Speechless Language Normally when a human being learns a language he or she learns to speak and be spoken to. Sounds are produced and understood. An acoustic ability is acquired. But this is not always so: some people learn language (e.g. the English language) without the aid of sound. They neither […]
Skepticism About the Conceptual World I will describe a startling new form of skepticism, to be set beside more familiar forms. It lurks beneath the surface of recent work on meaning and reference. Consider “water”: it has both a meaning (sense, connotation) and a reference (denotation, extension). Suppose its meaning […]
Sexual Knowledge In endnote [A] to An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume asks: “I should desire to know, what can be meant by asserting, that self-love, or resentment of injuries, or the passion between the sexes is not innate?” He clearly thinks that these “ideas” (Locke’s term) are innate, so […]
Selfish Genes and Selfish Beasts It is sometimes supposed that selfish gene theory implies that animals are always biologically selfish—that all animals carry “genes for selfishness”. That is a misunderstanding because the whole point of the theory is to allow for kin-related altruism: an animal will act against its own […]
Seeing Sensations It has been generally accepted that you can’t know what a sensation is like without experiencing it yourself. No experience of pain, no understanding of pain; no seeing of red, no knowing what seeing of red is. Possessing the concept requires instantiating what it is a concept of. […]
Remarks on Metaphysics What kind of statement expresses the results of metaphysical inquiry? Wittgenstein famously begins the Tractatusthus: “The world is all that is the case” (1), “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (1.1.), “The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all […]
Real Freedom The free will debate is usually characterized as a dispute about whether or not freedom is compatible with determinism. Determinism is understood as the doctrine that all events are subject to the laws of nature, which admit of no exceptions. So an act like raising your arm […]
Puzzling Pimples The philosophy of pimples is an underdeveloped subject. Why do we react to them with such revulsion? The other night I was watching TV (Jimmy Kimmel Live, 14 August, 2018) and was treated to some footage of assorted people looking at film of pimples being burst. My […]
Proprioception and Naïve Realism Philosophical discussions of sense perception seldom address proprioception, but it is a question whether theories that hold for the other senses, particularly vision, hold for proprioception. The objects of proprioception are generally taken to be the muscles and joints, possibly also the skin; they do not […]
Problems of Other Minds We speak of the problem of other minds, in the singular, but it is instructive to disentangle different strands in what is so described. Does the difficulty of knowing other minds stem from the nature of mind or from the contingent limits of our faculties […]