Alien Skepticism Suppose you are brought up to believe that you are a brain in a vat supervised by intelligent machines. Long ago humans abandoned their frail bodies for a safer life as a detached brain (it had something to do with global warming—bodies getting too hot and […]
A Quick Argument for Property Realism Property realism is the view that objects instantiate properties independently of mind or language. A standard argument for this view is that objects could have properties in the absence of mind and language. The anti-realist about properties must deny this, and sometimes he is sanguine […]
A Multimodal Theory of Film Experience Films come in many varieties, and they have changed significantly since their inception. There are comedies and dramas, horror flicks and science fiction, love stories and Biblical epics, dance movies and action movies, cartoons and crime thrillers. Some films are short and some are long. […]
Is Solipsism Logically Possible? It has been commonly assumed that solipsism is logically or metaphysically possible. I could exist without anything else existing. There are possible worlds in which I exist and nothing else does. I can imagine myself completely alone. Seductive as such thoughts may appear, I think they are […]
A Puzzle About Concepts When concepts enter into thoughts they occur attributively: that is, they are attributed to some designated particular or particulars. They are constituents of thoughts, and thoughts are true or false according to whether the concepts attributed hold of the things to which they are attributed. They occur in […]
Invisible Hands Here is a simple experiment you can do at home. Hold your hand a foot in front of your face with the thumb turned towards you, so that you are seeing your hand in profile. Have a look at it: it will look like a normal solid object in […]
Indexical Semantics in the Language of Thought Accepting that there is an innate and universal language of thought, we can inquire into its formal characteristics. It will have two components: a syntactic component and a lexical component. These components will be found in every human being’s cognitive-linguistic repertoire (barring pathology), like […]
Impossible Meaning Here is an argument purporting to show that the word “blue” is meaningless. There are many specific shades of blue that have their own names: aquamarine, navy blue, cobalt blue, azure, cerulean, indigo, etc. With respect to each of these we have a specific concept or idea, […]
The Word “Thing” In his Ethics Spinoza has a curious passage concerning the common word “thing”: “But not to omit anything it is necessary to know, I shall briefly add something about the causes from which the terms called Transcendental have had their origin—I mean terms like Being, Thing, and Something. These […]
A New Riddle of Induction Suppose that tomorrow the sun does not rise, bread does not nourish, and swans are blue. Does that show that nature is not uniform, that the past is not projectable to the future, and that induction has broken down? Can we conclude that what we observe tomorrow does not […]