Much has been written about the free energy principle (FEP), and much misunderstood. The principle has traditionally been put forth as a theory of brain function or biological self-organisation. Critiques of the framework have focused on its lack of empirical support and a failure to generate concrete, falsifiable predictions. I take both positive and negative evaluations of the FEP thus far to have been largely in error, and appeal to a robust literature on scientific modelling to rectify the situation. A (...) prominent account of scientific modelling distinguishes between model structure and model construal. I propose that the FEP be reserved to designate a model structure, to which philosophers and scientists add various construals, leading to a plethora of models based on the formal structure of the FEP. An entailment of this position is that demands placed on the FEP that it be falsifiable or that it conform to some degree of biological realism rest on a category error. To this end, I deliver first an account of the phenomenon of model transfer and the breakdown between model structure and model construal. In the second section, I offer an overview of the formal elements of the framework, tracing their history of model transfer and illustrating how the formalism comes apart from any interpretation thereof. Next, I evaluate existing comprehensive critical assessments of the FEP, and hypothesise as to potential sources of existing confusions in the literature. In the final section, I distinguish between what I hold to be the FEP—taken to be a modelling language or modelling framework—and what I term “FEP models.”. (shrink)

Machine learning (ML) refers to a class of computer-facilitated methods of statistical modelling. ML modelling techniques are now being widely adopted across the sciences. A number of outspoken representatives from the general public, computer science, various scientific fields, and philosophy of science alike seem to share in the belief that ML will radically disrupt scientific practice or the variety of epistemic outputs science is capable of producing. Such a belief is held, at least in part, because its adherents take ML (...) to exist on novel epistemic footing relative to classical mathematical or statistical modelling approaches utilised in science. Namely, they take modelling with ML to be a “theory-free” enterprise, in the sense of not resting essentially on input from human conceptual grasp on the target phenomenon and domain expertise. I take this view to arise from the further, and more deeply entrenched belief that data is worldly and objective; i.e., data is viewed as recapitulating or representing with perfect fidelity the structure or properties of the systems in nature it is sampled from. Yet most contemporary philosophers of science take on board, in one version or other, the thesis of theory-ladenness or theory-mediation of observation or measurement. From this, it follows that most philosophers of science (and, I will venture, many scientists) hold irreconcilable views on the nature of data, an internal tension which threatens the integrity of their appraisals of ML in science. Taking the thesis of theory-ladenness on board---and its implications for the nature of data seriously---it follows that there is no reason to believe that ML differs fundamentally in its epistemic footing from established mathematical modelling approaches in the sciences. I show that usage and interpretation can differ from “standard practice” in scientific projects which wield the tools of ML without accepting a difference in the epistemic or representational status of such tools. (shrink)

The principal target of this article is the reification Bruineberg et al. perceive of formalism within the literature on the variational free energy minimization (VFEM) framework. The authors do not provide a definition of reification, as none yet exists. Here I offer one. On this definition, the objects of the authors' critiques fall short of full-blown reification – as do the authors themselves.

_Youth in Education_ explores the multiple, interrelated social contexts that young people inhabit and navigate, and how educational institutions cope with increasing ethnic, cultural and ideological diversity. Schools, families and communities represent important settings in which young people must make successful transitions to adulthood, and the classroom often becomes a battleground in which these contexts and values interact. With contributions from the UK, Belgium, Germany and Canada, the chapters in this book explore rich examples from Europe and North America to (...) suggest strategies that can help to counter negative perceptions, processes of stigmatization and disengagement, instead prioritising peer support and cooperative learning to give pupils a renewed sense of worth. This book takes the growing ethno-cultural diversity in education systems to heart and studies the various related educational processes from a multidisciplinary and multi-method approach. It aims to offer more insight into underlying mechanisms that are often implicit, but can be important factors that positively or negatively influence educational trajectories and outcomes. It is essential reading for researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of education, sociology, higher education, policy and politics, and social and cultural geography. (shrink)

Barbara Herman’s The Moral Habitat develops an account of a system of duties – both juridical and ethical, perfect and imperfect – that provides the structure f.

