This paper sets out a novel response to the ‘screening off problem’ for naïve realism. The aim is to resist the claim (which many naïve realists accept) that the kind of experience involved in hallucinating also occurs during perception, by arguing that there are causal constraints that must be met if an hallucinatory experience is to occur that are never met in perceptual cases. Notably, given this response, it turns out that, contra current orthodoxy, naïve realists need not adopt any (...) particular view about the psychological nature of hallucinatory experience to handle the screening off problem. Consequently, room opens up for naïve realists to endorse whatever theory of hallucinatory experience seems to best capture the distinctive nature of such episodes. (shrink)

Standard responses to the knowledge argument grant that Mary could know all of the physical facts even while trapped inside her black‐and‐white room. What they deny is that upon leaving her black‐and‐white room and experiencing red for the first time, Mary learns a genuinely new fact. This paper develops an alternate response in a grounding physicalist framework, on which Mary does not know all of the physical facts while trapped inside the room. The main thesis is that Mary does not (...) know certain phenomenal facts while trapped inside the room, whereby these facts classify as physical due to being wholly and fully metaphysically grounded in the underlying fundamental facts which are themselves entirely physical. (shrink)

We introduce the topic of panpsychism, before briefly outlining the 19 essays on panpsychism containing in this special issue.

Are grounding claims fully general in character? If an object a is F in virtue of being G, does it follow that anything that’s G is F for that reason? According to the thesis of Weak Formality, the answer here is ‘yes’. In this paper, however, I argue that there is philosophical utility in rejecting this thesis. More exactly, I argue that two currently unresolved problems in contemporary metaphysics can be dealt with if we hold that there can be cases (...) of ‘kind-dependent grounding’, the key thought being that once we allow for such cases, we must also accept that Weak Formality is false. (shrink)

It seems possible to see a star that no longer exists. Yet it also seems right to say that what no longer exists cannot be seen. We therefore face a puzzle, the traditional answer to which involves abandoning naïve realism in favour of a sense datum view. In this article, however, I offer a novel exploration of the puzzle within a naïve realist framework. As will emerge, the best option for naïve realists is to embrace an eternalist view of time, (...) and claim that in the relevant case, one sees a still existent star‐stage located somewhere in the distant past. (shrink)

The Doctrine of Microphysical Supervenience states that microphysical duplicates cannot differ in their intrinsic properties. According to Merricks :59–71, 1998a, Objects and persons, Oxford University Press, 2001), however, this thesis is false, since microphysical duplicates can differ with respect to the intrinsic property of consciousness. In my view, Merricks’ argument is plausible, and extant attempts to reject it are problematic. However, the argument also threatens to make consciousness appear mysterious, by implying that consciousness facts fail to be microphysically determined and (...) that there can be brute and inexplicable differences in consciousness between material things. The paper therefore develops an account that can respect the soundness of Merricks’ argument while avoiding these problematic consequences. At the heart of the proposal is the idea that consciousness can be microphysically grounded despite failing to microphysical supervene. The proposed view also has the interesting consequence that consciousness is an intrinsic property despite depending on extrinsic factors for its instantiation. (shrink)

Relationalists about episodic memory must endorse a disjunctivist theory of memory-experience according to which cases of genuine memory and cases of total confabulation involve distinct kinds of mental event with different natures. This paper is concerned with a pair of arguments against this view, which are analogues of the ‘causal argument’ and the ‘screening off argument’ that have been pressed in recent literature against relationalist (and hence disjunctivist) theories of perception. The central claim to be advanced is that to deal (...) with these two arguments, memory disjunctivists both can and should draw on resources that are standardly appealed to by rival common factor theories of episodic memory, and, in particular, to the idea that genuine memories and merely apparent ones are to be distinguished, at least in part, in terms of the distinctive ways in which they are caused. On the proposed view, there are substantive causal constraints associated both with cases of genuine memory and with cases of mere confabulation. The resulting theory thus tells us something important about the nature both of genuine memories and of mere confabulations, namely, that such experiences must be caused in certain distinctive ways and cannot occur except as the result of a distinctive sort of causal process. In addition, the theory enables the disjunctivist to offer a unified response to an important pair of arguments against her view. (shrink)

