Online research in philosophy

This paper argues that the force and weaknesses of Thomas Nagel’s arguments against psychophysical reductionism can be felt more fully when held up to the defense of a similar view in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. What follows for both from their shared rejection of psychophysical reductionism is a defense of the claim that an objective conception of subjective reality is necessarily incomplete. I examine each one’s defense of this claim. However, although they both claim an objective conception of subjectivity will be incomplete, they do think we have some ability to form such a conception and I examine next the quite different ways in which Nagel and Sartre relate this ability to our use of language. The last sections of the paper discuss each philosopher’s belief that although the tension between the objective and the subjective is irreconcilable, humans continue to desire such reconciliation, i.e., they desire to be God.

I disagree with several of Chow's traditional descriptions and justifications of null hypothesis testing: (1) accepting the null hypothesis whenever p > .05; (2) random sampling from a population; (3) the frequentist interpretation of probability; (4) having the null hypothesis generate both a probability distribution and a complement of the desired conclusion; (5) assuming that researchers must fix their sample size before performing their study.

…those who accept that responsibility for a situation implies an ability to bring it about and, perhaps, an ability to prevent it, must explain how agents are able to do other than they are caused to do. Without it, they can give no defense of their counterexamples. With it, they can be confident that.

Nevertheless, any competent speaker will know what it means. What explains our ability to understand sentences we have never before encountered? One natural hypothesis is that those novel sentences are built up out of familiar parts, put together in familiar ways. This hypothesis requires the backing hypothesis that English has a compositional semantic theory.

How should the metaphysical hypothesis of materialism be formulated? What strategies look promising for defending this hypothesis? How good are the prospects for its successful defense, especially in light of the infamous “hard problem” of phenomenal consciousness? I will say something about each of these questions.

According to the knowledge argument, physicalism fails because when physically omniscient Mary first sees red, her gain in phenomenal knowledge involves a gain in factual knowledge. Thus not all facts are physical facts. According to the ability hypothesis, the knowledge argument fails because Mary only acquires abilities to imagine, remember and recognise redness, and not new factual knowledge. I argue that reducing Mary’s new knowledge to abilities does not affect the issue of whether she also learns factually: I show that gaining specific new phenomenal knowledge is required for acquiring abilities of the relevant kind. Phenomenal knowledge being basic to abilities, and not vice versa, it is left an open question whether someone who acquires such abilities also learns something factual. The answer depends on whether the new phenomenal knowledge involved is factual. But this is the same question we wanted to settle when first considering the knowledge argument. The ability hypothesis, therefore, has offered us no dialectical progress with the knowledge argument, and is best forgotten.

David Lewis (1983, 1988) and Laurence Nemirow (1980, 1990) claim that knowing what an experience is like is knowing-how, not knowing-that. They identify this know-how with the abilities to remember, imagine, and recognize experiences, and Lewis labels their view ‘the Ability Hypothesis’. The Ability Hypothesis has intrinsic interest. But Lewis and Nemirow devised it specifically to block certain anti-physicalist arguments due to Thomas Nagel (1974, 1986) and Frank Jackson (1982, 1986). Does it?