Self-knowledge is based on several different forms of information, so distinct that each one essentially establishes a different 'self. The ecological self is the self as directly perceived with respect to the immediate physical environment; the interpersonal self, also directly perceived, is established by species-specific signals of emotional rapport and communication; the extended self is based on memory and anticipation; the private self appears when we discover that our conscious experiences are exclusively our own; the conceptual self or 'self-concept' draws (...) its meaning from a network of socially-based assumptions and theories about human nature in general and ourselves in particular. Although these selves are rarely experienced as distinct (because they are held together by specific forms of stimulus information), they differ in their developmental histories, in the accuracy with which we can know them, in the pathologies to which they are subject, and generally in what they contribute to human experience. (shrink)
Self-knowledge is based on several different forms of information, so distinct that each one essentially establishes a different 'self. The ecological self is the self as directly perceived with respect to the immediate physical environment; the interpersonal self, also directly perceived, is established by species-specific signals of emotional rapport and communication; the extended self is based on memory and anticipation; the private self appears when we discover that our conscious experiences are exclusively our own; the conceptual self or 'self-concept' draws (...) its meaning from a network of socially-based assumptions and theories about human nature in general and ourselves in particular. Although these selves are rarely experienced as distinct (because they are held together by specific forms of stimulus information), they differ in their developmental histories, in the accuracy with which we can know them, in the pathologies to which they are subject, and generally in what they contribute to human experience. (shrink)
Traditionally, questions about consciousness and subjectivity are treated separately from questions about the self and identity. But sometimes 'the self' is spoken of as 'the subject,' which suggests that the first-person perspective may be constituted in the same way as the self. Narrative provides a powerful model of the self in contemporary psychology, philosophy of mind, and moral psychology. On some versions of narrative theory, narrative is held fundamental not only to self-understanding but to the phenomenology of the first-person point (...) of view, too. I call this approach the narrative self-subject model. I argue that the narrative model does not apply to subjectivity, and that the narrative self should be distinguished from the 'I' of the first- person perspective. Roughly, this is because first-person narratives employ the first-person pronoun 'I' to identify some person, but the distinctive features of subjectivity are marked by a different, non-identifying use of the pronoun 'I'. (shrink)
How is it that metaphors are meaningful, yet we have so much trouble saying exactly what they mean? I argue that metaphoric thought is an act of imagination, mediated by the contingent form of human embodiment. Metaphoric cognition is an example of the productive interplay between intentional imagery and the body scheme, a process of imaginal modeling. The case of metaphor marks the intersection of linguistic and psychological processes and demonstrates the need for a multi-disciplinary approach not only in philosophy (...) of language, but in cognitive science and consciousness studies as well. (shrink)
Metacognitive attitudes can affect behavior but do they do so, as Koriat claims, because they enhance voluntary control? This Commentary makes a case for saying that metacognitive consciousness may enhance not control but subjective predictability and may be best studied by examining not just healthy, well-integrated cognizers, but victims of multilevel mental disorders.
I contrast Bickle's new wave reductionismwith other relevant views about explanation across intertheoretic contexts. I then assess Bickle's empirical argument for psychoneural reduction. Bickle shows that psychology is not autonomous from neuroscience, and concludes that at least some versions of nonreductive physicalism are false. I argue this is not sufficient to establish his further claim that psychology reduces to neuroscience. Examination of Bickle's explanations reveals that they do not meet his own reductive standard. Furthermore, there are good empirical reasons to (...) doubt that the cognitive approach to mind should be abandoned. I suggest that the near future will not see a reduction of psychology to neuroscience, so much as a replacement of both sciences by an improved form of neuropsychology. (shrink)
Concepts and Conceptual Development draws together theorists from a wide range of theoretical orientations to consider many different aspects of 'the psychology ...
Perception, as Gibson described it – picking up information that specifies the real local situation – includes not only perceiving affordances and controlling small movements, but also seeing the large-scale environmental layout and the position/movement of the “ecological self.” If the dorsal cortical system is also responsible for that very significant achievement, its activity must be at least partly conscious.
