Boghossian on the Sceptical Solution

I have been reading a couple of densely argued, complex and interesting papers by Paul Boghossian, “The Rule Following Considerations” (Mind 98 (1989): 507-49) and “The Status of Content” (Philosophical Review 99 (1990): 157-84). I thought it might help me to understand the intricacies of Boghossian’s arguments to blog about them and try to [...]

Simple and Complex Translation Schemes and Quine’s Argument for the Indeterminacy of Translation

Ken writes (a philosophy related post from my other blog):
Might a translator have good reason to favour a complex and context-dependent translation scheme over a simple and context-independent one?
For example, would a translator, or more particularly someone constructing a theory of meaning for gavagai-language, have a reason to prefer a scheme that gave the meaning [...]

But is it Cornish? The identity of resurrected languages

Ken writes:
When the last speaker of a language dies, the language is said to be extinct (maybe that should be ‘fluent native speaker’, but I’m going with the more general condition). Can a language be resurrected? That is, can a language come to life again if people start speaking it again with sufficient fluency? I [...]

psychology of moral sacrifice

Ken writes:
Reflecting the other day on the fact that we have now basically given up on the environmentally correct choices of nappy (washable, and non-toxic, biodegradable disposal varieties), and therefore were in the wrong, morally speaking, it occurred to me that the moral calculation for deciding what to do basically does not seem to take [...]

boom, bust and the dark winter

Ken writes:
From the Irish Times:
While we complain about how tough times are now, things are still an awful lot better for most of us than at any point during the 100 years documented in Cold Meat . Could we cope with the deprivations of the war years or before? “We’d find it a shock, certainly,” [...]

Child language acquisition: a speculation

Ken writes: Language development is an area of inter-disciplinary interest and deserves the attention of developmental psychologists, psycho-linguists, and a host of others. As an academic philosopher, I’m one of the others. My speculations are likely to err in being insufficiently informed by detailed observations of how quickly children learn language, what words they learn [...]

Technology and Wisdom in balance

Ken writes: I’m reading Catherine Blyth’s ‘The Art of Conversation’ at the moment (I’ve just started, but so far it is very enjoyable). I was struck by a claim she attributes to Hannah Arendt (who I have never read…I’m not that sort of philosopher), namely that human technological prowess and human moral understanding have become [...]

Pagan Christians

Dot writes: I don’t know a great deal about Anglo-Saxon and Norse paganism (though I’ve been re-reading Voluspa lately), but the key idea I have managed to absorb is that paganism didn’t centre on a coherent body of doctrine or a systematic philosophy, though it certainly involved certain characteristic attitudes. Rather, it centred on local [...]

Bad and getting worse

Ken writes:
The Dublin metropolitan area university at which I work has, I’ve found out, declined to offer a promotion to an ambitious and prodigiously talented young scholar which would have retained him in the face of a counter-offer from a university in Canada. This is just so typical! Obviously the universities are at the heart [...]

Why I do it

Ken writes:
American philosopher Saul Kripke once said
There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word.
Wittgensein on Rules and Private Language Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 55
Kripke does not explicitly endorse this claim himself but presents it as the conclusion of another philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He doesn’t, however, say how it can be [...]