Psychology as Philosophy, Philosophy as Psychology - Articles and Reviews 2006-2019

Description

Since philosophical problems are the result of our innate psychology, or as Wittgenstein put it, due to the lack of perspicuity of language, they run throughout human discourse and behavior, so there is endless need for philosophical analysis, not only in the ‘human sciences’ of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, history, literature, religion, etc., but in the ‘hard sciences’ of physics, mathematics, and biology. It is universal to mix the language game questions with the real scientific ones as to what the empirical facts are. Scientism is ever-present and Wittgenstein, arguably the greatest intuitive psychologist of all time, has laid it before us long ago, beginning with the Blue and Brown Books in the early 1930’s. Language is programmed in our genes and is involved in nearly all our social behavior. Philosophy in the strict sense (i.e., academic philosophy), is as Wittgenstein showed us, the study of the way language is used (language games) and I regard it as the descriptive psychology of higher order thought (i.e., pretty much everything involving language which is often called System 2 or slow thinking). However, as I hope I have shown in my writings over the last decade, nonlinguistic behavior or System 1 or fast thinking is also described with language and this leads to endless confusion which I have tried to clarify here and which is summarized in the tables that I present. It is my contention that the table of intentionality (rationality, mind, thought, language, personality etc.) that features prominently here describes more or less accurately, or at least serves as an heuristic for, how we think and behave, and so it encompasses not merely philosophy and psychology, but everything else (history, literature, mathematics, politics etc.). Note especially that intentionality and rationality as I (along with Searle, Wittgenstein and others) view it, includes both conscious deliberative linguistic System 2 and unconscious automated prelinguistic System 1 actions or reflexes. I provide a critical survey of some of the major findings of two of the most eminent students of behavior of modern times, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, on the logical structure of intentionality (mind, language, behavior), taking as my starting point Wittgenstein’s fundamental discovery –that all truly ‘philosophical’ problems are the same—confusions about how to use language in a particular context, and so all solutions are the same—looking at how language can be used in the context at issue so that its truth conditions (Conditions of Satisfaction or COS) are clear. The basic problem is that one can say anything, but one cannot mean (state clear COS for) any arbitrary utterance and meaning is only possible in a very specific context. I analyze various writings by and about them from the modern perspective of the two systems of thought (popularized as ‘thinking fast, thinking slow’), employing a new table of intentionality and new dual systems nomenclature. I show that this is a powerful heuristic for describing behavior with critical reviews of the writings of a wide variety of behavioral scientists (i.e., everyone). The first group of articles attempt to give some insight into how we behave that is reasonably free of theoretical delusions. In the next three groups I comment on three of the principal delusions preventing a sustainable world— technology, religion and politics (cooperative groups). People believe that society can be saved by them, so I provide some suggestions in the rest of the book as to why this is unlikely via short articles and reviews of recent books by well-known writers. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ............................................................................................................................... 1 THE DESCRIPTION OF BEHAVIOR WITHOUT DELUSION The Logical Structure of Consciousness (behavior, personality, rationality, higher order thought, intentionality) ........................................................................................................ 9 The Foundation Stone of Psychology and Philosophy--A Critical Review of 'On Certainty' by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969) (1951) ............................................................ 17 Review of Wittgenstein And Psychology- A Practical Guide by Harre and Tissaw (2005) ................................................................................................................................................. .47 Review of Wittgenstein -- Rethinking the Inner by Paul Johnston (1993) ...................... 63 Review of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology by Malcolm Budd 203p (1989) .. 83 Review of Making the Social World by John Searle (2010)............................................ 102 Review of 'John R Searle-Thinking About the Real World' by Franken et al eds. (2010) ............................................................................................................................................... 124 Review of ‘Philosophy in a New Century’ by John Searle (2008) ................................. 142 Can there be a Chinese Philosophy? -- a Review of Searle's Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy--Bo Mou Ed 440p (2008) ................................................................................ 162 Seeing With the Two Systems of Thought—a Review of ‘Seeing Things As They Are: a Theory of Perception’ by John Searle (2015) .................................................................... 187 Review of Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy by Paul Horwich 248p (2013) .................. 218 Another cartoon portrait of the mind from the reductionist metaphysicians--a review of Peter Carruthers ‘The Opacity of Mind’ (2011) ............................................................... 240 Review of The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker (2008) ............................................... 266 Review of “Are We Hardwired? by Clark & Grunstein Oxford (2000) ....................... 278 THE DIGITAL DELUSION --COMPUTERS ARE PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE IS MATH AND HI-TECH WILL SAVE US Scientism on Steroids: A Review of Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett (2003)……282 Review of I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (2007) ..................................... 298 Will Hominoids or Androids Destroy the Earth? — A Review of How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil (2012) ...................................................................................................... 314 What Do Paraconsistent, Undecidable, Random, Computable and Incomplete mean? A Review of Godel's Way: Exploits into an undecidable world by Gregory Chaitin, Francisco A Doria, Newton C.A. da Costa 160p (2012) ................................................. 327 Wolpert, Chaitin and Wittgenstein on impossibility, incompleteness, the liar paradox, theism, the limits of computation, a non-quantum mechanical uncertainty principle and the universe as computer—the ultimate theorem in Turing Machine Theory .......... 341 Review of 'The Outer Limits of Reason' by Noson Yanofsky 403p (2013)…………..346 THE RELIGIOUS DELUSION – A BENEVOLENT UNIVERSE WILL SAVE US Review of Religion Explained-- The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by Pascal Boyer (2002) ............................................................................................................. 361 Review of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber 2nd ed 851p (2001) ..................... 373 The most profound spiritual autobiography of all time? - a review of "The Knee of Listening" by Adi Da (Franklin Jones) (1995) .................................................................. 391 Do our automated unconscious behaviors reveal our real selves and hidden truths about the universe? -- A review of David Hawkins ‘Power vs Force--the hidden determinants of human behavior –author’s official authoritative edition’ 412p (2012) (original edition 1995) ........................................................................................................ 395 THE ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY DELUSION-DEMOCRACY, DIVERSITY AND EQUALITY WILL SAVE US Is JK Rowling More Evil Than Me? .................................................................................. 400 The Transient Suppression of the Worst Devils of our Nature—a review of Steven Pinker’s ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined’(2012) ....... 404 A Review of The Murderer Next Door by David Buss (2005) ....................................... 409 Review of Individuality and Entanglement by Herbert Gintis 357p (2017) ................ 421 Altruism, Jesus and the End of the World—how the Templeton Foundation bought a Harvard Professorship and attacked Evolution, Rationality and Civilization. A review of E.O. Wilson 'The Social Conquest of Earth' (2012) and Nowak and Highfield ‘SuperCooperators’ (2012) ................................................................................................. 435 Suicide by Democracy - an Obituary for America and the World ............................... 450 How the Seven Sociopaths Who Rule China are Winning World War Three and Three Ways to Stop Them ............................................................................................................. 499