Why Is There Nothing It’s Like to be a Rock? We divide the world into two big classes: the conscious beings and the non-conscious beings. The mind-body problem concerns the conscious beings: we want to know what makes it the case that a being is conscious. This is an explanatory question: […]
The Language of Emotion Proponents of the language of thought typically don’t have much to say about emotion. We are said to deploy an internal language when we think, but it is not suggested that we do so when we feel. Internal speech is characteristic of thought but not of emotion—we […]
Freedom and Bondage in Psychology Chomsky has long urged that the use of language is stimulus-free. The point in itself is obvious, as many of the most important points are, but it stands opposed to entrenched ideas. I will make some remarks about its interpretation and significance. The notion of […]
How to Solve the Problem of Other Minds Brain splicing—that’s how. Suppose I want to know whether you have a mind, and if so whether it is like my mind. I am particularly concerned to know whether you have visual experiences like mine. So I arrange to have part of your brain […]
Consciousness and the Eye If you look into the eye of an animal (say, a bird) you gain a strong impression of consciousness: the eye seems to brim with consciousness. The same is not true of other sense organs: you don’t get a comparable impression from looking at […]
Contradictory Concepts and Skepticism Suppose we are engaged on a project of radical interpretation of an alien population. The project is progressing nicely, with many predicates already interpreted, but then we encounter a strange case: there is a predicate “squound” that appears to be an abbreviation of “square and round” and is […]
Matter and the Limits of Skepticism The skeptic questions whether we know the external world exists, purporting to provide a proof that we don’t know that it does. The proof takes the form of describing a possible alternative to what we normally assume. Thus it is suggested that a […]
The Water Paradox It has been a while since we had a new paradox to cudgel our brains over. For your edification (and frustration) I will present what I call “the water paradox”. Like all paradoxes it aims to derive an absurdity from self-evident premises, thus demonstrating the auto-destructive […]
Intention and Possibility How does the idea of possibility enter our thought? It is generally agreed that perception is not its source: we do not see possibility—we don’t think of possibility because our senses present it to us. A more likely view is that imagination is the progenitor of the idea […]
Evolution and the Blank Slate It is sometimes observed that evolution by natural selection resembles learning by trial and error. Mutation is the trial and natural selection is the error correction. It is certainly apt to think of evolution as a kind of learning process: over time organisms “learn” […]