What happens in your head if a speaker is speaking in Chinese? Most of us have no way of filtering those sounds into meaningful images. We need something in our heads that will decode the sounds that enter into our ears. Even with words we do understand, the decoding process is based on our own experiences and our understanding of the meaning of the words. We just picked up some "stressless chairs" we had ordered. If your decoding filter hasn't heard of or seen "stressless chairs" you can't fully understand what I mean by that phrase.
Here's my problem: you are assuming the very thing that I asked you to defend. You are saying, in effect, that these "filters" must be there because they do the very things that "filters" would do, if there were any.
"Filters" might not be the best term to describe what I'm trying to describe. What I'm referring to is the something that allows us to make sense out of what we hear. I've suggested that knowing English is a filter that allows us to put meaning to what an English speaker is saying. We know English because of our experiences and training. Some of us have also learned that there are some differences between American English and Canadian and British English.
You didn't respond to my example about hearing a Chinese speaker. We don't have the equipment in our brains to make sense of those words. It is meaningless gibberish. I'm saying that the something that allows a hearer to make sense of those sounds is a type of filter that transfers sounds into something meaningful.
They are an invention that allow us to explain things according to the way we now favor how explanations should go. What leaves me astonished (and makes me grumpy) is the way that, for instance, we have assembled a vastly inflated psychological apparatus that we are content to accept as defining how persons function. And then we employ that apparatus and its various dimensions -- whether it is linguistic "filters," sexual "orientations," or cognitive "structures" -- to craft explanations that we find comforting. The perplexing thing is that these explanatory ingredients themselves resist explanation; we need them to fill out our satisfying accounts of how things work, so we ignore the fact that they are mere inventions.
What I'm trying to describe is basic communication. What I remember from a long-ago book on communications:
that person A has an idea or picture in her head,
she encodes that idea or picture into language
the language is sent to person B
person B decodes the language to create the idea or picture in his head.
If both persons were using similar coding patterns, the idea or picture in person B's head should be the same as in person A's head. If they were using different coding patterns or filters, then the two pictures could be quite different.
Pr. Stoffregen, you mention above "our own experiences" and "the meaning of the words." Fine. Go with that. Don't go to all the trouble to manufacture a "decoding filter." Who needs it?
Communication folks need it. I would think that teachers would need it. If your students aren't grasping what you are trying to tell them, it is either because you've coded it in language that is foreign to them and you might have to change your language; or they haven't got the tools to properly decode it to turn it into an idea or picture in their own minds in which case you might have to train them in the meaning of words so that they can decode the proper language you want to use.
There is certainly something about us that causes us to disbelieve what millions of others do believe. "Filter" seems as good a term as others to describe that difference.
Maybe those others are just wrong?
What would make them wrong? What criteria do you use to judge them to be wrong? Maybe a more simple issue is when you are grading papers, what determines a wrong answer? or a right answer? That's easy with math problems; but probably not as easy with philosophical essays.
What makes Pentecostals wrong to use the book of Acts as their guide for baptisms in Jesus' name and a separate baptism in the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues? It happened a number of times in Acts. Why are we right to look at Romans 6 for our understanding of baptism; or that "baptism with water and the Spirit" from John 3 happens at the same time rather than two separate events?
We, speaking of Christians, use the Bible and our understanding of the faith to filter new information that comes to us. What "God" said to Mohammed and to Joseph Smith doesn't sound like things the God we believe through scriptures would say. Similarly, we don't believe what is written in the pseudepigrapha even if they claim to be written by apostles because they portray a God who is foreign to the filters our beliefs about God have created in our thinking.
"the filters our beliefs about God have created in our thinking"? So our filters are not part of the inherent furniture of the mind, but are created? And they are created by our beliefs? What, then, creates our beliefs? And these belief-created filters do whatever they do in our "thinking"? I could not have asked for a better phrase to describe the incoherence of an overly-psychologized attempt at an explanation.
The filters, at least as I'm talking about them, are no more inherent furniture in our minds than the English or the Chinese languages are. They are learned. Are there some moral absolutes that are innate? It's difficult to test for such things in young infants.
