Counterfactuals In a world with less gravity, the birds would be huge. In a world with more gravity, only insects would fly. In a world with more light and plant predators, plants would have consciousness and advanced intelligence. In a world with greater water resistance, whales would be small. In a colder world, there would […]
Fodor on Concept Possession Jerry Fodor holds that to possess a concept is to be able to think about its referent—and that’s all. He asks, rhetorically, “So what’s wrong with identifying having a concept C with being able to think about Cs as such?” (21: italics all his, for some reason.) Later we read: “To […]
Empiricist Psychology Let empiricism be the doctrine that all knowledge of the external concrete world derives from interactions with that world and only from such interactions. There is no knowledge of this world deriving from pure reason, tradition, God, the genes, or language. Super-empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge derives from interactions with the […]
Philosophy and AI I think AI will be good for philosophy (if the philosophers don’t ruin it first, a big if). The reason is obvious: AI is no good at philosophy, at least as AI now exists. But it is good at many other things: white-collar jobs, routine teaching, performing calculations, storing information, providing quick […]
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 […]