David Papineau Quotes

Quotes about:

• I realize that I won't have quite enough time to understand everything - but that hasn't stopped me wanting to understand as much as I can.

  David Papineau

  Enough Time, Realizing, Enough

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I say that there is nothing deficient about our current theoretical grasp of mind-brain identities. The problem is only that they are counter-intuitive.

  David Papineau

  Brain, Mind, Identity

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Nearly everybody nowadays accepts the 'causal completeness of physics' - every physical event (or at least its probability) has a full physical cause. This leaves no room for non-physical things to make a causal difference to physical effects. But it would be absurd to deny that thoughts and feelings (and population movements and economic depressions . . .) cause physical effects. So they must be physical things.

  David Papineau

  Differences, Feelings, Events

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I don't have much use for the concept of innateness. The everyday concept incorporates a number of different notions that can come apart in in many ways, and as a result encourages a range of dangerously fallacious inferences.

  David Papineau

  Numbers, Everyday, Different

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• This doesn't show that there is anything wrong with our theoretical understanding, any more than the intuition that the Earth is at rest shows that there must be something theoretically wrong with Copernicanism, or the intuition that time is moving shows that there is something theoretically wrong with the block universe 'B series' view of change.

  David Papineau

  Block, Moving, Views

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Everybody agrees that a future in which you are dead is a very bad thing, and that it isn't made any better by your not being around to notice how bad it is.

  David Papineau

  Made, Agree, Bad Things

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn't care, so to speak, how the trick is done.

  David Papineau

  Done, Care, Speak

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I don't think that we can figure out what is going on in conscious colour perception just by phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms as well. We need to figure out what information is present in the mechanisms that constitute conscious colour perception.

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Perception, Brain

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• The 'phenomenal concept' issue is rather different, I think. Here the question is whether there are concepts of experiences that are made available to subjects solely in virtue of their having had those experiences themselves. Is there a way of thinking about seeing something red, say, that you get from having had those experiences, and so isn't available to a blind person?

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Issues, Red

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• My first degree was in mathematics. That was great, but it didn't help with many of the things that puzzled me. I became a philosopher because I wanted to understand everything, especially those things that didn't make sense. And that has continued to be my philosophical motivation. That's one reason I have such a roving philosophical eye - once I have figured out a philosophical topic to my satisfaction, I find myself moving on to new problems.

  David Papineau

  Motivation, Moving, Philosophical

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• After all, in supporting phenomenal concepts I am in a sense siding with introspection against the more behaviourist Wittgensteinians. But even so I don't think that introspection is powerful enough to resolve the specific issue about how many colours you can see.

  David Papineau

  Powerful, Thinking, Issues

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com.

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• If neuroscientific research shows that those mechanisms only contain comparative information about colour differences, and have 'thrown away' more fine-grained information about the absolute colours of single surfaces, then that would support my position, in a way that just introspecting our colour experiences can't.

  David Papineau

  Differences, Support, Research

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Of course our genes will make some capacities very much easier to learn than others, and of course our genes themselves are not learned. But the point remains that genes themselves are not cognitive capacities, and that anything worth calling a cognitive capacity will depend to some degree on learning and so not be innate.

  David Papineau

  Degrees, Calling, Genes

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• The orthodox view of colour experience assumes that, when we see a colour difference between two surfaces viewed side-by-side, this is because we have different responses to each of the two surfaces viewed singly. Since we can detect colour differences between something like ten million different surfaces, this implies that we are capable of ten million colour responses to surfaces viewed singly.

  David Papineau

  Views, Two, Differences

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a 'downwards' causal influence on the physical realm in a straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that mental, biological and social phenomena must themselves be physical, in order to produce the physical effects that they do.

  David Papineau

  Smart, Order, Way

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• If there is such a simple argument for physicalism, how come everybody hasn't always been a physicalist? That's a good question, and there is a good answer. The 'causal completeness of physics' wasn't widely accepted until recently.

  David Papineau

  Simple, Good Questions, Answers

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• The use of neuroscientific data to help resolve phenomenological questions is proving a common theme in much contemporary thinking about the mind. How rich are the contents of visual perception? Does vision only tell us about shapes and colours, or does it also represent higher categories like lemon or umbrella?

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Data, Mind

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 20.

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• Again, when we view a scene fleetingly, do we consciously see all the details even though we don't retain them, or do we not see them in the first place? Neurological information is crucial to deciding these questions. After all, they are so interesting precisely because unaided introspection cannot resolve them. Rather we need to know what is going on in the brain activities that constitute visual awareness.

  David Papineau

  Views, Interesting, Brain

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I rather incline towards 'conceptualism', in line with my view of colour perception - I don't think that we can represent objects and properties for which we have no concepts, not even in perceptual experience. In this sense I differ from those who defend 'non-conceptual content' like Michael Tye and Chris Peacocke.

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Views, Perception

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• A certain kind of methodologically-minded philosopher of science is quick to read off metaphysical conclusions from features of scientific practice. Chemists don't derive their laws from fundamental physics, so reductive physicalism must be false. Biologists refer to natural numbers in some of their explanations, so numbers must exist. I think that this kind of thing makes for bad philosophy.

  David Papineau

  Philosophy, Thinking, Law

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• On the methodological issue, I think that would be hopeless to try to adjudicate between my view and orthodoxy by appeal to phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms.

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Views, Issues

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I think my view is rather more radical than Pete Mandik's. Both of us want to show that colour perception doesn't transcend what can be conceptualized, but I don't think he goes so far as to deny that it doesn't involve different responses to all the discriminable surfaces.

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Views, Perception

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Philosophers sometimes also use 'reductionist' more strictly, to mean 'type-identities' between mental and physical categories, and to exclude 'non-reductive physicalisms' like metaphysical functionalism.

  David Papineau

  Mean, Identity, Use

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But I don't regard that as a contentious issue. Even reductionists about chemistry will think that there are special chemical laws whose formulation makes essential use of chemical terminology.

  David Papineau

  Thinking, Law, Issues

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I'm not so sure that I am a reductionist in the strict type-identity sense. The issues here are messy. But I certainly a reductionist in the more general sense which is opposed to eliminativism and dualism.

  David Papineau

  Issues, Identity, Type

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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