Here, I’ll show you some of what’s going on in my thesis. Tradies, or skateboarders or people who play guitar or practice martial arts will be able to understand this even though it is a complex far-flung philosophical argument. Ryle divides the mind, vis dispositions into capacities and tendencies. Tendencies are motives, beliefs and inclinations. Capacities are skills, bits of knowledge, ability, technique and methodology. Capacities involve ‘how’ whereas tendencies involve ‘that’. Once you get your mind around that distinction, I have an argument about a theory of meaning. A theory of meaning in language is a theory about how language means certain things – how do the words we use interact with other people and the world to create ‘meaning’ in the things we say? They call it semantics and it’s part of what philosophers have been doing in the 20th century since linguists failed dismally at it. They give philosophers problems that are too hard for the other disciplines to solve. You have two logical rules Copy these out if it helps. Theyre interesting to think about. _______________________ Modus Tollens which goes If A then B. A Therefore B (A > B) A ____ B _____________________ Modus Ponens If A then B Not B Therefore not A (A > B) - B ___ - A _____________________ A common logical fallacy is to affirm the consequent. If A then B B Therefore A This is a mistake. If my brother is home the light will be on in his room The light is on in his room Therefore he is home But he may not be home. He might have left the light on, or my mum might be in there going through his stuff. You can’t go backwards in affirming an material implication. You can’t go ‘If A then B’ ahh ‘B is true, therefore A must be true’. This is because consequents can have multiple clauses. _______________________ You do have an equivalence which looks like that, but then affirming B is not just affirming the consequent of the left part, but affirming the antecedent on the right half. ((A > B) . (B > A)) _______________________ Forget that last part if it’s too complicated. Now in a theory of meaning about skills I argue that talk about skills can only be meaningful if you have some ability to perform those skills or comprehension about those skills. That is, someone who doesn’t know anything about boxing isn’t going to understand talk about right hooks and upper cuts. It’s just noise to them. The foundation of talk about boxing or fixing cars or pouring concrete or machining metal is based in the skill itself. That’s where the meaning comes from. If you have skills then your talk about those skills will be meaningful. Where academia and our education system start to go wrong is they commit a fallacy of the converse, an affirmation of the consequent. They affirm that knowledge about the skills is contained in propositional form, or ‘talk about the skills’ and not the skills themselves. These are like those true or false style tests they get you to take to pass part of your training. You might be able to fix the car by fiddling around with, changing parts, taking stuff apart and putting it back together. You might be the best mechanic in the Western suburbs, but you can’t put what you’re doing in to words. Your skills side, the ‘how’ of doing something doesn’t par up with the ‘that’ clauses about it. It’s a logical error. It’s a bit like those guys who watch Rugby League but never played a bit of it in school. They can talk about this or that, ‘oh that was a good try’ and ‘look at that dodge there’, but their talk isn’t knowledge about Rugby League qua Rugby League. They’re not ‘in’ the game imagining it like your or I can do because we played some of it. Ya know, the type of guys who talk about throwing a right hook, or an upper cut, and have never thrown a punch or stepped into a boxing gym in their lives. I just thought that’d be interesting, to see how logic works inside of a bit of analysis. You can see what you can do with the stuff – how it permeates our reality and our reasoning, and why it’s such an interesting subject to study.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 05:44:54 +0000