How To Be a Psychologist In my years as a psychology student no one ever suggested I read William James’s The Principles of Psychology. No doubt this was because it was deemed old-fashioned and far too philosophical. In those days great emphasis was placed on doing experiments. You couldn’t be a serious psychologist unless you […]
On Naming According to the classic description theory, names are synonymous with definite descriptions; they are said to abbreviate such descriptions, to be “short for” them. The two are therefore intersubstitutable. The description is said to “analyze” the name—spell out its meaning. Thus, there can’t be a language with names but no descriptions, and names […]
Wittgenstein on Propositions The Tractatus is a hymn to propositions. It is all about propositions. Wittgenstein is an unabashed propositional realist: propositions exist outside human minds, capture the structure of the world, have a hidden real essence, determine determinate meaning, divide up the space of logical possibilities, are isomorphic with facts. They are logical pictures, […]
American Guns Suppose you visited a foreign country in which the following practices prevailed. Poisonous chemicals are freely available. You can buy them at your local pharmacy or at specialty poison outlets. They are lethal—they can kill people and often do. People buy them in large quantities. There is a thriving culture of chemical ownership. […]
Alcaraz Ascendant You should have seen Carlos Alcaraz play Reilly Opelka last night. Carlos is 6ft; Reilly is 6’11. The big man has a fearsome serve, which gave the shorter man a good deal of trouble. But Carlos out-served him. I felt sorry for the poor sod, having done to him what he does to […]
Propositions What is a proposition? What indeed: no one really knows. There have been many proposals: a sentence, a statement, a thought, a meaning, a combination of concepts, a combination of objects, a set of possible worlds, a possible state of affairs, a picture, a model, an image, a name of a truth-value, a description […]
Disgust Again Returning from beautiful Barbados, I am struck anew by the moral squalor in which this country now wallows. Also, the government is pretty bad. An access of moral disgust: that curious puzzling emotion. I put it to one side when I wrote The Meaning of Disgust, not having much to say about it. […]
Brain Views Oh, those perishing bats, hogging all the limelight, with their fancy sense of echolocation! Let’s talk about the humble human and how things look to him or her. Can this be reduced to brain states? We have agreed that consciousness is having a point of view, specifically a visual one; can we argue […]
Points of View We are not good at talking about consciousness. The best we have been able to come up with is the what-it’s-like formula, inaugurated by Brian Farrell and Timothy Sprigge and popularized by Thomas Nagel. But this formula has resisted illuminating paraphrase and remains a vernacular catch-phrase. What is its analysis? Can we […]
‘Against Identity Theories’, “The Deep Problem’ and the ‘is’ of definition I agree with the gist of both papers. However…. Aristotle distinguished ‘real’ from ‘nominal’ definition. The latter is just a way of identifying what a name names. So (to modify and build on an actual Aristotelian example) “‘Lightening’ names the flashes in the sky […]