Chapter 30 Self-Quiz

. Quine believes that traditional empiricism has been dogmatic in

holding that no sharp line divides analytic truths from synthetic truths.

thinking that meaningful statements about the objective world reduce to statements about experiential data.

its view that philosophy is just an extension of empirical science.

blurring the line between natural science and speculative metaphysics.

. Quine's holism means that

statements about the world can be judged only as a corporate body.

total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are mathematical.

A conflict in the interior of the web of belief will occasion a reassignment of truth values at the periphery.

only logical laws are immune from revision.

. Observation sentences, Quine says,

are about the subjective content of our experience.

are about the stimulation of our sense organs.

are the only sentences immune from revision.

are the final checkpoint for theory.

. Quine's criterion for ontological commitment

tells us what we should be committed to by way of our ontology.

commits us to the existence of what medieval philosophers called "universals."

shows us not what there is, but what a theory says that there is.

is a way of committing metaphysics "to the flames."

. Naturalized epistemology

is basically third-person epistemology.

is basically first-person epistemology.

solves once and for all the skeptical problem of the external world.

guarantees the truth of observation sentences.

. To say that Intentionality is a fundamental characteristic of mental acts is to say that

intending to do some act is the basic fact about mind.

every mental act is about something.

there are no mental acts that are unconscious.

physical realism is false.

. Taking up Dennett's Intentional stance toward some object

is intending to understand its design and physical behavior.

enables us to predict the behavior of even a malfunctioning machine.

is incompatible with regarding it as a machine.

means treating it as though it were rational and goal-directed.

. A functionalist account of mental concepts (believing, intending, desiring, etc.)

entails that the mind is a "ghost in a machine."

is incompatible with locating mental phenomena in the brain.

allows that a purely physical item might perform the functions.

commits one to physical realism.

. Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment is supposed to show that

no one can learn Chinese in isolation from other people.

strong AI is a mistake.

Chinese is a very difficult language to master.

only someone growing up speaking Chinese can speak like a native.

. The idea that there is "something it is like" to be a certain entity

raises doubts about the sufficiency of functionalist accounts of the mind.

derives from science fiction stories about robots.

can be explained by the consciousness gene.

is a staple of third-person epistemology.

. When Mary, the neuroscientist, exits her black-and-white room, she learns (according to Jackson)

which brain states correlate with which colors.

what people say when they see red.

how many people are really color-blind.

What it is like to see red.

. The hard problem, according to David Chalmers, is

how to give a functionalist analysis of brain states.

how qualia relate to brain states.

whether there is any relation at all between brain states and consciousness.

whether zombies really exist.

. Dennett's heterophenomenology is a technique for

giving a third-person description of the contents of consciousness.

refuting Hegel's notion of Spirit.

supporting epiphenomenalism.

proving the existence of Feenoman.