Disjunctivists maintain that perceptual experiences and hallucinatory experiences are distinct kinds of event with different metaphysical natures. Moreover, given their view about the nature of perceptual cases, disjunctivists must deny that the perceptual kind of experience can occur during hallucination. However, it is widely held that disjunctivists must grant the converse claim, to the effect that the hallucinatory kind of experience occurs even during perception. This paper challenges that thought. As we will see, the argument for thinking that the hallucinatory (...) kind of experience is present even in cases of perception depends on prior acceptance of a ‘non-demanding’ conception of hallucination, on which all it takes to produce an hallucinatory experience is to induce in the subject the right kind of neurological condition. On the view developed here, by contrast, there are substantive causal conditions, going beyond the mere occurrence of the right kind of neurological state, that must be met if an experience of the hallucinatory kind is to occur. By drawing on this view, I argue, disjunctivists can deny that the kind of experience involved in hallucination ever occurs during perception. This then allows disjunctivists to avoid certain important problems they would otherwise face. It also leaves them with considerably more freedom when it comes to theorising about the nature of hallucinatory experience. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel challenge for the panpsychist solution to the problem of consciousness. It advances three main claims. First, that the problem of consciousness is really an instance of a more general problem: that of grounding the qualitative. Second, that we should want a general solution to this problem. Third, that panpsychism cannot provide it. I also suggest two further things: (1) that alternative kinds of Russellian monism may avoid the problem in ways panpsychists cannot, and (2) that (...) a kind of neo-Aristotelian or ground-theoretical physicalism fares just as well here if not better. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the paradox of decrease. Its aim is to defend the answer to this puzzle that was propounded by its originator, namely, the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. The main trouble with this answer to the paradox is that it has the seemingly problematic implication that a material thing could perish due merely to extrinsic change. It follows that in order to defend Chrysippus’ answer to the paradox, one has to explain how it could be that Theon is (...) destroyed by the amputation without changing intrinsically. In this paper, I shall answer this challenge by appealing to the broadly Aristotelian idea that at least some of the proper parts of a material substance are ontologically dependent on that substance. I will also appeal to this idea in order to offer a new solution to the structurally similar paradox of increase. In this way, we will end up with a unified solution to two structurally similar paradoxes. (shrink)

Whilst previous observational studies have linked negative thought processes such as an external locus of control and holding negative cognitive styles with depression, the directionality of these associations and the potential role that these factors play in the transition to adulthood and parenthood has not yet been investigated. This study examined the association between locus of control and negative cognitive styles in adolescence and probable depression in young adulthood and whether parenthood moderated these associations. Using a UK prospective population-based birth (...) cohort study: the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, we examined the association between external locus of control and negative cognitive styles in adolescence with odds of depression in 4,301 young adults using logistic regression models unadjusted and adjusted for potential confounding factors. Interaction terms were employed to examine whether parenthood moderated these associations. Over 20% of young adults in our sample were at or above the clinical threshold indicating probable depression. For each standard deviation increase in external locus of control in adolescence, there was a 19% higher odds of having probable depression in young adulthood, after adjusting for various confounding factors including baseline mood and different demographic and life events variables. Similarly, for each SD increase in negative cognitive styles in adolescence, there was a 29% higher odds of having probable depression in the adjusted model. We found little evidence that parenthood status moderated the relationship between external locus of control or negative cognitive styles in adolescence and probable depression following adjustment for confounding factors. Effect estimates were comparable when performed in the complete case dataset. These findings suggest that having an external locus of control and holding negative cognitive styles in mid- to late adolescence is associated with an increased likelihood of probable depression in young adulthood. (shrink)

This is a review of the excellent collection by Stephan Blatti and Paul Snowdon which collates essays pertaining to Animalism: the theory that we human persons are identical with the human animals we share our lives with, and thus have the property of being human animals; perhaps essentially and most fundamentally.

