The Unethicity of Wiki: "Citation Needed"

--- by JLS
------ for the GC

--- WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO DISQUALIFY A GRICEIAN SO? The wiki writes of Peacocke:

"Peacocke has been criticised for his unnecessarily abstruse and convoluted style."

Yet, they manage to make money out of quoting his very SUBTLE theories, that only an idiot will fail to understand on fifth reading. Let's consider all of Gricean maxims as we read this rather idiotic summary of Peacocke's work from the wiki:

"Of Peacocke's work, he is perhaps best known for the first chapter of his 1983 book, Sense and Content, entitled "Sensation and the Content of Experience."".


Earlier?

I think we have earlier than that.

"In this chapter," -- this seems to signal that the wiki writer -- anonymous, to boot -- only cared to read THAT chapter, and for a different assignment,

"Peacocke defends the claim that perceptual experience, over and above its intentional content, has certain sensational properties."

This is NOT the 'sense' (or is it? I think it IS) when we say

"Mame, you're just sensational
-- your wit has proved to
be inspirational, Mame!

---

"Peacocke gives a scenario where intentional content alone cannot capture every aspect of the experience -- the sensational property of the experience. Some of those who defend qualia have used these examples as evidence of their existence. Michael Tye and Fred Dretske have claimed that the supposed extra quality can indeed be captured in terms of intentional content."

I love Dretske and came to love him via his colleague: D. W. Stampe, who, along with Patton (vide "Kripke on Grice", this blog) I count as the best critics Grice ever had). Dretske is somewhat sombre when it comes to causation, so I personally wouldn't be too much bothered if Dretske thinks that some things are intentional which Peacocke does not.

----

All this of course relates to Criteria III in Grice's "Some remarks about the senses": the phenomenological qualia.

The wiki continues:

"In the 1983 book, Peacocke assumed that the intentional content of a mental state", or psychological attitude, as Grice would prefer, "is exclusively conceptual content, i.e. the content is such that the subject of the state needs to possess all the concepts that specify the intentional content in question."

So, if Carnap says,

"Pirots karulise elatically" -- he must be joking.

Wiki:

"From about 1986 and onwards, Peacocke abandoned this assumption, arguing that some mental states, in particular perceptual experiences and representational states implicated in subpersonal information processing (e.g., in the subconscious parsing of heard speech), have non-conceptual intentional content."

I agree. That's why it's best to refer to 'content complex' (Cfr. Grice on propositional complex -- a complex that is not YET a proposition, but whose transcendental justification is to count as the content of a 'that'-clause. For, how would we REPORT 'non-conceptual intentional content'? We can only do it opaquely, never transparently. We can do it from OUR perspective, not the perceiver's. Or we have to assume that we ARE the perceiver.

The wiki goes on:

"Peacocke is often seen as a leading proponent of this notion of non-conceptual intentional content."

Which is just as well because 'concept' is overrated in philosophy. The concept reduces totally to the perceptio. The perceptum/conceptum distinction of the medievalists. And we are never, as Grice notes (WoW:iii) happy with ascribing 'content' or a 'concept' to a thing like an 'or' or an 'of', or a 'the'. Yet they feature grossly in our thoughts, and utterances.

----

The wiki goes on:

"In his 1992, A Study of Concepts, Peacocke gives a detailed exposition of a philosophical theory of concept possession, according to which the nature and identity conditions for concepts may be given, in a non-circular way, by the conditions a thinker has to satisfy in order to possess the relevant concepts. The theory is a version of a so-called "conceptual" or "inferential role" theory of concepts."

He has expanded on this in an account of a rationalist and realist (NOT intuitionist -- to think that he could have separated from the malign influence of his tutor Dummett is praiseworthy -- also that he exceeded his tutor's capabilities: Dummett was only Wykeham prof. at Oxford -- Peacocke became a Waynflete. Like that.

The wiki concludes:

"Peacocke has been criticised for his unnecessarily abstruse and convoluted style."

Perhaps some of the Dummettian influence? Just joking. I, for one, find his prose transparent. And he occasionally brings in a diagram or two (Cfr. Alice, "What's the use of a book without a picture or an illustration?").