Moral Distance We tend to think that our moral obligations fall off with distance: the closer someone is to us the greater is his moral claim on us, and the further away the less. Morality operates like gravity—it weakens with distance. True, morality is an expanding circle, but […]
Memory Illusions In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, a thoughtful and unassuming young woman, makes the following observations to a certain Miss Crawford: “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do believe it is memory. There seems something more speakingly […]
Limits of Reality We speak of the limits of human knowledge or reason or our conceptual scheme, but we don’t tend to talk about the limits of reality. Knowledge is limited relative to reality—it is not as extensive as reality—but reality cannot fail to be as extensive as itself. But it may […]
Knowledge, Opinion, and Fantasy Plato wished to know the difference between knowledge and opinion. His idea, much elaborated over the centuries, is that something needs to be added to opinion to get knowledge. Knowledge is opinion plus something—truth, justification, reliability, etc. Certainly we can agree that knowledge is more than […]
Jane Austen’s Moral Universe Jane Austen is the most moral of writers, but what is her morality? What values does she espouse and promote? That is not an easy question, given the elusiveness of the authorial mind and the gap between life and art, but I propose to deal with […]
Is Psychology a Science? The question is only as precise as the word “science”, which isn’t very precise. But I don’t propose to quibble about that word (I incline to a wide application of it); instead I will compare psychology to some established sciences and note various gaps in […]
Is Moral Responsibility Logically Possible? There is a well-known argument purporting to show that human beings are not morally responsible, i.e. appropriate recipients of praise and blame, which goes as follows. [1] What you do results from the way you are—your psychology. But the way you are is fixed by heredity […]
Is Descriptive Metaphysics Possible? Strawson draws his famous distinction between two types of metaphysics in these words: “Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure”. This formulation raises puzzling questions. One might have […]
Introspective Invariance Our knowledge of the external world is subject to much variation in type and degree of access. We don’t always perceive accurately or clearly or with the same amount of revelation. There are illusions, occlusions, blurring, darkness, variations in appearance, constancy effects, blindness (partial or total), stimulus overload, perspectival […]
Interrogative Closure Nearly thirty years ago I coined the phrase “cognitive closure” to mean “things that can’t be known”. I now want to introduce the phrase “interrogative closure” to mean “questions that can’t be asked”—to be contrasted with “affirmative closure” meaning “answers that can’t be given”. Just as there may […]