Phenomenological Behaviorism Could it be that there is an element of truth in behaviorism? Behaviorism is usually presented as a third-person view of the human mind—what we know of the mind by external observation. It often goes with a materialist metaphysics. It therefore naturally incurs the charge of ignoring the first-person perspective—of overlooking the mind’s […]
The Logical Form of Omission Sentences There is an undeniable appeal to Davidson’s treatment of action sentences, in which adverbs appear as predicates of events quantified over.[1] Thus “John buttered some toast quickly in the kitchen” becomes “There was an event esuch that e was a buttering and e was by John and e was quick and e was in the kitchen”. Events have properties […]
Epiphenomenal Facts Epiphenomenalism is the doctrine that mental facts (properties, events, states) are causally idle. When it seems as if mental facts are causing behavior it is really correlated neural facts that are doing the causing—electrical signals sent from the brain down the efferent nerves and into the muscles. This is taken to be a […]
Temporal Panpsychism In the interests of exploring every metaphysical option, I will consider the doctrine of temporal panpsychism. Several positions on time may be distinguished: materialism, idealism, functionalism, mysterianism, and panpsychism. Materialism says that time reduces to physical objects or processes: clocks, whether natural or man-made, or possibly physical processes such as entropy. Idealism says […]
Dualism Naturalized Traditional dualism is characterized by two theses: (a) the mind is a separate substance (object, entity) from the brain, and (b) the mind is immaterial. These are logically independent; in particular, (a) does not entail (b). The mind could be a separate physical substance from the brain, existing alongside it. Or neither could be physical, […]
A Puzzle About Knowledge I want to discuss one of the oldest problems in philosophy, not aiming to solve it but with a view to articulating its difficulty. It has a claim to shaping the entire history of Western philosophy, refusing to go away. I mean the problem of a priori knowledge or, as we are apt […]
Why Materialism Collapses Into Panpsychism Weak materialism is the thesis that mental properties are aspects of entities (states, events) that also have physical properties, as with token identity theories. Strong materialism is the thesis that mental properties are physical properties, as with type identity theories. The physical properties are typically taken to be properties of the brain, […]
Phenomenology of A Priori Knowledge What is it like to know something a priori? How is it subjectively to know (say) that nothing can both be and not be, or that 2 + 2 = 4? The traditional definition of a posteriori knowledge has it that such knowledge is “dependent on experience”, while a priori knowledge is knowledge that is not dependent […]
Philosophy and Politics It would be naïve to suppose that philosophy in the twentieth century was sealed off from the political turmoil of the period, particularly two World Wars followed by a Cold War. Philosophers, being intellectual people, would naturally look to the causes of war (and oppression generally) in various forms of defective thinking: […]
The Alphabet of Thought An alphabet consists of a relatively small number of letters correlated with simple sounds. The modern English alphabet (deriving from the Latin alphabet) has 26 letters. The sounds represented are those found in speech, so the alphabet is a way to code the sound structure of speech. Writing consists of strings […]