The network approach to psychopathology posits that mental disorders can be conceptualized and studied as causal systems of mutually reinforcing symptoms. This approach, first posited in 2008, has grown substantially over the past decade and is now a full-fledged area of psychiatric research. In this article, we provide an overview and critical analysis of 363 articles produced in the first decade of this research program, with a focus on key theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions. In addition, we turn our attention (...) to the next decade of the network approach and propose critical avenues for future research in each of these domains. We argue that this program of research will be best served by working toward two overarching aims: (a) the identification of robust empirical phenomena and (b) the development of formal theories that can explain those phenomena. We recommend specific steps forward within this broad framework and argue that these steps are necessary if the network approach is to develop into a progressive program of research capable of producing a cumulative body of knowledge about how specific mental disorders operate as causal systems. (shrink)

Donald Davidson has prepared a new edition of his classic 1980 collection of Essays on Actions and Events, including two additional essays. In this seminal investigation of the nature of human action, Davidson argues for an ontology which includes events along with persons and other objects. Certain events are identified and explained as actions when they are viewed as caused and rationalized by reasons; these same events, when described in physical, biological, or physiological terms, may be explained by appeal (...) to natural laws. The mental and the physical thus constitute irreducibly discrete ways of explaining and understanding events and their causal relations. -/- Among the topics discussed are: freedom to act; weakness of the will; the logical form of talk about actions, intentions, and causality; the logic of practical reasoning; Hume's theory of the indirect passions; and the nature and limits of decision theory. The introduction, cross-references, and appendices emphasize the relations between the essays and explain how Davidson's views have developed. -/- . (shrink)

A formalism is developed that treats a robot as a subject that can interpret its own experience rather than an object that is interpreted within our experience. A regulative definition of a meaningful experience in robots is proposed in which the present sensible experience is considered meaningful to the agent, as the subject of the experience, if it can be related to the agent's temporal horizons. This definition is validated by demonstrating that such an experience in evolutionary autonomous agents is (...) embodied, contextual and normative, as is required for the maintenance of phenomenological accuracy. With this formalism it is shown how a dialectic similar to that described in Hegelian phenomenology can emerge in the robotic experience and why the presence of such a dialectic can serve as a constraint in the further development of cognitive agents. (shrink)

Phronesis is often described as a ‘practical wisdom’ adapted to the matters of everyday human life. Phronesis enables one to judge what is at stake in a situation and what means are required to bring about a good outcome. In medicine, phronesis tends to be called upon to deal with ethical issues and to offer a critique of clinical practice as a straightforward instrumental application of scientific knowledge. There is, however, a paucity of empirical studies of phronesis, including in medicine. (...) Using a hermeneutic and phenomenological approach, this inquiry explores how phronesis is manifest in the stories of clinical practice of eleven exemplary physicians. The findings highlight five overarching themes: ethos (or character) of the physician, clinical habitus revealed in physician know-how, encountering the patient with attentiveness, modes of reasoning amidst complexity, and embodied perceptions (such as intuitions or gut feeling). The findings open a discussion about the contingent nature of clinical situations, a hermeneutic mode of clinical thinking, tacit dimensions of being and doing in clinical practice, the centrality of caring relations with patients, and the elusive quality of some aspects of practice. This study deepens understandings of the nature of phronesis within clinical settings and proposes ‘Clinical phronesis’ as a descriptor for its appearance and role in the daily practice of (exemplary) physicians. (shrink)

Current cognitive science models of perception and action assume that the objects that we move toward and perceive are represented as determinate in our experience of them. A proper phenomenology of perception and action, however, shows that we experience objects indeterminately when we are perceiving them or moving toward them. This indeterminacy, as it relates to simple movement and perception, is captured in the proposed phenomenologically based recurrent network models of brain function. These models provide a possible foundation from which (...) predicative structures may arise as an emergent phenomenon without the positing of a representing subject. These models go some way in addressing the dual constraints of phenomenological accuracy and neurophysiological plausibility that ought to guide all projects devoted to discovering the physical basis of human experience. (shrink)

