Philosophical Sketches

When it comes to the means to survival, the dichotomy between rationality and instinct presents itself as the matter of all-or-nothing. That is, the idea is that rationality is deemed to be either best fit for self-preservation or a poor substitute for instinct which is, blessed by evolution, most optimal for promoting prosperity. However, the terms themselves are vague in their everyday usage, causing equivocations and conflations. (Even Kant, within whose tradition I locate my arguments, was vulnerable to this fallacy.) I believe that, once the terms are clarified, rationality would turn out to be much more reliable than instinct. Yet, this is due to the employment of rationality’s protégé, viz., intuition. Here are the provisional definitions for ‘rationality’ and ‘instinct’. Rationality: the capacity to impose and follow rules Instinct: the capacity to respond to stimuli (without involving rule-imposing/following) If you define instinct broadly merely as the capacity to res...

What is it to believe (that P , of x that it is F , in x , etc.)? If it is a family of mental representations, in regard to what common characteristics is it appropriate to bind them together? What kind of content does a belief consist in? What sort of attitude are we having in believing it? Under what condition could we identify ourselves as believers? The answers to these questions are in desperate need as the language-game of doxastic states is all too an intimate affair in our life. Here are some findings so far: (1) The contents of beliefs are propositional, and the condition of satisfaction (meaning) of doxastic propositions is their truth-conditions. As such, the grammatical parts of these propositions (expressing objects, properties, and relations) are knit together as to be referring to specific states of affairs. (2) The reference is fixed by (a) the causal link between the proposition and a state of affair and (b) the inferential relations among propositions: the former ins...

Wittgenstein: To know the meaning of ‘blue’ is to know the use of the linguistic item, i.e., to know the appropriate circumstance for employing it. Quine: One learns the usage of ‘blue’ via induction, i.e., by observing and generalizing over other people’s verbalization behaviors. David Lewis: The motivation for conforming to the convention consisting in the average behavioral patterns of the community is survival, and linguistic conventions contribute to survival by enabling information exchange. Kripke: The meaning of 'blue' is the rules rather than the psychological inclination (or disposition) associated with the use of the linguistic item. The rules are social, i.e., established and maintained by the community. Synthesis: To learn (the meaning of) ‘blue’ is to train one’s impulse to employ ‘blue’ only under certain circumstances the appropriateness of which is determined in respect to the conventions inaugurated by the community for information exchange that maximize one’s...