In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based ResearchJerry Rosiekit is both unsurprising and reassuring that the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy would host an invited lecture on community-university research collaborations. One of the most distinctive features of the tradition of philosophy on this continent has been the insistence that lived experience is the ultimate source of knowledge, and, more (...) importantly, amelioration of individual and collective community experience is the ultimate criterion for validation of knowledge relations. Dr. Ira Harkavy and the Netter Center at which he works represent a version of that ideal made institutionally manifest.In his 2022 Coss Lecture, Harkavy offers a vision for how the ideal of knowledge generation grounded in community experience and serving community priorities could be institutionalized in major US research universities. Furthermore, he makes the case that this transformation of research universities would revitalize our collective commitment to democratic citizenship and governance. It is an appealing vision, earnestly offered. In what follows, I celebrate the merits of this vision but raise concerns that it does not adequately consider questions about the ontology of experience. I review some of those questions and offer suggestions about what an updated ontology of experience, one that could revitalize democracy in the manner Harkavy says is needed, would look like.Experiential Basis for My ResponseA short personal introduction will provide context for (and perhaps lend credibility to) my response comments. I am a Professor of Education at the University of Oregon with affiliate appointments in the Department of Philosophy and in the Department of Ethnic Studies. My empirical research [End Page 81] focuses on how we prepare anti-racist educators to work in public schools (Pratt and Rosiek; Rosiek, “School Segregation”; Mitchell and Rosiek; Sconiers and Rosiek). My area of theoretical specialization is the development of new qualitative methodologies for research on educational equity. The latter involves working out the implications of different epistemologies and ontologies for educational inquiry and practice. Specifically, I have spent most of my career looking at the way teachers’ classroom experiences can be a valid source of general knowledge about educational practice and policy (Rosiek and Atkinson; Rosiek and Gleason).Both branches of my scholarship exist in a dialectic with my community activism around educational equity issues. My largest project to date was a ten-year study of the racial resegregation of a public school district, looking at how students and teachers navigated its aftermath (Rosiek and Kinslow). My most recent project involved two years of working with teachers all over the world to identify the ways they addressed equity challenges during the pandemic and to identify the institutional conditions that helped or hindered such work (DeRosia et al.). In a less academic context, I have worked with local educational activist organizations in my home community to support the needs of immigrant families and students, to create safer spaces for LGBTQIA students, and to get more equity-minded school board members elected.I share all of this just to clarify that I am familiar with the challenge of putting university expertise in the service of community improvement and, more specifically, promoting equity in educational institutions. I am familiar with approaching research in a manner that respects practitioners and non-academic community members as sources of knowledge, not just objects of knowledge.Praise for the Work at the Netter CenterFrom the vantage point that experience provides me, I want to offer energetic praise for the work that Harkavy and the Netter Center have been doing these last three decades. We should all recognize the difficulty of integrating the university’s knowledge-producing role with local education and service work (Brewer; Harkavy et al.). It is even more difficult to do so when aspiring to the ideal of collaborative knowledge production with the community in a manner that genuinely commits to epistemic egalitarianism. Service learning can be trivialized and can become the exploitative enlistment of unpaid labor in the service of an agenda exogenous to both the participants and the community (Santiago-Ortiz; Stoecker). [End Page 82]Sharing the power of designing the focus and means of service projects... (shrink)

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that (...) ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience. (shrink)

Fodor's theory makes thinking prior to doing. It allows for an inactive agent or pure reflector, and for agents whose actions in various ways seem to float free of their own conceptual repertoires. We show that naturally evolved creatures are not like that. In the real world, thinking is always and everywhere about doing. The point of having a brain is to guide the actions of embodied beings in a complex material world. Some of those actions are, to be sure, (...) more recondite than others. But in every case the contents of thoughts still look to depend, in some non‐unique but vitally important way, on the kinds of doings they support. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor is one of the leading philosophers of mind and language in the world today. He is best known for his work developing two theses which give theirnames to his books The Modularity of Mind and The Language of Thought. He teaches philosophy at Rutgers and at the CUNY Graduate Center.

David Hume's philosophy is notoriously naturalistic. It is an attempt to give an account of man and his world relying only on evidence which can be gleaned from sense observation and introspection. Whatever can be inferred from this evidence is a proper philosophical conclusion.

Jerry Fodor is one of the leading philosophers of mind and language in the world today. He is best known for his work developing two theses which give theirnames to his books The Modularity of Mind and The Language of Thought. He teaches philosophy at Rutgers and at the CUNY Graduate Center.

