Essays

The philosopher Wittgenstein famously said in Culture and Value: “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” My interest in this article is to analyze what Wittgenstein here means. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein described the task of philosophy as being “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Humor has a certain way of cutting through language, of getting to the truth of whatever game is at hand....

The law is not philosophy. Therefore, lawyers are not philosophers? My interest in this article is to show that lawyers may not produce philosophy but can be philosophers in virtue of engaging in philosophical reasoning some of the time. Of course, this claim is not entirely original. As the philosopher Ronald Dworkin writes: “Lawyers are always philosophers because jurisprudence is part of any lawyer’s account of what the law is, even when the jurisprudence is undistinguished and mechanical....

Call a ‘comprehensive doctrine of the good’ a set of beliefs affirmed by citizens concerning a wide range of values, including moral, metaphysical, and religious commitments, as well as beliefs about personal virtues, and political beliefs about the way society ought to be arranged; they form a conception of the good concerning “what is of value in life, the ideals of personal character, as well as ideals of friendship and of familial and associational relationships, and much else that is to inform our conduct, and in the limit to our life as a whole....

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes: 6.54: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. At least two interesting things are going on here....

In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” Jacques Lacan introduces a philosophical conception of the subject into psychoanalysis. He primarily responds to Freud’s conception of the developed subject as an “ego” which serves as a broad referent for the subject’s constellation of raw, biological drives. He thinks the ego as such does not account for the transformation that occurs within the subject when developing an ego, and he deduces the mirror stage as a solution that he thinks even Freud ought to accept....

In An Autobiographical Study, Sigmund Freud defines the process of free-association broadly as speaking one’s mind without direction or censorship.1 As Jonathan Lear aptly points out, Freud calls free-association the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis2 not only because it is essential to therapy but also because it is a sublime exercise of the capacity for human freedom.3 Despite this apparent freedom in free-association, Freud also notes: “we must, however, bear in mind that free association is not really free....

Kuhn distinguishes two meanings for ‘paradigm’: in a narrow sense, (1) the examples a discipline uses to articulate its assumptions that set the template for solving puzzles that arise in the discipline during a period of normal science, and in a broad sense, (2) the key theories, instruments, values, and metaphysical assumptions that are made prior to puzzle-solving which constitute the disciplinary matrix of normal science. Count two paradigms ‘incommensurable’ when the new paradigm is a radical alteration of the matrix of measurements, observations, and language adopted by the scientific community not for good reasons but by a non-rational kind of religious conversion to a new world that is different than, and discontinuous with, the one represented by the former paradigm....

Measuring things seems quite straightforward. Most of us already learned in primary school to measure how far apart two points are on a piece of paper: draw a line between them, and compare its length with the length of your ruler. After checking how many marks on the ruler your line covers, you can express the outcome of your measurement numerically. You may now see that the points are 10 centimeters or 4 inches apart, but the knowledge of such units is hardly necessary for your purposes....

In “Kripke and Functionalism” (Episode 61), Buechner describes how Kripke’s criticism of the dispositionalist response to the ‘rule-following paradox,’ found in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,can be generalized as a criticism of functionalist accounts of mental states, the thesis that mental states are abstract computational states realized in physical objects, like a brain. Here, I’d like to give a sketch of the rule-following paradox, the dispositionalist response, and Kripke’s criticism in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, in order to give you a clearer idea of the criticism of functionalism Buechner points to....

A central distinction in “Thoughts About Oughts” (Episode 60) is that between epistemic and deontic uses of ‘ought.’ As a quick review, here’s an example of an epistemic use of ‘ought.’ Imagine that you open the window in the morning, feel a strong breeze and suffocating humidity, and see a massive, dark wall of clouds on the horizon. You declare to your roommate: (Ep) It ought to rain today. And for an example of a deontic use of ought: Imagine that you have a final exam tomorrow, which you need to pass in order to graduate....

In Elucidations Episode 51, Groenendijk and Roelofsen sketch out some of the merits of the inquisitive semantics approach to questions in contrast to the ‘classical’ semantic approach. One stark area of contrast is with respect to conditional questions—questions like: “If Matt drinks coffee, does Phil drink coffee?” Groenedijk and Roelofsen observe that the classic semantic approach to questions cannot easily accommodate these conditional questions. In this post, I’d like to flesh out this observation just a bit more....

Toward the end of his interview on Elucidations, Greg Salmieri [S.] argues against Aristotle’s view that some of our life-activities are intrinsically valuable apart from the whole they constitute, in order to make room for valuing productive work alongside the candidates Aristotle himself prefers. This raises a question about Aristotle and a worry about S.’s own view. The question is this: what was Aristotle’s criterion for distinguishing the intrinsically valuable activities from the rest?...

