Mental toughness (MT) is a key psychological variable related to achievement in performance domains and perseverance in challenging circumstances. We sought to understand the lived experiences of mentally tough high-altitude mountaineers, focusing primarily upon decisions to persevere or abort summit attempts. Phenomenological interviews were conducted with 14 mountaineers including guides, expedition leaders, and doctors (Mage = 44 years). A content analysis was employed to identify key themes in the data. Participants emphasized the importance of MT in extreme environments and (...) described rational, flexible, and vigilant decision-making. Turning around without summiting was the toughest decision reported, with recognition of the thin line between persevering and overstretching. In contrast to much MT literature, mountaineers accepted limits, demonstrated restraint, and sacrificed personal goals to aid others. Costly perseverance was also reported with some mountaineers described as “too tough”: overcompetitive, goal-obsessed, and biased decision-makers. These findings revealed both benefits and dangers of MT in mountaineering. (shrink)

For many, Thomas Beauchamp and James Childress have elaborated moral reasoning by using the four principles whereby all substantive problems of medical ethics (and of ethics more generally) can be properly analysed and cogent philosophical solutions for the problems can be found. It seems that their ‘principlism’ gets updated, with better features being added during the course of the six editions of Principles of Biomedical Ethics. Nonetheless, Beauchamp and Childress seem to have been losing their way when it comes to (...) the common-morality justification, which is the epistemological (and perhaps metaphysical) backbone of their method, and this is shown more vividly in their most recent (2009) edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics. The author points out what he calls the problem of ‘thick in status, thin in content’ in principlism. The problem exists because principlism cannot adequately explain how the prescriptive sense of common morality it supports is consistent with the existence of what Beauchamp and Childress call the ‘legitimate moral diversity in the world’. Because of this problem, first, the practical end that principlism allegedly accomplishes (ie, providing practical moral guidelines in a relatively ‘thick’ content, based on common morality) is frustrated, and, second, principlism makes itself the method of common morality de jure and of moral pluralism de facto. (shrink)

Siegel and Byrne debate whether perceptual experiences present rich properties or exclusively thin properties.

“Thin concepts” are dubious entities. Careful analysis of the usual examples of thick and thin raises serious doubts about both their conceptuality and their thinness. Confusions aside, there is little obvious use for them in ethics or metaethics. The very idea that there could be a naturally-occurring purely evaluative moral concept, with no descriptive content, no cultural setting, and no capacity for distanced or ironic use, is as chimerical as any other ahistorical illusion. Our concentration on thick (...) and thin has distracted us from thinking about other interesting and important ethical distinctions—evidential/ verdictive, evaluative/ prescriptive, determinable/ determinate, Zangwill’s because-relation, Anscombe’s brute-relative-to relation—which have something genuine and non-illusory on both sides of them. (shrink)

This article explores a variety of techniques for “cutting through the clutter” in an era of information glut: body language, neuromarketing, and data mining. It traces connections between these different strategies by arguing that they converge on an understanding of the social, political, and economic roles of information, which challenge the empowering promise of the digital information revolution. The attempt to short-circuit the discursive content of communication in order to get straight at the underlying sentiment is symptomatic of an (...) impasse that Slavoj Zizek describes in terms of the demise of symbolic efficiency. The promise of direct access to emotional truths modeled, for example by deception detection experts on the show Lie to Me compensates for what might be described as a vernacular postmodernism in which representations are understood to be not only subject to contrivance, but completely reducible to it. The result, this article argues, is a shift in the relationship of information to power, and thus in strategies for challenging or resisting it. (shrink)

In this essay I argue for the role of positive, community-based black identities in the creation and maintenance of black solidarity. I argue against Tommie Shelby’s attempts to reduce the notion of black identity as it relates to solidarity from something social or cultural to something entirely political—“thin” black identity. As an alternative, I propose a model for the relationship between “thin” and “thicker” identities based on Rawls’ contention that the stability of overlapping political consensus isproduced by different (...) groups’ adherence to, rather than denial of, a plurality of comprehensive doctrines. I also discuss the benefits of positive, community-based black identities in terms of “black love” and show why, even if not possessed by each and every black American, such identities are ultimately indispensible to any black solidarity project. (shrink)

