What is the best way to decide between opposing opinions? So many issues are argued from the most extreme positions; there seems to be no middle ground. Such as: atheists vs. Evangelical/Fundamentalists; or the prevalence of sex addicts vs. some expert opinions that there is no such thing as "sex addiction". Thank you if you can accept my question.

Thank you for your good and important question. The extreme and contradictory positions we often hear proposed about difficult issues can make for a lot of confusion, and it's natural to wonder whether there is any rational way to adjudicate such disputes. Now, you asked what is *the* best way to decide between opposing opinions, whereas I don't think that we should assume that there is a unique best way in which to do so. However, I would like to suggest a few strategies that might be helpful. 1. When trying to decide between opposing opinions, take some time to articulate those opinions carefully. You might be surprised how little of an extreme-seeming position is left if you state it in plain English, after subtracting out the shouting and other emotional dimensions. 2. After this articulation, make sure that the opposed opinions are actually responding to the same issue. All too often, disputants twist the question at issue for their own purposes. If this happens, then it raises...

Excuse me, my English is not perfect. But I´ll try to make myself understood. I´m very interested in the problem, which Wittgenstein named "the bewitchment of our mind by language". I think, language is a cage inside we live, if we are not aware of its mechanisms. I want to ask you, if this topic is already investigated? Is there any explicit literature concerning it? Thank you very much. Yours sincerely. S.H.

Thank you for your question, which is a good one. It is not, however, clear what you mean in saying that language is a cage we inhabit. That presupposes that we have a reasonably clear idea what it would be to live outside of language. However, language is so integral to human thought and experience that it is not easy to understand what it might mean to live "outside" of language. Nevertheless, there is rich and rewarding work in the ways in which language can "bewitch" us. Some of that has been produced by adherents to the so-called Ordinary Language movement in philosophy. Gilbert Ryle was among them, and his book _Dilemmas_ is an accessible and intriguing discussion of the various problems that arise for thought when it is bewitched in the way that you allude to. Even though the book was published about a half-century ago, it still repays study today. Mitch Green

There are many attributes that are commonly attributed to God, or at least some versions of the Christian God, one of which is omniscience. I have my doubts that omniscience is a possible trait for any being to have because it seems to me to be a paradoxical trait. If God (or any being) knows everything that can be an object of knowledge can s/he know what it is like to not know everything that can be an object of knowledge? I say everything that can be an object of knowledge because there are obviously things that are unknowable like a round square or a married bachelor. However, I don't think that a being could know everything that was knowable and simultaneously know the experience of not knowing everything that it knowable (knowing the experience of not knowing everything that is knowable is something that is knowable because as humans that is how our experience is).

Thank you for your question. This is a good one that I had not heard before. If I understand you correctly, you are concerned that the notion of omniscience is not coherent. The reason is that omniscience means knowing everything. However, if a being knows everything, then it knows what it is like to be ignorant of something. However, to do that, such a being would have to have the experience of being ignorant of something, and that in turn requires that it is, or at least has been, ignorant of something--but that contradicts the definition of ignorance! This is, I take it, an epistemological analogue of the Paradox of the Stone, namely the question whether an omnipotent being could do something it is impossible to do (like make an unliftable stone). Someone who wants to defend the coherence of the notion of omniscience might, however, not be convinced that you've raised a compelling objection. The reason is that your objection assumes that to know what ignorance is like, you have to...

Sculpture is divided into modeling and carving, one additive, one subtractive. They lead to very different ways of thinking. Does philosophy have anything to say about creating meaning by tasking something away (carving) as opposed to continual increase (modeling)? It seems as if almost all normal academic disciplines are now additive.

What a nice question! You're right that we typically think of academic disciplines as adding knowledge rather than taking anything away. The operative phrase always seems to be "creating new knowledge." However, it doesn't go without saying that this is the only valuable thing an academic discipline can do, and Philosophy is sometimes "subtractive", to use your term. The reason is that part of the role of Philosophy is to relieve people of certain kinds of perplexity, and sometimes a good way to do this is not to answer a question that is puzzling them, but rather to show that the question is itself dubious in some way. So suppose for instance someone is trying to find the meaning of life. Philosophers will often be inclined *not* to try to answer the question directly, but rather to get the person to think harder about what sort of answer could possibly satisfy them. Again, the phrase 'the meaning of life' presupposes that there is exactly one thing that is life's meaning, whereas for all we know...

If "saying" refers to an action, and "believing" to a mental state, what is "asserting"? It seems to require an action (i.e. you have to say something) and it also seems to require a mental state (you need to believe what is said).

Thank you for your question! Saying is indeed an action, and believing is a mental state as you say (though just what a "mental state" is is no easy question). Asserting is an action, too: it is something we do at will, something we can refrain from, something we can be held responsible for, something we can try but fail to do and so on--in short, it has all the hallmarks of an action. However, unlike mere saying, asserting is subject to a norm, namely, "assert only what you believe." This is colloquially referred to as the norm of sincerity, thought there are some delicate issues about just what sincerity is. At any rate, that asserting is subject to certain norms involving mental states, does not imply that it is itself a mental state. (In this respect, compare asserting with promising.) Nonetheless, asserting is a comparatively sophisticated action, since it is subject to norms, without which I suspect assertion would not even be possible. Philosophers have long been fascinated with...

When you find yourself fixated on an idea in philosophy--a better definition of justice, an error in Hume's logic, or the result of some paradigm shift between one philosophical era and another--do you become a moron? It would be pretentious to call myself a philosopher, but I spend quite a bit of time reading and trying to figure out whether or not my favorite philosophers made as much sense as they seem to at first glance; the more headway I make, the more often I stare blankly at the microwave trying to figure out what buttons to push to heat up my coffee. Do real philosophers go through this? Or do you function better in the world when you have been wrestling with brain puzzles?

