Body-environment (b-en) -- Functional cycle (fucy) -- An object -- The body and time -- Evolution, novelty, and stability -- Behavior -- Culture, symbol, and language -- Thinking with the implicit.

_Philosophical Delusion and its Therapy_ provides new foundations and methods for the revolutionary project of philosophical therapy pioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The book vindicates this currently much-discussed project by reconstructing the genesis of important philosophical problems: With the help of concepts adapted from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, the book analyses how philosophical reflection is shaped by pictures and metaphors we are not aware of employing and are prone to misapply. Through innovative case-studies on the genesis of classical problems about (...) the mind and perception, and on thinkers including Locke, Berkeley and Ayer, the book demonstrates how such autonomous habits of thought systematically generate unsound intuitions and philosophical delusions, whose clash with reality, or among each other, gives rise to ill-motivated but maddening problems. The book re-examines models of therapeutic philosophy, due to Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and develops an approach that may let us overcome philosophical delusions and the problems they engender. In this way, the book explains where and why therapy in called for in philosophy, and develops techniques to carry it out. (shrink)

The reason which is generally given in the usage-based literature to account for the retention of irregularity in high frequency items during analogical change is entrenchment: a frequently occurring irregular linguistic unit resists analogical levelling because it is highly entrenched in speakers’ mental lexicons through its repeated use. Although previous research similarly suggests that the entrenchment of irregular and regularised forms competing during analogical levelling should be proportional to their frequency of use, evidence for this relation between frequency and entrenchment (...) comes exclusively from corpus-based studies; what is missing, therefore, are behavioural tests contrasting the competing innovative and conservative forms. The present paper aims to provide converging evidence for an entrenchment-based explanation of frequency patterns in analogical change on the basis of data obtained from an experiment in which participants are presented with traditional and analogical variants of a variable currently undergoing analogical levelling. Differences in processing latencies obtained during the experiment are interpreted as differences in entrenchment. The results provide i) evidence in favour of the prevalent entrenchment-based explanation of the conserving effect of frequency in analogical change, and ii) evidence of the current state and spread of the change under investigation. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

This paper presents a learning theory pertinent to dynamic decision making (DDM) called instancebased learning theory (IBLT). IBLT proposes five learning mechanisms in the context of a decision‐making process: instance‐based knowledge, recognition‐based retrieval, adaptive strategies, necessity‐based choice, and feedback updates. IBLT suggests in DDM people learn with the accumulation and refinement of instances, containing the decision‐making situation, action, and utility of decisions. As decision makers interact with a dynamic task, they recognize a situation according to its similarity to past instances, (...) adapt their judgment strategies from heuristic‐based to instance‐based, and refine the accumulated knowledge according to feedback on the result of their actions. The IBLT's learning mechanisms have been implemented in an ACT‐R cognitive model. Through a series of experiments, this paper shows how the IBLT's learning mechanisms closely approximate the relative trend magnitude and performance of human data. Although the cognitive model is bounded within the context of a dynamic task, the IBLT is a general theory of decision making applicable to other dynamic environments. (shrink)

In Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, Eugene Gendlin examines the edge of awareness, where language emerges from nonlanguage.

How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by (...) empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities. (shrink)

The paper presents a novel account of nature and genesis of some philosophical problems, which vindicates a new approach to an arguably central and extensive class of such problems: The paper develops the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘philosophical pictures’ with the help of some notions adapted from metaphor research in cognitive linguistics and from work on unintentional analogical reasoning in cognitive psychology. The paper shows that adherence to such pictures systematically leads to the formulation of unwarranted claims, ill-motivated problems, and pointless (...) theories. To do so, the paper proceeds from a case-study on a lastingly influential development in early modern philosophy: the adoption of the doctrine of secondary qualities, and its principal consequences. The findings motivate a new approach to an arguably extensive and important class of philosophical problems: to the problems we raise in the grip of philosophical pictures. (shrink)

