Open peer commentary on the article “Interactivity and Enaction in Human Cognition” by Matthew Isaac Harvey, Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen & Sune Vork Steffensen. Upshot: Enaction, as a paradigm, is still negotiating its position with respect to science done in an objective key. Some of the problems identified by the authors arise by treating enactive descriptions as if they were realist accounts. Negotiating a resolution here will demand progress all round.

Word problems are notoriously difficult to solve. We suggest that much of the difficulty children experience with word problems can be attributed to difficulty in comprehending abstract or ambiguous language. We tested this hypothesis by (1) requiring children to recall problems either before or after solving them, (2) requiring them to generate f'mal questions to incomplete word problems, and (3) modeling performance pattems using a computer simulation. Solution performance was found to be systematically related to recall and question generation performance. (...) Correct solutions were associated with accurate recall of the problem structure and with appropriate question generation. Solution "errors" were found to be correct solutions to miscomprehended problems. Word problems that contained abstract or ambiguous language tended to be miscomprehended more often than those using simpler language, and there was a great deal of systematicity in the way these problems were miscomprehended. Solution error pattems were successfully simulated by manipulating a computer model’s language comprehension strategies, as opposed to its knowledge of logical set relations. o was.. (shrink)

Many areas of science develop by discovering mechanisms and role functions. Cummins' (1975) analysis of role functions-according to which an item's role function is a capacity of that item that appears in an analytic explanation of the capacity of some containing system-captures one important sense of "function" in the biological sciences and elsewhere. Here I synthesize Cummins' account with recent work on mechanisms and causal/mechanical explanation. The synthesis produces an analysis of specifically mechanistic role functions, one that uses (...) the characteristic active, spatial, temporal, and hierarchical organization of mechanisms to add precision and content to Cummins' original suggestion. This synthesis also shows why the discovery of role functions is a scientific achievement. Discovering a role function (i) contributes to the interlevel integration of multilevel mechanisms, and (ii) provides a unique, contextual variety of causal/mechanical explanation. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that evolutionary explanations of cognitive phenomena involve the assumption that the capacities to be explained are both innate and modular. This is understandable: independent selection of a trait requires that it be both heritable and largely decoupled from other ”nearby’ traits. Cognitive capacities realized as innate modules would certainly satisfy these contraints. A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology, however, requires neither extreme nativism nor modularity, though it is consistent with both. In this paper, we seek to show (...) that rather weak assumptions about innateness and modularity are consistent with evolutionary explanations of cognitive capacities. Evolutionary pressures can affect the degree to which the development of a capacity is canalized by biasing acquisition/learning in ways that favor development of concepts and capacities that proved adaptive to an organism’s ancestors. (shrink)

In book two, Chapter eight of the essay, Locke claims that primary qualities, Unlike secondary qualities, Are really in objects and are resemblances of our ideas. The idioms of containment and of resemblance are explained as formulations of what jonathan bennett calls the analytic thesis and the causal thesis. It is argued that locke was concerned to distinguish primary qualities from what he calls secondary qualities because he thought the latter were not really qualities at all but mere powers and (...) hence not genuinely explanatory. (shrink)

The current debate over systematicity concerns the formal conditions a scheme of mental representation must satisfy in order to explain the systematicity of thought.1 The systematicity of thought is assumed to be a pervasive property of minds, and can be characterized (roughly) as follows: anyone who can think T can think systematic variants of T, where the systematic variants of T are found by permuting T’s constituents. So, for example, it is an alleged fact that anyone who can think the (...) thought that John loves Mary can think the thought that Mary loves John, where the latter thought is a systematic variant of the former. (shrink)

Looks at accounts by Locke, Fodor, Dretske, and Millikan concerning the nature of mental representation, and discusses connectionism and representation.

In exploring the nature of psychological explanation, this book looks at how psychologists theorize about the human ability to calculate, to speak a language and the like. It shows how good theorizing explains or tries to explain such abilities as perception and cognition. It recasts the familiar explanations of "intelligence" and "cognitive capacity" as put forward by philosophers such as Fodor, Dennett, and others in terms of a theory of explanation that makes established doctrine more intelligible to professionals and their (...) students.In particular, the book shows that vestigial adherence to the positivists' D-N model has distorted the view of philosophers of science about what psychologists (and biologists) do and has masked the real nature of explanation. Major sections in the book cover Analysis and Subsumption; Functional Analysis; Understanding Cognitive Capacities; and Historical Reflections.Robert Cummins is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

"This is an important new Cummins work.

But what are functions? Here, 15 leading scholars of philosophy of psychology and philosophy of biology present new essays on functions.