The 'content view', in slogan form, is 'Perceptual experiences have representational content'. I explain why the content view should be reformulated to remove any reference to 'experiences'. I then argue, against Bill Brewer, Charles Travis and others, that the content view is true. One corollary of the discussion is that the content of perception is relatively thin (confined, in the visual case, to roughly the output of 'mid-level' vision). Finally, I argue (briefly) that the (...) opponents of the content view are partially vindicated, because perceptual error is due to false belief. (shrink)

The ‘content view’, in slogan form, is ‘Perceptual experiences have representational content’. I explain why the content view should be reformulated to remove any reference to ‘experiences’. I then argue, against Bill Brewer, Charles Travis and others, that the content view is true. One corollary of the discussion is that the content of perception is relatively thin (confined, in the visual case, to roughly the output of ‘mid‐level’ vision). Finally, I argue (briefly) that the (...) opponents of the content view are partially vindicated, because perceptual error is due to false belief. (shrink)

IntroductionSymptoms of schizophrenia are closely related to aberrant language comprehension and production. Macroscopic brain changes seen in some patients with schizophrenia are suspected to relate to impaired language production, but this is yet to be reliably characterized. Since heterogeneity in language dysfunctions, as well as brain structure, is suspected in schizophrenia, we aimed to first seek patient subgroups with different neurobiological signatures and then quantify linguistic indices that capture the symptoms of “negative formal thought disorder”.MethodsAtlas-based cortical thickness values of 66 (...) patients with first-episode psychosis and 36 healthy controls were analyzed with hierarchical clustering algorithms to produce neuroanatomical subtypes. We then examined the generated subtypes and investigated the quantitative differences in MRS-based glutamate levels [in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex ] as well as in three aspects of language production features: fluency, syntactic complexity, and lexical cohesion.ResultsTwo neuroanatomical subtypes among patients were observed, one with near-normal cortical thickness patterns while the other with widespread cortical thinning. Compared to the subgroup of patients with relatively normal cortical thickness patterns, the subgroup with widespread cortical thinning was older, with higher glutamate concentration in dACC and produced speech with reduced mean length of T-units and lower repeats of content words, despite being equally fluent.ConclusionWe characterized a patient subgroup with thinner cortex in first-episode psychosis. This subgroup, identifiable through macroscopic changes, is also distinguishable in terms of neurochemistry and language behavior. This study supports the hypothesis that glutamate-mediated cortical thinning may contribute to a phenotype that is detectable using the tools of computational linguistics in schizophrenia. (shrink)

Is our experience of the world 'rich' or 'thin'? In other words, are we aware of unattended sensory stimuli, or are the contents of our consciousness constrained by what we attend to? A recent, ingenious, attempt to address this issue offers us a seemingly unavailable, 'moderate' option; our experience is somewhere between the two. But before we make our minds up about this conclusion, we should see that it resulted from conflating two ways of construing the relevant concepts. I (...) claim that, one way of reading 'rich' vs. 'thin', echoes the psychologists' distinction between 'early' vs. 'late' accounts of selective attention, and I argue that 'perceptual load theory', a recent response to this empirical issue, offers us a satisfying solution to our philosophical problem. Ultimately, we are only aware of what we attend to, so we can conclude that our experience of the world is philosophically 'thin'. Nonetheless, the second way of reading 'rich' vs. 'thin' relates to the range of sensory stimuli that we can be aware of. I claim that this range depends upon the attentional load that our sensory systems are placed under. The 'moderate' position, then, merely marks out one possible degree of sensory awareness on a continuum that runs from 'rich' to 'thin'. (shrink)

The meaning of an utterance is often enriched by the pragmatic context in which it is uttered. This is because in ordinary conversations we routinely and uncontroversially compress what we say, safe in the knowledge that those interpreting us will ‘add in’ the content we intend to communicate. Does the same thing hold true in the case of legal utterances like ‘This constitution protects the personal rights of the citizen’ or ‘the parliament shall have the power to lay and (...) collect taxes’? This article addresses this question from the perspective of the constitutional originalist—the person who holds that the meaning of a constitutional text is fixed at some historical moment. In doing so, it advances four theses. First, it argues that every originalist theory is committed to some degree of pragmatic enrichment, the debate is about how much. Second, that in determining which content gets ‘added in’, originalists typically hold to a common knowledge standard for enrichment, protestations... (shrink)

