According to the computational theory of mind , to think is to compute. But what is meant by the word 'compute'? The generally given answer is this: Every case of computing is a case of manipulating symbols, but not vice versa - a manipulation of symbols must be driven exclusively by the formal properties of those symbols if it is qualify as a computation. In this paper, I will present the following argument. Words like 'form' and 'formal' are ambiguous, as (...) they can refer to form in either the syntactic or the morphological sense. CTM fails on each disambiguation, and the arguments for CTM immediately cease to be compelling once we register that ambiguity. The terms 'mechanical' and 'automatic' are comparably ambiguous. Once these ambiguities are exposed, it turns out that there is no possibility of mechanizing thought, even if we confine ourselves to domains where all problems can be settled through decision-procedures. The impossibility of mechanizing thought thus has nothing to do with recherché mathematical theorems, such as those proven by Gödel and Rosser. A related point is that CTM involves, and is guilty of reinforcing, a misunderstanding of the concept of an algorithm. (shrink)

"Jim would still be alive if he hadn't jumped" means that Jim's death was a consequence of his jumping. "x wouldn't be a triangle if it didn't have three sides" means that x's having a three sides is a consequence its being a triangle. Lewis takes the first sentence to mean that Jim is still alive in some alternative universe where he didn't jump, and he takes the second to mean that x is a non-triangle in every alternative universe where (...) it doesn't have three sides. Why did Lewis have such obviously wrong views? Because, like so many of his contemporaries, he failed to grasp the truth that it is the purpose of the present paper to demonstrate, to wit: No coherent doctrine assumes that statements about possible worlds are anything other than statements about the dependence-relations governing our world. The negation of this proposition has a number of obviously false consequences, for example: all true propositions are necessarily true (there is no modal difference between "2+2=4" and "Socrates was bald"); all modal terms (e.g. "possible," "necessary") are infinitely ambiguous; there is no difference between laws of nature (e.g. "metal expands when heated") and accidental generalizations (e.g. "all of the coins in my pocket are quarters"); and there is no difference between the belief that 1+1=2 and the belief that arithmetic is incomplete. Given that possible worlds are identical with mathematical models, it follows that the concept of model-theoretic entailment is useless in the way of understanding how inferences are drawn or how they should be drawn. Given that the concept of formal-entailment is equally useless in these respects, it follows that philosophers and mathematicians have simply failed to shed any light on the nature of the consequence-relation. Q's being either a formal or a model-theoretic consequence of P is parasitic on its bearing some third, still unidentified relation to P; and until this relation has been identified, the discipline of philosophical logic has yet to begin. (shrink)

Linguistic expressions must be decrypted if they are to transmit information. Thoughts need not be decrypted if they are to transmit information. Therefore thought-processes do not consist of linguistic expressions: thought is not linguistic. A consequence is that thought is not computational, given that a computation is the operationalization of a function that assigns one expression to some other expression (or sequence of expressions).

This paper shows that Russell’s theory of descriptions gives the wrong se-mantics for definite descriptions occurring in questions and imperatives. Depending on how that theory is applied, it either assigns nonsense to per-fectly meaningful questions and assertions or it assigns meanings that di-verge from the actual semantics of such sentences, even after all pragmatic and contextual variables are allowed for. Given that Russell’s theory is wrong for questions and assertions, it must be wrong for assertoric state-ments; for the semantics of (...) ‘the phi’ obviously doesn’t vary depending on whether it occurs in a question or an assertion or a command. (shrink)

