Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind by Paul M. Churchland PDF

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Additional info for Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind

Sample text

In other words, a creature meeting Inference must have some concept of conditionality on that basis, but may not have any concept of logical validity as such. As with the failure of the argument to establish that all persons must share the concept of material conditionality, the failure to guarantee that all persons must have a concept of logical validity is an advantage. For it is by no means obvious that all humans, let alone all possible beings meeting Inference, do have such a concept. A final observation I wish to make is this.

Since conjunction is monotonic, q can be inferred from p and q together with p as well as it can be inferred from p and q alone. ¹⁶ Since I do not think that any introduction rule is canonical for conditionality as such (as opposed to one or another particular variety of conditionality), I shall assume that some fix of the latter type can be provided to deal with this issue. The second reason, however, why (4) fails to pick out a truthfunctional equivalence class of logical concepts is that there are many conditionals for which (4) is valid, both truth functional and non-truth functional.

My defense of the rationality of CP leads me to advance a very permissive theory about what it actually is to believe a conjunction in the first place. According to this theory, to believe a conjunction just is, under normal circumstances, to believe its conjuncts. The reference to normal circumstances is to rule out cases in which a person engages in some kind of mental partitioning or compartmentalization. This link between CP and issues of mental partitioning shows that the real thrust of the relation between personhood and the rationality of CP has to do with the irrationality of mental partitioning.

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