Whoa! With all due respect to Professor Nahmias, he is mistaken. The syllogism is NOT valid and here is why. Propositions that are "in the scope" of words like belief can't be manipulated while preserving validity. So while, Green people should be killed. Mushmush is a green person. ergo, Mushmush should be killed is valid, embedding the first premise in the scope of belief ('John believes that green people should be killed') will destroy the argument's validity. Words like 'believes' (and related ones such as 'knows', 'wants', 'fears') create what is known as opaque contexts, in which inferences that would otherwise be valid are no longer valid. The reason is that what a person believes (knows, wants, fears) depends not only on what is implied by the propositions he believes, but also on whether he *realizes* that these things are implied. Alas, we are all too often unaware of what is implied by the things that we believe. The point here has been discussed in detail by...

Thanks for your question. In general, I don't have any idea what the entire range of possible responses are to a question or comment, but here are a few to the ones you mention: 1. One response is to agree with the criticism and thereby acknowledge that these concepts are indeed meaningless. That's one possible response, but it might leave you a little unsatisfied, so you might consider another: 2. It is perhaps true that some philosophers use terms like these (I'll talk of terms rather than concepts) in a way that is more obfuscatory than illuminating. However, it's not so hard to use 'being' as a term for everything that exists. That seems perfectly intelligible even if we can't give a full account of what that includes, that is of all that does in fact exist. Also, whereas 'nothingness' is a bit hifalutin, one can use 'nothing' with a perfectly clear meaning. For instance a person might point out that there's nothing in the fridge, meaning not that it contains nothing at all ...

Thank you for your question. It is not exactly clear to me what sorts of things you are concerned about. Is it about expressing things verbally, or is it defining words or phrases? Your question touches on both issues. However, I'll first just discuss the issue of defining words and phrases. For the case you do raise, namely 'art', there has indeed been a lot of reflection about whether that term can be defined. This was much discussed in the middle of the last century in the field of aesthetics. The topic does still get some attention, and one thing we now see is that it's by no means clear that 'art' cannot be defined. In fact, a number of highly original and insightful contemporary philosophers (including Jerry Levinson, George Dickie and Stephen Davies) have forwarded definitions of art that have something going for them. I suspect that if you studied these theories you'd be at least *open* to the possibility that 'art' can be defined after all. So when you ask whether we lack the ability...

Thanks for your thoughtful question. People often have different conceptions of the same phenomenon. This doesn't prevent them from talking about one and the same thing. One person might think that Venus is a star while another think that it is a planet. In spite of these wildly divergent views, these two people might still be able to disagree about Venus rather than just talking past one another. For instance, one might think that Venus is shining right before dawn, and the other might deny it; they can still have a substantive disagreement. So too, I suspect the same is true of 'therapy': two parties might have different views of what therapy is but can still have the same thing in mind. How can you tell? One way would be to see if the two parties can agree on putative example of therapy. If they can agree on most or all such cases, then we can be confident that even if they have different *views* about therapy, these are views about one and the same thing. Accordingly, it would be...

Thanks for your questions. I'll address them separately since they're quite distinct. Question 1 I'm not sure that *most* philosophers talk in language incomprehensible to normal people, though I agree that some do. There are a number of reasons for why some do. (1) Some topics in philosophyare technical. You simply can't get very far these days in certain areas of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science (especially including subfields like phil of physics and phil of biology), philosophy of language or even ethics without mastering a lot of jargon. I don't think there's much that can be done about this, since these discussions need to make use of clearly defined technical terms to avoid confusion. In this respect the situation is not so different from math or biology. Here's a big qualification, though: In these cases the discussions are not *incomprehensible*. That would imply that they cannot be understood. Rather, they *can* be understood, but this just requires...

Good question. I have qualms about your claim that in societies lacking linguists and dictionaries, language is nothing more than our uses of words and our reactions to those uses by others. However, I think we can leave those qualms aside and assume this is correct. Even so, the aforementioned uses and reactions would not be possible unless the words and more complex expressions of which they're composed themselves possessed semantic value. Lacking that, utterances and inscriptions would perhaps have "expressive" value as some birdsong does, but it wouldn't mean anything beyond that. Let me illustrate this. Suppose I remark on the fact that you finally show up to a meeting on time by saying, "You're on time!" Here I've expressed surprise or delighted about your unexpected punctuality, but that pragmatic effect, which is not part of the literal meaning is my words, is only possible because of that literal meaning. If I had remarked on the redness of the carpet or the height of the clouds, that...

Thanks for your question. I agree that it's unlikely that the remark concerns the bad guy's moral duty. In lieu of a fuller description of the case, my guess about a reasonable gloss of that remark would be: it would have been in the bad guy's *interest* to kill him when he had the chance. Note that something can be in a person's interest even if it is immoral. For instance, it's in a sadist's interest to control and torture people, given his desires; that is of course compatible with the fact that it is immoral for him to control and torture people. Philosophers like to distinguish between prudential and moral norms, where the former have to do with a person's interests, whatever they may be. So it's prudent for the sadist to torture, even if it's wrong for him to do so. One other thing to keep in mind, I suggest, is that cases like these, even when represented in film, can be awfully complex, and good movies often bring a lot of moral ambiguity to the table. As a result, it is not...

Thanks for your nice question(s). One issue here is whether there are in fact any words that it is morally improper to utter, at least in a given language. Another question is whether, if there are any such words, the impropriety of uttering them is justifiable in some way. I separate these two questions because the impropriety of something might have no basis, or at least no justification: some aspects of morals might just be "brute". You're right that two words might refer to the same thing and yet only one of them be considered improper. Many philosophers of language would try to explain that difference in the following terms. Two such words might refer to the same thing and yet one of them express an attitude that the other does not. Some racial epithets, for instance, might not only refer to a racial group, but also express contempt toward that group. Note also that some expressions of contempt might be considered demeaning to their target. If I explicitly tell you that you're inferior...

Thanks for your excellent question. You're right to be dissatisfied with the "containment" characterization of analyticity. The reason is that containment is a topological or set-theoretic idea, and it's hard to know how to cash it out for the case of language. After all, subjects and predicates don't take up space, and it takes some doing to explain them in terms of sets also. Your suggested definition in terms of 'sufficient to identify unequivocally the subject in question,' is a good idea, but I also think it won't work without a lot of modification: After all, 'containing interior angles' is true analytically of triangles (triangles have interior angles' is plausibly analytic), but that predicate doesn't identify unequivocally the concept of a triangle, since lots of other things have that feature as well. A perhaps better characterization of analyticity is 'true by definition'. It's true by definition that triangles have three interior angles, and that bachelors are unarried. ...

You might think of a sentence type as an abstraction from lots of individual occurrences of a given sentence. There's fairly clear sense in which in the following: Fred eats spinach Fred eats spinach I've written two sentences, and a fairly clear sense in which I've written just one sentence. In the former sense of 'sentence', we have what are called *sentence tokens*. In the latter sense, we have what are called *sentence types*. That would still be true if the latter of the two above sentences had been written in a different font, or a different font size. More generally, the notion of 'type' here abstracts away from the peculiarities of all the tokens there may happen to be. Now in addition to all the sentence tokens that there are, one might reasonably suppose that those that are meaningful express something that transcends them: A meaning, a content, or what you will. Thus two synonymous sentences of different languages seem to express the same content, and many...