This study synthesizes current information from the various fields of cognitive science in support of a new and exciting theory of mind. Most psychologists study horizontal processes like memory and information flow; Fodor postulates a vertical and modular psychological organization underlying biologically coherent behaviors. This view of mental architecture is consistent with the historical tradition of faculty psychology while integrating a computational approach to mental processes. One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates features not (...) only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor presents a new development of his famous Language of Thought hypothesis, which has since the 1970s been at the centre of interdisciplinary debate about how the mind works. Fodor defends and extends the groundbreaking idea that thinking is couched in a symbolic system realized in the brain. This idea is central to the representational theory of mind which Fodor has established as a key reference point in modern philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. The foundation stone of our (...) present cognitive science is Turing's suggestion that cognitive processes are not associations but computations; and computation requires a language of thought. So the latest on the Language of Thought hypothesis, from its progenitor, promises to be a landmark in the study of the mind. LOT 2 offers a more cogent presentation and a fuller explication of Fodor 's distinctive account of the mind, with various intriguing new features. The central role of compositionality in the representational theory of mind is revealed: most of what we know about concepts follows from the compositionality of thoughts. Fodor shows the necessity of a referentialist account of the content of intentional states, and of an atomistic account of the individuation of concepts. Not least among the new developments is Fodor 's identification and persecution of pragmatism as the leading source of error in the study of the mind today. LOT 2 sees Fodor advance undaunted towards the ultimate goal of a theory of the cognitive mind, and in particular a theory of the intentionality of cognition. No one who works on the mind can ignore Fodor 's views, expressed in the coruscating and provocative style which has delighted and disconcerted countless readers over the years. (shrink)

In this workshop, a decentered approach to stakeholder theory is proposed, where a shared network problem, rather than a firm, frames stakeholder interactions. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the potential usefulness of adopting a decentered perspective on firm-stakeholder relations. Multi-stakeholder learning dialogues and actor-network theory are introduced as examples of possible theoretical frameworks that allow the adoption of a decentered perspective.

This open access book tackles the pressing problem of integrating concerns related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics into higher education curriculums aimed at future AI developers in Africa and beyond. For doing so, it analyzes the present and future states of AI ethics education in local computer science and engineering programs. The authors share relevant best practices and use cases for teaching, develop answers to ongoing organizational challenges, and reflect on the practical implications of different theoretical approaches to AI ethics. (...) The book is of great interest to faculty members, researchers, and students in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, mathematics, computer engineering, and related areas, as well as higher education administration. (shrink)

This work presents a stock/effort model describing both harvested fish population and fishing effort dynamics. The fishing effort dynamic is controlled by investment which corresponds to the revenue proportion generated by the activity. The dynamics are subject to a set of economic and biological state constraints. The analytical study focuses on the compatibility between state constraints and controlled dynamics. By using the mathematical concept of viability kernel, we reveal situations and management options that guarantee a sustainable system.

Coherence in conversations and in texts can be partially characterized by a set of coherence relations, motivated ultimately by the speaker's or writer's need to be understood. In this paper, formal definitions are given for several coherence relations, based on the operations of an inference system; that is, the relations between successive portions of a discourse are characterized in terms of the inferences that can be drawn from each. In analyzing a discourse, it is frequently the case that we would (...) recognize it as coherent, in that it would satisfy the formal definition of some coherence relation, if only we could assume certain noun phrases to be coreferential. In such cases, we will simply assume the identity of the entities referred to, in what might be called a “petty conversational implicature,” thereby solving the coherence and coreference problems simultaneously. Three examples of different kinds of reference problems are presented. In each, it is shown how the coherence of the discourse can be recognized, and how the reference problems are solved, almost as a by‐product, by means of these petty conversational implicatures. (shrink)

One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates features not only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in ...

Written in a highly readable, irreverent style, The Elm and the Expert provides a lively discussion of semantic issues about mental representation, with special attention to issues raised by Frege's problem, Twin cases, and the putative indeterminacy of reference. Bound to be widely read and much discussed, The Elm and the Expert, written in Jerry Fodor's usual highly readable, irreverent style, provides a lively discussion of semantic issues about mental representation, with special attention to issues raised by Frege's problem, (...) Twin cases, and the putative indeterminacy of reference. The book extends and revises a view of the relation between mind and meaning that the author has been developing since his 1975 book, The Language of Thought. There is a general consensus among philosophers that a referential semantics for mental representation cannot support a robust account of intentional explanation. Fodor has himself espoused this view in previous publications, and it is widespread (if tacit) throughout the cognitive science community. This book is largely a reconsideration of the arguments that are supposed to ground this consensus. Fodor concludes that these considerations are far less decisive than has been supposed. He offers a theory sketch in which psychological explanation is intentional, psychological processes are computational, and the semantic properties of mental representations are referential. Connections with the problem of "naturalizing" intentionality are also explored. The four lectures in The Elm and the Expert were originally delivered in Paris in the spring of 1993 to inaugurate the Jean Nicod Lecture series. The Jean Nicod Lectures are delivered annually by a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. The 1993 lectures marked the centenary of the birth of the French philosopher and logician Jean Nicod (1893-1931). The lectures are sponsored by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) as part of its effort to develop the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science in France. Jean Nicod series. (shrink)

