In ‘Wittgenstein and Qualia’ Ned Block argues for the existence of inverted spectra and those ineffable things, qualia. The essence of his discussion is a would-be proof, presented through a series of pictures, of the possible existence of an inverted spectrum. His argument appeals to some remarks by Wittgenstein which, Block holds, commit the former to a certain ‘dangerous scenario’ wherein inverted spectra, and consequently qualia live and breath. I hold that a key premise of (...) this proof is incoherent. Furthermore, Block’s dangerous scenario does not follow from Wittgenstein’s innocent one, as Block believes it does, but rather is in conflict with it. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Relativistic Content The Argument from Primitive Colors The Argument from the Inverted Spectrum The Argument from Dual Looks The Argument from Duplication Conclusion References.

Formerly a spectral apparition that haunted behaviorism and provided a puzzle about our knowledge of other minds, the inverted spectrum possibility has emerged as an important challenge to functionalist accounts of qualia. The inverted spectrum hypothesis raises the possibility that two individuals might think and behave in the same way yet have different qualia. The traditional supposition is of an individual who has a subjective color spectrum that is inverted with regard to that had (...) by other individuals. When he looks at red objects, this individual has the qualia normally produced in others by blue objects. And when presented with a blue object, this individual experiences qualia that most persons experience only when presented with red objects. And so forth - the Invert's color spectrum is the inverse of normal; there are systematic inter-subjective differences in qualia. (shrink)

Purest points of Hering's six primary colors reside at different levels of lightness such that inversion of each hue pair would be detectable in subjects' choice of foci on the Munsell array. An inverted spectrum would not impose the isomorphism constraint on a contrast of red-green or yellow-blue, whatever we conclude about inference in functionalism.

This is terribly hard, Thouless, I'm sorry. I have thought over all this for years. … It is now as if we had ploughed furrows in different parts of a field. There is a lot left to do. Judging from their writings, most contemporary analytic philosophers have not been persuaded that “the inverted spectrum problem” is – as Wittgenstein maintained – really a conceptual puzzle calling for dissolution, rather than a straight problem calling for a solution. In (...) this paper, I present Wittgenstein's view as clearly and persuasively as I can, contrasting it with the views of Sidney Shoemaker and Ned Block, two of his more prominent critics. I conclude with a look at Frank Jackson's well-known Knowledge Argument, which, if successful, would demonstrate the futility of looking for a physicalist solution to the inverted spectrum and related philosophical problems. My goal is to combat what I take to be the common and unfortunate failure – among both physicalistically inclined philosophers, including Shoemaker and Block, and anti-physicalists, such as Jackson – to appreciate the force of Wittgenstein's arguments. (shrink)

Intentionalism holds that two experiences differ in their representational content if and only if they differ in phenomenal character. It is generally held that Intentionalism cannot allow for the possibility of spectrum inversion without systematic error, unless it abandons the idea that, for example, the qualitative character of color experience is inherited from the qualitative character of colors. The paper argues that the conjunction of all three -- the possibility of spectrum inversion, Intentionalism, and the inheritance thesis (...) -- can be consistently, and plausibly, accepted. (shrink)

It is possible for a person and their environment to be physically identical each day and yet the representational content of their beliefs about color are inverted. Each day they utter the same words, ‘Wow! The colors of everything have switched again today.’ In uttering these words, they express a different proposition each day. This supports the view held by Reichenbach and Carnap that when it comes to representations of colored objects, relations of similarity and difference are fundamental. There (...) are no such things as colors like ‘redness’ and ‘greenness’ apart from the particular things we call red and green. (shrink)

Christopher Peacocke has recently made an important and insightful effort to fashion a non-verificationist method for distinguishing sense from nonsense. The argument is subtle and complex, and varies somewhat with each of his three target ‘spurious hypotheses’: that if a perfect fission of one person into two were to occur, one and only one of the resulting persons would be identical with the original; that another person’s visual experience can be qualitatively different from your own when you (...) are both seeing the same object, even though your relevant brain states are physically identical and so are your environmental conditions; and that the entire material universe is moving undetectably at a particular uniform velocity with respect to absolute space. My own assessment of his efforts is that they are most successful against the third of these hypotheses, and that this is a function of the fact that of the three, it alone clearly employs a problematic concept- that of absolute location. However, my purpose here is not to engage in a comprehensive evaluation of Peacocke’s project; it is rather to defend the extreme inverted spectrum hypothesis against his attack. I shall argue not only that his argument against EISH fails, but that he is himself independently committed to its intelligibility. Beyond that, I shall point out some striking and, to my mind, welcome consequences of his plausible claims concerning the relations between his own proposal and certain other views concerning content theory; the consequences in question depend both on his positive proposal and on my reasons for rejecting his argument against the extreme inversion hypothesis. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to defend the non-reductive thesis of phenomenal consciousness. This paper will give an overview of the arguments for the non-reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness and justify why the reductionist approach is implausible in the context of explaining phenomenal subjective experience. The debate between reductionist and non-reductionist on the project of demystifying and mystifying phenomenal consciousness is driven by two fundamental assumptions-1) Reductive-Naturalistic Objectivism, 2) Phenomenal Realism. There are several arguments for the irreducibility of phenomenal (...) consciousness; this paper will focus on the inverted spectrum argument, knowledge argument, and the conceivability argument. (shrink)

