# Full Text: DennettExplained

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ALIUS Bulletin n°3 (2019) 
  
aliusresearch.org/bulletin 
Dennett Explained 
 
An interview with 
Daniel Dennett 
by Brendan Fleig-Goldstein 
and Daniel A. Friedman 
Daniel Dennett 
daniel.dennett@tufts.edu 
Department of Philosophy 
Tufts University, MA, USA 
 
Brendan Fleig-Goldstein 
fleiggoldstein@pitt.edu 
Department of History and 
Philosophy of Science  
University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA 
 
Daniel A. Friedman 
dfri@stanford.edu 
Department of Biology  
Stanford University, CA, USA 
 
 
Citation: Dennett, D., Fleig-Goldstein, B. & Friedman, D. (2019). 
Dennett Explained. An interview with Daniel Dennett. ALIUS Bulletin, 
3, 11-25. doi: 10.34700/7gkw-zh08 
 
Abstract 
Throughout his long career, Professor Daniel Dennett has been notable for bringing 
together the ideas of academic philosophy, workbench scientists, artificial intelligence 
pioneers, and even “cultish” intellectual figures like Julian Jaynes and J.J. Gibson. In this 
interview, Dennett discusses his philosophical roots, as well as his thoughts on Freud, 
predictive processing, psychedelics, consciousness, and ancient Athens. Dennett believes 
that philosophers have the ability to criticize and contribute to the science of the mind, and 
speaks to the virtues of cross-disciplinary glances and “hybrid vigor.” He believes that 
psychoactive drugs have potential scientific and therapeutic value. Experimenting with 
psychoactive substances, however, should be done within the proper settings, and not left 
to rogue agents. 
keywords: altered states of consciousness, cognitive science, consciousness, philosophy, psychedelics. 
Your published works—and interviews—span volumes and fields, conveying complex 
ideas through engaging words and thought experiments. The singular Intuition Pumps 
and Other Tools for Thinking (2013b) breaks the fourth wall of being a philosophy 
professor, allowing the reader access to your mental processes. Works such as The 
Mind’s I (Hofstadter & Dennett, 1982) transcend genres as well as single authorship, 
positing deep questions to the philosophical, while also offering a doorway into 
philosophy for the inexperienced. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Dennett, 1996) is as a clear 
a defense of evolution now, as it was before the current genomics era in biology. Even 
in your articles published in philosophy journals, your work retains an accessible feel to 
it. Such engaging and radically interactive types of philosophy are rare overall. The 
effect of your philosophical style has been to buck the typical insularity and over-
professionalized nature of academic philosophy, providing an inroad for many people 
into some of the most valuable aspects of philosophical thinking, and also spurring an 
incredible amount of students into various areas of the cognitive sciences.

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Where do you believe this strategy came from, and how has your perspective on 
communicating philosophy evolved over your career? 
Well, my two chief advisors were W.V.O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle, who were both 
fine writers (who tried never to write a boring sentence and pretty well succeeded, 
at least for philosophically adept readers). I’ve also had, since I was an 
undergraduate, a suspicion of philosophers who seemed to go out of their way to 
make their work forbidding and technical and “deep.” They didn’t seem to want to 
explain what they were up to! 
If you were to “start it all over” as a young person with the same mindset in 2018, do 
you think you would have stayed in academia and tried to break out again, or might you 
have explored other avenues for communicating philosophy? 
The problem is that the audience for philosophy today includes many who don’t 
have the time or patience or, in the end, interest to really dig into a topic; they want 
instant gratification. I once wrote a little fable about this, in my review of Bob 
Nozick’s wonderful book (Dennett 1982): 
  
There was once a chap who wanted 
to know the meaning of life, so he 
walked a thousand miles and climbed 
to the high mountaintop where the wise 
guru lived. “Will you tell me the meaning 
of life?” he asked. 
“Certainly,” replied the guru, “but if 
you want to understand my answer, 
you must first master recursive function 
theory and mathematical logic.” 
“You’re kidding” 
“No, really.” 
“Well, then...skip it.” 
“Suit yourself.” 
  
