The mysteries of nature: How deeply hidden?

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 106, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 167-200

  Chomsky, Noam ^a  

^a MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67649449038     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2009106416     Document Type: Review

References (100)

1. David Hume, The History of England, VI, LXXI
2. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, chapter III. Locke's reasons, of course, were not Hume's, but relied on the boundaries of "the simple ideas we receive from sensation and reflection," which prevent us from comprehending the nature of body or mind (spirit)
3. R. Baillargeon, "Innate Ideas Revisited: For a Principle of Persistence in Infants' Physical Reasoning," Perspectives on Psychological Science, III (2008): 2-13
4. Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge: Harvard, 1985), p. 155
5. McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity (Notre Dame: University Press, 1978), pp. 52ff. He concludes that because of Newton's vacillation in use of the terms "mechanical," "spirit," and others, it is "misleading ... to take Newton to be an exponent of the 'mechanical philosophy'" (p. 73)
6. See Locke, Newton on Matter and Activity op. cit
7. and correspondence with Stillingfleet, cited by Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 73
8. On the development of "Locke's suggestion" through the eighteenth century, culminating in Joseph Priestley's important work (discussed below), see John Yolton, Thinking Matter (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1983)
9. Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, On the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, Volume I (1802) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1981)
10. Darwin cited by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain (New York: William Morrow, 1998), p. 227
11. Newton, Principia, General Scholium
12. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture (New York: Oxford, 1961; reprint, Princeton: University Press, 1986), pp. 479-480
13. See McMullin, The Mechanization of the World Picture op. cit., chapter 3, for more detailed analysis
14. Thomas Nagel, Other Minds (New York: Oxford, 1995), p. 106
15. For varying perspectives on the "explanatory gap," see essays in Galen Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, Anthony Freeman, ed. (Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2006)
16. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 259
17. Heinrich Hertz, cited by McMullin, The Copernican Revolution op. cit., p. 124
18. Dijksterhuis, The Copernican Revolution op. cit., p. 489
19. Joseph Glanvill; see John Henry, "Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy," History of Science, XXIV (1986): 335-81
20. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: California UP, 1979), pp. 139f., 213
21. Russell, Analysis of Matter (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927; reprint, New York: Dover, 1954), pp. 18f., 162
22. Dirac, Principles of Quantum Mechanics (New York: Oxford, 1930), p. 10, brought to my attention by John Frampton
23. Machamer, Introduction, and "Galileo's Machines, His Mathematics, and His Experiments," in Machamer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (New York: Cambridge, 1998), pp. 17, 69
24. cited by Pietro Redondi, "From Galileo to Augustine."
25. Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination (New York: Oxford, 2006). Recall that Newton hoped that there might be a scientific (that is, mechanical) solution to the problems of matter and motion
26. On these topics, see my Cartesian Linguistics (New York: Harper and Row, 1966)
27. and Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), chapter 1. Note that the concerns go far beyond indeterminacy of free action, as is particularly evident in the experimental programs by Cordemoy and others on "other minds"; see Cartesian Linguistics
28. Descartes, Letter to Queen Christina of Sweden, 1647
29. Principles of Philosophy. For discussion, see Tad Schmaltz, Malebranche's Theory of the Soul (New York: Oxford, 1996), pp. 204ff
30. See my "Turing on the 'Imitation Game'," in Stuart Schieber, ed., The Turing Test (Cambridge: MIT, 2004), pp. 317-321
31. Clarke, Descartes's Theory of Mind (New York: Oxford, 2003), p. 12
32. See also Descartes's 1641 letter to Mersenne on the goal of the Meditations, cited by Margaret Wilson, Descartes (Boston: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 2
33. Clarke, Descartes op. cit., p. 258
