I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representations, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.

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

There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works. That's no paradox. Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn't the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn't. This bears a lot of emphasis; it turns up in philosophy practically everywhere you look.

The degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system... simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems.

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

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.

It simply isn't true, for example, that being big is in general better for fitness than being small except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that flying slow and high is in general better for fitness than flying fast and low except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that being monogamous is in general better for fitness than being polygamous... except when there are effects of interacting variables... It's not that the underlying generalizations are there but imperceptible in the ambient noise.