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Soul talk and science talk

Science-talk (at least natural science) takes the behavior of things, taken in the third person and recombines them in paradoxical ways (we might not notice the paradoxes because thinking of them has become second nature to us).  Consider waves, for example.  I experience waves in a pond or pool.  Then my science teacher tells me that sound travels in waves.  Hmm: sounds paradoxical, but not impossible.  Learning about sine waves, I see the analogy between the repeated and regular compression and decompression of air and the waves in the pool.

Philosophical talk of the soul, on a good day, isn't about the sort of things that I can point to (what I call third person things, even though they typically aren't persons at all).  But it can talk about things that have a special connection to the first person: ability, disposition, action, striving, fulfillment.  It uses these terms to describe realities that escape the third person perspective: acting, being affected by desire, being acted upon by another, being engaged in pursuit of some goal, being satisfied, being ready and able to act, being disposed to act; and being alive, that is, being the being with all of these ways of being.

When someone only familiar with engineering and science hears soul-talk, they might take it as an attempt "science talk": that is, as talk of a hypothetical underlying mechanism that can't be experienced but has been postulated.  In misunderstanding soul-talk, they unwittingly create a straw-man version of the soul that can easily be debunked--but such a debunking misses its real target.

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