There is ongoing philosophical debate about the kinds of properties that are represented in visual perception. Both “rich” and “thin” accounts of perceptual content are concerned with how prior assumptions about the world influence the construction of perceptual representations. However, the idea that biased assumptions resulting from oppressive social structures contribute to the contents of perception has been largely neglected historically in this debate in the philosophy of perception. I draw on neurobiological evidence of the role of the (...) amygdala in visual processing to show that the influence of biased assumptions on visual perception gives us a unique path to rich evaluative content that does not require an appeal to controversial mechanisms like top-down modulation. (shrink)

This version of this paper has been superseded by a substantially revised version in G. Strawson, Real Materialism and Other Essays (OUP 2008) I take 'content' in a natural internalist way to refer to occurrent mental content. I introduce a 'thin' or ‘live’ notion of the subject according to which a subject of experience cannot exist unless there is an experience for it to be the subject of. I then argue, first, that in the case of a (...) particular experience E, its content C, and its (thin) subject S, [C ↔ E ↔ S]; and, second, that the metaphysical fact that underlies this (strong modal) equivalence is in fact identity: [E = S = C]. I suggest that the effort of thought required to grasp this is deeply revealing of the nature of reality. On the way I raise a doubt about the viability of the traditional object/property distinction. -/- . (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate in philosophy of mind and epistemology about whether perceptual experience only represents those “thin” features of our environment that are apprehended by our senses, or whether, in addition to these, at least some perceptual experiences represent more complex, “thick” properties. My aim in this paper is to articulate an important difference between thin and thick properties, and thus to diagnose a key intuitive resistance many proponents of the thin view feel towards the (...) thick view. My diagnosis then provides us with a novel and compelling argument against the thick view. In what follows, first I consider two unsuccessful versions of an alternative strategy against the thick view found in the literature. Next, I present my own argument. The argument involves proposing two constraints on the phenomenal contents of perceptual experience, which I call the Presentation Principle and the Containment Principle, and then reasoning from these principles to a conclusion that is fatal to the thick view—an outcome that I call the problem of Phenomenal Explosion. I conclude by responding to several objections. (shrink)

The value of psychology as a science has been challenged in phenomenology and in other epistemological trends. The main objective of this book is to draw the attention of students of human and animal behaviour to important achievements in phenomenological psychology and comparative physiology which are mostly overlooked, although they offer a genuine approach to subjective experience in relation to behavioural regulations. The work of Brentano, Stumpf, Husserl, Politzer, Katz, Michotte, Buytendijk and many others is analysed from this epistemological standpoint. (...) The significance of the phenomenological approach for the biology of behaviour is discussed. The meaning of Sherrington's physiology of the behavioural field is evaluated in the same framework. Basic reading for students of experimental psychology, comparative psychology and ethology, this book will appeal particularly to those interested in the philosophy of psychology and biology. Originally published in 1977. (shrink)

Recent studies support a model in which the progeny of SOX9+ epithelial progenitors at the distal tip of lung branches undergo cell allocation and differentiation sequentially along the distal‐to‐proximal axis. Concomitant with the elongation and ramification of lung branches, the descendants of the distal SOX9+ progenitors are distributed proximally, express SOX2, and differentiate into cell types in the conducting airways. Amid subsequent sacculation, the distal SOX9+ progenitors generate alveolar epithelial cells to form alveoli. Sequential cell allocation and differentiation are integrated (...) with the branching process to generate a functional branching organ. This review focuses on the roles of SOX9+ cells as precursors for new branches, as the source of various cell types in the conducting airways, and as progenitors of the alveolar epithelium. All of these processes are controlled by multiple signaling pathways. Many mouse mutants with defective lung branching contain underlying defects in one or more steps of cell allocation and differentiation of SOX9+ progenitors. This model provides a framework to understand the molecular basis of lung phenotypes and to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of lung patterning. It builds a foundation on which comparing and contrasting the mechanisms employed by different branching organs in diverse species can be made. (shrink)

According to indexical contextualism, the perspectival element of taste predicates and epistemic modals is part of the content expressed. According to nonindexicalism, the perspectival element must be conceived as a parameter in the circumstance of evaluation, which engenders “thin” or perspective-neutral semantic contents. Echoing Evans, thin contents have frequently been criticized. It is doubtful whether such coarse-grained quasi-propositions can do any meaningful work as objects of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I assess recent responses by Recanati, Kölbel, (...) Lasersohn and MacFarlane to the “incompleteness worry”. None of them manages to convince. Particular attention is devoted to an argument by John MacFarlane, which states that if perspectives must be part of the content, so must worlds, which would make intuitively contingent propositions necessary. I demonstrate that this attempt to defend thin content views such as nonindexical contextualism and relativism conflates two distinct notions of necessity, and that radical indexicalist accounts of semantics, such as Schaffer’s necessitarianism, are in fact quite plausible. (shrink)

