Philosophical Sketches

I see no God. I only see what I mean by ‘God’. My words never rigidly referred to anything. You may say that my perceptions are contaminated with human concepts. But such a view implies that there is the world out there my perception comes short of. Here is the better way of putting it. My perceptions were never contaminated; the idea of contamination is a blither. We simply have two names for the same thing, ‘perception’ and ‘expectation’. The separation of these two names arises only when one wants to enforce his perception on others. What one is after is not truth, not the ground of certainty, but validations, or submissions. O, beautiful Phosphorus, the morning star! You devised the language of semantics to hide your selfish motives, to blind (enlighten) my eyes. You tricked me into believing that the utterance of the word, ‘reference’, has a logical function. You gaslit me with the possibility of knowledge, of morality, and of the meaning of it all. You s...

Comedy is not as universal as tragedy is. It is not necessary for one to find humorous what another finds so. The taste of humor varies not just from one culture to another, but really from one individual to another. The same could of course be said of tragedy. But there are at least two reasons why humor is the more urgent topic. First, the discrepancy in humor (for different cultural, social, political, or religious backgrounds) is by and large much wider than that in sadness. It is harder to explain to someone from a different culture why something is comical than why it is tragic. Second, it is rather difficult to offend anyone by over-dramatizing anything. Often, if one does not know the social cue, pretending to be empathetic is the safe way to go. In contrast, one slightly offbeat joke is enough to offend everyone in the room and thereby instantly relegate the joker to the outcast status. Comedy is where the problem of diversity, tolerance, and understanding takes its starkest f...

Here is the famous Epicurean formulation of the problem of evil. P1:          God exists. P2:          God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. P2a:        An omnipotent being has the power to prevent evil. P2b:        An omniscient being knows that evil exists. P2c:        An omnibenevolent would want to prevent evil. P3:          Evil exists. These propositions are inconsistent. That is, at least one of these propositions must be false: either God does not exist, evil does not exist, or God is not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent. More on P2. Given that evil exists, if God is omnipotent, he either does not know that evil exists (not omniscient) or does not want to prevent evil (not omnibenevolent); if God is omniscient, he either has no power to prevent evil (...

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...