Life and the living (on Aristotelian biohorror) -- Supernatural horror as the paradigm for life -- Aristotle's De anima and the problem of life -- The ontology of life -- The entelechy of the weird -- Superlative life -- Life with or without limits -- Life as time in Plotinus -- On the superlative -- Superlative life I: Pseudo-Dionysius -- Negative vs. affirmative theology -- Superlative negation -- Negation and preexistent life -- Excess, evil, and non-being -- Superlative life II: (...) Eriugena -- Negation in the periphyseon -- The quaestio de nihilo: on nothing -- The quaestio de nihilo: superlative nothing -- Dark intelligible abyss -- Apophasis -- The apophatic logic -- Negation in Frege and Ayer -- Negation vs. subtraction in Badiou -- Negation and contradiction in Priest -- The dialetheic vitalism of negative theology -- Ellipses: Suhraward and the luminous void -- Univocal creatures -- On spiritual creatures -- Life as form in Aristotle -- The concept of the creature -- Univocity I: Duns Scotus vs. Aquinas -- Univocity in Aquinas' Summa theologica -- Univocity in Duns Scotus' Opus oxoniense -- The common nature of the creature -- Univocity II: Duns Scotus vs. Henry of Ghent -- Univocity in Henry of Ghent -- Negative vs. privative indetermination -- Absolute indetermination -- Univocity III: Deleuze's scholasticism three variations -- Spinoza et le problème de l'expression -- Différence et répétition -- Cours de Vincennes -- Univocal creatures -- Ellipses: Dgen and uncreated univocity -- Dark pantheism -- Everything and nothing -- Life as spirit in Aquinas -- The concept of the divine nature -- Immanence I: Eriugena's periphyseon -- Natura and the unthought -- Universal life -- Four statements on pantheism -- Immanence II: Duns Scotus' reportatio Ia -- Univocal immanence -- Actual infinity -- The pathology of the triple primacy -- Immanence III: Nicholas of Cusa's De docta ignorantia -- The coincidence of opposites -- The folds of life -- Absolute vs. contracted pantheism -- Speculative pantheism (Deleuze's interlocutors) -- Pantheism and pure immanence -- The insubordination of immanence in Deleuze -- Scholia I: the isomorphism of univocity and immanence -- Scholia II: the vitalist logic of common notions -- Scholia III: the life of substance -- Dark pantheism -- Ellipses: Wang Yangming and idealist naturalism -- Logic and life (on Kantian teratology) -- The wandering line from Aristotle to Kant -- Critique of life -- Spectral life and speculative realism -- Ontotheology in Kant, atheology in Bataille -- The night land. (shrink)

Gegenstand der Nikomachischen Ethik (ca. 335-323 v. Chr.) ist das >tätige Leben.

Is "natural law" actually the "Laws of Nature" as Thomas Jefferson explains in the Declaration of Independence, meaning the rights of Life, Liberty & the pursuit of Happiness, or the ecclesiastical view which holds that laws of the government must conform to "natural laws" in order to be binding? This text examines this conflict, yet leads the reader to draw his own conclusions.

Nelson and Winter’s An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982) was the foundational work of what has become the thriving sub-discipline of evolutionary economics. In attempting to develop an alternative to neoclassical economics, the authors looked to borrow basic ideas from biology, in particular a concept of economic “natural selection.” However, the evolutionary models they construct in their seminal work are in many respects quite different from the models of evolutionary biology. There is no reproduction in any usual sense, “mutation” (...) is directed as opposed to blind, and there is no meaningful distinction between phenotype and genotype. Despite these substantial departures from the conceptions of evolutionary biology, I argue that the “evolutionary” economics of Nelson and Winter is indeed a legitimate extension of Darwinian evolutionary principles to a novel domain, and that the traditional conception of evolution by natural selection must be revised. The novel features of evolutionary economics models reflect the distinctive theoretical requirements faced by economists. I further contend that reproduction, heredity, blind variation, and the genotype/phenotype distinction are all inessential to evolutionary theory, and that their role in evolutionary biology is a domain-specific feature of biological theory. (shrink)

After more than a decade of intensive discussion, the concept of »sustainable development still remains rather vague. However, a broad consent exists that sustainability implies intragenerational as well as intergenerational equity. Therefore, a policy for sustainability has to go beyond pareto-superiority and to face both queastions of distribution and of scale. This reveals that at the core of sustainability ethical problems are involved. Although the notion of sustainability cannot be used as a concrete recipe, as Karl Homann correctly observes, it (...) has tobe clarified in ordertobe a useful regulative idea. (shrink)

Eugene Schlossberger has created a practical guide to ethical decision-making for engineers, students, and workers in business and industry.The Ethical Engineer ...