The current study investigated the influence of morphological structure on the earliest stages of Arabic reading acquisition. More specifically, we aimed at examining the role of root and pattern units in beginners from Grade 1 to 3. A first set of reading tasks evaluated the presence of a morphology facilitation effect in word and pseudoword reading by manipulating independently the familiarity of roots and patterns. The second one pursued to examine the contribution of morphological awareness to reading performance. The results (...) suggest that reading ability is early influenced by the awareness of morphological composition. Children read faster and more accurately pseudowords composed of familiar morphemes. Furthermore, regression analyses revealed, for every reading measure, a significant contribution of one morphological test in addition to grapheme knowledge. Results are discussed taking into account the differences obtained depending on lexicality and morpheme type (root or pattern). (shrink)

Based on evidence that learning new characters through handwriting leads to better recognition than learning through typing, some authors proposed that the graphic motor plans acquired through handwriting contribute to recognition. More recently two alternative explanations have been put forward. First, the advantage of handwriting could be due to the perceptual variability that it provides during learning. Second, a recent study suggests that detailed visual analysis might be the source of the advantage of handwriting over typing. Indeed, in that study, (...) handwriting and composition –a method requiring a detailed visual analysis but no specific graphomotor activity– led to equivalent recognition accuracy, both higher than typing. The aim of the present study was to assess whether the contribution of detailed visual analysis is observed in preschool children and to test the variability hypothesis. To that purpose, three groups of preschool children learned new symbols either by handwriting, typing, or composition. After learning, children performed first a four-alternative recognition task and then a categorization task. The same pattern of results as the one observed in adults emerged in the four-alternative recognition task, confirming the importance of the detailed visual analysis in letter-like shape learning. In addition, results failed to reveal any difference across learning methods in the categorization task. The latter results provide no evidence for the variability hypothesis which would predict better categorization after handwriting than after typing or composition. (shrink)

If there is content that we reason on, cognitive content, it is in the head and accessible to reasoning mechanisms. This paper discusses the phenomenal theory of cognitive content, according to which cognitive contents are the contents of phenomenal consciousness. I begin by distinguishing cognitive content from the closely associated notion of narrow content. I then argue, drawing on prior work, that the phenomenal theory can plausibly account for the cognitive contents of many relatively simple (...) mental states. My main focus in this paper is the question whether the phenomenal theory can account for the apparently abstract and complex cognitive contents of "high-level" thoughts. It might seem dubious that the theory can account for such cognitive contents, because cognitive phenomenology is too scarce and too thin. However, I argue there are in fact few abstract or complex cognitive contents, so the phenomenal theory's predictions are correct. This position explains some apparently irrational behavior that is otherwise hard to explain, and it makes sense of the central role of inner speech and other forms of consciousness in reasoning. (shrink)

By religious experiences I mean those human experiences characterised by a kind of intuitional seeming to the effect that a transcendent or all‐encompassing being—God—exists. After explaining two significant similarities between religious and perceptual experiences, I will argue that the doctrine of phenomenal dogmatism about perceptual experiences can be applied to religious experiences as well. In the following two sections, the challenge arising from the objection from cognitive penetration is extended to the case of religious experiences. I show that the importance (...) of this challenge may be dependent on a debate over the proper content of experience—namely the debate over low‐level vs. high‐level content. In the subsequent section, I argue that even if the religious experience is deemed an experience with low‐level content, then the charge of cognitive penetration may not be avoided. Drawing upon the doctrine of divine simplicity, in the penultimate section, I argue that the experience of God has a specific characteristic which, in companion with its thin content, enables it to escape the charge of cognitive penetration. Alternatively put, the experience of God possesses an important epistemological advantage owing to its distinctive object, which makes it significantly reliable. In the final section, three possible objections are briefly addressed. (shrink)

Recent research on thick terms like “rude” and “friendly” has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like “friendly” and “courageous” can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like “rude” and “selfish”. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only (...) for thick terms but also for thin terms such as “good” or “bad” (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect indicates a pervasive asymmetry between positive and negative evaluative terms. (shrink)

