What is attention? Attention is often seen as a subject matter for the hard sciences of cognitive and brain processes, and is understood in terms of sub-personal mechanisms and processes. Correspondingly, there still is a stark contrast between the central role attention plays for the empirical investigation of the mind in psychology and the neurosciences, and its relative neglect in philosophy. Yet, over the past years, several philosophers have challenged the standard conception. A number of interesting philosophical questions concerning the (...) nature of attention arise. This article provides an introduction to contemporary debates concerning these questions. In particular, it discusses the question of how the pre-theoretic conception of attention might be reconciled with a scientific conception, arguments that provide support for an anti-reductivist theory of attention, and sketches several recent anti-reductivist theories and their inter-relations. (shrink)

Sebastian Schmidt (Zürich) fragt in seinem Beitrag »Wie vernünftig sind Verschwörungstheoretiker?«, wie es um die Vernunft derjenigen steht, die einer Verschwörungstheorie über die Corona-Pandemie anhängen. Im Umgang mit Corona scheint sich zu bestätigen, was die Psychologie seit Jahrzehnten lehrt: Menschen unterliegen in ihrem Denken kognitiven Fehlern und Verzerrungen. Doch ist verschwörungstheoretisches Denken, das solche Fehler ebenfalls begeht, deshalb irrational? Schmidt warnt davor, einander zu leichtfertig als irrational zu betrachten, und verweist auf die wichtige Rolle, die intellektuelles Vertrauen in Wissensgemeinschaften spielt. (...) Am Beispiel des sogenannten Bestätigungsfehlers führt er aus, dass Menschen, die ihre Überzeugungen nicht fortwährend kritisch prüfen, in diesem Verhalten durchaus rational sein können. (shrink)

Belief revision theory and philosophy of science both aspire to shed light on the dynamics of knowledge – on how our view of the world changes in the light of new evidence. Yet these two areas of research have long seemed strangely detached from each other, as witnessed by the small number of cross-references and researchers working in both domains. One may speculate as to what has brought about this surprising, and perhaps unfortunate, state of affairs. One factor may be (...) that while belief revision theory has traditionally been pursued in a bottom- up manner, focusing on the endeavors of single inquirers, philosophers of science, inspired by logical empiricism, have tended to be more interested in science as a multi-agent or agent-independent phenomenon. (shrink)

Porsdam Mann and colleagues provide an overview of opportunities and risks associated with the use of personalized large language models (LLMs) for text production in bio)ethics (Porsdam Mann et al...

The Introduction to this volume identifies and briefly summarizes certain issues which have been of central concern to philosophers in the transcendental tradition, including: the question of its relation to metaphysics; the relation of transcendentalism to transcendental idealism; the Kantian concept of a condition of possibility; the concepts of transcendental logic and of transcendental proof or argumentation; the concept of the transcendental turn and the issue of its justification; and the standpoint of transcendental reflection.

We present a new notion of game equivalence that captures basic powers of interacting players. We provide a representation theorem, a complete logic, and a new game algebra for basic powers. In doing so, we establish connections with imperfect information games and epistemic logic. We also identify some new open problems concerning logic and games.

Should artificial agents (such as robots) be granted moral status? This seems like an important question to resolve, given that we will encounter a growing number of increasingly sophisticated artificial agents in the not too distant future. However, many will think that before we can even start to tackle questions about the moral status of artificial agents, we first need to solve tricky issues in the philosophy of mind. After all, most orthodox views about moral status imply that only entities (...) with a mental life are eligible for moral status. But, whether an unfamiliar entity like an artificial agent has a mental life raises controversial questions in the philosophy of mind. Given this, one might hope that we can resolve questions about the moral status of robots via “minimalist” views that give sufficient conditions for granting moral status to an entity that we can know to be satisfied without knowing whether the entity in question has a mind. This paper argues that we should be pessimistic about the prospects of minimalist views avoiding controversial questions in the philosophy of mind, by arguing that minimalist sufficient conditions are only plausible if combined with assumptions in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

I provide an explicit formulation of empirical adequacy, the central concept of constructive empiricism, and point out a number of problems. Based on one of the inspirations for empirical adequacy, I generalize the notion of a theory to avoid implausible presumptions about the relation of theoretical concepts and observations, and generalize empirical adequacy with the help of approximation sets to allow for lack of knowledge, approximations, and successive gain of knowledge and precision. As a test case, I provide an application (...) of these generalizations to a simple interference phenomenon. (shrink)

Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theories of consciousness maintain that the kind of awareness necessary for phenomenal consciousness depends on the cognitive accessibility that underlies reporting. -/- There is empirical evidence strongly suggesting that the cognitive accessibility that underlies the ability to report visual experiences depends on the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). This area, however, is highly deactivated during the conscious experiences we have during sleep: dreams. HOT theories are jeopardized, as I will argue. I will briefly present HOT (...) theories in the first section. Section 2 offers empirical evidence to the effect that the cognitive accessibility that underlies the ability to report depends on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: dlPFC is the neural correlate of HOTs. Section 3 shows the evidence we have of the deactivation of this brain area during dreams and, in section 4, I present my argument. Finally, I consider and rejoin two possible replies that my opponent can offer: the possibility of an alternative neural correlate of HOTs during dreams and the denial that we have phenomenally conscious experiences during sleep. (shrink)

Schools in Germany are frequently named after people. Thus, these persons are remembered in the public sphere. This article answers the question to what extent the school names in the federal state of Thuringia correspond with the history of scientific pedagogy. For this purpose, in a first step, the controversial discussion about key figures in pedagogy and history of education is presented. In a second step the entirety of all school names in Thuringia is considered and individual results are discussed. (...) As a rule, it is not pedagogues who lend their names to schools but writers, artists and political figures. Only one fifth of all schools named after a person are named after educators. It is found that the key figures in pedagogy are rarely available as namesakes, whereas in practice successful school founders are preferred as name-givers. Accordingly, the history of pedagogy is represented in a filtered way in school names. Based on these results, further research perspectives for research on school names are formulated. (shrink)

We are all familiar with judgements about the persistence of people. Furthermore, we tend to structure certain attitudes and practices around such judgements because we think that personal identity matters for the relevant practical concerns. Response‐dependence views try to accommodate that personal identity matters by letting relevant attitudes and practices determine the personal identity relation for a particular person. This paper argues that genuine response‐dependence views are not well positioned to accommodate the connection between personal identity and what matters. Rather, (...) if we accept such a connection, this supports normative‐facts‐first views, according to which relevant normative facts determine personal identity. (shrink)

I argue first that attention is a (maybe the) paradigmatic case of an object-directed, non-propositional intentional mental episode. In addition attention cannot be reduced to any other (propositional or non-propositional) mental episodes. Yet, second, attention is not a non-propositional mental attitude. It might appear puzzling how one could hold both of these claims. I show how to combine them, and how that combination shows how propositionality and non-propositionality can co-exist in a mental life. The crucial move is one away from (...) an atomistic, building block picture to a more holistic, structural picture. (shrink)

We characterize the expressive power of the modal mu-calculus on monotone neighborhood structures, in the style of the Janin-Walukiewicz theorem for the standard modal mu-calculus. For this purpose we consider a monadic second-order logic for monotone neighborhood structures. Our main result shows that the monotone modal mu-calculus corresponds exactly to the fragment of this second-order language that is invariant for neighborhood bisimulations.

Adrian Moore argues that Kant’s transcendental idealism is incoherent, and that its incoherence gives us an invaluable insight into the fundamental nature of metaphysics, motivating the reconception of metaphysical inquiry with which Moore concludes his story of the development of modern philosophy. My discussion has three parts. First, I focus on the treatment of Kant’s transcendental idealism in Moore’s earlier book, Points of View, and highlight ways in which Moore is, I argue, open to challenge. Second, I suggest that the (...) historical record does not bear out Moore’s criticism of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Third, I compare Moore’s response to the alleged incoherence of transcendental idealism with that of the German Romantics. (shrink)

One argument that has been suggested for conventionalism about personal identity is that it captures that certain disagreements about personal identity seem irresolvable, without being committed to the view that these disagreements are merely verbal. In this paper, I will take the considerations about disagreement used to motivate conventionalism seriously. However, I will use them to motivate a very different, novel, and as yet unexplored view about personal identity. This is the view that personal identity is a non-representational concept, the (...) nature of which isn’t to be accounted for in terms of what entity it represents, but its non-representational role. I highlight that we find structurally very similar concerns about disagreement in another philosophical debate, namely in meta-ethics. But, in meta-ethics, such sorts of considerations are, traditionally, thought to support one distinctive view: meta-ethical expressivism, a non-representational view about normative thought and discourse. This suggests that we should take a similar view seriously for personal identity. I also develop what such an unfamiliar view might look like, using expressivism as a template. On this view, judgements about personal identity are plans that regulate who to hold accountable. (shrink)

