Blushing, Sneezing, Coughing, and Spitting Blushing is involuntary: you can’t blush intentionally or intentionally suppress a blush (though you can of course undertake a course of action that will have such results). Blushing is not an action, as philosophers say; it is not “subject to the will”. Sneezing is similar in that […]
Concepts of Natural Kinds According to the standard model, concepts like water and heat are natural kind concepts subject to Twin Earth cases: they are not “in the head”, they have an “indexical component”, they function as mere “labels”. Alongside these concepts we have another range of “theoretical” concepts, such as […]
Meaning and Consciousness Is it possible to mean something unconsciously? Grice’s bus conductor rings the bell three times, meaning that the bus is full: could he do this unconsciously? [1] That would mean, presumably, that he intentionally rang the bell three times as a result of having an unconscious intention to cause in […]
Meaning and Object Wittgenstein writes: “It is important to note that the word ‘meaning’ is being used illicitly if it is used to signify the thing that ‘corresponds’ to the word. That is to confound the meaning of a name with the bearer of the name. When Mr. N. […]
Epistemology of the Mind-Body Problem One of the peculiarities of the mind-body problem is that any position is about as plausible as any other—or as implausible. That is, any position can be made to seem as plausible as any other—which is why every position has its adherents. Fashions may come and go, […]
Sketch for a General Theory of Human Psychology Is it possible to come up with high-level organizational principles of human psychology? The task has been attempted before–as in associationist psychology, classical conditioning theory, and computationalism. The hope is to discover general principles that cover a wide variety of psychological phenomena, thus unifying […]
What is Belief? Can belief be defined? A prima facie attractive idea is that belief is to be defined as assent: to believe that p is to assent to a sentence s that means that p. Thus I believe that sharks bite if and only if I assent […]
Intentionality and Time The way we talk about intentionality in relation to time has some puzzling features. On the one hand, we say that we can have intentional relations to entities that exist at other times than the act of intentionality: we can remember things and events […]
What is Physicalism? Suppose for the sake of argument that panpsychism is true. Suppose also that a physicist investigating panpsychism finds evidence of its truth in the form of anomalous motions of elementary particles—motions that cannot be explained by the usual forces. She formulates a “psychic-field theory” that postulates a […]
Posing the Mind-Body Problem Often the best (and only) way to make progress on a problem is to pose it in the right form. In that spirit I propose that we divide the classic mind-body problem into three interconnected but distinguishable problems: the problem of substance, the problem of structure, […]