This book, published in 2000, is a clear account of causation based firmly in contemporary science. Dowe discusses in a systematic way, a positive account of causation: the conserved quantities account of causal processes which he has been developing over the last ten years. The book describes causal processes and interactions in terms of conserved quantities: a causal process is the worldline of an object which possesses a conserved quantity, and a causal interaction involves the exchange of conserved quantities. Further, (...) things that are properly called cause and effect are appropriately connected by a set of causal processes and interactions. The distinction between cause and effect is explained in terms of a version of the fork theory: the direction of a certain kind of ordered pattern of events in the world. This particular version has the virtue that it allows for the possibility of backwards causation, and therefore time travel. (shrink)

Vision, more than any other sense, dominates our mental life. Our visual experience is just so rich, so detailed, that we can hardly distinguish that experience from the world itself. Even when we just think about the world and don't look at it directly, we can't help but 'imagine' what it looks like. We think of 'seeing' as being a conscious activity--we direct our eyes, we choose what we look at, we register what we are seeing. The series of events (...) described in this book radically altered this attitude towards vision. This book describes one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on consciousness. It is the story of Dee Fletcher--a woman recently blinded--who became the subject of a series of scientific studies. As events unfolded, Milner and Goodale found that Dee wasn't in fact blind--she just didn't know that she could see. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, the two scientists who made this incredible discovery tell the amazing story of their work, and the surprising conclusion they were forced to reach. Written to be accessible to students and popular science readers, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind. (shrink)

First published in 1995, The Visual Brain in Action remains a seminal publication in the cognitive sciences. For this new edition, a very substantial and illustrated epilogue has been added to the book in which Milner and Goodale review the key developments that support or challenge the views that were put forward in the first edition.

In this updated and extended edition of their book, Goodale and Milner explore one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on the visual brain. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind.

Philosophers have long been fascinated by the connection between cause and effect: are 'causes' things we can experience, or are they concepts provided by our minds? The study of causation goes back to Aristotle, but resurged with David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and is now one of the most important topics in metaphysics. Most of the recent work done in this area has attempted to place causation in a deterministic, scientific, worldview. But what about the unpredictable and chancey world we (...) actually live in: can one theory of causation cover all instances of cause and effect? _Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World _is a collection of specially written papers by world-class metaphysicians. Its focus is the problem facing the 'reductionist' approach to causation: the attempt to cover all types of causation, deterministic and indeterministic, with one basic theory. Contributors: Stephen Barker, Helen Beebee, Phil Dowe, Dorothy Edgington, Doug Ehring, Chris Hitchcock, Igal Kwart, Paul Noordhof, Murali Ramachandran and Michael Tooley. (shrink)

This paper examines Wesley Salmon's "process" theory of causality, arguing in particular that there are four areas of inadequacy. These are that the theory is circular, that it is too vague at a crucial point, that statistical forks do not serve their intended purpose, and that Salmon has not adequately demonstrated that the theory avoids Hume's strictures about "hidden powers". A new theory is suggested, based on "conserved quantities", which fulfills Salmon's broad objectives, and which avoids the problems discussed.

Aristotle holds that individual substances are ontologically independent from nonsubstances and universal substances but that non-substances and universal substances are ontologically dependent on substances. There is then an asymmetry between individual substances and other kinds of beings with respect to ontological dependence. Under what could plausibly be called the standard interpretation, the ontological independence ascribed to individual substances and denied of non-substances and universal substances is a capacity for independent existence. There is, however, a tension between this interpretation and the (...) asymmetry between individual substances and the other kinds of entities with respect to ontological independence. I will propose an alternative interpretation: to weaken the relevant notion of ontological independence from a capacity for independent existence to the independent possession of a certain ontological status. (shrink)

Bringing together the expertise of rhetoricians in English and communication as well as media studies scholars, Arguments about Animal Ethics delves into the rhetorical and discursive practices of participants in controversies over the use of nonhuman animals for meat, entertainment, fur, and vivisection. Both sides of the debate are carefully analyzed, as the contributors examine how stakeholders persuade or fail to persuade audiences about the ethics of animal rights or the value of using animals.

This volume synthesizes these different approaches and demonstrates how anthropologists have engaged with human rights as committed activists, empirical ...

Although the mechanics of how the eye works are well understood, debate still exists as to how the complex machinery of the brain interprets neural impulses...

