Lyrics (Here)

 The more that you say, the less I know

Related Readings:

 Fisher, Matthew & Keil, Frank C. (2016). The Curse of Expertise: When More Knowledge Leads to Miscalibrated Explanatory Insight. Cognitive Science 40 (5):1251-1269. (link)

Commentary: 

 Fisher and Keil write, 

"Expertise increases confidence in the ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena. However, this confidence is unwarranted; after actually offering full explanations, people are surprised by the limitations in their understanding. For passive expertise, miscalibration is moderated by education; those with more education are accurate in their self-assessments. But when those with more education consider topics related to their area of concentrated study, they also display an illusion of understanding. This “curse of expertise” is explained by a failure to recognize the amount of detailed information that had been forgotten. While expertise can sometimes lead to accurate self-knowledge, it can also create illusions of competence."

Lyrics (Here)

Sometimes you just don't know the answer '

Til someone's on their knees and asks you

Related Readings:

  Barnes, Elizabeth (2015). What You Can Expect When You Don't Want to be Expecting. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (3):775-786. (Link)

Commentary:

Sometimes deciding not to do something can also be a transformative experience 

Lyrics (Here)

At dinner parties, I call you out on your contrarian shit 

Related Readings:

Joshi, Hrishikesh. "Debunking creedal beliefs." Synthese 200, no. 6 (2022): 1-18. (link) 

Commentary:

Joshi writes, 

"Simply being a contrarian doesn’t automatically guarantee well-formed beliefs. Indeed, we can imagine a contrarian who merely wants to deny his group’s beliefs for whatever reason, and holds the contrary attitudes for all sorts of misguided reasons. His resulting worldview may thus be inaccurate and unjustified. Nonetheless, I want to claim, even this contrarian avoids the specific debunking challenge presented in this paper for the simple reason that his beliefs are not socially adaptive." 

Lyrics (Here)

Time flies, messy as the mud on your truck tires 

Now I'm missing your smile, hear me out 

We could just ride around 

And the road not taken looks real good now

Related Readings:

Samuel Scheffler, "The Normativity of Tradition," in Equality and Tradition (Oxford, 2010)

Commentary:

 Scheffler writes, 

"A person who regularly acts in accordance with traditional practices assimilates these routines as his own, and in so doing such a person comes to inhabit what amounts to a pre-established temporal structure. As a way of domesticating time, this offers certain advantages when compared with the development of purely personal routines. Traditions are public, collective enterprises, so the temporal structures they make available have a social dimension that many people find comforting and enriching, much as many people prefer living with others to living alone. In addition, traditions usually have at their disposal substantial resources of wisdom and experience, and to the extent that they are supported by and embodied in institutions they often have substantial material resources as well. This means that the temporal routines they have established are likely to be both more elaborate and better grounded in the lessons of the past than are the purely personal routines developed de novo by individual agents. Moreover, insofar as traditions extend beyond the normal human lifespan, they offer individuals temporal structures that are themselves more enduring and so temporally more expansive than any routine those individuals could construct for themselves." 

Lyrics (Here)

Now I'm begging for footnotes in the story of your life

Related Readings:

Mitchell, Margaret E. "‘Beautiful Creatures’: The Ethics of Female Beauty in Daphne du Maurier's Fiction." Women: a cultural review 20, no. 1 (2009): 25-41. (link)

Commentary:

I like to think that High Infidelity is the sequel to this song. 

Lyrics (Here)

I think he did it, but I just can't prove it 

No, no body, no crime 

But I ain't lettin' up until the day I die

Related Readings:

Cocking, Dean, and Jeanette Kennett. "Friendship and moral danger." The Journal of Philosophy 97, no. 5 (2000): 278-296. (link) 

Commentary:

Friends will help you move. Best friends will help you move a body. 

Lyrics (Here)

All you want from me now is the green light of forgiveness 

You haven't met the new me yet 

And I think she'll give you that

Related Readings:

Korsgaard, Christine M. "Creating the kingdom of ends: reciprocity and responsibility in personal relations." Philosophical perspectives 6 (1992): 305-332. (link) 

Commentary:

Korsgaard writes, 

" She cannot be married to the older man, later, unless she holds him responsible, and takes him at his word. She cannot be married to the younger one, now, because he has already abandoned her. And further than that: to the extent that it is important to this woman's sense of her own identity, morally and personally, that she is his wife, he leaves her without anything clear to be, and so without anything clear to do. You cannot act in concert with one who does not act in concert with himself. Where our relations are constitutive of our ongoing identities, those with whom we have them must have ongoing identities too" 

Lyrics (Here)

And if you're ever tired of bеin' known for who you know 

You know that you'll always know me

Related Readings:

Sarah Stroud, "Epistemic Partiality in Friendship," Ethics 116:3 (2006) (link)

Commentary:

Does the speaker believe the best about Dorothea? Should friendship sway us in how we see others?

Lyrics (Here)

And when I got into the accident 

The sight that flashed before me was your face 

But when I walked up to the podium, I think that I forgot to say your name

Related Readings:

Murray, Samuel ; Murray, Elise D. ; Stewart, Gregory ; Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter & De Brigard, Felipe (2019). Responsibility for forgetting. Philosophical Studies 176 (5):1177-1201. (link)

Commentary:

Murray et al write, 

"There is a substantial debate over what factors might mitigate responsibility for forgetfulness. For instance, does it matter to people whether someone cares a lot about doing the thing that they forget to do? Does it matter whether someone forgets about something when they are under a lot of stress?"

Lyrics (Here)

 I wish to know The fatal flaw that makes you long to be Magnificently cursed

Related Readings:

Hawkins, Jennifer (2008). Desiring the bad under the guise of the good. Philosophical Quarterly 58 (231):244–264. (link) 

Commentary: 

Not every desire has to be linked up to an evaluative belief that satisfying that desire would be good!  

Lyrics (Here)

Forever is the sweetest con

Related Readings:

Dan Moller, "Love and Death," Journal of Philosophy 104:6 (2007) (link)

Commentary:

Moller notices that love doesn't always seem to last forever. Is that a problem for love, or is it a problem for our concept of love? Is forever a con? 

Lyrics (Here)

Actually I always felt I must look better in the rear view 

Missing me At the golden gates they once held the keys to

Related Readings:

here

Commentary:

here

Lyrics (Here)

What died didn't stay dead 

You're alive, you're alive in my head

Related Readings:

Johnston, Mark (2010). Surviving Death. Princeton University Press. (link ) (review) 

Commentary:

here

Lyrics (Here)

Writing letters 

Addressed to the fire

Related Readings:

here

Commentary:

here

Lyrics (Here)

I stayed there 

Dust collected on my pinned-up hair 

I'm sure that you got a wife out there 

Kids and Christmas, but I'm unaware 'Cause I'm right where....

Related Readings:

here

Commentary:

here

Lyrics (Here)

Sometimes giving up is the strong thing 

Sometimes to run is the brave thing 

Sometimes walking out is the one thing 

That will find you the right thing

Related Readings:

here

Commentary:

here

Lyrics (Here)

Yes, I got your letter 

Yes, I'm doing better 

I know that it's over, 

I don't need your Closure

Related Readings:

Macalester Bell, Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt (Oxford, 20213) (linked review)

Commentary:

here