Recent Responses
Would it ever be possible to achieve world peace? The only way that seems possible is to get everyone to believe the same thing. The only way that seems possible is if there were divine interference. Since this is highly unlikely how could there ever be world peace? ~Jordan~
Alexander George
November 16, 2005
(changed November 16, 2005)
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I suppose another way you could try to get everyone to believe the same thing is coercion, terror, and force, either outright or threatened. Doesn't sound appealing.
So maybe we should rethink what's needed for world peace. Instead of thinking that it requires universal agreement,... Read more
Does music create emotion, or does it bring to the surface existing emotions?
Aaron Meskin
November 16, 2005
(changed November 16, 2005)
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Music can certainly bring about emotions, and I think it can also make us conscious of ones that we already have. It may bring about emotions in a variety of ways. A work of music may remind us of something and produce emotion in that way, or it may move us when we recognize its quali... Read more
All spoken and written languages - current or extinct - have things they express poorly or can't express at all. Art can be used to fill in the gaps of the inexpressible. How many languages would a person need to know to express everything, and by being able to express everything, would they be more capable or less capable of art?
Richard Heck
November 16, 2005
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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 helpf... Read more
Why do we often put our thoughts into words which we have no intention of writing down or speaking? Surely language is a much less efficient way of perceiving the world as it doesn't express our exact viewpoint, therefore we have to add our own meaning to language anyway. Why then, do we sometimes put exact thoughts into an inexact form during the thought process?
Richard Heck
November 16, 2005
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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... Read more
Here's a real life question faced by most of us at some point in our lives and that I will soon face: Given our cultural context, what is the best thing to do with the last names of a couple that is to be married? The default position even today of the so-called "person on the street" is that the woman should take the man's last name. However, given the patriarchal ideology which this practice is a manifestation of, this seems like a social norm that ought to be violated until it no longer exists. But what to put in its place? I see three plausible alternatives: (1) both the man and the woman keep their original names; (2) the man takes the woman's name; (3) the man and the woman create a totally new last name that they choose to share in place of their former names. Option (3) seems best to me right now, because it seems to get the desired symbolic value of a common last name (it symbolizes the couple's unity and commitment to live their lives essentially together) without symbolically subordinating either member of the couple to the other. Still, (1) and (2) have their advantages (such as being a marginally accepted practice already and not involving name changing courts, and having greater symbolic protest value against a patriarchal ideology, respectively), and (3) has its disadvantages (it would be difficult to apply universally, geneology would become extremely difficult, and it could result in severe sanctions from both people's families or even in wider social contexts). So, as thoughtful people, what do you think makes the most sense to do?
Richard Heck
November 16, 2005
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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 relationshi... Read more
Lewis Carroll spoofed logic, semantics, and language in <i>Alice</i> with constructions such as (paraphrased): must I mean what I say when I say what I mean, to which the response was I see what I eat isn't the same as I eat what I see. Chomsky cited "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like bananas". My question is, are such constructions possible in all languages (presumably the above examples are not always directly translatable) especially non-Indo-European ones and, if not, what are the philosophical/linguistic ramifications of this? Does it just boil down to word play in any given language or are there linguistic universals at play? I once read a bilingual Chinese/English American (!) philosopher claiming that Chinese was more conducive to essaying logical analysis than English and, as far as I know, all writing about linguistic philosophy has been in 'Western' languages, usually English. Is this significant? Do individual languages or language families rather than language itself colour our perception of the world?
Richard Heck
November 16, 2005
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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... Read more
My friend asked me this question and frankly, I have no answer for him. "Is it possible that people that are mentally unstable (a little on the crazy side) are actually sane and we are the ones that are crazy?"
Richard Heck
November 16, 2005
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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 populatio... Read more
In art or design, why do certain combinations of color, shape, contrast, font, etc., strike more visual impact and/or seem more appealing than others? There are certain standbys or principles of design that seem to be successful (e.g., appropriate white space, complementary colors, etc.), yet it also seems entirely subjective as to what we find beautiful in artistic realms. Is there any generalizability to the quality of visual appeal?
Aaron Meskin
November 16, 2005
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I want to emphasize that the question of the subjectivity of beautyis distinct from the question of whether there are rules or principlesabout beauty. Many aestheticians are particularists. They believe thatthere are no general rules or principles governing what makes thingsbeautiful, and... Read more
It has been argued that if you duplicate a person the duplicate will not be the original person but a copy, identical but separate. (Teleportation devices would also fall into the above trap, as a recombination of your existing atoms is no more "you" than an identical duplication.) So does this imply that your essence is transcendent, and that materialists (like me) are wrong. How do you define your essence when it seems independent of atoms?
Peter Lipton
November 16, 2005
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What makes you the same person over time may not be that there is some essence that you have at each time, but rather that your different 'slices' are related to each other in the right way. Think of climbing rope. Modern synthetic ropes do have a single filament running their entire len... Read more
If you watch a car drive away from you down a straight road, it appears to get smaller as it gets farther away. We know that it doesn't *really* get smaller, it only *appears* to get smaller. So we distinguish between the real size of the car and the apparent size (at a particular distance). I have two problems with this. First, at what distance do we see the real size; or, at what distance does the apparent size equal the real size? Second, the real car is supposedly outside our heads and the apparent car is supposedly an image of the real car, and inside our heads. But the car we actually see is (a) outside our heads, so real, and (b) changing its size with distance, so an image inside our heads: but how can it be both?
Joseph G. Moore
November 16, 2005
(changed November 16, 2005)
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There are tensions here, I agree, though I think they reside in the way that we talk about appearances rather than in the appearance/reality distinction itself--at least as it applies to cars.Size is an intrinsic property of a car if any property is--that is, a car's size, like its shap... Read more