3 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2018
    1. For a pure disposition is a fictitious entity. The expressions that ostensibly denote dispo- sitions are best construed as syncategorematic parts of statements of the lawlike regularities in which (as we say) the dispositions are manifest.

      Trying to unpack this, Lewis is stemming away from Behaviorism to understand the hidden truth about dispositions where there a purely fictitious. I am getting myself caught up in what I believe to be circular reasoning that these dispositions are false but we are still able to conceptualize their construction or manifestation based upon syncategorematic parts. Lewis continues by saying that the causal connection between an experience and its typical occasions have some component of analytic necessity. How does this relate to dispositions?

    2. These coexistent nonphysical phenomena may be quite unrelated to physical phenomena;

      Would non-physical phenomena be considered real? Lewis discusses how they cannot be explained by physical phenomena, so does that entail there must be a non-physical explanation? Does non-physical phenomena need an explanation or cause and effect? I do not agree with Lewis's defense that they cannot be called experiences because I do not accept his definition of experience (that physical states possess the definitive characteristics of experience) (17).

    3. Or if there is, after all, a way in which it is analytic that experiences are unlocated, that way is irrelevant: perhaps in our presystematic thought we regard only concreta as located in a primary sense, and abstracta as located in a merely derivative sense by their inherence in located conereta.

      Is there a way in which it is analytic that experiences are unlocated? How is this possibility prejudiced? To say it is irrelevant is not to conclude it could be something else non-physically. If there is a location, it would seem there is an analytic necessity. The word abstract almost seems misleading, as if their is some source or derivative (such as a location) for the conclusion of effect. What if these experiences are phenomena with no definitive characteristics and cannot be known based on being "together with the sense of expressions by which they are referred to as things of that kind" (19). That would leave unlocated phenomena that is potentially unique to each first-person experience, subjective and indescribable.