Embodied approaches in cognitive science hold that the body is crucial for cognition. What this claim amounts to, however, still remains unclear. This paper contributes to its clarification by confronting three ways of understanding embodiment—the sensorimotor approach, extended cognition and enactivism—with Locked-in syndrome. LIS is a case of severe global paralysis in which patients are unable to move and yet largely remain cognitively intact. We propose that LIS poses a challenge to embodied approaches to cognition requiring them to make explicit (...) the notion of embodiment they defend and its role for cognition. We argue that the sensorimotor and the extended functionalist approaches either fall short of accounting for cognition in LIS from an embodied perspective or do it too broadly by relegating the body only to a historical role. Enactivism conceives of the body as autonomous system and of cognition as sense-making. From this perspective embodiment is not equated with bodily movement but with forms of agency that do not disappear with body paralysis. Enactivism offers a clarifying perspective on embodiment and thus currently appears to be the framework in embodied cognition best suited to address the challenge posed by LIS. (shrink)

The article focuses on Leibniz’s theory of dual access to the innate practical truths developed in the _New Essays_, on the background of the reconciliation between egoism and altruism he pursues – since his early writings on natural law – through the categories of disinterested love and charity, and the onto-aesthetic implication between harmony and pleasure as well. After reconstructing the meaning and the functions of the argument on the community of brigands that Leibniz addresses against Locke’s conventionalism, the article (...) dwells on the structure of social instincts in human and non-human animals and emphasises the role of the “prick of conscience”, conceived of as a first, affective and pre-rational step in the construction of otherness. (shrink)

_Riassunto_: Questo lavoro intende offrire una prospettiva sulla filosofia della mente implicita nell’opera di Pierre Bourdieu. Propongo di organizzare e analizzare le questioni psicologiche che si dipanano nella teoria della pratica di Bourdieu su due diversi piani descrittivi della sfera del mentale: quello ontologico e quello architettonico. Nella prima parte del lavoro chiarirò il concetto di habitus sulla base della sua costituzione schematica. Poi, definito l’habitus come “super-schema psicosociale”, esplorerò il suo funzionamento incarnato alla luce della teoria cognitiva della metafora. (...) Nella seconda parte del lavoro, intendo chiarire l’architettura del mentale che emerge dalla relazione che Bourdieu teorizza tra conoscenza pratica e conoscenza riflessiva. Qui, vorrei prima sottolineare come Bourdieu faccia uso di un’architettura duale della mente, segnata da una particolare doppia-opacità riflessiva, per sostenere poi che le affermazioni metacognitive di Bourdieu ben si adattano agli approcci contemporanei della parità sé-altro della conoscenza di sé. Infine sosterrò come il funzionamento inconscio dell’habitus sia coerente con una visione cognitiva dell’inconscio. _Parole chiave_: La filosofia della mente di Bourdieu; Habitus; Schema; Dualità della mente; Parità Sé-Altro; Inconscio cognitivo _The ontology and architecture of the mind in Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice_ _Abstract_: This article provides an outline of Bourdieu’s hidden philosophy of mind. I propose to organize and analyse the psychological themes that flow trough Bourdieu’s theory of practice using two different levels of description of the mental, the ontological and architectonic. In the first part of the article, I clarify the concept of habitus on the ground of its schematical constitution. Conceptualising habitus as a “psychosocial super-schema”, I explore its embodied functioning in the light of cognitive metaphor theory. In the second part, I clarify the architecture of the mental as it emerges from the relationship Bourdieu theorizes between practical and reflexive knowledge. Here, I first stress that Bourdieu employs a dual architecture of mind marked by a peculiar reflexive double-opacity, and then I argue that Bourdieu’s metacognitive claims fit the contemporary self-other parity accounts of self-knowledge. Finally, I claim that the unconscious functioning of habitus is consistent with a cognitivist theory of the unconscious. _Keywords_: Bourdieu’s Philosophy of Mind; Habitus; Schema; Duality of Mind; Self-Other Parity; Cognitive Unconscious. (shrink)

