Timothy Williamson in his article "Necessary Existents" presents a proof of the claim that everything necessarily exists using just three seemingly uncontroversial principles relating the notions of proposition with those of truth and existence. The argument, however, may be easily blocked once the distinction, introduced by R. M. Adams, between the notions of a proposition being true in a world and of (or at) a world is introduced. In this paper I defend the plausibility of the notion of a proposition's (...) being true of a world by rejecting two criticisms of it raised by Williamson; in the final section, I present a conception of propositions, according to which they are equivalence classes of mental representations, for which at least one of the principles comes out as false. (shrink)
In eleven pointed and sometimes provocative conversations, architect and professor of architecture, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani uses a critique of contemporary urban planning to develop principles for reestablishing the discipline. In seven projects designed with these principles in mind, he shows how his vigorous reinterpretation of the field can be implemented and what a fresh start can look like. Magnago Lampugnani envisages a calm modern city that can measure itself against the historic city, while emphasizing sustainability and providing a home (...) for a multifaceted and continually changing society. (shrink)
Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning. They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are: Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all concepts—even concepts about action and perception—are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain’s sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1) neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3) results about (...) the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called “abstract” concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical constructions and general inference patterns. (shrink)
Myin, Erik (2000) Direct Self-Consciousness (2)Bermúdez, José Luis (2000) Concepts and the Priority Principle (10)Bermúdez, José Luis (2000) Circularity, "I"-Thoughts and the Linguistic Requirement for Concept Possession (11)Meeks, Roblin R. (2000) Withholding Immunity: Misidentification, Misrepresentation, and Autonomous Nonconceptual Proprioceptive First-Person Content (12)Newen, Albert (2001) Kinds of Self-Consciousness (13)Bermudez, Jose Luis (2000) Direct Self-Consciousness (4)Bermudez, Jose Luis (2000) Prelinguistic Self-Consciousness (5)Gallese, Vittorio (2000) The Brain and the Self: Reviewing the Neuroscientific Evidence (6)Bermudez, Jose Luis (2000) The Cognitive Neuroscience of Primitive (...) Self-Consciousness (7) [Currently Displayed]Robbins, Philip (2000) Paradox Twice Lost (8)Fuller, Gary and Slater, Carol W. (2000) "I"-Thoughts: Criteria, Constitution, and Concept Possession (9)Evans, Cedric Oliver (2000) Prelinguistic Self-Consciousness (3)Bermudez, Jose Luis and Polytechnique, CREA Ecole (1999) The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (representation and Mind) (1). (shrink)
The same neural structures involved in the unconscious modeling of our acting body in space also contribute to our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains. Neuroscientific research also shows that there are neural mechanisms mediating between the multi-level personal experience we entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others. Such personal and body-related experiential knowledge enables us to understand the actions performed by others, and to directly decode (...) the emotions and sensations they experience. A common functional mechanism is at the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding: embodied simulation. It will be shown that the present proposal is consistent with some of the perspectives offered by phenomenology. (shrink)
This paper raises fundamental questions about the claims of art historian David Freedberg and neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese in their article "Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience." It does so from several perspectives, all of them rooted in the dynamic realities of movement. It shows on the basis of neuroscientific research how connectivity and pruning are of unmistakable import in the interneuronal dynamic patternings in the human brain from birth onward. In effect, it shows that mirror neurons are contingent (...) on morphology and corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic experience. Accordingly, it poses and answers the overlooked but seminally important question of how mirror neurons come to be. The original neuromuscular research of Parma neuroscientists and the findings of Marc Jeannerod concerning kinesthesia support the answer that the "underpinnings" of visual art appreciation are themselves underpinned. An abbreviated phenomenological analysis of movement and its implications regarding the fact that the making of all art is quintessentially contingent on movement, hence a dynamic enterprise, further bolster the given answer as does a brief review of an empirical phenomenological analysis of the natural dynamic congruency of emotions and movement. In the end, the paper shows that movement and life are of a piece in the creation and appreciation of art as in everyday life. (shrink)
Theory theorists conceive of social cognition as a theoretical and observational enterprise rather than a practical and interactive one. According to them, we do our best to explain other people's actions and mental experience by appealing to folk psychology as a kind of rule book that serves to guide our observations through our puzzling encounters with others. Seemingly, for them, most of our encounters count as puzzling, and other people are always in need of explanation. By contrast, simulation theorists do (...) their best to avoid the theoretical stance by using their own experience as the measure of everyone else's. When it comes to explaining how we understand other people some of the very best contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists are simulationists. For example, Vittorio Gallese, Alvin Goldman, Robert Gordon, Jane Heal, Susan Hurley, and Marc Jeannerod. This short list of simulationists, however, already involves some problems. Not everyone on this list understands simulation in the same way. In effect, there are different simulation theories, and although it is important to distinguish them, and I will do so before I go much further, I will in the end argue against all of them. For several reasons I don't think that the concept of simulation explains our primary and pervasive way of understanding others, any more than theory theory does. (shrink)
In this paper I put forward some arguments in defence of inclusive legal positivism . The general thesis that I defend is that inclusive positivism represents a more fruitful and interesting research program than that proposed by exclusive positivism . I introduce two arguments connected with legal interpretation in favour of my thesis. However, my opinion is that inclusive positivism does not sufficiently succeed in estranging itself from the more traditional legal positivist conceptions. This is the case, for instance, with (...) regard to the value-freedom principle, which is commonly accepted by inclusive positivist scholars. In contrast with this approach, I try to show, in the concluding section, how a constructivistic version of inclusive positivism could legitimately acknowledge the presence of value-judgments in the cognitive activities of jurists and legal theorists. (shrink)
Empathy is the phenomenal experience of mirroring ourselves into others. It can be explained in terms of simulations of actions, sensations, and emotions which constitute a shared manifold for intersubjectivity. Simulation, in turn, can be sustained at the subpersonal level by a series of neural mirror matching systems.
Spinoza speculated on how ethics could emerge from biology and psychology rather than disrupt them and recent evidence suggests he might have gotten it right. His radical deconstruction and reconstruction of ethics is supported by a number of avenues of research in the cognitive and neurosciences. This paper gathers together and presents a composite picture of recent research that supports Spinoza’s theory of the emotions and of the natural origins of ethics. It enumerates twelve naturalist claims of Spinoza that now (...) seem to be supported by substantial evidence from the neurosciences and recent cognitive science. I focus on the evidence provided by Lakoff and Johnson in their summary of recent cognitive science in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999); by Antonio Damasio in his assessment of the state of affective neuroscience in Descartes’ Error (1994) and in The Feeling of What Happens (1999) (with passing references to his recent Looking for Spinoza (2003); and by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese and their colleagues in the neural basis of emotional contagion and resonance, i.e., the neural basis of primitive sociality and intersubjectivity, that bear out Spinoza’s account of social psychology as rooted in the mechanism he called attention to and identified as affective imitation. (shrink)
Do moral appraisals shape judgments of intentionality? A traditional view is that individuals first evaluate whether an action has been carried out intentionally. Then they use this evaluation as input for their moral judgments. Recent studies, however, have shown that individuals’ moral appraisals can also influence their intentionality attributions. They attribute intentionality to the negative side effect of a given action, but not to the positive side effect of the same action. In three experiments, we show that this asymmetry is (...) a robust effect that critically depends on the agent’s beliefs. The asymmetry is reduced when agents are described as not knowing that their action can bring about side effects, and is eliminated when they are deemed to hold a false belief about the consequences of their actions. These results suggest that both evaluative and epistemic considerations are used in intentionality attribution. (shrink)
Positing the importance of sensorimotor contingencies for perception is by no means denying the presence and importance of representations. Using the evidence of mirror neurons we will show the intrinsic relationship between action control and representation within the logic of forward models.
To have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting our world, possesses an ontology too. It creates primitives and makes existence assumptions. It decomposes target space in a way that exhibits a certain invariance, which in turn is functionally significant. We will investigate which are the functional regularities guiding this decomposition process, by answering to the following questions: What are the explicit and implicit assumptions (...) about the structure of reality, which at the same time shape the causal profile of the brain's motor output and its representational deep structure, in particular of the conscious mind arising from it (its ''phenomenal output'')? How do they constrain high-level phenomena like conscious experience, the emergence of a first-person perspective, or social cognition? By reviewing a series of neuroscientific results and integrating them with a wider philosophical perspective, we will emphasize the contribution the motor system makes to this process. As it will be shown, the motor system constructs goals, actions, and intending selves as basic constituents of the world it interprets. It does so by assigning a single, unified causal role to them. Empirical evidence demonstrates that the brain models movements and action goals in terms of multimodal representations of organism-object-relations. Under a representationalist analysis, this process can be conceived of as an internal, dynamic representation of the intentionality-relation itself. We will show how such a complex form of representational content, once it is in place, can later function as a functional building block for social cognition and for a more complex, consciously experienced representation of the first-person perspective as well. (shrink)
This paper replies to Politzer’s ( 2007 ) criticisms of the mental model theory of conditionals. It argues that the theory provides a correct account of negation of conditionals, that it does not provide a truth-functional account of their meaning, though it predicts that certain interpretations of conditionals yield acceptable versions of the ‘paradoxes’ of material implication, and that it postulates three main strategies for estimating the probabilities of conditionals.