Sense-perceptions do not have to be deciphered if their contents are to be uploaded, the reason being that they are presentations, not representations. Linguistic expressions do have to be deciphered if their contents are to be uploaded, the reason being that they are representations, not presentations. It is viciously regressive to suppose that information-bearing mental entities are categorically in the nature of representations, as opposed to presentations, and it is therefore incoherent to suppose that thought is mediated by expressions or, (...) therefore, by linguistic entities. Attempts to neutralize this criticism inevitably overextend the concept of what it is to be a linguistic symbol, the result being that such attempts eviscerate the very position that it is their purpose to defend. Also, it is inherent in the nature of such attempts that they assume the truth of the view that for a given mental entity to bear this as opposed to that information is for that entity to have this as opposed to that causal role. This view is demonstrably false, dooming to failure the just-mentioned attempts to defend the contention that thought is in all cases mediated by linguistic symbols. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy and theoretical psychology are dominated by an acceptance of content-externalism: the view that the contents of one's mental states are constitutively, as opposed to causally, dependent on facts about the external world. In the present work, it is shown that content-externalism involves a failure to distinguish between semantics and pre-semantics---between, on the one hand, the literal meanings of expressions and, on the other hand, the information that one must exploit in order to ascertain their literal meanings. It is (...) further shown that, given the falsity of content-externalism, the falsity of the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) follows. It is also shown that CTM involves a misunderstanding of terms such as "computation," "syntax," "algorithm," and "formal truth." Novel analyses of the concepts expressed by these terms are put forth. These analyses yield clear, intuition-friendly, and extensionally correct answers to the questions "what are propositions?, "what is it for a proposition to be true?", and "what are the logical and psychological differences between conceptual (propositional) and non-conceptual (non-propositional) content?" Naively taking literal meaning to be in lockstep with cognitive content, Burge, Salmon, Falvey, and other semantic externalists have wrongly taken Kripke's correct semantic views to justify drastic and otherwise contraindicated revisions of commonsense. (Salmon: What is non-existent exists; at a given time, one can rationally accept a proposition and its negation. Burge: Somebody who is having a thought may be psychologically indistinguishable from somebody who is thinking nothing. Falvey: somebody who rightly believes himself to be thinking about water is psychologically indistinguishable from somebody who wrongly thinks himself to be doing so and who, indeed, isn't thinking about anything.) Given a few truisms concerning the differences between thought-borne and sentence-borne information, the data is easily modeled without conceding any legitimacy to any one of these rationality-dismantling atrocities. (It thus turns out, ironically, that no one has done more to undermine Kripke's correct semantic points than Kripke's own followers!). (shrink)

According to a popular doctrine known as "intentionalism," two experiences must have different representational contents if they have different phenomenological contents, in other words, what they represent must differ if what they feel like differs. Were this position correct, the representational significance of a given affect (or 'quale'---plural 'qualia'--to use the preferred term), e.g. a tickle, would be fixed: what it represented would not be a function of the subject's beliefs, past experiences, or other facts about his past or present (...) psychological condition. To be sure, many a quale has a significance; but it is never a quale's intrinsic properties that assign it that significance, it being quale-external facts about the subject's psychological composition that do so. (An example of such a fact would be a belief on the subject's part to the effect that relevantly similar qualia are consistent with arthritis.). (shrink)

According to Russell, '... the phi ...' means: 'exactly one object has phi and ... that object ...'. Strawson pointed out that, if somebody asked how many kings of France there were, it would be deeply inappropriate to respond by saying '... the king of France ...': the respondent appears to be presupposing the very thing that, under the circumstances, he ought to be asserting. But it would seem that if Russell's theory were correct, the respondent would be asserting exactly (...) what he was asked to assert. So Russell's theory wrongly predicts that the respondent's answer will be appropriate. Russellians deal with this by saying that this anti-Russellian intuition embodies our reaction not to what is semantically encoded in the respondent's words, but to what is pragmatically imparted by them. So Russell's theory is correct: the fact that it appears wrong is due to the distorting effects of pragmatics. In this paper I show that pragmatic phenomena cannot possibly be responsible for the just mentioned anti-Russellian intuition. No matter how hard we try to put the blame on pragmatics, Russell's theory still falls short. It follows that defi nite descriptions really are what they appear to be: referring expressions. I argue that defi nite descriptions are complex demonstratives; and, within that framework, I deal with cases where defi nite descriptions appear to be functioning non-referentially. I also solve Frege's puzzle within the framework defi ned by my treatment of defi nite descriptions taken in conjunction with Kripke-Kaplan semantics. (shrink)

According to Russell, '... the phi ...' means: 'exactly one object has phi and ... that object ...'. Strawson pointed out that, if somebody asked how many kings of France there were, it would be deeply inappropriate to respond by saying '... the king of France ...': the respondent appears to be presupposing the very thing that, under the circumstances, he ought to be asserting. But it would seem that if Russell's theory were correct, the respondent would be asserting exactly (...) what he was asked to assert. So Russell's theory wrongly predicts that the respondent's answer will be appropriate. Russellians deal with this by saying that this anti-Russellian intuition embodies our reaction not to what is semantically encoded in the respondent's words, but to what is pragmatically imparted by them. So Russell's theory is correct: the fact that it appears wrong is due to the distorting effects of pragmatics. In this paper I show that pragmatic phenomena cannot possibly be responsible for the just mentioned anti-Russellian intuition. No matter how hard we try to put the blame on pragmatics, Russell's theory still falls short. It follows that defi nite descriptions really are what they appear to be: referring expressions. I argue that defi nite descriptions are complex demonstratives; and, within that framework, I deal with cases where defi nite descriptions appear to be functioning non-referentially. I also solve Frege's puzzle within the framework defi ned by my treatment of defi nite descriptions taken in conjunction with Kripke-Kaplan semantics. (shrink)

