There is a long and storied history of debates over 'realism' that has touched literally every academic discipline. Yet realism- antirealism debates play a relatively minor role in the contemporary study of consciousness. In this paper four basic varieties of realism and antirealism are explored and their potential impact on the study of consciousness is considered. Reasons are offered to explain why there is not more debate over these issues, including a discussion of the powerful influence of externalist versions of (...) physicalist realism. Examples are given of approaches to consciousness studies that challenge contemporary versions of physicalist realism. (shrink)

In a recent article, James Van Cleve joins a growing throng who have argued that Hilary Putnam's model-theoretic argument (and his "just more theory" response) begs the question against those who hold externalist theories of reference. Van Cleve has misinterpreted Putnam's argument. Putnam does not demand that the statements which make up the causal theory of reference must, themselves, do the reference-fixing. That would be question-begging. Rather, Putnam's argument is a "reductio", which can only be blocked with a theory of (...) reference that is both substantive and plausible. Putnam argues that there is no interpretation of "causality" that meets both conditions. (shrink)

According to the most popular theories of intentionality, a family of theories we will refer to as “functional intentionality,” a machine can have genuine intentional states so long as it has functionally characterizable mental states that are causally hooked up to the world in the right way. This paper considers a detailed description of a robot that seems to meet the conditions of functional intentionality, but which falls victim to what I call “the composition problem.” One obvious way to escape (...) the problem (arguably, the only way) is if the robot can be shown to be a moral patient – to deserve a particular moral status. If so, it isn’t clear how functional intentionality could remain plausible (something like “phenomenal intentionality” would be required). Finally, while it would have seemed that a reasonable strategy for establishing the moral status of intelligent machines would be to demonstrate that the machine possessed genuine intentionality, the composition argument suggests that the order of precedence is reversed: The machine must first be shown to possess a particular moral status before it is a candidate for having genuine intentionality. (shrink)

This paper has two main goals. First, it asks whether causality is an adequate foundation for those theories of cognition and consciousness that are built upon it. The externalist revolution has reconceived all three dimensions of cognition -- the semantic, the epistemological, and the mental -- upon a foundation of 'causal connections of the appropriate type'. Yet, these new theories almost completely ignore the long-standing controversies surrounding the very nature of causality, and the very real threat that 'causality' may be (...) ill-equipped to do the work required of it. The second goal is to defend a kind of causality, largely ignored, that is grounded in the phenomenally conscious states of cognitive agents. While it is popular to try to reduce consciousness to causality, this is a kind of causality that ultimately reduces to (phenomenal) consciousness. (shrink)

Virtual environments engage millions of people and billions of dollars each year. What is the ontological status of the virtual objects that populate those environments? An adequate answer to that question requires a developed semantics for virtual environments. The truth-conditions must be identified for “tree”-sentences when uttered by speakers immersed in a virtual environment (VE). It will be argued that statements about virtual objects have truth-conditions roughly comparable to the verificationist conditions popular amongst some contemporary antirealists. This does not mean (...) that the virtual objects lack ontological standing. There is an important sense in which virtual objects are no less real for being mind-dependent. (shrink)

This is an extended intellectual obituary for Hilary Putnam.

There is a dogma about metaphysical realism that is well nigh universal: "If one is a metaphysical realist about the external world, then one ought to be a semantic realist about external- world statements". I argue that this dogma should be rejected. It is possible for a metaphysical realist to be a "semantic dualist", holding that some middle- sized object statements receive a realist interpretation, but that most such statements require an antirealist interpretation. To show that a semantically dual language (...) is at least possible, I describe a possible world whose inhabitants speak a version of English that is syntactically dual. Further I argue that English in the "actual world" is itself semantically dual. (shrink)

Functional intentionality is the dominant theory about how mental states come to have the content that they do. Phenomenal intentionality is an increasingly popular alternative to that orthodoxy, claiming that intentionality cannot be functionalized and that nothing is a mental state with intentional content unless it is phenomenally conscious. There is a consensus among defenders of phenomenal intentionality that the kind of phenomenology that is both necessary and sufficient for having a belief that "there is a tree in the quad" (...) is that the agent be consciously aware of the meaning of "tree" and "quad". On this theory, experiences with a valence -- experiences like happiness and sadness, satisfaction and frustration -- are irrelevant to intentionality. This paper challenges that assumption and considers several versions of "valent phenomenal intentionality" according to which a capacity for valent conscious experiences is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for intentionality (or both). (shrink)

