The Unity of the Word What is a word? It seems safe to say that a word is something that combines with other words to produces phrases and sentences. We can also describe words as discrete units of meaning, finite in number: they are digital not analogue, never shading into each […]
Semantic Discreteness as a Logical Defect It used to be said that natural languages are logically defective in one respect or another: quantifiers look like names, definite descriptions look like names, names look like names, vagueness is pervasive, no distinction is made between object language and meta-language, and […]
Consciousness Demystified In Nabokov’s political dystopia Bend Sinister (1947) the philosopher Adam Krug reflects on his eight-year-old son: “And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the […]
Consciousness As The Only Reality The belief that only consciousness is real (really real) is deeply ingrained in philosophy, both western and other. To many people it has seemed as if something like this must be true—that there is no coherent alternative. Consciousness undoubtedly exists, and it is all that […]
Deciding to be Good I start with an imaginary case to oil the wheels of thought. Suppose there are people who go through a specific schedule of moral development: around the age of ten their moral thinking crystallizes around the question, “Should I be a good person?” At this time […]
Philosophy as Logical Analysis The method of philosophy is sometimes described as “conceptual analysis”. This is not wrong, but it can mislead and it carries unwanted baggage. The phrase makes it sound as if the philosopher’s object of interest is a mental entity not an objective feature […]
Knowledge and Reasons for Belief Suppose I believe that you plagiarized me. Suppose that it’s true that you plagiarized me. Suppose also that I have irrefutable evidence that you plagiarized me, in the form of my exact words appearing in a paper of yours (this evidence exists precisely […]
Panpsychist Phenomenalism Phenomenalism analyzes material-object statements in terms of the actual and potential experiences of perceivers: for a table to exist is for table-type experiences (“sense data”) to exist—say, for it to look as if there is a table. This has the consequence that there can be no material objects unless […]
Degrees of Consciousness Think of the last time you sat opposite someone you know well and talked for a while. You had all sorts of conscious experiences: the look of the person’s face, the sound of his or her voice, and so on. At some point you may have said […]
Phenomenology of Memory We didn’t need Proust to teach us that memories can be remarkably vivid and emotion-laden, even distant memories. All of us experience those Proustian moments when we are pierced by the dagger of memory—pleasantly or unpleasantly. This is when “it all comes back as if it were […]