Well, there's a panel of very wise elders who meet in an oaken room in their black robes and officially confer meaning on words. At least, that's the idea you'd get the way some people talk about "correct" meanings, as they bemoan the fact that most people nowadays use the "wrong" ones. Linguists find this funny, because really words mean what people use them to mean. The linguistic-correctness freak wrongly takes the meaning-makers to be fussy usage manuals and outdated dictionaries, when the real tribunal is ordinary use. So "meat" comes to mean edible flesh rather than food in general not because of a dictionary change but because of a shift in ordinary usage. Dictionaries respond to changes in usage; they don't mandate them. How exactly does ordinary use manage to create linguistic meaning? The philosopher Paul Grice developed a very influential answer to this question. His idea is that the fundamental kind of "meaning" isn't linguistic meaning, but communicative meaning. A...

This is a very good question. My thinking about it owes a lot to the philosopher Michael Bratman. The obvious, quick answer is that there are few or no certainties, life is a gamble, and so you have to run with the odds. But this answer really doesn't get us very far. How much time should you spend acquiring evidence and assessing the odds of various outcomes for your options? Too little, and you're at fault for not having explored and deliberated more; too much, and you waste your time at best, and at worst miss the chance to do anything of value. So, the obvious, quick answer is that you should explore and deliberate just the right amount. But again that doesn't get us very far. How much time should you spend exploring and deliberating about how much time to use exploring and deliberating about your options? You see the worry---there is no hope for you if you commit yourself to providing an answer to every question of this kind. But is there any alternative, apart from being irrational...

No. And to prove it, here's my ascii picture of a car: __ _/ o\_ =O----O} That aside, I don't know exactly what you have in mind. Is it that maybe the term "art" already excludes what someone might have wanted to call "bad art"---so that "good art" is redundant? If that's the question, I suppose I think sometimes the term "art" is used like that. If we say "a guitar made by Fred is a work of art", we're probably not using "art" in a way in which it makes sense to add, "and a very bad work of art at that." But in plenty of other cases, we don't use "art" so that "bad art" makes no sense. A rather different issue concerns the objectivity of evaluations of artworks. If I say "that drawing is really bad", does the word "bad" denote, once and for all, an objective category of artworks, so that my statement is true or false depending on whether the drawing falls in that category? Or does my statement do only a more subjective job, perhaps of expressing my ...

Even if all living things did come to be as they are through evolution, it doesn't follow that every particular trait of a living thing contributed to its ancestors' fitness. Indeed, there can be traits which confer a selective disadvantage, but which evolution hasn't managed to weed out: perhaps it is currently slowly being weeded out; perhaps the genetic changes that would produce an organism lacking the trait (and able to pass that lack on) are so unlikely that they haven't happened often enough, or at all; perhaps the changes that, together, would be needed to eliminate the trait don't confer selective advantage when they arrive one at a time; perhaps the trait is the homozygote flip-side of a beneficial heterozygote trait; perhaps the trait is just an inevitable by-product of another trait or traits that have increased fitness . . . One can readily generate plausible-sounding explanations of just how tendencies towards hatred, jealousy, and greed would have conferred selective advantages...

You have changed. But for anything to change, it has to still be there after the change--otherwise how can it differ from how it was? In our jargon, you differ qualitatively ---you have different features from before---but you are the same numerically ---you are the very individual who existed in the past. Puzzle: is the gain or loss of the feature of existing (when something comes or ceases to be) a change? Can something gain or lose that feature?

You allude to the Kantian view that we should never treat humanityas a means only, but always as an end in itself (see Robert Johnson'sexplanation in the wonderful Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#8 ). Kant didn't think that we should never rely on people as means to our ends at all ,but just not at the expense of regarding their humanity as an end initself. Slavery is presumably a clear case on one side, and on theother might be a trade wherein both parties aim for mutual (not merelyselfish) benefit. Whether, and in what cases, a user of pornographymight be said to treat the model as an end in herself, is obviouslycomplicated, but these considerations might well be relevant: Is the user aiming at benefitting the model? Is headequately keeping in mind the effects on the model, on himself, and onthe women with whom he will interact, as well as the effects on peoplegenerally of a culture in which pornography is prevalent? The latter...

You have what is known in the industry as a Hard Problem. You apparently have already weighed the interests and responsibilities that favor (or as you say, require) your moving without your dog against any prospects of your staying put or moving with her. Presumably also you have exhausted every avenue in searching for a new owner or a rescue operation that might take her. So let's assume that you really have no alternatives besides immediate euthanasia and a two-week shelter stay probably followed by euthanasia. As far as "in principle" considerations go, the latter course has the advantage that you would not be killing your pet while there is any way of not doing so, while the former has the benefit of avoiding preventable misery. But to my mind this is a "weighing" situation, where those aspects of your options need to be assessed in conjuntion with any number of other things: the odds (such as they are) that she would find a new home in those two weeks, the value of the life she'd...

Here's something we might agree on, at least for the sake of argument: the chance that a (sufficiently powerful, etc.) designer would produce a "designy" universe is higher than the chance that a random selection of natural laws and initial conditions (i.e., "no designer") would do so: Prob( designy universe GIVEN designer) > Prob(designy universe GIVEN no designer) But you are wondering about a different comparison: Prob (designer GIVEN designy universe) ??? Prob(no designer GIVEN designy universe) But these latter probabilities seem much more problematic to estimate. Are we to imagine being "given" a universe "at random" with no information about it except that it is designy? But what does that even mean? How is this "random" selection made among all the possible designed and undesigned universes? Are we to assume that there is some objective fact, for instance, about what the odds are of a universe being designed rather than undesigned? This matters greatly, for if in general...

I'll grant you that there could be no immaterial god with cognitive capacities if such capacities are possible only for "organic" creatures. But I very much doubt that the latter condition is true.

I imagine that you've put on a few pounds since then, but you gave the game away with the word "I". You can only use that word to refer to one person, namely yourself. So if there is any person you can describe as "the person I was when I was two", it's the same person as the one you can describe as "the person I am today". If you want to leave open the question whether a single person has persisted over time occupying the body that you now inhabit, ask it...well, that way. I'm guessing the answer to that one is also yes, unless you're the sort that sends yourselves birthday cards.