I am struck by how little is known about so much of cognition. One goal of this paper is to argue for the need to consider a rich set of interlocking issues in the study of cognition. Mainstream work in cognition—including my own—ignores many critical aspects of animate cognitive systems. Perhaps one reason that existing theories say so little relevant to real world activities is the neglect of social and cultural factors, of emotion, and of the major points that distinguish (...) an animate cognitive system from an artificial one: the need to survive, to regulate its own operation, to maintain itself, to exist in the environment, to change from a small, uneducated, immature system to an adult, developed, knowledgeable one.Human cognition is not the same as artificial cognition, if only because the human organism must also be concerned with the problems of life, of development, of survival. There must be a regulatory system that interacts with the cognitive component. And it may well be that it is the cognitive component that is subservient, evolved primarily for the benefit of the regulatory system, working through the emotions, through affect.I argue that several concepts must become fundamental parts of the study of cognition, including the roles of culture, of social interaction, of emotions, and of motivation. I argue that there are at least 12 issues that should comprise the study of cognition, and thereby, the field of Cognitive Science. We need to study a wide variety of behavior before we can hope to understand a single class. Cognitive scientists as a whole ought to make more use of evidence from the neurosciences, from brain damage and mental illness, from cognitive sociology and anthropology, and from clinical studies of the human. These must be accompanied, of course, with the study of language, of the psychological aspects of human processing structures, and of artificially intelligent mechanisms. The study of Cognitive Science requires a complex interaction among different issues of concern, an interaction that will not be properly understood until all parts are understood, with no part independent of the others, the whole requiring the parts, and the parts the whole. (shrink)

Both cognitive science and phenomenology accept the primacy of the organism-environment system and recognize that cognition should be understood in terms of an embodied agent situated in its environment. How embodiment is seen to shape our world, however, is fundamentally different in these two disciplines. Embodiment, as understood in cognitive science, reduces to a discussion of the consequences of having a body like ours interacting with our environment and the relationship is one of contingent causality. Embodiment, as understood phenomenologically, represents (...) the condition of intelligibility of certain terms in our experience and, as such, refers to one aspect of that background which presupposes our understanding of the world. The goals and approach to modeling an embodied agent in its environment are also fundamentally different dependent on which relationship is addressed. These differences are highlighted and are used to support our phenomenologically based approach to organism-environment interaction and its relationship to brain function. (shrink)

The phenomenological goal of grounding the content of conceptual thought in the background understanding of everyday, skillful coping was approached using evolutionary autonomous agent methodology. The behavior of an EAA evolved to perform a specified motor task was identified with skillful coping. Changes in the dynamics of the EAA controller occurred when the EAA encountered an unexpected obstacle with loss of longer time scale components in its hierarchical temporal organization. These temporal changes are consistent with the phenomenological changes which we (...) experience with breakdown during equipment use with our adoption of a more immediate, determinate stance. Since this latter experience is the basis of conceptual thought, the EAA paradigm goes some way in providing a naturalized explanation for the grounding of the content of conceptual thought in everyday, skillful coping in a manner that is physiologically plausible and phenomenologically accurate. (shrink)

Annotation Adapted from the renowned Encyclopedia of Philosophy and its Supplement, Philosophy and Ethics provides an authoritative one-stop resource on the most-studied questions in philosophy.

Privacy by Design, a globally accepted framework for personal data management and privacy protection, advances the view that privacy cannot be assured solely by compliance with regulatory frameworks but must become an organisation’s default mode of operation. We are proposing a similar template for the research ethics review process. The Research Ethics by Design framework involves research ethics committees engaging researchers during the design phase of the proposal so that ethical considerations may be directly embedded in the science as opposed (...) to being viewed as addendums after the fact. This collaborative research design proposal results in the establishment of a culture of ethical research rather than research with ethical oversight. Both researchers and research ethics committees come to view the review process as one in which individual protection and collective benefit co-exist in a doubly-enabling positive-sum manner. (shrink)

THE BIGNESS COMPLEX by Walter Adams and James W. Brock New York: Pantheon, 1986. 426 pp., $22.95.

