Most ?theories of consciousness? are based on vague speculations about the properties of conscious experience. We aim to provide a more solid basis for a science of consciousness. We argue that a theory of consciousness should provide an account of the very processes that allow us to acquire and use information about our own mental states ? the processes underlying introspection. This can be achieved through the construction of information processing models that can account for ?Type-C? processes. Type-C processes can (...) be specified experimentally by identifying paradigms in which awareness of the stimulus is necessary for an intentional action. The Shallice (1988b) framework is put forward as providing an initial account of Type-C processes, which can relate perceptual consciousness to consciously performed actions. Further, we suggest that this framework may be refined through the investigation of the functions of prefrontal cortex. The formulation of our approach requires us to consider fundamental conceptual and methodological issues associated with consciousness. The most significant of these issues concerns the scientific use of introspective evidence. We outline and justify a conservative methodological approach to the use of introspective evidence, with attention to the difficulties historically associated with its use in psychology. (shrink)

Cognitive science has wholeheartedly embraced functional brain imaging, but introspective data are still eschewed to the extent that it runs against standard practice to engage in the systematic collection of introspective reports. However, in the case of executive processes associated with prefrontal cortex, imaging has made limited progress, whereas introspective methods have considerable unfulfilled potential. We argue for a re-evaluation of the standard ‘cognitive mapping’ paradigm, emphasizing the use of retrospective reports alongside behavioural and brain imaging techniques. Using all three (...) sources of evidence can compensate for their individual limitations, and so triangulate on higher cognitive processes. (shrink)

Bioregionalists have championed the utility of the concept of the watershed as an organizing framework for thought and action directed to understanding and implementing appropriate and respectful human interaction with particular pieces of land. In a creative analogue to the watershed, permaculturist Arthur Getz has recently introduced the term “foodshed” to facilitate critical thought about where our food is coming from and how it is getting to us. We find the “foodshed” to be a particularly rich and evocative metaphor; but (...) it is much more than metaphor. Like its analogue the watershed, the foodshed can serve us as a conceptual and methodological unit of analysis that provides a frame for action as well as thought. Food comes to most of us now through a global food system that is destructive of both natural and social communities. In this article we explore a variety of routes for the conceptual and practical elaboration of the foodshed. While corporations that are the principal beneficiaries of a global food system now dominate the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food, alternatives are emerging that together could form the basis for foodshed development. Just as many farmers are recognizing the social and environmental advantages to sustainable agriculture, so are many consumers coming to appreciate the benefits of fresh and sustainably produced food. Such producers and consumers are being linked through such innovative arrangements as community supported agriculture and farmers markets. Alternative producers, alternative consumers, and alternative small entrepreneurs are rediscovering community and finding common ground in municipal and community food councils. Recognition of one's residence within a foodshed can confer a sense of connection and responsibility to a particular locality. The foodshed can provide a place for us to ground ourselves in the biological and social realities of living on the land and from the land in a place that we can call home, a place to which we are or can become native. (shrink)

On September 3, 2015, the Political Epistemology/ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on epistemic democracy as part of the APSA’s annual meetings. Chairing the roundtable was Daniel Viehoff, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield. The other participants were Jack Knight, Department of Political Science and the Law School, Duke University; Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University; and Nadia Urbinati, Department of Political Science, Columbia University. We thank the participants for (...) permission to republish their remarks, which they edited for clarity after the fact. (shrink)

The “looks” of things are frequently invoked (a) to account for the epistemic status of perceptual beliefs and (b) to distinguish perceptual from inferential beliefs. ‘Looks’ for these purposes is normally understood in terms of a perceptual experience and its phenomenal character. Here I argue that there is also a nonexperiential sense of ‘looks’—one that relates to cognitive architecture, rather than phenomenology—and that this nonexperiential sense can do the work of (a) and (b).

What makes a biological entity an individual? Jack Wilson shows that past philosophers have failed to explicate the conditions an entity must satisfy to be a living individual. He explores the reason for this failure and explains why we should limit ourselves to examples involving real organisms rather than thought experiments. This book explores and resolves paradoxes that arise when one applies past notions of individuality to biological examples beyond the conventional range and presents an analysis of identity and (...) persistence. The book's main purpose is to bring together two lines of research, theoretical biology and metaphysics, which have dealt with the same subject in isolation from one another. Wilson explains an alternative theory about biological individuality which solves problems which cannot be addressed by either field alone. He presents a more fine-grained vocabulary of individuation based on diverse kinds of living things, allowing him to clarify previously muddled disputes about individuality in biology. (shrink)

An influential argument for anti-reductionism about testimony, due to CAJ Coady, fails, because it assumes that an inductive global defense of testimony would proceed along effectively behaviorist lines. If we take seriously our wealth of non-testimonially justified folk psychological beliefs, the prospects for inductivism and reductionism look much better.

