Cognitive Closure Generalized Transcendental naturalism (TN) is the idea that nature naturally transcends our ability naturally to know about it. Ignorance is real and natural—a biological fact.[1] Cognitive closure (CC) is the fact of being cut off from nature cognitively; not all of it, to be sure, but some of it. TN is a metaphysical […]
Description, Analysis, Explanation, and Philosophy I invite you to indulge with me in some loose reflections on the nature of philosophy. There will be no test or harsh judgment. We are doing this as friends at a kind of philosopher’s party. We can take the brakes off for a while. There are three kinds of […]
Universal Prescriptivism It used to be held that there are two types of speech act: descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive speech acts state facts; prescriptive speech acts recommend acts. The fact-act dichotomy underlies the description-prescription dichotomy. I think this is completely wrong: there is no such thing as a descriptive speech act in the intended sense, […]
Is it Epistemically Possible that the Mind is Reducible to the Brain? Might it turn out that the mind can be reduced to the brain? Are we now under an illusion of irreducibility that could be rectified in the future? The answer I want to give is yes and no. Let’s be specific: might it […]
Body Mentalism We are all too familiar with attempts to describe the mind in terms of the body, the better to integrate the two. Behaviorism and materialism spring to mind (in both senses). These attempts are seldom if ever convincing, at first glance or after many glances. They seem to put the mind where it […]
Physicalisms The word “physicalism” covers a multitude of sins: it is vague, honorific, and deeply mysterious. What does it mean? Don’t say it means “what physicists do”—that is completely circular and uninformative. Also, physics varies from one physicist to another: whose physics do we mean? Do we mean Descartes’ physics, centering around the notions of […]
Happy 250th! And so, America reaches its two hundred and fiftieth birthday, a milestone event (as some wit remarked). As nations go, that is about the early teen years (England is about 80 now). It seems uncertain of itself, neither one thing nor the other, wondering who it is. It has a toddler for president, […]
Football Mania I have been enjoying the World Cup these last couple of weeks, apart from the horrendous English accents of some of the commentators (one of whom insists on calling it the World Kep). I have been impressed by the level of skill exhibited, even by England, but especially by Congo. But what really […]
Greetings Colin – thanks for sending this: a) Loved this line: “Physics is an ontological mess for all its mathematical sophistication, but biology is on solid ontological ground.” b) Here’s a source reference for that Elizabeth Anscombe line: “The high success of Newton’s astronomy was in one way an intellectual disaster: it produced an illusion from […]
Laws and Nature When Newton brought all motion under a single set of laws, he changed our view of nature. Now nature was uniform, seamless, of a piece. These laws were mathematical, so nature was mathematical. The natural kind corresponding to these laws was a mathematical kind. Mass, force, and velocity were mathematical kinds, definable […]