Occupation: Philosopher Birth: 1935
There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works. That's no paradox. Understanding the ….
...if it isn't literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and ….
On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for..
The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know..
I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats. Surely, surely, no one but a relativist….
Faculty Psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psycho….
If, in short, there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be ….
Self-pity can make one weep, as can onions..
It simply isn't true, for example, that being big is in general better for fitness than being small except when there are effects of interacting vari….
No doubt, intuitions deserve respect. ...[but] I think that it is always up for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surel….
Methodological individualism is the doctrine that psychological states are individuated with respect to their causal powers..
Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads..
The theory of natural selection reduces to a banal truth: if a kind of creature flourishes in a kind of situation, then there must be something about….
...there are special sciences not because of the nature of our epistemic relation to the world, but because of the way the world is put together: not….
...monetary exchanges have interesting things in common; Gresham's law, if true, says what one of these interesting things is. But what is interestin….
Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e.g., the problem of ….
I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representations, and they are fo….
I rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did, and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don't imagine I'd ask someone wh….
The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not on the way that it is related to….
The degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system... simplicity, plausibility, and c….
To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to become a lawyer. It seems to me, in retrospect, that there was….