The thesis of this dissertation is that "the realism-idealism debate" is both a theoretical and a practical dispute. The practical dimension has been largely ignored because the deficiencies in the theoretical positions have gone unnoticed. As theoretical doctrines, realism and idealism are best interpreted as semantic theories specifying the conditions in virtue of which our statements are true and false. As semantic doctrines, however, both realism and idealism are false. Neither semantic theory is consistent with other philosophical positions to which (...) most contemporary philosophers are committed. Once it is acknowledged that most of the participants to the realism-idealism debate are not actually committed to either semantic realism or semantic idealism, the doctrines of "practical realism" and "practical idealism" can be given the attention they deserve. ;In Chapter One it is argued that the only acceptable candidate for a theoretical construal of realism is "semantic realism" as applied to the class of statements that express our ontological commitments. Chapter Two defends this claim against contemporary physicalist realists who argue that realism is strictly an "ontological" doctrine. Chapter Three investigates two famous arguments that are generally thought to be the strongest justification for the truth of semantic realism. It is shown that whether or not they are sound, they do not actually argue to the conclusion that semantic realism is true. Chapter Four presents what I refer to as "particularist" refutations of semantic realism and semantic idealism. Neither semantic realism nor semantic idealism is consistent with our "considered convictions" about the meaning of our utterances and thus should be rejected. Finally, Chapter Five offers a preliminary account of "practical realism" and "practical idealism" and thus a new model for the interpretation of many types of realism-idealism discourse. (shrink)

Do psychological traits predict philosophical views? We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (e.g., epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (N = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a number of psychological traits, such as personality, numeracy, well-being, lifestyle, and life experiences. We also included non-technical ‘translations’ of these views for eventual use (...) in other populations. We found limited to no support for the notion that personality or demographics predict philosophical views. We did, however, find that some psychological traits were predictive of philosophical views, even after strict correction for multiple comparisons. Findings include: higher interest in numeracy predicted physicalism, naturalism, and consequentialism; lower levels of well-being and higher levels of mental illness predicted hard determinism; using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predicted non-realist and subjectivist views of morality and aesthetics; having had a transformative or self-transcendent experience predicted theism and idealism. We discuss whether or not these empirical results have philosophical implications, while noting that 68% of our sample of professional philosophers indicated that such findings would indeed have philosophical value. (shrink)

This collection of original essays by preeminent interpreters of continental philosophy explores the question of whether Western thought and culture have been dominated by a vision-centered paradigm of knowledge, ethics, and power. It focuses on the character of vision in modern philosophy and on arguments for and against the view that contemporary life and thought are distinctively "ocularcentric." The authors examine these ideas in the context of the history of philosophy and consider the character of visual discourse in the writings (...) of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Habermas. With essays on television, the visual arts, and feminism, the book will interest readers in cultural studies, gender studies, and art history as well as philosophers. (shrink)

Henry More was probably the most important English philosopher between Hobbes and Locke. Described as the 'hammer' of the Cartesians, More attacked Descartes' conception of spirit as undermining its very intelligibility. This work, which analyses an episode in the evolution of the concept of spiritual substance in early modernity, looks at More's rational theology within the context of the great seventeenth century Cartesian controversies over spirit, soul-body interaction, and divine omnipresence. This work argues that More's new, univocal spirit conception, highly (...) influential upon Newton and Clarke, contributed unwittingly to a slow secularisation process internal to theistic culture. It thus fills a lacuna in scholarship by examining how conceptual changes in early modern metaphysics, as opposed to better researched transformations in moral philosophy, were an additional ingredient in the origins of modern speculative atheism. It also suggests that these controversies are by no means merely of historical interest but represent a resource for contemporary philosophical reflection. (shrink)

