In this paper I present some difficulties for Lewis’s and similar theories of counterfactuals, and suggest that the problem lies in the notion of absolute similarity. In order to explain the problem, I discuss the relation between Lewis’s and Goodman’s theory, and show that the two theories are not related in the way Lewis thought they were.

This article connects value-sensitive design to Gibson’s affordance theory: the view that we perceive in terms of the ease or difficulty with which we can negotiate space. Gibson’s ideas offer a nonsubjectivist way of grasping culturally relative values, out of which we develop a concept of political affordances, here understood as openings or closures for social action, often implicit. Political affordances are equally about environments and capacities to act in them. Capacities and hence the severity of affordances vary with age, (...) health, social status and more. This suggests settings are selectively permeable, or what postphenomenologists call multistable. Multistable settings are such that a single physical location shows up differently – as welcoming or hostile – depending on how individuals can act on it. In egregious cases, authoritarian governments redesign politically imbued spaces to psychologically cordon both them and the ideologies they represent. Selective permeability is also orchestrated according to business interests, which is symptomatic of commercial imperatives increasingly dictating what counts as moral and political goods. (shrink)

This paper is about Ramsey's Principle, according to which a belief's truth-conditions are those that guarantee the success of an action based on that belief whatever the underlying motivating desires. Some philosophers have argued that the Principle should be rejected because it leads to the apparently implausible consequence that any failure of action is the result of some false belief on the agent's part. There is a gap between action and success that cannot be bridged by the agent's cognitive state. (...) At best, the Principle should be relativized to circumstances. We show on the contrary that when the Principle is properly understood, it does not amount to “overburdening” belief. We exploit an analogy between knowledge and action in order to show that intentional action is a source of knowledge relative to a set of beliefs whose collective truth guarantees the success of the action. It does not follow that the agent is explicitly representing all possible obstacles to her action. Most of the relevant beliefs are implicit, in the sense that if they were to be formed, they would be directly or indirectly justified by the agent's experience of acting. (shrink)

The discovery of mirror neurons has given rise to a number of interpretations of their functions together with speculations on their potential role in the evolution of specifically human capacities. Thus, mirror neurons have been thought to ground many aspects of human social cognition, including the capacity to engage in cooperative collective actions and to understand them. We propose an evaluation of this latter claim. On the one hand, we will argue that mirror neurons do not by themselves provide a (...) sufficient basis for the forms of agentive understanding and shared intentionality involved in cooperative collective actions. On the other hand, we will also argue that mirror neurons can nevertheless play an important role in an account of the production and understanding of joint action, insofar as they provide the basic constituents of implicit agent-neutral representations and are useful elements in a process of online mutual adjustment of participants' actions. (shrink)

This paper is about the distinction between arguments and conditionals, and the corresponding distinction between premises and antecedents. I will also propose a further distinction between two different kinds of argument, and, correspondingly, two kinds of premise that I will call "assumption" and "hypothesis." The distinction between assumptions, hypotheses, and antecedents is easily made in artificial languages, and we are already familiar with it from our first logic courses (although not necessarily under those names, since there is no standard terminology (...) for the distinction). After explaining their differences in artificial languages, I will argue that there are ordinary-language counterparts of these three notions, meaning that some formal properties of the artificial notions nicely capture some features of the ordinary-language counterparts and their behavior in contexts of reasoning. My next crucial claim is that these three notions often get confused in ordinary language, which leads to problems for translation into symbols. I will suggest a solution to the translation problem by pointing to some distinctive characteristics of the three notions that link them to their artificial-language counterparts. Next, I will argue that this confusion is behind some well-known philosophical problems and puzzles. I will apply the distinctions in order to explain away some famous paradoxes: the direct argument (also known as or-to-if inference), a standard argument for fatalism, and McGee's counterexample to modus ponens. As Stalnaker also solved the first two of these paradoxes by using his theory of reasonable inference, I will elucidate the similarities between our solutions, and also explain why my distinctions apply more broadly, to some cases involving indicative and counterfactuals conditionals, where reasonable inference does not apply. (shrink)