Drawing on propositions from the signaling theory and expectancy theory, this study hypothesizes that the perceived corporate citizenship of job seekers positively affects a firm’s attractiveness and career success expectation. This study’s proposed research hypotheses are empirically tested using a survey of graduating MBA students seeking a job. The empirical findings show that a firm’s corporate citizenship provides a competitive advantage in attracting job seekers and fostering optimistic career success expectation. Such findings substantially complement the growing literature arguing that corporate (...) citizenship brings firms competitive advantages without solid evidence from the perspective of recruitment and human resources. Finally, managerial implications and limitations of this study are also discussed. (shrink)
Sharing and helping are important issues in ethical research. This study proposes a model based on flow theory by postulating key antecedents as the critical drivers of knowledge sharing and interemployee helping. Flow is the holistic sensation that employees feel when they act with total immersion and engagement, facilitating individuals’ reciprocal activities such as knowledge sharing and interemployee helping. In the proposed model, knowledge sharing is influenced by flow experience directly and also indirectly via the mediation of interemployee helping. Accordingly, (...) the flow experience is influenced simultaneously by four exogenous factors related to individuals’ perception about their work: work skills, self-fulfillment in challenges, perceived control, and vividness. This study contributes to the knowledge management literature by extending flow theory to the area of knowledge sharing and interemployee helping, by validating idiosyncratic antecedent drivers of the flow theory, and by performing a practical operationalization of the flow experience. This research also provides managerial implications for business leaders to boost their employees’ ethical behavior in terms of sharing and helping. (shrink)
Dasein is one of several twentieth-century notions which paint a portrait of the “post-Cartesian subject.” Critics of cognitivism such as Dreyfus (1992) have invoked Dasein in arguing that computational models cannot be sufficient to account for situated cognition. Van Gelder (1995) argues that dynamic systems theory provides an empirical model of cognition as practical activity which avoids the Cartesianism implicit in the computational approach. I assess Van Gelder’s claim for dynamic systems as a model of being-in-the-world. Contra Van Gelder, I (...) argue that the force of the “Dasein objection” is that the significance of a mental process, whether representational or not, depends on a lived background of value. While dynamic systems can help model the diachronic interplay between organism and environment, the semantic context for this interplay is no more accounted for here than in traditional computer models. (shrink)
_tableau_ can be given a full and satisfying explanation, while others cannot. We can explain in a full and satisfying way why the water in the mug is identical with H2O, why its liquidity is identical with a state of its molecular bonds, and why its heat is identical with its molecules being in motion. But we cannot explain in the same way why the neural processes which Joe undergoes when he looks at the mug are such as to make (...) the mug look green, and not red. The latter explanations have gaps. (shrink)
The Doomsday argument purports to show that the risk of the human species going extinct soon has been systematically underestimated. This argument has something in common with controversial forms of reasoning in other areas, including: game theoretic problems with imperfect recall, the methodology of cosmology, the epistemology of indexical belief, and the debate over so-called fine-tuning arguments for the design hypothesis. The common denominator is a certain premiss: the Self-Sampling Assumption. We present two strands of argument in favor of this (...) assumption. Through a series of thought experiments we then investigate some bizarre prima facie consequences – backward causation, psychic powers, and an apparent conflict with the Principal Principle. (shrink)
This is a reply to W. Paul Franks’ critique (‘Why a Believer Could Believe that God Answers Prayers’) of my recent paper in Sophia (2007). I argue that Franks’ Plantinga-inspired criticism fails because it turns on the dubious assumption that the efficacy of prayer could provide evidence for the existence of God.
Atran advances three theses: our folk-biological taxonomy is (1) universal, (2) innate, and (3) the product of natural selection. I argue that Atran offers insufficient support for theses (2) and (3) and that his evolutionary psychology thus amounts to nothing more than a just-so story.
What is the simulation theory? Arguments for simulation theory Simulation theory versus theory theory Simulation theory and cognitive science Versions of simulation theory A possible test of the simulation theory.
