ABSTRACTRecognising identity and emotion conveyed by the face is important for successful social interactions and has thus been the focus of considerable research. Debate has surrounded the extent...

Volume 34, Issue 8, December 2020, Page 1621-1631.

Many philosophers who support a four-dimensionalist metaphysics of things also conceive of experience as a state of a mind having temporal extension or existing as a momentary feature of the dimension of time. This essay shows that such a strict four-dimensionalism — suggested in works by D. M. Armstrong, Mark Heller, and David Lewis — cannot be correct, since it cannot allow for the passing of time that is essential to awareness. The argument demonstrates that the positing of any (...) temporal process at all must compromise the strict four-dimensionalist view of the temporality of experience. This is not to say that the traditional endurantist view is left wholeheartedly endorsed. As I point out, this traditional view makes several questionable claims of its own that must be carefully scrutinized. Still, the criticism of the strict four-dimensionalist ontology indicates a direction to be followed in developing a successful metaphysics of experience. (shrink)

We show that in the c.e. weak truth table degrees if b < c then there is an a which contains no hypersimple set and b < a < c. We also show that for every w < c in the c.e. wtt degrees such that w is hypersimple, there is a hypersimple a such that w < a < c. On the other hand, we know that there are intervals which contain no hypersimple set.

What is the function of cognition? On one influential account, cognition evolved to co-ordinate behaviour with environmental change or complexity. Liberal interpretations of this view ascribe cognition to an extraordinarily broad set of biological systems—even bacteria, which modulate their activity in response to salient external cues, would seem to qualify as cognitive agents. However, equating cognition with adaptive flexibility per se glosses over important distinctions in the way biological organisms deal with environmental complexity. Drawing on contemporary advances in theoretical biology (...) and computational neuroscience, we cash these distinctions out in terms of different kinds of generative models, and the representational and uncertainty-resolving capacities they afford. This analysis leads us to propose a formal criterion for delineating cognition from other, more pervasive forms of adaptive plasticity. On this view, biological cognition is rooted in a particular kind of functional organisation; namely, that which enables the agent to detach from the present and engage in counterfactual inference. (shrink)

The multiverse hypothesis is the leading alternative to the competing fine-tuning hypothesis. The multiverse dispels many aspects of the fine-tuning argument by suggesting that there are different initial conditions in each universe, varying constants of physics, and the laws of nature lose their known arbitrary values; thus, making the previous single-universe argument from fine- tuning incredibly weak. The position that will be advocated will be that a form of multiverse could exist and that any level of Tegmark's multiverse does not (...) circumvent the fine-tuning argument for the existence of a fine-tuner. An argument will be presented suggesting that the multiverse could strengthen the fine-tuning argument by narrowing down the parameters of the data to a more fundamental description needed for the multiverse to function as it does since it may be the case that some physical descriptions are not the same in every universe. That is, the task of explaining how the multiverse mechanism functions cannot be accounted for by the multiverse itself. Fine-tuning by a mind serves as a sufficient and best explanation for the data. (shrink)

Detailed studies of people who have experienced the Capgras delusion (the delusion that certain other people, usually close relatives, have been replaced by impostors) have led to advances in constructing an account which can deal with the basic symptomatology, testing alternative possibilities, generating and testing non‐trivial predictions, and broadening the scope of the basic account to encompass other delusions. This paper outlines these developments. It uses them to explore implications for understanding the formation and maintenance of beliefs, and to discuss (...) basic principles of what has come to be known as cognitive neuropsychiatry. (shrink)

In Act 1 scene iv of Macbeth, Duncan reflects that: 'There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face'. In contrast, the claim that Andy Young sets out in this book is that we are now developing a science of face perception which can indeed shed light on certain aspects of mentallife. Face and Mind consists of a series of seminal research and review papers on face perception published by the author and his colleagues over the last 12 (...) years. A comprehensive introductory chapter, written especially for this volume, serves to draw together the various themes explored in thedifferent contributions. The book examines the question of how faces are special, in terms of their social, biological, and theoretical roles. In particular, Face and Mind seeks to determine what our understanding of the face can tell us about the human brain. It discusses the evidence for anevolved neural substrate for face perception, and the question of whether we are innately predisposed to recognise faces, to find them attractive, and to decode the many social signals they give us. The ability of the human brain to process and remember the many different faces that we see andsubsequently recall is analysed. Young includes detailed studies of the types of impairment to face perception which can follow brain injury or psychiatric illness, and uses them to address these questions, as well as other issues of high intrinsic and interdisciplinary interest. These include theextent to which our mental lives result from the operation of discrete components devoted to different purposes, the differences between conscious and non-conscious processes, and how we use evidence to support our beliefs about the world. Because of the huge variety of social signals read from theface, it can offer unique theoretical and philosophical insights into these questions. This fascinating book will be of interest not only to psychologists and neuropsychologists working in the field of visual perception, but to cognitive scientists generally. It provides an excellent summary ofthe most important theorietical and empirical work done on face perception in recent years, and as such will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students in psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that (...) has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility. (shrink)

Some cases of prosopagnosia involve a highly circumscribed loss of A-consciousness. When seen in this way they offer further support for the arguments made in Block's target article.