This collection of new essays presents cutting-edge research on the semantic conception of logic, the invariance criteria of logicality, grammaticality, and logical truth. Contributors explore the history of the semantic tradition, starting with Tarski, and its historical applications, while central criticisms of the tradition, and especially the use of invariance criteria to explain logicality, are revisited by the original participants in that debate. Other essays discuss more recent criticism of the approach, and researchers from mathematics and linguistics weigh in on (...) the role of the semantic tradition in their disciplines. This book will be invaluable to philosophers and logicians alike. (shrink)

Among medieval Aristotelians, William of Ockham defends a minimalist account of artifacts, assigning to statues and houses and beds a unity that is merely spatial or locational rather than metaphysical. Thus, in contrast to his predecessors, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, he denies that artifacts become such by means of an advening ‘artificial form’ or ‘form of the whole’ or any change that might tempt us to say that we are dealing with a new thing (res). Rather, he understands artifacts (...) as per accidens composites of parts that differ, but not so much that only divine power could unite them, as in the matter and form of a proper substance. For Ockham, artifacts are essentially rearrangements, via human agency, of already existing things, like the clay shaped by a sculptor into a statue or the stick and bristles and string one might fashion into a broom. Ockham does not think that a new thing is thereby created, although his emphasis on the contribution of human artisans seems to leave questions about the ontological status of their agency open. In any case, there are no such things as natural statues, any more than substances created by human artifice. (shrink)

It is not widely realised that Turing was probably the first person to consider building computing machines out of simple, neuron-like elements connected together into networks in a largely random manner. Turing called his networks unorganised machines. By the application of what he described as appropriate interference, mimicking education an unorganised machine can be trained to perform any task that a Turing machine can carry out, provided the number of neurons is sufficient. Turing proposed simulating both the behaviour of the (...) network and the training process by means of a computer program. We outline Turing's connectionist project of 1948. (shrink)

Strong reciprocity has recently been subject to heated debate. In this debate, the “West camp” :231–262, 2011), which is critical of the case for SR, and the “Laland camp” :1512–1516, 2011, Biol Philos 28:719–745, 2013), which is sympathetic to the case of SR, seem to take diametrically opposed positions. The West camp criticizes advocates of SR for conflating proximate and ultimate causation. SR is said to be a proximate mechanism that is put forward by its advocates as an ultimate explanation (...) of human cooperation. The West camp thus accuses advocates of SR for not heeding Mayr’s original distinction between ultimate and proximate causation. The Laland camp praises advocates of SR for revising Mayr’s distinction. Advocates of SR are said to replace Mayr’s uni-directional view on the relation between ultimate and proximate causes by the bi-directional one of reciprocal causation. The paper argues that both the West camp and the Laland camp misrepresent what advocates of SR are up to. The West camp is right that SR is a proximate cause of human cooperation. But rather than putting forward SR as an ultimate explanation, as the West camp argues, advocates of SR believe that SR itself is in need of ultimate explanation. Advocates of SR tend to take gene-culture co-evolutionary theory as the correct meta-theoretical framework for advancing ultimate explanations of SR. Appearances notwithstanding, gene-culture coevolutionary theory does not imply Laland et al.’s notion of reciprocal causation. “Reciprocal causation” suggests that proximate and ultimate causes interact simultaneously, while advocates of SR assume that they interact sequentially. I end by arguing that the best way to understand the debate is by disambiguating Mayr’s ultimate-proximate distinction. I propose to reserve “ultimate” and “proximate” for different sorts of explanations, and to use other terms for distinguishing different kinds of causes and different parts of the total causal chain producing behavior. (shrink)

Even though one of the founding aspirations of our field was to foster mutually beneficial exchanges between economics and philosophy, economists never paid much attention to our work. Now that pra...

Recent worries about possible epiphenomenalist consequences of nonreductive materialism are misplaced, not, as many have argued, because nonreductive materialism does not have epiphenomenalist implications but because the epiphenomenalist implications are actually virtues of the theory, rather than vices. It is only by showing how certain kinds of mental properties are causally impotent that cognitive scientific explanations of mentality as we know them are possible.