Riassunto: Il presente studio indaga il modo in cui gli scienziati percepiscono la dimensione estetica nella propria attività e nei propri oggetti di studio, al punto da essere un criterio che orienta il loro lavoro; si cercherà pertanto di enucleare le proprietà che caratterizzano il tipo di bellezza da loro riscontrato, facendo riferimento agli scritti di Michael Polanyi. L’autore offre importanti spunti per chiarire il problema della validità di tale uso della bellezza scientifica. La questione è ancor più interessante perché, (...) se la bellezza è legittimamente un criterio scientifico, ne risulta un legame tra scienza e persona (infatti il senso estetico è proprio della persona). Tale bellezza ha caratteristiche specifiche: è intellettuale, strettamente dipendente dall’ordine, dall’intero e dalle relazioni. Inoltre, essa è il termine di una delle cosiddette passioni scientifiche o intellettuali degli scienziati: il ricercatore desidera la bellezza intellettuale e ne è (momentaneamente) appagato. Per Polanyi, la bellezza intellettuale è essenziale alla verità scientifica e ha il potere di rivelare la verità sul mondo naturale. Allo stesso tempo, però, tale standard di bellezza è sempre posto da noi e per noi stessi. Emergono così le tensioni polanyiane a riguardo del realismo. L’articolo propone una soluzione, a favore del criterio di bellezza, che può risultare utile anche per il progresso della ricerca scientifica. (shrink)

Nel 1545, dalla tipografia di Damiano de Turlini a Brescia, usciva un volume contenente due operette: la prima intitolata _Un brieve trattato dell’eccellentia delle donne_ composta dal filosofo lombardo Vincenzo Maggi; la seconda, anonima, con il titolo: _Una brieve essortatione a gli huomini_. Vincenzo Maggi, con un trattato –come lui stesso dichiara– breve e semplice, confuta il disprezzo verso il genere femminile imperante nella sua epoca, spinto dalla necessità di ritrovare la verità. Il tutto senza screditare né le tesi avverse (...) né i maschi; anzi, con l’intenzione di convincere costoro ad apprezzare ancor di più le donne e riconoscerne i superiori meriti. L’autore anonimo, invece, pretende smentire le affermazioni del filosofo lombardo esortando gli uomini all’azione, e si dichiara intimorito dall’idea che le donne possano prendere il sopravvento. È nostra intenzione analizzare le due opere presentandone le argomentazioni e i modi in cui esse vengono esposte, nonché offrire una breve biografia di Vincenzo Maggi oltre ad affrontare l’argomento della paternità della seconda opera. (shrink)

Kant è stato il principale riferimento epistemologico di quella ricerca sui fondamenti della matematica che ha avuto in Gottlob Frege il suo massimo esponente. In seguito, tuttavia, al tramonto dei programmi logicista, intuizionista e formalista, l'esigenza di garantire la certezza della matematica passa in secondo piano rispetto al problema della natura degli enti matematici. E in tal modo che, almeno a livello terminologico, Platone subentra a Kant come essenziale referente di una diversa costruzione epistemologica. Terreno fertile della ricerca fondazionale diviene (...) infatti, a partire dagli anni '60, il dibattito fra i sostenitori e gli avversari del 'platonismo matematico': etichetta che, utilizzata per indicare la trascendenza degli enti matematici, ha non di rado banalizzato o reso marginale l'originario pensiero di Platone. Il dibattito è ancor oggi un crogiolo di idee e tendenze, tra le quali emerge, accanto alla necessità di un maggiore approfondimento dei risultati e della reale attività del matematico, l'opportunità di interrogare i testi del filosofo greco. Nella sterminata letteratura contemporanea sui fondamenti della matematica, Platone e Kant si presentano, dunque, come problematici fili d'Arianna per orientarsi, mettere ordine, cogliere una linea evolutiva o anche soltanto originali spunti teorici per nuovi orizzonti. (shrink)

Insofern entwickelt die Begriffslogik eine Epistemologie freien Denkens. Damit entscheidet sich Hegel in den nachkantischen Debatten für Kant und gegen den von Schelling in die Diskussion zurückgebrachten Spinozismus.