As the accompanying articles in the Special Issue on Semiotic Scaffolding will attest, my colleagues in biosemiotics have done an exemplary job in showing us how to think about the critically generative role that semiotic scaffolding plays “vertically” – i.e., in evolutionary and developmental terms – by “allowing access to the upper floors” of biological complexity, cognition and evolution.In addition to such diachronic considerations of semiotic scaffolding, I wish to offer here a consideration of semiotic scaffolding’s synchronic power, as well (...) – and in particular the ability that it can afford its users to access new and other sign relations “horizontally” as a function of the way that multiple semiotically scaffolded relations intertwine to result in a “definite semantic topology that determines the ways that symbols modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations”.Taking up, in turn, Terrence Deacon’s later challenge that what the sciences of cognition – and biology more generally – needs to “come to grips with [is] the process of semiosis; the dynamic of interpretive activity by which semiotic relationships emerge from other semiotic relationships [as] intrinsically dynamic phases in a generative process”, I attempt here to show how Deacon’s own Peirce-inspired matrix of referential sign relations as presented in The Symbolic Species, when viewed as a semiotic scaffold of interactional constraints and possibility biases, provides the key to understanding the essentially thirdness-manifesting nature of symbol reference, formation and growth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scepticism About Persons in Book II of Hume’s TreatiseDonald C. AinslieBook ii of Hume’s Treatise—especially its first two Parts on the “indirect passions” of pride, humility, love, and hatred—has mystified many of its interpreters.1 Hume clearly thinks these passions are important: Not only does he devote more space to them than to his treatment of causation, but in the “Abstract” to the Treatise, he tells us that Book II (...) “contains opinions that are altogether as new and extraordinary” (T 659) as those found in Book I. And, he says, these opinions constitute “the foundation” (T 646) for his treatment of morals and politics in Book III.2 The mystery arises, however, because in the actual text of [End Page 469] Book II Hume never spells out what makes his opinions on the passions “new and extraordinary,” nor why they are foundational for his moral theory.Thus some of his interpreters, notably Norman Kemp Smith, conclude that Hume was simply mistaken in his assessment of his treatment of the passions. While his accounts of the will and of motivation (in the early Sections of Part iii of Book II) are significant, Kemp Smith takes the extended analysis of the indirect passions to spring merely from his misplaced enthusiasm for associationist psychology. As such, the philosophical lessons to be learned from the first two Parts of Book II are slim.3 Páll Árdal, in contrast, tries to construct for Hume what he seems to have omitted—a philosophical rationale for his obvious interest in the indirect passions. Árdal starts by drawing attention to the role these passions play in Hume’s moral philosophy, in particular, his repeatedly connecting the indirect passions to the moral sentiments of approval and disapproval. Árdal concludes that Hume means to equate the moral sentiments with particular kinds of indirect passions. The first two Parts of Book II are of interest, on Ardal’s reading, because it is there that he shows us how moral sentimentalism can be founded on something more fully naturalistic than Hutcheson’s somewhat mysterious “moral sense.”4I argue against Árdal’s interpretation in §2. But this reopens the problem of accounting for Hume’s interest in the indirect passions. I offer my view in §§3–5 where, like Árdal, I provide a reconstruction of Hume’s discussion of these passions in order to show how it has an underlying philosophical motivation. My claim is that Hume relies on the indirect passions to explain how we form beliefs about persons as bearers of features that make them into who [End Page 470] they are. It is by feeling an indirect passion towards someone that we think of her as more than accidentally related to some quality, such as her country, her riches, her family, or even her character traits. In support of my interpretation I point to the many parallels Hume draws between the indirect passions and the associative mechanism he offers to explain our forming causal beliefs (I.iii). And I suggest that, just as Hume’s associative explanation of causal beliefs is necessitated by his scepticism about intrinsic “necessary connexions,” so also his associative mechanism for our beliefs about persons—the indirect passions—is necessitated by a certain kind of scepticism about persons. This is not the scepticism about persons that we find in “Of personal identity” (I.iv.6), where Hume argues against the view that our perceptions inhere in a simple soul; it is rather a scepticism about there being intrinsic features of persons that define them as who they are.But, before I explain in more detail what my claim amounts to, it will help to have available a brief description of the mechanism that Hume’s takes to explain the indirect passions.1. THE MECHANISM FOR THE INDIRECT PASSIONSA passion, for Hume, is a simple impression felt in response to various circumstances. Because of their simplicity, we cannot define passions by putting their characteristic feeling into words; instead, Hume thinks, we can only delineate “such circumstances, as attend them” (T 277). Passions are indirect if those circumstances include as an outcome the focusing of attention onto a person... (shrink)