An incorrect interpretation of Goodman’s theory of counterfactuals is persistently being offered in the literature. I find that strange. Even more so since the incorrectness is rather obvious. In this paper I try to figure out why is that happening. First I try to explain what Goodman did say, which of his claims are ignored, and what he did not say but is sometimes ascribed to him. I emphasize one of the bad features of the interpretation: it gives counterfactuals some (...) formal properties that neither Goodman nor (usually) the interpreter would accept. The usual interpretation (UI), which I claim should not be ascribed to Goodman, considers a counterfactual A>C true iff A, together with natural laws and all contingent truths cotenable with it, entails C. (UI) makes valid the law of conditional excluded middle, which Goodman clearly rejected. Among possible reasons for which the interpreters might find (UI) adequate is that (UI), as I argue, smuggles in the idea of minimal change, which is otherwise attractive, natural to many, but not to be found anywhere in Goodman’s paper. At the end I stress the significance of Goodman’s theory by arguing that we still need some of his notions to test the adequacy of our modern theories. (shrink)

U ovom tekstu se obavlja jedno?naknadno citanje? onih opstih mesta koja ukazuju na partikularni, licni interes koji se krije iza maske objektivnosti, nuzde i istine. Kao primeri za takvu strukturu ovde se uzimaju drustveni prevrati, koji su svi redom stupali na snagu uz obavezno pozivanje na istinu, a koji su, po svom politickom karakteru, bili fasisticki, liberalno-demokratski ili komunisticki. Preispitivanjem njihovog odnosa prema istini i prema?velu iza kog se istina krije?, dalje se pokusava nesto reci o njima samima. Uporedo sa (...) razmatranjem fasistickih, liberalno-demokratskih i komunistickih rezima, ovde se razmatra i specificnost subjekta kakav se u svakom od ovih rezima konstituise. (shrink)

Interesuje nas, prednost koju Delez daje sintagmi?revolucionarna institucija? u odnosu na manje originalnu sintagmu?institucionalna revolucija?. Delez nekoliko puta upotrebljava u svojim tekstovima?revolucionarna institucija?, sigurno sasvim svestan da ova sintagma ima jednu prilicno haoticnu i nejasnu istoriju tokom post-revolucionarnog perioda, ali i da je ona savrseno u duhu Sanzistovih namera. Treba da proverimo da li ova sintagma najbolje opisuje jednu Delezovu imaginarnu teoriju institucije, ali i njegov angazman u teoriji uopste. Preeliminarna teskoca, koja automatski dovodi u pitanje i devalvira nasu intervenciju, (...) jeste Delezovo odbijanje da on s?m zaista tematizuje instituciju i svoj napor, te da zaista odgovori na pitanja koja s?m postavlja pedesetih godina proslog veka:?sta je to sto objasnjava instituciju?? i?koje bi to trebalo da budu savrsene institucije, to jest one koje se suprotstavljaju svakom ugovoru i pretpostavljaju tek najmanji broj zakona??. (shrink)

In this paper we present some benefits of semantic minimalism. In particular, we stress how minimalism allows us to avoid cognitive overloading, in that it does not posit hidden indexicals or variables at the LF or representational level and it does not posit the operation of free enrichment processes when we produce or hear a sentence. We nonetheless argue that a fully adequate semantic minimalism should embrace a form of relativism—that is, the view that semantic content must be evaluated, pace (...) Cappelen and Lepore, vis-à-vis a given situation, the latter being a fragment of a possible world or a partial world. In so doing we shall show how Cappelen and Lepore damage the insight of semantic minimalism insofar as they insist that the semantic content should be evaluated with respect to a whole possible world. This move fails to capture the powerful contextualist intuition that it does not make much sense to evaluate the content of, say, Naomi is rich, or Jon is tall, with respect to, for instance, the actual world. (shrink)

The presented study uses the Lukan parable of the Good Samaritan (10, 27-35) in order to present the shifts in the meaning depending on the reading contexts. After the basic structure of the original meaning is established, the pragmatic nuances of the parable are illustrated. The research subsequently throws light on the paradigmatic interpretations in both the medieval and the contemporary contexts. It concludes by exemplifying that the polyvalence of meaning is not only dependent upon the genuine literary structure of (...) the parable, but also on the innate ability of the Christian organism (Church) to actualize certain features of the sacred text in the concrete life-settings. (shrink)