Comparative psychology, the multidisciplinary study of animal behavior and psychology, confronts the challenge of how to study animals we find cute and easy to anthropomorphize, and animals we find odd and easy to objectify, without letting these biases negatively impact the science. In this Element, Kristin Andrews identifies and critically examines the principles of comparative psychology and shows how they can introduce other biases by objectifying animal subjects and encouraging scientists to remain detached. Andrews outlines the scientific benefits (...) of treating animals as sentient research participants who come from their own social contexts and with whom we will be in relationship. With discussions of science's quest for objectivity, worries about romantic and killjoy theories, and debates about chimpanzee cognition between primatologists who work in the field and those in the lab, Andrews shows how scientists can address the different biases through greater integration of the subdisciplines of comparative psychology. (shrink)

To answer tantalizing questions such as whether animals are moral or how morality evolved, I propose starting with a somewhat less fraught question: do animals have normative cognition? Recent psychological research suggests that normative thinking, or ought-thought, begins early in human development. Recent philosophical research suggests that folk psychology is grounded in normative thought. Recent primatology research finds evidence of sophisticated cultural and social learning capacities in great apes. Drawing on these three literatures, I argue that the human variety of (...) social cognition and moral cognition encompass the same cognitive capacities and that the nonhuman great apes may also be normative beings. To make this argument, I develop an account of animal social norms that shares key properties with Cristina Bicchieri's account of social norms but which lowers the cognitive requirements for having a social norm. I propose a set of four early developing prerequisites implicated in social cognition that make up what I call naïve normativity: the ability to identify agents, sensitivity to in-group/out-group differences, the capacity for social learning of group traditions, and responsiveness to appropriateness. I review the ape cognition literature and present preliminary empirical evidence supporting the existence of social norms and naïve normativity in great apes. While there is more empirical work to be done, I hope to have offered a framework for studying normativity in other species, and I conclude that we should be open to the possibility that normative cognition is yet another ancient cognitive endowment that is not human-unique. (shrink)

Following recent arguments that cultural practices in wild animal populations have important conservation implications, we argue that recognizing captive animals as cultural has important welfare implications. Having a culture is of deep importance for cultural animals, wherever they live. Without understanding the cultural capacities of captive animals, we will be left with a deeply impoverished view of what they need to flourish. Best practices for welfare should therefore require concern for animals’ cultural needs, but the relationship between culture and welfare (...) is also extremely complex, requiring us to rethink standard assumptions about what constitutes and contributes to welfare. (shrink)

Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. In (...) this paper, we propose a novel methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. We begin with an analysis of the explanatory aims of the cognitive science of social norms. From this analysis, we derive a recommendation for a reformed conception of its explanandum: a minimally psychological construct that we call normative regularities. Our central empirical proposal is that the psychological underpinnings of social norms are most likely realized by a heterogeneous set of cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms that vary between norms and between individuals, rather than by a single type of process or distinctive norm system. This pluralistic approach, we suggest, offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of social norms. (shrink)

In “Rethinking Norm Psychology,” Cecilia Heyes offers an insightful critique of nativist approaches to the psychology of norms and then proposes a plausible alternative model grounded in the theory of cognitive gadgets. We are broadly sympathetic to both the critique and to the cognitive-gadgets model, though our own pluralistic approach to the psychology of norms (Westra & Andrews, 2022) leads us to think that the range of psychological and ecological processes that contributes to our norm psychology is even more (...) diverse than what Heyes proposes. Here, though, we focus on Heyes’s conceptual critique of the nativist model and its explanatory target—namely, a system for representing and processing rules. Heyes’s criticism of this representational rule-based conception of the psychology of norms is quite sound. However, we will argue that Heyes’s alternative behavioral explanandum for the psychology of norms also fails to escape the gravitational pull of a rule-based approach. (shrink)

