Contents Of Thought by Robert H. Grimm
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’m not well versed in analytic philosophy. But here’s a book of 5 analytic philosophy essays, seeking to verify the, you guessed it, “contents of thought”
There is an anesthetic in analytic philosophy that is to be concise, precise and to have real world impact. The idea is that whatever thought experiment is said, should also have application in the real world. That is, it shouldn’t necessarily debunk our every day understanding but it should add to it, if possible. That being said, there appears to be two main veins that run through these essays. The first is the content approach, which assumes that there is real stuff, be this an interior content that is separate, or a belief that has a role in the chain of causation. The second approach is a formalism, a syntax only approach, which assumes that the relationships of various things constitute what a thing is, rather than there being any original content. The two are at odds. It’s perhaps impossible to verify one over the other, since from the second approach we wouldn’t admit to there being any content even if we ran across it because how would we know that it is what it is without it being hooked in the way that it naturally is? From the first approach, we can simply retool the same situation and explain behavior without appeal to any particular content — and that is sufficient to show that content is not necessary.
What these two approaches seem to me to highlight is what Karen Barad calls “the apparatus of measurement” which is to say what aesthetic tool we use to determine what is being questioned will emphasize or conclude a different aspect of the thought experiment. It’s beyond the scope of this review to really go into too much detail, but it’s suffices to say that the last essay in which Robert Stalnaker shows how the role of context changes meaning to impact belief and syntax appears to me to really highlight what is missing. All thought experiments pose a specific kind of inquiry, and in doing so, given the set up of the situation, beg the question. Changing the context will always inevitably change the meaning, or even destroy meaning itself. Lynne Rudder Baker’s essay does this quite well, wrapping our consideration within the context of what we would consider as being meaningful.
This split between formal approaches and content approaches however, is nothing new. Formalism as a whole is a modernist approach to development of theories. This kind of approach does have its limits, as we are seeing. What we are now at the edge of doing, across many different disciplines it seems, is to try and develop content itself as it arises from formalism. Something that, from a formalism only stand point or a content only stand point would appear to be near impossible.
