A Select Lexicon of Philosophical Terms

Lexicon and Glossary
for the Philosophically-Challenged
(you're in good company)

INDEX

Words are grouped as follows:

• Philosophy of Mind Terminology
• Philosophical Terminology
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophical Schools
• Psychopathic Terminology
• Popular Ideologies

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND TERMINOLOGY

• Abstraction – also, “imagination.” The ability to juxtapose ideas, images, thoughts in the mind that may or may not bear resemblance to existent facts and reality (conceptualization, IMAGINATION)

Creative -- Combing images to create a new image

Judgmental – Evaluating images for truth/false or right/wrong

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• Adapt - the process of accommodating, reconciling, and assimilating new information, experiences, persons, and environments (ADJUST)
• Adaptive – capable of adapting (pliant, flexible, malleable, adjustable, ADAPTABLE)
• Action – movement of the body by conscious or unconscious motivation (BEHAVIOR)
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kinetic – in movement, energetic

potential – available, but not moving or changing

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• Associative – like to like, analogous, thinking
• Causal – inferring a cause-and-effect relationship (LINKING)
• Character - the interaction and organization of one’s innate and acquired physical, mental, axiological, adaptive, and behavioral traits in the aggregate (orientation, personality, disposition, inclination, TEMPERAMENT)
• Desire - biological needs triggered by the mind to satisfy, such as food, sex, clothing, love, survival (appetites, cravings, drives, will, volition, URGE)
• Dissociative – the “conversion” of orderly processed information into a disordered process, drawing incorrect/improper inferences
• Emoting - the triggering of the process of feeling, responding, reacting, often both physical and with a value judgment, such as fear, anger, affection, disgust (passions, feelings, flight-fright response, EMOTIONS)
• Extrospection - thinking about the world
• Habit – a repetitive behavior or characteristic exhibited repeatedly
• Hedonism – the biological/philosophical principle that humans act to pursue the pleasurable/pleasant and avoid pain/unpleasant (Naive Hedonism "pleasure;" Modern Hedonism: "pleasant")
• Incommensurate – without parity, unequal, disparate, incomparable
• Inference – judgments, theoretical or practical, based on induction or deduction (Induction, REASONING)
• Instrumental – goal-directed action and decision-making, e.g., do A to achieve B (PRACTICAL REASON)
• Introspection - thinking about one’s thinking, values, knowledge, and experience (self-consciousness, self-awareness, SELF-ANALYSIS)
• Judgment – deliberative function to determine truth/false, good/bad, right/wrong
• Memory – recreating in the present moment aspects from past experiences, ideas, imagination
• Mind - the brain's conscious processes of sensations, thinking, emoting, drives, and moods occur, as well as autonomic – self-regulating functions – occur (consciousness, brain, HEAD)
• Motivation – the impulse/urge to do/act toward an objective (GOAL, DESIRE)
• Perception - the mind’s perception of the world through touching, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling (SENSORY EXPERIENCE)
• Person – a single member/instance of the species H. sapiens (self, other, INDIVIDUAL)
• Proximate – related, nearby, adjacent, juxtaposed
• Repression – suppression of conflicts, ideas, experiences from immediate memory (HIDING)
• Self-control – exercising discipline over one’s behaviors, attitudes, and desires
• Self-Reflexivity – our ability to imagine a hypothetical spectator observing one’s own outward characteristics and behaviors (self-aware, REFLECTIVE)
• Subconscious - the mind’s reserve of valuable experience not readily or frequently accessed “as needed” (cf., “unconscious”)
• Thinking - the process of the mind examining information (ratiocination, noesis)
• Trait – features, characteristics,
• Unconscious – comatose, insensate, unaware (N.B. Freudian "unconscious" not included)
• Value – a measure of relative worth, concern, merit, price
• Will – a judgment with commitment to act on it

PHILOSOPHICAL TERMINOLOGY

• Action – movement, often human movement, through time and space (DO)
• Aesthetics – values of perceptual taste and appreciation
• Arts – human creations, industry, manufacture, technology, paintings, sculpture, writings, etc. (MAKE)