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

Patients and physicians often perceive the current health care system to be unfair, in part because of the ways in which coverage decisions appear to be made. To address this problem the Ethical Force Program, a collaborative effort to create quality improvement tools for ethics in health care, has developed five content areas specifying ethical criteria for fair health care benefits design and administration. Each content area includes concrete recommendations and measurable expectations for performance improvement, which can be used by (...) those organizations involved in the design and administration of health benefits packages, such as purchasers, health plans, benefits consultants, and practitioner groups. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to set forth a sense in which programs can and do explain behavior, and to distinguish from this a number of senses in which they do not. Once we are tolerably clear concerning the sort of explanatory strategy being employed, two rather interesting facts emerge; (1) though it is true that programs are "internally represented," this fact has no explanatory interest beyond the mere fact that the program is executed; (2) programs which are couched (...) in information processing terms may have an explanatory interest for a given range of behavior which is independent of physiological explanations of the same range of behavior. (shrink)

With precision and profundity born of 30 years of devoted study, John Boyle offers an essential introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas on Scripture, shedding helpful light on the goals, methods, and commitments that animate the Angelic Doctor's engagement with the sacred page. Because the genius of St. Thomas's approach to the Bible lies not so much in its novelty but rather in the fidelity and clarity with which he recapitulates the riches of the preceding interpretive Tradition, this initiation into St. (...) Thomas's vision of Scripture is itself an orientation to the Church's vision of Scripture, from the Fathers through and beyond the Middle Ages. St. Thomas's embeddedness within the Church's Tradition and his own historical context is integral to his approach to Scripture, yet it sets him at some distance from modern readers, for whom his interpretive vision may seem perplexing or even impenetrable. In this Primer, Boyle first provides an acclimation to this medieval context through a survey and explanation of pertinent technical terminology used by St. Thomas and characteristic of the scholastic theology of the time. With an eye to the medieval practice of considering Scripture according to the fourfold division of causes, Boyle builds on this initial foundation by exploring in turn St. Thomas's accounts of the end or use of Scripture (final cause), its divine and human authorship (efficient cause), its order and division (material cause), and its literary styles or genres (formal cause). Drawing on writings from across St. Thomas's corpus, but especially his work On the Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture and the prologues to his biblical commentaries, Boyle masterfully elucidates both the hermeneutical principles and deep wisdom of the Angelic Doctor's approach to Scripture, imparting invaluable guidance not only for reading and understanding St. Thomas and other great masters of the Tradition, but also-and ultimately-for understanding Scripture in light of this Tradition and reading it with greater benefit and joy. (shrink)

The principle of respect for autonomy is increasingly under siege as a valuable component of healthcare ethics. Its critics charge that it has been elevated to a position out of proportion to its contribution, so that the individual's wishes and rights have come to dominate healthcare decisionmaking, while obligations and responsibilities are ignored or devalued. If we are to salvage respect for autonomy we must find a way to reconnect the individual and the community, rights and responsibilities, in the way (...) we think about, discuss, and make healthcare decisions. (shrink)

When reasoning about deontic rules (what one may, should, or should not do in a given set of circumstances), reasoners adopt a violation‐detection strategy, a strategy they do not adopt when reasoning about indicative rules (descriptions of purported state of affairs). I argue that this indicative‐deontic distinction constitutes a primitive in the cognitive architecture. To support this claim, I show that this distinction emerges early in development, is observed regardless of the cultural background of the reasoner, and can be selectively (...) disrupted at the neurological level. I also argue that this distinction emerged as a result of selective pressure favouring the evolution of reasoning strategies that determine survival within dominance hierarchies. (shrink)

In 1997 the women-run nonprofit organization Dress for Success opened its first location with the aim of empowering low-income women by providing gently used suits for job interviews. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork in an affiliate office, we analyze cross-race and cross-class interactions between privileged volunteers and low-income clients to demonstrate the emergence of what we term “neoliberal maternalism.” Historical forms of maternalism—the mother-centric voluntarism aimed at assisting indigent families a century ago—emphasized women’s domesticity and promoted the earliest welfare (...) provisions. We suggest that neoliberal maternalism, instead, works alongside welfare retrenchment by insisting that single mothers become self-sufficient workers. Similar to earlier maternalisms, the benevolence of affluent volunteers serves to reinforce class and race superiority while producing moments of genuine care and connection. We argue that while all forms of maternalism come with a related body politics aimed at disciplining the bodies of othered women, neoliberal maternalism carries a distinct body politics that, rather than regulating the home and reproduction, intrusively enforces ideals of aesthetic labor required for the postindustrial service economy. Finally, we suggest that retaining maternalism as an analytic framework is particularly important for investigating the influence of neoliberalism and the eroding social safety net on interactions between women. (shrink)