The greatest existential threats to humanity stem from increasingly powerful advanced technologies. Yet the “risk potential” of such tools can only be realized when coupled with a suitable agent who; through error or terror; could use the tool to bring about an existential catastrophe. While the existential risk literature has provided many accounts of how advanced technologies might be misused and abused to cause unprecedented harm; no scholar has yet explored the other half of the agent-tool coupling; namely the agent. (...) This paper aims to correct this failure by offering a comprehensive overview of what we could call “agential riskology.” Only by studying the unique properties of different agential risk types can one acquire an accurate picture of the existential danger before us. (shrink)

Discussion of the Aristotelian syllogistic over the last sixty years has arguably centered on the question whether syllogisms are inferences or implications. But the significance of this debate at times has been taken to concern whether the syllogistic is a logic or a theory, and how it ought to be represented by modern systems. Largely missing from this discussion has been a study of the few passages in the Prior Analytics where Aristotle provides explicit guidance on how to individuate syllogisms. (...) I argue that syllogisms are individuated by unordered premise pairs and so may be fruitfully thought of as multi-succedent sequents. I conclude by drawing a few consequences for the representation of the syllogistic. (shrink)

In a recent paper Wesley Salmon has replied to criticisms of his theory of causality, and has offered a revised theory which, he argues, is not open to those criticisms. The key change concerns the characterization of causal processes, where Salmon has traded “the capacity for mark transmission” for “the transmission of an invariant quantity.” Salmon argues against the view presented in Dowe, namely that the concept of “possession of a conserved quantity” is sufficient to account for the difference between (...) causal and pseudo processes. Here that view is defended, and important questions are raised about the notion of transmission and about gerrymandered aggregates. (shrink)

There is, no doubt, a temptation to treat preventions, such as ‘the father’s grabbing the child prevented the accident’, and cases of ‘causation’ by omission, such as ‘the father’s inattention was the cause of the child’s accident’, as cases of genuine causation. I think they are not, and in this paper I defend a theory of what they are. More specifically, the counterfactual theory defended here is that a claim about prevention or ‘causation’ by omission should be understood not as (...) being directly about actual genuine causation but primarily as a counterfactual claim about genuine causation.1 The relation between actual causation and the mere possibility of causation allows my theory to explain both the difference and the similarity between the two notions (causation and prevention/omission). Further, the difference explains certain intuitions we have and the similarity justifies and explains the fact that for practical purposes we usually treat preventions and omissions as if they were genuine causation. Finally, the fact that this counterfactual theory of prevention and omission takes causation as primitive suggests that it is consistent with any theory of causation. This allows us to construct two arguments against what I will call genuinism, the view that cases of prevention and ‘causation’ by omission really are cases of genuine causation. In section II I show that genuinism does not account for the so-called intuition of difference. In section III I outline a number of problems that various theories of causation have with preventions and ‘causation’ by omission. These problems are ipso facto problems for genuinism, whereas I show in section V how the counterfactual theory solves those problems. Further, I answer a genuinist argument based on another type of intuition—the genuinist intuition—by showing why we have that intuition and how it should be handled (section VI). (shrink)

When Aristotle introduces the perfect moods, he refers back to the dictum de omni et nullo, a semantic condition for universal affirmations and negations. There recently has been renewed interest in the question whether the dictum validates the assertoric syllogistic. I rehearse evidence that Aristotle provides a mereological semantics for universal affirmations and negations, and note that this semantics entails a nonstandard reading of the dictum, under which the dictum, in the presence of a minimal logical apparatus, indeed validates the (...) assertoric syllogistic. I argue that this mereological validation offers advantages over recent discussions in Morison, Malink, Ebert and Vlasits. (shrink)

Two major functions of the visual system are discussed and contrasted. One function of vision is the creation of an internal model or percept of the external world. Most research in object perception has concentrated on this aspect of vision. Vision also guides the control of object-directed action. In the latter case, vision directs our actions with respect to the world by transforming visual inputs into appropriate motor outputs. We argue that separate, but interactive, visual systems have evolved for the (...) perception of objects on the one hand and the control of actions directed at those objects on the other. This 'duplex' approach to high-level vision suggests that Marrian or 'reconstructive' approaches and Gibsonian or 'purposive-animate-behaviorist' approaches need not be seen as mutually exclusive, but rather as complementary in their emphases on different aspects of visual function. (shrink)

Much research has linked surprise to violation of expectations, but it has been less clear how one can be surprised when one has no particular expectation. This paper discusses a computational theory based on Algorithmic Information Theory, which can account for surprises in which one initially expects randomness but then notices a pattern in stimuli. The authors present evidence that a “randomness deficiency” heuristic leads to surprise in such cases.

