Hmm... Anyway, where are they now?
“... falliblist: for all beliefs it is possible that any single belief could be false...”

Peirce was an early advocate of falliblism. WTF? Can that spelling possibly be right, Maro? For Davidson, truth does not equal coherence. But the principle of charity entails that we have to have people who are coherent believers.
A lot of life is just putting in time here and there. Is it May? Is it June? I keep mistaking this time for June. It feels like June. You have to be careful when you are writing in public. People are liable to get disconcerted.
If the principle of charity works then it is not possible for all of our beliefs to be false (most should be true). Error makes sense only against a background of true belief. True beliefs are essential to interpretation, though there’s always some possibility of error. Successful communication entails mainly true beliefs held by someone. You have to assume that a believer holds true beliefs in order to allow for communication at all.
Oops, somehow we got on to de next presenter without me noticin: Michael Lockwood is gonna tell us all bout The Enigma of Science. Very exciting indeed.
“Every physical system has its associated state space. This is an abstract space, the dimensionality of which depends on the number of degrees of freedom, and the elements of which -the points or vectors of which it is composed- denote possible states of the system.”
Hmm... Not too bad so far. I wonder what Foucault would say to all of this.
“The last few decades, in particular, have seen striking advances in our understanding of how ordered complexity can arise spontaneously in systems maintained (as are living organisms) far from thermodynamic equilibrium.”
Why is everyone so big on complexity? I don’t get it. Not all de secrets o’d’universe are hidden in complexity. Some o’dem are actually quite simple. ha ha ha.
“The thought, here, is that the whole conceptual edifice that we bring to bear on the external world -from common-sense conceptions, at one end, to the dizzying heights of theoretical physics, at the other- is essentially formal. It is structure without explicit content: a lattice of abstract causal relations between postulated variables, which makes contact with direct experience only at the periphery, where conscious states and events are hypothetically linked into the structure.”
Ooooooh, fascinating. I had no idea, said the robot. ha ha ha. Yeah, right. What about Ned Block, sucker?! Oh, if only I could retort. Maro, where’s dat fucking paper! We gotta find it! I think it’s under ‘B’. QUICK! Before the moment has passed! “Chapter 2: Can the Mind Change the World?” Is that it? Lets see... Page 29? “Later (Putnam, 1967), he argued in favor of the identity on the grounds that it was more plausible to suppose mental states are functional states (as he then called them) than that they are behavioral or physical states.” Yes, yes, get to the punctum already. Ohh yeah, I love dis part:

Putnam was my teacher during both my undergraduate and graduate days, and I fear I have absorbed his ambivalence toward functionalism. My teacher has had a habit of changing his mind, but never has he done so within a single essay, and so in this chapter I have surpassed him. My chapter starts out as an argument for functionalism, but it ends up suggesting an argument against it.

Da’s’o awesome. Anyway, carrying on: “intentional content, that is, what is shared by the belief that grass grows and the desire that grass grows, the that grass grows that both states are directed toward.” Hey, I coulda totally written somethin on dis’hit re: Burge. I remember... I remember... in class one time. When we read this piece... Everyone jumped on Ned Block’s notion of ‘intentional content’, but there was really no reason too. They just did it because it was the weakest point in the piece. What a fuckin shame. Poor Ned Block. “The question at hand is whether the sciences of the mind preclude intentional content from causal relevance to behavior.” And I remember dat when I asked to use Ned Block for my essay topic, the prof shut me down. It seemed really unfair, as though Ned Block wasn’t fashionable enough or trendy enough for me to write on. Real fuckin shame, dat. Real fuckin shame. Der’s actually nothin wrong wid his ‘intentional content’, at least, not in de way dat he uses it in dis chapter. He just needs a little more explanation, da’s all. Oh, here’s de best part. He words dis in a way dat no one else has, in my humble opinion. “the processors in the head are not sensitive to content, so how could content have any effect on the outputs or changes of state of the system of processors?” Isn dat great, Maro? “And if content can’t affect the operation of this system of processors, how could it play any role in producing behavior?” I’m so glad I remembered dis’hit. I have to admit dat when Ned Block gets goin wid all his qualia shit I’m fuckin bored to tears, but dis really hits de nail exactly on d’head.



Whoa, Maro, frickin Gung Chen is frickin adjournin de meetin already. Where to now? Well, maybe I’ll jus go home an go to sleep for a change. I’m done worn out.