34. Kanwisher and Downing, "Separating the Wheat from the Chaff," Science, CCLXXXII (October 2, 1998). Newton, General Scholium
35. Kandel and Squire, "Neuroscience," Science, CCXC (November 10, 2000): 1113-1120
36. Gallistel, "Neurons and Memory," in M. Gazzaniga, ed., Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences (Cambridge: MIT, 1997), pp. 71-89
37. "Symbolic Processes in the Insect Brain," in D. Scarborough and S. Sternberg, eds., Methods, Models and Conceptual Issues: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Volume 4 (Cambridge: MIT, 1998), pp. 1-51
38. Zeki, "Art and the Brain," Daedalus: The Brain (Spring 1998): 71-104
39. Nagel, Daedalus: The Brain op. cit
40. For some cautionary notes on "sharp logical separation between the nervous system and the rest of the organism," see Charles Rockland, The Nematode as a Model Complex System, Working Paper (LIDS-WP-1865), Laboratory for Information and Decisions Systems, MIT (April 14, 1989), p. 30
41. Henry, The Nematode as a Model Complex System, op. cit
42. Alan Kors, "The Atheism of D'Holbach and Naigeon," in M. Hunger and D. Wootton, eds., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford, 1992), pp. 273-300
43. Locke, see above, and Yolton, Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment op. cit., p. 199
44. Voltaire, Kant, McMullin, Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment op. cit., pp. 113, 122f
45. from Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 1786
46. Michael Friedman, "Kant and Newton: Why Gravity Is Essential to Matter," in P. Bricker and R.I.G. Hughes, eds., Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science (Cambridge: MIT, 1990), pp. 185-202
47. Howard Stein, "On Locke, 'the Great Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton'," in Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science (1990), pp. 185-202. ibid. Friedman argues that there is no contradiction between Newton and Kant because they do not mean the same thing by "essential," Kant having discarded Newton's metaphysics and making an epistemological point within his "Copernican revolution in metaphysics."
48. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (1865)
49. The History of Materialism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925, translation of third expanded edition)
50. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1958), p. 210
51. Coyne, "The Scientific Venture and Materialism: False Premises," in Space or Spaces as Paradigms of Mental Categories (Milan: Fondazione Carlo Erba, 2000), pp. 7-19
52. Russell, Analysis of Matter, chapter 37
53. Russell did not work out how percepts in their cognitive aspect were assimilated into the "causal skeleton of the world," leaving him open to a counterargument by mathematician Max Newman. See Russell's letter to Newman, 24 April 1928, in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1914-1944, Volume II (Boston: Little Brown, 1967)
54. Democritus, quoted by Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks (New York: Cambridge, 1954), p. 89. Brought to my attention by Jean Bricmont
55. Stoljar and Nagasawa, "Introduction," in Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa, and Daniel Stoljar, There's Something about Mary (Cambridge: MIT, 2004), pp. 1-36
56. Hume, see John Mikhail, Rawls' Linguistic Analogy: A Study of the 'Generative Grammar' Model of Moral Theory Described by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 2000)
57. Moral Grammar: Rawls' Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral Judgment (New York: Cambridge, in press)
58. "Universal Moral Grammar: Theory, Evidence, and the Future," Trends in Cognitive Sciences, April 2007
59. On the irrelevance (and as it is formulated, even incoherence) of the doctrine of "accessibility to consciousness"), see my Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1975)
60. Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia, 1980)
61. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (New York: Cambridge, 2000)
62. On the rules of visual perception, inaccessible to consciousness in the interesting cases, see Donald Hoffman, Visual Intelligence (New York: Norton, 1998)
63. Jackson, Ludlow et al., Visual Intelligence op. cit., xv-xix and 410-42
64. Peirce, "The Logic of Abduction," in V. Tomas, ed., Pane's Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), pp. 235-255
65. See my Language and Mind, pp. 90ff. for discussion of his proposals, and fallacies invoking natural selection that lead him to the ungrounded (and implausible) belief that our "guessing instinct" leads us to true theories