What effect does creativity have on individuals, groups and societies, and on the fundamental values on which they base their actions and institutions? What constitutes good and evil, right and wrong, and how does creativity disrupt these beliefs? The Ethics of Creativity brings together an impressive collaboration of thinkers from several countries and disciplines to illuminate the thorny issues that arise when novel ideas and products brought forth by creativity collide with the rules and norms of what we believe to (...) be 'right' or 'good'. This book tackles questions of why most people claim to love creativity yet, in practice, may quash creative intentions, how creative innovations can create new ethical problems, when creativity and ethics tend to coincide and when they tend to conflict, and how both creativity and ethics might be harnessed to support a brighter future for all. (shrink)

Shen et al.'s (2024) novel 3 × 3 ethical framework aims to facilitate “study-by-study decisions about returning individual research results (IRRs) from digital phenotyping in psychiatry.” The frame...

In this article I wish to re-examine the vexed issue of the possibility of idealism in ancient and medieval philosophy with particular reference to the case of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c. 800idealisms immaterialism as his standard for idealism, and it is this decision, coupled with his failure to acknowledge the legacy of German idealism, which prevents him from seeing the classical and medieval roots of idealism more broadly understood.

In this paper I discuss Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological account of the constitution of the social world, in relation to some phenomenological contributions to the constitution of sociality found in Husserl’s students and followers, including Heidegger, Gurwitsch, Walther, Otaka, and Schutz. Heidegger is often seen as being the first to highlight explicitly human existence as Mitsein and In-der-Welt-Sein, but it is now clear from the Husserliana publications that, in his private research manuscripts especially during his Freiburg years, Husserl employs many of (...) the terms associated with Heidegger, e.g. Mitwelt, Weltlichkeit, Alltäglichkeit, Zeitlichkeit, and Geschichtlichkeit, and had detailed discussions of various forms of social constitution. It is clear that Husserl and Heidegger were exploring these themes in dialogue with one another, and that Husserl, in fact, has a rich phenomenology of sociality that is worth exploring in its own right. In this paper, I will outline some of the key aspects of Husserl’s contribution. (shrink)

When A utters a declarative sentence in a context to B, typically A can mean a proposition by the sentence, the sentence in context literally expresses a proposition, there are propositions A and B can agree the sentence literally expressed, and B can acquire knowledge from this testimonial exchange. In recent work on linguistic communication, each of these four platitudes has been challenged, and on the same basis: viz. on the ground that exactly which proposition the sentence expressed in context (...) is not discernible given the information provided by the context. I argue that, even if this is true, there will be propositional parts of the proposition expressed by the sentence in context which can be identified and that, consequently, the partial understanding afforded by the existence of such identifiable parts undermines the soundness of the arguments against the platitudes. (shrink)