Since the publication of David Lewis’ Counterfactuals, the standard line on subjunctive conditionals with impossible antecedents (or counterpossibles) has been that they are vacuously true. That is, a conditional of the form ‘If p were the case, q would be the case’ is trivially true whenever the antecedent, p, is impossible. The primary justification is that Lewis’ semantics best approximates the English subjunctive conditional, and that a vacuous treatment of counterpossibles is a consequence of that very elegant theory. Another justification (...) derives from the classical lore than if an impossibility were true, then anything goes. In this paper we defend non-vacuism, the view that counterpossibles are sometimes non-vacuously true and sometimes non-vacuously false. We do so while retaining a Lewisian semantics, which is to say, the approach we favor does not require us to abandon classical logic or a similarity semantics. It does however require us to countenance impossible worlds. An impossible worlds treatment of counterpossibles is suggested (but not defended) by Lewis (Counterfactuals. Blackwell, Oxford, 1973), and developed by Nolan (Notre Dame J Formal Logic 38:325–527, 1997), Kment (Mind 115:261–310, 2006a: Philos Perspect 20:237–302, 2006b), and Vander Laan (In: Jackson F, Priest G (eds) Lewisian themes. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004). We follow this tradition, and develop an account of comparative similarity for impossible worlds. (shrink)
Kit Fine (1994. “Essence and Modality”, Philosophical Perspectives 8: 1-16) argues that the standard modal account of essence as de re modality is ‘fundamentally misguided’ (p. 3). We agree with his critique and suggest an alternative counterfactual analysis of essence. As a corollary, our counterfactual account lends support to non-vacuism the thesis that counterpossibles (i.e., counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents) are not always vacuously true.
This paper is about the open future response to fatalistic arguments. I first present a typical fatalistic argument and then spell out the open future response as a response to that argument. Then I raise the question of how the open future response can be independently justified. I consider some possible ways in which the response might be defended, and I try to show that none of these is a plausible, non-question-begging defense. Next I formulate what I take to be (...) the only plausible, nonquestion-begging defense of the open future response. This defense involves both (i) the claim that the laws of nature are indeterministic and (ii) a certain version of the correspondence theory of truth. Finally, I argue that there is a very surprising consequence of justifying the open future response by making the defense in question, namely, that the past is sometimes open. Fatalism is the view that whatever will happen in the future is inevitable, due to certain considerations about truth and time. Fatalism, in turn, is normally taken to imply that there is no such thing as genuine, human free will. Suppose that I am an anti-fatalist. Suppose I believe that Joe Montana is free to choose what he will have for lunch tomorrow, and suppose I take this case to be a paradigmatic example of one involving both evitability and human free will. Now suppose that I meet a fatalist, who presents the following argument.1.. (shrink)
First published in 1899, The School and Society describes John Dewey’s experiences with his own famous Laboratory School, started in 1896. Dewey’s experiments at the Laboratory School reflected his original social and educational philosophy based on American experience and concepts of democracy, not on European education models then in vogue. This forerunner of the major works shows Dewey’s pervasive concern with the need for a rich, dynamic, and viable society. In his introduction to this volume, Joe R. Burnett states Dewey’s (...) theme. Industrialization, urbanization, science, and technology have created a revolution the schools cannot ignore. Dewey carries this theme through eight chapters: The School and Social Progress; The School and the Life of the Child; Waste in Education; Three Years of the University Elementary School; The Psychology of Elementary Education; Froebel’s Educational Principles; The Psychology of Occupations; and the Development of Attention. (shrink)
By “epistemic modals,” I mean epistemic uses of modal words: adverbs like “necessarily,” “possibly,” and “probably,” adjectives like “necessary,” “possible,” and “probable,” and auxiliaries like “might,” “may,” “must,” and “could.” It is hard to say exactly what makes a word modal, or what makes a use of a modal epistemic, without begging the questions that will be our concern below, but some examples should get the idea across. If I say “Goldbach’s conjecture might be true, and it might be false,” (...) I am not endorsing the Cartesian view that God could have made the truths of arithmetic come out differently. I make the claim not because I believe in the metaphysical contingency of mathematics, but because I know that Goldbach’s conjecture has not yet been proved or refuted. Similarly, if I say “Joe can’t be running,” I am not saying that Joe’s constitution prohibits him from running, or that Joe is essentially a non-runner, or that Joe isn’t allowed to run. My basis for making the claim may be nothing more than that I see Joe’s running shoes hanging on a hook. (shrink)
I. Non-Trivial Counterpossibles On Lewis’ account, a subjunctive of the form ‘if it were the case that p, it would be the case that q’ (represented as ‘p → q’) is to be given the following rough meta-linguistic truth-conditions1.