Leveraging, according to David M. Anderson and his colleagues, is both a basic principle of human conduct and the most dominant strategy in recent years that individuals, organizations and countries use to pursue their ends. Although many scholars agree that a crisis of "over-leveraging" caused the financial crisis of 2008-2010, it has not been appreciated that an "over-leveraging" crisis has existed in American politics and the American family system as well. This book addresses the need for a "Leverage (...) Mean" (falling between the extremes of too much leverage and too little leverage) in the economy, politics, family life, and international relations. It identifies three different kinds of leveraging-bargaining, resource, and investment and provides an explanatory and normative theory which draws on the fields of economics, political science, sociology, history, psychology, international relations, law, and philosophy. Moreover, it shows how the dissolution of the Cold War, the dismantling of the modern family, and the rise of the Internet along with the deregulation of the financial services industry led to the diffusion of power which has made leveraging of the first importance for everyone. This book should be of interest to social scientists, philosophers, political theorists, public policy makers and politicians. David Anderson and his colleagues are the first to characterize and assess one of the major instruments of power of the contemporary era. This volume represents the best work on leverage since Archimedes and will be widely read and discussed. Benjamin Ginsberg, David Bernstein Professor of Political Science and Chair, Center for Advanced Governmental Studies, Johns Hopkins University Leverage might literally be the operative word of the 21st century. Anderson's volume is a wide-ranging and illuminating study of this fundamental and dynamic concept. Parag Khanna, Senior Fellow, New Amer ica Foundation, author of The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-first Century. (shrink)

The posterior cortex, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex in the Leabra architecture are specialized in terms of various neural parameters, and thus are predilections for learning and processing, but domain-general in terms of cognitive functions such as face recognition. Also, these areas are not encapsulated and violate Fodorian criteria for modularity. Anderson's terminology obscures these important points, but we applaud his overall message.

Abstract. Although the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), a current approach to the scientific study of religion, has exerted an influence in the study of religion for almost twenty years, the question of its compatibility or incompatibility with theism has not been the subject of serious discussion until recently. Some critics of religion have taken a lively interest in the CSR because they see it as useful in explaining why religious believers consistently make costly commitments to false beliefs. Conversely, some (...) theists have argued for the compatibility of religious belief with basic CSR results. In this article, we contribute to the incipient discussion about the worldview relevance of the CSR by arguing that while a theistic reading of the field only represents one interpretative option at most, antitheistic claims about the incompatibility of the CSR with theism look like they may be harder to maintain than first appearances might suggest. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen the emergence of various cognitive and biological explanations of religious belief that claim to be better scientifically supported than predecessor explanations. This article provides an overview of such explanations and some of the philosophical discussions they have evoked. Contemporary naturalistic explanations of religious belief come in three types: cognitive explanations, evolutionary explanations and co‐evolutionary explanations. Some writers have claimed that scientifically plausible biological and psychological accounts of religious belief make religious belief itself irrational because they reveal (...) the naturalness and unreliability of the mechanisms that produce religious belief. Conversely, others have argued that the possible naturalness of religious belief is not enough to make it irrational or unwarranted. They maintain that naturalistic explanations of religious belief cannot debunk religious belief wholesale, but instead their religious relevance depends on the ways in which religious people justify their beliefs. Philosophical debates are currently in their early stages, as are the naturalistic theories, and the chief philosophical stakes themselves have not yet come entirely into focus. (shrink)

The effect of concurrent movement on incidental versus intentional statistical learning was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants learned the statistical regularities embedded within familiarization stimuli implicitly, whereas in Experiment 2 they were made aware of the embedded regularities and were instructed explicitly to learn these regularities. Experiment 1 demonstrated that while the control group were able to learn the statistical regularities, the resistance-free cycling group and the exercise group did not demonstrate learning. This is in contrast with (...) the findings of Experiment 2, where all three groups demonstrated significant levels of learning. The results suggest that the movement demands, rather than the physiological stress, interfered with statistical learning. We suggest movement activates the striatum, which is not only responsible for motor control but also plays a role in incidental learning. (shrink)

Stephen Darwall notes that for Cudworth the fundamental ethical motive is love, but that the Cambridge Platonist tells us little about love’s character, aim and object. In this article I examine Cudworth’s doctrine of ‘superintellectual instinct’ as a natural love for or inclination to the good as it takes shape in two of his unpublished freewill manuscripts. I show that in these manuscripts he assumes a threefold model of how this higher love as a natural or ‘created’ grace fits into (...) the overall moral life of a person, together with human free will and special grace. I argue that although Cudworth adopts an Origenist synergistic position on the question of the relationship between grace and free will, stating that special grace is a necessary condition of salvation conjointly with free will and creation grace, in reality he struggles to show the strict necessity of special grace. (shrink)

These essays highlight the shifting sets of relationships which determine the forms taken by desire. They argue that the spread of the subject within and across geographic, ethnic, class and gender boundaries makes a difference to the ways in which desire is theorized, experienced and represented.