This article offers an alternative reading of the Abbé Sieyès and the modern ‘nation-state’ problématique. I argue that the subject/object that is constituted in the early days of modernity is the incomplete society: an impossible-possibility ideal of congruency of population, authority and space. I suggest reading this ideal of congruency as a fantasy in that it offers a certain ‘fullness to come’, the promise of jouissance that can never be attained and is thus constantly re-envisioned and reinvoked. Drawing on discourse-analytical (...) and psychoanalytical tools I explain the logic of fantasy before analysing Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate?, as I show how he critiques and fragments the old model of the state and how his reading of the nation is fantasmatic, a continuous project towards impossible congruency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 422-423 [Access article in PDF] Robin Small, editor. A Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Perspectives on a Philosophical Tradition. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001. Pp. xxix + 191. Cloth, $79.95.The stated aim of this collection of thirteen essays (mostly new—four are reprints) by philosophers resident in Australia is to offer selective perspectives on the phenomenological tradition, correcting misunderstandings and highlighting aspects overlooked in (...) standard commentaries. Presumably, it also wants to exhibit contemporary Australian writing in the phenomenological tradition, and situate phenomenological claims in terms graspable by analytic philosophers.Robin Small's introduction, taking Husserl's conception of eidetic intuition as fundamental, sketches the rise of phenomenology. The collection is then divided into three parts. Part One ("Approaching the Sources") focuses on the sources of phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger) and opens with a thoughtful essay by Max Deutscher, reprinted from the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1980), which is replied to by Maurita Harney. Three further, not particularly distinguished, essays deal with the issues of realism, relativism, [End Page 422] and the relation between Ryle and Husserl. Part Two ("Following the Tradition") deals with new themes arising in Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida, while Part Three ("Making Connections") explores the relation between phenomenology and other disciplines, chiefly sociology, anthropology, and literature. A final essay by Jocelyn Dunphy Bloomfield examines the relevance of phenomenology in the Australian context.The collection is interesting but uneven. Some of the essays are out of date: Small's essay on Ryle and Husserl originally appeared in 1981 and Purushottama Bilimoria's paper, "Heidegger and the Japanese Connection," first published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1991), is in need of updating given the upsurge of interest in Husserl in Asia in recent years. Deutscher's "Husserl's Transcendental Subjectivity" is helpful in that it introduces Husserl's transcendental idealism through unusually prosaic analogies. He suggests that the transcendental attitude can be grasped in familiar experiences such as "keeping silence" during an awkward or embarrassing moment or adopting a detached or removed stance. An actor on stage can express anger without being angry. The transcendental attitude is such a detached spectator attitude; it is the capacity we have to judge and appraise ourselves (8). Moreover, it is in this attitude that we come to recognize our commitments to others. Deutscher resists the temptation to separate radically the ordinary living in the world from the detached contemplation of it. There never can be total but only intermittent detachment from the life-world; nevertheless the transcendental epoché is important in that it allows us the chance to gain self-awareness about our situation, about our "forms of life." While Deutscher does a terrific job demystifying one of Husserl's central and much misunderstood concepts, he is at risk of oversimplifying and worse of psychologizing Husserl's insights.Richard Campbell's essay on Heidegger's conception of truth as aletheia is also particularly noteworthy in that it is a philosophically sophisticated attempt to cut through Heidegger's somewhat inflated jargon and expresses his central intuitions about truth. Campbell goes to some trouble to elucidate and disambiguate what Heidegger is saying. Furthermore, he believes Heidegger is wrong in his interpretation of Plato; Plato is doing precisely the opposite of what Heidegger says he is doing. Deutscher's essay on Sartre, informed by an analytic rigor and sensitivity to ambiguity, gives a very clear account and partial defence of the relations between positional consciousness of the object and non-positional self-consciounsess. He is critical of Sartre's sweeping concept of the "in itself" and points out that in reality there are many diverse "in-itselves" with different real properties. Crittenden, too, has an interesting essay on Sartre's conception of "the look." Sartre understands the other as the one who looks at (and thereby seeks to objectify me) whereas for de Beauvoir, the other (in the particular case: woman) is the looked at and objectified. The article on sociology and phenomenology attempts to show the relation between their methods... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 422-423 [Access article in PDF] Robin Small, editor. A Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Perspectives on a Philosophical Tradition. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001. Pp. xxix + 191. Cloth, $79.95.The stated aim of this collection of thirteen essays (mostly new—four are reprints) by philosophers resident in Australia is to offer selective perspectives on the phenomenological tradition, correcting misunderstandings and highlighting aspects overlooked in (...) standard commentaries. Presumably, it also wants to exhibit contemporary Australian writing in the phenomenological tradition, and situate phenomenological claims in terms graspable by analytic philosophers.Robin Small's introduction, taking Husserl's conception of eidetic intuition as fundamental, sketches the rise of phenomenology. The collection is then divided into three parts. Part One ("Approaching the Sources") focuses on the sources of phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger) and opens with a thoughtful essay by Max Deutscher, reprinted from the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1980), which is replied to by Maurita Harney. Three further, not particularly distinguished, essays deal with the issues of realism, relativism, [End Page 422] and the relation between Ryle and Husserl. Part Two ("Following the Tradition") deals with new themes arising in Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida, while Part Three ("Making Connections") explores the relation between phenomenology and other disciplines, chiefly sociology, anthropology, and literature. A final essay by Jocelyn Dunphy Bloomfield examines the relevance of phenomenology in the Australian context.The collection is interesting but uneven. Some of the essays are out of date: Small's essay on Ryle and Husserl originally appeared in 1981 and Purushottama Bilimoria's paper, "Heidegger and the Japanese Connection," first published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1991), is in need of updating given the upsurge of interest in Husserl in Asia in recent years. Deutscher's "Husserl's Transcendental Subjectivity" is helpful in that it introduces Husserl's transcendental idealism through unusually prosaic analogies. He suggests that the transcendental attitude can be grasped in familiar experiences such as "keeping silence" during an awkward or embarrassing moment or adopting a detached or removed stance. An actor on stage can express anger without being angry. The transcendental attitude is such a detached spectator attitude; it is the capacity we have to judge and appraise ourselves (8). Moreover, it is in this attitude that we come to recognize our commitments to others. Deutscher resists the temptation to separate radically the ordinary living in the world from the detached contemplation of it. There never can be total but only intermittent detachment from the life-world; nevertheless the transcendental epoché is important in that it allows us the chance to gain self-awareness about our situation, about our "forms of life." While Deutscher does a terrific job demystifying one of Husserl's central and much misunderstood concepts, he is at risk of oversimplifying and worse of psychologizing Husserl's insights.Richard Campbell's essay on Heidegger's conception of truth as aletheia is also particularly noteworthy in that it is a philosophically sophisticated attempt to cut through Heidegger's somewhat inflated jargon and expresses his central intuitions about truth. Campbell goes to some trouble to elucidate and disambiguate what Heidegger is saying. Furthermore, he believes Heidegger is wrong in his interpretation of Plato; Plato is doing precisely the opposite of what Heidegger says he is doing. Deutscher's essay on Sartre, informed by an analytic rigor and sensitivity to ambiguity, gives a very clear account and partial defence of the relations between positional consciousness of the object and non-positional self-consciounsess. He is critical of Sartre's sweeping concept of the "in itself" and points out that in reality there are many diverse "in-itselves" with different real properties. Crittenden, too, has an interesting essay on Sartre's conception of "the look." Sartre understands the other as the one who looks at (and thereby seeks to objectify me) whereas for de Beauvoir, the other (in the particular case: woman) is the looked at and objectified. The article on sociology and phenomenology attempts to show the relation between their methods... (shrink)