The aim of this article is to introduce the concept of Cognitive Fitness (CF), identify its key ingredients underpinning both real-time task performance and career longevity in high-risk occupations, and to canvas a holistic framework for their assessment, training, and augmentation. CF as a capacity to deploy neurocognitive resources, knowledge and skills to meet the demands of operational task performance, is likely to be multi-faceted and differentially malleable. A taxonomy of CF constructs derived from Cognitive Readiness (CR) and Mental fitness (...) (MF) literature maps into phases of operational cycles from foundational to advanced, mission-ready and recovery. Foundational cognitive attributes, such as attention, executive control and co-action, were hypothesized to be trainable at the initial Cognitive Gym phase. More advanced training targets at the CR phase included stress and arousal regulation, adaptability, teamwork, situation awareness (including detection, sense-making and prediction) and decision making (de-biasing and confidence calibration). The mission-ready training phase is focused on tolerances (to sleep loss, monotony, pain, frustration, uncertainty) and resistance (to distraction, deception or manipulation). Operational Augmentation phase relies on support tools such as decision aids and fatigue countermeasures, while the Recovery phase employs reflexive (e.g., mindfulness), and restorative practices (e.g., nutrition and sleep hygiene). The periodization of cognitive training in this cycle is hypothesized to optimize both real-time cognitive performance and the resilience that enables life-long thriving. One of the most promising avenues of validating this hypothesis is by developing an expert consensus on the key CF ingredients and their relative importance in high-performance settings. (shrink)

Empirical insights into language processing have a philosophical relevance that extends well beyond philosophical questions about language. This chapter will discuss this wider relevance: We will consider how experimental philosophers can examine language processing in order to address questions in several different areas of philosophy. To do so, we will present the emerging research program of experimental argument analysis (EAA) that examines how automatic language processing shapes verbal reasoning – including philosophical arguments. The evidential strand of experimental philosophy uses mainly (...) questionnaire-based methods to assess the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments that are adduced as evidence for philosophical theories and as premises for philosophical arguments. Extending this prominent strand of experimental philosophy, EAA underpins such assessments, extends the scope of the assessments, and expands the range of the empirical methods employed: EAA examines how automatic inferences that are continually made in language comprehension and production shape verbal reasoning, and draws on findings about comprehension biases that affect the contextualisation of such default inferences, in order to explain and expose fallacies. It deploys findings to assess premises and inferences from premises to conclusions, in philosophical arguments. To do so, it adapts methods from psycholinguistics and recruits methods from computational linguistics. (shrink)

In this article I describe Practice Research (PR) as a collective, contextualized project. First I will introduce 'PR as practice' by presenting the construction of 'Learning Resources in the community of Wild Learning' constructed among others by 'Wild Learning' and my self. Then I will discuss 'Practice research in theory and methodology' comprising three main features: First the relation between theory and practice is characterized as a joint venture. Second I stress that doing PR means not only having a joint (...) venture with the professionals in a specific practice - it also means to analyze the specific practice from 'the outside', e.g. by relating it to how it is part of different participants' everyday life. I call this feature decentered analysis. The third important feature of PR is critical analysis; analyzing practice as both action contexts and discourse. Finally I present some critical reflections on the ideals, problems and dilemmas when working with PR. (shrink)

In Knowledge and its Limits (KAIL), Timothy Williamson argues for the view that “only knowledge warrants assertion” (2000, 243). Call this the knowledge norm of assertion. Several philosophers including DeRose, Hawthorne, and Stanley, agree that if the knowledge norm is true, then knowledge itself depends on stakes, since warranted assertability seems to change with what is at stake if the proposition in question is true (1992; 2003; 2005). This brings us to the question: stakes for whom? DeRose maintains that knowledge (...) depends on the stakes for the speaker of the knowledge attribution, arguing for Epistemic Contextualism (2002, 187). However, Hawthorne and Stanley disagree, contending that it is the stakes for the subject of the knowledge attribution which is relevant, arguing for Subject Sensitive Invariantism (2003, 157; 2005, 85). While the Contextualist and the Invariantist are armed with responses against each other’s view, I suspect that Russell’s and Doris’ indifference cases might break the impasse in favor of the Contextualist (2008, 432). This paper will thus attempt to show that the knowledge norm of assertion leads us to Contextualism rather than Subject Sensitive Invariantism, by comparing how Contextualism and Subject Sensitive Invariantism fare against Russell’s and Doris’ Indifference Cases. (shrink)

