One Man's Observation Is Another Man's Closed

The Line That I Am Urging As Today's Conventional Wisdom Is Not A Denial Of Consciousness. It Is Often Called, With More Reason, Arepudiation Of Mind. It Is Indeed A Repudiation Of Mind As A Second Substance, Over And Above Body. It Can Be Described Less Harshly As An Identification Of Mind With Some Of The Faculties, States, And Activities Of The Body. Mental States And Events Are A Special Subclass Of The States And Events Of The Human Or Animal Body.

My Position Is A Naturalistic One; I See Philosophy Not As An A Priori Propaedeutic Or Groundwork For Science, But As Continuous With Science. I See Philosophy And Science As In The Same Boat--a Boat Which, To Revert To Neurath's Figure As I So Often Do, We Can Rebuild Only At Sea While Staying Afloat In It. There Is No External Vantage Point, No First Philosophy.

... Two Men Could Be Just Alike In All Their Dispositions To Verbal Behavior Under All Possible Sensory Stimulations, And Yet Themeanings Or Ideas Expressed In Their Identically Triggered And Identically Sounding Utterances Could Diverge Radically, For The Two Men, In A Wide Range Of Cases.

One Man's Observation Is Another Man's Closed Book Or Flight Of Fancy.

The Mastery Of One's Phonemes May Be Compared To The Violinist's Mastery Of Fingering. The Violin String Lends Itself To A Continuous Gradation Of Tones, But The Musician Learns The Discrete Intervals At Which To Stop The String In Order To Play The Conventional Notes. We Sound Our Phonemes Like Poor Violinists, Approximating Each Time To A Fancied Norm, And We Receive Our Neighbor's Renderings Indulgently, Mentally Rectifying The More Glaring Inaccuracies.