John Lennon’s Mother I recently came across John Lennon’s song “Mother”. It begins with a doleful slow church bell sound, as at a funeral, repeated four times. Then he abruptly comes in with a loud and angry “Mother!” followed by these words: “You had me, but I never had you. I wanted you, you didn’t […]
Entanglement Epistemology Is there any alternative to empiricism and rationalism—experience and reason, impressions and innate ideas?[1] In particular, do we need to have experiences of everything we know? Can empirical knowledge (as opposed to the a priori kind) be constituted by anything other than sense impressions of the thing known? One might hope so, because […]
Fodor on Mystery This is Jerry Fodor in Hume Variations (2003): “Thinking, intentionality, concept possession, and concept individuation really are deeply mysterious, and they really can’t be allowed indefinitely to take in each other’s wash. The hardness of understanding intentionality and thought isn’t, these days, as widely advertised as the hardness of understanding consciousness, but […]
Cognitive Psychologies Epistemologists distinguish a priori and a posteriori knowledge, thus establishing a grand dichotomy—an undeniable dualism. But this duality is composed of a plurality of cognitive faculties: vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch (as well introspection and proprioception). Traditionally, we are said to have five senses, each operating differently; these differences are not trivial, […]
Faculty Knowledge Empiricists and rationalists agree that we have a number of cognitive faculties: the five senses plus whatever else is needed to account for the totality of human knowledge (mathematics, ethics, etc.). But how do we know this—how do we know, for example, that the visual faculty exists? The empiricists and rationalists never discuss […]
Chapter Ten And indeed, Amber was never the same again. The sickness had left her, never to return. At last, she was cured. She became a normal girl with normal reactions. She vomited only when she had eaten something that disagreed with her or because of a tummy bug. Back at school she blended in. […]
Chapter Nine Things didn’t quite work out the way she expected. As she slept the night before she was due to return home, a sinister plot unfolded. A group of highly trained Yellow Caps scaled the hotel wall and entered her room silently and kidnapped her. They slipped a specially designed kidnapping bag over her […]
Chapter Eight Amber was nearing the end of her twelfth year on planet Earth when word came from the United Federation of Independent States (UFIS—pronounced You fizz). They had a top-level mission for her to perform, if she would be so kind. This was not a word you could ignore, since UFIS represented all the […]
Chapter Seven One day the Minister for Justice paid her a visit. He said he needed her help in a matter of great importance. He had a careful way of speaking, as if each word could be a lasso to trip him up. He seldom uttered a sentence without saying it over in his mind […]