Expressive Language? There are obviously expressive vocalizations in both humans and animals: grunts, groans, sighs, moans, shrieks, laughs, barks, purrs, meows. Some of these vocalizations use the same sounds as spoken speech, such as the common utterance of Ach when something goes wrong; and some have a conventional […]
Games and Languages Evidently, play evolved among animals, including humans: there is a “ludic instinct”. The most likely explanation for this fact is that play provides the opportunity to practice skills that will be useful in the animal’s life—hence its appearance during childhood. But games in the formal cultural […]
Thought and Time A speech act occurs in time: it has a beginning, middle, and an end–it can be clocked. The more words a sentence contains the longer it takes to say it. Some people speak more quickly than others, thus taking up less time to utter the same sentence. Writing […]
Unity and the Universe The universe contains different sorts of unity. There is the kind of unity found in conscious subjects (psychic unity), the kind found in animals and artifacts (telic unity), and the kind found in inanimate objects like pebbles or snowflakes (geometric unity). There is phenomenological unity, functional […]
Complete and Incomplete Grammar books routinely inform their readers that a sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought. The idea is that some groups of words fail to express complete thoughts and hence are not sentences. Do they then express incomplete thoughts? Are we […]
What is Remembering? Not much philosophical attention has been paid to the concept of remembering, in contrast to perceiving and communicating (as well as thinking, reasoning, knowing, believing, imagining, willing, intending, acting, feeling, consciousness, and other concepts). How should remembering be conceived? Nabokov entitled his autobiography […]
Russell’s Paradox Made Easy [1] Consider the set of all men: its members are men, though it is not itself a man but a set. Most sets are like this: they don’t have sets as members, but ordinary things—flowers, bees, motorcars. (Some sets do have sets as members, such as […]
Agnosticism and Skepticism Consider a tribe of natural-born agnostics concerning the existence of the external world. This tribe regards it as plain common sense that they do not know whether there are any external objects. They have no inclination to believe in external objects, but neither do they disbelieve in […]
I Am Not a Person There is no person with whom I am identical, though there are persons. I am not Colin McGinn (if “Colin McGinn” names a person). Why do I say that about myself? Why do I say that no one referred to by “I” is […]
One Substance Spinoza’s view that there is just one substance is immensely attractive, but can we give any argument for it? How do we rule out many-substance views? We are accustomed to considering dual substance views such as Descartes’ dualism of mind and matter, but these don’t exhaust the field. […]