Copyright © 2013
Avello Publishing Journal
ISSN: 2049 - 498X
Issue 1 Volume 3:
Principia Mathematica
Jason Wakefield
University of Cambridge
Review: Mind, Meaning and Reality (2012) D.H Mellor. Oxford University Press.
These collected papers in addition to Ernie Lepore & Kirk Ludwig's Donald Davidson: Meaning,
Truth, Language and Reality (2007) and Paul Horwich's Truth, Meaning and Reality (2010) is the
answer by Oxford University Press to John McDowell's classic Meaning, Knowledge & Reality
(2001) from their main North American competitor Harvard University Press.
Horwich intersects with my own work on the nature of Kripke's and Nietzsche's paradoxes of
meaning; whilst his questioning intersects with Mellor on semantics and truth. All of the papers in
Mind, Meaning and Reality have been published before except chapter 5: Success Semantics. The
focus of this review will almost be exclusively on this new chapter, with exception to Mellor's
excellent remarks on the causal closure of physics; Newtonian mechanics and micro-physics. The
book is introduced with a citation from the 1913 preface of Russell & Whitehead's Principia
Mathematica 'the chief reason in favour of any theory on the principles of mathematics must always
be inductive', which Mellor uses to illustrate how his metaphysics and physics of science is
consistent, despite exceeding what can be tested by observation. Mellor defines his primitive
propositions in line with those by the young Wittgenstein (one of Russell's students at Trinity
alongside Broad and Neville) who applied them not only to the empirical sciences but to the moral
sciences, logic and mathematics; after his earlier studies on mechanical engineering in Manchester.
Assumptions of truth without proof by the various sciences is not used by Mellor for an easy escape
from doing a meta-metaphysics, as Mellor is careful to dedicate an entire chapter to
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atomic/molecular primary propositions, truthmakers, truth conditions, as well as direct and indirect
truthmaking. The meaning of truth is also analysed closely, by arguing against and for a descriptive
SDT which sets up the chapter on telling the truth that precedes chapter 5: Success Semantics. This
preceding chapter was presented as a public lecture by Mellor at Darwin College, Cambridge on the
20th January 1989 on Ways of Communicating. The lecture paper's figures on direct observation,
indirect observation and non-linguistic communication are best read in the context of the paragraph
in the introduction to the book on untestable identities:
Newton's laws of motion say that any force F acting on any object o of mass M will give o
an acceleration A proportional to F, and in the same direction, provided F does not alter M,
e.g. by knocking bits off o. (Mellor 2012: 2)
Thus many conditionals can be made true infinitely during a process of logically independent
accelarations, provided that F does not alter M, by knocking bits of o; thus it is possible for each of
them to be made true by a different property. Mellor acknowledges in a footnote to this page that
Newton's theory of gravity is needed to make M and F empirically detectable by linking them to
observable facts, such as the orbits of the planets in our galaxy. Mellor develops this in Part III:
Time of the book with regards specifically to cosmology, Feynman, micro-physics, Kant's rejection
of Newton and Leibniz's contrary view of time, Newtonian mechanics and the Newtonian thing-initself. This section of the book on time is significantly weaker than the parts of the book that
analyse action, belief, conditionals, dispositions, semantics, properties and truthmakers. Another
flaw in this book is the the poor analysis of non-linguistic behaviour. The scientific analysis of
Armstrong, Davidson, Lewis and Ramsey is excellent; however one wonders where is the
discussion of computational linguistics and the key mathematics behind the semantics of computer
languages or illuminations of advanced concepts of topology or bioinformatics.
Wittgenstein began his studies in mechanical engineering, thus Mellor perhaps should apply
his work to the task of solving concrete problems in programming with higher – order logic and
circuit design. According to Mellor's fellow metaphysicians, building complete systems to reflect
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digital design in the real world is missing from Mind, Meaning and Reality. With Arithmetic
circuits, Boolean algebra, datapath sequential logic, decoders, encoders, micro-code, asynchronous
logic and the implementation of system designs is how Mellor's fellow metaphysicians want to see
the reality of Mellor's science actively (or pragmatically) in use (or praxis) in contemporary society.
Practical real world examples of scientific computing or software are lacking in Mind, Meaning and
Reality to show how interfacing, numerical algorithms and graphical manipulation can be used to
design large – scale systems to manipulate or force speech and memory management. This is how a
human being's language of syntax and semantics can be manipulated and completely changed
through our new generation of computer programmers. Experts in propositional logic are now being
recruited to work in the design of chip multi-processors to embed in patients at the Cambridge
Biomedical Campus. Biomedical engineers can now monitor, analyze and modify some of a
person's speech remotely using high performance nano-chip architecture. This real-time analysis of
bio-chip data is missing from Mellor's introductory chapter on the nature of conscious experience
that he delivered as his Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society on 12th October 1992. The
technology had not emerged in 1992 yet to perfectly clone several billion neurons and several
trillion synapses (using data-intensive bio-chip computing) and our computer engineers working at
the University of Cambridge have still not perfected the management of such huge data sets today;
however Mellor's new chapter Success Semantics was written at a time when these neuro-synaptic
experiments where being conducted both at the University of Cambridge and at DARPA programs
contracted by IBM at university laboratories across North America. Whole brain emulation is the
current research plan of IBM (as well as other firms) and their specific interest is in the human
mind. As the mind arises from the brain, bio-chips have been created to reverse engineer the brain
with cognitive computing. To understand how the mind works, many people have been tricked in to
participating in violating the synapse activity of unwittingly chipped people, as the cognitive nature
of data extraction is often based on the recoginition of our friend's faces in crowds. These processes
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of our normal rational thinking can be disrupted and manipulated by organising choreography or
issuing instructions to manipulate environments. What is kept secret from these participants
specifically in Cambridge, England, is that the people with implants are being used to remotely
extract data on neuroimpulses that embody experiences, smells and sights. Every thought, reaction,
sound heard and visual observation causes a neurological spike and pattern in the brain's
electromagnetic field, which the bio-chip records in real-time and decodes; thus allowing for a
person's internal, private thoughts to be hacked then amplified or broadcast on to loudspeakers or
public address systems. It is a shame that the moral principles / sciences of Ramsey and
Wittgenstein have been severely damaged by evil individuals in Cambridge laboratories implanting
people so that their privacy vanishes for the rest of their lives. Our biological, neural circuits and
networks that connect our neurons on a electro-physiological level, are very similar in the way they
operate to how electric signals are transmitted in metal wire cables that carry electricity; thus it was
only a matter of time until we combined cortical processing with voice-coils in loudspeakers. My
concluding remark in this review of scholarly criticism is that Mind, Meaning and Reality is a book
of academic prestige, depth and excellent quality in the disciplines of causal functionalism, the
causation of actions and truth-conditional contents. The book should be purchased then read
alongside Grice's Studies in the Way of Words (1991), Samuelsson's Genomics and Bioinformatics:
An Introduction to Programming Tools for Life Scientists (2013) and Whyte's 'Success Again: Reply
to Brandom and Godfrey-Smith' Analysis 50: 84-8 (1997).
Bibliography
Akinwande, D & Wong, P. (2010) Carbon Nanotube and Graphene Device Physics Cambridge
University Press.
Lillehammer, H. & Mellor, D.H (2005) Ramsey's Legacy Oxford University Press.
Stahl, (2013) S. Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific Basis and Practical
Applications 4th Edition. Cambridge University Press.
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