until reading this and looking it up just now, i had for many years been under the impression that the etymology of "internecine" had to do with disagreements within nicene christianity. i wonder whether i've mispelled it in print or if spellchecker has saved me

orangutans make requests

After reading the NYer piece this morning, I reread the preface to Hat, which explicitly calls the case studies "fables". And, as you suggest, it's hard to imagine reading them (especially the dialogue in Awakenings and Hat) and not realizing there's a healthy dose of artistic license being taken.

yeah but you shoulda seen how i thought it, fervent raw babylike associations

you LOTheads just can't grasp the obvious implication: thinking in language makes you stupid

(yet another clue that fodor was a self-hating pragmatist)

on a second's more thought, putnam is almost certainly more directly who fodor got it from

Yeah, "belief fixation" is originally from Peirce, but I share the impression that Fodor injected it into cogsci and current phil mind. (And my vaguer impression is that Quine might be the main bridge from Peirce to Fodor?) But you find the term sprinkled throughout 20th C epistemology and phil mind

hahah yeah well you know i'm on your team there! just pointing out that some of the more reasonable people who aren't on our team want to go in for a way of cashing out betterness that isn't super metaphysically committing

i know this is something that people would yell at me about, but eg while lewis uses his conception of naturalness to do some metaphysically heavy stuff, the conception of naturalness itself doesn't seem super metaphysically substantive to me. ditto khalidi's simple causal theory of natural kinds

going consumer-based by ultimately going interpretivist: good

but also there are ways of making the kind of naturalness he would otherwise need pretty metaphysically lightweight

which ones do you like?