The main claim of this paper is that Andy Clark's most influential argument for ‘the extended mind thesis’ (EM henceforth) fails. Clark's argument for EM assumes that a certain form of common-sense functionalism is true. I argue, contra Clark, that the assumed brand of common-sense functionalism does not imply EM. Clark's argument also relies on an unspoken, undefended and optional assumption about the nature of mental kinds—an assumption denied by the very common-sense functionalists on whom Clark's argument draws. I also (...) critique Mark Sprevak's reductio of Clark's argument. Sprevak contends that Clark's argument does not merely entail EM; it entails an extended mind thesis so strong as to be absurd. He goes on to claim that Clark's argument should properly be viewed as a reductio of the very common-sense functionalism on which it depends. Sprevak's argument shares the flaw that afflicts Clark's argument, or so I claim. (shrink)

Over the last few years there seems to have been a sharp increase in the number of books that want to spread the news that economics is, or at least can be, fun. This paper sets out to explain in what senses economics is supposed to be fun. In particular, the books in what I will call the economics-made-fun genre will be compared first with papers and books written by economists with the explicit intent of making fun of economics. Subsequently, (...) it will be examined whether or not it makes sense to accuse books in the economics-made-fun genre of economics imperialism, as some commentators have recently done. (shrink)

In a series of joint papers, Teppo Felin and Nicolai J. Foss recently launched a microfoundations project in the field of strategic management. Felin and Foss observe that extant explanations in strategic management are predominantly collectivist or macro. Routines and organizational capabilities, which are supposed to be properties of firms, loom large in the field of strategic management. Routines figure as explanantia in explanations of firm behavior and firm performance, for example. Felin and Foss plead for a replacement of such (...) macro-explanations by micro-explanations. Such a replacement is needed, Felin and Foss argue, because macro-explanations are necessarily incomplete: they miss out on crucial links in the causal chain that connect macro phenomena with each other. I argue that this argument is flawed. It is based on a doubtful if not outright incorrect understanding and use of Coleman’s diagram. In a sense to be explained below, only if Coleman’s diagram is squared it can accurately account for the relations between individual action and interaction, routines and firm behavior and firm performance. Once Coleman’s diagram is squared, one can see why and how macro-explanations need not miss out on any link in the causal chains that connect macro phenomena. Micro-analyses are still needed, not to highlight and specify causal links that macro-explanations miss out on, but to check whether the many properties that are ascribed to routines in macro-explanations of firm behavior are warranted. (shrink)

In his PhD thesis (1938) Turing introduced what he described as 'a new kind of machine'. He called these 'O-machines'. The present paper employs Turing's concept against a number of currently fashionable positions in the philosophy of mind.

One of the more important and under-thematized philosophical disputes in contemporary European philosophy pertains to the significance that is given to the inter-related phenomena of habituality, skilful coping, and learning. This paper examines this dispute by focusing on the work of the Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger-inspired phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus, and contrasting his analyses with those of Gilles Deleuze, particularly in Difference and Repetition. Both Deleuze and Dreyfus pay a lot of attention to learning and coping, while arriving at distinct conclusions about (...) these phenomena with a quite different ethico-political force. By getting to the bottom of the former, my hope is to problematize aspects of the latter in both philosophers' work. In Deleuze's case, it will be argued that he adopts a problematic position on learning that is aptly termed 'empirico-romanticism'. While I will agree with the general thrust of Dreyfus' foregrounding of habit and skilful coping, even in the political realm, it will also be argued that there are some risks associated with his view, notably of devolving into a conservative communitarianism. (shrink)

Much current work in the social sciences seeks to understand the effects of trust and social capital on economic and political outcomes. However, the sources of trust remain unclear. In this article, the authors articulate a basic theory of the relationship between institutions and trust. The authors apply this theory to industrial districts, geographically concentrated areas of small firm production, which involve extensive cooperation in the production process. Changes in power relations affect patterns of production;the authors suggest that they also (...) have knock-on consequences for trust and cooperation among actors. (shrink)

In this thought-provoking study, Jack Russell Weinstein suggests the foundations of liberalism can be found in the writings of Adam Smith, a pioneer of modern economic theory and a major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. While offering an interpretive methodology for approaching Smith’s two major works, _The Theory of Moral Sentiments _and _The Wealth of Nations_, Weinstein argues against the libertarian interpretation of Smith, emphasizing his philosophies of education and rationality. Weinstein also demonstrates that Smith should be recognized for (...) a prescient theory of pluralism that prefigures current theories of cultural diversity. (shrink)

