Online research in philosophy

• home page

• Graduate student, York University
• PhD, Université du Québec à Montreal, 2008.

• Philosophy of Mind
• Epistemology
• Philosophy of Social Science
• Normative Ethics
• General Philosophy of Science

• Philosophy of Mind
• Epistemology
• General Philosophy of Science

My scholarly labours have thus far centered on opening up hitherto unnoticed avenues of theoretical reflection in epistemology, philosophy of mind, semiotics, and general philosophy of science. Topics I have addressed in this manner include the nature of consciousness, logical inference, arguments for metaphysical realism and anti-scepticism, the causal and discursive mechanisms whereby knowledge claims (scientific or otherwise) come to be justified, alternative approaches to the study of meaning, cognitive ethology, informational theories of concepts, and the ramifications of embodiment for agency, perception, and normativity. I am (proudly) conversant with the "analytic" and "continental" traditions—and still more. Major figures I am interested in (and/or indebted to) include Aristotle, Charles Sanders Peirce, John McDowell, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Deely, Karl Popper, Ned Block, Fred Dretske, Ayn Rand, Daniel Dennett, John Duns Scotus, Arthur Schopenhauer, Stathis Psillos, Shaun Gallagher, Epicurus, Umberto Eco, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Poinsot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Abélard.

12 items found. Sort by: publication yearfirst authorviewingsaddition date M. Champagne (forthcoming). One's a Crowd? On Greenwood's Delimitation of the Social. Philosophy of the Social Sciences. In an effort to carve a distinct place for social facts without lapsing into a holistic ontology, John Greenwood has sought to define social phenomena solely in terms of the attitudes held by the actor(s) in question. I argue that his proposal allows for the possibility of a “lone collectivity” that is (1) unpalatable in its own right and (2) incompatible with the claim that sociology is autonomous from psychology. As such, I conclude that the relevant beliefs need to be (...) held by more than one person. (shrink) Autonomy in Political Theories in Social and Political Philosophy Holism and Individualism in Social Science in Philosophy of Social Science Direct download (4 more)     My bibliography     Export citation   Marc Champagne (2013). Choosing Between the Long and Short Informational Routes to Psychological Explanation. Philosophical Psychology 26 (1):129-138. Following recent work by Don Ross (Ross, 2000; Ross & Spurrett, 2004), I contrast the influential theories of Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland in information-theoretic terms. Dennett makes much of the fact that the morphological shorthand which emerges before a witness as she looks upon cohesive aggregates of matter commands some measure of predictive power. This, for him, speaks against eliminating recourse to an intentional vocabulary. By contrast, the eliminative materialism defended by Churchland does not gloss such informational compressibility as (...) an explanatory desideratum, and thus regards the informational noise which accrues at higher levels of description as patently unacceptable. Yet, since it is unlikely, as Ross, Ladyman, and Collier (2007) have recently suggested, that anything remains once we subtract the appeal to patterns, I argue that the ubiquity of informational compression in scientific explanation seriously undermines the claim that talk of the mental could be eliminated. (shrink) Psychological Explanation in Philosophy of Cognitive Science Direct download (3 more)     My bibliography     Export citation   Marc Champagne (2013). Can “I” Prevent You From Entering My Mind? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12 (1):145-162. Shaun Gallagher has actively looked into the possibility that psychopathologies involving “thought insertion” might supply a counterexample to the Cartesian principle according to which one can always recognize one’s own thoughts as one’s own. Animated by a general distrust of a priori demonstrations, Gallagher is convinced that pitting clinical cases against philosophical arguments is a worthwhile endeavor. There is no doubt that, if true, a falsification of the immunity to error through misidentification would entail drastic revisions in how we conceive (...) the boundary between self and other. However, I argue that (1) the idea of unearthing an exception to the Cartesian thesis is, on further reflection, not a realistic prospect and that (2) this casts doubt on the attempt to conjoin first-person phenomenology and third-person cognitive science in the service of philosophical debates. (shrink) Immunity to Error through Misidentification in Philosophy of Mind Direct download (6 more)     My bibliography     Export citation   Marc Champagne (2012). Russell and the Newman Problem Revisited. Analysis and Metaphysics. In his 1927 Analysis of Matter and elsewhere, Russell argued that we can successfully infer the structure of the external world from that of our explanatory schemes. While nothing guarantees that the intrinsic qualities of experiences are shared by their objects, he held that the relations tying together those relata perforce mirror relations that actually obtain (these being expressible in the formal idiom of the Principia Mathematica). This claim was subsequently criticized by the Cambridge mathematician Max Newman as true but (...) trivial, insofar as from a closed body of observations (or “Ramsey sentence”) one can always generate other equally-satisfactory networks of relations, provided they respect the original set’s cardinality. Since any model thus generated will be empirically adequate, “[t]he defence is therefore driven back from the fairly safe fictitious-real classification to the much less tenable ‘trivial’ and ‘important’” (Newman 1928). Given the definitional rigour afforded by the initial appeal to isomorphism (via one-to-one correspondences in extension), the received assessment, shared by Russell himself, is that retreating to a pragmatic adjudication would betoken a fatal blow. However, I suggest that reliance on “importance” can be avoided if we incorporate an impersonal criterion of diachronic precedence. When collecting observations, an ordinality emerges alongside the cardinality which gives that underived structure an irrevocable epistemological privilege. Hence, I argue that, all other things being equal, any construct parasitic on an antecedent theory ought to be regarded as inferior/dispensable, since it was generated by an algorithm lacking the world-involving pedigree of its host structure. (shrink) Bertrand Russell in 20th Century Philosophy Logical Empiricism in 20th Century Philosophy Philosophy of Science, General Works in Philosophy of Science, Misc The Model-Theoretic Argument in Metaphysics The Observation-Theory Distinction in General Philosophy of Science Direct download     My bibliography     Export citation   Marc Champagne (2011). Постулируя нормативность умвельта. Резюме. Sign Systems Studies 39 (1):58-58. No categories Direct download     My bibliography     Export citation   Marc Champagne (2011). Axiomatizing Umwelt Normativity. Sign Systems Studies 39 (11):9-59. Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in rehearsing accepted moral intuitions, and have failed to concretely further our knowledge of why or how a creature comes to order objects in its environment in accordance with axiological charges of value or disvalue. For want of a more explicit account, theorists (...) writing on the topic have relied almost exclusively on semiotic insights about perception originally designed as part of a sophisticated refutation of idealism. The end result, which has been a form of direct givenness, has thus been far from convincing. In an effort to bring substance to the right-headed suggestion that values are rooted in the biological and conform to species-specific requirements, we present a novel conception that strives to make explicit the elemental structure underlying umwelt normativity. Building and expanding on the seminal work of Ayn Rand in metaethics, we describe values as an intertwined lattice which takes a creature’s own embodied life as its ultimate standard; and endeavour to show how, from this, all subsequent valuations can in principle be determined. (shrink) Life in Philosophy of Biology Moral Realism, Misc in Meta-Ethics Philosophy of Biology, Misc in Philosophy of Biology Semiotics in Social Sciences Values and Norms in Normative Ethics Direct download (2 more)     My bibliography     Export citation   Marc Champagne (2011). Postuleerides omailma normatiivsust. Kokkuvõte. Sign Systems Studies 39 (1):59-59. No categories Direct download     My bibliography     Export citation   Marc Champagne (2011). What About Suicide Bombers? A Terse Response to a Terse Objection. Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 11 (2):233–236. Stressing that the pronoun "I" picks out one and only one person in the world (i.e., me), I argue against Hunt (and other like-minded Rand commentators) that the supposed "hard case" of destructive people who do not care for their own lives poses no special difficulty for rational egoism. I conclude that the proper response to a terse objection like "What about suicide bombers?" is the equally terse assertion "But I don't want to get blown up.". General Issues in Applied Ethics, Misc in Applied Ethics Harm in Applied Ethics in Applied Ethics Moral Judgment, Misc in Meta-Ethics Direct download     My bibliography     Export citation   Marc Champagne (2009). Explaining the Qualitative Dimension of Consciousness: Prescission Instead of Reification. Dialogue 48 (01):145-183. This paper suggests that it is largely a want of notional distinctions which fosters the "explanatory gap" that has beset the study of consciousness since T. Nagel's revival of the topic. Modifying Ned Block's controversial claim that we should countenance a "phenomenal module" which exists in its own right, we argue that there is a way to recuperate the intuitions he appeals to without engaging in an onerous reification of the facet in question. By renewing with the full type/token/tone trichotomy (...) developed by C. S. Peirce, we think the distinctness Block (rightly) calls attention to can be seen as stemming not from any separate module lurking within the mind, but rather from our ability to prescind qualities from occurrences. (shrink) Philosophy of Consciousness, Misc in Philosophy of Mind Philosophy of Mind, General Works in Philosophy of Mind Qualia, Misc in Philosophy of Mind The Explanatory Gap in Philosophy of Mind What is it Like? in Philosophy of Mind Direct download (2 more)     My bibliography     Export citation   Marc Champagne (2009). Some Semiotic Constraints on Metarepresentational Accounts of Consciousness. In John N. Deely & Leonard G. Sbrocchi (eds.), Semiotics 2008 (Proceedings of the 33rd annual meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, pp. 557-564. Legas Press. "Representation" is one of those Janus-faced terms that seems blatantly obvious when used in a casual or pre-theoretic manner, but which reveals itself far more slippery when attentively studied. Any allusion to "metarepresentation", it would then seem, only compounds these difficulties. Taking the metarepresentationalist framework in its roughest outline as our point of departure, we thus articulate four key "structural" features that appear binding for any such theory. Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness, Misc in Philosophy of Mind Direct download (2 more)     My bibliography     Export citation   Marc Champagne (2008-09). What Anchors Semiosis: How Descartes Changed the Subject. RS/SI (Recherches Sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry) 28 (3-1):183–197. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it revises the historiographic partition proposed by John Deely in Four Ages of Understanding (2001) by arguing that the moment marking the beginning of philosophical Modernity has been vividly recorded in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy with the experiment with the wax. Second, an upshot of this historical study is that it helps make sense of Deely’s somewhat iconoclastic use of the words “subject” and “subjectivity” to designate mind-independent worldly things. The hope (...) is that successfully accomplishing these twin tasks will give semiotic inquiry a better appreciation of its own history, as well as resources genial to furthering its ongoing development. (shrink) History: Skepticism in Epistemology Medieval Metaphysics in Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy Metaphysical Realism in Metaphysics René Descartes in 17th/18th Century Philosophy Direct download     My bibliography     Export citation   Marc Champagne (2006). Some Convergences and Divergences in the Realism of Charles Peirce and Ayn Rand. Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 8 (1):19-39. Structured around Charles S. Peirce's three-fold categorical scheme, this article proposes a comparative study of Ayn Rand and Peirce's realist views in general metaphysics. Rand's stance is seen as diverging with Peirce's argument from asymptotic representation but converging with arguments from brute relation and neutral category. It is argued that, by dismissing traditional subject-object dualisms, Rand and Peirce both propose iconoclastic construals of what it means to be real, dismissals made all the more noteworthy by the fact each chose to (...) ground them in indissoluble triads of self-evident first principles. (shrink) 20th Century Philosophy Charles Sanders Peirce in 19th Century Philosophy Metaphysical Realism in Metaphysics Direct download     My bibliography     Export citation

