I'll be the light in the window.
Terminological infelicities have a way of breeding conceptual confusion.
Nothing in the world, no object or event, would be true or false if there were not thinking creatures.
There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation.
There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. Thereis therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.
The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox. Differentpoints of view make sense, but only if there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability.
Conceptual relativism is a heady and exotic doctrine, or would be if we could make good sense of it. The trouble is, as so often in philosophy, it is hard to improve intelligibility while retaining the excitement.
To find agreements in one's minority opinions is one of the great pleasures of reading.
It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
Anna despises two classes of people: first, those who own their own homes and have cars and families, and second, everybody else. Constantly she is on the verge of exploding. With rage. A pool of pure red. The pool is filled with speechlessness that talks away at her nonstop.
I could do an interview or just as well not do one. It's not like I'm looking for extra publicity.