This article argues that Habermas’s formal-pragmatics are better understood as a set of weak-universal dispositions susceptible to erosion over the course of a lifetime, if exposed to continual “disappointing” communicative experiences. Habermas’s rational-reconstructive project to explicate the intuitive rule-consciousness held by competent speakers retains immense theoretical value for analyzing both partisan and mass political discourse, if his emphasis on isolated speech situations is supplemented with a logic of communicative memory better accounting for how disagreement antecedes discourse on the formal-pragmatic register. (...) I argue that Habermas’s concept of the “lifeworld” contains untapped theoretical resources for thinking about the formal-pragmatic consequences of accumulated partisan experiences; namely, how such experiences lead inter-partisan actors to jettison mutual imputations of communicative accountability. I conclude by offering revisions to Habermas’s discourse ethics. Rapport-building intended to alleviate the negative effects of prior accumulated partisan experiences is first necessary if a norm is to enjoy real justification. (shrink)

In this paper, I recount the history of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies (IJPS), and my role as Founding Editor. The IJPS emerged from the earlier annual Philosophical Studies (Maynooth), founded by Desmond Bastable in 1951 and published regularly until 1988. I took over as Editor from 1989 to 1992 and then began the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

Epistemologists typically assume that the acquisition of knowledge from testimony is not threatened at the stage at which audiences interpret what proposition a speaker has asserted. Attention is instead typically paid to the epistemic status of a belief formed on the basis of testimony that it is assumed has the same content as the speaker’s assertion. Andrew Peet has pioneered an account of how linguistic context sensitivity can threaten the assumption. His account locates the threat in contexts in which an (...) audience’s evidence under-determines which proposition a speaker is asserting. I argue that Peet’s epistemic uncertainty account of the threat is mistaken and I propose an alternative. The alternative locates the threat in contexts that provide factors that give audiences a mistaken psychological certainty or confidence that a speaker has asserted a proposition she has not. (shrink)

Research suggests that interventions involving extensive training or counterconditioning can reduce implicit prejudice and stereotyping, and even susceptibility to stereotype threat. This research is widely cited as providing an “existence proof” that certain entrenched social attitudes are capable of change, but is summarily dismissed—by philosophers, psychologists, and activists alike—as lacking direct, practical import for the broader struggle against prejudice, discrimination, and inequality. Criticisms of these “debiasing” procedures fall into three categories: concerns about empirical efficacy, about practical feasibility, and about the (...) failure to appreciate the underlying structural-institutional nature of discrimination. I reply to these criticisms of debiasing, and argue that a comprehensive strategy for combating prejudice and discrimination should include a central role for training our biases away. (shrink)

Mitochondrial bioenergetics plays a key role in multiple basic cellular processes, such as energy production, nucleotide biosynthesis, and iron metabolism. It is an essential system for animals' life and death (apoptosis) and it is required for embryo development. This, in conjunction with its being subjected to adaptive processes in multiple species and its gene products being involved in the formation of reproductive barriers in animals, raises the possibility that mitochondrial bioenergetics could be a candidate genetic mechanism of speciation. Here, we (...) discuss genetic and biochemical evidence for the possible involvement of this unique system, encoded by two genomes (the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes), that differ by an order of magnitude in their mutation rates in processes leading to speciation events. (shrink)

Can we trust our intuitive judgments of right and wrong? Are moral judgements objective? What reason do we have to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong? In Conversations on Ethics, Alex Voorhoeve elicits answers to these questions from eleven outstanding philosophers and social scientists: -/- Ken Binmore; Philippa Foot; Harry Frankfurt; Allan Gibbard; Daniel Kahneman; Frances Kamm; Alasdair MacIntyre; T. M. Scanlon; Peter Singer; David Velleman; Bernard Williams. -/- The exchanges are direct, open, and sharp, (...) and give a clear account of these thinkers' core ideas about ethics. They also provide unique insights into their intellectual development - how they became interested in ethics, and how they conceived the ideas for which they became famous. Conversations on Ethics will engage anyone interested in moral philosophy. (shrink)

This article presents a semantic analysis of indirect speech reports. The analysis aims to explain a combination of two phenomena. First, there are true utterances of sentences of the form α said that φ which are used to report an utterance u of a sentence wherein φ's content is not u's content. This implies that in uttering a single sentence, one can say several things. Second, when the complements of these reports (and indeed, these reports themselves) are placed in conjunctions, (...) the conjunctions are typically infelicitous. I argue that this combination of phenomena can be explained if speech reports report (perhaps contingent) parts of the contents of the sentences reported. (shrink)

Money isn’t everything, so what is? Many government leaders, social policy theorists, and members of the general public have a ready answer: happiness. This paper examines an opposing view due to Robert Nozick, which centres on his experience-machine thought experiment. Despite the example's influence among philosophers, the argument behind it is riddled with difficulties. Dropping the example allows us to re-version Nozick's argument in a way that makes it far more forceful - and less dependent on people's often divergent intutions (...) about the experience machine. [DOWNLOAD AVAILABLE at oro.open.ac.uk repository, link below]. (shrink)