For forty years, Harvey Mansfield has been worth reading. Whether plumbing the depths of MachiavelliOs Discourses or explaining what was at stake in Bill ClintonOs impeachment, MansfieldOs work in political philosophy and political science has set the standard. In Educating the Prince, twenty-one of his students, themselves distinguished scholars, try to live up to that standard. Their essays offer penetrating analyses of Machiavellianism, liberalism, and America., all of them informed by MansfieldOs own work. The volume also includes a bibliography of (...) MansfieldOs writings. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of original contributions about the core knowledge in fundamental domains. It includes work on naive physics, such as formal specifications of intuitive theories of spatial relations, time causality, substance and physical objects, and on naive psychology.

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction PART I Intentionality Chapter 1 Fodor’ Guide to Mental Representation: The Intelligent Auntie’s Vade-Mecum Chapter 2 Semantics, Wisconsin Style Chapter 3 A Theory of Content, I: The Problem Chapter 4 A Theory of Content, II: The Theory Chapter 5 Making Mind Matter More Chapter 6 Substitution Arguments and the Individuation of Beliefs Chapter 7 Stephen Schiffer’s Dark Night of The Soul: A Review of Remnants of Meaning PART II Modularity Chapter 8 Précis of The Modularity of (...) Mind Chapter 9 Why Should the Mind Be Modular? Chapter 10 Observation Reconsidered Appendix: A Reply to Churchland’s ‘Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality" References Index of Names. (shrink)

Introduction: Something on the State of the Art 1 I. Functionalism and Realism 1. Operationalism and Ordinary Language 35 2. The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanations 63 3. What Psychological States are Not 79 4. Three Cheers for Propositional Attitudes 100 II. Reduction and Unity of Science 5. Special Sciences 127 6. Computation and Reduction 146 III. Intensionality and Mental Representation 7. Propositional Attitudes 177 8. Tom Swift and His Procedural Grandmother 204 9. Methodological Solipsism Considered as a (...) Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology 225 IV. Nativism 10. The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy 257 Notes 317. (shrink)

Counter to the popular impression that Adam Smith was a champion of selfishness and greed, Jerry Muller shows that the Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations maintained that markets served to promote the well-being of ...

Jerry L. Walls aims to demonstrate in his book Hell: The Logic of Damnation that some traditional views of hell are still defensible and can be believed with intellectual and moral integrity. Focusing on the issues from the standpoint of philosophical theology, Walls explores the doctrine of hell in relation to both the divine nature and human nature. He argues, with respect to the divine nature, that some traditional versions of the doctrine are compatible not only with God's omnipotence (...) and omniscience, but also with a strong account of His perfect goodness. The concept of divine goodness receives special attention since the doctrine of hell is most often rejected on moral grounds. (shrink)

Discovering high-utility itemsets (HUIs) consists of finding sets of items that yield a high profit in customer transaction databases. An important limitation of traditional high-utility itemset mining (HUIM) is that only the utility measure is used for assessing the interestingness of patterns. This leads to finding several itemsets that have a high profit but contain items that are weakly correlated. To address this issue, this paper proposes to integrate the concept of correlation in HUIM to find profitable itemsets that are (...) highly correlated, using the all-confidence and bond measures. An efficient algorithm named FCHM (fast correlated high-utility itemset miner) is proposed to efficiently discover correlated high-utility itemsets (CHIs). Two versions of the algorithm are proposed: FCHM|$_{all\text{-}confidence}$| and FCHM|$_{bond}$|⁠, which are based on the all-confidence and bond measures, respectively. An experimental evaluation was done using four real-life benchmark datasets from the HUIM literature: mushroom, retail, kosarak and foodmart. Results show that FCHM is efficient and can prune a huge amount of weakly CHIs. (shrink)

The renowned philosopher Jerry Fodor, a leading figure in the study of the mind for more than twenty years, presents a strikingly original theory on the basic constituents of thought. He suggests that the heart of cognitive science is its theory of concepts, and that cognitive scientists have gone badly wrong in many areas because their assumptions about concepts have been mistaken. Fodor argues compellingly for an atomistic theory of concepts, deals out witty and pugnacious demolitions of rival theories, (...) and suggests that future work on human cognition should build upon new foundations. This lively, conversational, and superbly accessible book is the first volume in the Oxford Cognitive Science Series, where the best original work in this field will be presented to a broad readership. Concepts will fascinate anyone interested in contemporary work on mind and language. Cognitive science will never be the same again. (shrink)

