This is a translation of the chapter on perception by Kumarilabhatta's magnum opus, the Slokavarttika , which is one of the central texts of the Hindu response to the criticism of the logical-epistemological school of Buddhist thought. It is crucial for understanding the debates between Hindus and Buddhists about metaphysical, epistemological and linguistic questions during the classical period. In an extensive commentary, the author explains the course of the argument from verse to verse and alludes to other theories of classical (...) Indian philosophy and numerous other technical matters. Notes to the translation and commentary go further into the historical and philosophical background of Kumarila's ideas. The book provides an introduction to the history and the development of Indian epistemology, a synopsis of Kumarila's work and an analysis of its argument. It is a valuable contribution to the field of Indian philosophical studies. (shrink)

This is a translation of the chapter on perception of Kumarilabhatta's magnum opus, the Slokavarttika, one of the central texts of the Hindu response to the criticism of the logical-epistemological school of Buddhist thought. In an extensive commentary, the author explains the course of the argument from verse to verse and alludes to other theories of classical Indian philosophy and other technical matters. Notes to the translation and commentary go further into the historical and philosophical background of Kumarila's ideas. The (...) book provides an introduction to the history and the development of Indian epistemology, a synopsis of Kumarila's work and an analysis of its argument. (shrink)

: Claus Oetke, in his "Ancient Indian Logic as a Theory of Non-monotonic Reasoning," presents a sweeping new interpretation of the early history of Indian logic. His main proposal is that Indian logic up until Dharmakirti was nonmonotonic in character-similar to some of the newer logics that have been explored in the field of Artificial Intelligence, such as default logic, which abandon deductive validity as a requirement for formally acceptable arguments; Dharmakirti, he suggests, was the first to consider that a (...) good argument should be one for which it is not possible for the property identified as the "reason" (hetu) to occur without the property to be proved (sadhya)-a requirement akin to deductive validity. Oetke's approach is challenged here, arguing that from the very beginning in India something like monotonic, that is, deductively valid, reasoning was the ideal or norm, but that the conception of that ideal was continually refined, in that the criteria for determining when it is realized were progressively sharpened. (shrink)

As is the case with most pre‐modern philosophers of India, very little historical information is available about Bhartṛ‐hari. There are many interesting legends, some turned into extensive plays and poems, current about him. However, it is impossible to determine on their basis even whether there was only one philosopher called Bhartṛ‐hari. The appellation “philosopher” could unquestionably be applied to the author or authors of at least two Sanskrit works that are commonly ascribed to Bhartṛ‐hari.

This essays considers the hypothesis that Indian epistemology does not clearly recognize, let alone emphasize, an intellectual faculty that apprehends intelligible things, such as essences or “truths of reason,” or elevate knowledge of such things to a status higher than that of sense perception. Evidence for this hypothesis from various sources, including Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Nyāya, and Buddhist logic-epistemological writings, is examined. Special attention is given to a passage from Kumārila’s _Ślokavārttika_, _Pratyakṣasūtra_ chapter, where he argues that the senses directly perceive (...) existence. Kumārila’s view is contrasted to Plato’s, in the _Theaetetus_, that existence is the object, not of the senses, but the soul (_psychē_). (shrink)

The pūrvapakṣa of the Śūnyavāda chapter of Kumārila’s Ślokavārttika (vv. 10-63) is the longest continuous statement of a Buddhist position in that work. Philosophically, this section is of considerable interest in that the arguments developed for the thesis that the form ( ākāra ) in cognition belongs to the cognition, not to an external object, are cleverly constructed. Historically, it is of interest in that it represents a stage of thinking about the two-fold nature of cognition and the provenance of (...) the ākāra that is clearly more advanced than Dignāga but not quite as sophisticated as Dharmakīrti. In particular, although one may see an anticipation of Dharmakīrti’s famous sahopalambhaniyama argument in this text, it is not yet fully spelled out. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI believe that Jonardon Ganeri, in his essay ‘Mental Time Travel and Attention’ together with his book The Self, develops a plausible and attractive account of the self as a mere ‘sense of ownership’ that accompanies our experiences or a ‘discrete cognitive system whose function is to implicate the self in the content of memory,’ but which needn't refer to anything. Objections that might be raised from a Strawsonian perspective are not, I believe, decisive. Nevertheless, even though Ganeri makes ingenious (...) use of Indian sources in working out this proposal, he chooses not to discuss what I take to be the most intriguing idea of Indian philosophers about the self. Philosophers from various Indian traditions argue that the ‘self’ as ordinarily experienced, that is, the finite ‘living’ self consisting of the body and cognitive and emotional faculties, is not what one really is. Rather, there is a reality beyond this self, which emerges when one steps away from or ‘abandons’ it. I suggest that an experience of this higher or ‘true’ Self or reality that lies beyond the self could still be accommodated within a naturalistic framework. (shrink)