Recent psychological research shows that attention affects appearances. An “attended item looks bigger, faster, earlier, more saturated, stripier.” (Block 2010, p. 41). What is the significance of these findings? Ned Block has argued that they undermine representationism, roughly the view that the phenomenal character of perception is determined by its representational content. My first goal in this paper is to show that Block’s argument has the structure of a Problem of Arbitrary Phenomenal Variation and that it improves on other instances (...) of arguments of the same form along several dimensions (most prominently, these are arguments based on the possibility of spectral inversion). My second goal is to consider responses to Block’s version of the arbitrariness problem. I will show that most of them have serious drawbacks. Overall, the best view is to accept that attention may distort perception, sacrificing veridicality for usability. I end my discussion by showing how to develop that view. (shrink)

En este trabajo nos proponemos, en primer lugar, reconstruir brevemente el análisis de Michel Foucault acerca de la episteme moderna, para luego analizar algunos rastros que identificamos en ciertos textos del pensador francés sobre la episteme contemporánea. A los fines de lograr este cometido, en tercer lugar, analizamos algunos textos de algunos pensadores del posestructuralismo francés y de la Mass Communication Research. Finalmente, concluimos que el acontecimiento que da lugar a la reconfiguración del saber occidental y a la conformación de (...) la episteme contemporánea está relacionado con las cuestiones del sentido y de la información, que contribuyen a delinear los contornos de las características del hombre y el lenguaje en la nueva episteme. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 50 Heft: 1 Seiten: 45-98.

Two recent papers appeared in FOOP disagree regarding the role played by decoherence in quantum physics. On the one hand, Elise Crull considers that decoherence, by itself, solves many conceptual problems in quantum physics, with no need of interpretative considerations. On the other hand, Antonio Vassallo and Michael Esfeld reply by correctly claiming that, although decoherence is a powerful tool to deal with conceptual problems, it does not dispense us from interpreting the formalism. In this brief note we want to (...) contribute to the debate with further considerations from another viewpoint. In this work we show that the discussions "decoherence versus interpretation" revolve around whether the theory of decoherence requires interpretive considerations to solve the measurement problem. In general, those discussions take the theory of decoherence for granted, as if it would not involve any difficulty. Therefore, they commonly focus on the "interpretation" wing: even in the case that the open system decoheres in a given basis, the whole closed system is still in a superposition and, thus, without an adequate interpretation, it cannot be said that the observables defined by that basis behave classically. Here we have focused on the "decoherence" wing: given the conceptual challenges that the theory must face and the alternative approaches to the orthodox view, the understanding of the very phenomenon of decoherence still requires a great deal of interpretive work. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a community and to be in a community? Can this social phenomenon be analogized to an individual person with her interwoven opinions, wants, and desires? Or is a community a phenomenon sui generis that requires its own methods and tools for research? Concretely: What does it mean that a community may achieve certain acts? And what about the intentional object of such an act, which has also been referred to as “social act”? These questions (...) raise the methodological ones: how is it even possible to characterize a community, such that it can be said to issue social acts? And how can such an inquiry be carried out, does it require an outside perspective or one from within a community, or can it be done by both? (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 65 Heft: 2 Seiten: 211-238.

El presente artículo discute algunas de las condiciones problemáticas previas a la postulación de una estética ambiental crítica que pudiese estar orientada a la comprensión de la devastación ecológica. En un primer momento se mostrarán los límites de la estética hermenéutica para analizar la precomprensión de la naturaleza en el arte, así como la necesidad de desarrollar una teoría sobre la movilización del espectador desde el arte. En un segundo momento se cuestionan las estéticas ambientales tradicionales que fundamentan la responsabilidad (...) ética en los valores estéticos. Finalmente, se exponen algunas de las implicaciones políticas del uso de la categoría de lo sublime en los proyectos artísticos sobre el cambio climático y el Antropoceno. (shrink)