The laws of classical logic are taken to be logical truths, which in turn are taken to hold objectively. However, we might question our faith in these truths: why are they true? One general approach, proposed by Putnam [8] and more recently Dickson [3] or Maddy [5], is to adopt empiricism about logic. On this view, logical truths are true because they are true of the world alone – this gives logical truths an air of objectivity. Putnam and Dickson both (...) take logical truths to be true in virtue of the world’s structure, given by our best empirical theory, quantum mechanics. This assumes a determinate logical structure of the world given by quantum mechanics. Here, I argue that this assumption is false, and that the world’s logical structure, and hence the related ‘true’ logic, is underdetermined. This leads to what I call empirical conventionalism. (shrink)

Higher education has expanded at astonishing rates around the world. We seek to understand the oppositions that periodically arise, which may produce enrollment declines and/or imposition of political controls. The post-1945 growth of higher education was – to a greater extent than is often recognized – propelled by the liberal, and later neoliberal, international order. Oppositions arise from illiberal alternatives, which also may organize globally. The recent weakening of the global liberal order, associated with growing populism and nationalism, creates conditions (...) for a new wave of oppositions. We hypothesize that attacks on higher education emerge in countries less integrated into world society and in countries linked to international structures that support illiberal alternatives. We examine cross-national data on higher education over the period 1960–2017. Enrollments and funding are higher in societies more tightly linked to world society and lower in countries tied to illiberal international organizations. Analyses of enrollments in various fields, constraints on academic freedom, and terrorist attacks on education institutions show similar pattern. Finally, we observe heterogeneity in the forms of illiberal opposition: countries that suppress academic freedom generally are less likely to restrict enrollments. (shrink)

In the past few decades, awareness around gender-based violence has expanded on a global scale with increased attention in global treaties, organizations, and conferences. Previously a taboo topic, it is now viewed as a human rights violation in the broader world culture. Drawing on a quantitative analysis of 568 textbooks from 76 countries from across the world, we examine the extent to which this growing global attention to GBV has filtered down into national educational curricula. We find that textbook discussions (...) of GBV are more prevalent in the post-1993 period and are linked to discussions of women’s rights. In addition, discussions of GBV are more common in countries with more linkages to the global women’s movement. Findings from our study underscore the influence of the women’s rights movement and the radical feminist perspective on the reframing of GBV as a human rights issue. (shrink)

The rise and legacy of world religions out of that period centered roughly around 500-600 BCE, what John Stuart-Glennie termed in 1873 the moral revolution, and Karl Jaspers later, in 1949, called the axial age, has been marked by heightened ideas of transcendence. Yet ironically, the world itself, in the literal sense of the actual earth, took on a diminished role as a central element of religious sensibility in the world religions, particularly in the Abrahamic religions. Given the issue today (...) of ecological unsustainability, including massive die-offs of wildlife and ever-increasing global human population and consumption, the legacy of those world religions face the question I consider here: Can religion transcend the earth in the long run? With the Axial Age/Moral Revolution, comes the possibility of transcendence of the world per se. The moral revolution/Axial Age represented significant changes in civilization, to be sure, but it can also be taken, as I do, as a second phase in the radical shift to anthropocentric mind already begun with the advent of agriculturally based civilization. The axial ideal of transcendence connects to a larger ideal, manifest not only in the legacies of the world religions but in contemporary science and technology, of a philosophy of escape from the earth. I show how ideas of axial transcendence, celebrated by scholars such as Jaspers and Bellah, nevertheless involve an unacknowledged tragic cost, the forgetting of the earth and its lessons and limits as central to what I have termed elsewhere, “sustainable wisdom.” . (shrink)

La démarche tient d'une « science de l'entre-deux » à la recherche de l'intervalle qui permettra de déchiffrer l'opposition de termes contraires et faire résonner leur fonction corrélative.