In what circumstances is it legitimate to use force? How should force be used? These are two of the most crucial questions confronting world politics today. The Just War tradition provides a set of criteria which political leaders and soldiers use to defend and rationalize war. This book explores the evolution of thinking about just wars and examines its role in shaping contemporary judgements about the use of force, from grand strategic issues of whether states have a right to pre-emptive (...) self-defence, to the minutiae of targeting. Bellamy maps the evolution of the Just War tradition, demonstrating how it arose from a myriad of sub-traditions, including scholasticism, the holy war tradition, chivalry, natural law, positive law, Erasmus and Kant's reformism, and realism from Machiavelli to Morgenthau. He then applies this tradition to a range of contemporary normative dilemmas related to terrorism, pre-emption, aerial bombardment and humanitarian intervention. (shrink)

There is a correlation between positions taken on some scientific questions and political leaning. One way to explain this correlation is the cultural cognition hypothesis (CCH): people's political leanings are causing them to process evidence to maintain fixed answers to the questions, rather than to seek the truth. Another way is the different background belief hypothesis (DBBH): people of different political leanings have different background beliefs which rationalize different positions on these scientific questions. In this article, I argue for two (...) things. I argue that two attempts by proponents of the CCH to discredit the DBBH fail. And I argue that this matters, because while the CCH makes epistemic paternalistic interventions seem called for (as some philosophers have argued compellingly), the DBBH does not. The DBBH makes it much easier to stay closer to an ideal of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

What must linguistic knowledge be like if it is to explain our capacity to use language? All linguists and philosophers of language presuppose some answer to this critical question, but all too often the presupposition is tacit. In this collection of sixteen previously unpublished essays, a distinguished international line-up of philosophers and linguists address a variety of interconnected themes concerning our knowledge of language.

Three arguments for the thesis that sex is socially constructed are examined and rejected. No such argument could succeed, because sex is not socially constructed.

Most contemporary philosophical discussions of intentionality start and end with a treatment of the propositional attitudes. In fact, many theorists hold that all attitudes are propositional attitudes. Our folk-psychological ascriptions suggest, however, that there are non-propositional attitudes: I like Sally, my brother fears snakes, everyone loves my grandmother, and Rush Limbaugh hates Obama. I argue that things are as they appear: there are non-propositional attitudes. More specifically, I argue that there are attitudes that relate individuals to non-propositional objects and do (...) so not in virtue of relating them to propositions. I reach this conclusion by not only showing that attempted analyses of apparently non-propositional attitudes in terms of the propositional fail, but that some non-propositional attitudes don’t even supervene on propositional attitudes. If this is correct, then the common discussions of intentionality that address only propositional attitudes are incomplete and those who hold that all intentional states are propositional are mistaken. (shrink)

Context-sensitive expressions appear ill suited to the purpose of sharing content across contexts. Yet we regularly use them to that end (in regulations, textbooks, memos, guidelines, laws, minutes, etc.). This paper describes the utility of the concept of a metacontext for understanding cross-contextual content-sharing with context-sensitive expressions. A metacontext is the context of a group of contexts: an infrastructure that can channel non-linguistic incentives on content ascription so as to homogenize the content ascribed to context-sensitive expressions in each context in (...) the group. Documents composed of context-sensitive expressions can share content across contexts when supported by an appropriate metacontext. The bible has its church, the textbook its education system, the form its bureaucracy, and the manifesto its social movement. Some metacontexts support cross-contextual content-sharing. Some don’t. A promising research programme (one with practical importance) would take metacontexts as its unit of analysis. (shrink)