Contingent valuation of people's willingness to pay has rapidly become the method of choice to value all manner of environmental damages. The correct measure is, however, the sum people require to compensate them for such losses, an amount which will normally be far larger than their willingness to pay. And on present evidence, responses to contingent valuation questions are not likely to represent any measure of economic values. The results of these valuation practices will, therefore, bias environmental policies and distort (...) incentives. (shrink)

That Piagetian epistemology has the dynamics of knowledge growth as its core consideration predetermines a need to consider it as potentially applicable to teaching. This paper addresses that need by first outlining the Piagetian theory of equilibration and then applying it to the construction of methods of teaching science.

This edited volume focuses on the use of ?necessary condition counterfactuals? in explaining two key events in twentieth century history, the origins of the ...

One of the lessons we ought to have learned from the history of philosophy and science is that it is rarely, if ever, useful in dealing with challenges from a new movement or in distinguishing one’s position from a different school of thought, to “draw a line in the sand” and claim that everything on this side is legitimate and that everything on that side is not, and can therefore be dismissed without serious consideration or discussion. On some analyses, Plato (...) sought to dismiss all of natural science in this way, by claiming that since it dealt with change it can yield at best belief, not knowledge. The logical positivists, building on the work of Hume, tried to use the analytic/synthetic distinction and various forms of verificationism to dismiss as nonsense everything but science, logic, mathematics, and the philosophy of science. Neither of these moves succeeded in banishing what was placed on that side of the line to intellectual never-never land. More recently, critics of creationism have dismissed the views they are attacking as “not science at all” and therefore of neither concern nor interest to the scientific communities. These maneuvers tend to be unsuccessful not just because they rely on distinctions which cannot, in the end, be sustained—or can be drawn and maintained only after all the hard work which they are frequently claimed to make unnecessary has been done—but because they refuse to deal with the specific evidence and arguments advanced by the challengers, bad as those might be. (shrink)

According to Nicole Oresme (c. 1320–1382), human beings, unlike all other animals, consist of two substances: a thinking substance and a sensing substance. This paper presents and explores the arguments Oresme uses to arrive at this position, which is unusual in medieval philosophical psychology and which at least superficially – though their methods are completely different – resembles what Descartes concluded about the nature of the human soul and body two and a half centuries later. The paper also considers some (...) moments of ambivalence in Oresme’s presentation, as well as unresolved difficulties, several of which have theological as well as philosophical implications. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship that obtains between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida through exploring an interesting point of dissension in their respective accounts of decision-making. Merleau-Ponty's early philosophy emphasizes the body-subject's tendency to seek an equilibrium with the world (by acquiring skills and establishing what he refers to as 'intentional arcs'), and towards deciding in an embodied and habitual manner that minimizes any confrontation with what might be termed a decision-making aporia. On the other hand, in his later writings, Derrida frequently (...) points towards a constitutive 'undecidability' involved in decision-making. He insists that a decision, if it is genuinely to be a decision, must involve a leap beyond all prior preparations, and this ensures that an aporia surrounds any attempt to decide. One must always decide without any equilibrium or stability, and yet these are precisely the things that Merleau-Ponty claims that our body moves us towards. Most of this essay will explore the significance of this disparity, and it will be argued that many of Merleau-Ponty's insights challenge the Derridean conception of the undecidability involved in decision-making. This becomes most obvious when comparing the decision-making processes of those expert in a particular field to those who are merely competent (for example chess), and this essay will attempt to establish that the aporia that Derrida discerns can actually be seen to constrict. (shrink)

