Reviews for Maya

The average rating for Maya based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-09-30 00:00:00 Richard Del Pizzo deVries and Triplett have accomplished an incredibly lucid 200-page explication of Sellars's 70-page essay. This page count might sound excessive, but it is not. deVries and Triplett provide invaluable background information about the theoretical traditions Sellars was up against. They summarize alternative interpretations of Sellars's text and show how these misunderstand Sellars. I consider deVries's and Triplett's work as invaluable for a deep understanding of Sellars; although Sellars's essay is brilliant, it is extremely difficult to read. He relies on a range of technical concepts, which he never explicitly defines, or defines later in the text. He also names various philosophers and traditions without explaining them. Sellars's essay is a must-read for anyone interested in philosophy of mind or epistemology. It exposes fundamental inadequacies of some methodologies in analytic philosophy and philosophy of mind. deVries and Triplett show that Sellars's main thesis is that many philosophical traditions postulate some kind of knowledge as occupying a special epistemological role. This role is that this kind of knowledge does not depend on any other facts to be justified, and yet this special knowledge can be used to provide epistemic support for other facts. Sellars names this kind of knowledge "the given"; it is crucial to any foundationalist epistemic view, on which some empirical knowledge can be certain (i.e., there is no infinite regress in needing to identify further premises to justify or support a given premise). For example, empiricist traditions assume that sensory impressions (also called qualia or sense-data) have the role as "givens" - while we can't know for sure whether objects out there in the world exist, or whether our ideas and beliefs are certain, we can know with certainty that the basic, raw sensations (colors, sounds, smells) that we have exist. As another example, a Cartesian rationalist tradition assumes that some form of thought, which embodies the cognito, necessarily exists. Sellars argues that it is a myth that there can be such "givens." Even knowledge of the most seemingly immediate and basic sensations, thoughts, or inner episodes depends on learned or acquired abilities. Sellars shows that it is possible that we humans can observe the world, and speak about it, without having any concept of inner episodes or mental states at all. He posits a thought experiment of a hypothetical society that meets these conditions. And then, a genius is born who forms the concept of inner episodes in response to seemingly baffling cases in which people can behave intelligently without speaking out loud -- inner episodes, of thoughts, can aid such behavior. This genius also comes to posit the notion of sensations to explain the cases in which people look at the same object but see very different things. Sellars shows that while our notion of thoughts is based on a model of utterances, our notion of sensations is based on a model of physical episodes. Thus, thoughts and sensations do not self-evidently and absolutely exist. Rather, they are like theoretical concepts, which are discovered and constructed. Moreover, although thoughts and sensations are private (in the sense that the subject has unique, privileged access to her own inner episodes), the possibility of recognizing experience as a thought or sensation depends on intersubjective learning. Observations of other people's behaviors are the findings/data that indicate that there might exist inner mental states; the former are prerequisite for understanding the latter. In addition to arguing that what we take to be "givens" are in fact theoretical constructs that are subject to revision and depend on acquired concepts (and so are not self-justified) -- Sellars also presents a positive view of how we should understand thoughts and sensations. He starts with the behavioralist idea that particular thoughts and sensations are triggered by appropriate circumstances or environmental conditions; these invariances account for the stable meaning of thoughts and sensations. According to such behaviorism, thoughts and sensations are necessarily true as long as they were appropriately triggered. But Sellars quickly deviates from this idea. He argues that meaning, or the referentiality of thoughts and sensations, also requires that the subject be able to identify the triggering circumstances and evaluate whether they are appropriate (i.e., whether they can justify the contents of her thoughts or sensations). Sellars shows that justification or truth cannot be reduced to mere causal processes, by which mental states are triggered by the environment. Rather, justification and truth depends on the subject's epistemic capacities (abilities to recognize the circumstances, grasp epistemic standards, and so on) and situatedness in intersubjective linguistic systems, which supply the subject the concepts necessary to have these capacities. Sellars also provides a magnificent manifesto that all domains of philosophy must heed to empirical science. He argues that our basic, ordinary understandings of mind and the world are deeply influenced by scientific consensus, and are revolutionized by scientific discoveries. So domains of philosophy that take themselves as analyzing ordinary language or dealing with objective ethical or mental concepts are ultimately held to the whim of science. In order to do the most rigorous philosophy, thinkers must be aware of scientific standards. While arguing for this, Sellars also warns against physical reductionism. He argues that there are distinct levels of analysis (i.e., phenomenal experience; physiological processes; particle interactions) which describe fundamentally different phenomena, even if these phenomena constitute each other. When I initially tried to read "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" without any secondary text, I knew it was rich in revolutionary ideas, but it was too opaque and convoluted to be accessible. I didn't complete it, in awareness that my lone attempts were futile. Reading deVries's and Triplett's explication was a wonderful experience; it is delightfully precise and well-organized. Then, I returned to Sellars, and could successfully read him. I would recommend interested readers in first reading deVries and Triplett, before taking on Sellars directly.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-22 00:00:00 Jeff Carroll I would say that this book helped me clear the fog of Sellars's magnum opus. I know have a better grasp of what Sellars was getting at in EPM.