An interesting puzzle. Here's at least one possible explanation. There are some things I agree with, but I can fairly easily imagine changing my mind. In cases, this possibility seems much more remote. For example: suppose my department is deciding between two job candidates, Jimenez and Grabowski. A colleague makes her case for hiring Jimenez. I think about it and say "I agree." And I really do. But the idea that someone might go for Grabowski doesn't seem crazy to me, and I can imagine that a conversation with another colleague might persuade me to re-think. However, we can imagine another case: the choice is between Abel and Zed and it's not just that I believe Abel to be the better candidate; it's that there just seems to me to be no contest: Abel is so clearly better than Zed that there's no room for reasonable disagreement. I don't just agree that we should offer the job to Abel; I strongly agree. The general point is that we believe the things we believe to varying degrees....

You're right that there needs to be a distinction that goes with the word if it's to be of much use. And there are no doubt some sense of the word "special" (meaning something like rare or unique ) that don't allow for all of us to be special. But there's still logical room for a sense in which we're all special. Here are two ways. The first is simply this: it could be that each of us possesses some distinction, though not the same one for all. You may be the world's greatest kazoo player; I may make the world's best Jello salad. And so on. You'd be special in the kazoo-playing way, I in the Jello-making mold and each other person in their own (dare I say) special way. But there's another possibility. It doesn't make sense to say that we're special, period . If any of us are special, it's because of something about us. But suppose some characteristics are intrinsically valuable -- that is, have value all by themselves, without reference to anything else. Perhaps being conscious...

We can at least make relative sense of a claim like this. For a native English speaker , Chinese is harder than Spanish. How so? Because English speakers can achieve a high level of mastery of Spanish much more quickly, on average, than they can with Chinese. Obviously other such comparisons among various languages are possible. Could one language be "absolutely" more difficult than another? Though I'm not a linguist, I'd think the answer is yes. Since I can't cite a fully real case (simply because I don't know enough), a slightly idealized one will do. IGNORING PRONUNCIATION, compare German and Afrikaans. They are related languages and there is a good deal of similarity between them. Knowing one will give you a leg up on understanding the other. (I have an intermediate knowledge of German. That lets me make elementary sense of a certain amount of written Afrikaans.) But anyone who has some familiarity with both languages will see that the grammar of Afrikaans is much simpler. In particular, there...

You've several questions, though they're closely related. Let me start with the first one: "What does the presence of grammatical gender in a language say about the mentality of its speakers?" My answer is: "Darned if I know!" But I rather suspect that most of my co-panelists are in the same position. Whether the presence of grammatical gender in a language has an effect on the outlook of people who speak it is something we could only figure out by bringing to bear the reseources of disciplines like sociology, psychology, sociolinguistics and who knows what else. It would also call for refining the question itself to the point where we knew what counts as an answer. As you yourself observe, it's not exactly obvious that societies whose languages don't mark gender are less sexist than their grammatically gendered counterparts. If there is an effect here, one suspects that it's a subtle one, and not easy to tease out. It may well be that if the people in a society believe that men and women are ...

Not to be flippant (well, yes: to be flippant) but I'm tempted to point to Peter Smith's earlier reply and say "What he said!" Let's grant that in one sense of the word "irrational," some of life's surd facts are irrational -- aren't how things would be if a rational Maker had her way. Prof. Smith acknowledges that some facts are difficult to cope with emotionally. And he might add (I'll add it for him) that being rational doesn't mean ignoring your emotions or trying to stuff them into a sack. But how, exactly, would it help to leave reason aside in dealing with tragic, intractable facts? Prof. Smith's closing comment seems to me to be a sober, thoughtful way of summing it up: "For irrationally formed beliefs are not likely to lead to actions whichget any of us what we want -- including a decent life, lived well inthe knowledge of our all-too-explicable mortality." The language of philosophy is seldom poetic; in that sense it may not mirror the gravity of some of its subject matter. That said, the...

If setting the meaning of words always required sticking within the circle of language, we'd be stuck. At some point, someone said "Let's call this day 'Monday'." (This is fictional history, but something like this happened.) It's a bit like my parents saying "Let's call this child 'Allen'." In general, to get words to stick to things, we need some way of getting outside the circle of words, and pointing, indicating, stipulating, etc. are ways of doing that.

Does the phrase "Does the phrase 'Go Jayhawks!' express a proposition?" express a proposition? No. Lots of bits of language don't express propositions. Questions don't express propositions, though answers to them usually do. Commands (like "Get out of my office!") don't express propositions either. We use words to do lots of things besides trying to say what's what. Someone who says "Go Jayhawks!" isn't trying to tell us that something is true (the usual mark of expressing a proposition.) Of course, it may be that this person is enthusiastic about the Jayhawks, and that may be why he yells "Go Jayhawks!" But the obvious thing to say is that his words express his enthusiasm rather than ascribe it to himself.

Perhaps the fact that I find this whole line of thought a little befuddling means that I shouldn't be answering the question. But maybe if I explain my confusion, that will help. Start with something simple. I might be curious about, say, some abstruse mathematical claim. And so I go to my mathematician friend and I say "Is it true that such-and-such?", where "such-and-such" is the mathematical conjecture I'm interested in. It would be pretty odd, wouldn't it, if my mathematician friend waxed "philosophical" about whether knowing the answer would change my behavior. In one way, of course, it would: I'd stop asking the question if I knew the answer. But in most other ways, life would go on as before. And yet, I still want to know whether such-and-such is really true. The point is that there really are two issues here, and it seems like confusion to mix them up. One is the matter of whether what I'm curious about is so; the other is the matter of what I'd do if it were -- or weren't. Now the two...

Let's start with "beated." On the one hand, it's a word as opposed to a punctuation mark or a pony. But that's not what you want to know. Your question is something like: is it a word in English? And so the more general question is: when does a potential word count as a "real" word in a language? What about this? It counts as a word if the people who use the language accept it as one. That's vague many ways over: Which people? (Presumably it needn't be all.) What's a language? (Can we do better than say that it's a dialect with a gun? What's a dialect?) Accept in what circumstances and for what purposes? We'd also have obvious circularity problems if we treated this formula as a serious definition of "word in a language." But the point is that there are no firm facts here; there are complicated, imprecise and often untidy conventions. We all have some say in what counts as a word in a language, because at the end of the day, how people speak and write settles the matter. But there are no simple...