Entries by Colin McGinn
Propositions
Propositions What is a proposition? What indeed: no one really knows. There have been many proposals: a sentence, a statement, a thought, a meaning, a combination of concepts, a combination of objects, a set of possible worlds, a possible state of affairs, a picture, a model, an image, a name of a truth-value, a description […]
Disgust Again
Disgust Again Returning from beautiful Barbados, I am struck anew by the moral squalor in which this country now wallows. Also, the government is pretty bad. An access of moral disgust: that curious puzzling emotion. I put it to one side when I wrote The Meaning of Disgust, not having much to say about it. […]
Brain Views
Brain Views Oh, those perishing bats, hogging all the limelight, with their fancy sense of echolocation! Let’s talk about the humble human and how things look to him or her. Can this be reduced to brain states? We have agreed that consciousness is having a point of view, specifically a visual one; can we argue […]
Points of View
Points of View We are not good at talking about consciousness. The best we have been able to come up with is the what-it’s-like formula, inaugurated by Brian Farrell and Timothy Sprigge and popularized by Thomas Nagel. But this formula has resisted illuminating paraphrase and remains a vernacular catch-phrase. What is its analysis? Can we […]
Comments from Michael Ayers
‘Against Identity Theories’, “The Deep Problem’ and the ‘is’ of definition I agree with the gist of both papers. However…. Aristotle distinguished ‘real’ from ‘nominal’ definition. The latter is just a way of identifying what a name names. So (to modify and build on an actual Aristotelian example) “‘Lightening’ names the flashes in the sky […]
Introspection
Introspection Some remarks on introspection in the light of recent papers. Is introspection a source of knowledge about the mind? On the one hand, it qualifies as a perceptual faculty, since it provides direct consciousness of the mind; and this means it is a source of genuine knowledge. We “see” what is currently in our […]
Non-Perceptual Knowledge
Non-Perceptual Knowledge Perceptual knowledge is quite sharply limited, though clearly a type of knowledge. But we don’t customarily stop there; we generally extend the concept of knowledge beyond this restricted domain, well beyond it. Thus, we recognize several kinds of inferential knowledge—knowledge about things we don’t and can’t perceive. Are there any reasons to doubt […]