_Making Up Your Mind_ is oriented toward the writing of arguments. It gives students techniques that they can use to better understand, organize, and present their own thoughts. The book provides an exceptionally clear statement of what critical thinking adds to the study of logic, along with complete and systematic coverage of all crucial logical operators and major logical relations. It also offers exceptionally clear and informative discussions of the definition of argument, the distinction between induction and deduction, and the (...) role of emotion in argument. The second half of the book presents an argument outline which students can use to organize virtually any ethical argument. This outline is also used to illustrate the most important informal fallacies and how they can be avoided. In its closing chapters, the book discusses the nature of good evidence and good sources of evidence and their role in argument. Included are discussions of scientific method, the logical form of arguments about causal theories, and arguments from analogy. (shrink)

A venerable philosophical tradition holds that we rational creatures are distinguished by our capacity for a special sort of mental agency or self-determination: we can “make up” our minds about whether to accept a given proposition. But what sort of activity is this? Many contemporary philosophers accept a Process Theory of this activity, according to which a rational subject exercises her capacity for doxastic self-determination only on certain discrete occasions, when she goes through a process of consciously deliberating about (...) whether P and concludes by “making a judgment”, thereby bringing about a change in what she believes. I argue that this conception of our control over our beliefs implies an unacceptable picture of the agency we exercise in judging, and of the relation of such agency to the condition of belief itself. I suggest that the beliefs of a rational creature are themselves “acts of reason”, which reflect the capacity for doxastic self-determination in their very nature, not merely in certain facts about how they can originate. (shrink)

This focused text is directed consistently towards teaching students to write their own arguments so as to better understand their own thoughts and present them to others in a clear written form. The text also provides a distinctive discussion of the role of emotion in argument under the concept of "emotional intelligence," and includes a wide range of exercises. In introducing students to the nature of argument (and especially ethical argument), Making Up Your Mind features a comprehensive introduction to the (...) logical forms of assertions and the most common forms of expression in English. The book then shows how to use all the main terms of argument, and provides a brief introduction to the most common forms of syllogism. The deductive and inductive aspects of argument are treated, and students are taught a basic technique of testing arguments for validity. Making Up Your Mind provides an argument outline, which can be used to organize virtually any ethical argument. This argument outline also provides a realistic context in which to study the most important informal fallacies and learn how to avoid them. In its closing chapters, the book discusses the nature of good evidence and good sources of evidence and their role in argument. Included are discussions of scientific method, the logical form of arguments about causal theories, and arguments from analogy. (shrink)

A recent account of the meaning of 'real' leads to a view of what anti-realism should be that resembles fictionalism, while not being committed to fictionalism as such or being subject to some of the more obvious objections to that view. This account of anti-realism explains how we might 'make up' what is true in areas such as mathematics or ethics, and yet these made-up truths are resistant to alterations, even by our collective decisions. Finally it is argued that (...) the sort of anti-realism suggested explains the appearance that the ethical domain supervenes on the naturalistic. (shrink)

In this work, I investigate the nature of the alleged binding force of decisions and commitments on future conduct. Contrary to pretheoretical intuitions, decisions and commitments are not means for the control of future conduct. Future-directed commitments do not constrain future action by either imposing causal restraints, or modifying the future situation of choice, or providing a reason to act as originally decided. According to my theory commitments determine the agent's conduct only if renewed at the time of action. The (...) agent must take the original decision ex nihilo at the time of action. I argue that this renewal does not threaten either intrapersonal transtemporal coordination of conduct or engagement in temporally extended activities. If the agent can assume the stability of her rationality over time, she can anticipate her future decision and action without settling in advance what she will do. This anticipation is sufficient for coordination. When uncertainty about the future makes the anticipation of future decision impossible, the agent can make preparatory arrangements in advance that create conditions for the rationality of the future conduct. The effects of preparatory arrangements are compatible with genuine commitments provided that they are understood as directed to a temporally extended activity that begins with the arrangements, rather than to a distal momentary action. ;I then show how the Sartrean account can be applied to limited agents like us, who do not have sufficient resources to engage in the constant renewal of their past resolutions. The solution rests in the division of deliberative labor. At the time of action the agent might endorse a past assessment about her present conduct and make it executive, thereby avoiding the full rehearsal of the deliberation. ;I argue that the Sartrean account satisfies all pretheoretical desiderata about the nature of commitments and that it also dissolves the puzzled about the transmission of the force of reasons over time. Finally, I discuss the role of the assumption of the temporal stability of rationality and suggest that it is related to the question of the persistence of the agent over time. (shrink)