This chapter examines the spectrum inversion hypothesis as an argument against certain kinds of account of what it’s like to be conscious of color. The hypothesis aims to provide a counterexample to accounts of what it’s like to be conscious of color in non-qualitative terms, as well as to accounts of what it’s like to be conscious of color in terms of the representational content of conscious visual states (which, according to some philosophers, is in turn given an (...) account in non-qualitative terms). I explain the hypothesis’s reasoning in sections 1 and 2. I then take up background issues: since the counterexample provided by the hypothesis is typically given as a possibility rather than an actuality, I briefly discuss the kind of possibility involved in section 3, and the methodologies used to evaluate the plausibility of possibilities in section 4. In section 5, I describe some general considerations that are commonly used against the spectrum inversion hypothesis. I take up attempts to support the hypothesis with findings from color science in section 6. I end with comments skeptical of both the motivation for the spectrum inversion hypothesis and the methodology used to support it. (shrink)

Critics of wide functionalism have traditionally sought to attack the theory by exposing weaknesses in its account of the qualitative content of experience. Wide functionalist theories of intentional content, however, were spared philosophical scrutiny. I propose that wide functionalist accounts of the intentional content are equally susceptible to attack. I will attempt to demonstrate this by enlisting the functionalist's old foe from the qualia wars - the inverted spectrum hypothesis - in a new way. If the (...) class='Hi'>argument is sound, not only will I have shown that the inverted spectrum hypothesis may have more use than philosophical literature recognizes, I will have also exposed a weakness in a dominant philosophical theory: the wide functionalist theory of intentional content. (shrink)

Christopher Peacocke has recently made an important and insightful effort to fashion a non-verificationist method for distinguishing sense from nonsense. The argument is subtle and complex, and varies somewhat with each of his three target ‘spurious hypotheses’: that if a perfect fission of one person into two were to occur, one and only one of the resulting persons would be identical with the original; that another person’s visual experience can be qualitatively different from your own when you (...) are both seeing the same object, even though your relevant brain states are physically identical and so are your environmental conditions; and that the entire material universe is moving undetectably at a particular uniform velocity with respect to absolute space. My own assessment of his efforts is that they are most successful against the third of these hypotheses, and that this is a function of the fact that of the three, it alone clearly employs a problematic concept- that of absolute location. However, my purpose here is not to engage in a comprehensive evaluation of Peacocke’s project; it is rather to defend the extreme inverted spectrum hypothesis against his attack. I shall argue not only that his argument against EISH fails, but that he is himself independently committed to its intelligibility. Beyond that, I shall point out some striking and, to my mind, welcome consequences of his plausible claims concerning the relations between his own proposal and certain other views concerning content theory; the consequences in question depend both on his positive proposal and on my reasons for rejecting his argument against the extreme inversion hypothesis. (shrink)

Functionalism, a philosophical theory, has empirical consequences. Functionalism predicts that where systematic transformations of sensory input occur and are followed by behavioral accommodation in which normal function of the organism is restored such that the causes and effects of the subject's psychological states return to those of the period prior to the transformation, there will be a return of qualia or subjective experiences to those present prior to the transform. A transformation of this type that has long been of philosophical (...) interest is the possibility of an inverted spectrum. Hilary Putnam argues that the physical possibility of acquired spectrum inversion refutes functionalism. I argue, however, that in the absence of empirical results no a priori arguments against functionalism, such as Putnam's, can be cogent. I sketch an experimental situation which would produce acquired spectrum inversion. The mere existence of qualia inversion would constitute no refutation of functionalism; only its persistence after behavioral accommodation to the inversion would properly count against functionalism. The cumulative empirical evidence from experiments on image inversion suggests that the results of actual spectrum inversion would confirm rather than refute functionalism. (shrink)

