Absolute Deontology Kant’s position that there cannot be a case of morally permissible lying has not been met with much enthusiasm. The idea of absolute moral rules thus seems mistaken. W.D. Ross sought to remedy the problem for deontological ethics by qualifying the force of moral rules: instead of saying that […]
A Psychology of Philosophy Most philosophers would agree that philosophy is a very difficult subject, in their heart of hearts if not in their practice. The problems of philosophy are difficult problems. They are not easily solved (sometimes not easily stated). The difficulty might be rated differently by different philosophers—from […]
A Problem in Hume Early in the Treatise Hume sets out to establish what he calls a “general proposition”, namely: “That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent” (Book I, Section I, p.52). [1] What […]
A Plurality of Selves Human beings are persons or selves and they have a specific nature: they have a certain type of psychology and a certain type of biological make-up. Not all possible sentient beings share this nature. For instance, humans have personal memories, consciousness, self-reflection, rationality, and a brain […]
A Plea for Persuasion Jane Austen’s sixth and final novel is entitled Persuasion. There is a reason it is so entitled—it deals with the role of persuasion in human life (as exemplified in Anne Eliot being persuaded against her better judgment not to marry Captain Wentworth). But we might see the […]
A New Theory of Color I will first state the theory as simply and clearly as possible, and then I will consider what may be said in its favor. I call the theory “Double Object Dispositional Primitivism” (DODP) or just “the double object theory”. [1] Its tenets are as follows: When […]
A New Riddle of Induction Suppose that tomorrow the sun does not rise, bread does not nourish, and swans are blue. Does that show that nature is not uniform, that the past is not projectable to the future, and that induction has broken down? Can we conclude that what we observe tomorrow does not […]
A Model of Language Acquisition Psycholinguists report that the child “internalizes” the grammar of his or her native language. Beginning with an innate schema of universal grammar (UG), the child hears the speech of adults and somehow extracts the rules that govern the particular language in question. That heard language is […]
A Negative Definition of Truth Consider a tribe that speaks a language containing no truth predicate. They do, however, have a falsity predicate, which they put to good and frequent use, for this is an argumentative tribe. They are forever telling each other that what they are saying is false—false! […]
A Causal Theory of Truth We have been inundated with causal theories: of perception, knowledge, memory, and reference. But no one (to my knowledge) has proposed a causal theory of truth. On the face of it this is surprising, since truth is so closely bound up with reference. If reference to both objects and properties […]