66. Cited by Wilson, Language and Mind, op. cit., p. 95
67. Hume, Inquiry, II.1
68. On dubious modern efforts to formulate what had been a reasonably clear project before the separation of philosophy from science, see New Horizons, pp. 79f., 144f.; and generally chapters 5, 6
69. (reprinted from Mind, CIV (1995): 1-61)
70. Black, Robert Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism (Princeton: University Press, 1970), p. 226
71. William Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 271
72. Thackray, Atoms and Powers (Cambridge: Harvard, 1970), pp. 37f., 276f
73. Brock, Atoms and Powers op. cit
74. For sources and further discussion, see New Horizons; my Knowledge of Language (New York: Praeger, 1986), pp. 251-252
75. David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom (New York: Free Press, 2001)
76. Some argue that even if quantum-theoretic unification succeeds, "in some sense the program of reduction of chemistry to [the new] physics fails," in part because of "practical issues of intractability." See Maureen Christie and John Christie, '"Laws' and 'Theories' in Chemistry Do Not Obey the Rules," in Nalin Bhushan and Stuart Rosenfield, eds., Of Minds and Molecules (New York: Oxford, 2000), pp. 34-50
77. See references of note 39. Sometimes misunderstanding and distortion reach the level of the surreal. For some startling examples, see my contribution to the Symposium on Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (New York: Oxford, 2006)
78. in Artificial Intelligence, CLXXI (2007): 1094-103 (Elsevier), at www.sciencedirect.com
79. On "the rigidity rule and [Shimon] Ullman's theorem," see Hoffman, Artificial Intelligence, CLXXI (2007) op. cit., p. 159. Needless to say, the rule is inaccessible to consciousness
80. Mountcastle, Daedalus: The Brain (Spring 1988)
81. Priestley, Materialism, from Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, 1777. In John Passmore, ed., Priestley's Writings on Philosophy, Science, and Politics (New York: Collier-MacMillan, 1965)
82. Similar ideas appear pre-Newton, particularly in the Objections to the Meditations, where critics ask how Descartes can know, "without divine revelation...that God has not implanted in certain bodies a power or property enabling them to doubt, think, etc." See Catherine Wilson, in Strawson, Priestley's Writings on Philosophy, Science, and Politics op. cit
83. Priestley, Materialism
84. For later discussion, see Yolton, Thinking Matter, p. 113. Similar conclusions had been drawn by La Mettrie a generation earlier, but in a different framework and without addressing the Cartesian arguments to which he is attempting to respond. The same is true of Gilbert Ryle and other modern attempts. For some discussion, see Cartesian Linguistics
85. Nagel, Thinking Matter, op. cit
86. Strawson, "Realistic Monism" and "Reply," in Strawson, Thinking Matter, op. cit. Printers errors corrected (Strawson, p.c.). See essays in this volume for further discussion
87. See my Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: MIT, 1965), pp. 199-200, and for much more extensive discussion, Cartesian Linguistics
88. On the accuracy of interpretations of the empiricist theory of ideas by Reid and others, see Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984), chapter 5
89. Yablo, 'The Real Distinction between Mind and Body," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary VolumeXVI (1990): 149-201
90. Quotes here from "Realistic Monism" and "Reply," in Strawson, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, op. cit
91. Quotes in this paragraph from Stoljar, "Physicalism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2001)
92. Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination, pp. 56, 58
93. Strawson, "Realistic Monism," note 21
94. Wheeler, At Home in the Universe (American Institute of Physics, 1994), Volume 9 of Masters of Modern Physics
95. Stapp, in Strawson, At Home in the Universe (op. cit
96. Lewontin, "The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer," in Scarborough and Sternberg, Ignorance and Imagination. op. cit
97. See Cartesian Linguistics, pp. 94ff., and McGilvray's introduction, on Cartesian and neo-Platonist conceptions of the role of "cognoscitive powers."
98. For review and sources on referring, see New Horizons; Shaftesbury, Hume, and forerunners
99. see Mijuskovic, New Horizons; op. cit
100. On misunderstandings about this matter, see my "A Note on the Creative Aspect of Language Use," Philosophical Review, XLI, 3 (July 1982): 423-434