 
You playfully characterized your earliest venture into academic philosophy as a mission 
to “Refute Quine,” an endeavor which ultimately led you to become something of the 
“village Quinian” by the time you had arrived at Oxford for graduate school. Following 
Quine, you view science and philosophy as continuous (Ross, Brook, & Thompson, 
2000). This led you to reject the analytic-synthetic distinction, accept the 
indeterminacy of translation thesis, and find affinity with American pragmatic traditions 
(Hookway, 2016). You stated that Quine’s view of a philosopher’s primary role is to 
“[provide] the conceptual clarifications and underpinnings for theories that are

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testable, empirical, scientific,” though noted that “he didn’t get much chance to actually 
do philosophy in this vein” (Dennett, 2003). This in some ways contextualizes your place 
in the conceptual landscape of philosophy: At a deep level, the perspective of Quine 
deeply resonates through your thinking. Yet methodologically, you have diverged from 
Quine and his ilk in that you rarely resort to the technical, mathematical, or otherwise 
formal presentations of your ideas that characterizes much of analytic philosophy. 
First, do you find these points to be accurate? 
Yes! 
Second, today, what do you see as the biggest disagreement that you have with Quine 
methodologically, and also concerning cognition? 
Quine, as a logician, wanted to get everything into a strict, well-policed system of 
expression. I viewed that project as hopeless and ill-motivated, but the effort was 
nevertheless full of enlightening challenges and pitfalls. 
In what ways do you feel you changed Quine’s mind throughout his career? 
Quine had a long friendship with B.F. Skinner, and simply bought into many of his 
friend’s proposed behavioristic simplifications. In those days it really was premature 
to try to hypothesize much in the way of particular neural mechanisms for cognition, 
so behaviorism could be viewed as a prudent noncommittal way of getting an 
account of a system’s input-output competence. But I think I got him to see that his 
pure Skinnerian behaviorism was too simple, more of a “nice try” than a “good trick.” 
He softened his line on the abandonment of intentional idioms in science after he 
saw that there was a rather Quinian way of handling them—my “intentional stance.”  
 Your early career was characterized by the fact that you took the time to learn 
neuroscience and psychology and incorporated these studies into philosophy of mind 
and philosophy of language. For many years you have argued against philosophers and 
scientists alike on what the implications of scientific findings are for the study of 
consciousness (e.g., neuroscientific studies purporting to show that we do not have free 
will). This sort of pioneering interdisciplinary work sowed the seeds for the approach 
we take here at ALIUS: to generate scientific knowledge about “consciousness” using 
diverse methodologies and conceptual frameworks. Further, you have also engaged in 
plausible speculations about as yet unanswered empirical questions, such as how 
hallucinations work, how neurons learn through evolution, and the nature of 
consciousness. In doing so, you have often anticipated future trends in cognitive 
science. For example, in your speculation on hallucinations, you anticipated the essence 
of the predictive processing paradigm (Dennett, 1993). All of these actions comport 
well with the view that science and philosophy are continuous. Nevertheless, there is a 
difference between providing conceptual and clarificatory underpinnings for scientific 
theories, and providing speculative scientific theories themselves—even if it is a matter 
of degree.

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First, when, in your mind, is it appropriate or useful for a philosopher to engage in the 
latter end of this spectrum, i.e., speculating on empirical questions? What is the role of 
this speculation? 
I don’t think there are any useful principles or policies here; it is a matter of seeing 
an opportunity and acting on it. I found myself at workshops and other meetings 
where scientists were describing experiments and asking them “what if you gave 
subjects this variation...?” or “how do you know that subjects aren’t...?”...and so forth, 
and sometimes the reply would be “that’s a great idea, let’s try it!” I had enough hits 
with that policy that I got into the habit of thinking about what experiments I would 
run and why. My contributions in such cases are no different from any 
experimenter’s suggestions. But perhaps my familiarity with all the “bird’s-eye-view” 
issues that philosophers worry about sometimes gives me a better perspective; 
experimenters can get stuck in the trenches and forget where they are on the 
battlefield. 
Second, a perennial question in philosophy of science is whether or not philosophers 
can tell scientists how to do better science. In what ways, if any, do you believe that a 
philosopher can tell a scientist how to do their job? 
Anybody can, in principle, tell scientists how to do better science. Scientists are just 
as vulnerable to illusion, sloppy thinking, unrecognized presuppositions as anyone 
else. And sometimes ‘hybrid vigor’ is particularly valuable. Schrödinger was no 
biologist, but he certainly gave a major boost to biology in What is Life?. Judea Pearl 
comes to mind as an AI researcher (and a good amateur philosopher!) who has 
developed statistical and mathematical methods that can teach researchers in lots of 
other fields how to do their projects better. I would love to see a curious and well-
informed poet ask a question that opened the eyes of, say, neuroscientists or (let’s be 
ambitious) geologists. But philosophers should be better positioned than most 
others to provide such perspectives because they claim to specialize in thinking the 
unthinkable, expanding the imagination, critiquing the hidden assumptions, etc. 
“ 
 