Despite increasing scientific interest in self-generated thought-mental content largely independent of the immediate environment-there has yet to be any comprehensive synthesis of the subjective experience and neural correlates of affect in these forms of thinking. Here, we aim to develop an integrated affective neuroscience encompassing many forms of self-generated thought-normal and pathological, moderate and excessive, in waking and in sleep. In synthesizing existing literature on this topic, we reveal consistent findings pertaining to the prevalence, valence, and variability of emotion in (...) self-generated thought, and highlight how these factors might interact with self-generated thought to influence general well-being. We integrate these psychological findings with recent neuroimaging research, bringing attention to the neural correlates of affect in self-generated thought. We show that affect in self-generated thought is prevalent, positively biased, highly variable (both within and across individuals), and consistently recruits many brain areas implicated in emotional processing, including the orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, and medial prefrontal cortex. Many factors modulate these typical psychological and neural patterns, however; the emerging affective neuroscience of self-generated thought must endeavor to link brain function and subjective experience in both everyday self-generated thought as well as its dysfunctions in mental illness. (shrink)

This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic folk psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not presented as a single theory or model of social cognition, but rather as a big-tent research (...) program encompassing both revisionary and more traditionally inspired approaches to folk psychology. After reviewing the origins of pluralistic folk psychology, the papers in the current issue are introduced. These papers fall into three thematic clusters: Folk-psychological strategies beyond propositional attitude attribution ; Enculturation and regulative folk psychology ; and Defenses of pluralism. (shrink)

The birth of a new science is long, drawn out, and often fairly messy. Comparative psychology has its roots in Darwin’s Descent of Man, was fertilized in academic psychology departments, and has branched across the universities into departments of biology, anthropology, primatology, zoology, and philosophy. Both the insights and the failings of comparative psychology are making their way into contemporary discussions of artificial intelligence and machine learning (Chollett 2019; Lapuschkin et al. 2019; Watson 2019). It is the right time to (...) turn a philosophical lens onto the methodologies of comparative psychology. That is the aim of this Element. -/- Comparative psychology is the umbrella covering the different ways scientists study animal mind and behavior. Comparative psychologists study animal behavior and mentality, including the mechanisms and inner states that allow crows to form hooks, vervet monkeys to give warnings, crabs to make trade-off decisions, and humans to use language. While focus is on the similarities and differences between different species, capacities are often studied in terms of their evolutionary history, development, and current ecological or cultural context. What this entails is that comparative psychologists have a range of different kinds of training, different areas of expertise, and different research questions. One comparative cognition researcher compares children and dogs on causal reasoning abilities (Daphna Buchsbaum), another looks at memory in corvids (Nicola Clayton). An animal behaviorist examines raccoon territories in a city (Suzanne MacDonald). One anthropologist looks at war in wild chimpanzees (John Mitani), another looks at how innovations are adopted in capu- chin monkeys (Susan Perry). One ethologist looks at play in wolves (Marc Bekoff), and another looks at deception in birds (Carolyn Ristau). One biologist looks at male alliances in dolphins (Richard Connor), and another examines economic game performance in apes and monkeys (Sarah Brosnan). An animal welfare scientist studies the effect of enrichment on mink (Georgia Mason). A learning theorist looks at gambling in pigeons (Thomas Zentall). A zoologist studies social learning in bees (Lars Chittka). It is not easy to guess in which department you’ll find a comparative psychologist. -/- This Element aims to examine the methods of comparative psychology, which remains especially concerned about how to study animal minds and behavior without falling prey to fuzzy thinking. Animals can be cute, so humans are often intrinsically drawn to them; and this love of animals is sometimes taken to be at odds with being a careful scientist. The methods of comparative psychology reflect this worry with their special emphases on avoiding bias and on avoiding developing warm relationships with animal subjects. The first two sections analyze three textbooks to examine what young scientists are taught. Section 1 investigates three methodological principles students are taught to follow: Anti-anthropomorphism, Morgan’s Canon, and Anti-anthropocentrism. I argue that the first two principles should be discarded, and that developing relationships with animals should no longer be discouraged, as relationships promote understanding. Building on this critique, in Section 2 I challenge the common prohibition against including animal consciousness in comparative psychology by arguing that it does not harm the science, but promotes it. Setting aside the special prohibitions for comparative psychology, in Section 3 I examine how the quest for objectivity in comparative psychology introduces its own bias and argue that the different disciplines of comparative psychology will introduce different biases; the best scientists can do is identify the sources of bias. The quest to eliminate all bias is a misguided one. Section 4 applies these issues to recent debates in ape cognition research between scientists who work in the field and those who work in the lab, and suggests best practices for integrating knowledge from both sources. -/- I have had the opportunity to work with a number of comparative psychologists in a variety of contexts, including a stint at Lou Herman’s dolphin communication lab in the 1990s, collaborative studies with Peter Verbeek on the child’s theory of mind at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Child Development, conducting research on orangutan pantomime communication with Anne Russon at her field sites in Borneo, research on rat social learning with Noam Miller at Wilfrid Laurier University, and co-teaching a field course in dolphin communication with Kathleen Dudzinski. As a philosopher of science who has been in the field and in the lab, I have a perspective from which to compare the comparative psychologists. This Element is my attempt to synthesize almost thirty years of experience and thinking about how to study animal minds. (shrink)

