Eternalists believe that there is no ontological difference between the past, present and future. Thus, a challenge arises: in virtue of what does time have a direction? Some eternalists, Oaklander and Tegtmeier ) argue that the direction of time is primitive. A natural response to positing primitive directionality is the suspicion that said posit is too mysterious to do any explanatory work. The aim of this paper is to relieve primitive directionality of some of its mystery by (...) offering a novel way to understand the phenomenon in terms of the recently popularised notion of grounding. (shrink)

Aesthetics, like other philosophical subjects, has historically made use of «top down» methods. Recent discoveries in genetics, evolutionary psychology, paleoarchaeology, and neuroscience call for a new «naturalistic» or «bottom up» perspective. Combining these fields with behavioral biology and ethnoarts studies, I offer seven premises that underlie a new understanding of evolved predispositions of the brain/mind that all artists use to attract attention, sustain interest, and create, mold, and shape emotion. I describe aesthetic «primitives» in somatic and behavioral modalities, suggesting that (...) these were present in early sapiens and continue to influence human art making and aesthetic response today. Keywords: Aesthetic Mind; Neuroaesthetics, evolutionary aesthetics, cognitive aesthetics, evolution of art. (shrink)

In this paper I wish to connect the recent debate in the philosophy of quantum mechanics concerning the nature of the wave function to the historical debate in the philosophy of science regarding the tenability of scientific realism. Being realist about quantum mechanics is particularly challenging when focusing on the wave function. According to the wave function ontology approach, the wave function is a concrete physical entity. In contrast, according to an alternative viewpoint, namely the primitive ontology approach, the (...) wave function does not represent physical entities. In this paper, I argue that the primitive ontology approach can naturally be interpreted as an instance of the so-called ‘explanationism’ realism, which has been proposed as a response to the pessimistic-meta induction argument against scientific realism. If my arguments are sound, then one could conclude that: (1) contrarily to what is commonly though, if explanationism realism is a good response to the pessimistic-meta induction argument, it can be straightforwardly extended also to the quantum domain; (2) the primitive ontology approach is in better shape than the wave function ontology approach in resisting the pessimistic-meta induction argument against scientific realism. (shrink)

In her ‘Primitive Normativity and Scepticism about Rules’ (2011b), Hannah Ginsborg proposes a novel solution to Kripke’s sceptical challenge to factualists about meaning (those who think that there is some fact about what you mean or meant by your utterances). According to Ginsborg, the fact in virtue of which you mean, say, addition by ‘plus’ is the fact that ‘you are disposed to respond to a query about (say) “68 plus 57” with “125,” where, in responding in that way, (...) you take that response to be primitively appropriate in light of your previous uses of “plus”’ (Ginsborg 2011b, 244). Ginsborg’s account is at its most compelling when considering what we might call unsophisticated cases of meaning, cases in which a subject means something by their words without their being in a position to identify the relevant rule or provide any sort of justification for their using the term as they do. In this paper, I raise doubts about whether Ginsborg’s account is extendable to sophisticated cases of meaning. Reflection on those cases which generate the doubts brings it into question whether the dispositions that Ginsborg identifies are necessary and jointly sufficient for one’s meaning that p even in unsophisticated cases. (shrink)

A theory of conceptual development must provide an account of the innate representational repertoire, must characterize how these initial representations differ from the adult state, and must provide an account of the processes that transform the initial into mature representations. In Carey, 2009 (The Origin of Concepts), I defend three theses: 1) the initial state includes rich conceptual representations, 2) nonetheless, there are radical discontinuities between early and later developing conceptual systems, 3) Quinean bootstrapping is one learning mechanism that underlies (...) the creation of new representational resources, enabling such discontinuity. I also claim that the theory of conceptual development developed in The Origin of Concepts addresses two of Fodor's challenges to cognitive science; namely, to show how learning could possibly lead to an increase in expressive power and to defeat Mad Dog Nativism, the thesis that all concepts lexicalized as mono-morphemic words are innate. A recent article by Georges Rey (Mind & Language, 29.2, 2014) argues that my responses to Fodor's challenges fail, because, he says, I fail to distinguish concept possession from manifestation and I do not confront Goodman's new riddle of induction. My response is to show that, and how, new primitives in a language of thought can be learned, that there are easy routes and hard ones to doing so, and that characterizing the learning mechanisms involved is the key to understanding both concept possession and constraints on induction. (shrink)