In this paper, I begin by defending permissivism: the claim that, sometimes, there is more than one way to rationally respond to a given body of evidence. Then I argue that, if we accept permissivism, certain worries that arise as a result of learning that our beliefs were caused by the communities we grew up in, the schools we went to, or other irrelevant influences dissipate. The basic strategy is as follows: First, I try to pinpoint what makes irrelevant influences (...) worrying and I come up with two candidate principles. I then argue that one principle should be rejected because it is inconsistent with permissivism. The principle we should accept implies that it is sometimes rational to maintain our beliefs, even upon learning that they were caused by irrelevant influences. (shrink)

In recent years, permissivism—the claim that a body of evidence can rationalize more than one response—has enjoyed somewhat of a revival. But it is once again being threatened, this time by a host of new and interesting arguments that, at their core, are challenging the permissivist to explain why rationality matters. A version of the challenge that I am especially interested in is this: if permissivism is true, why should we expect the rational credences to be more accurate than the (...) irrational ones? My aim is to turn this challenge on its head and argue that, actually, those who deny permissivism will have a harder time responding to such a challenge than those who accept it. (shrink)

It has been claimed that, in response to certain kinds of evidence, agents ought to adopt imprecise credences: doxastic states that are represented by sets of credence functions rather than single ones. In this paper I argue that, given some plausible constraints on accuracy measures, accuracy-centered epistemologists must reject the requirement to adopt imprecise credences. I then show that even the claim that imprecise credences are permitted is problematic for accuracy-centered epistemology. It follows that if imprecise credal states are permitted (...) or required in the cases that their defenders appeal to, then the requirements of rationality can outstrip what would be warranted by an interest in accuracy. (shrink)

This paper is about the connection between rationality and accuracy. I show that one natural picture about how rationality and accuracy are connected emerges if we assume that rational agents are rationally omniscient. I then develop an alternative picture that allows us to relax this assumption, in order to accommodate certain views about higher order evidence.

Greaves and Wallace argue that conditionalization maximizes expected accuracy. In this paper I show that their result only applies to a restricted range of cases. I then show that the update procedure that maximizes expected accuracy in general is one in which, upon learning P, we conditionalize, not on P, but on the proposition that we learned P. After proving this result, I provide further generalizations and show that much of the accuracy-first epistemology program is committed to KK-like iteration principles (...) and to the existence of a class of propositions that rational agents will be certain of if and only if they are true. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to apply the accuracy based approach to epistemology to the case of higher order evidence: evidence that bears on the rationality of one's beliefs. I proceed in two stages. First, I show that the accuracy based framework that is standardly used to motivate rational requirements supports steadfastness—a position according to which higher order evidence should have no impact on one's doxastic attitudes towards first order propositions. The argument for this will require a generalization of (...) an important result by Greaves and Wallace for the claim that conditionalization maximizes expected accuracy. The generalization I provide will, among other things, allow us to apply the result to cases of self-locating evidence. In the second stage, I develop an alternative framework. Very roughly, what distinguishes the traditional approach from the alternative one is that, on the traditional picture, we're interested in evaluating the expected accuracy of conforming to an update procedure. On the alternative picture that I develop, instead of considering how good an update procedure is as a plan to conform to, we consider how good it is as a plan to make. I show how, given the use of strictly proper scoring rules, the alternative picture vindicates calibrationism: a view according to which higher order evidence should have a significant impact on our beliefs. I conclude with some thoughts about why higher order evidence poses a serious challenge for standard ways of thinking about rationality. (shrink)

It seems like we care about at least two features of our credence function: gradational-accuracy and verisimilitude. Accuracy-first epistemology requires that we care about one feature of our credence function: gradational-accuracy. So if you want to be a verisimilitude-valuing accuracy-firster, you must be able to think of the value of verisimilitude as somehow built into the value of gradational-accuracy. Can this be done? In a recent article, Oddie has argued that it cannot, at least if we want the accuracy measure (...) to be proper. I argue that it can. 1Introduction2Some Nuts and Bolts3First Attempts4Oddie’s Constraint5The Good5.1Proximity over the disagreement metric 5.2Proximity over the magnitude metric 6The Bad and the Ugly 7Some More Good: The Role of Evenness of Distribution 8Some More Bad: Which Propositions to Privilege? 9Concluding Thoughts: Accuracy and Practical Value. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to argue that, if a robust form of moral realism is true, then moral vagueness is ontic vagueness. The argument is by elimination: I show that neither semantic nor epistemic approaches to moral vagueness are satisfactory.

