Phenomenological Ignorance We can’t know what it’s like to be a bat. This is an instance of a more general truth: no one can grasp the nature of experiences that are radically different from their own. We can grasp the nature of experiences similar to our own, but we can’t […]
Perceptual Duality The traditional distinction between primary and secondary qualities has clear implications for the nature of perception. Primary qualities are possessed by objects independently of perceivers and do not owe their existence to perceivers: they are objective. Secondary qualities are dependent on perceivers, being projected by the mind onto objects that otherwise […]
Pain and Unintelligent Design Pain is a very widespread biological adaptation. Pain receptors are everywhere in the animal world. Evidently pain serves the purposes of the genes—it enables survival. It is not just a by-product or holdover; it is specifically functional. To a first approximation we can say that pain […]
Our Concept of Mind How good is our concept of mind—how extensive, how accurate, how penetrating? I shall suggest that it is not very good—limited, misleading, shallow. It is much less good than our concept of body. It covers mental reality only ineptly, incompetently. There are three areas to consider: […]
Origins of the Free Will Problem In its modern form the problem of free will is supposed to arise from the scientific discovery (or perhaps scientific presupposition) that determinism is true. It is a tenet of modern science (at least of the Newtonian kind) that every event in […]
Ontological Commitment Can there be a criterion of ontological commitment? Can there be a formal test of what a person is ontologically committed to? What a person is committed to is a matter of what he believes or assumes or presupposes or is prepared to act on—on his attitudes. So the […]
Observation and Scientific Realism Positivism, following empiricism, maintained that the real is coterminous with the observable. A scientific theory that posits unobservable entities cannot be taken at face value, but must be regarded as merely instrumentally useful or as plain false. The observable entities are real enough, but the unobservable […]
Noumenal Powers Suppose you hold that the world consists of powers all the way down: all properties consist of causal powers. [1]Now combine that with Hume’s position on our knowledge of powers: we have no impressions of powers, and hence no adequate conception of powers. Then you are committed to an extreme […]
Notes on the Concept of Law Consider the sentence forms “It is illegal to A” and “It is immoral to A” where A is a type of action (we could also consider “It is impolite to A” and “It is imprudent to A”). These are superficially similar, syntactically and semantically. […]
Multi-Dimensional (Inclusive) Semantics I address you today in a spirit of inclusiveness and diversity. For too long semantics (theory of meaning) has been the confine of a single type of entity held to constitute all that meaning encompasses (or a couple of entities, closely related). We must broaden our horizons […]