A Plea for Persuasion Jane Austen’s sixth and final novel is entitled Persuasion. There is a reason it is so entitled—it deals with the role of persuasion in human life (as exemplified in Anne Eliot being persuaded against her better judgment not to marry Captain Wentworth). But we might see the […]
A New Riddle of Induction Suppose that tomorrow the sun does not rise, bread does not nourish, and swans are blue. Does that show that nature is not uniform, that the past is not projectable to the future, and that induction has broken down? Can we conclude that what we observe tomorrow does not […]
A Model of Language Acquisition Psycholinguists report that the child “internalizes” the grammar of his or her native language. Beginning with an innate schema of universal grammar (UG), the child hears the speech of adults and somehow extracts the rules that govern the particular language in question. That heard language is […]
A Negative Definition of Truth Consider a tribe that speaks a language containing no truth predicate. They do, however, have a falsity predicate, which they put to good and frequent use, for this is an argumentative tribe. They are forever telling each other that what they are saying is false—false! […]
A Causal Theory of Truth We have been inundated with causal theories: of perception, knowledge, memory, and reference. But no one (to my knowledge) has proposed a causal theory of truth. On the face of it this is surprising, since truth is so closely bound up with reference. If reference to both objects and properties […]
Utilitarianism maintains that the value of a state of affairs depends solely on its level of utility. For a state of affairs to be good (desirable, valuable) it is necessary and sufficient that it contains the best possible level of wellbeing (pleasure, happiness, preference satisfaction). So if two situations contain the same level […]