The aim of this paper is to describe a problem for calibrationism: a view about higher order evidence according to which one's credences should be calibrated to one's expected degree of reliability. Calibrationism is attractive, in part, because it explains our intuitive judgments, and provides a strong motivation for certain theories about higher order evidence and peer disagreement. However, I will argue that calibrationism faces a dilemma: There are two versions of the view one might adopt. The first version, I (...) argue, has the implausible consequence that, in a wide range of cases, calibrationism is the only constraint on rational belief. The second version, in addition to having some puzzling consequences, is unmotivated. At the end of the paper I sketch a possible solution. (shrink)

A defense of imprecise credences (and other imprecise doxastic attitudes).

The question of whether it is ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence has once again become a live question. Greater attention is now being paid to practical dimensions of belief, namely issues related to epistemic virtue, doxastic responsibility, and voluntarism. In this book, McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both products (...) of agency. Two important implications of this thesis, both of which deviate from the dominant view in contemporary philosophy, are 1) it can be permissible to believe for non-evidential reasons, and 2) we have a robust control over many of our beliefs, a control sufficient to ground attributions of responsibility for belief. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper defends a constraint that any satisfactory decision theory must satisfy. I show how this constraint is violated by all of the decision theories that have been endorsed in the literature that are designed to deal with cases in which opinions or values are represented by a set of functions rather than a single one. Such a decision theory is necessary to account for the existence of what Ruth Chang has called “parity” (as well as for cases in (...) which agents have incomplete preferences or imprecise credences). The problem with the all of the decision theories that have been defended to account for parity is that they are committed to a claim I call unanimity: when all of the functions in the set agree that an agent ought to do A, then an agent ought to do A. A decision theory committed to unanimity violates the constraint I defend in this paper. Thus, if parity exists, a new approach to decision theory is necessary. (shrink)

Had we grown up elsewhere or been educated differently, our view of the world would likely be radically different. What to make of this? This paper takes an accuracy-centered first-personal approach to the question of how to respond to the arbitrary nature in which many of our beliefs are formed. I show how considerations of accuracy motivate different responses to this sort of information depending on the type of attitude we take towards the belief in question upon subjecting the belief (...) to doubt. (shrink)

The article deals with larger stretches of talk-in-interaction and argues in favor of a descriptive approach, which integrates the structural requirements of global organization, the special type of sequential orderliness within larger units as well as the genre-orientation of these units. Drawing on previous work in conversation analysis, discourse analysis and the sociological genre analysis, the article introduces GLOBE as an analytical tool which functionally links discourse units to conventionalized communicative purposes. GLOBE reconstructs the interactive achievement of genre-oriented discourse units (...) in a three-branch analysis of jobs, devices and forms. The analytical potential of GLOBE is demonstrated in the exemplary genre-contrastive analysis of a narrative, an explanative and an argumentative excerpt. On the basis of the analyses of the three genres, the overarching constitution of genre-oriented global units is then explicated. (shrink)

In this paper I’ll suggest that a certain challenge facing defeatist views about higher-order evidence cannot be met, namely, motivating principles that recommend abandoning belief in cases of higher order defeat, but do not recommend global scepticism. I’ll propose that, ultimately, the question of whether to abandon belief in response to the realization that our belief can’t be recovered from what I’ll call ‘a perspective of doubt’ can’t be answered through rational deliberation aimed at truth or accuracy.

Reference to the state is ubiquitous in debates about global justice. Some authors see the state as central to the justification of principles of justice, and thereby reject their extension to the international realm. Others emphasize its role in the implementation of those principles. This chapter scrutinizes the variety of ways in which the state figures in the global-justice debate. Our discussion suggests that, although the state should have a prominent role in theorizing about global justice, contrary to what is (...) commonly thought, acknowledging this role does not lead to anti-cosmopolitan conclusions, but to the defense of an “intermediate” position about global justice. From a justificatory perspective, we argue, the state remains a key locus for the application of egalitarian principles of justice, but is not the only one. From the perspective of implementation, we suggest that state institutions are increasingly fragile in a heavily interdependent world, and need to be supplemented—though not supplanted—with supranational authorities. (shrink)

