Science and Philosophy Many scientists have got it into their head that the purpose of philosophy is to help them with their science. They then complain that it isn’t much help, if any. The complaint would be reasonable if their assumption were correct. But it isn’t. Philosophy is a different subject entirely. Their attitude is […]
Identity, Causality, and Caterpillars Suppose you don’t know the true relationship between caterpillars and butterflies: you don’t know that the former turn into the latter by metamorphosis. You notice the two are often found in the same vicinity, but you don’t know that they are really the same organism at different stages of its life. […]
Dolphin Phenomenology Dolphins have a highly sophisticated echolocation sense as well as high intelligence (and amazing motor abilities).[1] They can spot the location of fish buried under sand on the sea floor using this sense. They insert their snouts in the appropriate place and dig out the fish. What is going on in their minds? […]
Identity and Causality It is generally supposed that an object cannot cause itself; causation only holds between distinct things. I will question this orthodoxy. The argument will take the form of nudging intuitions in the direction of the target thesis. The claim will be that every object causes itself (among other things); every object is […]
Is Logic Revisable? What does this question mean? Does it mean to ask whether our current logical systems are in principle revisable? Or is it asking whether logical reality itself is revisable? Presumably not the latter: truth (reality, facts) isn’t revisable, only beliefs are. Unless we mean to be asking whether logical reality can be […]
Hand fish I was watching a truly splendid documentary on the oceans last night on Netflix, produced by the Obamas and narrated by Barack Obama. I thoroughly recommend it. Barack does an excellent job, though not quite at the level of David Attenborough and Morgan Freeman (otherwise known as the Voices of Nature). Anyway, I […]
The Non-Cognitive Mind The so-called cognitive mind is said to be subject to the representational theory of mind (RTM).[1] This theory has a number of elements chief among which is that thoughts have compositional structure—roughly, their conceptual content mirrors the compositionality of language. That means that they have propositional content—the kind of content that sentences […]
Fodor’s RTM Here is a telling passage in Hume Variations written by my old friend and fellow mysterian Jerry Fodor: “For a number of interlocking reasons, it remains fully plausible that cognitive processes are constituted by causal interactions among mental representations, that is, among semantically evaluable particulars. Either that, or we really are entirely in […]
Do Bats Know What it is Like to be Human? One answer would be that we don’t know whether they do or can know what it’s like to be human, because of the problem of bat other minds. That is a boring answer and, I think, incorrect; in any case, I will ignore it. We […]
A Fortiori I noticed with mounting irritation that Jerry Fodor keeps using the Latin phrase “a fortiori” to mean “it follows that” in Hume Variations. It doesn’t mean that; it means “with stronger reason” (look it up). The correct construction is “it follows a fortiori that p”. You can’t say “a fortiori a fortiori”—as if […]