Behaviorism Re-Refuted Behaviorism is a bit like a zombie: just when you think you’ve killed it the thing comes lumbering back into the room. So it may be worth reminding ourselves quite how bad the reasoning was that led to it. The doctrine may be defined thus: mental states are dispositions […]
Communication and Language It is commonly supposed that the use of language in communication is its primary use. There is either nothing else that is language or anything else is an internalized version of outer speech. But in fact communication itself presupposes that language exists in another form and is not […]
Is Logic Arbitrary? Propositional logic is the logic of truth functions: negation takes us from true to false and false to true; conjunction takes us from double true to true and otherwise to false; disjunction takes us from single true or double true to true and otherwise to false. But are these the […]
The Certainty Principle The Uncertainty Principle in physics comes as no surprise to a skeptic. We can’t know the position and velocity of a subatomic particle—so what? We can’t know a lot of things, including the position and velocity of an elephant. We think we can know that—or we think it […]
Internal Language and Consciousness Do the words of inner speech consist of mental images of outer speech? If I say to myself “It’s raining” do I entertain mental images of my saying out loud “It’s raining”? Are inward utterances strings of such images? If so, that would indicate that inner speech is […]
A Theory of Language In A Theory of Justice Rawls suggests a thought experiment designed to rid us of biases in our thinking about justice, labeled the Original Position. We find ourselves occupying a certain position in society, perhaps an unfairly privileged one, and we need a way to prescind from this contingency, […]
Yesterday I had the pleasure of conductng my first seminar in eight years. We discussed two papers of mine from this blog. We used Zoom. The students were excellent, the discussion scintillating; it was just what a philosophy seminar should be. You ask what institution organized this seminar–is it perhaps indicative of a thaw? Perhaps […]
Is Reference Real? “Sitting next to her, talking with her about the simplest and most insignificant subjects, Prince Andre admired the joyful shining of her eyes and smile, which referred not to what they were saying, but to her inner happiness”: Tolstoy, War and Peace, Volume II, Part Three, chapter XVII. […]
The Meta-Linguistic Turn Suppose you are interested in the nature of numbers or causation or necessity or the mind or values. Your interests are traditionally metaphysical or ontological. You propose to think about these things and try to come up with answers. But someone tells you that you are going about […]
I don’t usually like to comment on what is going on in the “the profession”, but the recent skirmish between Robin Dembroff and Alex Byrne over the definition of “woman” reminds me of two incidents in which I was involved: two young female professors wrote highly personal critical reviews of my books Basic Structures of […]