Academic literature on the topic 'Mentalistic terms'

The later Wittgenstein uses children in his philosophical arguments against the traditional views of language. Describing how they learn language is one of his philosophical methods for setting philosophers free from their views and enabling them to see the world in a different way. The purpose of this paper is to explore what features of children he takes advantage of in his arguments, and to show how we can read Wittgenstein in terms of education. Two children in Philosophical Investigations are discussed. The feature of the first child is the qualitative difference from adults. Wittgenstein uses the feature to criticize Augustinian pictures of language which tell us that children learn language by ostensive definition alone. The referential theory of meaning is so strong that philosophers fail to see the qualitative gap and to explain language-learning. The second child appears in an arithmetical instruction. Although he was understood to master counting numbers, he suddenly shows deviant reactions. Wittgenstein argues against the mentalistic idea of understanding by calling attention to the potential otherness of the child. This could happen anytime the child has not learned counting correctly. The two features show that teaching is unlike telling, an activity toward the other who does not understand our explanations. Since we might not understand learners because of otherness, the justification of teaching is a crucial problem that is not properly answered so long as otherness is unrecognized. As long as we ignore otherness, we would not be aware that we might mistreat learners.

This paper evaluates some philosophical views regarding the self who is an ethical deliberator and agent-specifically the traditional atomistic individualist self and the expanded biocentric self of deep ecology. The paper then presents an alternative manner of thinking about the ethical self which avoids some of the philosophical difficulties of the foregoing views. This alternative draws on the recent work by Val Plumwood and Donna Haraway. Haraway's cyborg identity is a kind of self-in-relation (Plumwood's term) which allows for ethical deliberations that take relations with others seriously without losing individuality in problematic holism (as deep ecology does). Self-in-relation is defined by the relation of intentional inclusion. This relation is given a functionalist, non-mentalistic interpretation. The notions of ontological foresight and moral foresight are introduced to enable determinations of moral responsibility without falling back into the problematic universalism which otherwise results from the functionalist view of cyborg self-in-relation.