Thanks for your good question! In answer to, "Do real philosophers go through this?", the answer is yes, definitely. Any intellectually challenging problem tends to make a person less able to get along practically. This has been observed as far back as in Ancient Greece with Aristophanes making fun of the philosophers in _The Clouds_. This is true of philosophy but I suspect it is equally true of other demanding fields like mathematics. Just as cell phone users tend to be unsafe drivers, philosophers who are deeply engaged with a problem do well to refrain from things like operating heavy machinery, perform surgery, operate microwaves, make marriage proposals, and so on. Most of use who have been through graduate school in philosophy have stories to tell about our professors who violated this rule. One of mine left his car engine running for four hours while he was in his office. Luckily for him the thing just ran out of gas rather than overheating. Anyway, I suggest you make your meals...

What is the sense of literature at all? Sometimes I wonder if the sense of literature is merely a capitalistic one. I am a writer myself, I like to write, a creativity in me that walks its own roads. But why do we read fictional texts from others? If I read one of my own, I know "what it is about", I know the grounds, dreams, feelings, hopes, etc. I had while writing. But then someone else reads that- how could he read anything in that text, that I tried to put there rather in between the lines. Does reading literature tells us something about "the other"? Does literature work as a translator between two people with singular minds? Is literature a connection between "myself" and "the other"? Is then, therefore, the sense of literature to (very general) live in a human society?

Thanks for your nice question. It contains many components and I won't be able to respond to all of them. One reason is that I'm hesitant to offer generalizations about literature across the board. Instead, it comes in many genres and sub-genres, and plays different kinds of roles in different cultures. One place you might look for more discussion of these issues is a collection of essays on the "philosophy of literature", here: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405141700,descCd-description.html. One of the questions that that volume addresses is the question of what kind of knowledge we can get from literature, and how far that knowledge extends. I take it that this is relevant to your concerns because I'm assuming that if you were a journalist writing for a newspaper, there wouldn't be a big issue about whether someone can learn from what you write. So long as you're not making things up, we can learn about what's going on in, say French politics from your articles. By...

I read somewhere that an ostensive definition is a definition that does not rely (only) on words, but (also) on a gesture of pointing. As far as I can see, however, a gesture of pointing is also a word. It is word in a sign language, or in a language that includes sounds and gestures. Isn't it?

Thanks for your nice question. Even if a language such as a sign language has a sign that is made just in the way that I move my hand when I point at something, that does not mean that when I am pointing at something I am using a word. Similarly, even if a baby happens to utter a series of sounds that sound exactly like the word 'hyperbole', this does not mean that the infant is referring to anyone's overstatement. Accordingly, when I point, particularly because I don't speak any sign language, I'm not using a word. The most that can be said is that I am making a hand movement that is identical to a word in some other language. You can, I think, see this even more dramatically if you think about gaze: we often use gaze, particularly overt gaze, as a form of ostension. However, even if there were a language that used overt gazing as a word (meaning perhaps, "look at that"), that doesn't mean that I am using a word in overtly gazing at something. Mitch Green
Art

There seem to be two major assertions about how an artwork comes into existence: the first one considers the artist to have some kind of access to the "essence of truth" or something like that; the artist receives the idea in an inspirational moment and consequently creates the artwork on that foundation afterwards. The second assertion considers art to be the product of a huge mental or bodily effort. The second one is undermined by the statements of many artists. But what do you think about the first assertion? I'm not sure about refusing it right away.

Thanks for your question. Your question is at least as much one for psychology as it is for philosophy. The reason is that it is not quite about the definition of art, which is probably a strictly philosophical question; rather it is about the causal conditions under which art is created. In spite of that, it seems to me that the first theory you mention is equally well undermined by the experience of artists and others. For one, many conceptual artists don't think of themselves as being guided by inspiration at all; rather they'd say that's a defunct Romantic obsession. Instead, a conceptual artist might see her work as commenting on the practice of art itself, or getting us to be reflective about some aspect of our lives such as our use of consumer goods or the way that we structure our time. Again, an artist might have an idea, and then might need to put it through many stages and drafts to make something that seems to fly. Do we need to call this an inspiration or some access to an essential...

I've been thinking about derogatory words for people who belong to specific groups. These words, I think, not only identify these persons, but they also kind of "state" that those persons are bad, inferior, or something like that. For instance, if you would call someone a "boche" (e.g. "She is a boche!"), you would not only be saying that that person is a German citizen, but also that ALL Germans are, say, despicable. Do you think this is a plausible view? And, if it is, don't you think that it is strange that a single word, as apllied to only one person, somehow contains a statement about a whole group of people?

Thanks for your perceptive comment/question. Derogatory words do identify groups. So both 'Wop' and 'Italian' apply to all and only Italians. However, the derogatory words convey more than this. You describe this further things by saying they kind of state that the persons are bad, etc. Philosophers of language have spent some time trying to get clear on this notion of "kind of stating", and so I'll try to give you the flavor of that effort here. In addition to what we literally say with our words, we now know that we can communicate a great deal more. Sometimes what I leave unsaid carries a lot of meaning: I ask you how you like the painting I just completed and you reply, "Well, it's very colorful." Here you don't actually say or state that the painting is not so great, but your meaning is clear. Philosophers often call this type of meaning, "implicature." Some implicatures, such as this one, depend heavily on context. In other cases, however, our implicatures depend on the...

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