Edward St Aubyn and Me I met Edward St Aubyn, author of the Patrick Melrose Trilogy, at a conference on consciousness in Tucson about twenty years ago. He was writing a book centering on the problem of consciousness. Tall, handsome, witty, refined—I took to him immediately. We became friends. I came to know him as […]
Astronomical Perception I don’t think anyone would seriously argue that we see stars just as they are. They look to us like small pinpoints of light not massive physical bodies, and they were conceived as such in earlier times. If there were a dome over the earth with apertures in it and a conflagration behind, […]
False Knowledge Is it true that all knowledge is knowledge of truths? Does the concept of knowledge entail that the proposition known is a true proposition? Certainly, we have been schooled to think so; and the idea is far from preposterous. But is the propositional content of the knowledge literally, universally, and necessarily true? We […]
Experience and Naïve Realism Is there anything in sense experience that indicates the falsity of naive realism? For example, is there anything in sense experience that informs us that objects are not objectively colored? Or is it a matter of science and conceptual reflection? Do we know that naïve realism is false just by being […]
Descriptions and Names The distinction between names and descriptions is not as sharp as we tend to suppose. We are prone to think that names are purely denotative (tags, labels) and descriptions are purely connotative (attributional, predicational), but actually the two overlap. If you favor a description theory of names, you are still up to […]
Nabokovian Mysterianism I came across the following passage in Brian Boyd’s weighty biography of Nabokov: “Space, time, the two prime mysteries. The transformation of nothing into something cannot be conceived by the human mind.”[1]Two points stand out here. First, he regards space and time as the two prime mysteries—not consciousness and free will, say. That […]
Descriptions in Disguise One might have thought that the description theory of names had been bashed enough; I propose to bash it some more. It hasn’t been bashed from every angle; indeed, it positively invites further bashing, given its audacity. The theory is quite disrespectful to names, insinuating that descriptions are the superior semantic citizen. […]