abstract This article refutes Henry Shue's claim that in the case of preventive military attacks it is sometimes morally permissible to make an exception to the fundamental principle regarding the inviolability of individual rights. By drawing on a comparison between torture and preventive military attacks, I will argue that the potential risks of institutionalizing preventive military attacks — what I call the Institutionalizing Argument — are far too great to even contemplate. Two potential risks with setting up a bureaucracy which (...) specializes in preventive military attacks will be highlighted: that any preventive military strike may nourish a cycle of violence that will inevitably cause more deaths and destruction than could ever be justified; and that such preventive military strikes may be abused by political leaders in a desperate effort to hold on to power, including democratically elected political leaders working within a democratic framework. (shrink)
The representational dynamics of the brain is a subsymbolic process, and it has to be conceived as an "agent-free" type of dynamical self-organization. However, in generating a coherent internal world-model, the brain decomposes target space in a certain way. In doing so, it defines an "ontology": to have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting the world, possesses an ontology too. It decomposes target space (...) in a way that exhibits certain invariances, which in turn are functionally significant. A challenge for empirical research is to determine which are the functional regularities guiding this decomposition process. What are the explicit and implicit assumptions about the structure of reality, which at the same time shape the causal profile of the brain's motor output and the representational deep structure of the conscious mind arising from it (its "phenomenal output")? How do they constrain high-level phenomena like conscious experience, the emergence of a first-person perspective, or social cognition? By reviewing a series of neuroscientific results, we focus on the contribution the motor system makes to this process. As it turns out, the motor system constructs goals, actions, and intending selves as basic constituents of the world it interprets. It does so by assigning a single, unified causal role to them. Empirical evidence now clearly shows how the brain actually codes movements and action goals in terms of multimodal representations of organism-object relations. Under a representationalist analysis, this process can be interpreted as an internal representation of the intentionality relation itself. We try to show how such a more complex form of representational content, once it is in place, can later function as the building block for social cognition and a for more complex, consciously experienced representation of the first-person perspective as well. The motor system may therefore play a decisive role in understanding how the functional ontology of the human brain could be gradually extended into the subjective and social domains. (shrink)
The paper deals with the peculiar nature of Anselm’s rationalism, focussing on the dialogue Cur deus homo. On the one hand, the argument in Cur deus homois based on reason alone. On the other hand, the dialogic nature of the work allows Anselm to unfold emotional states in a way that almost anticipates Kierkegaard. Anselm’s rationalism does not exclude the experience of anxiety and despair, and this is where faith comes to the rescue. Finally, God’s presence in the search is (...) shown to be logically compatible with the rationalist nature of the search. (shrink)
We have found that moral considerations interact with belief ascription in determining intentionality judgment. We attribute this finding to a differential availability of plausible counterfactual alternatives that undo the negative side-effect of an action. We conclude that Knobe's thesis does not account for processes by which counterfactuals are generated and how these processes affect moral evaluations.
Spinoza speculated on how ethics could emerge from biology and psychology rather than disrupt them and recent evidence suggests he might have gotten it right. His radical deconstruction and reconstruction of ethics is supported by a number of avenues of research in the cognitive and neurosciences. This paper gathers together and presents a composite picture of recent research that supports Spinoza’s theory of the emotions and of the natural origins of ethics. It enumerates twelve naturalist claims of Spinoza that now (...) seem to be supported by substantial evidence from the neurosciences and recent cognitive science. I focus on the evidence provided by Lakoff and Johnson in their summary of recent cognitive science in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999); by Antonio Damasio in his assessment of the state of affective neuroscience in Descartes’ Error (1994) and in The Feeling of What Happens (1999) (with passing references to his recent Looking for Spinoza (2003); and by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese and their colleagues in the neural basis of emotional contagion and resonance, i.e., the neural basis of primitive sociality and intersubjectivity, that bear out Spinoza’s account of social psychology as rooted in the mechanism he called attention to and identified as affective imitation. (shrink)
Is exploitation unjust? This essay attempts to resolve this famous question by suggesting a new approach to the relationship between exploitation and injustice. The literature on exploitation so far has focussed almost exclusively on the question of the circumstances of exploitation. This paper, by contrast, consists in investigating a different question, namely: what are the motives of exploitation? There are two different types of motive behind the act of exploitation: to secure an economic gain by using another person to one's (...) advantage, and to humiliate and degrade another person for the sake of identifying with power. Understanding exploitation in terms of the latter motive enables us to see the injustice of exploitation from a different angle, pushing us beyond the narrow perspective (popular amongst Marxists) that tends to equate exploitation with the economics of an unfair exchange. (shrink)