This paper explores gender differences in “make-up” and “suspicion” in a bargaining game in which the privately informed seller of a company sends a value message to the uninformed potential buyer who then proposes a price for the company. “Make-up” is measured by how much the true value is overstated, “suspicion” by how much the price offer differs from the value message. We run different computerized treatments varying in information about the gender and in embeddedness of gender information. (...) The asymmetry of the game and of information allows for a robust assessment of gender effects. We report here the results from just one shot round decision since we expect such effects to be more pronounced for inexperienced participants. We mainly find an effect of gender constellation: when female sellers are aware to confront a female buyer, they overstate more, i.e. there is more “make-up”. However, we cannot confirm gender effects for suspicion. (shrink)

If language is to serve the basic purpose of communicating our attitudes, we must be constructed so as to form beliefs in those propositions that we truthfully assert on the basis of careful assent. Thus, other things being equal, I can rely on believing those things to which I give my careful assent. And so my ability to assent or dissent amounts to an ability to make up my mind about what I believe. This capacity, in tandem with a (...) similar capacity in respect of other attitudes, supports three important lessons. It means that I can know what I believe by seeing what commands my assent, that I can put aside the possibility of error in committing myself to holding such a belief, and that I can therefore perform as a person: I can organize my mind around commitments to which others are invited to hold me. (shrink)

Making Up Your Mind is oriented toward the writing of arguments. It gives students techniques that they can use to better understand, organize, and present their own thoughts. The book provides an exceptionally clear statement of what critical thinking adds to the study of logic, along with complete and systematic coverage of all crucial logical operators and major logical relations. It also offers exceptionally clear and informative discussions of the definition of argument, the distinction between induction and deduction, and the (...) role of emotion in argument. The second half of the book presents an argument outline which students can use to organize virtually any ethical argument. This outline is also used to illustrate the most important informal fallacies and how they can be avoided. In its closing chapters, the book discusses the nature of good evidence and good sources of evidence and their role in argument. Included are discussions of scientific method, the logical form of arguments about causal theories, and arguments from analogy. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the phenomenal character of a mood experience wholly depends on affective modifications (appropriate for the mood in question) to the phenomenal characters of one's non-mood experiences. I argue that this view accounts for all distinctive aspects of mood phenomenology, in contrast to currently existing accounts of moods, each of which faces trouble accounting for some distinctive aspect of mood experience. I also explain how my view allows for holding both that moods seemingly lack intentional (...) objects and that their phenomenal character reduces to intentional content nonetheless. (shrink)

The article presents the conceptual groundwork for an understanding of the essentially improvisational dimension of human rationality. It aims to clarify how we should think about important concepts pertinent to central aspects of human practices, namely, the concepts of improvisation, normativity, habit, and freedom. In order to understand the sense in which human practices are essentially improvisational, it is first necessary to criticize misconceptions about improvisation as lack of preparation and creatio ex nihilo. Second, it is necessary to solve the (...) theoretical problems that derive from misunderstandings concerning the notions of normativity, habit, and freedom – misunderstandings that revolve around the idea that rationality is a form that is developed out of itself and thus works in a way similar to algorithms. One can only make sense of normativity, habit, and freedom if one understands that they all involve conflictual relationships with the world and with others, which in turn enables one to adequately take into account their constitutive connection to improvisation, properly understood. In outlining these conceptual connections, we want to prepare the foundations for an explanation of rational practices as improvisational practices. The article concludes by stating that human rational life is improvisatory because the conditions of human practice arise out of practice itself. (shrink)