This paper explores the prospects for using the notion of a primitive normative attitude in responding to the sceptical argument about meaning developed in chapter 2 of Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It takes as its stalking-horse the response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein developed in a recent series of important works by Hannah Ginsborg. The paper concludes that Ginsborg’s attempted solution fails for a number of reasons: it depends on an inadequate response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s ‘finitude’ objection (...) to reductive dispositionalism; it erroneously rejects the idea that a speaker’s understanding of an expression guides her use; it threatens to collapse into either full-blown non-reductionism or reductive dispositionalism; and there is no motive for accepting it over forms of non-reductionism such as those developed by Barry Stroud and John McDowell. (shrink)

Spontaneous collapse theories provide a promising solution to the measurement problem. But they also introduce a number of problems of their own concerning dimensionality, vagueness, and locality. In response to these problems, advocates of collapse theories have proposed various accounts of the primitive ontology of collapse theories—postulated underlying entities governed by the collapse theory and underwriting our observations. The most prominent of these are a mass density distribution over three-dimensional space, and a set of discrete “flash” events at space-time (...) points. My argument here is that these primitive ontologies are redundant, in the sense that the structures exhibited by the primitive ontologies that allow them to solve the problems facing spontaneous collapse theories are also present in the wave function. But redundancy is not nonexistence; indeed, the fact that the relevant structures are already there in the wave function shows that the mass density ontology and the flash ontology exist whether they are explicitly postulated or not. By the same token, there is no need to decide between a wave function ontology, a mass density ontology and a flash ontology. (shrink)

1. Outline of the Project. This paper is intended to be a progress report on a project in philosophy of science. The immediate stimulus of this report is the eightieth birthday of E. A. Singer, Jr., who was the inspiration of the project, and, needless to say, though responsible for the whole is not responsible for the misconceptions in the specific parts.

This paper examines the meaningfulness of pointing in great apes. We appeal to Hannah Ginsborg’s conception of primitive normativity, which provides an adequate criterion for establishing whether a response is meaningful, and we attempt to make room for a conception according to which there is no fundamental difference between the responses of human infants and those of other great apes to pointing gestures. This conception is an alternative to Tomasello’s view that pointing gestures and reactions to them reveal (...) a fundamental difference between humans and other apes. (shrink)

This paper discusses theological responses in the Church of England to the South African War as reflected in sermons by theologians and church leaders and the limited amount of theological writing on the subject during the period. Three points emerge: first is the strong sense in which the mission was to civilise and Christianize. The fact that the war was being fought against a white enemy led to a characterisation of the Boer as uncivilised and primitive. Secondly, the (...) British Empire was not understood simply as a means of promoting the British interest across the world. Instead it was regarded as at least potentially a Christian Empire which embodied higher universal values. The emphasis was on humility and judgement, whereby moral absolutes were relativised by the vision of a more universal goal. This undoubtedly helped lessen the strength of some of the imperialist rhetoric. Finally, the higher values of self-sacrifice created a sense of moral seriousness: the universal values displayed in love for the community were prioritized over those of a narrow patriotism or individualism. Like the early days of the First World War, the Boer War functioned as an “antidote to anomie”. All in all, the strong dose of Platonism injected into Anglicanism in the nineteenth century meant that it functioned as a modest check on unfettered jingoism. A limited degree of prophetic critique – albeit deeply ambiguous, compromised and sometimes racist – remained the dominant theological discourse of Anglicanism, even at the highest point of imperialism. (shrink)