The paper explores the distinction between two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are to be construed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined.The following claims are defended: (1) That the traditional dispute between (...) “rational” and “naturalistic” psychology is plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the computational theory of mind. Rational psychologists accept a formality condition on the specification of mental processes; naturalists do not. (2) That to accept the formality condition is to endorse a version of methodological solipsism. (3) That the acceptance of some such condition is warranted, at least for that part of psychology which concerns itself with theories of the mental causation of behavior. This is because: (4) such theories require nontransparent taxonomies of mental states; and (5) nontransparent taxonomies individuate mental states without reference to their semantic properties. Equivalently, (6) nontransparent taxonomies respect the way that the organism represents the object of its propositional attitudes toitself, and it is this representation which functions in the causation of behavior.The final section of the paper considers the prospect for a naturalistic psychology: one which defines its generalizations over relations between mental representations and their environmental causes, thus seeking to account for the semantic properties of propositional attitudes. Two related arguments are proposed, both leading to the conclusion that no such research strategy is likely to prove fruitful. (shrink)

In this paper, planning models developed in artificial intelligence are applied to the kind of planning that must be carried out by participants in a conversation. A planning mechanism is defined, and a short fragment of a free‐flowing videotaped conversation is described. The bulk of the paper is then devoted to an attempt to understand the conversation in terms of the planning mechanism. This microanalysis suggests ways in which the planning mechanism must be augmented, and reveals several important conversational phenomena (...) that deserve further investigation. (shrink)

Jerry L. Walls argues that the doctrine of heaven is ripe for serious reconsideration. He contends not only that the orthodox view of heaven can be defended from objections commonly raised against it, but also that heaven is a powerful resource for addressing persistent philosophical problems, not the least of which concern the ground of morality and the meaning of life. Walls shows how heaven is integrally related to central Christian doctrines, particularly those related to salvation, and tackles the (...) difficult problem of why faith in Christ is necessary to save us from our sins. In addition, heaven is shown to illumine thorny problems of personal identity and to be an essential component of a satisfactory theodicy. Walls goes on to examine data from near-death experiences from the standpoint of some important recent work in epistemology and argues that they offer positive evidence for heaven. He concludes that we profoundly need to recover the hope of heaven in order to recover our very humanity. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor argues against the widely held view that mental processes are largely computations, that the architecture of cognition is massively modular, and...

Preface 1 Introduction: The Persistence of the Attitudes 2 Individualism and Supervenience 3 Meaning Holism 4 Meaning and the World Order Epilogue Creation Myth Appendix Why There Still Has to be a Language of Thought Notes References Author Index.

There are themes in Wittgenstein's later work which are extremely radical. By ‘radical’ I mean both that they cut to the very root of crucial philosophical issues, and that they tend to be ignored by the established philosophical positions of the day. More specifically, these themes focus on the understanding of epistemological bedrock, and they lead in directions about which it is difficult to get a hearing in major philosophical circles.

We take it that Brandom’s sense of the geography is that our way of proceeding is more or less the first and his is more or less the second. But we think this way of describing the situation is both unclear and misleading, and we want to have this out right at the start. Our problem is that we don’t know what “you start with” means either in formulations like “you start with the content of words and proceed to the (...) content of sentences” or in formulations like “you start with the content of sentences and you proceed to the content of words.” Brandom’s official view seems to be that he’s talking about explanatory priorities (see the preceding quote); but we think that can’t really be what he has in mind, and we can’t find any alternative interpretation that seems plausible. Speaking just for ourselves, we’re inclined towards a relatively pragmatic view of explanation; what explanation we should “start with” depends, inter alia, on what it’s an explanation of and whom it’s an explanation for. But, in any case, we would have thought that explanatory priority is of more than heuristic interest only if it reflects a priority of some other kind: ontological, semantical, psychological, or whatever. In talking about what one “starts with”, Brandom must be claiming more than. (shrink)

At a time when the label "conservative" is indiscriminately applied to fundamentalists, populists, libertarians, fascists, and the advocates of one or another orthodoxy, this volume offers a nuanced and historically informed presentation of ...

