ABSTRACT
To the extent that the more ‘normal’ theories of language, mind and knowledge have a definite cultural effect they may also succeed in somehow benumbing our intellectual life-for a while at least-by obliquely discouraging the expression of further pressing questions. Even though in the form of an enlightened ‘liberation’ from confusion, some philosophical outlooks may quietly encourage intellectual repression. A perplexing aspect of our more rigorous philosophies, in fact, is not so much that they fail to yield ‘solutions’ of the problems they focus on but that they do not see the problems closely surrounding their foci of attention; or they even obscure them completely. The theoretical representation of cognition does not necessarily show what minds do when they cognize, although it may none the less be a description that is adequate for particular purposes. Indeed, only philosophical questions that have achieved great popularity come to appear as worthy of intellectual scrutiny. Being insufficiently articulated may thus cause even the most ‘urgent’ of practical and theoretical questions to be excluded from cultural life. We could condense the issue in the words of Putnam by saying that ‘the question that won’t go away is how much what we call “intelligence” presupposes the rest of human nature’.1