The effect of task difficulty on inter-task transfer is a classic issue in motor learning. We examined the relation between self-efficacy and transfer of learning after practicing different versions of a stick balancing task. Practicing the same task or an easier version led to significant pre- to post-test transfer of learning, whereas practicing a more difficult version did not. Self-efficacy increased modestly from pre- to post-test with easy practice, but decreased significantly with difficult practice. In addition, self-efficacy immediately prior to (...) the post-test was significantly lower after difficult practice than easy or intermediate practice. Self-efficacy immediately prior to the post-test, performance at the end of practice, and pre-test performance explained 75% of the variance in post-test performance. The mediating role of self-efficacy on transfer of learning offers an alternative explanation for recent findings on the superiority of easy-to-difficult transfer and may help clarify inconsistencies in earlier research. (shrink)

This study examined the effect of a prior bout of exercise on implicit cognition. Specifically, we examined whether a prior bout of moderate intensity exercise affected performance on a statistical learning task in healthy adults. A total of 42 participants were allocated to one of three conditions—a control group, a group that exercised for 15 min prior to the statistical learning task, and a group that exercised for 30 min prior to the statistical learning task. The participants in the exercise (...) groups cycled at 60% of their respective V˙O2max. Each group demonstrated significant statistical learning, with similar levels of learning among the three groups. Contrary to previous research that has shown that a prior bout of exercise can affect performance on explicit cognitive tasks, the results of the current study suggest that the physiological stress induced by moderate-intensity exercise does not affect implicit cognition as measured by statistical learning. (shrink)

Cet article examine l’interprétation athée de la doctrine de l’esprit de Descartes que More propose dans ses écrits tardifs, en particulier dans l’ Enchiridion Metaphysicum de 1671 et dans des remarques éparses dans ses scholies de 1679. More n’a pas toujours pensé que la philosophie de Descartes conduisait à l’athéisme. Cependant, je suggère qu’à l’époque où il rédigeait l’ Enchiridion, il était convaincu que le cartésianisme impliquait l’athéisme au sens fort où il impliquait l’impossibilité de Dieu. Je présente les principales (...) raisons de More à l’appui de sa lecture athée et me tourne dans une seconde partie vers son principal problème à l’égard de la doctrine de l’esprit de Descartes – ce qu’il nomme « nullibisme ». La critique du nullibisme par More est implicite dès la correspondance avec Descartes (1648-1649), mais c’est seulement dans les œuvres ultérieures et en particulier dans l’ Enchiridion qu’elle est principalement développée. J’essaie de montrer que le problème avec le nullibisme se réduit au problème avec l’autre doctrine de l’esprit inacceptable aux yeux de More – le « holenmérisme » scolastique – et que sa reductio ad atheismum de la philosophie de Descartes repose au fond sur sa façon de comprendre le holenmérisme. Or je suggère que celle-ci n’est pas charitable. À l’inverse, la doctrine de l’esprit qu’il défend – l’étendue spirituelle – échoue à surmonter les difficultés que le nullibisme et le holenmérisme cherchent, chacune de leur manière, à résoudre. (shrink)

How do educators better reach their students, better capture their attention and imagination without sacrificing scholarship? Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education examines the pedagogy of Prescott College, a school that has embraced experiential education and been finding success with it for over thirty years. These essays—from scholars in fields as wide ranging as religious studies, environmental science, psychology, dance, literature, adventure education, and peace studies—examine the challenges and, ultimately, the rewards of student-centered education.

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The Concussion in Sport Group guidelines have successfully brought the attention of brain injuries to the global medical and sport research communities, and has significantly impacted brain injury-related practices and rules of international sport. Despite being the global repository of state-of-the-art science, diagnostic tools and guides to clinical practice, the ensuing consensus statements remain the object of ethical and sociocultural criticism. The purpose of this paper is to bring to bear a broad range of multidisciplinary challenges to the processes and (...) products of sport-related concussion movement. We identify lacunae in scientific research and clinical guidance in relation to age, disability, gender and race. We also identify, through multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary analysis, a range of ethical problems resulting from conflicts of interest, processes of attributing expertise in sport-related concussion, unjustifiably narrow methodological control and insufficient athlete engagement in research and policy development. We argue that the sport and exercise medicine community need to augment the existing research and practice foci to understand these problems more holistically and, in turn, provide guidance and recommendations that help sport clinicians better care for brain-injured athletes. (shrink)