We are aware of truths (e.g. the truth that the shoes I'm now wearing are uncomfortably tight) and also of states of affairs (e.g. the uncomfortable tightness of said shoes). My awareness of the tightness of my shoes---not, be it emphasized, of the corresponding truth, but of the shoe-related mass-energy-distribution underlying that truth---is an instance, not of truth-awareness, but of fact-awareness or, as I prefer to put, object-awareness. The aforementioned truth-awareness corresponding to that object-awareness is the result of my conceptualizing (...) that object-awareness. The distinction between truth-awareness, which is conceptual, and object-awareness, which is non-conceptual, is often overlooked. Because self-knowledge originally consists of object-awarenesses, only later taking the form of truth-awarenesses, a failure to distinguish between object- and truth-awareness has led many to advocate the false contention that self-conscious creatures, such as ourselves, can be categorically mistaken as to what it is that they are consciously experiencing. In this paper, it is argued that, once the distinction between object- and truth-awareness is taken into account, the mistaken judgments that people make as to their conscious conditions embody erroneous conceptualizations of veridical awarenesses of said conditions. (shrink)

A person with one dollar is poor. If a person with n dollars is poor, then so is a person with n + 1 dollars. Therefore, a person with a billion dollars is poor. True premises, valid reasoning, a false a conclusion. This is an instance of the Sorites-paradox. (There are infinitely many such paradoxes. A man with an IQ of 1 is unintelligent. If a man with an IQ of n is unintelligent, so is a man with an IQ (...) of n+1. Therefore a man with an IQ of 200 is unintelligent.) Most attempts to solve this paradox reject some law of classical logic, usually the law of bivalence. I show that this paradox can be solved while holding on to all the laws of classical logic. Given any predicate that generates a Sorites-paradox, significant use of that predicate is actually elliptical for a relational statement: a significant token of "Bob is poor" means that Bob is poor compared to x, for some value of x. Once a value of x is supplied, a definite cutoff line between having and not having the paradox-generating predicate is supplied. This neutralizes the inductive step in the associated Sorites argument, and the would-be paradox is avoided. (shrink)

This paper puts forth two reasons to hold that at least some mental entities are not physical entities. First argument: Some mental entities (namely, pains and other qualia) cannot possibly differ from how they seem to be, and since this cannot possibly be true of any non-mental entity, it follows that some mental entities are not physical. Second argument: It is necessarily on theoretical grounds, as opposed to strictly experiential grounds, that mental entities are identified with physical entities. Water is (...) legitimately believed to consist of microparticles of a certain kind because there is independent reason to believe that entities relevantly similar to such particles, supposing them to exist, are relevantly similar to water, so far as the latter can be directly observed. It is not, nor could it possibly be, on the basis of some directly observed concomitance between molecule-activity and water-activity that we believe the former to constitute the latter. It obviously isn't on the basis of any directly observed concomitance between brain-activity and mental-activity that the former is believed to mediate the latter. At the same time, there cannot possibly be any other legitimate basis for that belief. The reason for this is that nothing relevantly similar to mental activity can possibly be observed to accompany anything relevantly similar to brain activity. And the reason for the latter fact is that, even if brain-activity and mental-activity occur in the same physical space, they occur in different data-spaces: when you experience a pain, it is not given to you as occurring in the same spatial manifold as the falling of a stone or any other physical event. In general, mental events, whether or not they in fact have spatial coordinates, cannot possibly be observed (experienced) as having such coordinates, and for this reason they cannot be observed as having the same coordinates as brain-events. Thus, there can be no reason to grant the existence of the concomitances whose existence is needed to legitimate the bridge principles on the basis of which the mental could legitimately be identified with the physical. Note on the second argument: This argument doesn't show that the mental is non-physical; it shows only that there cannot possibly be any justification for the belief that the mental to be physical or, at any rate, that, if there is such a justification, it isn't comparable to the justification for the belief that water consists of molecules. (shrink)

It is discussed why it is beneficial to let go of anger. To this end, the teachings of the Buddha are discussed.