Using a combination of semantic theory and findings from conversation analysis, this paper describes a way in which questions, which incorporate presuppositions that are false, when used in a courtroom cross-examination wherein there are certain turn-taking rules, rights and restrictions, stop a rape victim from expressing the content that she wants to express in that context. This kind of silencing contrasts with other kinds of silencing that consist in the disabling of a speech act's force, rather than precluding the expression (...) of certain contents. -/- Content Note: there are explicit descriptions of sexual violence in this paper. (shrink)

Would suppressing deepfakes violate freedom of expression norms? The question is pressing because the deepfake phenomenon in its more poisonous manifestations appears to call for a response, and automated targeting of some kind looks to be the most practically viable. Two simple answers are rejected: that deepfakes do not deserve protection under freedom of expression legislation because they are fake by definition; and that deepfakes can be targeted if but only if they are misleadingly presented as authentic. To make progress, (...) following a discussion of why freedom of expression deserves protection in a democracy, the question is reframed. At issue is not whether the arrival of deepfakes brings new and potentially serious dangers (it does), nor whether these dangers call for measures that potentially limit freedom of expression (they do), but whether the need for such measures raises any new and unfamiliar freedom-of-expression challenges. The answer to that question, surprisingly, is no. The balancing act needed to cope with the arrival of deepfakes brings plenty of difficulties, certainly, but none of the measures likely to be effective in tackling deepfake harms raises freedom-of-expression concerns that aren’t familiar from consideration of non-deepfake harms. In that respect, at least, the arrival of deepfakes makes no difference. (shrink)

This unique volume is an introduction for computer scientists, including a formal study of theoretical algorithms for Big Data applications, which allows them to work on such algorithms in the future. It also serves as a useful reference guide for the general computer science population, providing a comprehensive overview of the fascinating world of such algorithms. To achieve these goals, the algorithmic results presented have been carefully chosen so that they demonstrate the important techniques and tools used in Big Data (...) algorithms, and yet do not require tedious calculations or a very deep mathematical background. (shrink)

Philosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom.

This paper aims to contribute to epistemology by studying the psychoanalytic notion of transference. Contrary to previous philosophical research on Freud, I claim that traditional models of interpretation or translation are insufficient to explain psychoanalytic understanding. After exploring the conceptual roots of this mistake, which I define as generic, I focus on the notion of transference and claim that it should be viewed as a unique form of understanding that enables the emergence of unconscious meaning or truth. I elaborate this (...) claim with a detailed study of the development of this notion in Freud’s texts. Transference is thus delineated as a form of understanding which is closely related to the matrix of love and defined in relation to the following parameters: intersubjectivity; visuality; and performativity. (shrink)

A linguistic theory is correct exactly to the extent that it is the explicit statement of a body of knowledge possessed by a designated language-user. This popular psychological conception of the goal of linguistic theorizing is commonly paired with a preference for idiolectal over social languages, where it seems to be in the nature of idiolects that the beliefs one holds about one’s own are ipso facto correct. Unfortunately, it is also plausible that the correctness of a genuine belief cannot (...) consist merely in that belief’s being held. This paper considers how best to eliminate this tension. (shrink)

How do cognition and affect interact to produce action? Research in intergroup psychology illuminates this question by investigating the relationship between stereotypes and prejudices about social groups. Yet it is now clear that many social attitudes are implicit. This raises the question: how does the distinction between cognition and affect apply to implicit mental states? An influential view—roughly analogous to a Humean theory of action—is that “implicit stereotypes” and “implicit prejudices” constitute two separate constructs, reflecting different mental processes and neural (...) systems. On this basis, some have also argued that interventions to reduce discrimination should combat implicit stereotypes and prejudices separately. We propose an alternative framework. We argue that all putative implicit stereotypes are affect-laden and all putative implicit prejudices are “semantic,” that is, they stand in co-activating associations with concepts and beliefs. Implicit biases, therefore, consist in “clusters” of semantic-affective associations, which differ in degree, rather than kind. This framework captures the psychological structure of implicit bias, promises to improve the power of indirect measures to predict behavior, and points toward the design of more effective interventions to combat discrimination. (shrink)