One point worth noting here is that words like "fake" are, so far as I can see, always intensional. meaning that whether something is a fake F depends upon what property F is, and not just which things are F. They are also "attributive", meaning that an Adj-Noun isn't just an Adj that is Noun, but (roughly) something that is Adj for a Noun. E.g., a tall basketball player is someone who is tall for a basketball player, not just someone who is tall and a basketball player. Attributives are hard enough; intensionality is hard enough; both by themselves. Put them together, and it's a nightmare.

Frege's views about truth are complex, and there is a great deal of controversy concerning their proper interpretation. (Robert May and I have recently written a paper trying to outline Frege's views .) So I won't try to go into this in detail. But the first point to remember is that, for Frege, a "thought" is not any kind of mental episode. Frege means by a a "thought" roughly what other philosophers mean by a "proposition". So "truth is factual thoughts" would have to mean something like "truth is factual propositions", which probably sounds rather less exciting.

Most of these questions are not so much philosophical as empirical, and there has been a tremendous amount of extremely important work done in the last few decades on children's concepts of number. The locus classicus is The Child's Understanding of Number , by Rachel Gelman and Randy Galistel, which was originally published in 1978, but this stuff really took off in the late 1990s or so. A lot of people have contributed to this work, but I'll mention two: Susan Carey and Liz Spelke , who are both at Harvard. You will find links to some of their work on their websites. Part of the reason people got interested in these issues is because they are closely related to issues about object recognition and individuation, which had been a focus of a great deal of work just before that. (I.e, people had been interested in the question at what age children start to "pick out" objects from the environment, and to think of them as distinct entities, that continue to exist even when you do not see them....

Without disagreeing with anything Alex has said, let me just add one more thing: There are logicians who sympathize with this sort of question, and so who would deny that an argument with inconsistent premises is always valid. There are logics, that is to say, that do NOT validate all inferences of the form: A & ~A, therefore B, for arbitrary B. Such logics are called "paraconsistent, and if you'd like to read about them I'd recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia article as a start.

I guess the obvious question is whether there is any actual evidence that women aren't interested in movies that in which the main female character isn't romantically involved with some man. I'd rather suspect the opposite: That it's men who won't be interested, if the woman isn't presented as a sex object. Not only have feminists been "working to encourage a version of womanhood that is more expansive", they have had a great deal of success. Try reading Betty Friedan's famous book The Feminist Mystique , or talking to some older female relatives, if you want to know what things were like for women just half a century ago. Since we've just passed the anniversary of Title IX: Did you know that several attempts were made to exclude funding for sports from Title IX, on the ground that women just weren't interested in sports? Fortunately for all of us, those attempts failed, and the rates at which girls and women how do participate has put the lie to that particular assumption.

I think there's rather more that can be said here (and, for what it's worth, I don't actually agree that "words mean what we use them to mean"). We probably need to distinguish a couple different things here. One kind of case is that of idiom . These are linguistic expressions, like "kicked the bucket", whose meaning has nothing to do with the component words. These sorts of phrases are really just single words, but long ones, and there are good tests for when you have an idiom. Note, e.g., that I cannot say "The bucket was kicked by John" and have it mean the same as "John kicked the bucket", where the latter is the idiomatic use meaning "John died". It might well be that "not bad" in this kind of case is an idiom, but the case seems to me to have many features of a case of implicature . Here's a standard kind of example. Suppose Professor Jones writes a letter of recommendation for Mr Smith. The letter says: To whom it may concern: Smith has excellent handwriting and was never late...

It should also be said that there is nowadays a lot of formal, logical work that is devoted to various forms of implication, like strict implication. Part of this is done within so-called "modal" logic; part of it is done in theories of conditionals generally; some of it concerns non-classical logics like relevant logic.

Let's assume the following: (1) If you understand a proposition, then you also understand its negation. (2) It is necessary, if you are to believe a proposition, to understand it. (3) It's perfectly possible to believe a proposition and not believe its negation. It follows from these that understanding a proposition is not sufficient for believing it. So there's an argument. One might wonder why we should accept (1)-(3), of course. I think most people would take (2) to be obvious enough. What's meant here by "understanding" is something like: being able to take mental attitudes towards. Belief is just such an attitude. Regarding (1), this just seems to follow from your understanding what negation is. For detailed discussion, however, one might look at Frege's last essay "Negation". Regarding (3), one would hope that it is true! Even if we sometimes believe contradictions, one would hope we didn't always have to do so!!

It does seem a bit unwise to base too much speculation on the reported remarks of a couple of hotel staff. Not that I mean to question their veracity or intelligence!

This is an interesting question. It's related, in a way, to a famous objection to Descartes's "I think, therefore I am". The objection was: What's with the I? Why not just: Some thinking is happening? So maybe the dog can be thinking: Petting would be good. Eating is good. Baths are bad! Frisbee is good! Etc, etc. Another important point to make is that one doesn't have to think that dogs have the same worth or dignity as human beings to think they have worth and dignity, even that they have quite a lot of worth and dignity. Personally, I'm more of a cat person, and, whether or not my cats are self-conscious, they are sophisticated social beings, with each of whom I have a complex, individual, and mutual relationship. There are no doubt limits to their mental capacities. But there are limits to our mental capacities, too. And I think it would definitely go too far to say that they have no appreciation at all of the difference between minded and unminded things. There are lots of things they do...