The situated cognition movement has emerged in recent decades (although it has roots in psychologists working earlier in the 20th century including Vygotsky, Bartlett, and Dewey) largely in reaction to an approach to explaining cognition that tended to ignore the context in which cognitive activities typically occur. Fodor’s (1980) account of the research strategy of methodological solipsism, according to which only representational states within the mind are viewed as playing causal roles in producing cognitive activity, is an extreme characterization of (...) this approach. (As Keith Gunderson memorably commented when Fodor first presented this characterization, it amounts to reversing behaviorism by construing the mind as a white box in a black world). Critics as far back as the 1970s and 1980s objected to many experimental paradigms in cognitive psychology as not being ecologically valid; that is, they maintained that the findings only applied to the artificial circumstances created in the laboratory and did not generalize to real world settings (Neisser, 1976; 1987). The situated cognition movement, however, goes much further than demanding ecologically valid experiments—it insists that an agent’s cognitive activities are inherently embedded and supported by dynamic interactions with the agent’s body and features of its environment. (shrink)
This paper offers directions for the continuing dialogue between business ethicists and environmental philosophers. I argue that a theory of corporate social responsibility must be consistent with, if not derived from, a model of sustainable economics rather than the prevailing neoclassical model of market economics. I use environmental examples to critique both classical and neoclassical models of corporate social responsibility and sketch the alternative model of sustainable development. After describing some implications of this model at the level of individual firms (...) and industries, I offer an ethical justification of the sustainability alternative that is derived from the same values that underlie traditional market economics. (shrink)
It is widely agreed that contraposition, strengthening the antecedent and hypothetical syllogism fail for subjunctive conditionals. The following putative counter-examples are frequently cited, respectively.
Externalism with regard to mental content says that in order to have certain types of intentional mental states (e.g. beliefs), it is necessary to be related to the environment in the right way.
The simulation theory is an account of our everyday ability to attribute mental states and predict and explain human behavior. It has been developed both as an empirical hypothesis in cognitive science and as an account of mental concepts in the philosophy of mind.
Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno (2008) have defended the validity of counterfactual hypothetical syllogism (CHS) within the Stalnaker-Lewis account. Whenever the premisses of an instance of CHS are non-vacuosly true, a shift in context has occurred. Hence the standard counterexamples to CHS suffer from context failure. Charles Cross (2011) rejects this argument as irreconcilable with the Stalnaker-Lewis account. I argue against Cross that the basic Stalnaker-Lewis truth condition may be supplemented in a way that makes (CHS) valid. Yet pace Brogaard (...) and Salerno, there are alternative ways of spelling out the basic truth condition which are standard in most debates; and given these ways, the counterexamples to CHS are successful. (shrink)
Internalism in epistemology is the view that all the factors relevant to the justification of a belief are importantly internal to the believer, while externalism is the view that at least some of those factors are external. This extremely modest first approximation cries out for refinement (which we undertake below), but is enough to orient us in the right direction, namely that the debate between internalism and externalism is bound up with the controversy over the correct account of the distinction (...) between justified beliefs and unjustified beliefs.1 Understanding that distinction has occasionally been obscured by attention to the analysis of knowledge and to the Gettier problem, but our view is that these problems, while interesting, should not completely seduce philosophers away from central questions about epistemic justification. A plausible starting point in the discussion of justification is that the distinction between justified beliefs and unjustified beliefs is not the same as the distinction between true beliefs and false beliefs. This follows from the mundane observation that it is possible to rationally believe.. (shrink)
Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno (Counterfactuals and Context, ANALYSIS 68 (2008): 39-46) argue that the standard Stalnaker-Lewis counterexamples to hypothetical syllogism, strengthening the antecedent, and contraposition trade on a failure to hold fixed the context in which truth values are determined for the premises and conclusion in each counterexample. I argue that no contextual fallacy is committed in the standard counterexamples, and I offer a different view of what it is for a fact to be held fixed by a counterfactual (...) antecedent. On my view, for a fact to be held fixed is an epistemological matter, not a semantic matter. (shrink)