Polarization is a generalized feature of intellectual life. Few authors however have studied polarities as they actually occur in every day life and discourse. This paper proposes two hypotheses to account for the pervasiveness of polarities. The first relates to uncertainty. Almost everything that touches our lives is filled with irreducible uncertainty. As a rhetoric, polarization uses arguments from (future) consequences in order to manage the future. The second hypothesis relates to phenomenology: body and behavior incorporate tensions or dualistic (...) properties which are easily reproduced in language and thinking. Polarized thinking helps people to imagine extremes so that they may better anticipate the spectrum of possibilities available for action. The article concludes with remarks on the dangers of (over)generalizing and universalizing particulars (or extremes) in polarity based argumentation. (shrink)

Newly accessible source material calls for a revision of our picture of the more technical transmission of sceptical epistemologies in the intellectual landscape of early Islam. Abū al‐Qāsim al‐Balkhīʼs (ninth/tenth century) Book of Doctrines shows that naẓar as the basic argumentative method of kalām is defined by the encounter with a broad spectrum of sceptical strategies. By the beginning of the tenth century, Greek traditions were amalgamated in a complex way with other intellectual traditions, most notably dualist ontologies. This (...) situation has shaped the evolution of kalām methodology decisively. Based on extensive paraphrases in Ibn al‐Malāḥimī (twelfth century) going back to Nawbakhtī (tenth century), it can be seen that arguments of the Greek sceptical tradition were accessible in Arabic in the early tenth century. The scarcity of coherent information on sceptical approaches before that time rather has to do with the problem that in general few sources of this earlier formative period of Islamic theology are preserved. Early Muʿtazilī treatises from this period are superseded by Ashʿarī texts in the later transmission. Sceptical approaches, being systematically involved in the very formation of early Muʿtazilī theology, are particularly invisible due to this process. (shrink)

A theory of the structure and cognitive function of the human imagination that attempts to do justice to traditional intuitions about its psychological centrality is developed, largely through a detailed critique of the theory propounded by Colin McGinn. Like McGinn, I eschew the highly deflationary views of imagination, common amongst analytical philosophers, that treat it either as a conceptually incoherent notion, or as psychologically trivial. However, McGinn fails to develop his alternative account satisfactorily because (following Reid, Wittgenstein and Sartre) he (...) draws an excessively sharp, qualitative distinction between imagination and perception, and because of his flawed, empirically ungrounded conception of hallucination. His arguments in defense of these views are rebutted in detail, and the traditional, passive, Cartesian view of visual perception, upon which several of them implicitly rely, is criticized in the light of findings from recent cognitive science and neuroscience. It is also argued that the apparent intuitiveness of the passive view of visual perception is a result of mere historical contingency. An understanding of perception (informed by modern visual science) as an inherently active process enables us to unify our accounts of perception, mental imagery, dreaming, hallucination, creativity, and other aspects of imagination within a single coherent theoretical framework. (shrink)

This article introduces the concept of inversion as a rhetorical-political strategy used to redescribe climate concerns from being sacrificed in favour of profitability to seeing that profitability necessitates climate concerns. Drawing on discourse theory and rhetorical analysis, the article analyses discursive struggles in the dominant discourse of fossil-fuel growth in Norway, from 2013 to 2019. By inverting the image of fossil-fuel dependency from growth and success to loss and stagnation in the Norwegian public discourse on fossil fuels (...) and climate risk, those who challenge the hegemonic pro-fossil fuel-investments system pave the way for an alternative description of an ideal welfare state. As such, inversion, as a practice and rhetorical-political strategy may help us understand the strategic manoeuvring of the environmental movements as counter-hegemonic forces. (shrink)

Much of the debate concerning the question “Was Protolanguage Holophrastic?” assumes that protolanguage existed as a single, stable transitional form between communication systems akin to those of modern primates and human languages as we know them today. The present paper argues for a spectrum of protolanguages preceding modern languages emphasizing that protospeech was intertwined with protosign and gesture; grammar emerged from a growing population of constructions; and an increasing protolexicon drove the emergence of phonological structure. This framework weakens (...) arguments for the view that the earliest protolanguages were not holophrastic while advancing the claim that protolanguages became increasingly compositional over time en route to the emergence of true languages. (shrink)

Much of the debate concerning the question “Was Protolanguage Holophrastic?” assumes that protolanguage existed as a single, stable transitional form between communication systems akin to those of modern primates and human languages as we know them today. The present paper argues for a spectrum of protolanguages preceding modern languages emphasizing that protospeech was intertwined with protosign and gesture; grammar emerged from a growing population of constructions; and an increasing protolexicon drove the emergence of phonological structure. This framework weakens (...) arguments for the view that the earliest protolanguages were not holophrastic while advancing the claim that protolanguages became increasingly compositional over time en route to the emergence of true languages. (shrink)

Certain arguments that phenomenal conscious states play no role, or play a role that could be different, depend upon the seeming plausibility of thought experiments such as the inverted spectrum or phenomenal zombie. These thought experiments are always run for perceptual states like colour vision. Run for affective states like emotions, they become absurd, because the prior intension of our concepts of emotional states are that the phenomenal experience is inseparable from their motivational aspects. Our growing scientific (...) understanding of emotion and motivation lends inductive evidence to this view. This points the way towards a positive hypothesis that affective consciousness is type-specific to its function. (shrink)

At the outset of this discussion, I undertook to present an argument from design which would follow Swinburne's example in making use of a priori judgments, while avoiding some of the objections which have been posed in response to his treatment of these issues. So we need to ask: how does this approach to the question of design compare with Swinburne's?Swinburne argues that a chaotic world is a priori more likely than an ordered world: this consideration provides one (...) central reason, on his account, for giving an explanation of some sort for the world's regularity. The other central argument he advances for this claim is the argument from analogy (in terms of the coins) which we noted earlier. The approach I have taken offers an alternative route to this same conclusion. In particular, it substitutes the simpler a priori judgments recorded in (i) and (ii) for the rather difficult and contentious claim that chaos is a priori more likely than order. In place of this claim, I have offered the judgment that order, or recurrence, is more likely given the activity of a common source or common kind of source than otherwise: this proposal does not commit us to a view either way on the question of whether order is a priori likely per se. Moreover, in place of Swinburne's analogical argument, I have offered an a priori approach, with the advantages I have noted.Given that recurrence is to be explained, we might ask: why offer an explanation in terms of design? On this point, Swinburne argues, for instance, that no other explanation of temporal regularity is even possible a priori. Again, the a priori principles which I have used, in (iv) and (v), may be less ambitious, but at the same time more persuasive. In support of this same idea, Swinburne also cites various ideas to do with the predictive power of the idea of design. I have tried to bring out the role of this sort of consideration in terms of my principle (v). Principle (iv) has no place in Swinburne's account, in view of his reliance on the principle of simplicity as a measure of prior probability.Lastly, we may ask: if we are to cite a designer, are there reasons for attributing to this agent more powers than are needed for the production of the effect to be explained? On this point, Swinburne cites the principle of simplicity. Again, my approach avoids what has proved to be a relatively controversial judgment about the nature of a priori probabilities, offering in place of the principle of simplicity the less ambitious principle recorded in (iii). At this point, I have moreover inverted the logical sequence of Swinburne's argument: it seems to me that, in the ways I have indicated, it is helpful to consider the extent of the powers of the source of recurrence before addressing the question of design.In these various ways, I hope I have made good my undertaking to present an argument which avoids some of the controversy surrounding the particular measures of a priori probability which figure in Swinburne's argument. Moreover, I hope that this approach provides an indication of how a priori judgments may function in a relatively unproblematic way within an argument from design, in so far as (i)–(v) are all rather modest proposals. In sum, the argument I have presented is distinguished by its explicit use of the a priori judgments recorded in (i)–(v), by its attempt to buttress in this fashion analogical forms of argument, and by the logical role it gives to the idea that the source of regularity possesses more powers than are required for the production of this effect.Lastly, we might ask: how persuasive is this argument? Of course, the cogency of the idea of design depends upon the balance of debate in other areas of the philosophy of religion, especially upon our ability to provide some account of the existence of evil. In this paper, I have been concerned to argue simply that recurrence by kind provides evidence for design: I have not addressed the question of whether other features of the world provide good evidence against the idea of (benevolent) design. However, if we confine our attention to this one phenomenon, there is it seems to me good evidence for the idea of design, (i) and (ii) suggest that recurrence surely calls for some explanation; (iii), together with the existence in nature of statistical irregularities, suggests that whatever provides this explanation could have brought about other effects besides; and design seems the only clear explanation of why this effect should have been brought about, if (as I have argued) analogies drawn from vegetable and animal reproduction fail, and if we cannot explain the effect satisfactorily by reference to the conditions of observation. Moreover, I have argued that there are reasons for supposing that the probability a priori of design is relatively high in relation to the probability a priori of any rival hypothesis of equivalent predictive power. In brief, this is because the design hypothesis (unlike the hypothesis of theism) can cite an agent of relatively indeterminate power in order to account for the phenomenon to be explained. In this regard, it is less ‘precisely defined’ than any rival hypothesis of equivalent predictive power. If all of this is so, then as philosophers from early times have supposed, temporal regularity provides the basis for a powerful argument in favour of design. It remains true, of course, that its import can be judged in full only when we have taken into account the relevance of other phenomena, many of which are apparently less favourable to the idea of design. (shrink)

One form of argument from analogy is identified and Stephen Barker's remarks about a second kind of argument from analogy, non-inductive (and non-deductive) argument from analogy, are used as a springboard to identify a second form. That form is then refined, explained, exemplified, and related to the first form. It is argued that there is a spectrum of different forms of argument from analogy, with the two forms identified being end points (...) on the spectrum. Except in terms of form, however, there is no reason to speak of two different kinds of argument from analogy. (shrink)

An epistemological orthodox view holds that knowing that p is an absolute ‘yes-or-no’ affair rather than something that comes in degrees. The rising epistemic gradualist theory challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that knowledge-that is a gradable concept. The predominant form of argument for gradualism in the current literature is the argument from component, according to which knowledge is gradable because its various components (e.g., justification, belief, truth) are gradable. I will show that the argument from (...) components involves a non-sequitur: the alleged gradability of knowledge’s components cannot ensure the gradability of knowledge per se. The crux of this logical lacuna lies in that the argument neglects the external gradability of knowledge, viz, there is no clear-cut threshold between knowledge and lack thereof. The lacuna can be mended by seeing knowledge-that as a spectrum concept such that a more complete gradualist picture can be achieved. (shrink)

Modal arguments like the Knowledge Argument, the Conceivability Argument and the Inverted Spectrum Argument could be used to argue for experiential primitivism; the view that experiential truths aren’t entailed from nonexperiential truths. A way to resist these arguments is to follow Stoljar (Ignorance and imagination. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) and plead ignorance of a type of experience-relevant nonexperiential truth. If we are ignorant of such a truth, we can’t imagine or conceive of the (...) various sorts of scenarios that are required to make these arguments sound. While I am sympathetic to this response, in this article I will argue that we have good reason to believe that this particular ignorance hypothesis is false. (shrink)

Recent advancements in developmental biology enable the creation of embryo-like structures from human stem cells, which we refer to as human embryo-like structures (hELS). These structures provide promising tools to complement—and perhaps ultimately replace—the use of human embryos in clinical and fundamental research. But what if these hELS—when further improved—also have a claim to moral status? What would that imply for their research use? In this paper, we explore these questions in relation to the traditional answer as to why (...) human embryos should be given greater protection than other (non-)human cells: the so-called Argument from Potential (AfP). According to the AfP, human embryos deserve special moral status because they have the unique potential to develop into persons. While some take the development of hELS to challenge the very foundations of the AfP, the ongoing debate suggests that its dismissal would be premature. Since the AfP is a spectrum of views with different moral implications, it does not need to imply that research with human embryos or hELS that (may) have ‘active’ potential should be completely off-limits. However, the problem with determining active potential in hELS is that this depends on development passing through ‘potentiality switches’ about the precise coordinates of which we are still in the dark. As long as this epistemic uncertainty persists, extending embryo research regulations to research with specific types of hELS would amount to a form of regulative precaution that as such would require further justification. (shrink)

In this introductory work, Mind and Brain: A Dialogue on the Mind-Body Problem, 2nd edition, Gennaro updates and expands the work to reflect current topics and discussions. The dialogue provides a clear and compelling overview of the mind-body problem suitable for both introductory students and those who have some background in the philosophy of mind. Topics include: Immortality, Materialism, Descartes' "Divisibility Argument" for substance dualism, The "Argument from Introspection" for substance dualism, The main objections to dualism, The (...) interaction between mind and brain, The relation between brain damage and the prospect of an afterlife, Parallelism and epiphenomenalism, The type/token distinction within materialism and the problem of multiple realizability, Arguments against materialism and its ability to explain consciousness, Property dualism and panpsychism, The epistemological problem of other minds, The nature of inductive knowledge, Evidence for animal consciousness, The problem of machine or robot minds, The inverted spectrum argument. Also included are a brief Introduction, a list of Study Questions designed to enhance classroom discussion and serve as a resource for the development of paper topics, a Glossary, and an Index of Key Terms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I consider paradoxical spectrum arguments involving transitive relations like ‘better than’. I argue that, despite being formally different from sorites arguments, at least some spectrum arguments arise from vagueness, and that vagueness might often be the most natural diagnosis.

To the familiar idea of an undetectable spectrum inversion some have added the idea of inverted earth. This new combination of ideas is even harder to make coherent, particularly as it applies to a supposed inversion of black and white counteracted by an environmental switch of these. Black and white exhibit asymmetries in their connections with illumination, shadow and visibility, which rule out their being reversed. And since the most saturated yellow is light and the most saturated blue (...) dark, yellow and blue could not be reversed unless light and dark could be. The difficulties suggest some more general morals for how to think of the role of 'qualia' in colour perception. (shrink)

In recent decades, the focus in autism research progressively expanded. It presently offers extensive material on sensorimotor disturbances as well as on perceptive-cognitive preferences of people with autism. The present article proposes not only a critical interpretation of the common theoretical framework in autism research but also focuses on certain experiences common to some people with autism and which can be appropriately understood by phenomenology. What I will call “hypnotic experiences” in autism are moments in which some individuals withdraw into (...) intense sensorial and perceptive experiences. Following their examples, I use the term “hypnosis” primarily to describe a trance state in which the individuals become highly alert to and awake for an experience of a totally new kind. Through a close analysis of autobiographical writings from people with autism I defend the idea that the particularity of hypnotic experiences in autism consists in a certain qualitative shift within experience itself: what changes, in the hypnotic moments, is the way a person with autism relates to his/her own bodily experiences. If this qualitative shift is indeed difficult to account for within a reifying and intellectualist research perspective, phenomenology offers a large conceptual framework for understanding it. Phenomenology, and precisely, phenomenological psychopathology, will thus emerge as a major device in accounting for such “hypnotic experiences”. The argument mainly draws on the twofold structure of experience which is traditionally used in phenomenological research: it claims that in hypnotic experience people with autism are inclined to focus on non-reified “sensings”, “perceivings” and “movings”, and thus leave aside the object itself and any intentional reification of it. Finally, I will claim that this restriction to mere non-reified sensings might lead to a completely new conception of self and world. In the hypnotic experiences of autism, neither the subject nor the object come to a full-blown and independent existence. A thorough phenomenological analysis of hypnotic experience in autism therefore also has to face the question of a corresponding ontology of these experiences. (shrink)

If you trained someone to emit a particular sound at the sight of something red, another at the sight of something yellow, and so on for other colors, still he would not yet be describing objects by their colors. Though he might be a help to us in giving a description. A description is a representation of a distribution in a space (in that of time, for instance).

Rejoinders to Robert Bishop, John Smythies, and Edmond Wright concerning my paper Phenomenology in Absentia: Dennett's Philosophy of Mind. The untoward social and moral consequences of Daniel Dennett's heterophenomenology are documented. Rhetorical methodology, fallacious reasoning, and lack of empirical support for a philosophical abolition of consciousness and phenomenology are exposed. Consciousness denial by Dennett is shown to proceed by the same fallacious method involved in his phenomenological nihilism. Additional arguments are adduced against the presumed nonexistence of veridical and non-veridical percepts, (...) as interpreted by elementary science of perception, and as this implicates a more general critique of naive realism and its applications to such hypothetical scenarios as our actual existence within cranial vats and the so-called inverted spectrum argument devolved from Locke. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Sociology originated in the mid-nineteenth century from a new confidence in the power of science to explain the world on a mathematical foundation. Both mathematics and sociology transformed over the ensuing century, inverting the hierarchical relationship from sociology as a mathematics-based science of complex human configurations to mathematics as a complex science based on social institutions. That is, where sociology began as the hard case for mathematics, it became possible to see mathematics as the hard case for sociology. (...) In this light, we examine a number of motivations and provocations for the sociology of mathematics, from language and social cognition to Marxist and materialist skepticism of ideology, and sample the evidence and arguments brought to bear on the sociology of mathematics at a range of scales. (shrink)

Michael Tye’s considered position on visual experience combines representationalism with externalism about color, so when considering spectrum inversion, he needs a principled reason to claim that a person with inverted color vision is seeing things incorrectly. Tye’s responses to the problem of the inverted spectrum ( 2000 , in: Consciousness, color, and content, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and 2002a , in: Chalmers (ed.) Philosophy of mind: classical and contemporary readings, Oxford University Press, Oxford) rely on (...) a teleological approach to the evolution of vision to secure the grounds upon which people with normal color vision can be justly called ‘right’ and those with inverted color vision can be called ‘wrong’. I demonstrate that since the inverted spectrum thought experiment requires that both sorts of vision be behaviorally indistinguishable, no biologically acceptable concept of teleology will allow Tye to draw the distinction he needs. (shrink)

The spectrum argument purports to show that the better-than relation is not transitive, and consequently that orthodox value theory is built on dubious foundations. The argument works by constructing a sequence of increasingly less painful but more drawn-out experiences, such that each experience in the spectrum is worse than the previous one, yet the final experience is better than the experience with which the spectrum began. Hence the betterness relation admits cycles, threatening either transitivity or (...) asymmetry of the relation. This paper examines recent attempts to block the spectrum argument, using the idea that it is a mistake to affirm that every experience in the spectrum is worse than its predecessor: an alternative hypothesis is that adjacent experiences may be incommensurable in value, or that due to vagueness in the underlying concepts, it is indeterminate which is better. While these attempts formally succeed as responses to the spectrum argument, they have additional, as yet unacknowledged costs that are significant. In order to effectively block the argument in its most typical form, in which the first element is radically inferior to the last, it is necessary to suppose that the incommensurability is particularly acute: what might be called radical incommensurability. We explain these costs, and draw some general lessons about the plausibility of the available options for those who wish to save orthodox axiology from the spectrum argument. (shrink)

If you trained someone to emit a particular sound at the sight of something red, another at the sight of something yellow, and so on for other colors, still he would not yet be describing objects by their colors. Though he might be a help to us in giving a description. A description is a representation of a distribution in a space (in that of time, for instance).

In this paper I address the question of whether the fact that our colour experiences have a finer‐grained content than our ordinary colour concepts allow us to represent should be taken as a threat to theories of the conceptual content of experience. In particular, I consider and criticise McDowell's response to that argument and propose a possible development of it. As a consequence, I claim that the role of the argument from the finer‐grained content of experience has (...) to be redefined. In particular, I acknowledge that this problem is helpful in order to bring to the fore the issue of the proper characterisation of the constraints upon the possession conditions of perceptual demonstrative concepts. Yet, I contend that, in light of the foregoing discussion, it is neutral with respect to the dispute between conceptual and non‐conceptual theorists. For that dispute hinges on whether it is possible to have experiences with a certain content independently of having the concepts, which are needed for its canonical specification and not on whether those experiences are conceptualisable in all their finesse of grain. (shrink)

How have broad patterns of violence and war changed from the dawn of humanity up to present time? In answering this question, researchers have typically framed their arguments and evidence in terms of the polarized debate between Hobbes (or hawks) and Rousseau (or doves). This article moves beyond the stalemated debate and integrates the most robust existing theoretical developments and empirical findings that have emerged from various disciplines over the past 20 years– primarily sociology, political science, anthropology, and (...) archaeology– to answer the question. Drawing on carefully curated violent lethality data for pre historically appropriate hunter-gatherers, as well as historical pre-state and state societies, it shows that simple narratives of violence and war decreasing through history from ostensibly high levels in the human state of nature, on the one hand, and the obverse insistence that the once mostly peaceful communities became highly belligerent with the transition to modernity, on the other, are both wrong. Instead, multiple lines of existing evidence and theoretical perspectives suggest a complex, non-linear, Kuznets-style relationship between violence and the passage of history. (shrink)

Scientific realists argue that a good track record of multi-agent, and multiple method, validation of empirical claims is itself evidence that those claims, at least partially and approximately, reflect ways nature actually is independent of the ways we conceptualize it. Constructivists contend that successes in validating empirical claims only suffice to establish that our ways of modelling the world, our “constructions,” are useful and adequate for beings like us. This essay presents a thought experiment in which beings like us intersubjectively (...) validate claims about properties of particular things in nature under conditions in which those beings have profoundly different personal phenomenological experiences of those properties. I submit that the thought experiment scenario parallels our actual situation, and argue that this shows that successes in intersubjectively validating empirical claims are indeed enough to claim victory for the realist. More specifically, I champion a variation of realism that marries Ronald Giere’s brand of ‘perspectival realism’ with Philip Kitcher’s ‘real realism,’ and posits that causal relations between ourselves and properties instantiated in nature ground our references to the relevant properties even though our conceptions of them are perspective relative. (shrink)

This paper is an "ordinary language" analysis of the philosophical discussion of visual perception in the context of Twentieth Century British "sense datum" theorists, primarily G.E. Moore. -/- The title of the paper is derived from A.J. Ayer's "argument from illusion", which also forms part of the context of this paper. Both Moore and Ayer believed in sense datum theory, but Moore provides an interesting illustration that is intended to clarify (and also prove) sense datum theory in (...) his paper, "A Defence of Common Sense". Moore invites us to inspect his hand. I try to follow suit, but succeed only in falling out with the viewpoints of both Moore and Ayer. (shrink)

Slaman and Wehner have constructed structures which distinguish the computable Turing degree 0 from the noncomputable degrees, in the sense that the spectrum of each structure consists precisely of the noncomputable degrees. Downey has asked if this can be done for an ordinary type of structure such as a linear order. We show that there exists a linear order whose spectrum includes every noncomputable Δ 0 2 degree, but not 0. Since our argument requires the technique (...) of permitting below a Δ 0 2 set, we include a detailed explanation of the mechanics and intuition behind this type of permitting. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes’s Legacy: Minds and Meaning in Early Modern Philosophy by David B. Hausman, Alan HausmanDaniel E. FlageDavid B. Hausman and Alan Hausman. Descartes’s Legacy: Minds and Meaning in Early Modern Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xiv + 149. Paper, $19.95.David and Alan Hausman have written a fascinating study of Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume. It is an examination of what the Hausmans call the “information problem,” (...) that is, “how an information-processing entity receives input from a source outside itself and processes it” (1), and how those philosophers attempted to solve the problem. It does not examine the writings of these philosophers in their historical context.At the heart of their work is an argument that Cartesian ideas are intentional. Noting the remark in the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet that all ideas—including ideas of color—are innate, they argue that innate ideas intend exemplars or archetypes, entities whose existence is eternal but in principle, even if not in fact, independent of God. Only such a position, they argue, can solve the semantic problem posed by the third Cartesian demon, namely, that “if our thoughts could mean something other than what we believe they mean, then no proof for the actual existence of anything, including God and the cogito, could give us results” (38). This implies that all ideas are meaningful, have objective reality, and represent genuine possibilities, a point that Descartes himself came to recognize only in the years following the publication of the Meditations (39). Further, it solves the problem posed by the ex nihilo principle: “If the ex nihilo principle as a constraint on efficient causality requires that the meaningfulness of ideas have an intentional structure such that a complex of such ideas necessitates which possibilities must be actualized in order for the ideas to be true; there are necessary connections between ideas and their intentions” (40). Contending that the ex nihilo principle is the basis for Cartesian rationality (41), they argue that their position disposes [End Page 465] of a significant element of the Cartesian circle: the meaningfulness of an idea is independent of the existence and goodness of God (42). Since ideas intend exemplars, it is possible to explain the notion of eminent containment of extension without contending that God is extended (43–46). With the introduction of ideas as intentional entities—not entities which inherently resemble their objects—the mind/body distinction becomes a logical outgrowth of the necessity of solving a new philosophical problem, viz., how to deal with the fact that intentional entities have an entirely different logical structure from physical entities.Descartes’s second demon concerns individuals (49). The Hausmans attempt to solve this problem by way of a discussion of the distinction between simple and complex ideas: “Complex ideas will get meaning as a function of the simple ideas they ‘contain’ ” (49). Simple ideas intend exemplars. Complex ideas are ideas of complex individuals. The Hausmans argue that Descartes deals with the problem of individuation on the basis of some version of a substratum theory of substance, a claim based in part on an analysis of the piece of wax argument (54–57). “[G]iven the causal principles of the Third Meditation, the only way we can account for our judgements about individual physical things is to posit the existence of a physical world” (57): the problem is a semantic problem resting on the necessity of the ex nihilo principle (58).Their first Cartesian demon is discussed in terms of the “inverted spectrum” problem, e.g., the possibility that cubes produce sphere ideas and vice versa, a possibility that results systematically in false judgments: there is a physical world, but it is systematically different from the way we believe it to be (58–61). Unlike the earlier demons, the first demon can be exorcised only if there is a good God, although behaviorally such a systematic deception would be indistinguishable from behavior based on ideas corresponding to a physical reality.In their last three chapters, the Hausmans focus on related issues in the philosophies of Berkeley and Hume. They argue that Berkeley’s account of reality blurs the distinction between idea... (shrink)