Papineau Quotes

#1. Even if no learning to speak of was involved in locking my mental term onto doorknobs, it is odd to say that therefore my possession of a doorknob concept is innate, just as it is odd to say that my head-injury-caused singing is innate.

David Papineau

#2. I realize that I won't have quite enough time to understand everything - but that hasn't stopped me wanting to understand as much as I can.

David Papineau

#3. On the methodological issue, I think that would be hopeless to try to adjudicate between my view and orthodoxy by appeal to phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms.

David Papineau

#4. I'm not so sure that I am a reductionist in the strict type-identity sense. The issues here are messy. But I certainly a reductionist in the more general sense which is opposed to eliminativism and dualism.

David Papineau

#5. Everybody agrees that a future in which you are dead is a very bad thing, and that it isn't made any better by your not being around to notice how bad it is.

David Papineau

#6. I don't think that we are capable of anything like this many possible colour responses. Instead I argue that the perception of colour differences between two surfaces viewed side-by-side is a gestalt phenomenon.

David Papineau

#7. Nature is God's first missionary. Where there is no Bible there are sparkling stars. Where there are not preachers there are spring times ...
If a person has nothing but nature, then nature is enough to reveal something about God.

Max Lucado

#8. I don't think that we can figure out what is going on in conscious colour perception just by phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms as well. We need to figure out what information is present in the mechanisms that constitute conscious colour perception.

David Papineau

#9. Peoples, be peoples and others will respect you. Be courtiers and others will scorn you and it will be well deserved.

Louis-Joseph Papineau

#10. While old men feel sensibly enough their own advance in years, they do not sufficiently recollect it in those whom they have seenyoung.

Thomas Jefferson

#11. I don't have much use for the concept of innateness. The everyday concept incorporates a number of different notions that can come apart in in many ways, and as a result encourages a range of dangerously fallacious inferences.

David Papineau

#12. Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn't care, so to speak, how the trick is done.

David Papineau

#13. I just bet Dad another thousand that you'll be back by this Christmas." - I

Whitney G.

#14. Philosophers sometimes also use 'reductionist' more strictly, to mean 'type-identities' between mental and physical categories, and to exclude 'non-reductive physicalisms' like metaphysical functionalism.

David Papineau

#15. He chanced a glance at her. She was not tearful; that was one of the many wonderful things about Ginny, she was rarely weepy. He had sometimes thought that having six brothers must have toughened her up.

J.K. Rowling

#16. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given to us by education.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#17. Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Francis Bacon

#18. I say that there is nothing deficient about our current theoretical grasp of mind-brain identities. The problem is only that they are counter-intuitive.

David Papineau

#19. I think my view is rather more radical than Pete Mandik's. Both of us want to show that colour perception doesn't transcend what can be conceptualized, but I don't think he goes so far as to deny that it doesn't involve different responses to all the discriminable surfaces.

David Papineau

#20. You are the only person who can make you happy and whole. You do not have another half out there waiting to be discovered.

Raphael Zernoff

#21. Anyone can say anything about you, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, it's none of your business. It is not their mind that is in your head anyways.

The Eldest

#22. Nothing exists without music, for the universe itself is said to have been framed by a kind of harmony of sounds, and the heaven itself revolves under the tone of that harmony.

Isidore Of Seville

#23. If there is such a simple argument for physicalism, how come everybody hasn't always been a physicalist? That's a good question, and there is a good answer. The 'causal completeness of physics' wasn't widely accepted until recently.

David Papineau

#24. After all, in supporting phenomenal concepts I am in a sense siding with introspection against the more behaviourist Wittgensteinians. But even so I don't think that introspection is powerful enough to resolve the specific issue about how many colours you can see.

David Papineau

#25. There is a brain mechanism that works to identify colour differences directly, without first identifying the absolute colour of each surface. So on my view there is no reason to suppose anything like ten million colour responses to surface viewed singly.

David Papineau

#26. Eliminating the Death Tax will continue to restore consumer confidence, spur capital investment, and create new jobs which are critical components of economic growth, particularly within the small business community.

Howard Coble