Ethicists are typically willing to grant that thick terms (e.g. ‘courageous’ and ‘murder’) are somehow associated with evaluations. But they tend to disagree about what exactly this relationship is. Does a thick term’s evaluation come by way of its semantic content? Or is the evaluation pragmatically associated with the thick term (e.g. via conversational implicature)? In this paper, I argue that thick terms are semantically associated with evaluations. In particular, I argue that many thick concepts (if not all) conceptually (...) entail evaluative contents. The Semantic View has a number of outspoken critics, but I shall limit discussion to the most recent--Pekka Väyrynen--who believes that objectionable thick concepts present a problem for the Semantic View. After advancing my positive argument in favor of the Semantic View (section II), I argue that Väyrynen’s attack is unsuccessful (section III). One reason ethicists cite for not focusing on thick concepts is that such concepts are supposedly not semantically evaluative whereas traditional thin concepts (e.g. good and wrong) are. But if my view is correct, then this reason must be rejected. (shrink)

In addition to thin concepts like the good, the bad and the ugly, our evaluative thought and talk appeals to thick concepts like the lewd and the rude, the selfish and the cruel, the courageous and the kind -- concepts that somehow combine evaluation and non-evaluative description. Thick concepts are almost universally assumed to be inherently evaluative in content, and many philosophers claimed them to have deep and distinctive significance in ethics and metaethics. In this first book-length treatment (...) of thick concepts, Pekka Väyrynen argues that all this is mistaken. Through detailed attention to the language of thick concepts, he defends a novel theory on which the relationship between thick words and evaluation is best explained by general conversational and pragmatic norms. Drawing on general principles in philosophy of language, he argues that many prominent features of thick words and concepts can be explained by general factors that have nothing in particular to do with being evaluative. If evaluation is not essential to the sort of thinking we do with thick concepts, claims for the deep and distinctive significance of the thick are undermined. The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty is a fresh and innovative treatment of an important topic in moral philosophy and sets a new agenda for future work. It will be essential reading to anyone interested in the analysis and the broader philosophical significance of evaluative and normative language. (shrink)

According to so-called “thin” views about the content of experience, we can only visually experience low-level features such as colour, shape, texture or motion. According to so-called “rich” views, we can also visually experience some high-level properties, such as being a pine tree or being threatening. One of the standard objections against rich views is that high-level properties can only be represented at the level of judgment. In this paper, I first challenge this objection by relying on some (...) recent studies in social vision. Secondly, I tackle a different but related issue, namely, the idea that, if the content of experience is rich, then perception is cognitively penetrable. Against this thesis, I argue that the very same criteria that help us vindicate the truly sensory nature of our rich experiences speak against their being cognitively penetrable. (shrink)

Williamson argues for the contention that substructural logics are ‘ill-suited to acting as background logics for science’. That contention, if true, would be very important, but it is refutable, given what is already known about certain substructural logics. Classical Core Logic is a substructural logic, for it eschews the structural rules of Thinning and Cut and has Reflexivity as its only structural rule. Yet it suffices for classical mathematics, and it furnishes all the proofs and disproofs one needs for the (...) hypothetico-deductive method in science. We explain exactly what Classical Core Logic is, why it is a substructural logic par excellence, and what the basic requirements would be for a logic to be ‘suited to acting as [a] background logic for science’. We also explain how Classical Core Logic meets all these requirements. We end by examining Williamson’s argument in order to expose where its error lies. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

