Assorted thought from ME on stuff...
Taken from notes scrawled on post-its at the end of 8 hours of working in an over-crowded library full of children and people looking for things that weren't where they were supposed to be.
We are in a position where we trust niether our thoughts nor our experience. Clever, how we have left ourselves so little.
If I think I'm not following a rule, but you think that I am, who is right?
Do men like cleavage because it reminds them of buttocks, or do they like buttocks because they remind them of cleavage?
Deep huh? This is what happens when you don't get enough coffee.
philosophy
We are in a position where we trust niether our thoughts nor our experience. Clever, how we have left ourselves so little.
If I think I'm not following a rule, but you think that I am, who is right?
Do men like cleavage because it reminds them of buttocks, or do they like buttocks because they remind them of cleavage?
Deep huh? This is what happens when you don't get enough coffee.
philosophy
posted by Samuel Douglas at 8:38 AM
4 Comments:
On the Rule thought ... If you don't think that your following a rule then, probably, you can claim that you are not. The problem is that it is quite likely that there are 'deep-structured meta-rules', if you will, that will govern your constructions even when you think that you are not following a rule. Or have I lost the plot?
Ah so I might be following some rules.
But...(Hysterical women in Info common, ugh)these 'deep-structured meta-rules' sound suspiciously like dispositions to me. Which is ok, as lomg as I don't try to use them to attribute meaning to things. I do see your point though.
Would this mean that it is impossible to ever be not following a rule? A parallel case might be something like the apparent factthat computers canot generate true random numbers. Are we like this? All I could say for sure is that I wasn't following a given rule, and then only in virtue of my knowledge that I could not assert within the community that I was using that particular rule. No matter what we are doing, it can be said that we are follwing some rule?
That does not seem quite right.
We needn't be concious of the rule we are following to be following it, do we?
My brain hurts. I think I've lost the plot now too.
Ok, let's try this again ...
If we 'follow' rules - in the sense that 'following' is predicting a construction that will accord with the rule - it is possible that certain rules become 'instinctual' (which are the sort that I dubbed 'deep-structured meta-rules'). These rules are such that they can govern actions, whilst remaining outside conscious awareness of their opperation. So, yes they are akin to those pieces of programming that prevent computers from generating truely random numbers.
Now, should thses rules exist, it seems possible to say that they could govern your action when you claimed to be not following a rule. Now, this is not to say that they do - it is quite possible that you could undertake an action that is not in accord with a rule - but just because you are not attempting to follow a rule (or activly attempting not to accord with any rule) does not mean that you are free from being governed by rules.
All of which still seems to point to some sort of 'thing'. I don't know.
No more Kripke for me this week!
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