As a procedure, reflective equilibrium is simply a familiar kind of standard scientific method with a new name. A theory is constructed to account for a set of observations. Recalcitrant data may be rejected as noise or explained away as the effects of interference of some sort. Recalcitrant data that cannot be plausibly dismissed force emendations in theory. What counts as a plausible dismissal depends, among other things, on the going theory, as well as on background theory and on knowledge (...) that may be relevant to under-standing the experimental design that is generating the observations, including knowledge of the apparatus and observation conditions. This sort of mutual adjustment between theory and data is a familiar feature of scientific practice. Whatever authority RE seems to have comes, I think, from a tacit or explicit recognition that it has the same form as this familiar sort of scientific inference. One way to see the rationale underlying this procedure in science is to focus on prediction. Think of prediction as a matter of projecting what is known onto uncharted territory. To do this, you need a vehicle—a theory—that captures some invariant or pattern in what is known so that you can project it onto the unknown. How convincing the projection is depends on two factors: how sure one is of the observational base, and how sure one is that the theory gets the invariants right. The two factors are not independent, of course. One's confidence in the observational base will be affected by how persuasively the theory identifies and dismisses noise; one's confidence in the theory, on the other hand, will depend on one's confidence in the observations it takes seriously. Prediction is important as a test of theory precisely because verified predictions seem to show that the theory has correctly captured the general in the particular, that it has got the drift of the observational evidence in which our confidence is ultimately grounded. (shrink)

In the beginning, there was the DN (Deductive Nomological) model of explanation, articulated by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948). According to DN, scientific explanation is subsumption under natural law. Individual events are explained by deducing them from laws together with initial conditions (or boundary conditions), and laws are explained by deriving them from other more fundamental laws, as, for example, the simple pendulum law is derived from Newton's laws of motion.

There is a certain view abroad in the land concerning the philosophical problems raised by Tarskian semantics. This view has it that a Tarskian theory of truth in a language accomplishes nothing of interest beyond the definition of truth in terms of satisfaction, and, further, that what is missing — the only thing that would yield a solution to the philosophical problem of truth when added to Tarskian semantics — is a reduction of satisfaction to a non-semantic relation. It seems (...) to me that this view either misidentifies the philosophical problem altogether, or encourages a seriously misleading picture of the nature of the problem.The view I have in mind is nowhere more persuasively at work than in a recent paper by Hartry Field.1 In this paper Field argues that a Tarskian theory of truth for a natural language is impossible if we insist on Tarski's case-by-case elimination of ‘satisfies'. More fundamentally, however, he argues that a Tarskian theory could provide nothing of philosophical interest beyond the admittedly interesting reduction of truth to satisfaction, and his ground for this claim is, roughly, that a Tarskian theory does not reduce its primitive semantic relation — satisfaction — to a non-semantic relation. (shrink)

Neo-teleology is the two part thesis that, e.g., (i) we have hearts because of what hearts are for: Hearts are for blood circulation, not the production of a pulse, so hearts are there--animals have them--because their function is to circulate the blood, and (ii) that (i) is explained by natural selection: traits spread through populations because of their functions. This paper attacks this popular doctrine. The presence of a biological trait or structure is not explained by appeal to its function. (...) To suppose otherwise is to trivialize natural selection. (shrink)

Is bioethics consultation a profession? Withfew exceptions, the arguments andcounterarguments about whether healthcareethics consultation is a profession haveignored the historical and cultural developmentof professions in the United States, the wayssocial changes have altered the work andboundaries of all professions, and theprofessionalization theories that explain howmodern societies institutionalize expertise inprofessions. This interdisciplinary analysisbegins to fill this gap by framing the debatewithin a larger theoretical context heretoforemissing from the bioethics literature. Specifically, the question of whether ethicsconsultation is a profession is examined fromthe (...) perspectives of trait theory, Wilensky''sfive-stage process of professionalization,Abbott''s interdependent system of professions,and Haug''s deprofessionalization thesis. Whilehealthcare ethics consultation does not meetthe criteria to claim professional status,neither could most professions pass these idealtheoretical standards. Instead of a yes or nodichotomous response to the question, it ismore helpful to envision a professionalizationcontinuum with sales clerks or carpenters atone end and medicine or law at the other. During the past decade healthcare ethicsconsultation has been moving along thiscontinuum toward greater professional status. (shrink)

A discussion of a number of ways that information can be present in a computer program without being explicitly represented.