The idea that the self is in need of rethinking, as the title to this collection of essays suggests, presupposes that the self has already been “thought.” And indeed it has—both explicitly, by philosophers, and implicitly, in the practices of everyday life. For philosophers, this thinking about the self has taken place largely in abstract terms; persons have been treated as metaphysical-cum-moral subjects, disembodied minds that could plausibly be split from or melded with other such minds, or as rational agents, (...) capable of choosing a plan in terms of which to live their lives. In everyday life, in contrast, we “think” one another as selves by making assumptions about how the people we encounter fit into the social landscape and about how we ourselves have a place in the world. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, feminists have challenged both ways of thinking of selfhood in various, sometimes contradictory, ways. (shrink)

Donald Davidson was one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. The Structure of Truth presents his 1970 Locke Lectures in print for the first time. They comprise an invaluable historical document which illuminates how Davidson was thinking about the theory of meaning, the role of a truth theory therein, the ontological commitments of a truth theory, the notion of logical form, and so on, at a pivotal moment in the development of his thought. Unlike (...) Davidson's previously published work, the lectures are written so as to be presented to an audience as a fully organized and coherent exposition of his program in the philosophy of language. Had they been widely available in the years following 1970, the reception of Davidson's work might have been very different. Given the systematic nature of their presentation of Davidson's semantic program, these lectures will be of interest to anyone working in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In 2014, Morten Tønnessen and the editors of Biosemiotics officially launched the Biosemiotic Glossary Project in the effort to: solidify and detail established terminology being used in the field of Biosemiotics for the benefit of newcomers and outsiders; and to by involving the entire biosemiotics community, to contribute innovatively in the theoretical development of biosemiotic theory and vocabulary via the discussions that result. Biosemiotics, in its concern with explaining the emergence of, and the relations between, both biological ‘end-directedness’ and semiotic (...) ‘about-ness’, would seem a fertile field for re-conceptualizing the notion of intentionality. The present project is part of a systematic attempt to survey and to document the current thinking about this concept in our field. (shrink)

David Lewis has recently developed the notion of conversational scorekeeping as a way of explaining the acceptability of utterances in various contexts and the manner in which this acceptability changes in a rule-governed manner. I will expand Lewis's discussion by showing how the acceptibility of conditionals is linked to conversational score. In particular, I will argue that at least one controversial issue concerning the logic of conditionals, the interpretation and use of conditionals with disjunctive antecedents, may be resolved by applying (...) Lewis's notion of an accommodation rule for conversational scorekeeping. (shrink)

What is the nature of the social sciences? What kinds of knowledge can they—and should they—hope to create? Are objective viewpoints possible and can universal laws be discovered? Questions like these have been asked with increasing urgency in recent years, as some philosophers and researchers have perceived a "crisis" in the social sciences. Metatheory in Social Science offers many provocative arguments and analyses of basic conceptual frameworks for the study of human behavior. These are offered primarily by practicing researchers and (...) are related to problems in disciplines as diverse as sociology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and philosophy of science. While various points of view are expressed in these nineteen essays, they have in common several themes, including the comparison of social and natural science, the role of knowledge in meeting the demands of society and its pressing problems, and the nature and role of subjectivity in science. Some authors hold that subjectivity cannot be studied scientifically; others argue that it can and must be if progress in knowledge is to be made. The essays demonstrate the philosophical pluralism they discuss and give a wide range of alternative positions on the future of the social and behavioral sciences in a postpositivist intellectual world. (shrink)

