Epistemology Is physicalism an impoverished metaphysics? 6 Oct 20146 Oct 2014 Every so often, we read about some philosopher or other form of public intellectual who makes the claim that a physicalist ontology – a world view in which only things that can be described in terms of physics are said to exist – is impoverished. That is, there are things… Read More
Epistemology The Philosophers’ Menu 4 May 2010 The Philosophers’ Menu Presuppositions. Kantelope Assorted carnaps Pareto soup Hart-boyled eggs with a rescher of bacon Major Premises Jugged hare, with milled popper Skinnered peacocke, with nashed paretos Plato’ the Day Humeburger, with gibbard gravy Frankfurts and schauer kraut Bass van frassen [sic] Nagels and lockes Frege legs with russell… Read More
Cognition Thoughts on the Hard Problem 30 Jun 20201 Jul 2020 Most of you will already know that David Chalmers, the once-hirsute Australian philosopher of mind (only Rob Wilson seems to remain in the Hirsute Philosopher’s Club these days. God knows I never was) proposed what came to be known as the Hard Problem of Consciousness: The really hard problem of… Read More
Language is a tool? (If the words weren’t there, there wouldn’t be a right one that wasn’t being recollected.)
Check out this recent blog post from the same site http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/blog/?b=321 Awesome!
@enigMan, that language is a tool for manipulating interest systems, others’ and one’s own, is the idea that got me my PhD, back when
Long before I had even heard of a Worf (the Klingon one without the ‘h’) I remember reading that there was no direct English equivalent for the French word epanouissement and being struck by the possibility that it might be possible to talk and think about things in one language but not in another and wonder how that might affect a culture. Would it be true, as Chancellor Gorkon comments in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, that “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” Is there any support for at least the weak version of the hypothesis?
Personally, I think that any alien language which resembles the gutteral utterances of odd-toed ungulates will tend to make a culture a bit beastly. I call it the Worf-Tapir Hypothesis