The Cruel Gene I can forgive the genes their selfishness; it is their cruelty I can’t forgive. [1] I understand their need to build survival machines to preserve themselves until they can replicate: they need the secure fortress of an animal body. But why did they have to build suffering […]
Particles and Identity In the case of statues and similar objects we can separate the identity of the thing from its substance. Thus the statue is not identical to the piece of bronze that composes it, because the piece but not the statue survives being melted down. The piece is the aggregate […]
Appearance Without Reality Is it possible for everything to be an appearance? Might there be nothing in the world but appearances? Granted, there may be many appearances for which there is no corresponding reality (of the kind that we normally suppose), but could this be universally true? Is the pure-appearance world […]
Truth and Existence The concepts of truth and existence form a natural pair. They are both highly general abstract concepts. They have both been suspected of being pseudo-properties, expressed by logically misleading predicates. They have both been declared redundant, adding nothing to their bearers: calling a proposition true amounts to no more […]
A Refutation of Positivism The positivists maintain that a sentence is meaningful if and only if it is verifiable. Thus a sentence can be said to be both meaningless and unverifiable. Here is a possible counterexample to that claim: “It’s raining”. This sentence is not meaningless, but it is not […]
The Value of a Life It is natural to think that the value of a life depends on the nature of that life. The value of a life is internal to it. It depends on what happens to the individual, what he or she accomplishes, what he or she is. But […]
The Value of Modal Knowledge As reflective rational beings, we tend to assume that knowledge of necessity has a special kind of value. Think back to when you first discovered that necessarily 2 + 2 = 4: didn’t you experience this discovery as a kind of revelation—as deep, […]
Competence and Performance Multiplied In psycholinguistics it is customary to distinguish competence from performance. [1] Competence is an internal cognitive structure (“knowledge of grammar”) while performance is the outward expression of this knowledge in actual speech. Performance is conceived as the externalization of competence. But this dualism is too simple: we […]
Is the Mind Identical to the Brain? The mind-body problem is usually formulated as a problem about the relationship between mental and physical events, or about mental and physical attributes, or about “mental phenomena” and the brain. Seldom, if ever, is it formulated as a problem about what we call “the mind”, […]
Gricean Belief and Desire Grice argues that speaker meaning is a certain kind of complex intention: the speaker intends to produce in her audience the belief that p by means of the audience’s recognition of that intention—so the act of speaker meaning involves an intention that refers to an intention. [1] I […]