I think philosophers include some smart people, and they produced some excellent work (some of which might still help us today). I also think philosophy is not a natural class. You would never lump the members of this category together without specific social factors pushing them together. Studying “philosophy” seems unlikely to produce any good results unless you know what to look for.
I have little confidence in your recommendations, because your sole concrete example to date of a philosophical question seems ludicrous. What would change if a neurally embodied belief rather than a sentence (or vice versa) were the “bearer of meaning”? And as a separate question, why should we care?
The issue is whether a sentence’s meaning is just its truth conditions, or whether it expresses some kind of independent thought or proposition, and this abstract object has truth conditions. These are two quite different approaches to doing semantics.
Why should you care? Personally, I don’t see this problem has anything to do with the problem of figuring out how a brain acquires the patterns of connections needed to create the movements and sounds it does given the stimuli it receives. To me it’s an interesting but independent problem, and the idea of ‘neurally embodied beliefs’ is worthless. Some people (with whom I disagree but whom I nevertheless respect) think the problems are related, in which case there’s an extra reason to care, and what exactly a neurally embodied belief is, will vary. If you don’t care, that’s your business.
I think philosophers include some smart people, and they produced some excellent work (some of which might still help us today). I also think philosophy is not a natural class. You would never lump the members of this category together without specific social factors pushing them together. Studying “philosophy” seems unlikely to produce any good results unless you know what to look for.
I have little confidence in your recommendations, because your sole concrete example to date of a philosophical question seems ludicrous. What would change if a neurally embodied belief rather than a sentence (or vice versa) were the “bearer of meaning”? And as a separate question, why should we care?
The issue is whether a sentence’s meaning is just its truth conditions, or whether it expresses some kind of independent thought or proposition, and this abstract object has truth conditions. These are two quite different approaches to doing semantics.
Why should you care? Personally, I don’t see this problem has anything to do with the problem of figuring out how a brain acquires the patterns of connections needed to create the movements and sounds it does given the stimuli it receives. To me it’s an interesting but independent problem, and the idea of ‘neurally embodied beliefs’ is worthless. Some people (with whom I disagree but whom I nevertheless respect) think the problems are related, in which case there’s an extra reason to care, and what exactly a neurally embodied belief is, will vary. If you don’t care, that’s your business.
This has done very little to convince me that I should care (and I probably care more about academic Philosophy than most here).
Thanks for pointing this out. I tend to conflate the two, and it’s worth keeping the distinction in mind.