This paper develops an interpretation of what is essential to kant's doctrine of the highest good, Which defends it while also explaining why it is often rejected. While it is commonly viewed as a theological ideal in which happiness is proportioned to virtue, The paper gives an account in which neither feature appears. The highest good is best understood as a state of affairs to be achieved through human agency, Containing the moral perfection of all individuals and the satisfaction of (...) their permissible ends-I.E., One in which all act from the moral law and in doing so achieve their intended ends. The paper shows that the texts contain two distinct conceptions not distinguished by kant-Both a theological and a secular (political) notion. The standard objections apply to the theological, But the secular conception is consistent with kant's conception of moral conduct. Moreover, That the highest good is introduced as an end to be constructed out of the moral law indicates that the secular version is the essential notion. (shrink)

Birch sketches out an ingenious account of how the psychology of social norms emerged from individual-level norms of skill. We suggest that these individual-level norms of skill are likely to be much more widespread than Birch suggests, extending deeper into the hominid lineage, across modern great ape species, all the way to distantly related creatures like honeybees. This suggests that there would have been multiple opportunities for social norms to emerge from skill norms in human prehistory.

I suggest a pluralistic account of folk psychology according to which not all predictions or explanations rely on the attribution of mental states, and not all intentional actions are explained by mental states. This view of folk psychology is supported by research in developmental and social psychology. It is well known that people use personality traits to predict behavior. I argue that trait attribution is not shorthand for mental state attributions, since traits are not identical to beliefs or desires, and (...) an understanding of belief or desire is not necessary for using trait attributions. In addition, we sometimes predict and explain behavior through appeal to personality traits that the target wouldn't endorse, and so could not serve as the target's reasons. I conclude by suggesting that our folk psychology includes the notion that some behavior is explained by personality traits—who the person is—rather than by beliefs and desires—what the person thinks. Consequences of this view for the debate between simulation theory and theory theory, as well as the debate on chimpanzee theory of mind are discussed. (shrink)

Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and ...

This chapter examines Kant's moral philosophy, which is developed principally in three major works: the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, and The Metaphysics of Morals. It begins with an overview of Kant's foundational theory, and then turns, more briefly, to his normative theory.

The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Kant's three Critiques, and his second work in moral theory after the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Its systematic account of the authority of moral principles grounded in human autonomy unfolds Kant's considered views on morality and provides the keystone to his philosophical system. The essays in this volume shed light on the principal arguments of the second Critique and explore their relation to Kant's critical philosophy as a whole. They (...) examine the genesis of the Critique, Kant's approach to the authority of the moral law given as a 'fact of reason', the metaphysics of free agency, the account of respect for morality as the moral motive, and questions raised by the 'primacy of practical reason' and the idea of the 'postulates'. Engaging and critical, this volume will be invaluable to advanced students and scholars of Kant and to moral theorists alike. (shrink)

This article explores a set of questions about the ‘idea of freedom’ that Kant introduces in the fourth paragraph of Groundwork III. I develop a reading that supports treating it as a normative notion and brings out its normative content in some detail. I argue that we should understand the idea as follows: that it is a general feature of reasoning and judgement that it understands itself to be a correct or sound application of the normative standards of the relevant (...) domain of cognition, not influenced by irrelevant or external factors. Reasoning and judgement are thus normatively committed to these standards of correctness. A second and related concern is to explore connections between the idea of freedom and Kant’s conception of autonomy and to identify different points at which autonomy plays a role in the argument of Groundwork III. In the final section, I mine the idea of freedom for a set of normative commitments specific to rational agency that play a foundational role in Kant’s moral conception. (shrink)

