What is a Mental State? The first-person viewpoint is apt to skew our conception of what a mental state essentially involves. We introspect the state and think we have attained a pretty comprehensive picture of what it is, intrinsically, constitutively. Fundamentally, this is a confusion (conflation) of epistemology and metaphysics—privileging one mode of knowing over […]
Are There Psychophysical Correlations? The orthodox view is that mental states or attributes are correlated with physical states or attributes. For every mental state M, there is a physical state P such that M is correlated with P (not so in the opposite direction). That is, every mental distinction has a corresponding physical distinction, down […]
Are There Psychophysical Laws? This question has been much debated since the publication of Davidson’s 1970 article “Mental Events”.[1]Here I will give my current take on the question. First, we must distinguish strict laws from statements that are lawlike or law-ish, i.e., those that have some nomological force but don’t achieve the status of basic […]
Refuting the Identity Theory Suppose someone were to make an outrageous identity claim—say, that Donald Trump is identical to Barack Obama. It would be easy to refute that by pointing out that the two men are to be found in different places, so cannot be the same man—following the principle (beloved of detectives) that one […]
On Drumming My thesis is that all playing of musical instruments is drumming. Drumming is what they all have in common, what constitutes their underlying real essence. It might be thought that this cannot be right, because drums are a rhythm instrument and other instruments are used to produce melody. But actually, drums also produce […]
Identity and Synonymy It is commonly supposed that “water is H2O” is both known to be true and synthetic (hence a posteriori). I think this is not so. The reason is not difficult to see: if the sentence is known to be true, then speakers will associate the same descriptions with each term (following Leibniz’s […]
Shark Attacks I recently read Francois Sarano’s excellent forthcoming book In the Name of Sharks (sent to me by the publishers because I wrote a review of a book about the octopus in the Wall Street Journal). It puts up a strong case for the preservation of shark populations in the face of dwindling numbers […]
Am I Certain That I Think? Descartes wanted to build human knowledge on a foundation of certainty. He thought the Cogito provided an instance of certainty, and many have agreed (Montaigne was there before him). Critics have argued that the conclusion of the Cogito doesn’t follow from the premise (the Lichtenberg objection). However, the premise […]
Seeming Seeming is a pervasive feature of conscious life. We (and other animals) are constant subjects of seeming: things are forever seeming this way or that to us. It now seems to me that there is a red cup in front of me, that Sebastian is in a good mood today, and that seeming is […]
A Philosophy of Seeming In “Seeming” I introduced seeming as a sui generis psychological natural kind. Here I will explore its uses in philosophical thought—the kind of impact it would have on philosophy were it to be taken seriously. I won’t repeat what I said in the earlier paper (this one should be read in […]