Spam A Lot

Ever since I found Richard’s comment in the spam section and noticed that there has been a big increase in spam comments blocked lately I started getting worried that people’s comments aren’t getting posted. If you try to post something that doesn’t show up email me and I will check the spam box (email on [...]

Varieties of Rigidity

I am still reading Jason Stanley’s paper. I think that in the end the position he comes to is something close to frigidity which is nice. But first I want to discuss his characterizion of rigidity. He says,   Rigidity is a semantic property of an expression. More specifically, it has to do with evaluation of that [...]

Truth and Necessity

I have been reading Jason Stanely’s paper on names and rigid designation from the Oxford Companion to the Philosophy of Language in the course of doing some research for my frigidity v. rigidity axe-grinding. It is an interesting and informative, though technical, introduction to issues about rigidity and I will come back to its relation [...]

Timothy Williamson on Necessary Existents

In the discussion of my post I Necessarily Exist Jason Zari pointed out Timothy Williamson’s paper Necessary Existants as a way of explaining how he was led to questions about logic and the proof of necessary existence. I had never read the Williamson paper and I made some comments/responses to his argument that I would [...]

Language, Thought, and Logic

When one wants to give a theory of language the natural place to start is the sentence. When one wants to give a theory of the mind the natural place to start is the thought. Given that both thoughts and sentences are said to have meanings and that semantics is the study of meaning we [...]

The Introspective HOT Zombie Problem

Photo from http://www.zombiepinups.com/ Usually you will find me defending Rosenthal’s version of the higher-order thought theory of consciousness but today I want to raise what might be a problem. In an earlier post (Varieties of Higher-Order Zombie) I introduced what I call an Introspective HOT Zombie, which is a creature who lacked all of my [...]

Evidence for something String-ish

There has been a lot of debate lately about string theory and testability (see for instance Hanging on by a Thread) . It seems to be one of the only theories in the modern time that is taken seriously by physicists in spite of the fact that it cannot be empirically tested, and in fact [...]

50th Philosophers’ Carnival

Welcome to the July 16, “Dog Days of Summer ’07″ edition of the philosophers’ carnival. The theme, as advertized, is: Mind, Meaning and Morals. I hope you find some interesting articles below and manage to avoid work for a litle while longer  MIND Ivana Simic addresses an issue in modal epistemology introduced by Crispen Wright in [...]

That’s Not an Argument

Mandik seems to think that if he deletes my arguments and threatens to ban me from his blog then he doesn’t have to address the issues…that’s fine. But there is an issue to address that I think is worth spelling out, as I think it generalizes a bit. So, then what exactly is the disagreement? In [...]

Logic, Language, and Existence

I have been thinking a lot about the argument of an earlier post (I Necessarily Exist), due to some excellent comments on the post and because I have been having some discussion via email with Kent Bach about it, and I think I understand what the argument is supposed to look like now. So what [...]