The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.

I rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did, and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don’t imagine I’d ask someone whose credentials consist of a PhD in philosophy.

Methodological individualism is the doctrine that psychological states are individuated with respect to their causal powers.

Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads.

Self-pity can make one weep, as can onions.

On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for.

The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not on the way that it is related to other thoughts.

If there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.

Look, suppose you’re an official in the National Science Foundation, and a guy comes to you and says: Listen I have this interesting idea, give me $100,000 and I’ll work on it. And then 50 of the most respected people in the field come up to you and say: Look, the guy’s crazy, that can’t be true. Who are you going to believe? You’re going to end up supporting a very conservative, middle brow scientific institution. It’s hopeless.

Pinker quotes Chomsky’s remark that ‘ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries’ and continues: ‘I wrote this book because dozens of mysteries of the mind, from mental images to romantic love, have recently been upgraded to problems (though there are still some mysteries too!)’ Well, cheerfulness sells books, but Ecclesiastes got it right: ‘the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning.