Author Archives: Nic Koziolek
The Guise of the Good
[The curtain rises on A, standing stock still, at the end of the crosswalk, facing the street, staring off into space. B stands, also stock still, on the other side of the street, watching A. Long pause. A crosses the … Continue reading
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Meritocracy
It’s insulting to remind the winners that we don’t live in a meritocracy; they don’t want to be reminded that they don’t deserve what they have. The losers, on other hand, can glory in the thought: they, at least, deserve … Continue reading
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Priority in account – in the philosophy of perception
One thing that’s become increasingly important to my thinking is the idea of priority in account. As I think of it, the basic idea is just this. In any theory (including any philosophical theory), some terms will be defined in terms … Continue reading
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The “transparency” of experience
In the first part of The Mind’s Construction, Matthew Soteriou spends a lot of time talking about a famous passage of G.E. Moore’s “The Refutation of Idealism,” in which Moore says: “The moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness … Continue reading
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Self-conscious knowledge and the KK principle
When I first read Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits, one thing that struck me, and stuck with me, was the fact that, while Williamson rejects the KK principle: KK: If you know that p, then you know that you know that p, … Continue reading
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A question about “intuitions”
In a paper just published online in Erkenntnis, “Intuition Talk is Not Methodologically Cheap: Empirically Testing the ‘Received Wisdom’ About Armchair Philosophy,” Zoe Ashton and Moti Mizrahi mention the following note by Anscombe as an example of an appeal to intuition: … Continue reading
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Consciousness and Self-Consciousness
Here’s something that’s been bugging me for a while: when philosophers characterize conscious mental states, they often do so in terms that seem to imply that those states are self-conscious. In other words, they seem to be conflating consciousness and self-consciousness; assuming, … Continue reading
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Self-Consciousness and the Taking Condition
It’s possible that, in my earlier posts (here and here), I run two distinct things together: (i) the “takings” posited by the Taking Condition and (ii) the belief (in the best case, the knowledge)––acquired in any self-conscious inference––that you’ve come to know … Continue reading
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Kant on Self-Consciousness
At one point in “Some Remarks on Kant’s Theory of Experience,” Sellars is summarizing some “familiar Kantian theses” (279), and says: “Even our consciousness of what is going on in our own mind is a conceptual response which must be distinguished from … Continue reading
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How do you know that your premises support your conclusion?
I suggested in an earlier post that any theory of inference needs to be able to distinguish between inferences of the following two forms: (1) q; r; therefore, p (2) q; r; <q> and <r> support <p>; therefore, p. Intuitively, the difference is that, in order to perform … Continue reading
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Nicholas Koziolek 