Anybody can, in principle, tell scientists 
how to do better science. Scientists are 
just as vulnerable to illusion, sloppy 
thinking, unrecognized presuppositions 
as anyone else. 
 
 
Recently Carhart-Harris and Friston (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2010) integrated 
psychiatry with predictive processing and neuroscience to argue that “Freudian 
constructs may have neurobiological substrates.” For example they claim that the 
”

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brain’s default mode network (DMN) plays a functional role similar to the Freudian ego 
concept, and that distributed cortical activity functionally implements Freud’s primary 
and secondary processes (processes that control the id & ego, respectively). If this 
analysis is correct, then the “virtual governor” you discuss (e.g. in (Dennett, 2018)) may 
not be so virtual, and may instead have a more delineated structural substrate. This 
anatomical network is not a Cartesian Theatre in which a “second transduction” occurs 
(Hobson & Friston, 2016). Nevertheless, functionally it is like the manager of cerebral 
celebrity (if not the celebrity itself), and in this sense suggests a more centralized 
picture of consciousness in the brain than you have often advocated for. 
What is your attitude toward incorporating Freudian concepts into contemporary 
theories of consciousness? Are you willing to swap the Cartesian Theatre for the 
Freudian Ego? 
Way back when I was a freshman in college I became fascinated with Freud and read 
most of his books and articles, and a lot of secondary literature. He was clearly 
getting at some aspects of mind that have been largely ignored for the last fifty years, 
and it would be good to see some renaissance of his ideas, though his methods are 
rightly shunned, in the main. I think I’ve always been quite open-minded about 
renegade thinkers, taking seriously and even championing ideas of even rather 
cultish figures: Erving Goffman, Julian Jaynes, J. J. Gibson, to name three. One idea 
of Freud’s that I want to take very seriously is simply the idea that some thoughts 
are harder—more painful—to think than others, and it has nothing to do with how 
much information they contain or how many steps away from the sensory periphery 
they are. Bringing the affective or emotional dimension into cognitive science is now 
getting underway, long overdue. In Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer 
the Mind, Hurley, Adams and I argued that all control in nervous systems is 
accomplished by “emotional” signals; there is no highest-level executive control 
system (as there is in GOFAI models of cognitive agents). So in the end Freud will 
have the last laugh, in a way, since stormy conflicts between emotional 
subcomponents of the mind will be the underlying dynamics of the res cogitans. 
Has the intellectual deficit spending of the psychoanalysts been paid off to some degree 
by the predictive processing paradigm (perhaps in the same way affordances have 
been), leading to better construct validity of Freudian concepts? It is interesting to note 
that Kant and Helmholtz influenced (in a fairly complicated and not fully understood 
way) Freud and Jung (Brook, 2003; Jung, 1963), as well as the predictive processing 
paradigm (Clark, 2013; Swanson, 2016). 
Maybe. I haven’t given it enough thought yet. 
Consider content in the brain that has not achieved much cerebral celebrity, but which 
might have important consequences for an individual’s personal life if it did achieve a 
certain level of celebrity (e.g., a belief about needing to quit a job, or that one has left the 
front door unlocked). In Jungian psychology, dreams are thought to be a stage for the