Imagine that in entering a café, you are struck by the absence of Pierre, with whom you have an appointment. Or imagine that you realize that your keys are missing because they are not hanging from the usual ring-holder. What is the nature of these absence experiences? In this article, we discuss a recent view defended by Farennikova (2012) according to which we literally perceive absences of things in much the same way as we perceive present things. We criticize and (...) reject the perceptual interpretation of absence experiences but we also reject the cognitive view which reduces them to beliefs. We propose an intermediary, metacognitive account according to which absence experiences belong to a specific kind of affective experience, involving the feeling of surprise. (shrink)

Episodic memory involves the sense that it is “first-hand”, i.e., originates directly from one’s own past experience. An account of this phenomenological dimension is offered in terms of an affective experience or feeling specific to episodic memory. On the basis of recent empirical research in the domain of metamemory, it is claimed that a recollective experience involves two separate mental components: a first-order memory about the past along with a metacognitive, episodic feeling of knowing. The proposed two-tiered account is contrasted (...) with other, reductionist two-tiered accounts as well as with reflexive accounts of episodic memory to be found in the literature. (shrink)

A popular idea at present is that emotions are perceptions of values. Most defenders of this idea have interpreted it as the perceptual thesis that emotions present (rather than merely represent) evaluative states of affairs in the way sensory experiences present us with sensible aspects of the world. We argue against the perceptual thesis. We show that the phenomenology of emotions is compatible with the fact that the evaluative aspect of apparent emotional contents has been incorporated from outside. We then (...) deal with the only two views that can make sense of the perceptual thesis. On the response–dependence view, emotional experiences present evaluative responsedependent properties (being fearsome, being disgusting, etc.) in the way visual experiences present response-dependent properties such as colors. On the response–independence view, emotional experiences present evaluative response-independent properties (being dangerous, being indigestible, etc.), conceived as ‘Gestalten’ independent of emotional feelings themselves. We show that neither view can make plausible the idea that emotions present values as such, i.e., in an open and transparent way. If emotions have apparent evaluative contents, this is in fact due to evaluative enrichments of the non-evaluative presentational contents of emotions. (shrink)

Some enlightenment regarding the project to mechanise reason. The assembly line of machine learning: data, algorithm, model. The training dataset: the social origins of machine intelligence. The history of AI as the automation of perception. The learning algorithm: compressing the world into a statistical model. All models are wrong, but some are useful. World to vector: the society of classification and prediction bots. Faults of a statistical instrument: the undetection of the new. Adversarial intelligence vs. statistical intelligence: labour in the (...) age of AI. (shrink)

We investigate the nature of the sense of presence that usually accompanies perceptual experience. We show that the notion of a sense of presence can be interpreted in two ways, corresponding to the sense that we are acquainted with an object, and the sense that the object is real. In this essay, we focus on the sense of reality. Drawing on several case studies such as derealization disorder, Parkinson’s disease and virtual reality, we argue that the sense of reality is (...) two-way independent from the spatial and sensory contents of experience. We suggest that the sense of reality is an affective experience akin to a metacognitive feeling. Finally, we present a potentially important implication of our account for the current debate between Intentionalism and Naïve Realism. Since perception is “opaque” with respect to the reality of what is perceived, Intentionalism cannot refer to the sense of reality as what differentiates perception from sensory-like experiences such as imaginings. In contrast, Naïve Realism has an independent explanation of the specificity of perception. (shrink)

Following Meinong, many philosophers have been attracted by the view that emotions have intrinsically evaluative correctness conditions. On one version of this view, emotions have evaluative contents. On another version, emotions are evaluative attitudes; they are evaluative at the level of intentional mode rather than content. We raise objections against the latter version, showing that the only two ways of implementing it are hopeless. Either emotions are manifestly evaluative or they are not. In the former case, the Attitudinal View threatens (...) to collapse into the Perception View or any other view according to which emotions are evaluative at the level of content. In the latter case, the Attitudinal View does not stand up to an obvious alternative, namely that emotions can only be assessed with respect to extrinsic norms or conditions of correctness. (shrink)

In chapter 5 of Knowledge and its Limits, T. Williamson formulates an argument against the principle (KK) of epistemic transparency, or luminosity of knowledge, namely “that if one knows something, then one knows that one knows it”. Williamson’s argument proceeds by reductio: from the description of a situation of approximate knowledge, he shows that a contradiction can be derived on the basis of principle (KK) and additional epistemic principles that he claims are better grounded. One of them is a reflective (...) form of the margin for error principle defended by Williamson in his account of knowledge. We argue that Williamson’s reductio rests on the inappropriate identification of distinct forms of knowledge. More specifically, an important distinction between perceptual knowledge and non-perceptual knowledge is wanting in his statement and analysis of the puzzle. We present an alternative account of this puzzle, based on a modular conception of knowledge: the (KK) principle and the margin for error principle can coexist, provided their domain of application is referred to the right sort of knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, we criticise the claim, made by J. McDowell and B. Brewer, that the contents of perceptual experience are purely conceptual.

CHAPTER Simulation theory and mental concepts Alvin I. Goldman Rutgers University. Folk psychology and the TT-ST debate The study of folk psychology, ...

Aesthetics, both in its theoretical and empirical forms, has seen a renewed interest in the sublime, an aesthetic category dear to traditional philosophers, but quite neglected by contemporary philosophy. Our aim is to offer a novel perspective on the experience of the sublime. More precisely, our hypothesis is that the latter arises from ‘a radical limit-experience’, which is a metacognitve awareness of the limits of our cognitive capacities as we are confronted with something indefinitely greater or more powerful than us. (...) This hypothesis better explains the negative feelings involved in the experience of the sublime and accounts for its demarcation from other experiences (for example, terrible beauty). Experiences of the sublime have an overall positive valence, though. We will explore different ways in which a subject can try to overcome the negative evaluation involved in radical limit-experiences, and suggest that only one of them is appropriate to experiences of the sublime. (shrink)

We discuss the distinction between the sensory modalities; the metaphysics of sounds; and the structure of sound space. We defend a physicalist conception of sounds, without accepting the identification of sounds with sound-waves in the medium. Sounds, we hold, are events in resonating objects. We evaluate the two main accounts of orientation in perceptual space: relationism and absolutism. We then address Strawson's problem of whether the logical space of sounds could be spatial in the full sense of the term. In (...) the Appendix, we discuss the logic of perceptual auditory reports, and show their compatibility with our theory of sounds. (shrink)

When we remember a past situation, the emotional import of the latter often transpires in a modified form at the phenomenological level of our present memory. When it does, we experience what is sometimes called an “affective memory.” Theorists of memories have disagreed about the status of affective memories. Sceptics claim that the relationship between memory and emotion can only be of two types: either the memory is about a past emotion (the emotion is part of what is remembered), or (...) it causes a present emotion (the emotion is a separable effect of the memory). We argue that there is a third option, which points to an emotional way of representing the past situation. Drawing from Peter Goldie’s account of mental narratives, we show that three levels of mental perspective are involved in memories: the perspective of the represented subject (the character, if there is one), the perspective of the representing subject (the author), and the intermediary perspective of the narrator (who may remain virtual). Affective memories are cases in which the narrator’s emotional perspective has direct implications for the author’s emotional perspective, even if the former typically differs from the latter. (shrink)

The book introduces Ramsey's main doctrines and assesses their contemporary significance. In particular, Jérôme Dokic and Pascal Engel are interested in Ramsey's thoughts on truth and belief, and his pragmatic thesis that the truth of one's beliefs guarantees the success of one's actions. From this, it is a short step to what may be called "Ramsey's principle": the content of a belief is constituted by the success of one's actions. This principle finds its current expression in the work of (...) philosophers who offer evolutionary conceptions of mental states, according to which the success conditions of a belief are constituted by its biological functions. (publisher, edited). (shrink)

This book provides a much-needed critical introduction to the main doctrines of Frank Ramsey's work and assesses their contemporary significance.

