Tyranny of the Majority Here is de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835): “But the dominating power in the United States [the majority] does not understand being mocked like that. The slightest reproach offends it, the smallest sharp truth stimulates its angry response and it must be praised from the style of its language […]
I have lived in this country for 30 years, but I count myself an outsider. What we have witnessed in the last week, and in the last few years, has undoubtedly been ugly in the extreme, but to my eye it is not so far removed from business as usual in America. The same tendencies […]
Self-Blindness and “I” Hume’s point that the self is not introspectively detectable has always been met with intuitive acceptance. Its significance is more contentious. Does it show that the self does not exist, or that introspection is limited, or that the self is really just a congeries of mental states? A possible view […]
Death, Time, and Other Minds It is often said that we are “social animals”. What seems to be intended is twofold: we have an emotional craving for human contact, and we are similar to other social animals in this respect. [1] Both observations are surely correct, but could there be anything more to our […]
Cognitive Closure De Dicto and De Re De dicto belief does not entail de re belief and vice versa. The two have different conditions of possibility. Someone could believe de dicto that the tallest man in the world is over 8 feet without believing de re of the tallest man that he is […]
Physiological Investigations It would be wrong to think that all the organs of the body are pumps. The heart is a pump and it features prominently in our picture of the body, but not every organ resembles the heart. We might be tempted to think that the lungs, stomach, and kidneys are […]
Language, Truth, and Grammar It would be convenient if only true statements were grammatical. Then we would be able to read truth-value off grammar. Falsehood would be signaled by ungrammaticality. But of course false statements are as grammatical as true ones. Grammar is completely indifferent to truth. The world is what determines […]
Two Dogmas of Rationalism We may suppose the rationalist to hold two theses: (a) there is an analytic-synthetic distinction, and (b) the meaning of statements can be reduced to the innate ideas expressed or denoted by the terms in them. Since rationalism accords priority to a priori statements, the odd member of the […]
Inverted Positivism I wish to introduce you to the work of an obscure Austrian philosopher. His name is Otto Otto and he lives in the suburbs of Vienna. [1] He belongs to a group called the Vienna Oval by facetious analogy with the better-known Vienna Circle. Otto (you can take this to be […]
Studying the Brain Brain studies have proceeded apace since that clump of grey tissue in our heads was tapped as the basis of mind. First it was inspected with the naked eye, prodded and poked; then dissected and anatomized; then stained and examined under a microscope; then electrically recorded, grossly and minutely; and […]