Cancellation and Quotation Today I happened by chance on an article in Scientific American on panpsychism by Dan Falk. The second paragraph contains the sentences: “As philosopher David Chalmers asked: ‘How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?’ He famously dubbed this quandary the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.” In the […]
Data in Philosophy Every academic subject requires a source of data. Without data a subject cannot thrive, survive, or even exist. History requires written documents of the past. Archeology requires preserved artifacts. Microbiology requires data from microscopes. Anatomy requires dissections. Atomic physics requires data from supercolliders. Astronomy requires light readings from telescopes. Zoology requires observations […]
Determinacy of Translation The following seems logically possible: a speaker’s use of the word “rabbit” is accompanied by rapid changes in its meaning and denotation—at one moment meaning rabbit and at another meaning undetached rabbit part. This will not be apparent to an observer, since assent behavior will remain constant in the presence of rabbits […]
Does Truth Matter? Theories of truth are very various, as if people can’t decide what kind of thing truth is. Is it just another name for consistency (coherence), an inter-propositional relation? Is it nothing at all, mere repetition of the proposition said to be true? Is it some sort of abstract correspondence between proposition and […]
Against World-Making There is a view out there, made respectable by Nelson Goodman, that the world is made not found—or rather, worlds, plural.[1] Worlds are versions, verbiage, visions (to parody Goodman’s alliterative style). They are not discovered, or uncovered; they are constructed, built. Is there any truth to this trope (merit to this meme)? Note that […]
Geometrical Knowledge How do we come to have geometrical knowledge? How do we acquire geometrical concepts? The question has been around since Plato and his theory is still probably the best—we have such knowledge innately. But this doesn’t answer the question of what triggers the innate knowledge (it isn’t there fully formed from the start): […]
Quantified Logics Standard propositional logic contains no quantifiers. It simply replaces sentences with propositional variables (“schematic letters”) that remain unbound. But there is nothing to prevent us from introducing quantifiers that bind these variables, ranging over propositions. These can be objectual or substitutional, according to taste. They will be read “for all p” and “for […]
Other Bodies The orthodox view of our knowledge of minds is that while other people’s minds are doubtful my own mind is not: I can be certain of my mind but not of other minds. Hence there is a skeptical problem of other minds but not of my own mind. There is a deep epistemological […]
Academic Blacklisting A few weeks ago, a fellow philosopher suggested to me that it would be a good idea to produce a book of essays discussing my work, which he would edit. I agreed. He contacted Wiley publishers and received a highly enthusiastic response from their commissioning editor Will Croft. It only remained to sign […]
Cogito for the External World The traditional Cogito “I think, therefore I am” yields a moderate harvest of existential conclusions: the existence of a subject of thoughts (albeit momentary and etiolated) and the existence of propositions as the content of thoughts. We might compare this to a plant that is rooted in the earth and […]