In this post, I would like to propose an elaboration of Salmieri’s (Episode 50) discussion of instrumental and constitutive means, and his suggestion of a holistic approach to the evaluation of activities (the ‘holistic view of life’). In particular, I will suggest one way in which we can see a blurring of the distinction of instrumental and constitutive means as leading us to the holistic picture that Salmieri sketches in the episode....

In our latest episode, Frey sketches out Aquinas’ “exemplary method of philosophy,” the ‘quaestio format.’ With this format, Aquinas models a core pedagogical technique of the universities of his time—quaestiones disputatae (lit: questions debated). For this technique, students would take up sides of an issue, articulated as a question, and offer arguments for each side. The master (think professor) would then evaluate the arguments and adjudicate. That Aquinas structures many of his texts around this technique (especially his magnum opus, the Summa Theologica) indicates that he is concerned with students reading his texts acquiring not only the content of the view Aquinas himself supports, but also the proper method for thinking through an issue and arriving at a view—one which engages with contrary arguments and show the superiority of one’s own view to such arguments....

In Episode 47, Baltag and Matt briefly discuss what they call the ‘KK principle,’ or the ‘principle of positive introspection.’ The basic formulation of this principle is: (KK): If I know that p, then I know that I know that p. (Where ‘p’ is some proposition.) For example, if I know that 2+2=4, then I know that I know that 2+2=4. A close cousin of the ‘KK principle’ is what we’ll call the ‘K-not-K principle,’ or the principle of negative introspection....

In the Veltman episode on normality (46), Matt mentions the “No True Scotsman Fallacy,” in its relationship to statements of normality. I’d like to sketch out what the fallacy is just a bit more fully, and further highlight how it brings out the problem of how we falsify normality claims. The basic idea behind the No True Scotsman Fallacy is that one can make a generalization of some sort (from the offensive ‘All Greeks are lazy’ to the more benign ‘Bears normally hibernate’), and then protect this generalization from any counterexample by claiming that it isn’t a real counterexample....

In the first part of this post, we talked about the motivations behind the epistemic interpretation of probability. Now, let’s take a look at one of the core mathematical theorems employed by those who subscribe to such an interpretation: Bayes’ Theorem (which is mentioned by Fitleson in Ep. 31). Before introducing Bayes’ Theorem, it is important to get clear on one last concept: conditional probability. The basic idea behind conditional probabilities is that we offer the probability that some event occurs, given that something else is true....

Two recent episodes (Fitelson, Ep. 31; Vasudevan, Ep. 45) have mentioned ‘epistemic interpretations’ of probability and Bayes’ Theorem. For Fitleson, Bayes’ Theorem provides a model for inductive reasoning, and he is concerned with deviations from this model (as in the ‘base rate fallacy’ and ‘Linda cases’). Vasudevan takes epistemic interpretations of probability as the historical response to the apparent tension between determinism and our intuitions about chance events like the flip of a coin—a response which he ultimately rejects....

Much of our last episode dealt with what Aristotle meant by words like ‘every’ and ‘some.’ As we discussed at some length in our previous post, in the Aristotelian setting, the meaning of ‘every’ was slightly different from what we’re used to. Under today’s meaning of the word ‘every,’ when I say ‘every frog is green,’ you can check to see whether what I just said is true by checking to see whether the set of frogs is a subset of the set of green things....

In our latest episode, Peter Kail addressed a popular misreading of David Hume’s views about induction—the process of inferring things about the future on the basis of facts about the past. According to this reading, Hume is a skeptic about induction. Let’s distinguish skeptical from non-skeptical views about induction like this: Skepticism about induction: we are never justified in believing things about the future on the basis of facts about the past....

Thus far, three of our episodes (12, 25 and 28 have contained some discussion of possible worlds semantics. Most memorably, we learned in our last episode that John Searle is rather critical of the enterprise. But what is possible worlds semantics? Let’s take a look. This possible worlds business originally stems from the work of 17th-century philosopher and polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz got the ball rolling on possible worlds by putting forth the idea that a statement is necessarily true just in case it is true in all possible worlds, and possibly true just in case it is true in some possible world....

Thus far, a number of our interviews have alluded to what philosophers of language call indexical expressions. (In particular, episodes 12, 25, and 27.) Although the theory of what these words and phrases mean represents one of the major developments in philosophy over the past fifty or so years, it can seem counterintuitive at first. Since the questions these words raise are unusually subtle and difficult, we thought it might be worthwhile to go over some of the basics....