The recent debacle involving the presidents of three top American universities is symptomatic of a deeper and more widespread malaise. The moral obtuseness and intellectual ineptitude of these three women is just part of a general degradation in American universities and intellectual life. I won’t go into the causes of this, but what appalls me […]
Consciousness, Paralysis, and Functionalism Paralysis has been regularly used to defeat behaviorism and its descendant functionalism. How can the mind consist of behavior if paralysis is consistent with having a mind? The objection is clear and strong: paralysis shows that behavior is not required for consciousness to exist. To have a conscious state is not […]
Macro and Micro Necessity A curious fact of necessity studies: although necessity is liberally spoken of, its extent is rarely tabulated. We find reference to necessities involving people and items of furniture (and the occasional cat) but little in the way of mapping the full distribution of necessities in the world, or their interconnections. We […]
A New Metaphysics of Necessity There is a tacit recognition in the history of philosophy that in order to account for necessity we need to introduce a split in what we regard as overall reality. Thus, we have the idea that necessity resides in meaning, conceived as separate from the ordinary reality of things and […]
I thought it would be fun to write a Christmas song and this is what came out. Merry Christmas everyone! Merry Christmas, Christmas Christmas here, Christmas there Christmas, Christmas everywhere! Christmas, Christmas, where will you go When the world’s so hot there is no snow? Christmas, Christmas, do you care If forest fires […]
And and Not Sharp thinkers (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, among others) have felt that there is something special about the classical logical connectives, and, or, not, and if. I will list the features commonly attributed to these concepts. They are truth-functional and referentially transparent. They are disquotational in the manner formulated by Tarski’s so-called recursion clauses […]
Imagination, Knowledge, and Other Minds We don’t know what it is like to be a bat, a shark, or an octopus. There are facts of the matter—phenomenological facts—about these things, but we don’t stand in the knowledge relation to them. We don’t grasp them, apprehend them, conceptualize them. Our knowledge reaches its limits with these […]
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 […]