Nussbaum’s theory of the emotions draws heavily on the Stoic account. In her theory, emotions are a kind of value judgment or thought. This is in stark contrast to the well-known proposal from William James, who took emotions to be bodily feelings. There are various motivations for taking emotions as judgments. One main reason is that emotions are intentional mental states. They are always about something, directed at particular objects or state of affairs. For example, fear seems to involve the (...) anticipation of danger. To grief for the passing of a loved one involves the thought that someone dear to us is now gone. In Upheavals of Thought and also in her Hochelaga Lecture, Nussbaum analyzed compassion as a set of judgments, including for example the judgment that someone is experiencing serious suffering, and that the person in question does not deserve the suffering. (shrink)
According to the view I christen sharpism, when Joe says to his daughter in a perfectly ordinary context ‘The Earth is super-duper old’, his claim has an incredibly discriminating truth condition: although it’s true if the Earth is over 347,342,343 years, 2 days, and 17 nanoseconds old, if the Earth is even a nanosecond younger then his claim has some status other than “just plain true”—but we leave open what that new status might be: false, indeterminate, indeterminately indeterminate, meaningless, just (...) under 100% true, or whatnot. The material point is that the claim changes in truth status (“alethic status”) with a nanosecond change in the Earth’s age. The sharp cutoff might not be a cutoff separating the true from the false, but it is a sharp alethic cutoff nonetheless. It has this sensitive truth condition even though Joe has never made any relevant linguistic stipulations and doesn’t even know what a nanosecond is. Another example: when I say to a visiting speaker, ‘The auditorium where you’ll give your lecture is a short walk from here’, my claim is true if the auditorium is no more than 123 meters, 6 centimeters, and 16 nanometers away. Hence, if it turns out that we were 123 meters, 6 centimeters, and 17 nanometers away from the auditorium, my claim had some status other than true. (shrink)
Lewis/Stalnaker semantics has it that all counterpossibles (i.e., counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents) are vacuously true. Non-vacuism, by contrast, says the truth-values of counterpossibles are affected by the truth-values of the consequents. Some counterpossibles are true, some false. Williamson objects to non-vacuism. He asks us to consider someone who answered ‘11’ to ‘What is 5 + 7?’ but who mistakenly believes that he answered ‘13’. For the non-vacuist, (1) is false, (2) true: (1) If 5 + 7 were 13, x (...) would have got that sum right (2) If 5 + 7 were 13, x would have got that sum wrong Williamson is not persuaded by the initial intuitiveness of such examples: ... they tend to fall apart when thought through. For example, if 5 + 7 were 13 then 5 + 6 would be 12, and so (by another eleven steps) 0 would be 1, so if the number of right answers I gave were 0, the number of right answers I gave would be 1. (2006) That’s the whole argument—much of it implicit. Alan Baker’s critique (2007) of Brogaard and Salerno (2007) prompts us to say something less abbreviated about a less abbreviated form of Wiliamson’s argument. Then we further develop our (2007) counterfactual analysis of essense. (shrink)
A collection of long, detailed interviews with philosophers and scientists who work on issues in ethics and moral psychology. The researchers interviewed include Galen Strawson, Philiip Zimbardo, Stephen Stich, Jonathan Haidt, Frans De Waal, Michael Ruse, Joshua Greene, Liane Young, Joe Henrich, and William Ian Miller.
(1) The average Mum has 2.4 children. (2) The number of Argle’s fingers equals the number of Bargle’s toes. (3) There are two possible ways in which Joe could win this chess game. In the right contexts, and outside the philosophy room, all the above sentences may be completely uncontroversial. For instance, if we know that Joe could win either by exchanging queens and entering an endgame, or by initiating a kingside attack then, if ignorant of Quine’s work on ontology, (...) we would take (3) to be uncontroversially true. (shrink)
This paper is about possible worlds semantics for propositional attitude sentences. In particular I shall focus on belief reports in English such as "Lusina believes that tofu is nutritious." It is well-known that possible worlds semantics for such reports suffers from the so-called _problem of equivalence_ . In this paper I shall examine some attempts to deal with this problem and argue that they are unsatisfactory.
