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 […]
Chapter Ten And indeed, Amber was never the same again. The sickness had left her, never to return. At last, she was cured. She became a normal girl with normal reactions. She vomited only when she had eaten something that disagreed with her or because of a tummy bug. Back at school she blended in. […]
Chapter Nine Things didn’t quite work out the way she expected. As she slept the night before she was due to return home, a sinister plot unfolded. A group of highly trained Yellow Caps scaled the hotel wall and entered her room silently and kidnapped her. They slipped a specially designed kidnapping bag over her […]
Chapter Eight Amber was nearing the end of her twelfth year on planet Earth when word came from the United Federation of Independent States (UFIS—pronounced You fizz). They had a top-level mission for her to perform, if she would be so kind. This was not a word you could ignore, since UFIS represented all the […]
Chapter Seven One day the Minister for Justice paid her a visit. He said he needed her help in a matter of great importance. He had a careful way of speaking, as if each word could be a lasso to trip him up. He seldom uttered a sentence without saying it over in his mind […]
Chapter Six Predictably, a cult formed around her name—the “Amberists”. Their agenda? To root out evil wherever it was found. They were fanatically anti-evil, and Amber was their tool. They tried to imitate her: they would consume heaps of bad food and then go out to confront evil in all its forms. This never worked […]
Chapter Five You might not have thought that Amber and Tang Wurlitzer had a lot in common, but Tang didn’t see it that way. She had all these problems with people and things: advertisements, supermarket chickens, news programs, history, politics, prisons. But Tang never had a problem with anyone: it was his job not to […]
Chapter Four Several years went by, relatively uneventfully. Amber grew accustomed to her affliction, her special talent. She learned how to manage it, as best she could. She even returned to school. She was permitted to keep mainly to herself. The playground was decreed off-limits. Fortunately, people tended to steer clear of her, for obvious […]
Chapter Three And so it was established to the highest scientific standards: Amber was suffering from ETS. She had a badness-detector inside her rigged to her esophagus. The news spread quickly, as all medical news will: it was initially reported in a medical magazine by none other than Dr. Denise Evelyn Daniloff. The article caused […]