Orthodox physicalism has a problem with mental causation. If physics is complete and mental events are not identical to physical events (as multiple-realisation arguments imply) it seems as though there is no causal work for the mental to do. This paper examines some recent attempts to overcome this problem by analysing causation in terms of counterfactuals or conditional probabilities. It is argued that these solutions cannot simultaneously capture the force of the completeness of physics and make room for mental causation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Natural Philosophy: On Retrieving a Lost Disciplinary Imaginary by Alister E. McGRATHJack ZupkoMcGRATH, Alister E. Natural Philosophy: On Retrieving a Lost Disciplinary Imaginary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. viii + 248 pp. Cloth, $39.95This book attempts to retrieve and reimagine the tradition of natural philosophy as an antidote for what the author sees as the fragmented, instrumentalized, and ethically disengaged understanding of the natural world most of us (...) have today. The idea is not to reinstate the older vision of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, with its final causes and animated spheres, or even the early modern culmination of natural philosophy in Newton’s universe of mathematically fixed natural laws; rather, the author hopes to engender a newer and deeper understanding of nature that is at once scientific, ethical, and poetic, which he explains in terms of the conceptual framework of Popper’s “Three Worlds”: objective, subjective, and theoretical. What is recovered thereby is said to be a “lost conceptual space” wherein human beings learn both about and from nature, modes of knowing rendered obsolete by disciplinary specialization in the sciences as well as our commitment to objective methods that leave no room for ethical or spiritual approaches to understanding the natural world and our place in it.The author covers quite a bit of ground on the historical side, from the ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages, moving on to the idea of natural philosophy as it was gradually transformed during the early modern period by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Boyle, and Newton—a picture finally eclipsed by the objective, empirical concept of natural science familiar to us today. Curiously, the book says very little about the Platonic tradition of natural philosophy that grew up around the Timaeus. Because it was available in Latin (or the first half of it, anyway, in a Latin translation by the Roman Neoplatonist Calcidius, who also wrote an influential commentary on the work), the Timaeus was, for almost a millennium, the authoritative text in natural philosophy in the West, at least until Aristotle’s nonlogical and scientific writings were recovered in the twelfth century. The Timaeus was the subject of many commentaries and philosophical discussions, from Calcidius in the fourth century to Bernardus Silvestris, William of Conches, and Alan of Lille in the twelfth. It fell out of favor among philosophers with the rise of Aristotle’s Physics and Aristotelian natural philosophy, though it continued to shape the popular imagination of nature in other genres, such as art and literature—recall, for example, the well-known image of “God the Geometer” (c. 1230), measuring the cosmos with a compass. If the author’s project is about “retrieving” natural philosophy “as a lost disciplinary imaginary” (the book’s subtitle), then surely the Platonic vision of the universe deserves equal billing with the Aristotelian. [End Page 158]That said, there is much to like in the project sketched here. The author’s diagnosis of the epistemic malaise of modern-day science sounds right to anyone familiar with the history of philosophy and natural science. So, even though we can now correctly describe the velocity constant of earth’s gravity as 9.8 m/s2, among other scientific achievements, we take ourselves to be wearing a different hat when we wax poetic at the beauty of the sky and the stars. Early-and pre-modern authors were more adept at bringing together science and poetry, but that might be because their epistemic position was radically different from our own. Calcidius, for example, finds it easy to draw moral and aesthetic conclusions from the motions of the cosmos because he really believed heavenly bodies are, like us, animated by souls. Even a materialist like Lucretius accepts that the gods exist; his (still) very radical thesis is that they don’t care about us. (And why should they? The Pythagorean theorem is much more beautiful and edifying to consider than the troubles of ignorant and weak-willed mortals.) Enlightened moderns that we are, we no longer believe the heavens are populated by super-intelligent beings; yet we continue to marvel at Van Gogh’s Starry Night and feel it is wrong to cause gratuitous... (shrink)

It is obvious that technology is rapidly changing the world around us. Nowhere is that change more evident than in the revolution occurring for those with physical and mental limitations-their portrayal in the media, their use of the media to achieve group aims and their use of the new on-line media to communicate with others who have limitations and the non-disabled world. In a very real way the growing sense of community among those with disabilities has been linked to the (...) media. (shrink)

In Mental Acts Professor Peter Geach asserts that “‘The same’ is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean ‘the same X’, where ‘X’ represents a general term … ” In Reference and Generality Geach interjects the following note: “I maintain that it makes no sense to judge whether x and y are ‘the same’, or whether x remains ‘the same’, unless we add or understand some general term ‘the same F’.” Here, as in Mental Acts, (...) he goes on to say that not any general term will serve to complete ‘the same’ constructions; only substantival terms will suffice for this purpose. Finally, in his article, “ldentity,” Geach asserts that “When one says ‘x is identical with y’, this … is an incomplete expression; it is short for ‘x is the same A as y’, where ‘A’ represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance—or else, it is just a vague expression of a half-formed thought.” (We should not, incidently, conclude from this last remark that Geach thinks all and only count nouns are substantival terms. (shrink)