Is Stupidity Innate? This is a question people are too polite to raise. We can just about ask whether intelligence is innate, wholly or partly, but please don’t ask whether some people are born stupid! Can it be responsibly maintained that some people are condemned by their genes to a life of stupidity? And here […]
Law and Morality In a morally ideal society, there are no laws. Everyone does what they should out of the goodness of their heart not fear of legal consequences. The whole apparatus of law does not exist—police, courts, lawyers, prisons, etc. It sounds wonderful: no one steals, murders, rapes, cheats on their taxes, speeds, or […]
Romantic Overtures We really need to get tougher on romance, especially at universities. As things stand, people can make romantic overtures to other people and face no consequences. They can even make declarations of love and get away with it! This can lead to all sorts of discomfort and loss of focus on one’s studies, […]
Bad Bunny I was looking forward to the half-time performance from Bad Bunny (less so the Superbowl itself). In the event my response was divided: I approved of it politically and personally (many of my best friends are Latin) and I really wanted to like the music more, but Latin music has little appeal for […]
Can Dogs Talk? I watched a very interesting documentary last night on PBS about whether dogs can talk. Of course, they do talk—they talk dog. There could be an interesting documentary on whether humans can talk…dog language. They might to a limited degree, but not as well as dogs. But the documentary was about whether […]
Possible Language Semantics The theory of meaning is supposed to concern the semantics of our language: in virtue of what does human language have the meaning it has? But do all possible languages share the same semantics? Might a semantic theory that is incorrect for our language correctly describe the semantics of some alien language? If […]
Meaning Explained (Finally) It’s really very strange that we can’t say what meaning is. Surely, we know what we mean! Meaning is a mental act and we know our mental acts, don’t we? Yet all attempts hitherto have foundered, often embarrassingly so. Mental images, sensations, definite descriptions, objects in the world, rules of use, behavioral […]
