Dispositions don't tie down meaning and reference (Quine, Kripke). Dispositions don't tie down qualia (pace functionalism). And dispositions don't tie down matter (Russell et al). Neither language nor mind nor matter can be explained in terms of dispositions. Dispositions are a superstructure suspended over these three realms, but not their essence. Reality is not subjunctive.

Lately I've found that as my backhand has improved my forehand has deteriorated. Now my backhand is my best shot, while in the past I struggled with it (as most players do). There seems to be what psychologists call negative transfer of training from one hand to the other. The forehand used to feel natural and the backhand unnatural, now it's the other way round. I plan to use my ball machine to get my forehand back into shape. Will my backhand suffer a corresponding decline? (David, my instructor, thinks I've just got lazy and complacent about my forehand. "Move your feet!" he shouts at me, while drilling me mercilessly.)

I'm putting a story about a raccoon and me on the site. It happened this summer, and every detail in my telling is factual--strange as some of it may sound. Make of it what you will.

I've just been teaching Kantian ethics. The idea is that a right action is one the guiding maxim of which can be universalized without contradiction, and a wrong action is one that cannot be so universalized. So it is wrong to break your promises because if everyone did so there would be no institution of promising. It is contradictory to will universal promise-breaking, since there can be promises only when there is trust in them--which requires that they generally be kept. It's a very clever idea, but one that only a rationalist philosopher could approve--that it's actually contradictory to act immorally. The fault of the bad person is thus purely intellectual: he can't see that his actions are guided by contradictory principles. Immorality is a form of incoherence. If only!

Last weekend I for the first time played tennis against a ball machine. It was quite an experience. I hit balls by myself on the court for a full three hours, working on my technique (half volley backhands, down the line side to side forehands). I'm sure I improved my game considerably. Then I played a couple of hours with lads of 17 and 13. All in all, I was on the court for six hours. At the end my right arm was killing me and my legs were shot. Excessive? Sure, but that's the way to get good at tennis. You just keep doing it till you get it right.

The first thing that confronted us on our return to Long Island, after eleven months away, was a rat in the sofa. More precisely, the nest, remnants, and droppings of what was most likely a rat (the squirrel hypothesis had a moment in the sun). The rat had obviously come into the house during the winter and made a nice little home for itself; much the same thing had happened five years earlier. We had even left a large supply of cat food for it to feed on—and its little ones too, in all probability. The home was a pocket sized hole in the cushioning, carefully constructed, quite cozy looking--with bits of stuffing torn out and mingling with the dried droppings behind the sofa. Cathy was highly displeased, not to say disgusted, and wanted to spend the night in the car, in case our guest felt like returning. But she relented, firmly closing the bedroom door instead. The next day I cleaned up the mess with brush and pan and lugged the heavy sofa outside, to be picked up by the town. You expect some animal inconvenience in Mastic—but rats in the sofa?

How alien is objective physical reality compared (a) to its perceptual appearance and (b) to our own consciousness? As to (a), it seems to lack secondary qualities like color; in which case, what makes it capabable of occupying space? As to (b), unless we go in for panpsychism it seems very remote from the nature of experience. So it must be quite alien to the things we know about most directly. Is it SO alien that we couldn't represent it in our experience in principle? We're accustomed to the strangeness of matter from contemporary physics, but is it so far removed from what we are familiar with that we have no hope of adequately representing it? Is it as remote from our understanding as a bat's experience? Or is it remoter, because at least a bat has experience, which we also do--while matter sits at an opposite ontological extreme? Is the entire universe an alien form of life--though completely dead?

The odd thing about utilitarianism is that what makes it most attractive is also what makes it most implausible. It seems good to require impartiality, so that no one is treated as privileged in making a moral decision--hence U doesn't discriminate with respect to whose happiness is maximized. But this very feature of the theory is what leads to its hyperbolic demandingness--as when it obliges us to give away all our money to charity and neglect our own children in order to benefit remote individuals. The altruistic aspect of U comports well with the intuitive content of morality, but the slide into excessive altruism is immediate. To prevent this, we have to insist on partiality, but then we are back discriminating against certain people. Stressing special relationships quickly leads to favoring our own tribe at the expense of others. It's either demandingness or discrimination.

I just finished re-reading Kingsley Amis's first novel. If you haven't read it, you should. It is the most anti-literary literary tour de force ever. The language is flawless while flaunting its "inelegance". It reminds me of J.L.Austin's style: challenging you to find a mistake, while grammatically impeccable. It is designed to intimidate and amuse. Yet the Amis novel manages to find, amidst the pseuds and bastards, the liars and creeps, a vein of morality that is completely authentic and totally unselfadvertising. Jim is no one's idea of a saint, but he's a better specimen of humanity than those deemed his betters. Notably, Gore-Urquhart, the richest and poshest of the lot, is the most discerning and decent man in the book--and has the most in common with the "common" Jim. Kingsley is off to the side, stoically amused, pulling faces of his own, laying down those sentences that don't seem to care whether they end elegantly but always do.

Consider the following thought experiment. You go to a possible world and encounter some space-occupying objects. They appear just as our space-occupying objects do--with shapes, colors, masses, and so on. Does it follow that they are made of the same material stuff as our objects? Mightn't they be made of same strange ectoplasm that merely simulates the superfical properties of we call material things; or of some other variant of the general category "matter"? In particular, these possible entities have the same causal properties and dispositions as our objects, despite their different constitution. If this is a real possibility, then the knowledge of matter we now have cannnot include its actual intrinsic constitution, since if it did we could know that the entities in this possible world are not of the same stuff as our entities. In short, we don't know the intrinsic nature of matter.