This paper examines the controversial diagnosis of excited delirium, which is often employed after individuals die during an encounter with the police. Rather than asking the important, and widely explored, question of whether the diagnosis is real or not, here, we consider how it operates in the world and why it seems to stick around, despite growing controversy and resistance to its use. First, we consider the question of what kinds of people are made up through the diagnosis of excited (...) delirium, exploring how racial stereotypes are exploited and certain behaviors are engendered through the illness script offered by excited delirium. Next, we ask what work excited delirium doing is doing in the world, unpacking how it tends to justify force and redirect responsibility, as well as who is it serving, and who is it not benefitting. Finally, we interrogate the slippery logic of excited delirium, examining how the way it is employed renders it non-falsifiable, and therefore impossible to uncover as real or unreal. (shrink)

In order to argue that cognitive science should be more accepting of explanatory plurality, this paper presents the control of fetching movements in the octopus as an exemplar of a cognitive process that comprises distinct and non-redundant representation-using and non-representational elements. Fetching is a type of movement that representational analyses can normally account for completely—but not in the case of the octopus. Instead, a comprehensive account of octopus fetching requires the non-overlapping use of both representational and non-representational explanatory frameworks. What (...) this need for a pluralistic or hybrid explanation implies is that cognitive science should be more open to using both representational and non-representational accounts of cognition, depending on their respective appropriateness to the type of cognition in question. (shrink)

In believing or acting on authority, an agent appears to believe or act without making up her own mind about what is the case or what to do. How is this possible? How can an agent make up her mind about a theoretical or practical question, and so believe or act intentionally, without doing so for herself? This paper argues that the standard account available in the literature of how it is that an agent can make up her (...) mind without doing so for herself, an account framed in terms of Joseph Raz’s notion of preemptive reasons, fails to adequately distinguish our rational dependence on other agents from reliance on ordinary instruments. It then offers an alternative account of what it is to make up one’s mind without doing so for oneself, one that focuses on the way in which the kind of rational responsibility that accrues to instances of settling a theoretical or practical question can be interpersonally distributed between agents and authorities. (shrink)

A review of Porter and Girsch’s book for gifted middle and high school children, focusing on useful classroom activities. Boersema analyzes how the book accounts for multiple philosophic discussions for children, including the following: (1) Nature vs. Nurture, (2) Deduction vs. Induction, (3) Absolutism vs. Relativism, (4) Discovered Math vs. Invented Math, (5) Reason vs. Revelation, (6) Free Will vs. Determinism, (7) Liberalism vs. Conservatism, (8) Free Markets vs. Regulated Markets, (9) Safety vs. Risk, and (10) Melting Pot vs. Melting (...) Not. (shrink)

One could only suppose that the apparently forgotten beginning of any story was unforgettable; perpetually one was subject to the sense of there having had to be a beginning somewhere. Like the lost first sheet of a letter or missing first pages of a book, the beginning kept on suggesting what must have been its nature. One never was out of reach of the power of what had been written first. Call it what you liked, call it a miscarried love, (...) it imparted, or was always ready and liable to impart, the nature of an alternative, attempted recovery or enforced second start to whatever followed. The beginning, in which was conceived the end, could not but continue to shape the middle part of the story, so that none of the realisations along that course were what had been expected, quite whole, quite final. (shrink)

This paper is an account of the co-construction of categorical identity and personal identity among human beings. As people recognize themselves within a socially sanctioned categorical scheme, they reproduce that scheme, and hence institutional and personal reflexivity occur as a joint movement that, at the same time, can be seen as an exercise in social control. The inspirations for this account are lan Hacking's view about the distinctiveness of social kinds from natural kinds, and Dan Sperber's idea about cultural communication (...) as a form of social epidemiology. (shrink)

The following case was presented by a trainee general practitioner, working in inner London, to her release course for discussion. It is told, as it was presented, in the immediate aftermath of the events described. The names and some of the details have been altered.

