David Papineau

Suits is good on games, but bad on sports. Because he views sports as games, he has trouble accommodating the many sports that aren’t really games at all, like running, swimming, and rowing. More importantly, he mistakes the value of sport, suggesting that it derives from the challenges posed by the arbitrary rules that constitute games, when in truth it lies in the development and exercise of physical abilities. This paper argues that sport includes any activity whose central purpose is the exercise of physical skills, whether or not it is also a game, and that the value of sport derives from the intrinsic worth of such exercises.

This chapter aims to show how the distinctive features of narrative are upshots of the more basic human practice of _constructing histories_, in the sense of forming representations that locate past events not only geographically, but also by their temporal locations. The chapter first compares this special human ability with some cognitive abilities also present in non-human animals and infants, and then assesses a number of standard ideas about human memory against this background. After that, the chapter reveals how many features of narrative emerge straight from the construction of histories. This analysis is intended to complement Peter Goldie’s discussion of narrative and its importance for human life in _The Mess Inside_. We will be better placed to understand the significance of Goldie’s points about narrative once we see how they are corollaries of certain more basic features of human thinking.

Paul Griffiths — the author of Chapter 6 in this book — argues that the process coined “genetic assimilation” has little connection with the issue C. H. Waddington had in mind when he invented the term. This chapter's response is that Griffiths is running two things together, genetic canalization and genetic assimilation. What he says would make sense if related to an earlier paper by, David Papineau, the author of this chapter. Previously David Papineau had been concerned only with Waddington's notion of genetic canalization, but Waddington's thoughts about the Baldwin Effect involve the more specific idea of genetic assimilation, and it was these thoughts that David Papineau addressed in that paper. Given this, Griffith's criticisms miss their mark.

Those who criticize the Everett interpretation on the grounds that it makes no sense of probability apply a double-standard, for no other physical theory of probability does any better in explaining probability or in deriving its link with decision theory. In fact, others do worse, for in any one world theory it is a mystery as to why, given that only a single outcome of a chance process occurs, we should nevertheless act so as to maximize expected utilities, which involves all possible outcomes of a chance process. This difficulty does not apply to the Everett interpretation, in which all outcomes happen.

Illusionists and a posteriori physicalists agree entirely on the metaphysical nature of reality — that all concrete entities are composed of fundamental physical entities. Despite this basic agreement on metaphysics, illusionists hold that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, whereas a posteriori physicalists hold that it does. One explanation for this disagreement would be that either the illusionists have too demanding a view about what consciousness requires, or the a posteriori physicalists have too tolerant a view. However, we will argue that this divergence of opinion is merely an upshot of the semantic indeterminacy of the term 'conscious' and its cognates. We shall back up this diagnosis by showing how semantic indeterminacy of the kind in question is a pervasive feature of language. By illustrating this pattern with a range of historical examples, we shall show how the dispute between the illusionists and a posteriori physicalists is one instance of a common kind of terminological imprecision. The disagreement between them is thus not substantial. In effect, the two sides differ only about how to make an indeterminate term precise. The moral is that they should stop looking for arguments designed to settle the dispute in their favour.