I picture a cartoon in the New Yorker: a child with her mother watching Trump on TV–“Mommy, how do I stop myself becoming a billionaire?” The level of lying reached by Trump and his associates has reached epic proportions. People appear on TV telling outright lies and clearly know they are. Trump himself will say […]
I enjoyed watching Hillary C. extol truth and reason in her Wellesley commencement speech, and denounce the idea of alternative facts. But then she went on, in characteristic modern style, to commend “diverse viewpoints”. But these are incompatible ideas: there is only one set of truths (and many sets of falsehoods) because reality is only […]
Indexical Semantics in the Language of Thought Accepting that there is an innate and universal language of thought, we can inquire into its formal characteristics. It will have two components: a syntactic component and a lexical component. These components will be found in every human being’s cognitive-linguistic repertoire (barring pathology), like any […]
Peter Kivy, my old friend and colleague from Rutgers, was the nicest person you could wish to meet: funny, civilized, humane, generous, kindly, and a real friend. We used to drive back to Manhattan together after a long day at Rutgers and have delightful conversations on the New Jersey Turnpike. But he had a sharp […]
I remember when it was desirable to find citations relevant to what one had written: it anchored one’s work to that of others, so that it didn’t seem merely eccentric. How nice to find some obscure reference backing up what one wanted to say! But the proliferation of journals and people writing in them has […]
One finds people bemoaning the state of “the philosophy profession” these days, but I never see it noted that it is American philosophy that is eating itself alive. I haven’t observed that philosophy in other countries is undergoing a similar crisis (though there may be some spillover). Title IX is an American thing (I won’t […]
