John-Michael Kuczynski

Four contentions are defended. First, given what AI has shown us about neural networks, there does exist a "logic of discovery", contrary to what Popper and virtually every other philosopher of science has alleged. Second, given some rudimentary points about AI, the obvious solution to the Gettier problem (namely, that the justification mustn't involve a falsehood) is shown to be correct, a secondary result being that a version of coherentism is likely correct. Third, connectionism is compatible with Chomsky's generative grammar, contrary to first appearances. Fourth, cognition is shown to be analog, a corollary being that the Computational Theory of Mind is shown to be even more incoherent than it was previously known to be.

When I see a cat, the "object" of my visual awareness is a cat, not a construct. But given only that someone is seeing a cat, we literally have zero knowledge as to the nature of the information encoded in that perception. Two people seeing the same object can for that very reason be processing radically different bodies of information, and two people seeing different objects can for that very reason be processing qualitatively identical bodies of information. Consequently, the information borne by our perceptions and by our post-perceptual thoughts cannot be delineated in terms of their objects. At the same time, the information borne by a given perception cannot possibly be delineated except in terms of some object or other, and this object, so it follows, is a “virtual” entity—a schematic representation of the perception’s veritable object. The relationship between this virtual entity and that object is similar to the relationship between a forest and a map of that forest, with the qualification this virtual entity, unlike the map, covaries in real time with its external counterpart.

Tractatus Arboris de Philosophia Analyticae is a systematic reconstruction of analytic philosophy in the tradition of Wittgenstein's Tractatus-but one that succeeds where the Tractatus failed. Organized as thirty interconnected treatises with hierarchically numbered propositions, this work begins with Frege's insight that logical form diverges from grammatical form and builds outward to address every major philosophical domain: properties and Platonism, propositions and truth, language and thought, the limits of empiricism, Cartesian skepticism, inductive inference, causation, modality, personal identity, determinism, free will, ethics, religion, and law. Kuczynski dismantles eight major arguments against Platonism, exposes the self-refuting nature of empiricism, and demonstrates why nominalism collapses under its own weight. The result is a rigorous, integrated philosophical system constructed from first principles-philosophy done the way it should be done, with no hand-waving, no appeal to intuitions that dissolve under scrutiny, and no retreat into linguistic therapy.

Tractatus de Philosophia et Psychologia is a systematic philosophical work composed of a series of rigorously structured treatises addressing core problems in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, and philosophical psychology. Written in a formal, axiomatic style reminiscent of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, the book advances a unified account of knowledge, causation, explanation, meaning, and mental phenomena grounded in the concept of structural continuity and information transmission. Across its constituent tractates, the work develops original analyses of truth, belief, justification, inference, natural law, causation, counterfactuals, induction, and explanation, while offering sustained critiques of pragmatism, Humean regularity theories, counterfactual analyses of causation, possible-worlds semantics, intentionalism, and the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation.

AI's architecture is connectionist, not computational. Despite this, so the present work shows, AI's behavior is not only consistent with, but strongly supports, a number of shibboleths of classical semantics, each of which has always been assumed to align with computational conceptions of cognition. These include: (i) the contention that language divides neatly into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; (ii) the contention that semantics and pragmatics are distinct and, in particular, that semantics is not an "abstraction" of pragmatics; (iii) the contention that meaning is compositional, along with the related contention that linguistic processing is at least partly recursive in nature, granting that it is not solely or even predominantly so. At the same time, (iv) AI-functioning is shown to warrant a complete rejection of the Russell-Frege position that grammar and logical form are misaligned. In the course of establishing (iv), it is shown exactly why, pace Russell-Frege, "everybody snores" and "Bob snores" parallel each other both in respect of grammar and logical form. By way of anticipation: "Bob snores" maps onto "Bob-singleton (smallest class containing Bob) is a subset of the class of snorers"; and "everybody snores" maps onto "the class of people is a subset of the class of snorers." This analysis is easily generalized to hold of all quantified generalizations and of all other sentences whose grammars allegedly misalign with their logical forms. And this last fact comes as a relief to researchers concerned with the cognitive feasibility of semantic theories, especially those familiar with the hundreds of psycholinguistic experiments showing that reaction times, event-related potentials, and error rates are totally inexplicable on the assumption that anything remotely similar to the Russell-Frege position to any degree describes any stratum of linguistic cognition.

