Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Be careful with thought experiments - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (97)
I'm not sure how you can appeal to map-territory talk if you do not allow language to refer to things. All the maps that we can share with one another are made of language. You apparently don't believe that the word "Chicago" on a literal map refers to the physical city with that name. How then do you understand the map-territory metaphor to work? And, without the conventional "referentialist" understanding of language (including literal and metaphorical maps and territories), how do you even state the problem of the Mind-Projection Fallacy?
It is hard for me to make sense of this paragraph when I gather that its writer doesn't believe that he is referring to any actual neurons when he tells this story about what "neurons" are doing.
Suppose that you attempt an arithmetic computation in your head, and you do not communicate this fact with anyone else. Is it at all meaningful to ask whether your arithmetic computation was correct?
Eliezer cites Putnam's XYZ argument approvingly in Heat vs. Motion. A quote:
See also Reductive Reference:
ETA: The Heat vs. Motion post has a pretty explicit statement of Putnam's thesis in Eliezer's own words:
(Bolding added.) Wouldn't this be an example of "think[ing] of meaning as being a kind of correspondence between words and either things or concepts"?