Work on dispositions focuses chiefly on dispositions that are manifested in dynamic causal processes. Williams, Neil. 2005. “Static and Dynamic Dispositions.” Synthese 146: 303–24 has argued that the focus on dynamic dispositions has been at the expense of a richer ontology of dispositions. He contends that we ought to distinguish between dynamic and static dispositions. The manifestation of a dynamic disposition involves some change in the world. The manifestation of a static disposition does not involve any change in the world. (...) In this paper, we concede that making a conceptual distinction between dynamic and static dispositions is useful and we allow that we can truthfully represent objects as manifesting static dispositions. However, we argue that the distinction is not ontologically deep. Rather, the truthmakers for our representations of static dispositions are actually dynamic dispositions to whose manifestations we may fail to be sensitive. (shrink)

Shared intentions supporting cooperation and other social practices are often used to describe human social life but not the social lives of nonhuman animals. This difference in description is supported by a lack of evidence for rebuke or stakeholding during collaboration in nonhuman animals. We suggest that rebuke and stakeholding are just two examples of the many and varied forms of social maintenance that can support shared intentions. Drawing on insights about mindshaping in social cognition, we show how apes can (...) be stakeholders of a different sort in joint action. Drawing on pluralistic social maintenance methods of behavior enforcement, we show ape joint action can be supported by different forms of positive and negative social pressures, and not just protest. We explain how diverse relationships, contexts, social structures, and forms of communication may play a role in forming and successfully fulfilling joint commitments for humans, great apes, and other animals. (shrink)

This essay examines the reception of Ivan Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes in early to mid-twentieth century Britain. Recent work on the political interpretation of biology has shown that the nineteenth-century strategy of “making socialists” was undermined by August Weismann’s attacks on the inheritance of acquired characters. I argue that Pavlov’s research reinvigorated socialist hopes of transforming society and the people in it. I highlight the work of Pavlov’s interpreters, notably the scientific journalist J. G. Crowther, the biologist Lancelot Hogben, (...) and the science writer H. G. Wells, who made Pavlov’s work accessible to a British audience and embraced the socialist implications of his research – especially the idea that people could be persuaded to become socialists through science writing for a nonspecialist audience and through use of a simplified language such as Basic English. They saw, in the followers of National Socialism, how Pavlovian conditioning could create a national movement, and believed that this could be used for their own more democratic form of socialism. In the final part of the essay, I suggest that this broad socio-cultural movement to reshape humanity proved controversial, especially in the post-war period and in light of Soviet use of brainwashing. The likes of Aldous Huxley and F. A. Hayek feared that conditioning could only lead to totalitarianism, while the historian E. P. Thompson put forward a socialist humanism that left room for human agency. (shrink)