While the inference problem is widely thought to be one of the most serious problems facing non-Humean accounts of laws, Jonathan Schaffer has argued that a primitivist response straightforwardly dissolves the problem. On this basis, he claims that the inference problem is really a pseudo-problem. Here I clarify the prospects of a primitivist response to the inference problem and their implications for the philosophical significance of the problem. I argue both that it is a substantial question whether this sort of (...) response ought to be accepted and that the inference problem, contra Schaffer, remains a significant problem with important implications for the non-Humean position. I also argue that this discussion indicates grounds to be wary about applying the Schaffer-style strategy of straightforwardly dissolving problems by stipulation to other philosophical problems. (shrink)

This debate with William Beik and David Parker concerns whether a capitalist bourgeoisie developed in the ancien régime. Parker asserts that, in 1789, this class at best was new and unfledged. Beik claims that it is unhistorical to speak of its existence. Addressing their arguments, I re-iterate that the existence of a capitalist bourgeoisie was of long standing. It emerged from the sixteenth century onwards, buoyed by primitive accumulation and strengthened itself even in the face of the so-called offensive (...) of rent under seventeenth-century absolutism. (shrink)

In this article I want to explore some questions that arise from the work of Stanley Cavell. My purpose is to examine lines of connections between Cavell's readings of Wittgenstein (specifically his notions of 'criteria', 'aspect blindness' and 'primitive reaction', with special reference to the philosophical problem of 'other minds') and Shakespeare, on the one side, and a certain dimension of the ethical, on the other. Although Cavell has rarely offered explicit remarks on the issue of morality, and is (...) normally not considered a moral philosopher, it is my contention that it is possible to elicit what we could call an implied ethics from his philosophical view. This ethical outlook is not to be confused with a theory, but is rather a turn or bent that emerges especially by understanding the place of acknowledgment and ethical responsiveness in our practical life. Key Words: acknowledgment • Cavell • ethics • skepticism • Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Within recent years, we have witnessed an alarming increase in so-called school-shootings, where one or more students enter their school and purposely start shooting other students or staff. Earlier, the phenomenon was primarily American, but lately school-shootings have also been seen in Canada, Europe, and Australia. School-shootings have become an increasing problem and the phenomenon calls for more thorough investigation. In this article, we analyse the actions of teachers, more specifically the ones where teachers give their lives to save students. (...) This unselfish act is analysed in the light of Jacques Derrida’s ethical discussions around ‘the gift of death’, and is displayed as an absolute responsibility. Moreover, the sacrificial actions displayed by teachers are viewed as acts of primitive leadership, which take us back to the romanticism and heroism of leadership. Unlike the everyday management of organisations, crises call for extraordinary leadership; for sacrifice and responsibility. (shrink)

Current models of speech motor control rely on either trajectory-based control (DIVA, GEPPETO, ACT) or a dynamical systems approach based on feedback control (Task Dynamics, FACTS). While both approaches have provided insights into the speech motor system, it is difficult to connect these findings across models given the distinct theoretical and computational bases of the two approaches. We propose a new extension of the most widely used dynamical systems approach, Task Dynamics, that incorporates many of the strengths of trajectory-based approaches, (...) providing a way to bridge the theoretical divide between what have been two separate approaches to understanding speech motor control. The Task Dynamics (TD) model posits that speech gestures are governed by point attractor dynamics consistent with a critically damped harmonic oscillator. Kinematic trajectories associated with such gestures should therefore be consistent with a second-order dynamical system, possibly modified by blending with temporally overlapping gestures or altering oscillator parameters. This account of observed kinematics is powerful and theoretically appealing, but may be insufficient to account for deviations from predicted kinematics – i.e., changes produced in response to some external perturbations to the jaw, changes in control during acquisition and development, or effects of word/syllable frequency. Optimization, such as would be needed to minimize articulatory effort, is also incompatible with the current TD model, though the idea that the speech production systems economizes effort has a long history and, importantly, also plays a critical role in current theories of domain-general human motor control. To address these issues, we use Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) to expand a dynamical systems framework for speech motor control to allow modification of kinematic trajectories by incorporating a simple, learnable forcing term into existing point attractor dynamics. We show that integration of DMPs with task- based point-attractor dynamics enhances the potential explanatory power of TD in a number of critical ways, including the ability to account for external forces in planning and optimizing both kinematic and dynamic movement costs. At the same time, this approach preserves the successes of Task Dynamics in handling multi-gesture planning and coordination. (shrink)