Walter Benjamin's writings on the Paris shopping arcades and nineteenth- century urban industrial culture are frequently referenced in contemporary examinations of ‘modernity'. In current cultural studies Benjamin's investigation of the aesthetics of merchandise and his insights into the social fact of mass consumerism are repeatedly invoked. Indeed these investigations may be alluded to even more frequently than reference is made to Benjamin's once much reproduced essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. A decade and a half (...) ago Benjamin's ‘Artwork’ essay was one of the most frequently cited essays in new art history and cultural studies academic textbooks. To put it crudely, a turnaround has occurred. In the 1970s academic attention spotlit Benjamin's materialist history of artistic production, distribution and reception as presented in the ‘Artwork’ essay and in ‘The Author as Producer’. The political events of 1968 had made Benjamin extremely readable. His thoughts discharged after some years delay. Most alluring to the German 68ers were the statements on political art and Benjamin's dissections of fascism. Also entrancing were Benjamin's analyses of experience. Benjamin wrote extensively, and from early on, about ways of expanding the conceptualisation of experience: sometimes philosophically - by means of Kant-critique, sometimes aesthetically — by a probing of surrealism and psychoanalysis, and sometimes practically – through experiments with hashish, which were later written up as protocols. John Berger's Ways of Seeing represented an original attempt to introduce Benjamin to an English audience, via the appropriately mass mediation of television. Benjamin was adopted as a leftist mascot, and a materialist who could recommend directions for art interpretation and more importantly, cultural practice. The approaches of the 1980s and 1990s, inflected by the priorities of feminist and postmodernist scholarship as they have loomed in cultural studies, art history and sociology, increasingly turned to those aspects of Benjamin's work that appear to illuminate a burgeoning interest in urbanism and consumerism. Interest has shifted away from cultural production and critique towards consumption and characterization. These days, Benjamin is regularly served up as one of the theorists who can vindicate a feel-good consumerism, lending a glamourizing and theoretical loftiness to the activity of shopping. Indeed, far from blasting the chimeras of commodity fetishism, Benjamin becomes the commodity's high-priest. (shrink)

Stacie Friend (2012) dismisses the traditional view that it is an author's imaginative activity of ‘making the story up’ rather than the reader's make-believe, that is of the essence of fiction. She claims that this view is ‘neither plausible nor popular’. I argue that her claim is false and that her arguments are unconvincing. I argue further in defence of the traditional view that it is quite easy to find or to simply construct counterexamples to the standard view that (...) fiction necessarily involves an invitation to the reader or audience to engage in make-believe. The counterexamples are the direct result of the fact that composing fiction need not involve any invitation to engage in make-believe. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of committed beliefs: beliefs we commit to through reflection and conscious reasoning. To help make sense of committed beliefs, I present a new view of conscious reasoning, one of putting yourself in a position to become phenomenally consciously aware of evidence. By doing this for different pieces of evidence, you begin to make your up mind, making conscious reasoning, as such, a voluntary activity with an involuntary conclusion. The paper then explains how we (...) use conscious reasoning in reflection not just to form and change committed beliefs, but to become aware of existing ones. The paper concludes with an explanation of how the limitations of conscious reasoning require us to maintain committed beliefs in a system. It is our maintenance of this system that allows us to knit together individual episodes of conscious reasoning into one enduring performance as a committed systematic believer. (shrink)

At the center of much contemporary work on self-knowledge of our attitudes is a debate between Agentialists and Empiricists. Empiricists hold that first-person knowledge of one’s own attitudes possesses a broadly empirical basis, such as observation or inference. Agentialists insist that an account of self-knowledge must make sense of the intimate connection between knowing one’s attitudes and actively forming them in response to reasons. But it is plausible to suppose that a psychologically realistic account of self-knowledge will emphasize both (...) active and passive elements. Focusing on the idea that we form self-ascriptions of belief on the basis of active deliberation, this paper outlines such a middle ground position. (shrink)

Lynne Rudder Baker, Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, xii + 177 pp. Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987, xi + 388 pp. Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness Cambridge: MIT Press, revised edition, 1988, xii + 184 pp.

