Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Reply to Haldane 169
7 Earlier (see p. 13) I described teleological talk in biology as ‘as if ’ talk. Equally
one might, as I have done here, follow Karen Neander, in what ontologically
comes to almost the same thing, in describing the function of an object in
evolutionary terms, as what it was selected for. See Karen Neander, ‘Functions as
Selected Effects: The Conceptual Analyst’s Defense’, Philosophy of Science, 58
(1991), 168–84.
8 See also my essay ‘Physicalism and Emergence’, in J.J.C. Smart, Essays Metaphysical
and Moral (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). This essay originally appeared
in Neuroscience, 6 (1987), 109–13.
9 Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (London: Vintage, 1993). See ch. 3,
‘Two Cheers for Reductionism’.
10 Ibid., p. 42.
11 See W.V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960),
pp. 212ff.
12 See David Lewis, ‘Attitudes De Dicto and De Se’, Philosophical Review, 88 (1979),
513–43.
13 I have of course oversimplified. ‘Sentence’ has to be relativized to a language, or
else we should have to talk of classes of intertranslatable sentences, and Quine
has pointed out the obscurity or indeterminacy of individuation of a language and
of the concept of translation. Folk psychology gives only an approximation to
truth, and it is part of the natural history of humans and animals. (An animal
does not itself need to have a language to have its beliefs and desires singled out
by mentions of our sentences.) Thus desires and beliefs are woolly like clouds but
nevertheless can be identified with brain states imprecisely described. If and
when we make robots that can learn and use a language this part of natural
history will be seen to be ontologically reducible to the physical. The reduction
already looks a plausible speculation. In metaphysics I try to eschew indexicals,
but the sort of indexical in ‘true of himself ’ above is all right. It is not a true
indexical and is only a device for cross reference.
14 David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960) and
David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973).
15 W.V. Quine, ‘Necessary Truth’, in W.V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other
Essays (New York: Random House, 1966).
16 See my essay ‘Materialism’ in J.J.C. Smart, Essays Metaphysical and Moral.
17 B.A. Farrell, ‘Experience’, Mind, 59 (1950), 170–98.
18 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953); Gilbert
Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949); Robert Kirk, Raw Feelings
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Austen Clark, Sensory Qualities (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993).
19 D.M. Armstrong, ‘The Headless Woman Illusion and the Defence of Materialism’,
Analysis, 29 (1968–9), 48–9. This article was written in less feminist times:
no doubt now it would be a headless person illusion.
20 See D.M. Armstrong, in Armstrong and Malcolm, Consciousness and Causality,
especially pp. 110–15.
21 Roger Teichmann, ‘The Chicken and the Egg’, Mind, 100 (1991), 371–2.