Our response to this symposium on our 2006 paper centers on three questions. First, what motivations exist in the political wild, and do our experimental manipulations realistically capture them? We agree that strong accuracy motivations are likely (but not certain) to reduce biases, but we are not at all confident that the real world supplies stronger accuracy motivations than our subjects received. Second, how can we square our findings of stubbornly persistent beliefs and attitudes with the well-established literatures on framing (...) and persuasion, which find political opinion to be more malleable? We argue that our John Q. Public theory of political information accounts for both persistence and persuasion and explains when we should expect one or the other. Citizens will be more responsive to contextual information or persuasive appeals when prior feelings are weak, knowledge is sparse, and information is encountered outside of awareness. Resistance to information or arguments is most likely when prior feelings are strong, attitudes are embedded within dense knowledge networks, and appeals are consciously perceived. Third, is belief persistence driven by feelings and emotions, as we claim, or is it more the result of a conviction that one's priors are accurate? We suggest that the distinctions that stand behind this question are suspect. We see in some of our commentators a tendency to align accuracy motivation, central processing, and cognition on one side of the dual-processing framework, with directional motivation, peripheral processing, and feelings on the other side. On the contrary, we argue that beliefs in the truth of one's priors often result from feelings and wishes and are themselves sources of motivated bias in processing new information. Moreover, directional motivations are also often a source of central processing, so it is not easy to disentangle these processes. (shrink)

Our response to this symposium on our 2006 paper centers on three questions. First, what motivations exist in the political wild, and do our experimental manipulations realistically capture them? We agree that strong accuracy motivations are likely (but not certain) to reduce biases, but we are not at all confident that the real world supplies stronger accuracy motivations than our subjects received. Second, how can we square our findings of stubbornly persistent beliefs and attitudes with the well-established literatures on framing (...) and persuasion, which find political opinion to be more malleable? We argue that our John Q. Public theory of political information accounts for both persistence and persuasion and explains when we should expect one or the other. Citizens will be more responsive to contextual information or persuasive appeals when prior feelings are weak, knowledge is sparse, and information is encountered outside of awareness. Resistance to information or arguments is most likely when prior feelings are strong, attitudes are embedded within dense knowledge networks, and appeals are consciously perceived. Third, is belief persistence driven by feelings and emotions, as we claim, or is it more the result of a conviction that one's priors are accurate? We suggest that the distinctions that stand behind this question are suspect. We see in some of our commentators a tendency to align accuracy motivation, central processing, and cognition on one side of the dual-processing framework, with directional motivation, peripheral processing, and feelings on the other side. On the contrary, we argue that beliefs in the truth of one's priors often result from feelings and wishes and are themselves sources of motivated bias in processing new information. Moreover, directional motivations are also often a source of central processing, so it is not easy to disentangle these processes. (shrink)

[Edited from Conclusion section:] We have looked at various challenging issues to do with getting connectionism to cope with high-level cognitive activities such a reasoning and natural language understanding. The issues are to do with various facets of generalization that are not commonly noted. We have been concerned in particular with the special forms these issues take in the arena of propositional attitude processing. The main problems we have looked at are: (1) The need to construct explicit representations of generalizations, (...) not just generalize correctly to individual cases; (2) The need to be able to match two or more complex short-term information structures, to enable rapid generalization from recent examples rather than from long-term memories; (3) The need to represent and reason with anomalous combinations of concepts; (4) The need to perform embedded reasoning. This presents special problems for systems using non-concatenative representations (as in mainstream connectionist approaches). We also touched on vague quantification in attitude report complements. Neither this topic nor that of analogies between short-term structures (point 2) has been adequately addressed in the symbolic framework, let alone in connectionism. -/- The opportunities and problems covered are put forward as things worth being optimistic about or pessimistic about, respectively. They are not put forward as decisive arguments for or against connectionism. The hope is that this chapter contributes to a greater understanding of the connectionist/symbolist gap by presenting some unusual issues and by throwing new light on some well known ones. (shrink)

This volume is a state-of-the-art review of the evidence and theory supporting the existence and significance of automatic processes in our daily lives, with chapters by the leading researchers in this field today.

"The world's leading expert on the unconscious mind reveals the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior. For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has been conducting revolutionary research into the unconscious mind--not Freud's dark, malevolent unconscious but the new unconscious, a helpful and powerful part of the mind that we can access and understand through experimental science. Now Dr. Bargh presents an engaging and enlightening tour of the influential psychological forces that are at (...) work as we go about our daily lives--checking a dating app, holding a cup of hot coffee, or getting a flu shot. Dr. Bargh takes you into his labs at New York University and Yale where his ingenious experiments have shown how the unconscious guides our actions, goals and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction. He reveals the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind on who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more. Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as tricks to help you remember to-do items, shop smarter, and sleep better. Before You Know It will profoundly change the way you understand yourself by introducing you to a fascinating world only recently discovered, the world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving."--Jacket. (shrink)

How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for (...) its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being “meta-dynamism” (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time. (shrink)

