The Cogito There have been many criticisms of the Cogito and many versions of it (some preceding Descartes’ version). Lichtenberg’s criticism has been influential: all we know with certainty is that there are thoughts occurring, not that there exists someone having those thoughts. We introspect our thoughts and thereby […]
Confined Knowledge Our knowledge of mind is conspicuously confined: we know mind in our own case quite clearly and distinctly, but we can at best speculate about mind as it occurs elsewhere. Nothing else in nature is quite like this: we don’t know shape, say, in only one instance while being […]
Metamorphosis and the Self It is not implausible to maintain that the caterpillar and the butterfly it becomes are the same organism, but it is another question whether they are the same self. The caterpillar crawls on tiny feet and munches leaves: it has the sensations and motivations that go with […]
Democracy and Desire The essence of democracy is collective decision. Each citizen is accorded equal power to determine the outcome of elections and hence to influence public policy. The simplest version of the democratic principle is majority rule: what the majority wants determines the decisions of the state. There have been criticisms […]
Quantum Semantics The so-called quantum revolution, initiated by Planck and Einstein in the first decade of the twentieth century, was just that: an overturning of entrenched earlier theory. Light (radiation) had been conceived as continuous and wavelike not as having a particulate structure. Much of the experimentally observed behavior […]
Impossible Questions If I ask myself what are the most difficult topics in metaphysics, I find that the following three stand out: necessity, causation, and existence. The questions couldn’t be simpler to state: What is the nature of necessity? What is the nature of causation? What is the nature of […]
Knowledge of Entailment How do we know that one proposition entails another proposition? If we think of entailment as logical necessitation, how do we know that one proposition logically necessitates another? I suggest that we consider this question by analogy with Hume’s treatment of causation. According […]
Knowledge and Belief According to the tradition stemming from Plato, knowledge is a special type of belief. In order to know that p one has to believe that p and meet various further conditions on that belief—that the belief be true, that it be justified, that it not be accidentally true, […]
Induction Again I will consider two instructive thought experiments. First, suppose there are people who have the following psychological deficiencies: (a) they have no concept of the natural powers or dispositions of objects, just concepts of manifest properties; and (b) they have no natural tendency, innate or acquired, to expect certain […]
Internal Behaviorism Goethe’s famous dictum, “In the beginning was the deed” is often invoked as a motto for behaviorism: if you want to understand the mind, you should look to overt behavior not to some supposed inner landscape. But that is not the only way the dictum can be interpreted, since not […]