I am happy to announce that our next Mind & Language symposium is on Aaron Norby’s “Uncertainty Without All the Doubt“ from the journal’s February 2015 issue with commentaries by Keith Frankish (Open University), Jennifer Nagel (Toronto), and Nicholas J.J. Smith (Sydney). Philosophical discussions of rationality and decision making are freqeuntly structured by the …
This post ends with a brief discussion about anxiety about the internal. I take that anxiety to arise when we see strong arguments for the idea that theories cannot successfully posit non-reducible mental states that provide distinctive causal explanations. The idea that the causal powers producing our beliefs, actions and …
In this post I want to focus on a distinction that has come up in both comment threads. It’s the distinction between inferences, and factors that regulate inferences. Here’s an example. It’s about wishful thinking.
In this post I want to approach the topic of the previous post from a different angle. I raised two questions about the U&C study: whether people believe the comparative ratings (Question 1), and what inference, if any, leads them to their ultimate verdict (Question 2). Either question would be …
When you were a kid, did your room ever get really messy? Of course it did. Did its messiness bother you? Quite possibly not. Lots of kids are not at all bothered by their messy rooms. (Question: Does it even look messy to them, or does it look orderly? We …
You may (or may not) have noticed that Pete Mandik and Richard Brown (me) have started a podcast, called SpaceTimeMind, where we talk about tax law updates for 2014, uh, I mean, er, we talk about space and time and mind! The first episode is up now (and has been …
In my last post I want to go back to delusions. Isn’t it just hopeless to suggest that they can achieve epistemic innocence? It probably is, as delusions violate all norms of rationality for beliefs we can think of. But it is important to ask whether delusions have any redeeming …
