David Papineau

My first university was in my home town, Durban, in the mid-1960s. I was doing a mathematics degree but most of my friends were doing arts subjects. Sartre and Marx were the thinkers of the moment and my friends would press their (mostly illegal) writings on me. Ideologically I was entirely sympathetic, but intellectually they didn’t do much for me—too obscure, too difficult, too dogmatic. In my final year I chanced on Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledge. It wasn’t exactly relevant to apartheid South Africa, but I consumed it eagerly. Through Ayer I was led to Russell’s logical atomism. What appealed to me in both these authors was the sense of solving fundamental problems through careful logical analysis. Of course, in retrospect we can see that their limpid style concealed many doubtful assumptions. Yet you could always see exactly what they were claiming and how the argument was supposed to go. I still think that this is the best way to do philosophy.

How does thought latch onto reality? Our minds have the ability to reach out and refer to items in the external world. I can think about the tree outside my study window, say, or about Margaret Thatcher, or about solar neutrinos. But how is the trick done? How can my thoughts refer to things beyond themselves? We tend to take the mind's referential powers for granted, but they are enormously difficult to explain. Whole philosophical systems have foundered on the problem of understanding mental reference.

Russell’s place in the public eye was maintained by a steady stream of writing for the general reader. He no longer held any academic position, and needed to support himself and his family by his pen. While he continued to do some technical work in philosophy, more of his energies were devoted to journalism and other popular writings. He was in great demand. His distinctive prose and dry wit enabled him to puncture the fusty assumptions of contemporary thinking, and his rationalist alternatives struck many readers as a liberating antidote to conventional morality.

Gary Marcus has written a very interesting book about mental development from a nativist perspective. For the general readership at which the book is largely aimed, it will be interesting because of its many informative examples of the development of cognitive structures and because of its illuminating explanations of ways in which genes can contribute to these developmental processes. However, the book is also interesting from a theoretical point of view. Marcus tries to make nativism compatible with the central arguments that anti-nativists use to attack nativism and with many recent discoveries about genetic activity and brain development. In so doing, he reconfigures the nativist position to a considerable extent.

A number of recent writers have argued that we should explain mental representation teleologically, in terms of the biological purposes of beliefs and other mental states.A rather older idea is that the truth condition of a belief is that condition which guarantees that actions based on that belief will succeed.What I want to show in this paper is that these two ideas complement each other. The teleological theory is inadequate unless it incorporates the thesis that truth is the guarantee of successful action. Conversely, the success-guaranteeing account of truth conditions is incomplete until it is placed in a teleological context.

When I woke up a few days ago, the following thoughts ran through my mind. ‘I need a haircut. If I don't get it first thing this morning, I won't have another chance for two weeks. But if I go to the barber down the road, he'll want to talk to me about philosophy. So I'd better go to the one in Camden Town. The tube will be very crowded, though. Still, it's a nice day. Why don't I just walk there? It will only take twenty minutes. So I'd better put on these shoes now, have breakfast straight away, and then set out for Camden.’

IntroductionSporting skills divide contemporary theorists into two camps. Let us call them the habitualists and the intellectualists. The habitualists hold that thought is the enemy of sporting excellence. In their view, skilled performers need to let their bodies take over; cognitive effort only interferes with skill. The intellectualists retort that sporting performance depends crucially on mental control. As they see it, the exercise of skill is a matter of agency, not brute reflex; the tailoring of action to circumstance requires intelligent conceptual guidance.On the habitualist side are Dreyfus, Beilock and ; intellectualism is defended in various ways by McDowell, Stanley, Sutton, Sutton et al., Montero and Fridland.I think that both sides are right, and that both are wrong. We need to distinguish different aspects of sporting performance. When we do so, we w

By way of an example, Lewis imagines your being invited to join Schrödinger’s cat in its box for an hour. This box will either fill up with deadly poison fumes or not, depending on whether or not some radioactive atom decays, the probability of decay within an hour being 50%. The invitation is accompanied with some further incentive to comply (Lewis sets it up so there is a significant chance of some pretty bad but not life-threatening punishment if you don’t get in the box). Lewis argues that the many minds theory implies that you should get in the box with the cat, despite this making it 50% likely you will die.