In setting up a blog, name comes before content. There is an obvious problem.
Past performance may be no guarantee of future results, but when the past performance stretches over a longish career, and quite a few pieces of writing, what is likely to appear in a blog is not entirely speculative. I have spent my working life making, analyzing, and criticizing arguments, in books, papers, and briefs and orally before students, philosophers, juries, and judges. Especially on the philosophy side, the arguments have been about ideas: ideas of the historical greats, of contemporaries, of colleagues, of students, and of my own. With respect to the latter, I have found with time that they are usually wrong, at least they are wrong on the first go, and typically remain wrong, although not as glaringly so, through many iterations. Hence the word "conjectures" to express the tentativeness with which experience has taught me that I should approach my conclusions. My reading has also convinced me that the desirability of such an attitude is not limited to myself.
An issue in the history of philosophy is how to understand "Socratic irony," typified by Socrates's frequent confessions that he did not know the answer to a philosophical question. My favorite interpretation, although I cannot vouch for its historical accuracy, is that Socrates did not think there was a bottom level of philosophical truth. Through reasoned argument we can show up bad answers to philosophical questions. As we follow the procedure farther and deeper, we find what is wrong with less bad answers. We may not get closer to truth, but we get farther from egregious error. We enlarge our understanding in seeing why originally seductive ideas won't do. If this is the right way to see progress in philosophy, as I conjecture it may well be, then the word "conjectures" in my blog title is particularly apt.
Can philosophy ever arrive at positive truth, by which I mean something of the sort "consciousness is . . ." as contrasted with the negative truth, "Descartes's theory of consciousness is false"? If so, it is going to be in a partnership with empirical scientists, and we philosophers may well be the junior partners Surely that is going to be the case for the example of consciousness.
Philosophy of mathematics is a special case where the partnership is with mathematicians, where "empirical" does not apply, at least straightforwardly. Moral theory and philosophy of law are also special cases, although in each case empirical facts are going to be relevant and partnerships in order.