This article uses a reading of John Wesley's Primitive Physic, or An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases (1747) to resist the common rejection—often as "quackery"—of Wesley's treatments for common maladies. We engage Wesley not because he was right but because his approach offers useful moments of pause in light of contemporary medical epistemology. Wesley's recommendations were primarily oriented towards the categories of personal responsibility and capability, but he also sought to empower individuals—especially the poor—with the knowledge (...) to safely and affordably treat maladies of their own. We leverage Primitive Physic to rethink contemporary medical knowledge production, especially as sanctioned by randomized clinical trials and legitimate views of experience and contemporary institutions such as the AMA. Ultimately, we suggest that the medical humanities has a key role to play in mining the discarded and dismissed for what they can tell scholars about medical knowledge. (shrink)

John Hare’s paper successfully exposes philosophical naïvéties and reductive pretensions in the evolutionary research he surveys. But he fails to clarify how ‘God’, on a view such as Dominic Johnson’s, could not be seen merely as a dispensable projection of ‘primitive’ societies, and thus how his own continuing commitment to a Kantian ethic might need to be bolstered by a concomitant form of ‘natural theology’ attentive to evolutionary dynamics.

Counterfactual theories of causation have had difficulty in delivering the intuitively correct verdicts for cases of causation involving preemption, without generating further counterexamples. Hall has offered a pluralistic theory of causation, according to which there are two concepts of causation: counterfactual dependence and production. Hall’s theory does deliver the correct verdicts for many of the problematic kinds of preemption. It also deals successfully with cases of causation by omission, which have proved stubborn counterexamples to physical process theories of causation. Hall’s (...) theory therefore appears to be a significant improvement on extant univocal theories of causation, both physical and counterfactual. In this paper I present a series of counterexamples to Hall’s theory. I also describe cases in which our causal judgments appear to be sensitive to moral considerations. It does not seem likely that conventional theories of causation, which attempt to situate causation in an objective metaphysical picture of the world, will ever accord our intuitions in such cases. Finally, the notion of responsibility is considered, but rejected as an illuminating primitive for analyzing causation. (shrink)

Tyler Burge is famous for defending primitivist naturalism about mental representations, according to which mental representations are primitive natural states. Primitivist naturalism contrasts with semantic reductionism, according to which mental representations are reducible to more fundamental natural states. Burge developed the most compelling and influential attack on semantic reductionism from a primitivist naturalist point of view. My goal in this paper is to defend semantic reduc- tionism from Burge’s attack. I assess and refute his objection to the motivations for (...) semantic reductionism and his objection to the semantic reductionist theory that he takes to be the most promising one, namely, teleosemantics. I argue that in spite of the ingenuity of Burge’s objections, they fail to show that there is no motivation for taking representational states as reducible to more fundamental natural states or that the core thesis of teleosemantics is flawed. (shrink)

Why did Frege look for the foundations of arithmetic in logic? Robin Jeshion has argued against several proposed answers, mine among them, and offered one of her own. In response, I argue that (i) Jeshion's own interpretation does not work: it is unsupported by the text and fails to answer the question; (ii) while it is not my view that Frege is motivated solely by philosophical concerns, his motivation cannot be divorced from his belief that foundations for science must show (...) whether its truths are analytic or synthetic, a priori or a posteriori; (iii) it must (for Frege) be evident from the content of a primitive truth to which of these categories the truth belongs. (shrink)

Acerca de la imagen de tapa: Ritmos Primarios, la Subversión del Alma, de Hugo Aveta, 2013.

