Art and the Hand When you look at a work of art, say the Mona Lisa, you are struck by its beauty, as by that of its subject. You may imagine that long-dead woman, or the artist who painted her. But you don’t generally imagine the hand that painted her (or it): you don’t form […]
Functionalism and Materialism We have been told that mental states admit of multiple realization; this is the heart of the functionalist doctrine. Keep the function while letting the matter vary and you keep the mental state. The idea is not without merit; function must surely be part of what matters to mind. Pain could not […]
Interviews I have been conducting a series of interviews over the last few weeks with my Turkish associate (now friend) Ugur Polat. We have done four so far, each over three hours long (using Zoom). He plans ten in total. The actual interviewing is done by his neurologist wife Burcu, because her spoken English is […]
Kayak Philosophy The other day I was talking to Ian Macleod, world champion kayak surfer (a South African living in the US). He is building me a new waveski (surf kayak) and we were finalizing details. I asked him how the recent world championships had gone and he replied laconically “I won”. He added that […]
Buying a Language I want to learn a language, say Spanish, but I can’t be bothered to do it the old-fashioned way, so I decide to buy it (expensive but labor-saving). I go to the language store (Lang-Mart, right next to the Chinese supermarket). I am told that I can buy either a grammar chip […]
Drummers In a typical four-piece band you have two guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer; the lead vocalist usually has one or two back-up singers. It isn’t easy to manage with one guitarist; you need a dedicated rhythm guitarist. There are never two bassists and very rarely two drummers. There is certainly no need for […]
Chinese Rooms and Linguistic Knowledge John Searle’s Chinese room argument shows that it’s possible to be able to form meaningful sentences in a foreign language without knowing that language. That is, you can know the grammatical rules of a language without knowing the lexicon—what the individual words mean and refer to. Suppose you wanted to […]
A List I will make a list so that you can see that I’m not exaggerating. Intellectual. Philosophy: all areas, technical and popular. Science: psychology, biology, economics, physics. Literature: Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Nabokov, etc. Writing: novels, short stories, poetry, songs (rock, ballads, blues, pop). Sports. Tennis, table tennis, squash, badminton, gymnastics, pole vault, discus, basketball, […]
By a Long Chalk The phrase originates in keeping scores by making chalk marks. I remember Professor John Cohen, head of the psychology department at Manchester University when I was a student there (1968-72), writing to me and saying that my M.A. thesis on innate ideas was “the best M.A. thesis I have ever read […]
Epistemic Necessity and the Good The connection between metaphysical necessity and the Good is speculative and questionable, though there are signs of affinity.[1] But the connection between epistemic necessity and the Good is immediate and easy to discern: it goes via certainty. If a given proposition is epistemically necessary, it is certain: I am certain […]