I introduce a thin concept of ad hoc identity -- distinct from metaphysical accounts of either relative identity or absolute identity -- and an equally thin account of concepts and their content. According to the latter minimalist view of concepts, the content of a concept has behavioral consequences, and so content can be bounded if not determined by appeal to linguistic and psychological evidence. In the case of counting practices, this evidence suggests that the number (...) concept depends on a notion of identity at least as strong as ad hoc identity. In the context of nonrelativistic QM in particular, all of the counting procedures appealed to in the existing literature on nonindividuality are shown to involve ad hoc identity. I then show that Goyal Complementarity and the associated derivation of a strong symmetrization principle in QM can be understood in terms ad hoc identity. Specifically, persistence and non-persistence models of quantum processes are seen to be complementary in the sense that they involve two relations of ad hoc identity that occasionally overlap in empirically meaningful ways. Finally, I attempt to draw out consequences for theories of nonindividuality from the above conceptual analysis. The upshot is that counting and definite cardinality are incompatible with nonindividuality, and that none of the counting procedures cited for quantum phenomena offer positive support for an interpretation in terms of nonindividuals. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness arises in most incarnations of present day physicalism. Why should certain physical processes necessarily be accompanied by experience? One possible response is that physicalism itself should be modified in order to accommodate experience: But, modified how? In the present work, we investigate whether an ontology derived from quantum field theory can help resolve the hard problem. We begin with the assumption that experience cannot exist without being accompanied by a subject of experience (SoE). While people (...) well versed in Indian philosophy will not find that statement problematic, it is still controversial in the analytic tradition. Luckily for us, Strawson has elaborately defended the notion of a thin subject—an SoE which exhibits a phenomenal unity with different types of content (sensations, thoughts etc.) occurring during its temporal existence. Next, following Stoljar, we invoke our ignorance of the true physical as the reason for the explanatory gap between present day physical processes (events, properties) and experience. We are therefore permitted to conceive of thin subjects as related to the physical via a new, yet to be elaborated relation. While this is difficult to conceive under most varieties of classical physics, we argue that this may not be the case under certain quantum field theory ontologies. We suggest that the relation binding an SoE to the physical is akin to the relation between a particle and (quantum) field. In quantum field theory, a particle is conceived as a coherent excitation of a field. Under the right set of circumstances, a particle coalesces out of a field and dissipates. We suggest that an SoE can be conceived as akin to a particle—a SelfOn—which coalesces out of physical fields, persists for a brief period of time and then dissipates in a manner similar to the phenomenology of a thin subject. Experiences are physical properties of selfons with the constraint (specified by a similarity metric) that selfons belonging to the same natural kind will have similar experiences. While it is odd at first glance to conceive of subjects of experience as akin to particles, the spatial and temporal unity exhibited by particles as opposed to fields and the expectation that selfons are new kinds of particles, paves the way for cementing this notion. Next, we detail the various no-go theorems in most versions of quantum field theory and discuss their impact on the existence of selfons. Finally, we argue that the time is ripe for a rejuvenated Indian philosophy to begin tackling the three-way relationship between SoEs (which may become equivalent to jivas in certain Indian frameworks), phenomenal content and the physical world. With analytic philosophy still struggling to come to terms with the complex worlds of quantum field theory and with the relative inexperience of the western world in arguing the jiva-world relation, there is a clear and present opportunity for Indian philosophy to make a worldcentric contribution to the hard problem of experience. (shrink)