A review of Porter and Girsch’s book for gifted middle and high school children, focusing on useful classroom activities. Boersema analyzes how the book accounts for multiple philosophic discussions for children, including the following: (1) Nature vs. Nurture, (2) Deduction vs. Induction, (3) Absolutism vs. Relativism, (4) Discovered Math vs. Invented Math, (5) Reason vs. Revelation, (6) Free Will vs. Determinism, (7) Liberalism vs. Conservatism, (8) Free Markets vs. Regulated Markets, (9) Safety vs. Risk, and (10) Melting Pot vs. Melting (...) Not. (shrink)

A review of Porter and Girsch’s book for gifted middle and high school children, focusing on useful classroom activities. Boersema analyzes how the book accounts for multiple philosophic discussions for children, including the following: (1) Nature vs. Nurture, (2) Deduction vs. Induction, (3) Absolutism vs. Relativism, (4) Discovered Math vs. Invented Math, (5) Reason vs. Revelation, (6) Free Will vs. Determinism, (7) Liberalism vs. Conservatism, (8) Free Markets vs. Regulated Markets, (9) Safety vs. Risk, and (10) Melting Pot vs. Melting (...) Not. (shrink)

I propose a narrative fabrication thesis of dream reports, according to which dream reports are often not accurate representations of experiences that occur during sleep. I begin with an overview of anti-experience theses of Norman Malcolm and Daniel Dennett who reject the received view of dreams, that dreams are experiences we have during sleep which are reported upon waking. Although rejection of the first claim of the received view, that dreams are experiences that occur during sleep, is implausible, I evaluate (...) in more detail the second assumption of the received view, that dream reports are generally accurate. I then propose a “narrative fabrication” view of dreams as an alternative to the received view. Dream reports are often confabulated or fabricated because of poor memory, bizarre dream content, and cognitive deficits. It is well documented that narratives can be altered between initial rapid eye movement sleep awakenings and subsequent reports. I argue that we have reason to suspect that initial reports are prone to inaccuracy. Experiments demonstrate that subjects rationalize strange elements in narratives, leaving out supernatural or bizarre components when reporting waking memories of stories. Inaccuracies in dream reports are exacerbated by rapid memory loss and bizarre dream content. Waking memory is a process of reconstruction and blending of elements, but unlike waking memory, we cannot reality-test for dream memories. Dream experiences involve imaginative elements, and dream content cannot be verified with external evidence. Some dreams may involve wake-like higher cognitive functions, such as lucid dreams. Such dreams are more likely to elicit accurate reports than cognitively deficient dreams. However, dream reports are generally less accurate than waking reports. I then propose methods which could verify the narrative fabrication view, and argue that although the theory cannot be tested with current methods, new techniques and technologies may be able to do so in the future. -/- . (shrink)

What I call semiotic brains are brains that make up a series of signs and that are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds” and so in thinking intelligently. An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of disembodiment of mind that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underling the semiotic emergence of meaning (...) processes. Indeed at the roots of sophisticated thinking abilities there is a process of disembodiment of mind that presents a new cognitive perspective on the role of external models, representations, and various semiotic materials. Taking advantage of Turing’s comparison between “unorganized” brains and “logical” and “practical” machines” this paper illustrates the centrality to cognition of the disembodiment of mind from the point of view of the interplay between internal and external representations, both mimetic and creative. The last part of the paper describes the concept of mimetic mind I have introduced to shed new cognitive and philosophical light on the role of computational modeling and on the decline of the so-called Cartesian computationalism. (shrink)