Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece o...f toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the 'it' of 'Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...' seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would not... follow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox. Different... points of view make sense, but only if there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assump...tion about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Conceptual relativism is a heady and exotic doctrine, or would be if we could make good sense of it. The trouble is, as so often i...n philosophy, it is hard to improve intelligibility while retaining the excitement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consis...tent and true by our own standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There... is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »