A recent report by Persaud et al. [Persaud, N., McLeod, P. & Cowey, A. . Post-decision wagering objectively measures awareness. Nature Neuroscience 10, 257–261] addresses a fundamental issue in consciousness science: the experimental measurement of conscious content. The authors propose a novel technique, ‘post-decision wagering’, in which subjects place bets on the correctness of decisions or discriminations. In this note, I critique the authors’ claim that their method “measures awareness directly”.

In this rigorous investigation into the logic of truth Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap explain how the concept of truth works in both ordinary and pathological..

Türk makam müziği, kökeni Orta Asya’ya dayanan, Çin, Hint, Fars ve Ortadoğu kültürüyle yoğurulmuş, çok kültürlü yapısıyla oldukça zenginleşmiş bir müziktir. İslâmiyetin kabulüyle Orta çağ İslâm dünyasının en önemli kuramcılarından olan Kındî, Farâbî ve İbn-î Sînâ yapmış oldukları çalışmalarla Türk makam müziğinin gelişimine büyük katkı sağlamışlardır. Türk mûsikîsi en büyük gelişimini Osmanlı devleti zamanında göstermiştir. Padişahların birçoğunun mevlevî tarikatına mensup olması bu bağlamda mûsikî ve edebiyata hâkim olmaları gelişimi sağlayan en önemli etkenlerdendir. Türk makam müziğinin gelişiminde Doğu (...) coğrafyası ile olan etkileşiminde önemli payı vardır. Safüyiddin Urmevî ve Abdülkâdir Merâgî yazmış oldukları eserlerle mûsikînin şekillenmesine büyük katkı sağlamıştır. On beşinci yüzyıl Türk makam müziği adına yapılan kuramsal çalışmaların arttığı, yapılanmanın hızlandığı ve günümüz mûsikî nazariyatının şekillendiği bir yüzyıl olmuştur. On altıncı yüzyılın sefer ve fetihlerle geçmesi mûsikî adına bir duraksamayı da beraberinde getirmiş, On yedinci yüzyıl ise özellikle bestecilik alanında önemli gelişmelerin yaşandığı bir dönem olmuştur. Çoğu müzik tarihçisi bu dönemi klâsik dönem olarak kabul etmiştir. Çalışmanın başlığında da belirtildiği üzere Hatip Zâkirî Hasan Efendi bu yüzyılın dini form besteciliğinde en önemli isimleri arasında yer almaktadır. Çalışmada bestecinin TRT repertuvarında yer alan Rast makamında ve ilâhî formunda iki adet eseri makam ve biçim açısından incelenmiş ve dönemin mûsikî kültürü adına çıkarımlar yapılmıştır. (shrink)

Phenomenal particularism is the view that particular external objects are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. It is a central part of naïve realist or relational views of perception. We consider a series of recent objections to phenomenal particularism and argue that naïve realism has the resources to block them. In particular, we show that these objections rest on assumptions about the nature of phenomenal character that the naïve realist will reject, and that they ignore the full (...) resources that naïve realism has to offer in explaining phenomenal character. (shrink)

For Kant, the human cognitive faculty has two sub-faculties: sensibility and the understanding. Each has pure forms which are necessary to us as humans: space and time for sensibility; the categories for the understanding. But Kant is careful to leave open the possibility of there being creatures like us, with both sensibility and understanding, who nevertheless have different pure forms of sensibility. They would be finite rational beings and discursive cognizers. But they would not be human. And this raises a (...) question about the pure forms of the understanding. Does Kant leave open the possibility of discursive cognizers who have different categories? Even if other discursive cognizers might not sense like us, must they at least think like us? We argue that textual and systematic considerations do not determine the answers to these questions and examine whether Kant thinks that the issue cannot be decided. Consideration of his wider views on the nature and limits of our knowledge of mind shows that Kant could indeed remain neutral on the issue but that the exact form his neutrality can take is subject to unexpected constraints. The result would be an important difference between what Kant says about discursive cognizers with other forms of sensibility and what he is in a position to say about discursive cognizers with other forms of understanding. Kantian humility here takes on a distinctive character. (shrink)

After nearly 20 years of work by activists, fair trade, a movement establishing alternative trading organizations to ensure minimal returns, safe working conditions, and environmentally sustainable production, is now gaining steam, with increasing awareness and availability across a variety of products. However, this article addresses several major remaining challenges: (a) a lack of agreement about what fair trade really means and how it should be certified; (b) uneven awareness and availability across different areas, with marked differences between some parts of (...) Europe and North America that reflect more fundamental debates about distribution; (c) larger questions about the extent of the potential contribution of fair trade to development under the current system, including limitations on the number and types of workers affected and the fair trade focus on commodity goods. (shrink)

Triumph of Togetherness is a celebration of unity among human beings. While the story is set in the context of family, it holds equally ture for relationships in business among and between promoters and professionals, government officials, players in team sports, different societal groups, nations and humanity at large.

The concept of »similarity« lies at the centre of this interview with Anil Bhatti. Distinguishing itself from a culturalistic hermeneutic of the familiar and the strange, it concentrates on the »as-well-as«, on the area »between« theories of difference and such aspects of identity. Through the notions of »translation« and »over-lapping«, of »the vague« and »the preliminary« this concept seeks to ameliorate cultural theory.

Some criticisms are offered of Barwise and Etchemendy's theory of truth, the principal one being that it violates a feature of truth called “supervenience”.

The standard behavioral index for human consciousness is the ability to report events with accuracy. While this method is routinely used for scientific and medical applications in humans, it is not easy to generalize to other species. Brain evidence may lend itself more easily to comparative testing. Human consciousness involves widespread, relatively fast low-amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical core of the brain, driven by current tasks and conditions. These features have also been found in other mammals, which suggests that consciousness (...) is a major biological adaptation in mammals. We suggest more than a dozen additional properties of human consciousness that may be used to test comparative predictions. Such homologies are necessarily more remote in non-mammals, which do not share the thalamocortical complex. However, as we learn more we may be able to make “deeper” predictions that apply to some birds, reptiles, large-brained invertebrates, and perhaps other species. (shrink)

According to non-conceptualist interpretations, Kant held that the application of concepts is not necessary for perceptual experience. Some have motivated non-conceptualism by noting the affinities between Kant's account of perception and contemporary relational theories of perception. In this paper I argue (i) that non-conceptualism cannot provide an account of the Transcendental Deduction and thus ought to be rejected; and (ii) that this has no bearing on the issue of whether Kant endorsed a relational account of perceptual experience.

Many philosophers have argued that statistical evidence regarding group characteristics (particularly stereotypical ones) can create normative conflicts between the requirements of epistemic rationality and our moral obligations to each other. In a recent article, Johnson-King and Babic argue that such conflicts can usually be avoided: what ordinary morality requires, they argue, epistemic rationality permits. In this article, we show that as data get large, Johnson-King and Babic’s approach becomes less plausible. More constructively, we build on their project and develop a (...) generalized model of reasoning about stereotypes under which one can indeed avoid normative conflicts, even in a big data world, when data contain some noise. In doing so, we also articulate a general approach to rational belief updating for noisy data. (shrink)

Early twentieth-century philosophers of perception presented their naïve realist views of perceptual experience in anti-Kantian terms. For they took naïve realism about perceptual experience to be incompatible with Kant’s claims about the way the understanding is necessarily involved in perceptual consciousness. This essay seeks to situate a naïve realist account of visual experience within a recognisably Kantian framework by arguing that a naïve realist account of visual experience is compatible with the claim that the understanding is necessarily involved in the (...) perceptual experience of those rational beings with discursive intellects. The resultant view is middle way between recent conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations of Kant, holding that the understanding is necessarily involved in the kind of perceptual consciousness that we, as rational beings, enjoy whilst allowing that the relations of apprehension which constitute perceptual consciousness are independent of acts of the understanding. (shrink)

This book deals with the question of understanding religion and its relationship with politics in the context of developing countries. It reviews specific theories, such as modernisation theory, marxism, liberalism, hermeneutics and critical approach to explain questions related to religion and religious traditions. The book focuses on the recent attempts to theorise religion by Jurgen Habermas. It argues modernisation and orthodox Marxian theory are inadequate in understanding the recent spurt of religious phenomenon in politics. It discusses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s view to (...) show a way forward regarding dialectical hermeneutics in facilitating a dialogue between different traditions and religions. The book is of interest to students, scholars, practitioners of development, and all those who concern themselves with the questions of religion, tradition, modernity and secular well-being in developing countries such as India and beyond. (shrink)

James Van Cleve has argued that Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the categories shows, at most, that we must apply the categories to experience. And this falls short of Kant’s aim, which is to show that they must so apply. In this discussion I argue that once we have noted the differences between the first and second editions of the Deduction, this objection is less telling. But Van Cleve’s objection can help illuminate the structure of the B Deduction, and it suggests (...) an interesting reason why the rewriting might have been thought necessary. (shrink)

The Bayesian brain hypothesis provides an attractive unifying framework for perception, cognition, and action. We argue that the framework can also usefully integrate interoception, the sense of the internal physiological condition of the body. Our model of entails a new view of emotion as interoceptive inference and may account for a range of psychiatric disorders of selfhood.

