Four Ways of Studying Language What is the linguist or philosopher of language studying? It will be useful to distinguish four different (but overlapping) areas of study: ontological, epistemological, behavioral, and phenomenological. By “ontological” I mean the study of language as a formal object: its nature, structure, and inner workings. What is it composed of? […]
Phenomenology of Language Suppose we undertake a phenomenological investigation of human speech (we leave Vulcan speech to the Vulcans). What distinctions will we need to make? What categories must we adopt? What methods should we use? What precedents should we cite? Obviously, we will need a speaker-hearer distinction, as well as distinctions between inner speech […]
Consciousness and Language Consciousness science has not yet penetrated the field of linguistics, but clearly consciousness and language have a lot to do with each other. How are the two related? They are salient features of the human animal and we would expect to see significant interactions between them. Yet linguistics and philosophy of language […]
Act and Object Dismantled Things are getting scary around here, philosophically. Paradigms are shifting, shattering, vaporizing before our very eyes (literally). The act-object analysis of conscious experience is in deep trouble. The senses have no objects! There is no object such that a visual experience is a seeing of it. Not physical, not mental, and […]
Are We Blind? I can state the argument of this paper very succinctly: we don’t see matter and we don’t see mind; therefore, we don’t see anything; therefore, we are blind. I think this argument is sound. Moreover, it generalizes: we don’t hear or touch or smell or taste anything; therefore, we are deaf, etc. […]
Consciousness and Solipsism This is to be an essay in existential psychotherapy, proceeding from a sound basis in the metaphysics of consciousness. It is going to be pretty abstract and theoretical, though with a practical payoff (sort of). We can begin with the old thought that consciousness (the conscious self) is an isolated thing as […]
Degrees of Grammaticalness In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) Chomsky discusses what he calls “degrees of grammaticalness”. He concludes this discussion with these words: “More generally, it is clear that the intuitive notion of grammatical well-formedness is by no means a simple one and that an adequate explanation of it will involve theoretical […]
Conscious Matter I will pose a question I don’t think has been posed before: Why can’t there be conscious matter, but only conscious mind? A mental state can be either conscious or unconscious, passing from one condition to the other, but an unconscious material state can only be unconscious. Consider a state of the brain […]
Division and Diversity Professional pundits often say that the trouble with contemporary political culture is that we are too “divided”. The remedy is to “bring people together” by recognizing that “we have more in common than we think”. This is completely wrong: the problem isn’t division; it’s error. If people have contradictory opinions, one side […]
Knowledge of the Unconscious We have two minds: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. These two minds differ in respect of the distinctive mark of consciousness (“what-it’s-likeness”) and in their accessibility to knowledge. The unconscious mind lacks the mark of consciousness and isn’t known in the way the conscious mind is. We know what […]