Impossible Questions If I ask myself what are the most difficult topics in metaphysics, I find that the following three stand out: necessity, causation, and existence. The questions couldn’t be simpler to state: What is the nature of necessity? What is the nature of causation? What is the nature of […]
Knowledge of Entailment How do we know that one proposition entails another proposition? If we think of entailment as logical necessitation, how do we know that one proposition logically necessitates another? I suggest that we consider this question by analogy with Hume’s treatment of causation. According […]
Knowledge and Belief According to the tradition stemming from Plato, knowledge is a special type of belief. In order to know that p one has to believe that p and meet various further conditions on that belief—that the belief be true, that it be justified, that it not be accidentally true, […]
Induction Again I will consider two instructive thought experiments. First, suppose there are people who have the following psychological deficiencies: (a) they have no concept of the natural powers or dispositions of objects, just concepts of manifest properties; and (b) they have no natural tendency, innate or acquired, to expect certain […]
Internal Behaviorism Goethe’s famous dictum, “In the beginning was the deed” is often invoked as a motto for behaviorism: if you want to understand the mind, you should look to overt behavior not to some supposed inner landscape. But that is not the only way the dictum can be interpreted, since not […]
Only Consciousness is Physical As formulated by Descartes and others, mechanism is the doctrine that the objects of sense (“material bodies”) are characterized by extension, solidity, and contact causation. Specifically, the causation involved does not require divine intervention (“occasionalism”) or a scholastic notion of the transfer of forms or Aristotelian teleology […]
Contradiction Contradictions arise quite naturally in several areas of thought and it is not easy to resolve them. [1] It is generally felt that contradictions are unacceptable for two reasons: (a) contradictions entail anything and (b) they violate the logical law of non-contradiction. But some have questioned these reasons for rejecting contradictions, […]
Bivalence and States of Affairs It is sometimes maintained that bivalence fails for certain kinds of sentences or propositions. What I will argue is that if bivalence holds for states of affairs it holds for sentences and propositions. Moreover, it is plausible that bivalence does hold for states of affairs, so we […]
Difference and Necessity Essentialists have found in identity a shining example of their creed. Any object is necessarily identical to itself—how could that not be so? It has even been thought that the necessity of identity can be proved from Leibniz’ Law: given that a is necessarily identical to a […]
Psychic Structures It is interesting to read a book like Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures while thinking about thinking. To what extent does the structure of thought mirror the structure of language? Does thought have a grammar in the way languages have a grammar? Does the apparatus of linguistic theory carry over to thinking? […]