It has become common to distinguish between two kinds of ethical concepts: thick and thin ones. Bernard Williams, who coined the terms, explains that thick concepts such as “coward, lie, brutality, gratitude and so forth” are marked by having greater empirical content than thin ones. They are both action-guiding and world-guided: -/- If a concept of this kind applies, this often provides someone with a reason for action… At the same time, their application is guided by the (...) world. A concept of this sort may be rightly or wrongly applied, and people who have acquired it can agree that it applies or fails to apply to some new situation. -/- Thin concepts are concepts such as good and bad, right and wrong, obligation and duty. Judgments applying thick concepts have been seen as lending support to the possibility of explaining moral knowledge, and objectivity in ethics. It appears that due to their empirical content – their world-guidedness – judgments employing thick concepts can be true or false, depending on whether they get the worldly facts right. In addition they provide reasons for action – they are action-guiding – and thus may provide the starting point of a realist account of practical reasons: the view that reasons are facts and whether or not a person has a reason to act does not (normally) depend on her attitudes. The cruelty of an action is a reason not to perform it or to prevent it; that an action is kind is a reason in its favour. Of course these remarks aren’t conclusive – far from it. But even so, some non-cognitivists may regard them as completely wrongheaded, and so does Bernard Williams even though he is not a non-cognitivist. However, he believes that having a practical reason does depend on a person’s attitudes and motives. A certain worry about thick concepts will make clear what the problem is. It has most expressly been raised by Simon Blackburn, who sees it as undermining even the most superficial plausibility of moral cognitivism, as well as the claim that the properties picked out by thick concepts provide reasons. While we may readily accept that the kindness of an action or the fact that it is required by justice is a reason to perform it, there are many thick concepts whose action-guiding role we would reject. Some derogatory – e.g., racist or sexist - words express thick concepts too, Blackburn notes. And surely there are no racist or sexist truths. Furthermore there are concepts that some people use evaluatively (like chaste or obscene), but many of us do not regard the propositions in which those concepts feature as even prima facie reason giving. In raising these points, Blackburn claims that it is morally objectionable to regard the facts asserted in propositions which employ thick concepts as action-guiding because it leads to “a conservative and ultimately self-serving complacency.” As he sees it, the problem is that if we believe that the correct application of thick concepts yields evaluative truths and that evaluative truths state reasons for actions, we seem to be committed to accepting that some people are, say, fat, derog., and therefore to be ridiculed, and that there is at least a pro tanto reason to lead a chaste life, or feel affection towards cute women. Therefore, the view that all evaluative properties provide reasons for action or for attitudes such as admiration, affection or (dis)approval must be rejected. I will call this worry henceforth Blackburn’s challenge. The challenge is that understanding judgments employing thick concepts as expressing evaluative truths and providing reasons for actions or for attitudes leads to a morally unacceptable view. Blackburn suggests instead that we should separate the conditions for applying thick concepts and the reasons that we have in virtue of the concept applying. She may be cute, yes, but that is not a reason for “admiration and arousal.” -/- …it is morally vital that we proceed by splitting the input from the output in such a case. By refusing to split we fail to open an essential specifically normative dimension of criticism. -/- According to Blackburn, the meaning of thick concepts is made up of two distinct and in principle separable components: a descriptive one and the expression of an attitude. The truth-aptness and cognitive appearance of judgments employing thick concepts is explained by the descriptive component alone. Blackburn writes “[w]e get nothing but detachable and flexible attitudes, coupled with delineations of traits of character or action”. I will call this reply to Blackburn’s challenge the separability thesis. I agree with Blackburn that any account of thick concepts has to face and answer the challenge that he poses. In this paper, I will focus on one reply to the challenge which denies separability, namely Bernard Williams’s. Williams answers Blackburn’s challenge, while holding on to a cognitivist understanding of thick concepts. But his particular brand of cognitivism is peculiar: Williams rejects the separability thesis, and claims that correct applications of thick concepts yield evaluative (and not just descriptive) knowledge. But this is a special kind of knowledge. It is confined to a local community. The members of a community which uses certain thick concepts may have reasons to act accordingly, but the non-members do not. And even the reasons of members remain a little fragile: they may not want to continue using their concepts upon thorough reflection. The local knowledge view allows Williams to answer Blackburn’s challenge, because even though thick concepts are evaluative concepts and their application can yield evaluative knowledge, no one who isn’t a member of the relevant community has reason to be guided by the concept. Complementing a cognitivist view of thick concepts with reasons internalism allows Williams to answer the challenge. My aim in this paper is to show that Williams’s position is, despite its initial attraction, untenable. In particular, I am going to show why the internal reasons view is incompatible with Williams’s own understanding of thick concepts. My modest result is that the internalist view of reasons does not help to answer Blackburn’s challenge. My aim in this paper is not to answer the challenge but, rather, to explore the possibility of developing Williams’s attenuated version of cognitivism, and the possibility of combining it with reasons internalism. (shrink)

endorsed one kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis and rejected another. This paper argues that the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis that Wittgenstein endorsed is the thin end of the wedge that precludes a Wittgensteinian critique of the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis he rejected. The danger of the dangerous kind is that it provides an argument for qualia, where qualia are contents of experiential states which cannot be fully captured in natural language. I will pinpoint the difference between the (...) innocuous and dangerous scenarios that matters for the argument for qualia, give arguments in favor of the coherence and possibility of the dangerous scenario, and try to show that some standard arguments against inverted spectra are ineffective against the version of the dangerous scenario I will be advocating. The leading idea of the paper is that an argument for qualia based on spectrum inversion does not require that the inversion be behaviorally indistinguishable. At one crucial point, I will rely on a less controversial version of an argument I gave in Block. Wittgenstein's views provide a convenient starting point for a paper that is much more about qualia than about Wittgenstein. (shrink)

I argue that there is a wide variety of epistemic norms, distributed along two different spectra. One spectrum runs from the ideal to the practical and concerns the extent to which it is possible to follow the norm given our cognitive and epistemic limitations. The other spectrum runs from thin to thick and concerns the extent to which the norm concerns facts about our beliefs over and above the content of the belief. Many putative epistemic norms, such as (...) truth and various conceptions of justification, can be found at different points on the spectra. There is no single obvious privileged point from which to say any of these norms is more fundamental than the others, though there may be some reason to doubt that some of the norms are intrinsically interesting. (shrink)