Blog Schmog
In the philosophy of mathematics varieties of constructivism are usually criticized because they cannot justify succesful uses of strange areas of mathematics in physics. This explanation of success is I think taken to be the main task of philosophy of mathematics. Strangely, philosophy of mathematics is never tasked with explaining when strange areas of mathematics […]
One of the strange things about pop (broadly conceived) music is that listeners have so little ability to seperate narrator from artist. For example, Johnny Cash said that many people he met thought he’d really done hard time in prison. I guess this happens to novelists who write in first person sometimes as well. Sometimes […]
"Introduction to ethics" classes are almost always actually courses on comparitive ethical theories. The theories end up being inconsistent in some cases (e.g. utilitarian theories tend, and deontological theories tend not, to support things like physician assisted suicide). "Moral Problems," or "Practical Ethics," courses tend to give arguments for all sides of hot button issues […]
Three paper-worthy ideas from Rorty: (1) there is an extreme tension between Rorty’s "Wittgensteinian" it’s-only-linguistic maneuver and his endorsement of Quine/Putnam problems with the analytic-synthetic distinction, (2) there is an extreme tension between Rorty’s critique of "invidious distinctions" and his downgrading of the cognitive status of ethics and mental talk, and (3) one can extract […]
A couple of years ago I was trapped on a beach with a guitar. Me and two other people took turns playing songs. The beachdwellers included undergraduates that wished they were still highschoolers, graduate students that wished that they were still undergraduates, and faculty members that wished they were still graduate students. It was sickening. […]
In Saul Kripke’s piece on substitutional quantification he bemoans the fact that nobody in epistemology is familiar with Montague’s paradox. We should all bemoan the fact that nobody in contemporary analytical metaphysics is familiar with Kripke’s admonitions in the piece. People who write about presentism make much of the fact that it is very hard […]
I think to imagine that P is impossible is to imagine a being experiencing frustration trying to bring P about. I would like to give an anti-realist account of modality in terms of this, but I think analogs to Crispin Wright’s ("Truth and Objectivity") argument that coincident normative force (his example, P’s truth and P’s […]
(1) BELIEFS are the primary way we represent the world to ourselves, // (2) knowledge is something like justified, true, BELIEF (plus maybe some fourth condition added), // (3) the propositional content of a BELIEF is determined by whatever it is in the world that makes the belief true or false, // (4) a BELIEF […]
1) necessity and possibility are best explained in terms of our interactions with the world, but (contra Blackburn) should be spelled out along Kantian rather than Humean lines, (2) the computational metaphor for human thinking is mistaken, (3) one of the proper upshots of the later Wittgenstein is that agreement on meaning is not based […]