This volume brings together a number of previously unpublished essays that will advance the reader's philosophical understanding of specific aspects of causation, agency and moral responsibility. These are deeply intertwined notions, and a large proportion of the volume is taken up by papers that shed light on their mutual connections or defend certain claims concerning them. The volume investigates several important questions, including: Can causation be perceived? If it can, can it be perceived in any way other than visually? Can (...) the interventionist theory developed by James Woodward offer an adequate account of causation? Is a causal relation a necessary condition for moral responsibility? Can there be a responsibility difference without a causal difference? Are causal ascriptions based on the more primitive language game of blame ascriptions? What can be learnt from the analogy between causal interference and unbreakable processes, on one side, and motivational interferences and "unbreakable" resolutions, on the other side? How can humans be routinely considered responsible for non-deliberated omissions? Should the connection between moral responsibility and the epistemic conditions usually required for moral responsibility to be obtained be weakened? What is the connection between awareness of one's doing and intentional action? These essays constitute a valid contribution towards the discovery of reasonable answers to such deep questions as the metaphysics of causal relations, the epistemology of causal explanations, the interventionist theory of causation, and the relationship among causality and moral responsibility, willpower, agency and intentional action. (shrink)

Arguing against the claim that every dispositional property is grounded in some property other than itself, Stephen Mumford presents what he calls the ‘Ungrounded Argument’. If successful, the Ungrounded Argument would represent a major victory for anti-Humean metaphysics over its Humean rivals, as it would allow for the existence of primitive modality. Unfortunately, Humeans need not yet be worried, as the Ungrounded Argument is itself lacking in grounding. I indicate where Mumford’s argument falls down, claiming that even the dispositions (...) of the simplest particles can have categorical bases. (shrink)

Reviewing the state of play in the attempt to naturalise content a quarter of a century after John Haugeland’s survey paper “The Intentionality All-Stars”, Dan Hutto and Glenda Satne propose a new naturalistic account of content that supposedly synthesizes what is best in the three failed programs of neo-Cartesianism, neo-Behaviourism and neo-Pragmatism. They propose to appeal to a Relaxed Naturalism, a non-reductive genealogical form of explanation and a primitive notion of contentless ur-intentionality. In this paper I argue that the (...) authors’ Relaxed Naturalism is a broad form of Scientific Naturalism and, as such, it is unable to account for the problem of conceptual normativity that arises for any scientific naturalist attempt to explain content – whether reductive or not. This is based on the irreconcilability of the objective third-personal character of scientific inquiry and the intersubjective second-personal nature of the normativity of content. I suggest that the authors would do better to simply become neo-Pragmatists who, properly understood, are Liberal Naturalists who have the conceptual and methodological resources to acknowledge and do justice to conceptually normative content. (shrink)

Talia Welsh (2006) argues that Shaun Gallagher and Andrew Meltzoff's (1996) application of neonatal imitation research is insufficient grounds for their claim that neonates are born with a primitive body image and thus an innate self-awareness. Drawing upon an understanding of the self that is founded upon a ?theory of mind,? Welsh challenges the notion that neonates have the capacity for self-awareness and charges the supposition with an essentialism which threatens to disrupt more social constructionist understandings of the self. (...) In this paper, I initially defend Gallagher and Meltzoff's (1996) application of infant imitation to understandings of neonatal self-awareness by explaining how body image schemas can be understood as non-representational embodied cognitive phenomena that challenge ?theory of mind? theory. I then further develop the claim that neonates are born self-aware with reference to my own work in fetal development. I conclude that Welsh's political concerns are unfounded by showing how the conclusion that a neonate is self-aware does not signal a return to an essentialist understanding of self-awareness, but rather introduces into philosophical and psychological discourse possible alternate understandings of an embodied sense of self that are embedded within intersubjective contexts. (shrink)