Internalists face the following challenge: what is it about an agent's internal states that explains why only these states can play whatever role the internalist thinks these states are playing? Internalists have frequently appealed to a special kind of epistemic access that we have to these states. But such claims have been challenged on both empirical and philosophical grounds. I will argue that internalists needn't appeal to any kind of privileged access claims. Rather, internalist conditions are important because of the (...) way in which we expect them to act as causal mediators between states of the world, on the one hand, and our beliefs and actions on the other. (shrink)

Los cinco estudios que componen este volumen estan dedicados a mostrar que es posible abordar el estudio de un film y por extension del cine en su conjunto a partir de fragmentos minimos extraidos de una obra concreta. Concebidos con una metodologia unitaria intentan, limitando al maximo el uso de esa jerga especializada que suele hacer de muralla entre el analista y el lector, proporcionar instrumentos operativos para todos aquellos que conciben el cine como territorio donde saber y placer no (...) solo no estan renidos sino que se refuerzan mutuamente. Los ejemplos han sido tomados, conscientemente, de obras al mismo tiempo muy conocidas y suficientemente representativas de determinadas maneras de hacer. Se ha huido de toda normatividad con la finalidad de hacer buena la frase de S.M. Eisenstein cuando recordaba a sus discipulos que el no podia ensenarles nada, pero ellos si que podian aprender mucho. Equidistante del moderno analisis formalista y de la tradicion clasica que reivindicaba la primacia del contenido, el tipo de trabajo patente en estas paginas reivindica el lugar central del texto filmico y sus texturas singulares en los nuevos estudios cinematograficos. (shrink)

How is medical knowledge made? There have been radical changes in recent decades, through new methods such as consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine. Miriam Solomon explores their origins, aims, and epistemic strengths and weaknesses; and she offers a pluralistic approach for the future.

For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science, psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the (...) traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science. After discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding, administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive influence on scientific decision making through practical social recommendations. (shrink)

REVIEW ESSAY The minimal self needs a social update Self and other: Exploring subjectivity, empathy, and shame, by Dan Zahavi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, 304 pp.

My main aim in this paper is to specify conditions that distinguish rational, or justified, hope from irrational, or unjustified hope. I begin by giving a brief characterization of hope and then turn to offering some criteria of rational hope. On my view both theoretical and practical norms are significant when assessing hope’s rationality. While others have recognized that there are theoretical and practical components to the state itself, when it comes to assessing its rationality, depending on the account, only (...) one of these dimensions matters. Either hope’s rationality is taken to be entirely derivative on the rationality of some belief that the hope entails, or the focus is entirely on the practical dimensions. If we take seriously the idea that both kinds of norms are at play, an account which treats these both as salient and as intertwining in important ways is preferable. I argue that as the practical importance of hope increases, the demand for the level of evidential support lessens and as the stakes get lower, the evidence for the likeliness of the hoped-for outcome coming to be must go up for the hope to be rational. This is so because a hope is rational insofar as it contributes to agential flourishing, but the different dimensions of hope each pick out different aspects of agency; to hope well requires agential competence in both the epistemic and practical realms. (shrink)

This paper takes a new look at an old question: what is the human self? It offers a proposal for theorizing the self from an enactive perspective as an autonomous system that is constituted through interpersonal relations. It addresses a prevalent issue in the philosophy of cognitive science: the body-social problem. Embodied and social approaches to cognitive identity are in mutual tension. On the one hand, embodied cognitive science risks a new form of methodological individualism, implying a dichotomy not between (...) the outside world of objects and the brain-bound individual but rather between body-bound individuals and the outside social world. On the other hand, approaches that emphasize the constitutive relevance of social interaction processes for cognitive identity run the risk of losing the individual in the interaction dynamics and of downplaying the role of embodiment. This paper adopts a middle way and outlines an enactive approach to individuation that is neither individualistic nor disembodied but integrates both approaches. Elaborating on Jonas’ notion of needful freedom it outlines an enactive proposal to understanding the self as co-generated in interactions and relations with others. I argue that the human self is a social existence that is organized in terms of a back and forth between social distinction and participation processes. On this view, the body, rather than being identical with the social self, becomes its mediator. (shrink)