The article presents a new interpretation of Hume’s treatment of personal identity, and his later rejection of it in the “Appendix” to the Treatise. Hume’s project, on this interpretation, is to explain beliefs about persons that arise primarily within philosophical projects, not in everyday life. The belief in the identity and simplicity of the mind as a bundle of perceptions is an abstruse belief, not one held by the “vulgar” who rarely turn their minds on themselves so as to think (...) of their perceptions. The author suggests that it is this philosophical observation of the mind that creates the problems that Hume finally acknowledges in the “Appendix.” He is unable to explain why we believe that the perceptions by means of which we observe our minds while philosophizing are themselves part of our minds. This suggestion is then tested against seven criteria that any interpretation of the “Appendix” must meet. (shrink)

In the Treatise of Human Nature , Hume argues that, because we have adequate ideas of the smallest parts of space, we can infer that space itself must conform to our representations of it. The paper examines two challenges to this argument based on Descartes's and Locke's treatments of adequate ideas, ideas that fully capture the objects they represent. The first challenge, posed by Arnauld in his Objections to the Meditations , asks how we can know that an idea is (...) adequate. The second challenge, implicit in Locke's Essay , asks how an empiricist can characterize an idea as inadequate, as both picking out an object and yet failing to capture it fully. In showing how Hume responds to these challenges, his theory of perceptual representation is explained and his treatment of space is related to his scepticism. His conclusion is shown not to be a characterization of space as it exists wholly apart from our powers of conception. Instead, in an adumbration of Kant, his claim is restricted to space as it appears to us. (shrink)

The article presents a new interpretation of Hume's treatment of personal identity, and his later rejection of it in the “Appendix” to the Treatise. Hume's project, on this interpretation, is to explain beliefs about persons that arise primarily within philosophical projects, not in everyday life. the belief in the identity and simplicity of the mind as a bundle of perceptions is an abstruse belief, not one held by the “vulgar” who rarely turn their minds on themselves so as to think (...) of their perceptions. the author suggests that it is this philosophical observation of the mind that creates the problems that Hume finally acknowledges in the “Appendix.” He is unable to explain why we believe that the perceptions by means of which we observe our minds while philosophizing are themselves part of our minds. This suggestion is then tested against seven criteria that any interpretation of the “Appendix” must meet. (shrink)

The current interest in bioregionalism, stimulated in part by Kirkpatrick Sale’s Dwellers in the Land, shows that people are looking for a form of political praxis which addresses the importance of region. In this paper, I argue that much of the bioregional literature written to date mystifies the concept of region, discounting the role of subjectivity and culture in shaping regional boundaries and veers toward asimplistic view of “nature knows best.” Bioregionalism can be rehabilitated, provided we treat it not as (...) a “revealed wisdom” for the reconstruction of human society, but as a sensibility and environmental ethic that can infuse our work even as we make use of the functional regionalisms that increasingly shape people’s consciousness. I conclude by citing Lewis Mumford’s concept of a region as capturing the dialectical interplay of natural and cultural elements. (shrink)

Some philosophers such as Ninian Smart have claimed that mystics from different religious traditions may sometimes have the same experience , while nevertheless giving different and tradition-bound descriptive reports of that experience. In two important essays, Steven Katz has challenged such a claim. Mystics from different religious traditions do not have the same experience.

This paper sets out to give sufficient detail to the notion of mental simulation to allow an appraisal of its contribution to ‘mindreading’ in the context of the ‘false-belief tasks’ used in developmental psychology. We first describe the reasoning strategy of ‘modified derivation’, which supports counterfactual reasoning. We then give an analysis of the logical structure of the standard false-belief tasks. We then show how modified derivation can be used in a hybrid strategy for mindreading in these tasks. We then (...) formulate the hypothesis that children become able (around the age of 4 years) to pass these tasks when they acquire the counterfactual reasoning ability required in this strategy. We find this to be consistent with various empirical findings. We then discuss the implications for the theory/simulation debate, meta-representation and pretence. (shrink)