Applied Arts – law, medicine, bioeconomics, anthropology, technology, surgery

Fine Arts – products made by humans (artifacts) of special value and worth

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• Axiology - the study of practical value judgments (ethics, morality, art, aesthetics, politics, conduct, economics VALUES)
• Brain – the biological/physical organ of organisms’s anatomy that locates the functions and operations of the mind
• Coherence Theory of Truth – theory that world exists independently and innately to our perceptions of it, and our sensory experience reflects/corresponds to the innate world
• Correspondence Theory of Truth – the theory that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world, and whether it accurately describes/corresponds with that world.
• Epistemology - the study of what humans know and how they claim to know it (FACTS)
• Ethics – prescriptive teleological principles of conducting one’s life with virtue
• Essential – only metaphysically epistemological traits are ontological (all are all the same)
• Existential – only individual particulars are ontological (every instance is unique)
• Hermeneutics – the study of literary works that interprets how language is used in literature and other arts; see, Polysemy
• Heuristics – the process of discovery
• Law1 – codes of human conduct prescribed or proscribed or both by authority
• Law2 – verified theories of natural science not yet falsified, such as gravity, evolution, heliocentrism, thermodynamics,
• Logic – the rules of inference in reasoning




Deductive – inferring from the general to the particular of necessity

Inductive – inferring from the sum of particulars to the general in probability

Fallacy – an erroneous or spurious inference from inductive logic

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• Metaphysics – imaginative speculation and abstractions of the non-physical traits, features, ideas, and speculations
• Mind – the mental aspects of reason, emotion, thought, abstraction, values, perception, instrumentality, memory, motivation, and values that the brain processes; also “brain physiology” and “neurophysiology” and “CNS” (CONSCIOUSNESS)
• Modality – contingency versus necessity, essential versus existential; possible versus probable; accidental versus deliberate; etc.
• Morality – proscriptive deontological principles of barring certain types of human conduct
• Ontology – the basis of reality
• Paradigm – a categorization and matrix of ideas in structure order (TEMPLATE)
• Philosophical Method – skeptically and critically evaluating and positing fact/value claims by means of the formal sciences
• Polysemy – literally “many meanings,” the theory of language that literal (historical), allegorical, metaphorical, moral, and anagogical meanings cohere to the same textual referents as fundamental to hermeneutics
• Praxeology – the study of human actions and conduct (sociology, history, politics, sociobiology, behaviorism)
• Pseudo-Science – the proverbial “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” those disciplines of study that claim a “scientific” basis, but lack evidence and theories to substantiate their claims, e.g., astrology, psychology, sociology, chiropractic, creationism, behaviorism, nephrology, etc.
• Rhetoric – the study and use of language for persuasion and fostering intelligible communication
• Science – rationally empirical knowledge verifiably repeated by others




Formal Science – mathematics, logic, scientific methods, probability, statistics

Junk Science – also “pseudo-science;” behaviorism, sociology, astrology, critical theory

Natural Science – biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy by scientific methodology

Social Science – also, “pseudo-science;” see, Praxeology, Arts

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• Scientific Method – observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning, observation, and experimentation, leading to formation and testing of hypotheses from which to build theories

Methodological Naturalism – all scientific endeavor is confined to natural and observable phenomena and theories based on such observations

Critical Rationalism – rejection of the claim of bias elimination, and replacing verification with falsification as the scientific criterion

Instrumentalism – rejection of all “true/false” statements, and the use of “usefulness” as the sole criterion, see, Pragmatism

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• Theory – a set of descriptive statements that organize ideas, information, and experience in an organized pattern (cf., Paradigms)




Scientific – verified theories not yet falsified; see, Law2

Speculative – conceptual, ideological; see, Metaphysical

Social – also “critical theory;” see, Metaphysical

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PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

• Descriptive – describing an object or idea
• Connotation - meaning of words or ideas (SENSE)
• Detonation - the object, person, place named (REFERENCE)
• Ostensive Denotation – pointing to an object as “this” and naming it with words
• Evocative – signs and symbols that provoke associated images, ideas, or persons not directly assossociated with descriptive or prescriptive use of language
• Prescriptive - command, directive, proscription (PERFORMATIVES)
• Use - how words are employed in grammar (rules of language) coupled with the context and intentionality of the users.
  
• Essentialism – words express a transcendental essence or metaphysical trait of in the realm of the noetic or in its divine states of consciousness (sometimes "naive realism")
• Nominalism – words used to name objects, persons, and/or clusters of associated descriptive statements
• Social Constructionism – the theory that humans mold language and language molds humans by a reciprocal pattern, i.e., our social reality is ontologically subjective while epistemologically objective as linguistic users (cf., Postmodernism)

PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS

• Idealism – doctrine that ideas, or thought, make up either the whole or an indispensable aspect of any full reality
• Empiricism – the doctrine that all knowledge is only from direct experience with the concrete particulars in the actual world without innate ideas or metaphysical predispositions
• Materialism – doctrine that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions (PHYSICALISM)
• Naturalism – the doctrine that phenomena can be studied by natural methods and therefore supernatural and metaphysical methods are nonexistent, unknowable, incoherent, unfounded, or not inherently different from natural phenomena or hypotheses.
• Phenomenalism – the doctrine that physical objects do not exist as things in themselves but only as perceptual experience
• Pragmatism – the theory that relative usefulness of information alone determines the truth/value of all experience
• Rationalism – the doctrine that all knowledge is only from our mental deductive reasoning without appeals to sensory experience for support
• Realism – the naive assumption that the world is exactly as we experience and think about it
• Skepticism – the doctrine that all reasoning leads to infinite regresses and all sensory experience is inherently unreliable thus all claims to knowledge are suspended as indeterminate

PSYCHOPATHIC TERMINOLOGY

• Disorder - outside the normal ordinary functioning process (dysfunction)
• Dysregulated Thinking – faulty inferences adversely affecting one’s ability to manage and adapt to one’s environment, including adapting to other persons and situations
• Madness - a persistently disordered state of the mind to alter ordinary consciousness as a defense against a perceived trauma (schizophrenia, paranoia, persecution, hallucinations, phantom voices and images; PSYCHOSIS)
• Moods - a persistently unpleasant state of melancholy, euphoria, dysphoria, or mixed states (depression, mania, states of mind, AFFECT)
• Perturbance – a brief or sustained emotional discomfort (anxiety, frustration, obsessions, neuroses, upset, anxiety, AGITATION)
• Psychoactive – any substance that alters perception such as hallucinogens, opiates, cannabis, ethyl alcohol, stimulants, depressants
• Psychotropic – an approved psychoactive agent used in psychiatry (minor/major tranquilizers, mood alterations, anti-psychotics, stimulants, depressants)

POPULAR IDEOLOGIES

• Communitarianism – the broad class of various collectivist approaches to civil and religious socio-political orders including conservatism, progressivism, socialism, etc., where social order is ontologically prior to individual freedom (cf., liberalism)
• Conservatism – a moral-based communitarian approach to social organization based on promoting moral goods and containing moral evils
• Creationism – the theory that an Intelligent Designer created “irreducibly complex” birds that cannot fly, blind insects to multiply disease, dinosaurs that did not survive Noah’s Flood, and the ultimate primate “without boners” in their penises
• Deconstructionism – the self-repudiating claim that all rhetoric is indeterminate
• Essentialism – the theory that transcendent properties and features inhere in substances (Platonism)
• Evangelicialism – the use of Calvin’s extra-biblical maxim (the Bible is literal and inerrant) to promote capitalist wealth and Walmart exploitation and sell Tammy Faye’s makeup.
• Hypocrites – those who espouse two different values, like Vitters, Allen, Bush, Cheney, Zionists, Evangelicals, Homophobes, McGreevey, Rothstein, and Semites for Zion. Also known as Pharisees, Sadducees, Sanhedrin, and Evangelicals. Also common among Prada Popes and their boyfriends, in their discrete and indiscrete concealment of pederasts.
• Liberalism – the theory that society serves the individual as guarantor of his maximal liberties with its minimal structures and regulations
• Natural Law Theory – the flawed Catholic theological conflation of Aristotle’s “final be-causes” from the archaic Physics with Aristotle's “instrumentality” in his Ethics, where only one “final end” is permitted for every action (see, Contraception, Patriarchy)
• Neoconservatism – The blend of Burkean and Straussian conservatism in which moral imperatives justify imperial power and concentrated authority and power among the elite educated intellectuals
• Postmodernism – “bullshit.” Synthesis of Deconstruction, Marxism, and Freudism for the politically left who have difficulty thinking logically.
• Pragmatism – the American theory that “usefulness” is the sole criterion, that true/false, good/bad are reducible to what is “useful” (see, WILL TO POWER)
• Progressivism – a statist-based communitarianism in which the government and state will engineer society’s needs and wants, usually on a unitarian calculus, to the amelioration of humankind (Messianism)
• Psychology – the Cult of Therapy which immunizes humans from their humanity to “void” all their values for Emily Post rehabilitation of their “unconsciousness”
• Relativism – The self-refuting claim that all claims are without certainty and cannot be known or asserted, except for their absolute claim of relativism
• Queer Theory – Postmodernism in sado-masochistic drag; gagged reflexes, tied-up, and deviance the normative standards (except “no” standards allowed).
• Sociobiology – the integration of biological laws (survival, reproduction, kin selection, etc.) into the study of social organization, behavior, and institutions
• Structuralism – Another vacuous French theory that posits Aristotle’s ten categories as one set of relational binaries as ontologically-primitive