Wikipedia will eventually triumph over all other existing encyclopedias. Does any edition of Britannica or Encarta have a “List of films ordered by the use of the word ‘fuck’“?
Yesterday’s featured article was about philosopher and socialist Hilary Putnam, who is the Putnam in the “Quine-Putnam indispensability thesis” and definitely my kind of thinker. (By that I mean I admire his style, not that I am even remotely in his league.) Partly I’m sympathetic because I was accused in the mid-90s by a theologian friend of suffering from terminal case of functionalism.
Putnam is a kind of anti-Chomsky, having developed the dominant model in the theory of mind, but moved away from it as a result of seeing its weaknesses, even as others have gone on to develop it. From his Wikipedia entry I liked this quote especially, under the heading of “Criticism”:
“Ironically, Putnam himself may have been his own most formidable philosophical adversary.”
Dude.
Huh. Funny you should mention functionalism. It draws the same kind of strawman criticism that the EM attracts. That’s not to say that there are no valid criticisms of this mind theory. It’s just that the most vocal critics aren’t smart enough to know what they are. They just regurgitate the same tired old rubbish (Chinese room anyone?).
Anyway, everyone should check out the wiki on P2X Receptors. If you get past the bad grammar and dodgy spelling, it’s very informative. Change your life, even.
Ooh! Hilary Putnam. Desert island reading matter.
The talk page for “List of films that most frequently use the word fuck” is worth a look too. Its tone ranges from the pensive (“Just out of interest, does this only cover the word ‘fuck’, or does it also cover ‘fucking’, ‘fucker’, etc.?”) to the admiring (“I found this to be totally awesome”) to the profound (“Nobody will be killed or maimed by inaccurate ‘fuck’ usage data”) and back again. Does Putnam evoke the same range of responses and, if not, why not?
Functionalism is dead. Even Kim thinks that the qualia objection succeeds.