I’ve noticed a disturbing new trend in the philosophy profession: not answering letters. You write to someone to make a critical point about something they have said and they simply don’t bother to reply, thus avoiding the task of responding rationally to the criticism. In the old days if someone wrote to you, however critically, […]
Abstract If philosophy consists of conceptual analysis, is it thereby debarred from being a science? I argue that it is not and that philosophy so conceived is a science. The argument takes the form of careful attention to the meaning of “science,” “experiment,” “empirical,” and related words. Philosophy is a formal science. This does […]
Set-Theoretic Psychology Set theory as a branch of mathematics is a comparatively recent invention, but the concepts it uses are surely planted deep in the mind. The idea of membership in a collection is primordial: things do not just exist separately; they exist as elements of something more inclusive. […]
Sketch for a General Theory of Human Psychology Is it possible to come up with high-level organizational principles of human psychology? The task has been attempted before–as in associationist psychology, classical conditioning theory, and computationalism. The hope is to discover general principles that cover a wide variety of psychological phenomena, thus unifying […]
Is Moral Responsibility Logically Possible? There is a well-known argument purporting to show that human beings are not morally responsible, i.e. appropriate recipients of praise and blame, which goes as follows.[1]What you do results from the way you are—your psychology. But the way you are is fixed by heredity and […]
The civil war begins today in the Senate. Just because the facts will likely never be established it is possible for either side to take exception to the other side. The bad feeling and distrust is now turned up very high. I found Professor Ford convincing and Judge Kavanaugh unconvincing. If they appoint him to […]
I have heard it said by people who fancy themselves physicists that Pauli exclusion is the explanation for why there cannot be two objects in the same place at the same time. This is claimed in criticism of my discussion of the latter principle in my book Basic Structures of Reality. It is completely wrong and […]
Defining Philosophy It is an embarrassment to philosophers that they cannot define their discipline. It makes them look like shady operators. I propose to alleviate their embarrassment by offering a succinct definition of philosophy. If you ask a physicist what physics is about, he will say that it is about physical reality, and you […]
Believing Zombies Could there be zombies that believe they are conscious?[1]They have no consciousness, but they erroneously believe that they do. That may seem possible if we think of their beliefs as implanted at birth or something of the sort: couldn’t a super scientist simply interfere with their brain to install the […]
I started playing guitar at age 60 after being a drummer for nearly 50 years. Not easy. Lately I’ve been playing bass more, which combines guitar and percussion. I recently learned the bass lick in Prince’s Sign O’ the Times (quite a thrill to play that). But even more recently I took up blues harmonica, […]