argument is that, since pains aren't identified via some contingent description, but in terms of how they feel, I have no good way of constructing a possible world, so to speak, where C-fibres are present yet pains absent.

  David Papineau

  Pain, Brain, Mind

  "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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• I don't think that we are capable of anything like this many possible colour responses. Instead I argue that the perception of colour differences between two surfaces viewed side-by-side is a gestalt phenomenon.

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Two, Differences

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

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• There is a brain mechanism that works to identify colour differences directly, without first identifying the absolute colour of each surface. So on my view there is no reason to suppose anything like ten million colour responses to surface viewed singly.

  David Papineau

  Views, Differences, Brain

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

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• I think my view is rather more radical than Pete Mandik's. Both of us want to show that colour perception doesn't transcend what can be conceptualized, but I don't think he goes so far as to deny that it doesn't involve different responses to all the discriminable surfaces.

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Views, Perception

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

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• On the methodological issue, I think that would be hopeless to try to adjudicate between my view and orthodoxy by appeal to phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms.

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Views, Issues

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

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• If there is such a simple argument for physicalism, how come everybody hasn't always been a physicalist? That's a good question, and there is a good answer. The 'causal completeness of physics' wasn't widely accepted until recently.

  David Papineau

  Simple, Good Questions, Answers

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

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• I think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But I don't regard that as a contentious issue. Even reductionists about chemistry will think that there are special chemical laws whose formulation makes essential use of chemical terminology.

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Law, Issues

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

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