Is this list right? BibTeX / EndNote / RIS / etc Export this page: Choose a format.. Formatted textPlain textBibTeXZoteroEndNoteReference Manager Limit to items. Viewing options show categories categorization shortcuts hide abstracts open articles in new windows Open Category Editor Off-campus access Using PhilPapers from home? Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access. Monitor this page Be alerted of all new items appearing on this page. Choose how you want to monitor it: Email   RSS feed About PhilPapers Institute of Philosophy School of Advanced Study University of London Centre for Consciousness Australian National University General Editors: David Bourget (London) David Chalmers (ANU, NYU) Area Editors: Anthony Beavers David Bourget Berit Brogaard Margaret Cameron David Chalmers Gabriele Contessa Rafael De Clercq Catarina Dutilh Novaes Pablo Gilabert Hans Halvorson Jonathan Ichikawa Jonathan Kvanvig Øystein Linnebo JeeLoo Liu Paul Livingston Brandon Look Michiru Nagatsu Susana Nuccetelli Gualtiero Piccinini Darrell Rowbottom Constantine Sandis Jonathan Schaffer Thomas Senor Robin Smith Robert Sparrow Daniel Star Jussi Suikkanen Lynne Tirrell John Simpson Wilkins Other editors Contact us Learn more about PhilPapers