Showing posts from July, 2021Show all

Let's try to debunk that Chinese Room.

The Chinese Room is one of a handful thought experiments in philosophy that can truly be said to have gone viral. Well, at least within the field itself, although I would recommend any intellectually curious person to learn what it's about. Many excellent accounts… Read more

The repugnant conclusion.

This paradox in ethics is called the repugnant conclusion . Many people would agree with the following when it comes to designing a policy that affects people's quality of life and the size of the population. A world with 10bln people and high happiness for each is… Read more

The category mistake: useful but tricky.

In the recent article about the lottery fallacy  I talked about how to spot this fallacy but also how not to "overspot" it and start seeing it even if it's not there. Let's do the same with the fallacy known as the category mistake or category error .… Read more

Just semantics?

In a recent article on free will I argued that there are, very broadly speaking, two candidate meanings for the term "free will". I ended the article by asking: which of the two definitions is better? But what does it even mean for one definition of a term t… Read more