Is there a response, which is not accounted for by regression to the mean, natural history, the Hawthorne effect?The term placebo comes to us from the Latin for "I shall please," indicating that the phenomenon known as the "placebo effect" or "placebo response" has been familiar to medical practitioners for a number of centuries, at least. As we reached the mid-20th century and randomized controlled trials became a central feature of medical research, the use of controls and blinding in those (...) trials allowed for the isolation of the placebo effect in ways that made it much clearer that there... (shrink)

In a recent paper (1994) Wesley Salmon has replied to criticisms (e.g., Dowe 1992c, Kitcher 1989) of his (1984) theory of causality, and has offered a revised theory which, he argues, is not open to those criticisms. The key change concerns the characterization of causal processes, where Salmon has traded "the capacity for mark transmission" for "the transmission of an invariant quantity." Salmon argues against the view presented in Dowe (1992c), namely that the concept of "possession of a conserved quantity" (...) is sufficient to account for the difference between causal and pseudo processes. Here that view is defended, and important questions are raised about the notion of transmission and about gerrymandered aggregates. (shrink)

This paper examines and analyzes five definitions of ‘existential risk.’ It tentatively adopts a pluralistic approach according to which the definition that scholars employ should depend upon the particular context of use. More specifically, the notion that existential risks are ‘risks of human extinction or civilizational collapse’ is best when communicating with the public, whereas equating existential risks with a ‘significant loss of expected value’ may be the most effective definition for establishing existential risk studies as a legitimate field of (...) scientific and philosophical inquiry. In making these arguments, the present paper hopes to provide a modicum of clarity to foundational issues relating to the central concept of arguably the most important discussion of our times. (shrink)

The essays in this volume cover a wide range of topics, such as the campaigns waged by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (including the sexy ...

There are five ways in which shame might negatively impact upon our attempts to combat and treat HIV. Shame can prevent an individual from disclosing all the relevant facts about their sexual history to the clinician. Shame can be a motivational factor in people living with HIV not engaging with or being retained in care. Shame can prevent individuals from presenting at clinics for STI and HIV testing. Shame can prevent an individual from disclosing their HIV status to new sexual (...) partners. Shame can serve to psychologically imprison people, it makes the task of living with HIV a far more negative experience than it should, or needs to, be. Drawing on recent philosophical work on shame, and more broadly on work in the philosophy and psychology of emotion, we propose a framework for understanding how shame operates upon those who experience the emotion, propose a strategy for combatting the negative role shame plays in the fight against HIV, and suggest further study so as to identify the tactics that might be employed in pursuing the strategy here proposed. (shrink)

1 Context The idea for the current issue of _Philosophia Scientiæ_ emerged from discussions which took place in the Manchester Ethnomethodology Reading Group. This reading group has its origins in Wes Sharrock’s weekly discussion groups, which have taken place in Manchester (UK) since the early 1970s. As the global Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, the reading group moved online, facilitated by Phil Hutchinson and Alex Holder. Being an online reading group opened up participation to people beyond Northwest UK (...) and within weeks the group became global, with the membership including participants logging on from Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. While the name of the group might indicate an exclusive focus on ethnomethodology, following the naming conventions for academic discussion groups, the name really fails to indicate both the heterogeneity of the group’s reading materials, the interests of t... (shrink)

Since its origins in the mid-Twentieth Century, Cognitive Science has almost exclusively operated within the philosophical frames provided by Cartesian Representationalism. In recent years, alternative, phenomenological and pragmatist, frames have served as a resource for the emergence of non-representational approaches to mind and cognition. These have been gathered under the label ‘4E cognition’, indicating their Embodied, Extended, Enacted and Embedded nature. This chapter examines one version of 4E cognition, which builds upon Ecological Psychology, and argues that it fails to pass (...) the Evaluation Test: it cannot account for the central role of normativity and evaluation in our responsiveness to loci of significance in the lifeworld, while failing to provide an argument for the exclusion of evaluative and normative aspects. (shrink)

Causal pluralists hold that that there is not just one determinate kind of causation. Some causal pluralists hold that ‘cause’ is ambiguous among these different kinds. For example, Hall (2004) argues that ‘cause’ is ambiguous between two causal relations, which he labels dependence and production. The view that ‘cause’ is ambiguous, however, wrongly predicts zeugmatic conjunction reduction, and wrongly predicts the behaviour of ellipsis in causal discourse. So ‘cause’ is not ambiguous. If we are to disentangle causal pluralism from the (...) ambiguity claim, we need to consider what other linguistic approaches are available to the causal pluralist. I consider and reject proposals that ‘cause’ is a general term, that the term is an indexical, and that the term conveys different kinds of causation through implicature or presupposition. Finally, I argue that causal pluralism is better handled by treating ‘cause’ as a univocal term within a dynamic interpretation framework. (shrink)

Experimental methods and conceptual confusion : philosophy, science, and what emotions really are -- To 'make our voices resonate' or 'to be silent'? : shame as fundamental ontology -- Emotion, cognition, and world -- Shame and world.

In this paper I show how the conserved quantity theory, or more generally the process theory of Wesley Salmon and myself, provides a sufficient condition in an analysis of causation. To do so I will show how it handles the problem of alleged 'misconnections'. I show what the conserved quantity theory says about such cases, and why intuitions are not to be taken as sacrosanct.