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unconscious to communicate to the conscious mind via non-linguistic symbols. 
Predictive processing theories of dreams (such as the one you give in Consciousness 
Explained) state that dreams are expectation driven.  It seems reasonable to suppose 
under this expectation-driven dream process, that cerebrally unfamous fears, desires, 
apprehensions, and so forth help to influence the dream narrative. Might such a 
situation then allow for a meaningful analysis of dreams as a way of uncovering 
“unconscious” material? In this sense, does predictive processing also lend construct 
validity to Jungian ideas? 
That’s a good way of putting it. Yes, the construction of content in dreams is clearly 
not random, so figuring out what processes interact to generate these remarkable 
sequences or narratives is a project that is likely to bear fruit in the near future. I 
can imagine somebody figuring out ways of biasing dreams by using optogenetic 
interventions for instance. The royal road to theory confirmation here, as always, 
lies in showing how a model predicts the results of well-aimed disruptions of the 
system.  
Neurological recording/stimulation devices and human-computer interfaces are 
progressing rapidly. These technologies represent “Read/Write” access to the human 
brain. How do you think these technologies will change the study of human 
consciousness? Do you think that such technologies will prove to be an acid test for the 
computational theory of mind? 
Yes, as I just said. 
If you could design your dream empirical experiment in order to test some aspect of 
consciousness, what would you do? Feel free to ignore financial, methodological, or 
ethical constraints. What theory would this experiment aim to prove or disprove? If not 
answered above—what empirical evidence (if any) do you think it would take to sway 
your critics on Consciousness? 
If I could design my dream experiment right now, I’d be off doing it. Give me a year 
or so and ask me again. Back when I wrote Consciousness Explained (Dennett 1995) 
and Sweet Dreams (Dennett, 2006), I was close to the cutting edge of the research 
going on, but I then took a few years off to work on religion, which struck me as a 
pressing political and moral obligation. I don’t regret the decision at all, and it 
permitted me to get my thoughts about cultural evolution and its importance to the 
mind into much better shape and detail, but when I returned to full-time thinking 
about consciousness, I found I had some serious catching up to do. I’m happy with 
how well the theory sketch in Consciousness Explained (Dennett 1995) has stood up 
for twenty-five years, but now it’s time to fill in a lot of details and extend it. In 
addition to the blossoming of new experimental paradigms—on beyond masked 
priming and blindsight to inattentional blindness and the attentional blink and 
others—there is mounting evidence, and hints of consensus, on the brain regions

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involved. There is still some yawning chasms—nobody yet has a good account of 
how content is registered and transmitted, so far as I know—but there’s now an 
embarrassment of riches to sort through, not a blank wall of befuddlement. 
The idea of “affordances” (the idea that organism’s perceive possible interactions with 
objects in the environment) held an important role in your recent work From Bacteria to 
Bach and Back (Dennett, 2017). As far as we can tell, your writing about affordances 
began during your discussions of the predictive processing paradigm (Dennett, 2013a, 
2014). You seem to think ( Dennett, 2014) that predictive coding provides a way to pay 
off the intellectual debt that affordances took on when they were originally introduced 
by Gibson in the context of ecological psychology (Gibson, 1979). In particular, you 
suggest that brains produce “affordances galore” (Dennett, 2014) by predicting the 
ways in which the organism can interact with objects in the environment. Relatedly, 
there is the idea of Umwelt, referring to the aspects of the environment that make a 
difference to an organism, and with which an organism can interact. This concept has 
origins in the field of semiotics (Salthe, 2014; Uexküll, 1910). What led you to start 
thinking that affordances and Umwelt have an important role to play in how scientists 
study consciousness? In what ways does your concept of affordances differ from 
Gibson’s? 
I’ve been saying for many years that the brain’s job is to “produce future” (I’m not 
alone in making that observation of course). Gibson’s idea of affordances and von 
Uexküll’s idea of the Umwelt together draw attention to the economy or efficiency 
of evolution: it is always optimizing, selecting the arrangements that most 
effectively, swiftly—and with energetic efficiency—do what needs to be done. Don’t 
waste time and energy on information-gathering and processing that won’t often 
pay for itself. Nature is a ruthlessly efficient finder of shortcuts and acceptable half-
measures, which is why we find ourselves living in a macroscopic world of colored 
solid surfaces, liquids that don’t seem to be swarms of mobile molecules, invisible 
gases, etc. 
If philosophers of mind discuss psychedelics, which they rarely do, they often treat 
them as little more than inducers of hallucinations and delusions (i.e., non-veridical 
perceptions and beliefs). Such a perspective does not comport well with people who 
have actually used these substances, for whom hallucinations and delusions play a 
relatively small part of the experience. These people instead typically value 
psychedelics’ ability to: facilitate metacognitive re-evaluations of the way they have 
been thinking, feeling, or acting (e.g., come to the realization that their alcoholism is 
killing them); temporarily change their sense of self, including the phenomenon of “ego 
death” whereby individuals come to the realization that their own consciousness is 
indeed, as you put it, a user-illusion; and in other ways positively impact long-term 
personal development. While this psychonautic autoheterophenomenology may 
provide data that is unconvincing on its own, there have now been a swell of studies 
concluding that psychedelics have substantial therapeutic value (Bogenschutz et al., 
2018; Carhart-Harris & Goodwin, 2017; Garcia-Romeu & Richards, 2018). The clinical

