This paper follows on from “The Cruel Gene” and “Pain and Unintelligent Design” on this blog. Evolution of Pain Pain has evolved over many millions of years. Presumably it had primitive forms that were subjected to natural selection. It was honed and whittled, modified and amplified. There are now several species of pain, each […]
Rejecting the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction If we cannot make sense of the idea of a synthetic truth, it looks as if we have to reject the analytic-synthetic distinction (the reverse of post-Quine orthodoxy).[1] There is nothing coherent for the concept of analytic truth to contrast with (a genuine distinction requires meaningful things to be distinct). Yet […]
Are There Synthetic Truths? There is a tradition, stemming from Quine (but not pre-dating him), claiming that the concept of analytic truth is undefined, or ill-defined, so that the analytic-synthetic distinction cannot be made sense of; accordingly, there are only synthetic truths. I think this is the opposite of the truth. Nothing is true but […]
The recent debacle involving the presidents of three top American universities is symptomatic of a deeper and more widespread malaise. The moral obtuseness and intellectual ineptitude of these three women is just part of a general degradation in American universities and intellectual life. I won’t go into the causes of this, but what appalls me […]
Consciousness, Paralysis, and Functionalism Paralysis has been regularly used to defeat behaviorism and its descendant functionalism. How can the mind consist of behavior if paralysis is consistent with having a mind? The objection is clear and strong: paralysis shows that behavior is not required for consciousness to exist. To have a conscious state is not […]
Macro and Micro Necessity A curious fact of necessity studies: although necessity is liberally spoken of, its extent is rarely tabulated. We find reference to necessities involving people and items of furniture (and the occasional cat) but little in the way of mapping the full distribution of necessities in the world, or their interconnections. We […]
A New Metaphysics of Necessity There is a tacit recognition in the history of philosophy that in order to account for necessity we need to introduce a split in what we regard as overall reality. Thus, we have the idea that necessity resides in meaning, conceived as separate from the ordinary reality of things and […]
I thought it would be fun to write a Christmas song and this is what came out. Merry Christmas everyone! Merry Christmas, Christmas Christmas here, Christmas there Christmas, Christmas everywhere! Christmas, Christmas, where will you go When the world’s so hot there is no snow? Christmas, Christmas, do you care If forest fires […]
And and Not Sharp thinkers (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, among others) have felt that there is something special about the classical logical connectives, and, or, not, and if. I will list the features commonly attributed to these concepts. They are truth-functional and referentially transparent. They are disquotational in the manner formulated by Tarski’s so-called recursion clauses […]
Imagination, Knowledge, and Other Minds We don’t know what it is like to be a bat, a shark, or an octopus. There are facts of the matter—phenomenological facts—about these things, but we don’t stand in the knowledge relation to them. We don’t grasp them, apprehend them, conceptualize them. Our knowledge reaches its limits with these […]