We are grateful to Professor Robert Koons for his excellent, and generous, review (henceforth KR) of our book The Revision Theory of Truth (henceforth RTT). Koons provides in KR a welcome guide to our RTT, and he puts forward objections that deserve serious consideration. In this note we shall respond only to his principal objection.' This objection, which is developed on pp. 625 — 628 of KR, calls into question our main thesis. As we argue below, however, the objection is (...) not successful. We should forewarn the reader that this note is not self-contained. It presupposes familiarity with RTT (primarily, Chapter 4) and with KR. The main thesis of RTT is that truth is a circular concept. We argued that the Tarski biconditionals, read as partial definitions, constitute an intensionally adequate definition of truth. In other words, if T is a predicate defined by the Tarski-style infinitistic definition (I). (shrink)

Papers presented in three conferences, supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Excellence Cluster 16: 'Cultural Foundation of Integration' at the University of Konstanz, and the Institute of German Studies and the Forum Scientairum at the Univesity of Tubingen.

Visual experiences seem to exhibit phenomenological particularity: when you look at some object, it – that particular object – looks some way to you. But experiences exhibit generality too: when you look at a distinct but qualitatively identical object, things seem the same to you as they did in seeing the first object. Naïve realist accounts of visual experience have often been thought to have a problem with each of these observations. It has been claimed that naïve realist views cannot (...) account for the generality of visual experiences, and that the naïve realist explanation of particularity has unacceptable implications for self- knowledge: the knowledge we have of the character of our own experiences. We argue in this paper that neither claim is correct: naïve realism can explain the generality of experiences, and the naïve realist explanation of particularity raises no problems for our self-knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the claim that testimony can serve as a basic source of knowledge of other people’s mental lives against the objection that testimonial knowledge presupposes knowledge of other people’s mental lives and therefore can’t be used to explain it.

Scepticism is sometimes expressed about whether there is any interesting problem of other minds. In this paper I set out a version of the conceptual problem of other minds which turns on the way in which mental occurrences are presented to the subject and situate it in relation to debates about our knowledge of other people's mental lives. The result is a distinctive problem in the philosophy of mind concerning our relation to other people.

Neural Darwinism (ND) is a large scale selectionist theory of brain development and function that has been hypothesized to relate to consciousness. According to ND, consciousness is entailed by reentrant interactions among neuronal populations in the thalamocortical system (the ‘dynamic core’). These interactions, which permit high-order discriminations among possible core states, confer selective advantages on organisms possessing them by linking current perceptual events to a past history of value-dependent learning. Here, we assess the consistency of ND with 16 widely recognized (...) properties of consciousness, both physiological (for example, consciousness is associated with widespread, relatively fast, low amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical system), and phenomenal (for example, consciousness involves the existence of a private flow of events available only to the experiencing subject). While no theory accounts fully for all of these properties at present, we find that ND and its recent extensions fare well. (shrink)

BackgroundSimilar to many other countries, in Germany patients with alcohol-related liver disease are obliged to prove their abstinence before being accepted on a waitlist for liver transplantation. Health care professionals (HCPs) must both treat patients and ensure that patients have proven their abstinence. The aim of this exploratory study was to develop a deeper understanding of how HCPs deal with this dual role.MethodsThe study used semi-structured interviews as the source of data. 11 healthcare professionals from ten of the 22 German (...) transplant centers were interviewed. After transcription, a qualitative content analysis was performed.ResultsWe found that these HCPs faced an ethical dilemma, as they must balance the roles of being both a treatment provider (the therapist role) and an assessor (the monitoring role). To solve this dilemma, the strategy seems to be a tendency for the HCPs to take on one dominant role amongst these two roles. HCPs who prefer to take on the therapist role seem to feel burdened by the 6-month abstinence rule and the obligation to monitor their patients. HCPs who prefer to take on the monitoring role tend to have negative assumptions about the patients. HCPs also reported the impression that patients perceive HCPs as more involved in monitoring and less open to the therapeutic role. From this it can be deduced that current regulations and structures lead both to stress for HCPs and to suboptimal therapy for those affected.ConclusionsThe results showed that current transplantation guidelines can have a negative impact on both patient care and the burdens on the HCPs. From our point of view, there are various changes that could be made to the current clinical practice that would help solve this dilemma. For instance, integrating other assessment criteria that are more closely adapted to the health status trajectory and psychosocial background of the individual patient would be both possible and would lead to improvements in practice. (shrink)