This paper is an examination of evidential holism, a prominent position in epistemology and the philosophy of science which claims that experiments only ever confirm or refute entire theories. The position is historically associated with W.V. Quine, and it is at once both popular and notorious, as well as being largely under-described. But even though there’s no univocal statement of what holism is or what it does, philosophers have nevertheless made substantial assumptions about its content and its truth. Moreover they (...) have drawn controversial and important conclusions from these assumptions. In this paper I distinguish three types of evidential holism and argue that the most oft-cited and controversial thesis is entirely unmotivated. The other two theses are much overlooked, but are well-motivated and free from controversial implications. (shrink)
In 'Jackson on physical information and qualia'(1984) Terry Horgan defended physicalism against Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument by raising what later has been called the 'mode of presentation reply'- arguingthatthe Knowledge Argumentis fallacious because itsubtly equivocates on two different readings of 'physical information'. In 'Mary, Mary, quite contrary' (2000) however, George Graham and Terry Horgan maintain that none of the replies against Jackson has yet been successful, not even Horgan's own 1984 rejoinder.Tosubstantiate their claim, they present an allegedly improved version of (...) the Knowledge Argument, the 'Mary Mary Argument' whose default moral is property-dualism. In section 1, I will set the scene by making some clarifying remarks regarding Jackson's original argument. In section 2, I will consider several objections to the most promising physicalist rejoinder to the Knowledge Argument, the mode of presentation reply. In section 3 I will discuss the Mary Mary Argument and propose the indexical account of consciousness that, as it happens, is based on Horgan's own 1984 account as a possible solution. Finally,in section 4, I will argue that to the extent that the Mary Mary Argument exceeds the force of Jackson's original challenge it coincides with Joe Levine's Explanatory Gap Argument. (shrink)
I'm going to focus my comments on a relatively small part of Joe Heath's book, the section on the household division of labour. Although it's a small piece of a much larger picture, I've chosen this area for two reasons: First, it connects with my own interests in issues of family justice. Second, I think for me it highlights a potentially larger problem concerning the relationship between justice and efficiency. When Heath puts the contrast between those who place rights before (...) efficiency in terms of a contrast between the US and Canadian health care systems, I find that I'm in agreement with the argument for efficiency. But when I think about the contrast in terms of the question of the gendered division of domestic labour, I'm less certain that I want to accord efficiency the kind of status it has according to Heath. (I must confess that I've always thought of Canada as the just society, rather than the efficient society. If it turns out.. (shrink)
The paradox of knowability is a logical result suggesting that, necessarily, if all truths are knowable in principle then all truths are in fact known. The contrapositive of the result says, necessarily, if in fact there is an unknown truth, then there is a truth that couldn't possibly be known. More specifically, if p is a truth that is never known then it is unknowable that p is a truth that is never known. The proof has been used to argue (...) against versions of anti-realism committed to the thesis that all truths are knowable. For clearly there are unknown truths; individually and collectively we are non-omniscient. So, by the main result, it is false that all truths are knowable. The result has also been used to draw more general lessons about the limits of human knowledge. Still others have taken the proof to be fallacious, since it collapses an apparently moderate brand of anti-realism into an obviously implausible and naive idealism. (shrink)
At 30 years' distance, it is safe to say that Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia has achieved the status of a classic. It is not only the central text for all contemporary academic discussions of libertarianism; with Rawls's A Theory of Justice, it arguably frames the landscape of academic political philosophy in second half of 20th century. Many factors, obviously account for the prominence of the book. This paper considers one: the book's use of rhetoric to charm and disarm its (...) readers, simultaneously establishing Nozick's credibility with readers, turning them on his ideological opponents, and helping his argument over some of its more serious substantive difficulties. Footnotesa I am grateful to Joe Bankman, Tom Grey, Pam Karlan, Ellen Frankel Paul, Seana Shiffrin, and Bob Weisberg for their very helpful comments on previous drafts of this essay. I am also grateful to my fellow contributors to this volume and to the participants in the Berkeley GALA and the UCLA Law and Philosophy Workshop, at which earlier versions of this essay were presented. All errors and indiscretions are mine alone. (shrink)
Direct source incompatibilism (DSI) is the conjunction of two claims: SI-F: there are genuine Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs); SI-D: there is a sound version of the direct argument (DA). Eric Yang ( 2012 ) responds to a recent criticism of DSI (Campbell 2006 ). We show that Yang misses the mark. One can accept Yang’s criticisms and get the same result: there is a deep tension between FSCs and DA, between SI-F and SI-D. Thus, DSI is untenable. In this essay, we (...) use an important yet overlooked distinction between truthmakers and determiners to help drive this point home. (shrink)