One cannot have the concept of a red object without having the concept of an extended object. But the word "red" doesn't contain the word "extended." In general, our concepts are interconnected in ways in which the corresponding words are not interconnected. This is not an accidental fact about the English language or about any other language: it is inherent in what a language is that the cognitive abilities corresponding to a person's abilities to use words cannot possibly be reflected (...) in semantic relations holding among those words. This fact in its turn is a consequence of the fact that expressions are, whereas concepts are not, digital structures, for which reason the ways in which cognitive abilities interact cannot possibly bear any significant resemblance to the ways in which expressions interact. Consequently, there is no truth to the contention that our thought-processes are identical with, or bear any resemblance to, the digital computations that mediate computer-activity. (shrink)

A number of psychologists hold that aggression is a basic instinct, meaning that it is a primitive drive and therefore cannot be derived from, or decomposed into, other drives. The truth is that aggression is not a basic drive. Desire for power is a basic drive, and aggression is what results when that desire is frustrated.

The behavior of individuals who compose an institution tends to mirror the behavior of that institution as a whole. This short work illustrates this principle.

A series of sharp, deep answers to hard-hitting questions about psychopathy, with embedded link to the author real-timing it.

Kripke made a good case that “…the phi…” is not semantically ambiguous between referential and attributive meanings. Russell says that “…the phi…” is always to be analyzed attributively. Many semanticists, agreeing with Kripke that “…the phi…” is not ambiguous, have tried to give a Russellian analysis of the referential-attributive distinction: the gross deviations between what is communicated by “…the phi..”, on the one hand, and what Russell’s theory says it literally means, on the other, are chalked up to implicature. This (...) paper shows that, when the phenomenon of implicature is scrutinized, there is overwhelming reason to doubt that a Russellian analysis can succeed. A positive, non-Russellian analysis is proposed: it is shown that, if definite descriptions are treated as referring expressions, it is easy to deal with the referential-attributive distinction. When “…the phi…” is functioning attributively, the definite description is seen as referring to some object described in an understood, antecedent existence claim. (shrink)

Kripke made a good case that “…the phi…“ is not semantically ambiguous between referential and attributive meanings. Russell says that “…the phi…“ is always to be analyzed attributively. Many semanticists, agreeing with Kripke that “…the phi…“ is not ambiguous, have tried to give a Russellian analysis of the referential-attributive distinction: the gross deviations between what is communicated by “…the phi..“, on the one hand, and what Russell's theory says it literally means, on the other, are chalked up to implicature. This (...) paper shows that, when the phenomenon of implicature is scrutinized, there is overwhelming reason to doubt that a Russellian analysis can succeed. A positive, non-Russellian analysis is proposed: it is shown that, if definite descriptions are treated as referring expressions, it is easy to deal with the referential-attributive distinction. When “…the phi…“ is functioning attributively, the definite description is seen as referring to some object described in an understood, antecedent existence claim. (shrink)

The modern age has not given rise to any new psychopathologies. But modern social configurations have withdrawn some of the constraints that in times past inhibited the development of latent psychopathology.

It is said what aggregative properties are and also what emergent properties are, and examples are given each of kind of property. It is also explained why, even though all emergent properties are aggregative properties, not all aggregative properties are emergent properties. It is further made clear that, strictly speaking, emergence is a property of one's knowledge of a given kind of aggregate, and not of such aggregates themselves, this being why a property that is emergent at one time will, (...) when additional information becomes available, cease to be emergent. And it is explained why, for this very reason, the right answer to the question 'why does X exist?' is never 'because X is an emergent property.'. (shrink)

This book answers three questions: (i) What is it for a statement to be analytically true? (ii) What is a priori knowledge? (How does it differ from inherited empirical knowledge? And how does it differ from acquired conceptual (non-empirical) knowledge, such as one's knowledge that not all continuous functions are differentiable?). (iii) Do we have a priori knowledge? It is shown that content-externalism is an 'epistemologicization' of the (logically, not psychologically) innocuous fact that, if a sentence S of natural language (...) expresses a multiply quantified generalization, S also expresses each quantified generalization obtained by permuting the quantifiers in it. It is also shown that, through judicious usage of Kaplan's dthat-operator, the shred of truth in content externalism can be reconciled with the datum that, in virtue of having a given representational content R, a mental state M has causal powers that it would not otherwise have. And it is thereby shown how to reconcile content-externalism, so far as the latter is true, with the legitimacy of individualist approaches to psychology. Finally, it is shown that content-externalism embodies a crude and false conception of the nature of the relationship between the literal meanings of linguistic expressions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the contents of the thoughts underlying our usage of such expressions. More precisely, content-externalism presupposes that literal meaning and cognitive content are in lockstep with each other; which, it is shown, is not the case and---what is also shown---only appears to be the case because of a failure on the part of semanticists to know where to draw the line between semantics and pragmatics. (shrink)