Kant holds that when an agent acts contrary to a strict moral requirement, all of the resulting bad consequences are imputable to the agent, whether foreseeable or not. Conversely, no bad consequences resulting from an agent's compliance with duty are imputable. This paper analyzes the underlying rationale of Kant's principles for the moral imputation of bad consequences. One aim is to show how Kant treats imputability as a question for practical reason occurring within the context of first-order moral norms, rather (...) than a causal or metaphysical issue. This is because the actions that are candidates for imputation are those picked out as salient by moral norms, and because what is imputable depends on first determining what an agent's moral requirements are. The basic idea behind Kant's principles is that the subject to whom an action or its consequences are imputed is the agent on whose authority the action is undertaken. Bad consequences of an action are imputable to an agent who violates a moral requirement because, in transgressing the limits on action established by morality, the agent acts "on his own authority". Consequences that are unforeseeable or which occur by accident may be imputed by this general principle on these grounds: though the consequences may not have been foreseeable, since the agent was subject to a moral requirement, he had compelling reason to, and thus could have refrained from the action that led to them. Though Kant's principles are generally plausible once their basis is evident, the possibility of bad consequences that are only accidentally connected to a violation of duty indicates the need to set limits on what is imputable. The paper concludes by suggesting that an outcome resulting from a violation of duty is imputable when the requirement under which the agent stands provides a reason to act in ways that will standardly prevent or avoid outcomes of that general kind. Nach Kant werden dem Handelnden, der eine strikte moralische Pflicht verletzt, die schlechten Folgen dieses seines Verhaltens stets zugerechnet, und zwar unabhängig davon, ob diese Folgen nun vorhersehbar waren oder nicht. Umgekehrt: Schlechte Folgen, die aus einem pflichtgemäßen Verhalten hervorgehen, sind nicht zurechenbar. Der Beitrag untersucht das Konzept, das diesen Kantischen Prinzipien für die moralische Zurechnung schlechter Folgen zugrunde liegt. Ein Ziel ist es dabei zu zeigen, wie Kant Zurechenbarkeit nicht als ein metaphysisches oder als ein Problem der Kausalität behandelt, sondern als eine Frage der praktischen Vernunft, die im Zusammenhang mit den moralischen Normen erster Ordnung auftaucht. Dies deshalb, weil die Relevanz der Handlungen, die für die Zurechnung in Frage kommen, in erster Linie von den moralischen Normen herkommt, und weil, was zurechenbar ist, von der vorherigen Bestimmung dessen abhängt, was die moralischen Pflichten des Handelnden sind. Die Grundidee der Kantischen Prinzipien besteht darin, daß das Subjekt, dem eine Handlung oder deren Folgen zugerechnet werden, als Urheber der Handlung betrachtet werden muß. Schlechte Folgen einer Handlung sind einem Handelnden, der eine Pflicht verletzt, deshalb zuzurechnen, weil der Handelnde mit der Überschreitung der von der Moral gesetzten Grenzen "aus eigener Machtvollkommenheit" handelt. Unvorhersehbare oder zufällig eintretende Folgen können unter Zugrundelegung dieses Prinzips aus folgenden Gründen zugerechnet werden: Obwohl die Folgen nicht vorhersehbar gewesen sein mögen, hatte der Handelnde, da er einer moralischen Pflicht unterworfen war, doch einen zwingenden Grund dafür und deshalb auch die Möglichkeit dazu, von der Handlung Abstand zu nehmen, die zu jenen Folgen geführt hat. Wenn Kants Prinzipien, hat man ihre Grundlagen erst einmal verstanden, im allgemeinen auch plausibel sind, ist es doch so, daß die Möglichkeit von schlechten Folgen, die mit einer Pflichtverletzung nur zufälligerweise verknüpft sind, eine Einschränkung der Zurechnung fordert. Der Beitrag schließt mit dem Vorschlag, einen Erfolg, der aus einer Pflichtverletzung resultiert, nur dann zuzurechnen, wenn die moralische Verpflichtung, der der Handelnde unterworfen ist, einen Grund dafür liefert, so zu handeln, daß die Folgen dieses Typs von Handlung normalerweise verhindert oder vermieden werden. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I. Introduction II. Transcendental Freedom and Practical Freedom III. The Possibility of Freedom of the Will IV. The Reality of Freedom of the Will.

One aim of the Critique of Practical Reason is to establish that reason alone can determine the will. To show that it can, it suffices to show that there are practical principles given by reason alone – what Kant terms ‘practical laws’, or (roughly) requirements of reason on action. Chapter I of the Analytic accomplishes this aim by arguing that the moral law is an authoritative practical principle given as a ‘fact of reason’. The chapter begins in section 1 with (...) a ‘Definition’ (Erklärung) of a practical law as a practical principle that.. (shrink)

The essays in this volume offer an approach to the history of moral and political philosophy that takes its inspiration from John Rawls. All the contributors are philosophers who have studied with Rawls and they offer this collection in his honour. The distinctive feature of this approach is to address substantive normative questions in moral and political philosophy through an analysis of the texts and theories of major figures in the history of the subject: Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant and (...) Marx. By reconstructing the core of these theories in a way that is informed by contemporary theoretical concerns, the contributors show how the history of the subject is a resource for understanding present and perennial problems in moral and political philosophy. This outstanding collection will be of particular interest to historians of moral and political philosophy, historians of ideas, and political scientists. (shrink)

