Thank you for your good and important question. The extreme and contradictory positions we often hear proposed about difficult issues can make for a lot of confusion, and it's natural to wonder whether there is any rational way to adjudicate such disputes. Now, you asked what is *the* best way to decide between opposing opinions, whereas I don't think that we should assume that there is a unique best way in which to do so. However, I would like to suggest a few strategies that might be helpful. 1. When trying to decide between opposing opinions, take some time to articulate those opinions carefully. You might be surprised how little of an extreme-seeming position is left if you state it in plain English, after subtracting out the shouting and other emotional dimensions. 2. After this articulation, make sure that the opposed opinions are actually responding to the same issue. All too often, disputants twist the question at issue for their own purposes. If this happens, then it raises...

Thank you for your question, which is a good one. It is not, however, clear what you mean in saying that language is a cage we inhabit. That presupposes that we have a reasonably clear idea what it would be to live outside of language. However, language is so integral to human thought and experience that it is not easy to understand what it might mean to live "outside" of language. Nevertheless, there is rich and rewarding work in the ways in which language can "bewitch" us. Some of that has been produced by adherents to the so-called Ordinary Language movement in philosophy. Gilbert Ryle was among them, and his book _Dilemmas_ is an accessible and intriguing discussion of the various problems that arise for thought when it is bewitched in the way that you allude to. Even though the book was published about a half-century ago, it still repays study today. Mitch Green

Thank you for your question. This is a good one that I had not heard before. If I understand you correctly, you are concerned that the notion of omniscience is not coherent. The reason is that omniscience means knowing everything. However, if a being knows everything, then it knows what it is like to be ignorant of something. However, to do that, such a being would have to have the experience of being ignorant of something, and that in turn requires that it is, or at least has been, ignorant of something--but that contradicts the definition of ignorance! This is, I take it, an epistemological analogue of the Paradox of the Stone, namely the question whether an omnipotent being could do something it is impossible to do (like make an unliftable stone). Someone who wants to defend the coherence of the notion of omniscience might, however, not be convinced that you've raised a compelling objection. The reason is that your objection assumes that to know what ignorance is like, you have to...

What a nice question! You're right that we typically think of academic disciplines as adding knowledge rather than taking anything away. The operative phrase always seems to be "creating new knowledge." However, it doesn't go without saying that this is the only valuable thing an academic discipline can do, and Philosophy is sometimes "subtractive", to use your term. The reason is that part of the role of Philosophy is to relieve people of certain kinds of perplexity, and sometimes a good way to do this is not to answer a question that is puzzling them, but rather to show that the question is itself dubious in some way. So suppose for instance someone is trying to find the meaning of life. Philosophers will often be inclined *not* to try to answer the question directly, but rather to get the person to think harder about what sort of answer could possibly satisfy them. Again, the phrase 'the meaning of life' presupposes that there is exactly one thing that is life's meaning, whereas for all we know...

Thank you for your question! Saying is indeed an action, and believing is a mental state as you say (though just what a "mental state" is is no easy question). Asserting is an action, too: it is something we do at will, something we can refrain from, something we can be held responsible for, something we can try but fail to do and so on--in short, it has all the hallmarks of an action. However, unlike mere saying, asserting is subject to a norm, namely, "assert only what you believe." This is colloquially referred to as the norm of sincerity, thought there are some delicate issues about just what sincerity is. At any rate, that asserting is subject to certain norms involving mental states, does not imply that it is itself a mental state. (In this respect, compare asserting with promising.) Nonetheless, asserting is a comparatively sophisticated action, since it is subject to norms, without which I suspect assertion would not even be possible. Philosophers have long been fascinated with...

Thanks for your good question! In answer to, "Do real philosophers go through this?", the answer is yes, definitely. Any intellectually challenging problem tends to make a person less able to get along practically. This has been observed as far back as in Ancient Greece with Aristophanes making fun of the philosophers in _The Clouds_. This is true of philosophy but I suspect it is equally true of other demanding fields like mathematics. Just as cell phone users tend to be unsafe drivers, philosophers who are deeply engaged with a problem do well to refrain from things like operating heavy machinery, perform surgery, operate microwaves, make marriage proposals, and so on. Most of use who have been through graduate school in philosophy have stories to tell about our professors who violated this rule. One of mine left his car engine running for four hours while he was in his office. Luckily for him the thing just ran out of gas rather than overheating. Anyway, I suggest you make your meals...

Thanks for your nice question. It contains many components and I won't be able to respond to all of them. One reason is that I'm hesitant to offer generalizations about literature across the board. Instead, it comes in many genres and sub-genres, and plays different kinds of roles in different cultures. One place you might look for more discussion of these issues is a collection of essays on the "philosophy of literature", here: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405141700,descCd-description.html. One of the questions that that volume addresses is the question of what kind of knowledge we can get from literature, and how far that knowledge extends. I take it that this is relevant to your concerns because I'm assuming that if you were a journalist writing for a newspaper, there wouldn't be a big issue about whether someone can learn from what you write. So long as you're not making things up, we can learn about what's going on in, say French politics from your articles. By...

Thanks for your nice question. Even if a language such as a sign language has a sign that is made just in the way that I move my hand when I point at something, that does not mean that when I am pointing at something I am using a word. Similarly, even if a baby happens to utter a series of sounds that sound exactly like the word 'hyperbole', this does not mean that the infant is referring to anyone's overstatement. Accordingly, when I point, particularly because I don't speak any sign language, I'm not using a word. The most that can be said is that I am making a hand movement that is identical to a word in some other language. You can, I think, see this even more dramatically if you think about gaze: we often use gaze, particularly overt gaze, as a form of ostension. However, even if there were a language that used overt gazing as a word (meaning perhaps, "look at that"), that doesn't mean that I am using a word in overtly gazing at something. Mitch Green

Thanks for your question. Your question is at least as much one for psychology as it is for philosophy. The reason is that it is not quite about the definition of art, which is probably a strictly philosophical question; rather it is about the causal conditions under which art is created. In spite of that, it seems to me that the first theory you mention is equally well undermined by the experience of artists and others. For one, many conceptual artists don't think of themselves as being guided by inspiration at all; rather they'd say that's a defunct Romantic obsession. Instead, a conceptual artist might see her work as commenting on the practice of art itself, or getting us to be reflective about some aspect of our lives such as our use of consumer goods or the way that we structure our time. Again, an artist might have an idea, and then might need to put it through many stages and drafts to make something that seems to fly. Do we need to call this an inspiration or some access to an essential...

Thanks for your perceptive comment/question. Derogatory words do identify groups. So both 'Wop' and 'Italian' apply to all and only Italians. However, the derogatory words convey more than this. You describe this further things by saying they kind of state that the persons are bad, etc. Philosophers of language have spent some time trying to get clear on this notion of "kind of stating", and so I'll try to give you the flavor of that effort here. In addition to what we literally say with our words, we now know that we can communicate a great deal more. Sometimes what I leave unsaid carries a lot of meaning: I ask you how you like the painting I just completed and you reply, "Well, it's very colorful." Here you don't actually say or state that the painting is not so great, but your meaning is clear. Philosophers often call this type of meaning, "implicature." Some implicatures, such as this one, depend heavily on context. In other cases, however, our implicatures depend on the...