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value of psychedelics suggests a picture in which psychedelics impact the mind in a 
much more targeted, structured, interesting, complicated—take your pick—way than in 
the traditional psychotomimetic model, wherein psychedelics simply induce temporary 
psychotic like symptoms. There are many, for this reason, who believe that psychedelics 
provide an important inroad into studying consciousness and cognition at large. An 
interesting quote on this matter comes from Terence McKenna (Lorenzo 2017): 
“I don’t think you could discover consciousness if you didn’t perturb it, because as Marshall 
McLuhan said, ‘whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn’t a fish.’ Well, we are fish 
swimming in consciousness; and yet we know it’s there. Well, the reason we know it’s there is 
because if you perturb it, then you see it; and you perturb it by perturbing the engine which 
generates it, which is the mind/brain system resting behind your eyebrows. If you swap out 
the ordinary chemicals that are running that system in an invisible fashion, then you see: it’s 
like dropping ink into a bowl of clear water—suddenly the convection currents operating in the 
clear water become visible, because you see the particles of ink tracing out the previously 
invisible dynamics of the standing water. The mind is precisely like that, and the psychedelic 
is like a dye-marker being dropped into this aqueous system. And then you say, ‘Oh, I see—it 
works like this...and like this.’” 
Do you believe that psychedelics can play an important role in the study of the mind? 
What is the role of various “altered states of consciousness” in your work? For example 
in Dennett (2017) you talk about LSD in the context of hallucinations, but we find few 
other discussions on the topic. 
Yes, you put it well. It’s risky to subject your brain and body to unusual substances 
and stimuli, but any new challenge may prove very enlightening¾and possibly 
therapeutic. There is only a difference in degree between being bumped from 
depression by a gorgeous summer day and being cured of depression by ingesting a 
drug of one sort or another. I expect we’ll learn a great deal in the near future about 
the modulating power of psychedelics. I also expect that we’ll have some scientific 
martyrs along the way¾people who bravely but rashly do things to themselves that 
disable their minds in very unfortunate ways. I know of a few such cases, and these 
have made me quite cautious about self-experimentation, since I’m quite content 
with the mind I have¾though I wish I were a better mathematician. Aside from 
alcohol, caffeine, nicotine and cannabis (which has little effect on me, so I don’t 
bother with it), I have avoided the mind-changing options. No LSD, no psilocybin 
or mescaline, though I’ve often been offered them, and none of the “hard” drugs.  
“ 
 
It’s risky to subject your brain and body to 
unusual substances and stimuli, but any new 
challenge may prove very enlightening—and 
possibly therapeutic.  
 
 
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As a philosopher, I have always accepted the possibility that the Athenians were 
right: Socrates was quite capable of corrupting the minds of those with whom he 
had dialogue. I don’t think he did any clear lasting harm, but it is certainly possible 
for a philosopher to seriously confuse an interlocutor or reader—to the point of 
mental illness or suicide, or other destructive behavior. Ideas can be just as 
dangerous as drugs. 
“ 
 
Ideas can be just as dangerous as drugs.  
 