Dasgupta poses a serious challenge to realism about natural properties. He argues that there is no acceptable explanation of why natural properties deserve the value realists assign to them and are consequently absent of value. In response, this paper defines and defends an alternative non-explanatory account of normativity compatible with realism. Unlike Lewis and Sider, who believe it is sufficient to defend realism solely on realist terms, I engage with the challenge on unfriendly grounds by revealing a tu quoque. Dasgupta (...) and anti-realists face a similar challenge to that directed against realism: one that not only undermines the objection to realism by legitimising non-explanatory normativity but leaves them facing a significant dilemma. (shrink)

We examine the degree structure $\operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbf {ER}}}$ of equivalence relations on $\omega $ under computable reducibility. We examine when pairs of degrees have a least upper bound. In particular, we show that sufficiently incomparable pairs of degrees do not have a least upper bound but that some incomparable degrees do, and we characterize the degrees which have a least upper bound with every finite equivalence relation. We show that the natural classes of finite, light, and dark degrees are (...) definable in $\operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbf {ER}}}$. We show that every equivalence relation has continuum many self-full strong minimal covers, and that $\mathbf {d}\oplus \mathbf {\operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbf {Id}}}_1}$ needn’t be a strong minimal cover of a self-full degree $\mathbf {d}$. Finally, we show that the theory of the degree structure $\operatorname {\mathrm {\mathbf {ER}}}$ as well as the theories of the substructures of light degrees and of dark degrees are each computably isomorphic with second-order arithmetic. (shrink)

The primary concern of this paper is to outline an explanation of how Kant derives morality from reason. We all know that Kant thought that morality comprises a set of demands that are unconditionally and universally valid. In addition, he thought that to support this understanding of moral principles, one must show that they originate in reason a priori, rather than in contingent facts about human psychology, or the circumstances of human life. But do we really understand how he tries (...) to establish that moral principles originate in reason? In at least two passages in the second section of the Groundwork, Kant insists upon the importance of grounding the moral law in practical reason a priori, and subsequently states a conception of practical reason from which he appears to extract a formulation of the Categorical Imperative. The reasoning employed in these passages would appear to be of central importance to the overall argument of the Groundwork, but in each case the route travelled from the definition of practical reason to the ensuing formulation of the moral law is obscure. My goal is to work out a plausible reconstruction of this portion of Kant’s argument. At the very least, I hope that my interpretation will illuminate the distinctive structure of the Kantian approach to questions of justification in ethics. What I understand of Kant’s view leads me to believe that its aims and overall shape are different in important respects from what is often assumed. It also represents an approach to foundational issues in ethics, which provides an alternative to many contemporary attempts to ground morality in reason. (shrink)

First published in 1995, The Visual Brain in Action remains a seminal publication in the cognitive sciences. For this new edition, a very substantial and illustrated epilogue has been added to the book in which Milner and Goodale review the key developments that support or challenge the views that were put forward in the first edition.

The philosophy of animal minds addresses profound questions about the nature of mind and the relationships between humans and other animals. In this fully revised and updated introductory text, Kristin Andrews introduces and assesses the essential topics, problems, and debates as they cut across animal cognition and philosophy of mind, citing historical and cutting-edge empirical data and case studies throughout. The second edition includes a new chapter on animal culture. There are also new sections on the evolution of consciousness (...) and tool use in animals, as well as substantially revised sections on mental representation, belief, communication, theory of mind, animal ethics, and moral psychology. Further features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary make The Animal Mind an indispensable introduction to those teaching philosophy of mind, philosophy of animal minds or animal cognition. It will also be an excellent resource for those in fields such as ethology, biology, and psychology. (shrink)

The transparency of visual experience is a widely held and important thesis in the philosophy of perception. Critical discussion of transparency has focused on visual experiences, such as the experience of visual blur that are taken to be counter examples to transparency. Here, I consider a novel objection to transparency that does not depend on intuitions about examples. The objection is that if transparency is true then we cannot explain our ability to think about our visual experiences as such. In (...) response to this objection, I develop an account of how we are able to think about our own visual experiences as such that is compatible with transparency. (shrink)