Illuminating insights into lymphoid oncogenesis came with the finding that the chromosome translocations characteristic of many tumors of immunoglobulin‐producing cells represent conjunction of an immunoglobulin gene locus with the myc oncogene. The potency of this combination has been underlined by recent studies in which DNA regions mimicking certain chromosome junctions of lymphomas were shown to be highly tumorigenic when inserted into the mouse germline. Nevertheless, the mechanism by which an immunoglobulin locus activates the oncogene remains largely an enigma, particularly in (...) those cases where the two loci remain at some distance. (shrink)

In Brazil, the country with the largest population of African descent in the Americas, the idea of race underwent a dramatic shift in the first half of the twentieth century. Brazilian authorities, who had considered race a biological fact, began to view it as a cultural and environmental condition. Jerry Dávila explores the significance of this transition by looking at the history of the Rio de Janeiro school system between 1917 and 1945. He demonstrates how, in the period between (...) the world wars, the dramatic proliferation of social policy initiatives in Brazil was subtly but powerfully shaped by beliefs that racially mixed and nonwhite Brazilians could be symbolically, if not physically, whitened through changes in culture, habits, and health. Providing a unique historical perspective on how racial attitudes move from elite discourse into people’s lives, _Diploma of Whiteness_ shows how public schools promoted the idea that whites were inherently fit and those of African or mixed ancestry were necessarily in need of remedial attention. Analyzing primary material—including school system records, teacher journals, photographs, private letters, and unpublished documents—Dávila traces the emergence of racially coded hiring practices and student-tracking policies as well as the development of a social and scientific philosophy of eugenics. He contends that the implementation of the various policies intended to “improve” nonwhites institutionalized subtle barriers to their equitable integration into Brazilian society. (shrink)

Jerry L. Walls argues that the doctrine of heaven is ripe for serious reconsideration. He contends not only that the orthodox view of heaven can be defended from objections commonly raised against it, but also that heaven is a powerful resource for addressing persistent philosophical problems, not the least of which concern the ground of morality and the meaning of life. Walls shows how heaven is integrally related to central Christian doctrines, particularly those related to salvation, and tackles the (...) difficult problem of why faith in Christ is necessary to save us from our sins. In addition, heaven is shown to illumine thorny problems of personal identity and to be an essential component of a satisfactory theodicy. Walls goes on to examine data from near-death experiences from the standpoint of some important recent work in epistemology and argues that they offer positive evidence for heaven. He concludes that we profoundly need to recover the hope of heaven in order to recover our very humanity. (shrink)

This book dares to challenge natural selection--not in the name of religion but in the name of good science. Most scientists are so terrified of religious attacks on the theory of evolution that it is never examined critically. There are significant scientific and philosophical problems with the theory of natural selection. Darwin claimed the factors that determine the course of evolution are very largely environmental. Empirical results in biology are increasingly calling this thesis into question. The authors show that Darwinism (...) is committed to inferring, from the premise that a kind of creature with a certain trait was selected, the conclusion that that kind of creature was selected for having that trait. Though such inferences are fallacious, they are nevertheless unavoidable within the Darwinist framework. Ultimately, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini level a devastating critique against Darwinist orthodoxy and suggest new ways of thinking about evolution.--From publisher description. (shrink)

Hume? Yes, David Hume, that's who Jerry Fodor looks to for help in advancing our understanding of the mind. Fodor claims his Treatise of Human Nature as the foundational document of cognitive science: it launched the project of constructing an empirical psychology on the basis of a representational theory of mind. Going back to this work after more than 250 years we find that Hume is remarkably perceptive about the components and structure that a theory of mind requires. Careful (...) study of the Treatise helps us to see what's amiss with much twentieth-century philosophy of mind, and to get on the right track. Hume says in the Treatise that his main project is to construct a theory of human nature and, in particular, a theory of the mind. Hume Variations examines his account of cognition and how it is grounded in his 'theory of ideas'. Fodor discusses such key topics as the distinction between 'simple' and 'complex' ideas, the thesis that an idea is some kind of picture, and the roles that 'association' and 'imagination' play in cognitive processes. He argues that the theory of ideas, as Hume develops it, is both historically and ideologically continuous with the representational theory of mind as it is now widely endorsed by cognitive scientists. This view of Hume is explicitly opposed to recent discussions by critics who hold that the theory of ideas is the Achilles heel of his philosophy and that he would surely have abandoned it if only he had read Wittgenstein carefully.You don't have to know much about Hume to enjoy this inventively argued, provocative, and stimulating defence of the representational theory of mind--which is looking increasingly hard to resist.LINES OF THOUGHTPhilosophy books don't need to be hundreds of pages long to make a substantial contribution to the subject. This new series presents original works by leading philosophers at an affordable price and a readable length. Series EditorsPeter Ludlow Scott Sturgeon. (shrink)