Ontologically, brains are more basic than mental representations. Epistemologically, mental representations are more basic than brains and, indeed, all other non-mental entities: it is, and must be, on the basis of mental representations that we know anything about non-mental entities. Since, consequently, mental representations are epistemically more fundamental than brains, the former cannot possibly be explained in terms of the latter, notwithstanding that the latter are ontologically more fundamental than the former. There is thus an explanatory gap, notwithstanding the presumptive (...) truth of materialism. (shrink)

The same person who claims to be a relativist about musical beauty—who claims that all musical works are equally ‘valid’ and beautiful---adores certain musical works while detesting others. And the same person who claims to be a relativist about personal beauty—who claims that all people are beautiful, if only ‘on the inside’---finds certain people intensely attractive and finds others equally intensely repellent. And the same person who is guilty of the one hypocrisy is almost always guilty of the other. So (...) we are dealing with two hypocrisies---two ‘open secrets’, each of which has a social justification while lacking an alethic or logical justification---that parallel each other. And that is because the one hypocrisy is really just a proxy for the other: relativism about musical beauty—which is just an absurd purely philosophical position---is really just a proxy for relativism about female beauty—which is not an absurd philosophical position, but a deeply important social protocol that is rooted in the depths of female psychology. (shrink)

According to David Hume, there is nothing to the mind other than the various fleeting events that it hosts. According to commonsense, this is false. But the commonsense view has never been meaningfully elaborated. This short work states an analysis of personal identity that combines Hume's position with the position, so far as there is one, of commonsense, thereby giving much needed substance to the latter.

An explanation of the psychology of the bureaucrat and of bureaucratic institutions.

The theorems of the propositional calculus and the predicate calculus are stated, and the analogous principles of Boolean Algebra are identified. Also, the primary principles of modal logic are stated, and a procedure is described for identifying their Boolean analogues.

Sometimes, when a given person and/or his scholarly work are boring, it is intentional: that person is deliberately being boring so that nobody bothers to scrutinize, or therefore discover, the emptiness of either him or his work.

The semantic rules governing natural language quantifiers (e.g. "all," "some," "most") neither coincide with nor resemble the semantic rules governing the analogues of those expressions that occur in the artificial languages used by semanticists. Some semanticists, e.g. Peter Strawson, have put forth data-consistent hypotheses as to the identities of the semantic rules governing some natural-language quantifiers. But, despite their obvious merits, those hypotheses have been universally rejected. In this paper, it is shown that those hypotheses are indeed correct. Moreover, data-consistent (...) hypotheses are put forth as to the identities of the semantic rules governing the words "most" and "many," the semantic rules governing which semanticists have thus far been unable to identify. The points made in this paper are anticipated in a paper, published in the same issue of the Journal of Pragmatics, by Andrzej Boguslawski. (shrink)

The most basic laws and principles of the Predicate Calculus, also known as Quantification Theory, are stated, as clearly and concisely as possible.

If more than a tiny minority of people were non-bureaucrats, civilization would not be possible.

This book concisely states the main laws and precepts of formal logic along with their immediate corollaries. Commentary is kept to a minimum.

For intellectuals, and probably others, one form of escapism is a kind of constricted and shallow hyper-realism—the hyper-realism of having a dead-end job, even though one has a PhD or an IQ of 170. And that sort of hyper-realism is pseudo-realism, because realism is not about having a bad life; it is having the courage to have a good life, which the intellectual with the dead end job does not have.

The greater the extent to which a given system rewards the absence of merit, the greater the incentive that people within that system have to perpetuate that system. People who are falsely rewarded have a double stake in the perpetuation of whatever it is that falsely rewarded them. First, without that system and all of the lies surrounding it, such people lose their wealth and their social status. Second, without that system, such people lose their self-respect. The more a given (...) person is overvalued, the more likely it is that his social status and self-image depend on specific institutions and, therefore, the more likely it is that he does not those institutions to be replaced or even improved. (shrink)

