Recent Responses
There were some questions about vegetarian diets recently, and I'd like to ask a few follow-up questions if I may? First, what is the philosophy in favor of vegetarian diet? is it mostly that it is healthier, or is it moral objections to using animals for food? if the latter, how come so many vegetarians wear leather shoes and carry alligator bags? are they being poseurs or are they just superficial in their thinking? Second, if people object to the way cattle or chicken are raised to be slaughtered, that's fine if we don't want them to suffer. Eating shrimp, crab, insects, and the like would also give us plenty of protein we need for a healthy diet. Finally, in parts of the US prairie, protectect ungulate populations (deer, elk) have no natural predators. To prevent overbreeding which would lead to overgrazing which would lead to mass starvation, state Conservation Departments survey their ungulate populations every spring in order to determine how many hunting permits to issue each fall. If the philosophy behind vegetarianism is compassion, then to be consistent, shouldn't vegetarians APPROVE of this humane hunting, culling a few animals from the population so that the overall health of the herd is enhanced? Thanks!
Richard Heck
September 15, 2012
(changed September 15, 2012)
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On (1): Different people have different reasons to be vegetarian. Besides the ones mentioned, there are many others. One important one, nowadays, is an environmental concern. Animal farms emit enormous amounts of greenhouse gases; they produce large amounts of pollution; etc. It's also t... Read more
I've heard some philosophers of mind use the term 'singular content'- but what does that mean?
Richard Heck
September 15, 2012
(changed September 15, 2012)
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The usual term would be something like "singular proposition", as opposed to a "general proposition". A singular proposition is one that is about some particular object. For example, the proposition that the Dalai Lama is German is a singular proposition. A general proposition would be s... Read more
I read once that an African tribe was asked a simple logical problem paraphrased as follows: "Berlin is a city in Germany. There are absolutely no camels in Germany. Are there camels in Berlin?" The tribe could not provide a definitive answer, instead saying things like "I have never been to Berlin, so I cannot say whether there are camels or not" or "If Berlin is a big city, there must be camels" in other words, completely missing the logical puzzle and instead providing more pragmatic answers. Now this story may be apocryphal, since I cannot find where I read it, but it raises an interesting question. To what extent is logic universal, is it culturally biased/culturally learned, and how do we explain the answers of the tribe?
Richard Heck
September 15, 2012
(changed September 15, 2012)
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The claim that "logic is universal" is the claim that the norms of correct reasoning are universal. It is not the claim that everyone follows those norms, or that everyone reasons well.
In the story as told (apocryphal or otherwise), the tribesmen are failing to make a certain inference... Read more
Is the fact that spraining my ankle is bad for my welfare something that exists independently of my feeling that spraining my ankle is bad for my welfare?
Allen Stairs
September 15, 2012
(changed September 15, 2012)
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It certainly would seem to be. After all, if my ankle is sprained it gets in the way of doing things I need to do to take care of myself - whether I recognize this or not. Compare: it's pretty clearly bad for the welfare of an animal if it has a broken leg, even though the animal may not... Read more
Is it racist to use the word "niggardly," despite the word not being etymologically related to the notorious N-word?
Stephen Maitzen
September 14, 2012
(changed September 14, 2012)
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It's not clear to me which of two questions you're asking: (a) Is it always racist to use the word "niggardly"? (b) Can it be racist to use the word "niggardly"? I'd answer "no" to (a). It's not racist, and it's accurate, to describe Ebenezer Scrooge (before his conversion) as a n... Read more
What is the truth maker for logic? In other words, why should I take logical truths (e.g., material implication) as true?
William Rapaport
September 13, 2012
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A few points need clarification before I can begin to answer your question. First, logic is not concerned with truth in the way that, say, the sciences are. Logic is concerned with relationships among sentences that have truth value, not with the actual truth values of the (atomic)... Read more
Is it racist to use the word "niggardly," despite the word not being etymologically related to the notorious N-word?