Since psychedelics were made illegal in 1966, much of psychedelic research has been 
carried out by “underground” scientists and psychonauts. While there has been 
progress in the last 50 years in terms of making psychedelic research more respectable 
and possible, it is still extremely limited. While now “above ground,” much of the work is 
outside of academia. For example, much research is carried out or organized by the 
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Our group ALIUS is 
unaffiliated with any academic organization. Altered States of Consciousness research 
is not alone in this flight from academic halls. Another example, with very different 
causation, is that private and governmental sector AI research sectors are surpassing 
academic AI research. Similar escapes from academia may occur for biological areas like 
genomics, brain-computer interfaces, and neurofeedback as well. 
Do you think that universities should make a greater effort to absorb or otherwise 
integrate these extra-academic research veins? Or do you think it is admissible for 
schisms in research to persist, with only the migration of researchers to and fro 
facilitating communication between? 
Do you think philosophers have a unique position to publicly advocate for the academic 
and scientific study of (altered states of) consciousness? Is it important to impress upon 
people that not only are psychedelic substances useful for psychotherapeutic purposes, 
but that they are also important ingredients in studying and understanding our ordinary 
mental functions? 
I think that the policies that have been hammered out in academia for doing 
ethically defensible research, while not perfect, should be followed everywhere, and 
I don’t know how that can be enforced. Perhaps—perhaps—by passing legislation 
making developers, wherever they are, strictly liable for any harmful applications of 
their products. Strict liability laws (which disallow ignorance as an excuse), if done 
right, can set up prudent systems of self-policing: investors won’t invest their money 
if they know that they cannot insure themselves against catastrophic losses in class 
action suits, etc, and insurance companies will not provide coverage unless they have 
convinced themselves that the insured have taken all reasonable steps and followed 
all the rules scrupulously. I think these conditions should be in force for AI as well 
as for psychedelics and gene-tinkering. There will still be rogues, for whom such risk 
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is not motivating, apparently, and they should not be romanticized or honored at 
all; they should be regarded as intellectual vandals. The power to do tremendous 
harm to society, to life itself, is growing, and it will be very hard to keep 
irresponsible adventurers from launching projects that have terrible consequences. 
“ 
 
I think that the policies that have been 
hammered out in academia for doing ethically 
defensible research, while not perfect, should 
be followed everywhere… There will still be 
rogues, for whom such risk is not motivating, 
apparently, 
and 
they 
should 
not 
be 
romanticized or honored at all; they should be 
regarded as intellectual vandals.  
 
 
You have said that we should teach children about religion, and in fact all of the world’s 
religions, as a way to vaccinate them against absolutist beliefs held by their elders 
(Frazier, 2009). Pluralistic education may vaccinate children against traditional 
religious extremism, but it is not clear that such an approach would prevent the 
adoption of differently-dangerous views such as extreme moral relativism, nihilism, or 
worse. Since you are an advocate of maintaining a “Moral Agents Club,” legions of 
children adopting these latter types of perspectives and engaging in a bit of the old 
ultraviolence would be a bad thing. How then should we tell children which set of 
behaviors are actually preferable? 
 “Show, don’t tell”—as the teachers of fiction-writing urge. The project of rearing 
and socializing our children so that they can enter the adult world with a good 
chance of success is well-known to be a daunting challenge, requiring patience, 
persistence, judgment and flexibility, which would be too much to expect of many 
if not most of us were it not for the biases inherited with our genes: we normally 
find our offspring cute, cuddly, adorable, and worthy of considerable sacrifice. 
There is plenty of cultural variation around this central pattern, but no exceptions. 
Don’t get between a mother bear and her cub, and don’t get between a human 
mother and her baby. (This holds for fathers too, of course, but for well-explored 
biological reasons, careless fathers are much more common than careless mothers.) 
The natural, genetically endorsed tendency of all of us to love and protect our 
children has been wisely—if largely unwittingly—exploited by the processes that 
have generated our moral policies and their supporting intuitions. In short we try 
not to “spoil” our children. Some parents succeed better than others. It is a tightrope 
act, with mistakes and pitfalls on both sides. Too much blaming and scolding can 
create a guilt-ridden adolescent and adult, to say nothing of the excesses of corporal 
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punishment and outright abuse. Too little “supervision” can produce young adults 
who, “through no fault of their own,” are burdened with an unwarranted sense of 
entitlement, unable to summon the self-control required to negotiate the complex 
social world of adulthood without constantly falling into conflict with their fellow 
citizens and with authority. 
“ 
 