Wittgenstein and Brandom both say that knowledge of a language constitutes one's ability to think. Further, they say that a language is an essentially public entity: so to know a language, and to be able to think, consist in one's being embedded in a public practice of some kind. Wittgenstein provides two famous arguments for this: his "private-language" and "rule-following" arguments. Brandom develops these arguments. In this paper, I argue that the Wittgenstein-Brandom view strips anyone of the ability to mean (...) anything by anything. Indeed, it strips anyone of the ability to think at all; the Wittgenstein-Brandom view is really just a version of Pavlov's stimulus-response psychology, and shares all its deficiencies. The rule-following argument is shown to be nothing more than a failure to register the fact that, in certain contexts, epistemic operators can be given either wide or narrow scope with respect to other operators. The private-language argument is shown to be based on a failure to distin-guish the conditions that are causally necessary for language from those that are constitutive of it. Brandom's argument involves a massive over-extension of the concept of a "linguistic community". The result is that his view becomes trivial: anything that can speak or think is by definition a member of a linguistic community; so Brandom's "demonstration" that only encultured beings can think turns out to be an artifact of his definitions. (shrink)

Les sciences empiriques font des suppositions qu'elles ne sont pas elles-mêmes capables de justifier. La philosophie justifie ces hypothèses; C'est son travail.

In this short work, Cantor's famous 'diagonal' proof of the non-recursivity of the class of real numbers is stated and discussed.

It is shown that moral relativism ('morality is culture-specific') and moral conventionalism ('moral laws are agreements among people as to how to behave') both presuppose the truth of moral realism and are therefore false. It is also shown that every attempt to trivialize moral truth or to prove its non-existence is inconsistent with the fact that moral statements have the same truth-conditions as biological statements.

A system is counterentropic to the extent that it has a fractal structure and entropic to the extent that it doesn't.

Chomsky's arguments for the existence of pre-experiential knowledge, and for the existence of sub-personal cognition, are clearly stated and shown to be cogent.

Ordinarily counterfactuals are seen as making statements about states of affairs, albeit ones that hold in merely possible or alternative worlds. Thus analyzed, nearly all counterfactuals turn out to be incoherent. Any counterfactual, thus analyzed, requires that there be a metaphysically (not just epistemically) possible world w where the laws are the same as here, and where almost all of the facts are the same as here. (The factual differences relate to the antecedent and consequent of the counter-factual.) But, as (...) I show, this requirement typically involves the positing of worlds whose necessary non-existence can be shown by fairly elementary deductions. Further, the possible-worlds analysis of counterfactuals is guilty of covert circularity. For, thus analyzed, counterfactuals can only be understood in terms of laws of nature (the laws that apply here are assumed in the hypothetical world - except in the atypical case where the counterfactual is also a counter-nomic). But the concept of a law cannot itself be defined except in terms of the notion of a counterfactual (a law is given by a counterfactual-supporting proposition). I give a purely epistemic analysis of counterfactuals, arguing that they are crypto-probability propositions. I also argue that the relevant kind of probability can be defined wholly in terms of what has happened (not what would happen and not even what must happen in a nomic sense). So my analysis isn’t guilty of any kind of circularity. (shrink)

Según David Hume, el concepto de causalidad y probabilidad debe entenderse en términos de los conceptos de similitud y repetición. En este libro, se demuestra que deben ser entendidos en términos del concepto de la continuidad. Un corolario es que no existe una base legítima para el escepticismo sobre la legitimidad de la inferencia inductiva. Otra es que el anti-realismo sobre las entidades teóricas es erróneo.

Even though the world is governed by laws, human beings are able to be free. In fact, there is no difference between being genuinely free and having a distinctively human psychological architecture. But self-deception and rationalization can result in the replacement of actual beliefs with operational pseudo-beliefs. When this happens, the result is a sociopathic pseudo-person. The difference between a sociopath and a psychopath is that, whereas the sociopath once had a distinctively human psychological architecture, the psychopath never developed such (...) an architecture to begin with. Thus, whereas the sociopath's personality is that of an ossified human, the psychopath has no real personality to speak of. What the psychopath lacks in the way of an actual identity, he replaces with narratives, the primary function of which is to give a semblance of cohesiveness to his otherwise gelatinous psyche, and a secondary function of which is to defraud others. But the psychopath's tendency to defraud others is merely a way of providing external reinforcement for his flimsy narrative-based faux-identity. (shrink)

In this fictitious dialogue, it is shown that there are three kinds of freedom, each of which, though non-trivially different from the other two, is identical with the subject's being appropriately constitutive of a causally cohesive structure of some kind or other. Analogues of this point are proven to hold not just of personal freedom, but also of personal identity, and not just of personal identity, but also of objectual identity.