---- By J. L. S.
----------- for the Grice Club
---- THIS IS THE FIRST PART OF a contribution. The second will be "Digital-to-Analog Converter" (Gricean), apres my friend: "I am converting all my CD collection to vinyl".
From Stanford Encyclopaedia, "mental representation" -- "section: imagery".
D. Pitt writes:
"The distinction between [something] and discursive representation can be characterized in terms of the distinction between analog and digital representation (Goodman 1976). This distinction has itself been variously understood (Fodor & Pylyshyn 1981, Goodman 1976, Haugeland 1981, Lewis 1971, McGinn 1989)."
-- the discrete/continuum distinction.
"A widely accepted construal is that analog representation is continuous (i.e., in virtue of continuously variable properties of the representation), while digital representation is discrete (i.e., in virtue of properties a representation either has or doesn't have) (Dretske 1981)."
"An analog/digital distinction may also be made with respect to cognitive processes. (Block 1983.)) On this understanding of the analog/digital distinction, imagistic representations, which represent in virtue of properties that may vary continuously (such as being more or less bright, loud, vivid, etc.), would be analog, while conceptual representations, whose properties do not vary continuously (a thought cannot be more or less about Elvis: either it is or it is not) would be digital."
--- Block, incidentally, we would use at this cognitive-science seminar I was _forced_ to attend, and he cares to quote Grice 1975a ("Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre") as a good manifesto of functionalism.
--- So
"Describe the aroma of coffee" Wittgenstein asked. "Analog." Can't. Kant.
"Is Elvis dead?"
(1) Yes
(2) No
(3) Truth-Value Gap
Pitt:
"a thought cannot be more or less about Elvis Presley: either it is or it is not". Digital
Fuzzy logic: digital? Yes. Pseudo-analogic? Perhaps.
This excerpted from "Precis of "Aspects of Reason"", THIS BLOG>
"Grice features five features of _flat_ 'reason'"
"Flat reason is:
(1) not variable,
(2) basic,
(3) non-valuational,
(4) essential to the idea of rational being, and
(5) the source for degree-variant reason.
He then goes on to list thirteen (13) manifestations ("excellences") of this "degree-variant" (analog) reason which Grice sees as 'derived' from 'digital' reason. Degree variant reason involves
1) clear headedness,
2) critical acumen,
3) thoroughness,
4) tenacity in argument,
5) felixibility,
6) orderliness,
7) breadth,
8) a sense of relevance,
9) intellectual caution,
10) nose (intuitiveness),
11) inventiveness,
12) subtlety, and
13) memory. -- cfr. Kramer, THIS BLOG, "Comments on "Grice's Grand Plan"
For Grice, some of these (13 manifestations) are truly specificatory
-- e.g.
6) orderliness,
and
2) critical acumen).
Some are just ancillary
13) memory) -- just as in tennis a good eyesight, while indispensable, is not itself a part of excellence as having a powerful service is.
Tomorrow the digital-to-analog converter (Gricean) for the other team.
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Oh my. Nothing is continuous as identical, unchanging, without distinction, timeless etc. For some this might be the identity paradox, namely, that rivers change, so no actual individual has continuity, and must be therefore uniquely discrete, but also simultaneously evanescent. I would think this to be one of the earliest proof problems in pantheism, is so far as thetic presence cannot have 'digital' presence of itself, without denial of the eternal substantiality of that argument.
ReplyDeleteRight. There are serious issues in the analog/digital distinction, and I'm only providing some of them as they relate to Grice. We are furthering Kramer's hypothesis that Grice, qua analytic (or digital-obsessed analytic, yet analog mind in an analog world).
ReplyDeleteSo, the idea is that pheonema are _analog_: they display degrees, they are continuous, they are variable. They are mostly incomprehensible. And when they are not, i.e. when they become a memory, for psychology of memory tells us that memory is analogical, it no longer keeps its status as a central feature of what makes us rational (vide Grice above comparing 'memory' with 'eyesight' in tennis -- as opposed to a having a good service). But there are further problems, and your image of the Heraclitean river is apt. Indeed, it may not be casual that Grice's analysis of "personal identity" (in his early Mind essay for 1941) is strictly in terms of 'total temporary states' (THIS BLOG). So, while it depends on an analog faculty of the 'mind', it still can be game for analysis of discrete units (those precise 'states'). His analysis is pretty complex (THIS BLOG), and indeed he raises the issue, "Some will say that it can't be that each sentence featuring "I" -- as in "I went to the supermarket today" -- gets analysed in such an obscurus per obscurius way. But we philosophers are used to this." or something. Of course he meant his analytic mind was used to that?