This essay explores the prospects of grounding an account of pictorial experience or ‘seeing-in’ on a theory of presence in ordinary perception. Even though worldly objects can be perceptually recognized in a picture, they do not feel present as when they are perceived face to face. I defend a dual view of perceptual phenomenology according to which the sense of presence is dissociated from the contents of perception. On the one hand, the sense of presence is best conceived as a (...) non-sensory feeling. Ordinary objects are felt but not seen to be present. On the other hand, the contents of perception are determined by the actualization of perceptual-recognitional abilities. Unlike current versions of the feeling-based account of the sense of presence, I claim that these abilities enable us to perceive worldly (partial or overall) appearances. This claim justifies the strongest interpretation of recognition theories which does not fall back on the view that pictorial experience involves a kind of perceptual illusion. (shrink)

Perceptual experiences have been construed either as representational mental states—Representationalism—or as direct mental relations to the external world—Disjunctivism. Both conceptions are critical reactions to the so-called ‘Argument from Hallucination’, according to which perceptions cannot be about the external world, since they are subjectively indiscriminable from other, hallucinatory experiences, which are about sense-data ormind-dependent entities. Representationalism agrees that perceptions and hallucinations share their most specific mental kind, but accounts for hallucinations as misrepresentations of the external world. According to Disjunctivism, the phenomenal (...) character of perceptions is exhausted by worldly objects and features, and thus must be different from the phenomenal character of hallucinations. Disjunctivism claims that subjective indiscriminability is not the result of a common experiential ground, but is because of our inability to discriminate, from the inside, hallucinations from perceptions. At first sight, Representationalism is more congenial to the way cognitive science deals with perception. However, empirically oriented revisions of Disjunctivism could be developed and tested by giving a metacognitive account of hallucinations. Two versions of this account can be formulated, depending on whether metacognition is understood as explicit metarepresentation or as implicit monitoring of first-order informational states. The first version faces serious objections, but the second is more promising, as it embodies a more realistic view of perceptual phenomenology as having both sensory and affective aspects. Affectbased phenomenology is constituted by various metacognitive feelings, such as the feeling of being perceptually confronted with the world itself, rather than with pictures or mere representations. (shrink)

Similarity is central for the definition of concepts in several theories in cognitive psychology. However, similarity encounters several problems which were emphasized by Goodman in 1972. At the end of his article, Goodman banishes similarity from any serious philosophical or scientific investigations. If Goodman is right, theories of concepts based on similarity encounter a huge problem and should be revised entirely. In this paper, we would like to analyze the notion of similarity with some insight from psychological works on analogical (...) cognition. Analogical cognition compares two situations or objects in order to find similarities between them. In doing so, the analogical process sorts the different features of the two situations or objects and determines the most important ones. The analogical process is also highly sensitive to context. Context-sensitivity is desirable at some level, but it is also problematic as it leads to a computational explosion. To answer this problem, we would like to consider salience as a possible heuristic in the analogical process. We will distinguish three forms of salience: Sensory, categorical, and operational. By taking salience into account, we can introduce a shortcut into the computation of similarity and circumvent computational explosion. (shrink)

We provide some meta-theoretical constraints for the evaluation of a-spatial theories of sounds and auditory perception. We point out some forms of spatial content auditory experience can have. If auditory experience does not necessarily have a rich egocentric spatial content, it must have some spatial content for the relevant mode of perception to be recognizably auditory. An auditory experience devoid of any spatial content, if the notion makes sense at all, would be very different from the auditory experiences we actually (...) enjoy. This is enough to dismiss current a-spatial theories of auditory perception. As a consequence, our initial taxonomy of proximal, medial, and distal theories, as well as our phenomenological argument in favor of distal theories, are still topical. (shrink)

The notion of perceptual content is commonly introduced in the analysis of perception. It stems from an analogy between perception and propositional attitudes. Both kinds of mental states, it is thought, have conditions of satisfaction. I try to show that on the most plausible account of perceptual content, it does not determine the conditions under which perceptual experience is veridical. Moreover, perceptual content must be bipolar (capable of being correct and capable of being incorrect), whereas perception as a mental state (...) is not (if it is veridical, it is essentially so). This has profound consequences for the epistemological view that perception is a source of knowledge. I sktech a two-level epistemology which is consistent with this view. I conclude that the analogy between perception and propositional attitudes, from which the notion of perceptual content is born, may be more misleading than it is usually thought. (shrink)

Defense of a non-psychological dynamics of demonstrative thoughts.