Philosophical Originality What produces philosophical originality? One answer is genius: from time to time a genius crops up and from his or her fertile brain originality flows. Then we have a golden age. No doubt the greatest philosophers were geniuses, so it is natural to suppose that this is what brings […]
Combining Concepts We possess concepts and we combine them into thoughts. Those are deceptively easy words to say. What is this “possessing” of concepts? Somehow concepts are stored in the mind, unconsciously, but not in the form of use or mention: we are not using all of our concepts at […]
Puzzling Performatives J.L. Austin insisted that utterances of performative sentences are neither true nor false. If I say, “I promise to dine with you” my utterance has no truth-value. Presumably this implies that it expresses no proposition (though it is clearly meaningful), since if it did it would have to be either […]
Believing Zombies Could there be zombies that believe they are conscious? [1] They have no consciousness, but they erroneously believe that they do. That may seem possible if we think of their beliefs as implanted at birth or something of the sort: couldn’t a super scientist simply interfere with their brain to install […]
Knowledge of Consciousness How does our knowledge of our own consciousness differ from our knowledge of other things? Presumably it does differ: there is something unique about the way I know my own conscious states. There are many types of conscious state (event, process) and many types of knowledge of conscious […]
Performatives and Self-Reference By uttering the words “I promise” a speaker can promise; he or she promises in virtue of uttering words. So we might expect performative utterances to allude to words as well as use them. Normally they do not take this form, containing no quotation or demonstrative reference […]
Why Is There Nothing It’s Like to be a Rock? We divide the world into two big classes: the conscious beings and the non-conscious beings. The mind-body problem concerns the conscious beings: we want to know what makes it the case that a being is conscious. This is an explanatory question: […]
The Language of Emotion Proponents of the language of thought typically don’t have much to say about emotion. We are said to deploy an internal language when we think, but it is not suggested that we do so when we feel. Internal speech is characteristic of thought but not of emotion—we […]
Freedom and Bondage in Psychology Chomsky has long urged that the use of language is stimulus-free. The point in itself is obvious, as many of the most important points are, but it stands opposed to entrenched ideas. I will make some remarks about its interpretation and significance. The notion of […]
How to Solve the Problem of Other Minds Brain splicing—that’s how. Suppose I want to know whether you have a mind, and if so whether it is like my mind. I am particularly concerned to know whether you have visual experiences like mine. So I arrange to have part of your brain […]