It has historically been assumed that comparative and superlative quantifiers can be semantically analysed in accordance with their core logical–mathematical properties. However, recent theoretical and experimental work has cast doubt on the validity of this assumption. Geurts & Nouwen have claimed that superlative quantifiers possess an additional modal component in their semantics that is absent from comparative quantifiers and that this accounts for the previously neglected differences in usage and interpretation between the two types of quantifier that they identify. Their (...) semantically modal hypothesis has received additional support from empirical investigations. In this article, we further corroborate that superlative quantifiers have additional modal interpretations. However, we propose an alternative analysis, whereby these quantifiers possess the semantics postulated by the classical model and the additional aspects of meaning arise as a consequence of psychological complexity and pragmatic implicature. We explain how this model is consistent with the existing empirical findings. Additionally, we present the findings of four novel experiments that support our model above the semantically modal account. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that evolutionary explanations of cognitive phenomena involve the assumption that the capacities to be explained are both innate and modular. This is understandable: independent selection of a trait requires that it be both heritable and largely decoupled from other `nearby' traits. Cognitive capacities realized as innate modules would certainly satisfy these contraints. A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology, however, requires neither extreme nativism nor modularity, though it is consistent with both. In this paper, we seek to show (...) that rather weak assumptions about innateness and modularity are consistent with evolutionary explanations of cognitive capacities. Evolutionary pressures can affect the degree to which the development of a capacity is canalized by biasing acquisition/ learning in ways that favor development of concepts and capacities that proved adaptive to an organism's ancestors. q 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

An experiment was conducted to investigate the relative contributions of syntactic form and content to conditional reasoning. The content domain chosen was that of causation. Conditional statements that described causal relationships (if (cause>, then (effect>) were embedded in simple arguments whose entailments are governed by the rules -oftruth-functional logic (i.e., modus ponens, modus tollens, denying the antecedent, and affirming the consequent). The causal statements differed in terms ofthe number of alternative causes and disabling conditions that characterized the causal relationship. (A (...) disabling condition is an event that prevents an effect from occurring even though a relevant cause is present.) Subjects were required to judge whether or not each argument’s conclusion could be accepted. Judgments were found to vary systematically with the number of alternative causes and disabling conditions. Conclusions of arguments based on conditionals with few alternative causes or disabling conditionswerefoun~d:tobe-rnore accept~ able than cdnclusions based on those with many. (shrink)

I begin by criticizing an elaboration of an argument in this journal due to Hawley , who argued that, where Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles faces counterexamples, invoking relations to save PII fails. I argue that insufficient attention has been paid to a particular distinction. I proceed by demonstrating that in most putative counterexamples to PII , the so-called Discerning Defence trumps the Summing Defence of PII. The general kind of objects that do the discerning in all cases (...) form a category that has received little if any attention in metaphysics. This category of objects lies between indiscernibles and individuals and is called relationals: objects that can be discerned by means of relations only and not by properties. Remarkably, relationals turn out to populate the universe. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that the causal theory of mental content (hereafter CT) is incompatible with an elementary fact of perceptual psychology, namely, that the detection of distal properties generally requires the mediation of a “theory.” I shall call this fact the nontransducibility of distal properties (hereafter NTDP). The argument proceeds in two stages. The burden of stage one is that, taken together, CT and the language of thought hypothesis (hereafter LOT) are incompatible with NTDP. The burden of (...) stage two is that acceptance of CT requires acceptance of LOT as well. It follows that CT is incompatible with NTDP. I organize things in this way in part because it makes the argument easier to understand, and in part because the stage-two thesis—that CT entails LOT—has some independent interest and is therefore worth separating from the rest of the argument. (shrink)

From February 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to closures of educational institutions to reduce the spread of infectious disease. This forced the U.S. education system into a massive experiment with online education. Despite conducting online bioethics education for nearly twenty years, our bioethics program, a joint endeavor of Clarkson University and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, was not immune to this disruption because our curriculum features intensive, one-week onsite courses. Even in the face of historic disruptions, it is (...) vital to ensure minimal interruptions to teaching and assessing students to provide effective education. This paper reviews the steps we took to successfully convert the onsite components of our curriculum to a synchronous online format, and it focuses on how we preserved instruction and assessment of practical skills that comprise these courses’ core. It also explains how we fostered interactive classroom environments. (shrink)

It has been generally assumed that certain categories of numerical expressions, such as ‘more than n’, ‘at least n’, and ‘fewer than n’, systematically fail to give rise to scalar implicatures in unembedded declarative contexts. Various proposals have been developed to explain this perceived absence. In this paper, we consider the relevance of scale granularity to scalar implicature, and make two novel predictions: first, that scalar implicatures are in fact available from these numerical expressions at the appropriate granularity level, and (...) second, that these implicatures are attenuated if the numeral has been previously mentioned or is otherwise salient in the context. We present novel experimental data in support of both of these predictions, and discuss the implications of this for recent accounts of numerical quantifier usage. (shrink)

This collection of essays on themes in the work of John Locke , George Berkeley , and David Hume , provides a deepened understanding of major issues raised in the Empiricist tradition. In exploring their shared belief in the experiential nature of mental constructs, The Empiricists illuminates the different methodologies of these great Enlightenment philosophers and introduces students to important metaphysical and epistemological issues including the theory of ideas, personal identity, and skepticism. It will be especially useful in courses devoted (...) to the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)