Winter’s Haven

Tolerance is a terrible word. Here’s a real, live example which illustrates the problem all too well:

My unwillingness to tolerate your intolerance doesn’t make me intolerant.

Ugh. There is a way to interpret that sentence that makes it something other than an analytic falsehood, but it’s still very confusing. The dictionary actually addresses the different meanings [...]

Julian Sanchez has an excellent post on symbolic beliefs. However, the question which the post nominally addresses (Are people in the South completely insane, or merely slightly batty?) is actually much less interesting than the generalized discussion of symbolic beliefs.

In a post at Meteuphoric, Katja Grace explains why the notion of (non-deterministic) free will is just incoherent nonsense. I wholly concur.
I’d like to further point out that her argument does not depend on a materialist theory of mind. Buying into dualism doesn’t help make free will the least bit more tenable. The question of [...]

I’ve recently observed several people use the word “deconstruct” as a synonym for “analyze”. Let’s see what the dictionary says about “deconstruct”:

1. To break down into components; dismantle.
2. To write about or analyze (a literary text, for example), following the tenets of deconstruction.

A deconstruction is a particular type of analysis: one done in accordance with [...]