Consciousness and Evolution Evolution by natural selection is a gradual process, not a jumpy jerky one.[1] Small modifications not sudden leaps forward. Complex organs don’t spring into existence from nowhere as a result of spectacular random mutations. This basic Darwinian principle applies as much to the mind as the body. And it applies to consciousness […]
Moral Seeming In moral philosophy we find distinctions between moral language, moral psychology, and moral reality. Interrelations between these areas are explored. Moral psychology tends to dwell on questions about moral motivation—does it consist in moral beliefs, moral desires, or moral sentiments? I wish to add a further topic: what I call moral seeming.[1] There […]
Advice for Obituarists I have reached that point in life at which a man starts to wonder about his obituaries, and whether there will even be any. In my case cancellation might go that far. It’s a nasty question. In a close counterfactual world, I would be perfectly sanguine, given my life history; but as […]
Language As Thought I am going to present a new theory of language—a new philosophy of language. Or perhaps I should say newish because elements of it are already out there, particularly in Chomsky.[1] The question is what language is—what fundamentally constitutes it, what its primary mode of being consists in. And the idea is […]
The Pronoun War: A Ceasefire Proposal The war has gone on long enough; it is time to reach an agreement. No one gets everything they want; some territory must be conceded on both sides. I propose that male writers (or speakers) use “he” and female writers (or speakers) use “she”. Each party has their pronoun […]
Language Identity Given plausible empirical assumptions, we can argue on conceptual grounds for two counterintuitive theses: (1) there is only one human language, and (2) this language is not learnable. It will turn out that these statements are not as counterintuitive as they seem. In fact, they follow from well-known considerations advanced by Noam Chomsky, […]
On Reading I am going to tackle a question that has baffled our finest minds: why reading is so pleasurable. Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, your uncle Tony—all these have ignored, or avoided, the question. Too hard, I guess. But this leaves us with a rich field for startling discovery—who will be the first to […]
Intelligence Assessment There is something I used to do routinely that I don’t do anymore: assess other people’s intelligence. As a professor, it’s part of the job—forming opinions about other people’s intellectual abilities. Sometimes it seems like the main part of the job. It comes in many forms: grading, admissions, letters of recommendation, job interviews, […]
On the Origin of Heavenly Bodies The main thesis of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is that species evolve from other species. They arise from natural variations found within a given species that are selected for or against. They do not arise spontaneously and independently, or by dint of divine or extraterrestrial intervention. […]
Art Miami I went to the annual Art Miami festival yesterday with my friend and tennis partner Eddy. The people were as interesting to look at as the art; indeed, they were works of art themselves. Obviously from the art world, they knew how to put on a good sartorial show. What particularly caught my […]