This book proves a new theorem in recursion theory with major consequences for logic, philosophy, AI, and epistemic engineering. The main result is that the class of all recursive, truth-preserving deductive logics is not recursively enumerable-no algorithm can list all possible formal systems. This strengthens Gödel: incompleteness does not just block any single system from capturing all truths; it prevents recursion itself from surveying the space of formal systems. The core philosophical payoff is overturning the long-standing but false assumption that rationality = recursivity. Rational thought includes both recursive rule-following and non-recursive pattern-recognition capacities, and neither can be reduced to the other. This insight dissolves classical problems (induction, rule-following, foundationalism), explains why GOFAI failed, clarifies why neural networks succeed, and reframes mathematical and linguistic understanding as non-recursive pattern-based cognition. As a result, epistemic engineering-the design of systems that expand, stabilize, and operationalize human knowledge-must integrate non-recursive rational mechanisms rather than treating rationality as algorithmic.

This monograph presents a non-reflexive proof of Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem. That is: we demonstrate the incompleteness of first-order arithmetic without relying on self-reference, paradoxes, or diagonalization. Instead, we base our proof on a cardinality mismatch: the set of arithmetical truths is countable, but the space of candidate proof-sets over those truths has the cardinality of the continuum. Thus, the system cannot, even in principle, admit a recursively enumerable set of axioms that proves all and only the true arithmetical statements—some truths must go unprovable. This is the substance of Theorem 0. We call this result a non-reflexive proof of incompleteness, in contrast to Gödel’s original argument, which crucially relies on self-reference and the arithmetization of syntax. Our proof avoids any appeal to statements like “This sentence is unprovable.” It is entirely based on set-theoretic and logical properties of arithmetic and its metatheory.

This essay attempts to solve the so‐called paradox of analysis: if one is to have any questions about x, one must know x; but if one knows x, one has no questions about x. The obvious solution is this: one can inquire into x if one knows some, but not all, of x's parts. But this solution is erroneous. Let x′ be those parts of x with which one is acquainted, and let S be the percipient in question. As with x, either S knows x′, in which case he has no questions about it; or S does not know x′, in which case he has no questions about it. My solution is this. Perception and cognition give us, not the thing‐in‐itself, but a certain analogue of the thing‐in‐itself. To inquire into x, it is necessary to know not x, but only some analogue of x; and to learn more about x is to become acquainted with increasingly precise analogues of x.

This paper argues that classical logic fundamentally fails as a tool for reasoning because it requires more intelligence to recognize that an inference instantiates a logical law than to recognize the validity of the inference directly. Drawing on evidence from artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, we propose an alternative "System L" that better captures how both human and artificial minds actually reason. This system emphasizes pattern explicit recognition, meta-reasoning templates, and defeasible inference rather than rule application, suggesting reconceptualization of logic's nature and purpose.

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.)

It is shown (i) that causation exists, since we couldn't even ask whether causation existed unless it did; (ii) that any given case of causation is a case of persistence; and (iii) that spatiotemporal relations supervene on causal relations. (ii) is subject to the qualification that we tend not to become aware of instances of causation as such except when two different causal lines---i.e. two different cases of persistence---intersect, resulting in a breakdown of some other case of persistence, this being why we tend to regard instances of causation as fundamentally disruptive, as opposed to preservative in nature. The meaning of (iii) is that spatiotemporal relations are causal relations considered in abstraction of the various specific differences holding between different kinds of causation.

Nietzsche distinguishes between “slave morality” (the morality of the weak) and “master morality” (the morality of the strong), and he believes the structure of modern society to be rooted in slave morality. According to Nietzsche, slave morality is the morality of modern “bourgeois” (commerce-based) society, whereas “master morality” was the morality of ancient caste-based societies. In this paper, I argue for the legitimacy of the distinction between these two kinds of morality but argue against Nietzsche's contention that contemporary (capitalist or semi-capitalist) society embodies slave morality.

Do I know that my chair won’t sprout wings and fly away? I know that it would be needlessly anomaly-generative to believe that it will. Setting aside limiting-cases, such as my knowledge that I am conscious, what we refer to as knowing that such-and-such is really knowledge that it would be needlessly anomaly-generative to believe otherwise. Consequently, what we typically refer to knowing that such-and-such is the case is really meta-knowledge to the effect that granting such-and-such eliminates mysteries and denying it creates them.

According to Rawls, a just society is one that one would choose to belong to if one knew nothing as to what one's position in that society would be and if one knew nothing as to one's gender, ethnicity, intelligence-level, or other such status-relevant parameters. Such a society would be a squalid bureaucratic wasteland, similar to the Soviet Union, and its entire structure would be a weapon for the mediocre to hold back the gifted, with the result that people as a whole, including the mediocre, would be prevented from flourishing. There is obviously a sense in which the social contract described by Rawls is "fair", but there is no meaningful sense in which the resulting society would be just. Moreover, since a Rawlsian society would quickly degenerate into a condition of bureaucratic tyranny, in which everybody oppressed everybody, it would be irrelevant that its inception occurred in a "fair" way. Several vigorous attempts to create and run societies along Rawlsian lines have been implemented, and they all failed utterly, showing how wrong Rawls' analysis is.