Scott Soames has argued that Rigidified Descriptivism wrongly predicts that one cannot believe, say, that Joe Strummer was born in 1952 without having a belief about the actual world. Soames suggests that agents in other possible worlds may have this belief, but may lack any beliefs about the actual world, a world that they do not occupy and have no contact with. I respond that this argument extends to other popular actuality-involving analyses. In order for Soames to hold on to (...) his argument against Rigidified Descriptivism, he must provide alternatives to these analyses. I argue that there is reason to think that these alternatives are not forthcoming, so Soames should surrender his argument against Rigidified Descriptivism. (shrink)
Does a factive conception of knowability figure in ordinary use? There is some reason to think so. ‘Knowable’ and related terms such as ‘discoverable’, ‘observable’, and ‘verifiable’ all seem to operate factively in ordinary discourse. Consider the following example, a dialog between colleagues A and B: A: We could be discovered. B: Discovered doing what? A: Someone might discover that we're having an affair. B: But we are not having an affair! A: I didn’t say that we were. A’s remarks (...) sound contradictory. In this context the factivity of ‘someone might discover that’ explains this fact. So there is some reason to believe that knowability and related modalities are factive in ordinary use. For factive treatments of knowability in the context of epistemic theories of truth, compare Tennant (2000: 829) and Wright (2001: 59-60, n. 17). (shrink)
The paradox of knowability threatens to draw a logical equivalence between the believable claim that all truths are knowable and the obviously false claim that all truths are known. In this paper we evaluate prominent proposals for resolving the paradox of knowability. For instance, we argue that Neil Tennant’s restriction strategy, which aims principally to restrict the main quantifier in ‘all truths are knowable’, does not get to the heart of the problem since there are knowability paradoxes that the restriction (...) does nothing to thwart. We argue that Jon Kvanvig’s strategy, which aims to block the paradox by appealing to the special role of quantified epistemic expressions in modal contexts, has grave errors. We offer here a new proposal founded on Kvanvig’s insight that quantified expressions play a special role in modal contexts. On an articulation of this special role provided by Stanley and Szabo, we propose a solution to the knowability paradoxes. Introduction.. (shrink)
The indispensability argument is a method for showing that abstract mathematical objects exist (call this mathematical Platonism). Various versions of this argument have been proposed (§1). Lately, commentators seem to have agreed that a holistic indispensability argument (§2) will not work, and that an explanatory indispensability argument is the best candidate. In this paper I argue that the dominant reasons for rejecting the holistic indispensability argument are mistaken. This is largely due to an overestimation of the consequences that follow from (...) evidential holism. Nevertheless, the holistic indispensability argument should be rejected, but for a different reason (§3)—in order that an indispensability argument relying on holism can work, it must invoke an unmotivated version of evidential holism. Such an argument will be unsound. Correcting the argument with a proper construal of evidential holism means that it can no longer deliver mathematical Platonism as a conclusion: such an argument for Platonism will be invalid. I then show how the reasons for rejecting the holistic indispensability argument importantly constrain what kind of account of explanation will be permissible in explanatory versions (§4). (shrink)
This piece outlines the opportunities and obstacles to the appli- cation of critical realism to the study of the self. Based on a recent seminar on the subject, the paper discusses a number of diverse approaches to the application of critical realism to selfhood, identity and psychology. It is argued that for the social sciences, the political dangers of essentialism in studying the self require clear explication of how critical realist approaches do not necessarily lead to reductionism or determinism.
Let me begin by saying that I am sympathetic to the simulation theory, especially where it is conceived of as a crucial and central addition alongside the theory-theory as the explanation of our capacity to attribute mental states, rather than as an exclusive and exhaustive account by itself.1 I part company with Professor Stueber, however, in that I view the recent simulation theory/theory- theory controversy as subject to resolution primarily through empirical findings. Still, it cannot be denied that Stueber has (...) helped to crystallize elements of the simulation theory/theory-theory debate that have been lurking all along, and has illuminated an important avenue of inquiry into the status of simulation. (shrink)
Simulation has emerged as an increasingly popular account of folk psychological (FP) talents at mind-reading: predicting and explaining human mental states. Where its rival (the theory-theory) postulates that these abilities are explained by mastery of laws describing the connections between beliefs, desires, and action, simulation theory proposes that we mind-read by "putting ourselves in another's shoes." This paper concerns connectionist architecture and the debate between simulation theory (ST) and the theory-theory (TT). It is only natural to associate TT with classical (...) architectures where rule governed operations apply to explicit propositional representations. On the other hand, ST would seem better tuned to procedurally oriented non-symbolic structures found in connectionist models. This paper explores the possible alignment between ST and connectionist architecture. Joe Cruz argues that connectionist models with distributed non-symbolic representations are particularly well suited to simulation theory. The purported linkage between connectionist architecture and simulation theory is criticized in this paper. The conclusion is that there are reasons for thinking that connectionist forms of representation are the enemy of both TT and ST. So the contribution of connectionism may be to suggest the need for an alternative to both views. (shrink)
