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? […]
Inner and Outer We have the concepts of the inner and outer, but how are they to be defined? Is one more basic than the other? The following seems true: the outer is not the inner and the inner is not the outer. Alternatively, we could say the private is not the […]
Speech When a person speaks he or she enunciates words one after the other, producing a temporal sequence of words. Normally these words are used not mentioned. It is natural to assume that nothing meta-linguistic is going on: one word is used, then another, then another, until the utterance […]
Raindrops and Persons Consider a single raindrop: it exists for a certain period of time, eventually meeting its end through evaporation. But suppose instead that it divides into two before that happens—by wind or human intervention. Now we have two raindrops where before we had one: what is the relationship between […]
Consciousness and Sleep Why do we say that a person is unconscious when asleep but conscious when awake? During sleep we often dream and dreaming is a conscious activity of mind, so why don’t we say that we are often conscious while sleep? Why do we speak as if sleeping […]
Evolution of Language Consider a hypothetical species with the following profile: they have evolved by mutation and natural selection a language of thought, an internal symbolic system of infinite scope and finite base. This they use as the medium of their thought. They have not yet, however, evolved a public language […]
Semantic Levels Anyone interested in language and perception will recognize that there are different levels of analysis of the phenomenon in question. In linguistics we will distinguish […]
Philosophy and Form Philosophy is versatile as to form. We have the long-form book or monograph, the medium length article, the note or comment, and the epigram. There is also the dialogue form (Plato, Hume, Berkeley). Philosophy can be written as poetry (Lucretius, Eliot, Donne) or performed in a play (Shaw, […]
Knowledge By Necessity We can know that a proposition is true and we can know that a proposition is necessary, but can we know that a proposition is true by knowing that it is necessary? Consider a simple tautology like “Hesperus = Hesperus”: don’t you know this is true […]
The Ultra-Selfish Gene In David Attenborough’s nature documentary Frozen Planet there is some remarkable and rare footage of polar bears mating. The male begins a twenty-mile trek through deep snow lured by the scent of a distant female. He catches up with her and engages in courting behavior, which […]