On the former question, how much I pay for car insurance is a function of how much accident claims cost insurance companies. People who do not wear seatbelts cause themselves greater injuiries, which lead to higher insurance claims, which lead to higher rates for me. So it's far from clear that one who doesn't wear a seatbeltharms only h'erself (even waiving the harm s'he might be doing to family and friends). The same is true in the latter case: It's not entirely obvious that people who abuse cocaine, say, harm only themselves. More needs to be said, obviously.

These new coffee beans I just got make very nice coffee. I could try to describe the difference in the taste, but I'm not much of a coffee expert. I'm sure there are people who could do a better job than I could, but, frankly, I don't find the descriptions I read on the bins all that helpful. I mean, I can see why someone would say that this particular roast had a hint of cinnamon, but that hardly captures it. Is there a thought here that cannot be put into words? That's quite unclear, but there does seem to be something here that it is difficult, maybe even impossible, to put into words, except, as John McDowell suggested, by saying simply: that taste. But that's not exactly what one had in mind. Suppose I've tried a lot of coffees, and I find that many of them seem similar to me in a certain hard to describe way. Coffees A, B, and C seem similar to one another in this respect; coffees D and E are similar in that respect, but not to A, B, and C; and coffee F is unique in that respect....

A picture is worth a thousand words, to be sure, and so language is, in a sense, a poor instrument as compared to perception. But perception isn't always what is needed. The very fact that perception makes such fine distinctions of, say, color is what makes it so ill-suited for expressing similarities . Indeed, seeing and expressing similarities is, one might say, precisely a way of being less exact, but certainly for a purpose. I may, for example, want a red pen. I don't care which shade of red it is, so long as it is red. If I had to show you the color of the pen I wanted, I'd have a problem.

As you say, many people face this question. I'll quickly point outthat, in Massachusetts, it is not always a man and a woman who face it.Talk about subverting the patriarchal ideology. Indeed, I believe it'sprecisely because gay marriage (and more generally, the existence ofgay relationships) so profoundly upsets common practices andassumptions that so many people oppose it. (If two men get married, who's in charge?) That may not be theirconscious reason, of course, but I'm convinced that it is often the causallyactive one. You don't mention option 4, which is commonhyphenation. (Perhaps that's a version of option 3.) Then, of course,you face the problem of which order to use, but perhaps that could bedecided aesthetically or, if you want to make a political point, youcould put the woman's name first. And, speaking of aesthetics, you canget some pretty awful combinations. My brother and his wife weren'tabout to become the Hamm-Hecks. This option has the advantage (which itshares with options 2 and...

I would be surprised if examples like Chomsky's didn't exist in all human languages. The example rests simply upon the fact that "flies" can be either a noun or a verb and "like" can be either a verb or a, uh, what is it in that construction? a preposition? Both sentences Chomsky cites are therefore, in principle, ambiguous, although one reading in each case is so odd that it is often pragmatically unavailable. That is to say, these examples are essentially just examples of so-called structural ambiguity, that is, of ambiguities that arise because of different possible analyses of the logical structure of a sentence rather than because of different meanings a single word can have. Carroll's examples seem quite different. It's not that there is some ambiguity in "I eat what I see". (At least, if there is, it's not relevant to this example.) What that means is: Anything I see, I eat. Similarly, "I see what I eat" means: Anything I eat, I see. These need not both be true. It does not, however,...

I take it that by "sane" one has in mind some notion of normal mental functioning. If so, then the question points to an ambiguity in the notion of normality. One such notion is a statistical one: What is "normal" is simply what is common (or average, or what have you) in a given population. Another notion is normative: What is normal is what is proper, in accord with the rules, and the like. The contrast emerges in different ways in different cases, but its presence can usually be uncovered by considering modal statements: Would what is now normal still be normal if things were very different from how they now are? For example, it is normal for human beings to have five fingers on each hand. Suppose genetically modified corn carried some kind of virus so that, if a pregnant woman were to eat it, her children would have six fingers on each hand. Suppose further that such corn becomes very common, so that babies everywhere start to be born with twelve fingers. No-one knows what the cause is, so this...

For this reason, many philosophers now suppose that the problem of free will really has nothing to do with determinacy. My own favorite book on the subject is Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room , but I'm sure other people have other favorites.

On (a), I might add that possible worlds are an extremely useful tool. As Lynne mentioned, there are many different ways to understand what they are supposed to be. For many purposes, however, one can simply regard possible worlds as a certain kind of mathematical construct. The reason they are then so useful is that they allow us to understand, in a precise way, the logic of such expressions as "necessarily" and "possibly". In fact, there are many notions of necessity and possiblity, and their logics can be very different. Perhaps more importantly, though, possible worlds help us to get a grip on so-called "counterfactual conditionals", like "If JFK had not been assassinated, the US would not have become as seriously involved in Vietnam". It might interest you to know that, even before "paraconsistent" logics came on the scene—these are the logics that allow contradictions to be true...and, of course, false—logicians were interested in logics of necesssity and possibility that allow "It is...

There is very good evidence now that "sexual orientation" has alarge genetic component. Whether it is genetically determined (orbetter, to what extent) is not clear, but most "gay" people reporthaving known of their "orientation" at a fairly young age. So even ifthere are also strong environmental components, that certainly does notimply that one's "sexual orientation" is chosen nor, for that matter,that it could be changed. There is also very good evidence that "sexualorientation" lies on a continuum, and that "gay" and "straight" arejust the two ends of that continuum, with most people falling somewherealong it. I therefore doubt very much that people who lie at the "gay"end choose their "orientation" any more than do the people at the"straight" end. And honestly: Do those of us who are "straight" haveany sense at all that we chose so to be? If not, why should "gay" folkbe any different? As you'll gather from the scare-quotes, I have a problem with the terminology I've been using. Let me explain...

There are other examples, too, though some of them are more complex. Philosophers used to spend a lot of time trying to understand the difference between "Every student read some book" and "Some book was read by every student" and, more generally, why sentences like the latter logically imply sentences like the former, but not vice versa . (The former means only that no student failed to read a book, whereas the latter says that all students read the same book.) The broad outlines of a solution to that problem were presented by Gottlob Frege in 1879 with the introduction of modern logic. There remain different ways to sort out the details.