This paper introduces the important concept of a biophysical perspective on economics into the business ethics literature. The biophysical perspective recognizes that ecological processes determine what can be done in an economy and how best to do it. A biophysical perspective places the economic system into a larger context of the ecologic system. This changes the perception of ethical issues by identifying a larger scope of management decisions. The paper examines the changing ethical landscape in such issues as biotechnology, planned (...) obsolescence, productivity, and international trade. The paper also examines the shift in mindset associated with the shift in economic framework. It draws on the literature on cognitive structures and moral imagination to show this new perspective can actually raise the bar for ethical decision-making and behavior. The pattern is that the ethical behavior associated with a biophysical economic framework has a greater scope of responsibility with the benefit that the required ethical behavior leads to better long-term decision making. (shrink)

Afghanistan. In the heat and dust, young British army medic Elinor Nielson watches an Afghan girl walk into a hail of bullets. But when she runs to help, Ellie finds her gone. Who is she? And what's happened to her? What Ellie discovers makes her question everything she believes in - even her feelings for the American lieutenant who takes her side.

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Locke on Personal Identity Hume's Critique of Locke The Belief in Mental Unity Hume's Second Thoughts Some Interpretations Unity in Reflection References.

This paper heeds the advice of EPAT's editor, who said he ‘will be happy to publish further works on Heidegger and responses to these articles’ after introducing four articles on Heidegger (and one of his students) and education in the August, 2005, issue. It discusses the papers in order of appearance critically, for none of them shows understanding of Heidegger's writings and descriptions of human existence in his most important work, Being and Time, nor the work of the internationally recognized (...) educational philosopher who has written about educational problems using Heidegger's perspective (among others) over the past forty years and that should be considered in any application of Heidegger's thought to education if educational philosophy is to become a cumulative discipline. Because philosophy of education is notoriously non‐accumulative and requires far more than referring to education in the first and last paragraphs of an article in order to be about an educational problem or phenomenon, the publications of this scholar in the phenomenology of education are mentioned throughout, as are Heidegger's works, to show how the four authors might have benefited from library research to utilize existing understandings and go beyond them. Finally, some suggestions are made about how to read with understanding Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time. (shrink)

The state that we inhabit plays a significant role in shaping our lives. For not only do its institutions constrain the kinds of lives we can lead, but it also claims the right to punish us if our choices take us beyond what it deems to be appropriate limits. Political philosophers have traditionally tried to justify the state's power by appealing to their preferred theories of justice, as articulated in complex and wide-ranging moral theories—utilitarianism, Kantianism, and the like. One of (...) John Rawls's greatest contributions to political philosophy has been his recognition that this is the wrong way for this field to approach its task. He points to what he calls “the fact of reasonable pluralism,” which is the incontestable fact that in a free society people striving to lead their lives ethically will subscribe to conflicting moral and religious doctrines, many of which will be “reasonable” in the special sense of leaving their adherents willing to cooperate with those with whom they have moral disagreements. And this means that political philosophers can no longer rely on any particular “comprehensive” doctrine in their attempts to justify the state. For doing so would be unfair to those who subscribe to a conflicting reasonable doctrine; it would mean that the coercive power of the state would not be justified to them in terms they can accept, even while they were forced to abide by its terms. (shrink)

The state that we inhabit plays a significant role in shaping our lives. For not only do its institutions constrain the kinds of lives we can lead, but it also claims the right to punish us if our choices take us beyond what it deems to be appropriate limits. Political philosophers have traditionally tried to justify the state's power by appealing to their preferred theories of justice, as articulated in complex and wide-ranging moral theories—utilitarianism, Kantianism, and the like. One of (...) John Rawls's greatest contributions to political philosophy has been his recognition that this is the wrong way for this field to approach its task. He points to what he calls “the fact of reasonable pluralism,” which is the incontestable fact that in a free society people striving to lead their lives ethically will subscribe to conflicting moral and religious doctrines, many of which will be “reasonable” in the special sense of leaving their adherents willing to cooperate with those with whom they have moral disagreements. And this means that political philosophers can no longer rely on any particular “comprehensive” doctrine in their attempts to justify the state. For doing so would be unfair to those who subscribe to a conflicting reasonable doctrine; it would mean that the coercive power of the state would not be justified to them in terms they can accept, even while they were forced to abide by its terms. (shrink)