Four studies show that observers and readers imagine different alternatives to reality. When participants read a story about a protagonist who chose the more difficult of two tasks and failed, their counterfactual thoughts focused on the easier, unchosen task. But when they observed the performance of an individual who chose and failed the more difficult task, participants' counterfactual thoughts focused on alternative ways to solve the chosen task, as did the thoughts of individuals who acted out the event. We conclude (...) that these role effects may occur because participants' attention is engaged when they experience or observe an event more than when they read about it. (shrink)
This paper analyses the question of animals in the framework of the phenomenological problem of the common world. First, it underlines the contrast between Husserl’s idea of animals as subjects acting in accordance with a motivation, and the views of Descartes, Heidegger and Sellars, who consider animal behaviour as mechanical or instinctive. After an account of the phenomenological approach to the question of the common world and of Husserl’s position concerning animals, it is showed that the results of scientific research (...) on animal behaviour mainly confirm that position. (shrink)
In the present paper we address the issue of the role of the body in shaping our basic self-awareness. It is generally taken for granted that basic bodily self-awareness has primarily to do with proprioception. Here we challenge this assumption by arguing from both a phenomenological and a neurophysiological point of view that our body is primarily given to us as a manifold of action possibilities that cannot be reduced to any form of proprioceptive awareness. By discussing the notion of (...) affordance and the spatiality of the body we show that both have to be construed in terms of the varying range of our power for action. Finally, we posit that the motor roots of our bodily self-awareness shed new light on both the common ground for and the distinguishing criterium between self and other. The properties of the mirror mechanism indicate that the same action possibilities constituting our bodily self also allow us to make sense of other bodily selves inasmuch as their action possibilities can be mapped onto our own ones. Our proposal may pave the way towards a general deconstruction of the different layers at the core of our full-fledged sense of self and others. (shrink)
Summary The concept of evolutionary epistemology has been critically discussed by philosophers who have mainly pointed to unacceptable philosophical tenets (cf. Vittorio Hösle, this Journal, Vol. 19 (1988), pp. 348â377). However, as most philosophers are extremely reluctant to critically treat the biological theories on which the ideas of evolutionary epistemology are based, the invalid concepts of adaption escaped their critical scrutiny. Therefore the influence of preconceived biological theories on the biological basis of evolutionary epistemology and the distorting consequences on (...) the philosophical level could not be elaborated. The following context sketches a new view of organismic reasoning and its impact on evolutionary aspects of epistemology. The basic theorem of adaptation is shown to be unacceptable and invalid if organisms are conceived as autonomous entities which can only evolve according to their specific internal organismic properties. (shrink)
According to Kanazawa (Psychol Rev 111:512â523, 2004), general intelligence, which he considers as a synonym of abstract thinking, evolved specifically to allow our ancestors to deal with evolutionary novel problems while conferring no advantage in solving evolutionary familiar ones. We present a study whereby the results contradict Kanazawaâs hypothesis by demonstrating that performance on an evolutionary novel problem (an abstract reasoning task) predicts performance on an evolutionary familiar problem (a social reasoning task).
This study examines the antecedents of corporate scandals. Corporate scandals are defined as rare events occurring at the apex of corporate fame when managerial fraud suddenly emerges in conjunction with a significant gap between perceived corporate success and actual economic conditions. Previous studies on managerial fraud have examined the antecedents of illegal acts in isolation from strategic decisions and in terms of CEOs’ individual responses to the external context. This study frames the antecedents of corporate scandals in terms of the (...) interplay of CEOs’ personal traits with corporate strategy and stakeholders’ cohesion. With this aim, this study builds on extant theory to examine the case of Banca Popolare di Lodi, an Italian bank involved in a corporate scandal in year 2005. The model contributes to advance understanding of the complex dynamics underlying the emergence of corporate scandals. (shrink)
The Biotheoretical Shortcomings of the Evolutionary Epistemology. The concept of evolutionary epistemology has been critically discussed by philosophers who have mainly pointed to unacceptable philosophical tenets (cf. Vittorio Hösle, this Journal, Vol. 19 (1988), pp. 348-377). However, as most philosophers are extremely reluctant to critically treat the biological theories on which the ideas of evolutionary epistemology are based, the invalid concepts of adaption escaped their critical scrutiny. Therefore the influence of preconceived biological theories on the biological basis of evolutionary (...) epistemology and the distorting consequences on the philosophical level could not be elaborated. The following context sketches a new view of organismic reasoning and its impact on evolutionary aspects of epistemology. The basic theorem of adaptation is shown to be unacceptable and invalid if organisms are conceived as autonomous entities which can only evolve according to their specific internal organismic properties. (shrink)
Simulation theories of social cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear what simulation means and how it works. The discovery of mirror neurons, responding both to action execution and observation, suggested an embodied approach to mental simulation. Over the last years this approach has been hotly debated and alternative accounts have been proposed. We discuss these accounts and argue that they fail to capture the uniqueness of embodied simulation (ES). ES theory provides a unitary account of basic (...) social cognition, demonstrating that people e their own mental states or processes represented with a bodily format in functionally attributing them to others. (shrink)
