Online research in philosophy

Arithmetical self-reference through diagonalization is compared with self-recognition in a mirror, in a series of diagrams that show the structure and main stages of construction of self-referential sentences. A Gödel code is compared with a mirror, Gödel numbers with mirror images, numerical reference to arithmetical formulas with using a mirror to see things indirectly, self-reference with looking at one’s own image, and arithmetical provability of self-reference with recognition of the mirror image. The comparison turns arithmetical self-reference into an idealized model of self-recognition and the conception(s) of self based on that capacity.

The paper argues that an important class of aesthetic terms cannot be used as metaphors because it is impossible to commit a category mistake with them. It then uses this fact to provide a general definition of 'aesthetic property'.

In this journal, Luke Russell defends a sophisticated dispositional account of evil personhood according to which a person is evil just in case she is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions in conditions that favour her autonomy. While I am generally sympathetic with this account, I argue that Russell wrongly dismisses the mirror thesis—roughly, the thesis that evil people are the mirror images of the morally best sort of persons—which I have defended elsewhere. Russell’s rejection of the mirror thesis depends upon an independently implausible account of moral sainthood, one that is implausible for reasons that Russell himself suggests in another context. Indeed, an account of moral sainthood that parallels Russell’s account of evil personhood is plausible for the same reasons that his account of evil personhood is, and that suggests that Russell himself is actually committed to the mirror thesis.

A number of philosophers have been impressed with the thought that moral saints and moral monsters—or, evil people, to put it less sensationally—“mirror” one another, in a sense to be explained. Call this the mirror thesis. The project of this paper is to cash out the metaphorical suggestion that moral saints and evil persons mirror one other and to articulate the most plausible literal version of the mirror thesis. To anticipate, the most plausible version of the mirror thesis implies that evil persons mirror moral saints insofar as the characters of each are marked by similar aretaic properties: suffering from extremely vicious character traits—in a sense to be explained—suffices for being evil whereas possessing extremely virtuous character traits similarly suffices for moral sainthood.

Mirror neurons are neurons which fire in two distinct conditions: (i) when an agent performs a specific action, like a precision grasp of an object using fingers, and (ii) when an agent observes that action performed by another. Some theorists have suggested that the existence of such neurons may lend support to the simulation approach to mindreading (e.g. Gallese and Goldman, 1998, 'Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind reading'). In this note I critically examine this suggestion, in both its original and a revised form (due to Iacoboni et al., 2005, 'Grasping the intentions of others with one's own mirror neuron system'), and argue that the existence of mirror neurons can in fact tell us very little about how intentional attribution actually proceeds.

Lake Tanganiyka has lefty and righty cichlid fish that show there can be natural selection for a trait over its mirror image counterpart.This raises the question Can there be biological selection of a whole organism over its mirror image counterpart? That is, could the fitness of a fish be altered by simply changing it into its own enantaniomorph? My answer is no. I present Flatlander thought experiment to demonstrate that mirror imagecounterparts are duplicates because they only differ in how they happen to be oriented in space. The counterparts have the same intrinsic properties and are in the same environment,so there can be no difference in fitness.

A flop is a picture that mirror reverses the original scene. Some flops are reversed copies. For instance, mirror reversal is systematic with technologies that require contact between a template and an imprint surface. Other flops are just pictures that have undergone the operation of flopping. For example, a slide that is inserted backwards into a projector is a flop.

According to Roy Sorensen [Philosophical Studies 100 (2000) 175-191] an object cannot differ aesthetically from its mirror image. On his view, mirror-reversing an object — changing its left/right orientation — cannot bring about any aesthetic change. However, in arguing for this thesis Sorensen assumes that aesthetic properties supervene on intrinsic properties alone. This is a highly controversial assumption and nothing is offered in its support. Moreover, a plausible weakening of the assumption does not improve the argument. Finally, Sorensen's second argument is shown to be formally flawed. As a result, the case for the aesthetic irrelevancy of orientation seems still open.