Stephen Maitzen
September 14, 2012
(changed September 14, 2012)
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It's not clear to me which of two questions you're asking: (a) Is it always racist to use the word "niggardly"? (b) Can it be racist to use the word "niggardly"? I'd answer "no" to (a). It's not racist, and it's accurate, to describe Ebenezer Scrooge (before his conversion) as a n... Read more
I recently read an article by a philosopher who stated that physicalism must be false or at least incomplete because it doesn't adequately account for experience. For example, say you knew all the physical information involved in seeing a sunset, even if you convey all that information to a person you'll never actually describe a sunset. Say you know a blind woman (since birth) and she asks you "what's it like to experience a sunset?", do you go off saying well it's a wavelength hitting the photoreceptors in your eyes which send electrical signals to your brain, even if that's true she's still no closer to understanding what experiencing a sunset is like. The point being that you can't reduce experience (or qualia) down to purely physical information. Personally I agree that it's impossible to describe experience with just physical information, even with something as simple as the smell of an orange, you can only communicate a description of what the smell of orange smells like tautologically, i.e. "it smells like an orange". (or something something incredibly close-smelling to an orange.) I suppose my question is, is physicalism false because experiences can't be described with purely physical information? How important is describing experiences in philosophies of mind any way? I mean if experiences really are caused by physical processes, does it matter whether we can or can't fully describe the experience with that information?
Eddy Nahmias
September 10, 2012
(changed September 10, 2012)
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One way to understand the basic argument you outline, which is advanced most famously by Thomas Nagel in "What is it like to be a bat?" and Frank Jackson in various papers about Mary the color-blind super-scientist, is like this:
1. If physicalism is true, then someone who knew all the r... Read more
Does an Omniscient God contradict Free Will? Yes, a very age-old question, with many answers. The problem seemed to arise when we thought that if God knows what we will do or "choose" then it's metaphysically necessary for us to choose or do that, because what God knows IS true, thus it's true event A will happen if God knows it will. There's no Free Will because there's no chance that event A can NOT happen, in this view Free Will is just an illusion. But! Some Philosophers have objected by saying that God's knowledge is from or depends on our choice, it's formed by the choices we genuinely (freely?) make for ourselves, because God's omniscience is "logically simultaneous" with our choices. So God's knowledge doesn't write out history, history writes out God's knowledge. (By the way doesn't this make god a contingent being? Thus precluding God from "working" as an answer for the modal ontological and cosmological argument, since God is not a non-contingent being?) But I've never been convinced by this. I think there is one aspect about God's story ignored in all this. Which is that God created us, we didn't choose to exist, God chose that for us. Now why is this relevant? Let me give a narrative; Say you're holding a Rat above a maze deciding whether to drop it in. There are only two exits "reward zone" and "punishment zone". You're omniscient (in the same way the above God is) and know that if you drop the Rat in it will choose a path for itself that leads to the punishment zone. But if you drop the Rat into the maze then you're making (forcing) the Rat to exist in a world in which you know it will end up in the punishment zone. In other words aren't you condemning the Rat to the punishment zone? By now I'm sure you get what I'm making an analogy to. Doesn't Omniscience along with the "Act of Creation" preclude Free Will? i.e. Because God forced us to exist in a world where it knew we would do A, doesn't that mean it condemned us to eventually do A? Thanks I really look forward to any responses!
Thomas Pogge
September 9, 2012
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First, I don't think it matters for the answer to your question whether the omniscient God is or is not the creator of the beings whose conduct He foresees. Thus suppose the rats are created not by God but by some fairy. God observes the rats and, knowing of each whether it is smart or dum... Read more
Take the case of a box sitting on a table. In an introductory physics course, we'd say that there are two forces acting on the box: the force of gravity, pulling it down; and a normal force of precisely equal magnitude, pushing it up. Is there any real difference, though, between saying that there is no net force acting on a body, and saying that no forces are acting on it at all?
Thomas Pogge
September 9, 2012
(changed September 9, 2012)
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Sure there's a real difference. The first account implies that the box is being compressed vertically because gravity acts on all its parts (molecules) whereas the opposing force is acting on its bottom surface (where it touches the table). The second account implies that there is no such... Read more