Ignorance, Error, and Mystery The extent of our ignorance is stupendous. We know next to nothing about vast tracts of reality. If the world is the totality of facts, then our knowledge is confined to a tiny proportion of these facts. Just think of the distant past and remote future: all those individual […]
On Not Denoting The literature on descriptions tends to operate with a limited class of examples, mainly descriptions of people and places (“the queen of England”, “the capital of France”). This can bias us in favor of certain theories of their semantics. We can think of descriptions as referring to people and places […]
Particle Psychology Physics is particle physics. The physical world consists of atoms that consist of particles (electrons, protons, neutrons). This was discovered not so long ago, though it was conjectured by the ancient Greeks. It is not part of common sense and is not suggested by perceptual appearance. If anything, physical objects […]
Sexuality and the Transsexual Consider a person, Alec, who believes he was born into the wrong kind of body. He believes himself to be essentially female, despite his anatomy. Accordingly, he chooses to become the woman he inwardly perceives himself to be: he dresses in women’s clothes, wears make-up, and acts the […]
Night and Day How firm is the distinction between night and day? What is night and what is day? What kind of distinction is this? Clearly there are periods during which it is neither night nor day—at dusk and dawn. Night is turning into day, but it is neither one nor the […]
Tyranny of the Majority Here is de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835): “But the dominating power in the United States [the majority] does not understand being mocked like that. The slightest reproach offends it, the smallest sharp truth stimulates its angry response and it must be praised from the style of its language […]
I have lived in this country for 30 years, but I count myself an outsider. What we have witnessed in the last week, and in the last few years, has undoubtedly been ugly in the extreme, but to my eye it is not so far removed from business as usual in America. The same tendencies […]
Self-Blindness and “I” Hume’s point that the self is not introspectively detectable has always been met with intuitive acceptance. Its significance is more contentious. Does it show that the self does not exist, or that introspection is limited, or that the self is really just a congeries of mental states? A possible view […]
Death, Time, and Other Minds It is often said that we are “social animals”. What seems to be intended is twofold: we have an emotional craving for human contact, and we are similar to other social animals in this respect. [1] Both observations are surely correct, but could there be anything more to our […]
Cognitive Closure De Dicto and De Re De dicto belief does not entail de re belief and vice versa. The two have different conditions of possibility. Someone could believe de dicto that the tallest man in the world is over 8 feet without believing de re of the tallest man that he is […]