Semantic Levels
Semantic Levels Anyone interested in language and perception will recognize that there are different levels of analysis of the phenomenon in question. In linguistics we will distinguish […]
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Philosophy and Form
Philosophy and Form Philosophy is versatile as to form. We have the long-form book or monograph, the medium length article, the note or comment, and the epigram. There is also the dialogue form (Plato, Hume, Berkeley). Philosophy can be written as poetry (Lucretius, Eliot, Donne) or performed in a play (Shaw, […]
Knowledge By Necessity
Knowledge By Necessity We can know that a proposition is true and we can know that a proposition is necessary, but can we know that a proposition is true by knowing that it is necessary? Consider a simple tautology like “Hesperus = Hesperus”: don’t you know this is true […]
The Utra-Selfish Gene
The Ultra-Selfish Gene In David Attenborough’s nature documentary Frozen Planet there is some remarkable and rare footage of polar bears mating. The male begins a twenty-mile trek through deep snow lured by the scent of a distant female. He catches up with her and engages in courting behavior, which […]
Philosophical Originality
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
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
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
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
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
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 […]