... in doing our psychology, we want to attribute mental states fully opaquely because it's the fully opaque reading which tells u...s what the agent has in mind, and it's what the agent has in mind that causes his behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modern theories of mental dysfunction led to the elimination of witches from our serious ontology. The concepts of folk psychology...--belief, desire, fear, sensation, pain, joy, and so on--await a similar fate, according to the view at issue. And when neuroscience has matured to the point where the poverty of our current conceptions is apparent to everyone, and the superiority of the new framework is established, we shall then be able to set about reconceiving our internal states and activities, within a truly adequate conceptual framework at last.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child bu...t a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively. . . .LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They [women] can use their abilities to support each other, even as they develop more effective and appropriate ways of dealing wi...th power.... Women do not need to diminish other women ... [they] need the power to advance their own development, but they do not "need" the power to limit the development of others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would not... follow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the whole, "organic" illnesses of the body are viewed as a misfortune over which the victim has little control. Not so for "men...tal" illnesses. These diseases of the mind become diseases of the "self." We (our "selves") can distance ourselves from our "bodily" illnesses: "my leg is broken" or "my heart is failing." But, because of mind-body dualism, our mind is our self. "My mind is sick" is not differentiated psychologically from "I am sick." We cannot distance ourselves, take a detached view of our minds: we are our minds. When a disease affects brain function, the afflicted person and those around him feel that the "self" must be somehow in control of the disorder of "self."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fundamentally the male artist approximates more to the psychology of woman, who, biologically speaking, is a purely creative being... and whose personality has been as mysterious and unfathomable to the man as the artist has been to the average person.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The conflict between science and religion is in reality a misunderstanding of both. Scientific materialism has merely introduced a... new hypostasis, and that is an intellectual sin. It has given another name to the supreme principle of reality and has assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed an old thing. Whether you call the principle of existence "God," "matter," "energy," or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol. The materialist is a metaphysician malgré lui. Faith, on the other hand, tries to retain a primitive mental condition on merely sentimental grounds. It is unwilling to give up the primitive, childlike relationship to mind-created and hypostatized figures; it wants to go on enjoying the security and confidence of a world still presided over by powerful, responsible, and kindly parents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »