Revisions

Paradoxes (seeming or actual) that derive from the difficulty of conceiving of a state of affairs (or of oneself) as radically different:

• (1) Global skeptical scenarios: e.g. Putnam's brains-in-a-vat. Because the brains have no connection whatsoever (it's stipulated) to the world we inhabit, none of their words, even if they happen to sound like ours, refer to what our words refer to; therefore the brains-in-a-vat cannot think "perhaps we're brains-in-a-vat" and mean what we mean by that thought. So if we are brains-in-a-vat we can't coherently think that we are.
  

  
  

• (2) Changing one's self: e.g. determining what one wants one's will to be. If one's will is constitutive of one's identity (or at least one's identity as an agent), how do we go about altering it if it's we who are doing the altering? Depression offers a similar scenario: to get out of it, often what is required is to reconceive of oneself or one's environment in such a way that what is constitutive of oneself is different.
  

  
  

• (3) Meno paradox: how can we seek what we don't know, if not knowing it means that we also don't know what we're looking for? The Meno paradox seems much weaker than the first two, since it is not so radical a change as that between two causally disconnected languages or even two differently defined wills. Its pull, insofar as it has any, relies on conceiving of the two knowledge-states as completely, unpredictably different--the knowledge one seeks being the kind of thing one can't acquire in a routine way, like seeing an aspect.
  

  
  

• (4) Counterfactuals: The claim that one "could have done otherwise" seems, if one believes some minimal kind of determinism is true, odd. Even in an ordinary case, it seems that many things would have to have been different for one to have done otherwise. It's hard to know how far these conditions extend from our present perspective, having acted in some particular way. If one thinks one's psychology is affected by events in one's life, the person who acts at time t on one timeline of events might be different from the person who acts at the same point on an alternate timeline. In what sense could I have done otherwise, then? (There's a way of answering this--by appealing to the elements of one's psychology that are under one's control.)
  

(I can't take 2 or more classes at once without making them into the same thing. My future as a specialist is hopeless.)