Understanding Symbolic Language, Logic, and Aesthetic Experience
Symbolic Language: An Interpersonal Communication System
The symbolic language is an interpersonal communication system that carries out three basic functions:
- Representative: Linguistic signs are symbols used to represent states of affairs.
- Expressive: Linguistic signs show the speaker’s inner states.
- Appellate: Linguistic signs are addressed to the interlocutor, who is expected to take a certain action.
Formal and Informal Logic
Formal Logic: Studies the structure of arguments regardless of specific content. Formal logic deals with the study of rules that allow us to distinguish valid arguments from invalid ones.
Informal Logic: Studies the correct modes of argument in response to different contexts of dialogue and the issues dealt with therein.
Aesthetic Experience
Aesthetic experience is the encounter a human being has with beauty. It involves capturing the beauty of art and nature, and creating beautiful objects from the given reality.
Features of Aesthetic Experience:
- Transforms our vision of reality, making the world seem lighter and life more bearable, through which we discover a new meaning in things.
- Alters our experience of time, which passes almost without feeling. We can overcome the transience of ordinary time and enjoy eternity, moving seamlessly from past to present and future.
- Leads us to forget ourselves in the creation and contemplation of beauty.
- It’s intense but brief: the aesthetic pleasure is precarious, and the reality after contemplation seems harder.
Theories on the Brain and Mind
Theories on the brain and mind can be divided into three groups:
- Theories that explain the human psyche as a result of the brain’s development. These are called materialistic monism because they only admit a reality with a material nature.
- Theories that say man, besides the matter of his body, has a separate and intangible principle, commonly called the soul, which cannot explain human action. These theories are encompassed under the term dualism.
- Theories that try to go beyond the materialistic and dualistic.
Monistic Materialist Theories:
- Physicalist Materialism: Maintains that mental activities are mere physicochemical processes. Another form is cyber-physicalism, according to which the brain is nothing but a complicated computer.
- Emergent Materialism: Mental properties are not confined to the physical, but emerge evolutionarily from the physical.
Dualistic Theories:
- Platonic Dualism: Sees man as a composite of body and soul, but such a union is a mere accident. In reality, the soul is immaterial and immortal and existed before joining the body, so the real human being is his soul. The body is material and mortal.
- Hylemorphism: The soul and body are two main complementary and inseparable ingredients of a single reality or substance, of being special humano.este is a dualism, since k distinguishes two essential principles but stresses k can only be separated in our imagination, while in reality k always go together.
- Cartesian Dualism: Affirms that the human being is composed of the union of two completely different substances: the body (extended substance) and the soul (thinking substance).
- Interactionist Dualism: Supports several ideas:
- Mind and brain are two different realities.
- Claims that the self is a conscious mind.
- The welcome is insufficient by itself to give the reason for the parallel phenomena mentales.la interaction between the physical and mental occurs in the cerebral cortex.
Types of Reason and Freedom
Theoretical Reason: Deals with what cannot be otherwise.
Practical Reason: Is concerned with what may be otherwise, i.e., the study of realities that may or may not be, or may be in many different ways.
Historical Reason: Comes from our sense of historical development.
Vital Reason: Is not a way comparable to others, but such is life k razón.la contitutivo reason is an element of life, so k and we can understand this without reason.
Types of Freedom:
External Freedom: No one is prevented from moving and acting as we see fit behind the k allowed by the laws and customs of their country.
Inner Freedom: Is the ability to decide for ourselves on issues affecting us.