Analysing film. Distinguishing the filmic contribution to meaning -- Examples of filmic "textual organisation" -- Redrawing boundaries -- Organisation of the book -- Semiotics and documents. Semiotics and its relations to film -- The nature of discourse semantics -- The film as cinematographic document -- A combined view: filmic documents for filmic discourse -- Constructing the semiotic mode of film. Semiotic multimodality -- The internal organisation of semiotic strata -- Composing and combining semiotic modes -- Materiality and "epistemological commitment" -- (...) Christian Metz and the grande syntagmatique of the image track. The original model -- Two examples of analysis with the grande syntagmatique -- Revisions and rebuttals -- Foundations for analysis: filmic units. The basic units of film: preliminaries -- Audiovisual iconic representations -- Perception, perceptual realism and reliable measurement -- Multiplicity: from perception to discourse -- Filmic units revisited: discourse-motivated definitions -- The paradigmatic organisation of film. Beyond Metz: towards a grande paradigmatique -- Capturing discourse dependency structures in film -- The paradigmatic dimensions of projection, taxis and plane -- Two examples of paradigmatic analysis -- Summary and conclusions. (shrink)

This chapter argues that scientific and philosophical progress in our understanding of the living world requires that we abandon a metaphysics of things in favour of one centred on processes. We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We show how taking a processual stance in the philosophy of biology enables us to ground existing critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and mechanicism, all of which have traditionally been associated with (...) substance ontology. We illustrate the consequences of embracing an ontology of processes in biology by considering some of its implications for physiology, genetics, evolution, and medicine. And we attempt to locate the subsequent chapters of the book in relation to the position we defend. (shrink)

The notion of Simulative Reasoning in the study of propositional attitudes within Artificial Intelligence (AI) is strongly related to the Simulation Theory of mental ascription in Philosophy. Roughly speaking, when an AI system engages in Simulative Reasoning about a target agent, it reasons with that agent’s beliefs as temporary hypotheses of its own, thereby coming to conclusions about what the agent might conclude or might have concluded. The contrast is with non-simulative meta-reasoning, where the AI system reasons within a detailed (...) theory about the agent’s (conjectured) reasoning acts. The motive within AI for preferring Simulative Reasoning is that it is more convenient and efficient, because of a simplification of the representations and reasoning processes. The chapter discusses this advantage in detail. It also sketches the use of Simulative Reasoning in an AI natural language processing system, ATT-Meta, that is currently being implemented. This system is directed at the understanding of propositional attitude reports. In ATT-Meta, Simulative Reasoning is yoked to a somewhat independent set of ideas about how attitude reports should be treated. Central here are the claims that (a) speakers often employ commonsense (and largely metaphorical) models of mind in describing agents’ attitudes, (b) the listener accordingly needs often to reason within the terms of such models, rather than on the basis of any objectively justifiable characterization of the mind, and (c) the commonsense models filter the suggestions that Simulative Reasoning comes up with concerning target agents’ reasoning conclusions. There is a yet tighter connection between the commonsense models and the Simulative Reasoning. It turns out that Simulative Reasoning can be rationally reconstructed in terms of a more general type of reasoning about the possibly-counterfactual “world” that the target agent believes in, together with an assumption that that agent has a faithful representation of the world. In the ATT-Meta approach, the reasoner adopts that assumption when it views the target agent through a particular commonsense model (called IDEAS-AS-MODELS). (shrink)

The science of the mind, and of consciousness in particular, needs carefully to consider people's common-sense views of the mind, not just what the mind really is. Such views are themselves an aspect of the nature of (conscious) mind, and therefore part of the object of study for a science of mind. Also, since the common-sense views allow broadly successful social interaction, it is reasonable to look to the common-sense views for some rough guidance as to the real nature of (...) the mind. On the other hand, to the extent that common-sense views are inaccurate, and perhaps even in gross conflict with the true nature of the mind, one interesting scientific question is: why do we hold such views, given our access to our own minds? Why should introspection be limited in a way that allows inaccurate views to hold sway? Now, common-sense views of the mind are revealed in natural language discourse that describes mental states, and such descriptions are largely metaphorical. The metaphors are used within thinking about the mind as well as in language. Therefore the study of metaphor is central to the study of mind. The present article is a preliminary study of the importance of metaphor in the scientific study of consciousness. It concentrates on analysing the nature of a range of important metaphors of mind, briefly discussing the extent to which they can be used to describe or qualify states of consciousness, and pointing to important questions about the nature of consciousness that the study of the metaphors raises. The article further conjectures that the reason people use metaphors in describing themselves is often not (just) that they have intellectually worked out some structural analogy --- e.g., between interactions of physical objects in physical space and interactions of ideas in the mind --- but rather that they {\it feel} their own minds to be as described by the metaphor --- e.g., they feel that the ideas in their minds are interacting physical entities. This matter of how a mind feels to itself is an aspect of the central issue of consciousness, namely its phenomenal quality. -/- (NB: The archived file is a preprint. However, it is substantially the same as the published version.). (shrink)