In order to understand a sentence, one must know the relevant semantic rules. Those rules are not learned in a vacuum; they are given to one through one's senses. As a result, knowledge of semantic rules sometimes comes bundled with semantically irrelevant, but cognitively non-innocuous, knowledge of the circumstances in which those rules were learned. Thus, one must work through non-semantic information in order to know what is literally meant by a given sentence-token. A consequence is that one's knowledge of what is literally meant by a given sentence-token is sometimes embedded in non-semantic knowledge, resulting in a cleavage between what that sentence-token literally means and what the auditor in question takes it to mean. Such deviations obviously have nothing to do with the principles put forth by Grice, since those principles only concern sentence-tokens that have already been understood---since, to put it another way, those principles only concern post-semantic implicature. The just-described deviations are appropriately described as being due to "pre-semantic implicature." Given the phenomenon of pre-semantic implicature, it is easily shown that Russell's Theory of Descriptions, if taken as a theory of literal meaning, is false. In the present volume, these rather elementary principles are entirely ignored, and all of the articles in it are sterile repetitions of the points made by Russell and Strawson. The blinkered approach to language embodied in this volume must be reconsidered in light of psychological principles relating to language-acquisition and language-use. Unfortunately, analytic philosophers shy away from such topics, as is made clear by the papers in this grim volume

Easy to understand philosophy papers in all areas. Table of contents: Three Short Philosophy Papers on Human Freedom The Paradox of Religions Institutions Different Perspectives on Religious Belief: O’Reilly v. Dawkins. v. James v. Clifford Schopenhauer on Suicide Schopenhauer’s Fractal Conception of Reality Theodore Roszak’s Views on Bicameral Consciousness Philosophy Exam Questions and Answers Locke, Aristotle and Kant on Virtue Logic Lecture for Erika Kant’s Ethics Van Cleve on Epistemic Circularity Plato’s Theory of Forms Can we trust our senses? Yes we can Descartes on What He Believes Himself to Be The Role of Values in Science Modern Science Kant’s Moral Philosophy Plato’s Republic as Pol Potist Bureaucracy Schopenhauer on Human Suffering Bertrand Russell on the Value of Philosophy The Philosophical Value of Uncertainty Logic Homework: Theorems and Models Searle vs. Turing on the Imitation Game Hume, Frankfurt, and Holbach on Personal Freedom Manifesto of the University of Wisconsin, Madison Secular Society Michael’s Analysis of the Limits of Civil Protections Bentham and Mill on Different Types of Pleasure Set Theory Homework Aristotle on Virtue Nagel On the Hard Problem Wittgenstein on Language and Thought Camus and Schopenhauer on the Meaning of Life Camus’ Hero as Rebel without a Cause My Little Finger: Camus’ Absurdism Illustrated Are Late-term Abortions Ethical? Does Mathematics Assume the Truth of Platonism? The Self-defeating Nature of Utilitarianism and Consequentialism Generally What is The Good Life? Bentham and Mill regarding types of pleasures Kant’s Moral Philosophy Five Short Papers on Mind-body Dualism Tracy Latimer’s Father had the Right to Kill Her: Towards a doctrine of generalized self-defense Arguments Concerning God and Morality Goldman, Rousseau and von Hayek on the Ideal State J.S Mill on Liberty and Personal Freedom A Kantian Analysis of a Borderline Date-rape Situation Living Well as Flourishing: Aristotle’s Conception of the Good Life Three Essays on Medical Ethics: Answers to Exam Questions on Elective Amputation, Vaccination, and Informed Consent Hobbes, Marx, Rousseau, Nietzsche: Their Central Themes De Tocqueville on Egoism Mill vs. Hobbes on Liberty Exam-Essays on the Moral Systems of Mill, Bentham, and Kant Kant’s Moral System Aristotle on Virtue Plato’s Cave Allegory An Ethical Quandary Superorganisms The Tuskegee Experiment A Rawlsian Analysis Why Moore’s Proof of an External World Fails A Defense of Nagel’s Argument Against Materialism A Utilitarian Analysis of a Case of Theft The Paradox of the Self-aware Wretch: An Analysis of Pascal’s Moral Philosophy Jean-Paul Sartre: Decline and Fall of a Marxist Sell-out A One Page Proof of Plato’s Theory of Forms Plato’s Republic as Pol Potist Bureaucracy The problem of the one and the many Four Short Essays on Truth and Knowledge What is ‘the Good Life?’ The Ontological Argument Different Political Philosophies: Plato, Locke, Madison, Rousseau, Hayek, and Mill on the State What do I know with certainty? Skepticism about skepticism Neuroscience and Freewill Operant Conditioning What makes us special? Are Late-term Abortions Ethical? No Two Papers on Epistemology: Gettier and Bostrom Examination Nietzsche on Punishment God’s Foreknowledge and Moral Responsibility