Quinian bootstrapping is Susan Carey's solution to Fodor’s paradox of concept learning. Carey claims that contrary to Fodor’s view, not all learning amounts to hypothesis testing, and that there are ways in which even primitive concepts can be learned. Recently Georges Rey has argued that Carey’s attempt to refute radical concept nativism is unsuccessful. First it cannot explain how the expressive power of mental representational systems could increase due to learning. Second, both Fodorian circularity charges and Goodmanian problems of (...) indeterminacy apply to Carey’s examples of Quinian bootstrapping. I argue that Carey’s examples of bootstrapping can be amended to escape Fodorian and Goodmanian objections. I suggest some ways to improve on our models of concept learning to this end. I also argue that skill learning is the way for mental representational systems to increase their own expressive power, that is, to enrich their conceptual repertoire beyond what compositionality alone affords. (shrink)

Acerca de la imagen de tapa: El Negro Matapacos, por Caiozzama. Noviembre 2019, Santiago de Chile.

In his comments, Daniel Nicholls succeeds in saying more than a few things that I had scarcely realized about the ways in which I write and, therefore, of what I tend to take for granted. He sees in what I write a capacity ‘to utilize the “obvious” whilst at the same time saying something about it.’ Not every philosopher would take that as a compliment. Many philosophers and philosophies have quite other pretensions – to transcend the illusions of common thought (...) and perception towards a higher plane of metaphysical philosophy – or of physics and mathematics. I find that Nicholls’s remark both compliments and complements my work, however. The use of everyday language and example to disturb that everyday world to ‘bring it into high relief’ as Nicholls puts it – is a significant part of philosophical method. To juxtapose the esoteric language of metaphysics (being-in-itself, being-for-itself, being-for-others) with the everyday (what there is, living for oneself, living for others) is to haunt the everyday with a metaphysical imagination even as it reveals what metaphysics had erased from the coinage of common words. (I am thinking, of course, of Derrida’s remarks about Anatole France’s satirical view of philosophical language as coinage from which all marking has been erased). (shrink)

In this article I examine an example of sympathy -- the actions of one woman who rescued Jews during their persecution in Nazi Europe. I argue that this woman''s account of her actions here suggests that sympathy is a primitive response to the suffering of another. By primitive here I mean: first, that these responses are immediate and unthinking; and second, that these responses are explanatorily basic, that they cannot be explained in terms of some more (...) fundamental feature of human nature -- such as some particular desire or sentiment that we possess. My conclusion is then that our sympathetic responses are themselves partially constitutive of our conception of what is to be a human being. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Part II of the Family LawAct 1996 gives expression to a new form ofresponsibility. I begin by suggesting thatresponsible behaviour has shifted from prohibiting orrequiring particular actions: we now exhibitresponsibility by our attitude towards our actions. I then examine where this new conception ofresponsibility has come from. Through an examinationof the work of post-liberal theorists, principallyMichael Sandel, I argue that a changing view ofpersonhood within post-liberal theory has led to aquestioning of the possibility of (...) choice, and that theabsence of choice necessitates a shift in thedefinition of responsible behaviour. If we are createdby our decisions then we cannot be held to account forour decisions, but only for the care we have takenover them. Responsibility is therefore measured notby our level of self-control but by our level ofself-awareness. Finally I examine the consequences ofthis shift in the meaning of responsibility. Withinthis framework autonomy is illusory thereforedecisions do not need to be respected. This explainswhy the implementation of Part II of the Family LawAct 1996 has been called into question. Within thisframework responsibility is relative therefore itextends indefinitely. This enables the Family Law Actto be uniquely intrusive and judgmental: everydivorcing couple, on being held up to scrutiny, isfound lacking. (shrink)