Intentionality and Space Here is a famous passage from Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874): “Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction […]
Acquaintance Knowledge There are some things that can only be known by acquaintance, i.e. by “direct experience”. If you want to know what red is, it’s no use having it described to you; you have to experience it for yourself. Such knowledge is not propositional: it is knowledge concerning a thing (what […]
[1] My ulterior purpose here is to defend traditional philosophical theorizing from misguided objections stemming from the impossibility of completing a classic conceptual analysis. Gettier didn’t show that the whole project of a priori analysis (we can still use that word) is pointless; rather, he showed (arguably) that a certain conception of analysis can’t be […]
Is Knowledge True Justified Belief? Yes, despite the counterexamples. It is fair to say that before Gettier’s paper the TJB analysis of knowledge was the accepted theory. The theory was not regarded as a work in progress, as somehow incomplete, or vulnerable to counterexample. If not self-evidently correct, it was taken to […]
Attributes of Mind Three attributes of mind stand out: intentionality, subjectivity, and privacy. The mind is essentially about something; the mind is accessible only from a certain point of view; the mind is known directly only by its subject. I take it these attributes are familiar and I won’t elaborate on them […]
Intentionality and Psychologism Brentano’s thesis is that every mental phenomenon is directed to an Object distinct from itself.[1] It has an extra-mental correlate—the thing thought about or perceived or desired or loved or hated, etc. This entity may or may not exist (but I will ignore the latter case from now on). […]
Epistemic Unity Epistemic unity among inquirers is an important goal of all inquiry. We strive to arrive at the same opinion on a given subject. We try to eliminate diversity of opinion, divergence of belief. The conscientious inquirer seeks consensus, convergence, homogeneity of belief. To this end we employ methods that reliably […]
Quantifiers and Mass Terms The usual approach to quantification focuses on quantifier words combined with count nouns, as in “All men are mortal” and “Some sheep are black”. We are told that such sentences require a paraphrase by means of variables ranging over objects (the “domain of quantification”)—“for some object x etc.”. […]
[1] I suspect some of the hostility to philosophy in certain academic circles arises from a sense that philosophy has no right to exist—that it is just an institutional holdover from earlier times. For the subject seems to persist without solving its problems and yet there is no good explanation of this fact. So the […]
Why Does Philosophy Exist? It is easy to see why most subjects exist. Geography exists because planet Earth is divided into parts that can be mapped: there are geographical facts that can be ascertained. Physics and chemistry exist because the world contains physical and chemical facts (objects, properties) that can be discovered. […]