Abstract
Mental life presents many holistic phenomena. Gestalt perception comes to mind as does the manifold of intentions—beliefs, desires, and actions—and the fabric of linguistic meanings. In this paper I want to argue that none of these wholes resist analysis except for conscious intentional attitudes. It seems we cannot get a theoretical grasp of the difference between tacit (unconscious or preconscious) beliefs, desires, etc. and conscious feeling-laden belief. As I shall endeavor to explain, perception, unconscious attitudes, linguistic competence, and even intellectual skills accompanied by raw feeling (kinesthetic sensation at the edge of attention while typing or playing a musical instrument) are explainable in principle within the computer paradigm. Conscious attitudes alone seem not to be explainable in such terms and are perhaps absolutely holistic.
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Footnotes
Nelson Goodman, Ways of World Making. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1978, pp. 4–5.
This is no place to take up Kripke’s arguments against the identity theory, which many consider to be devastating. See Kripke (1980), also in Davidson and Harman (1972). I think his argument can be defused. See Nelson (1982) pp. 331–335; and my article “On Causal Reference”, forthcoming.
D. Lewis, “General Semantics” in Davidson and Harman (1972), p. 170.
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© 1988 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Nelson, R.J. (1988). Mechanism and Intentionality: The New World Knot. In: Otto, H.R., Tuedio, J.A. (eds) Perspectives on Mind. Synthese Library, vol 194. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4033-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4033-8_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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