Charles Sanders Peirce famously claimed that ‘The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth’ (W3: 273). Christopher Hookway has argued for a highly distinctive interpretation of this claim in terms of speech-acts and the normative commitments we incur in performing them. So-construed, Peirce’s conception of truth is difficult to compare with standard theories of the concept, which tend to focus instead upon some property or feature that is (...) shared by all and only true propositions, and with whether or not that property is substantive or metaphysically significant. This paper examines Hookway’s interpretation of Peirce’s conception of truth in an effort to clarify its position in logical space. It then raises some difficulties for the way Hookway tries to accommodate Peirce’s remarks about the special status of assertion and belief in science. (shrink)

Majority-Minority electoral districts, while increasing the number of minorities in legislatures, work to deepen divisions among racial groups, to exacerbate the systematic disadvantages of some individuals, and to impede effective representation. I examine another form of race-conscious districting that will increase marginalized minority presence in legislatures while avoiding these problems.

This paper defends a key aspect of the Peircean conception of truth—the idea that truth is in some sense epistemically-constrained. It does so by exploring parallels between Peirce’s epistemology of inquiry and that of Wittgenstein in On Certainty. The central argument defends a Peircean claim about truth by appeal to a view shared by Peirce and Wittgenstein about the structure of reasons. This view relies on the idea that certain claims have a special epistemic status, or function as what are (...) popularly called ‘hinge propositions’. (shrink)

Pietraszewski exemplifies the need for computational theory using group conflict; I complement this with an example of group cooperation. He criticizes past theories for having black boxes; I suggest his theory also has a black box – the concept of costs. He divides what mentally constitutes a group from mere ancillary attributes; I hazard that some of these attributes are essential.

In his influential book Truth, Paul Horwich deploys a philosophical method focused on linguistic usage, that is, on the function(s) the concept of truth serves in actual discourse. In doing so Horwich eschews abstract metaphysics, arguing that metaphysical or ontological conceptions of truth rest on basic misconceptions. From this description, one might reasonably expect Horwich's book to have drawn inspiration from, or even embodied philosophical pragmatism of some kind. Unfortunately Horwich relies upon Russell's tired caricature of pragmatism about truth (''p' (...) is true if and only if it is useful to believe p' (Ibid., p. 34, p. 47)), and as a result underestimates the challenge it poses to Minimalism. This paper develops a pragmatist critique of minimalism that focuses on the seemingly central, plausibly constitutive role played by the concept of truth in the speech-act of assertion. The critique suggests that Horwich's Minimalism does not and cannot accomplish its stated goal of explaining all of the facts involving truth. Indeed, the kind of thorough-going deflationism sought by Horwich and others (including pragmatist sympathizer Bob Brandom) is incompatible with an adequate account of assertion, and perhaps other concepts (like belief, judgement and inquiry) as well. (shrink)

Historically, Thomas Aquinas has been controversial for his use of Averroistic-Aristotelian metaphysics. Because of his doctrine of simplicity many of argued that this entails a necessitarian view of nature—a debate that would pass through Spinoza, Descartes, and even to this day. Nevertheless, Thomas would prevail, not only to sainthood, but to become the patron of education and the Teacher of the Church. The task in this paper is to demonstrate that, contrary to many current contentions in Protestant, and especially Evangelical (...) circles, Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics remains a suitable, viable, even preferable framework for Christian Theism and, for the purposes of this paper, scientific thought. The specific focus will be on creation metaphysics and the relationship between current science and Christian thought raised by Lydia Jaeger. I will conclude with an example of the ability of radical contingency in Thomas to both satisfy contemporary physics and frame a consistent and coherent Christian Theism. (shrink)

Between inventing the concept of a universal computer in 1936 and breaking the German Enigma code during World War II, Alan Turing, the British founder of computer science and artificial intelligence, came to Princeton University to study mathematical logic. Some of the greatest logicians in the world--including Alonzo Church, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, and Stephen Kleene--were at Princeton in the 1930s, and they were working on ideas that would lay the groundwork for what would become known as computer science. (...) Though less well known than his other work, Turing's 1938 Princeton PhD thesis, "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals," which includes his notion of an oracle machine, has had a lasting influence on computer science and mathematics. This book presents a facsimile of the original typescript of the thesis along with essays by Andrew Appel and Solomon Feferman that explain its still-unfolding significance. A work of philosophy as well as mathematics, Turing's thesis envisions a practical goal--a logical system to formalize mathematical proofs so they can be checked mechanically. If every step of a theorem could be verified mechanically, the burden on intuition would be limited to the axioms. Turing's point, as Appel writes, is that "mathematical reasoning can be done, and should be done, in mechanizable formal logic." Turing's vision of "constructive systems of logic for practical use" has become reality: in the twenty-first century, automated "formal methods" are now routine. Presented here in its original form, this fascinating thesis is one of the key documents in the history of mathematics and computer science. (shrink)

On June 13, 2013, the Supreme Court placed its imprimatur on a principle that has been gathering force within patent law for several decades: human beings constitute unpatentable subject matter. In Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., the court answered the question it had posed itself–“Are human genes patentable?”–decisively in the negative. This legal result was predictable, given a careful reading of the entrails of judicial decisions, congressional bills, executive branch pronouncements, and decisions in other countries about patents (...) claiming human‐related inventions, all of which have echoed the spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment by proscribing property rights‐including intellectual property rights‐in human beings. To understand how patent law has evolved toward this result, one may trace the legal treatment of patents claiming human embryonic stem cells, chemical products of human physiology, human thought, and now, human genes. Woven together, these strands of evidence led inexorably toward the ultimate rejection of human gene patents by the Supreme Court. (shrink)

The God of Israel in the theology of Robert Jenson -- Jenson's hermeneutics -- Godd in Israel's life -- The God of Israel and Jesus -- The God of Israel and the Trinity -- The God of Israel, the People of God, and the Eschaton -- The identity of the one and triune God of Israel -- Jenson, the God of Israel, and non-supersessionist theology.