The natural, genetically endorsed tendency of 
all of us to love and protect our children has 
been wisely—if largely unwittingly—exploited 
by the processes that have generated our 
moral policies and their supporting intuitions. 
In short we try not to “spoil” our children.  
 
 
Negotiating these opposing pitfalls is a delicate task, especially in light of the fact 
that every move we make is public, discussable, criticizable, likely to “telegraph our 
punches” to those we are trying to influence (for their own good, of course, but 
mainly for the good of society at large). We are not considering the most effective 
and humane policies of cattle raising or fishing or, for that matter, bricklaying, 
where the objects of concern are oblivious to our reasoning. We are considering how 
we, language-using, comprehending adults should go about influencing each other’s 
behavior. This fact is sometimes forgotten by proponents on one side or another. 
What would you like your stance on Plato to be remembered as? Or, what did Plato get 
right? 
I once set out to produce a textbook on Plato’s theory of forms, looking at all the 
Platonic texts that arguably could be considered to deal with the theory of forms, 
and inviting students to harmonize them—by reordering them, reinterpreting them, 
even rejecting some texts that didn’t “fit” an otherwise good version. This was in 
part inspired by Gilbert Ryle’s book Plato’s Progress, which I read in draft when I 
was Ryle’s student.  Ryle called it his “naughty book” since it was so irreverently 
critical of much of the scholarship on Plato, and advanced an astonishing but 
speculative theory: Plato’s dialogues were composed as plays to be performed at the 
Olympic Games, and Plato himself typically played the role of Socrates!  This was a 
project I abandoned in the late 60s, in spite of getting encouragement from 
publishers, in part because I have never been happy with either Plato’s methods or 
the fruits of his labors. He and Socrates seduced philosophers into several millennia 
of essence-hunting and counter-example-mongering that we are only just now 
recovering from. I view Plato’s views as wonderful examples to study, in the 
diagnostic spirit of “let’s see if we can pinpoint where these brilliant folks misled 
”

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each other.” Their crowning achievement was, you might say, the invention of self-
conscious meta-cognition, thinking carefully about thinking. That habit has been 
immensely fruitful across all human inquiry, but philosophers have often been 
trapped in diminishing returns by narrowing their focus onto their own thinking 
about their own thinking about their own thinking, while ignoring the thinking 
going on among their less self-absorbed contemporaries. 
Genomic and paleological analyses suggest that New World monkeys split off from Old 
World monkeys within the last 60 million years, and arrived in South America far before 
any human ancestors (Bond et al., 2015; Perelman et al., 2011). How the New World 
monkeys were able to reach South America is still something of a mystery. It is not clear 
that they would have been able to amble across frozen Northern straights, or persist 
long travels on a floating mass of vegetation diffusing across the Atlantic. Would you 
care to offer a speculation of your own? 
I’d guess that some band(s) of monkeys in Africa got swept out to sea on some 
floating vegetation and made it all the way across the South Atlantic to South 
America (or the Caribbean). That seems to be the favored hunch among the experts, 
but who knows what will turn up to settle the matter? You express doubt that this 
would be possible, but I don’t see why. How tight was the genetic bottleneck through 
which New World monkeys had to pass? I don’t know, and the articles I’ve skimmed 
don’t discuss it, but I would think this bottleneck would leave a trace after 30-40 
million years, discoverable via bioinformatics today.

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Bond, M., Tejedor, M. F., Campbell, K. E., Jr, Chornogubsky, L., Novo, N., & Goin, F. 
(2015). Eocene primates of South America and the African origins of New World 
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*Extraction method: pymupdf*