On 15 Feb 2014, at 12:58, David Nyman wrote:
On 15 February 2014 10:25, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I wonder that. I generally assume people arguing on a forum
like this are rational (ish) and hence that they intend what they
say and when they keep avoiding questions it's because they don't
want to answer them, and when they're rude and arrogant it's
intentional, and so on. But sometimes I think they can't be
conscious of what they're doing, that surely no one would want to be
like that deliberately, at least no one interersted in truth and
science - maybe money and politics. It's a mystery, to me at least.
Galen Strawson recently quoted some remarks of Herbert Feigl that,
mutatis mutandis, might well apply more generally: "Philosophers are
hypersensitive .. in their repressed perplexities. A puzzle which
does not resolve itself within a given favored philosophical frame
is repressed very much in the manner in which unresolved
intrapersonal conflicts are repressed. I surmise that
psychologically the first kind may be subsumed under the second.
Scholars cathect certain ideas so strongly and their outlook becomes
so ego involved that they erect elaborate barricades of defenses,
merely to protect their pet ideas from the blows (or the slower
corrosive effects) of criticism. No one can be sure that he is not
doing this sort of thing in a particular case, and I claim no
exception for myself." (The Mental and the Physical).
Once I accepted to be present at an introduction to logic made by a
psychoanalyst, which was a sort of guru, to an audience of
psychoanalysts.
The first half was rather good, but then he made a simple mistake in
a truth table, and someone mention it.
A normal mathematician would have just say "sorry", and fix it in the
second and proceed. But the guy was a guru, and apparently cannot be
false, so that the second half was a delirious justification of why he
changed the truth table, and this did not make an atom of sense. The
more people laugh at that move, the more he became insulting and the
more he insists on his delirium. It was just impossible to change his
mind, and all this for what I took to be just a typo without any
importance.
On another occasion, the same guy seemed to be able to change his
mind. The only difference was the lack of women in the (small)
audience. May be all this is related to mating. Man hates to lost face
in front of women, perhaps. We might be programmed for this.
You know the universal laws:
1) The boss is right,
2) even when the boss is false, "1)" still applies,
3) especially when the boss is false, "1)" still applies.
And Sam Harris, in his reply to Dan Dennett in their recent debate
on free will, remarks that he's ".. begun to doubt whether any smart
person retains the ability to change his mind".
I have another theory of intelligence, which is that kids are
intelligent (= can change their mind and learn), and adults are stupid
(= can no more change their minds).
Of course one might well wonder how applicable the term "smart"
would be if this were indeed the case (leave alone the question of
how "free" or otherwise we are to change our minds!).
... something which could restart all threads of the list :)
Bruno
David
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