It’s hardly news that speakers often fail to produce verbatim direct reports. Clark and his collaborators (Wade and Clark 1993, W&C; Clark and Gerrig 1993, C&G) attempt to exploit this widespread foible in practice to expose and undermine what they believe is a deep-seated assumption about the semantics of direct quotation, viz., that one is true just in case it is a verbatim reproduction of the original speaker’s words. Accordingly, Clark denies that (1) can be true only if Joe uttered (...) (2). (shrink)
One major obstacle in providing a compositional semantics for natural languages is that it is not clear how we should deal with propositional attitude contexts. In this paper I will discuss the Interpreted Logical Form proposal , focusing on the case of belief. This proposal has been developed in different ways by authors such as Harman (1972), Higginbotham (1986,1991), Segal (1989) and Larson and Ludlow (1993). On this approach, the that-clause of a belief report is treated as a singular term, (...) referring to the interpreted logical form (ILF) of its embedded sentence. The ILF of a sentence is made up of two parts : a syntactic representation of the sentence at the level of logical form, and an assignment of semantic values to parts of the representation. Thus, given a belief report such as. (shrink)
Cognitive science aims to provide scientific explanations of various mental phenomena. Attempts to study the mind, however, go back thousands of years, and what is distinctive about cognitive science is not its aim but the use of computations and representations in psychological explanations. We shall discuss whether the computational approach comes under challenge from dynamics, and look at some of the main themes in recent developments in cognitive science. In the final part of this paper we shall look at two (...) areas where cognitive science might provide significant benefits to the contemporary world. (shrink)
Joe Campbell has identified an apparent flaw in van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument. It apparently derives a metaphysically necessary conclusion from what Campbell argues is a contingent premise: that the past is in some sense necessary. I criticise Campbell’s examples attempting to show that this is not the case (in the requisite sense) and suggest some directions along which an incompatibilist could reconstruct her argument so as to remain immune to Campbell’s worries.
In everyday life, we typically explain what people do by attributing mental states such as beliefs and desires. Such mental states belong to a class of mental states that are _intentional_, mental states that have content. Hoping that Johnny will win, and believing that Johnny will win are of course rather different mental states that can lead to very different behaviour. But they are similar in that they both have the same content : what is being hoped for and believed (...) is the very same thing. According to the thesis of externalism that has been defended most notably by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, not all of the contents of our mental states are determined by our intrinsic properties. Instead, the contents of our beliefs and desires are often determined in part by our relations to the environment. They are, so to speak, "wide" contents that are "not in our heads." Although externalism is accepted by most philosophers, many have argued that mental states with wide contents must also have a kind of content wholly determined by the intrinsic properties of the individuals who are in those states. This kind of content is called "narrow content". The aim of this paper is to distinguish between three rather different motivations for postulating narrow content. I argue that, given a certain conception of narrow content that I shall explain below, none of these three motivations succeed in establishing the existence of narrow content. (shrink)
The question with which I would like to get to grips in this article is one that has been addressed many times and readdressed with particular vigor in recent years: what does Nietzsche value? The different ways in which Nietzsche's position on morality has been construed in the past few years give some idea of how divergently this question has been answered: Nietzsche's mature position has been read, among other things, as that of a perfectionist, a fictionalist, and a moral (...) noncognitivist.1What does Nietzsche value? What I am aiming to develop here is the most general principle according to which Nietzsche's values operate. I will discuss later the explicit but rather bald answers Nietzsche himself gives to this .. (shrink)
Constructivist theory must choose between the hypothesis that felt perturbation drives cognitive development (the priority of felt perturbation) and the hypothesis that the particular process that eventually produces new cognitive structures first produces felt perturbation (the continuity of process). There is ambivalence in Piagetian theory regarding this choice. The prevalent account of constructivist theory adopts the priority of felt perturbation. However, on occasion Piaget has explicitly rejected it, simultaneously endorsing the continuity of process. First, I explicate and support this latter (...) position, arguing that felt perturbation emerges after the construction of a new cognitive structure has already begun. Next, I discuss the broader significance of rejecting the priority of felt perturbation in terms of a distinction between two types of theory of effective change, labeled Lamarckian and Darwinian in analogy with familiar theories of evolutionary change. Rejecting the priority of felt perturbation allows the development of a Darwinian perspective. In turn, the Darwinian perspective offers advantages for elaborating the analogy Piaget proposed between consciousness and the relation of form and content. (shrink)
