I have a few things to say in response to your question. First of all, about whether too high a value is placed onrationality in “Western” culture: I feel that rationality is too little valuedin the United States at the moment, and that irrationality is celebrated. An extremely popular trope in US books,movies, and television shows is the heroism of a person who “believes” – that is, who accepts on faith something thatflies in the face of all evidence and logic. The skeptic, the “man (usually) of science,” is always shown to bewrong, often disastrously so. And manypeople report with great pride that they hold their particular religious orpolitical beliefs on the basis of no evidence or reason at all. “It’s just what I believe.” Secondly, as to the nature of our cognitive processes. You’re raising a perfectly sensible empiricalquestion – what are the neurological processes that account for the phenomenawe call “thought”? It’s clear...

Clearly, machines can process information. For the machine to have knowledge, however, this information has to be information for the machine – the machine would have to understand the information it processes. What would that involve? In the first place, the states or events in the machine that store or process the information (including, for example, data bases and the contents of memory registers) would have to be richly integrated with all the other states of the machine, and particularly with the machine’s input and output states, analogously to the way in which our thoughts and memories are integrated with our perceptions and motor commands. This is a functional requirement on machine understanding. The second requirement is that the input states that supply the information be properly related to the states of affairs in the world the information is about. For human beings, the input states are perceptions, and what a visual perception "means" – what it is about – is determined...

There is a lot of debate among philosophers right now as to whether our common sense view of "personality" is accurate. We tend to think of ourselves and of others as having stable psychological characteristics that underlie and explain our behavior in a large range of diverse circumstances. But there’s an increasing body of evidence from social psychology that suggests that a great deal of our behavioral responses depend heavily on what situation we’re in. For example, a study of students at the Princeton Theological Seminary showed that the likelihood of a student’s stopping to help an apparently injured person was strongly depended heavily on whether the student had been advised that he or she was running late for the next phase of the experiment. So what may appear to be "uncharacteristic" behavior on the part of some individual may simply be the result of the individual’s being in an "uncharacteristic" situation. And certainly the people one interacts with are important determinants of...

What you have in mind is Descartes's cogito argument: "Insofar as I am thinking, I must exist." Descartes was trying to systematically rid himself of beliefs in any propositions about which he could con ceive of being de ceived about. His insight was that no matter how thoroughly he was deceived on any other matter, he couldn't at least be deceived about the fact that he was thinking, since a person cannot be in the state of being deceived without being in some mental state or other. Hence, he concluded, as long as he was thinking (actually, as long as he was experiencing any mental state) he could be completely certain of his own existence. You're right that this argument can only be made in the first person. Descartes himself had a two-step strategy for demonstrating the existence of other minds: first, he established the general reliability of the senses, and thus established his right to believe in the existence of material objects. So that got him knowledge of other people's bodies...

There's a conceptual reason: if I "preferred" your opinion to my own, in the sense of thinking it is more likely to be true than the one I currently hold, then I presumably would change my opinion to match yours, and your opinion would become mine. Of course there's the matter of considering another person's opinion -- seriously trying to take account of what someone else has to say. Maybe you're asking why "most people" fail to do that, why "most people" are close-minded. In that case, I have to say that I don't think that the presupposition of your question is true. Everyone I know -- my kids, my husband, my colleagues, my students, my friends -- generally do seem to listen to and consider what other people say. So I have a question for you: why do most people say "most people" when they generally mean "some people some of the time"?

I'm not completely sure what you are asking. Presumably you do not want to know what it is that feminists know that others don't, though I could write you a book on that. I suspect what you're curious about is feminist theories of knowledge , or feminist epistemology . This is a book-length topic, too, but I'll try to say enough in a short space to give you an idea what is going on. Feminist epistemology -- really, feminist philosophy generally -- begins with a simple observation: virtually the entire body of our received philosophical thought has been developed by men, and by socially privileged men at that. The question then arises whether this homogeneity among philosophers has resulted in some kind of bias or distortion in the theories produced. In philosophy, suspicion is heightened by the fact that our methodology relies heavily on "intuitions" that theorists presume are universally shared. What if they're not? (And by the way, there's excellent evidence, apart from...

Let me add some comments to Mitch Green's and Gabriel Segal's. (And a quick plug: you might want to check out my entry on "Nativism" in the new edition of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, due out soon.) Two quick points, and then a longer one. First: Showing that a trait has a "biological basis" is not the same thing as showing that it is "natural" in any sense that can be opposed to "nurtural" (is that a word? It should be.) Unless you are a dualist, you shouldn't be surprised to find that psychological states are correlated with, depend upon, or are flatout identical with biological states. (Indeed, you shouldn't be surprised even if you are a dualist, but that's another story.) But that means that any acquired trait will have some biological effect. Showing, therefore, that the brains of musically accomplished individuals are different from people who aren't hardly shows (as one NPR story reported, I swear to God) that musical talent is innate. ...