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  1. Jeremy Goodman's avatar
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  4. Valerie Dawson's avatar

    Exactly! The question is not whether AI is conscious or forms human-like intentions. The question is whether AI–in carrying out…

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  6. David Wallace's avatar

    This is a very strange comment. Searle’s Chinese Room, and his general position on intentionality, were controversial, and criticized (correctly,…

  7. Nat Hansen's avatar

More Unger on “Empty Ideas”

Here.  (Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)

Feel free to continue the discussion here.  (I gather from the last thread on Unger that the 3 Quarks discussion sections tend to go off the rails.)

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2 responses to “More Unger on “Empty Ideas””

  1. Every time a piece of philosophy comes out for public consumption that 'analyses' stuff you can buy from Ikea I die a little more inside. I think it's time to hire a PR firm.

  2. In my comment on the previous Unger post, I latched onto Unger's claim that nothing ever got established in philosophy. Although Unger did claim that in the interview, it's now clear that the thrust of his book, Empty Ideas, is quite different. The thesis of this book is that (mainstream, analytic) philosophers do not propose theories that "delineate a way for concrete reality to be which differs from other ways for it to be" or, using Unger's proposed terminology, philosophers now work only with concretely empty ideas. Instead, Unger claims, such philosophers content themselves to philosophizing merely about the use of and connections between certain words.

    I haven't read the whole book yet, but here is a counterexample off the top of my head (although I realize that Unger has chosen not to deal with Ethics, I think this is mainstream enough to be fair game): Cornell Realism, which includes the view that ethics is part of the woodwork of concrete reality. Although, to not mix metaphors, I should say that ethics is part of the "cement" of concrete reality.

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