Online Resources

This is a list of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries that I will (continue to) utilize in my research. I will update occasionally.


The Philosophy of Mind


Culture, Memetics and Evolutionary Theory


Semantics, Logic and Information


Knowledge and Method



Popular posts from this blog

Dennett on Semantic Information and Shannon Information

In his recent book,   From Bacteria to Bach and Back  (2017), Dennett utilizes memetics to develop his ideas on consciousness. I haven't finished it yet. I paused after 120 or so pages, because I have concerns with his preliminary discussion of information.There are areas where I agree with Dennett, but I have problems with his discussion of both Shannon information and semantic information. The problems with the latter are unfortunately predictable given Dennett's longstanding approach to intentionality.  I. Shannon Information In a chapter entitled "What is Information?,” Dennett follows a seventy-year tradition of making a strong distinction between semantic information and Shannon information. Here is how Claude Shannon (" A Mathematical Theory of Communication ," 1948) introduces the distinction:  The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.   Frequently the...
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Introduction: the why and how of this blog

The aim of this blog is to document and further my studies in philosophy. I'm planning on applying to a PhD program--most likely in the fall of 2025, and most likely in Poland--and I have a lot of work to do before I can confidently approach a dissertation topic and make myself a desirable PhD candidate.       Until very recently, I hadn't engaged with philosophy at all for about ten years. I'm a bit daunted by my decision to return to the discipline after such a break. The thing is, I don't simply want to catch up on what's been going on in the past ten years; I also need to fill in a lot of gaps in my education.       See, I never earned a philosophy degree. Though Philosophy was one of my dual majors (the other was Mathematics) when I began my undergraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in 1992, I graduated with a degree in Literary & Cultural Studies and only a minor in Philosophy. I went on to work towards an MA in Philosophy at t...
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Notes on Kripke's "Naming and Necessity," Lecture I, Part 2 of 2 (pp. 54-70)

1. Kripke on Wittgenstein and the meter stick (pp. 54-57): Wittgenstein famously claimed that we cannot say of the standard meter in Paris that it is one meter long. This is because it was used to define the length equal to one meter. In other words, the competence to use the measurement “one meter” was nothing more than the competence to measure something against the standard meter in Paris. Since you cannot measure the length of the standard meter against itself, there is no procedural competence that could make sense of the claim that it is equal to one meter. Kripke doesn’t like this, and he tries to undermine the point by changing the terms. Instead of (1) Stick S is one meter long, Kripke claims that the length equal to one meter cannot vary over time. So he changes (1) to (2) Stick S is one meter long at time t 0 . Then he claims there are two possible uses for such a sentence. The first one is to “give the meaning” of “meter.” This is the usage that Wittgenstein...
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