Twenty years ago, Nancy Cartwright wrote a perceptive essay in which she clearly distinguished causal relations from associations, introduced philosophers to Simpson’s paradox, articulated the difficulties for reductive probabilistic analyses of causation that flow from these observations, and connected causal relations with strategies of action (Cartwright 1979). Five years later, without appreciating her essay, I and my (then) students began to develop formal representations of causal and probabilistic relations, which, subsequently informed by the work of computer scientists and statisticians, led (...) eventually to a practical theory of causal inference and prediction, a theory incorporating some of the sensibilities Cartwright had voiced (Glymour et al. 1987; Spirtes et al. 1993). That theory, and ideas related to it, have become a subfield of computer science with contributions far deeper than mine from many sources, and its inferential and predictive techniques have been successfully applied in biology, economics, educational research, geology and space physics. (shrink)

Traditionally Kant's theory of punishment has been seen as wholly retributive. Recent Kantian scholarship has interpreted the theory as more moderately retributive: punishment is deterrent in aim, and retributive only in so far as the amount and type of penalty is to be determined by retributive considerations (the ius talionis). But it is arguable that a more coherent Kantian theory of punishment can be developed which makes no appeal to retribution at all: hypothetical contractors would have no good reason to (...) endorse punishment distributed retributively. This position is first sketched behind Rawls's neo‐Kantian ‘veil of ignorance’, and it is suggested that the same theory will emerge from Scanlon's more relaxed neo‐Kantian position. (shrink)

The paper argues for a normative rather than psychological interpretation of Nietzsche's conceptions of power and will - and hence will to power. It does so with a view to rethinking the questions of Nietzsche's relationship to Enlightenment thought. Jürgen Habermas's view of Nietzsche's philosophy of power as epitomizing a counter-Enlightenment instrumentalism is contrasted with Maudmarie Clark's attempt to divest it of its power aspect in order to place him within the tradition of Enlightenment. Both approaches, it is argued, (...) ignore the irreducibly normative basis of Nietzsche's conception of will to power. This normative basis suggests that Nietzsche's thought can in fact contribute to the reconfiguration of our concept of rationality recently urged by Habermas.In der Abhandlung wird in Abgrenzung zur psychologischen ein normative Interpretation von Nietzsches Auffassung von Macht und Willen, und folglich seiner Idee vom Willen zur Macht, vorgestellt, mit der zugleich Nietzsches Beziehung zum Denken der Aufklärung revidiert werden soll. Dazu wird zunächst Jürgen Habermas' verkürzte Deutung von Nietzsches Philosophie der Macht als eines Instruments der Gegenaufklärung mit Maudmarie Clarks Versuch konfrontiert, Nietzsches Philosophie ihres Machtaspektes zu berauben und ihn so in die Tradition der Aufklärung zu stellen. Es wird gezeigt, das beide Interpretationsversuch die nicht reduzierbar normative Basis von Nietzsches Begriff des Willens zur Macht ignorieren. Dagegen legt die normative Deutung nahe, dass Nietzsches Denken tatsächlich zur Rekonfiguration unseres Vernunftkonzeptes beitragen kann, wie sie jüngst von Habermas gefordet wurde. (shrink)

1. The Situation in Cognition 2. Situated Cognition: A Potted Recent History 3. Extensions in Biology, Computation, and Cognition 4. Articulating the Idea of Cognitive Extension 5. Are Some Resources Intrinsically Non-Cognitive? 6. Is Cognition Extended or Only Embedded? 7. Letting Nature Take Its Course.

Was Luther avowing a genuine moral incapacity when he claimed that he could do no other? Bernard Williams has distinguished moral from psychological incapacity in terms of deliberation. There are three particular difficulties for the notion: in addition to (1) scepticism about whether the agent is genuinely incapable, there are (2) the possibility of conflicting moral incapacities, and (3) apparent cases where there is no actual or possible deliberation. If (1) can be countered, (2) can be met by ceteris paribus (...) clauses, and it is shown that these do not remove the element of necessity. And (3) can be met by showing how possible deliberation is involved in putative counter‐examples. Williams' account needs to be augmented to deal with cases of the morally unthinkable, and refined to allow for incipient attempts to do the morally impossible. (shrink)

Words, Thoughts and Theories arguesthat infants and children discover the physical and psychological featuresof the world by a process akin to scientific inquiry, more or less asconceived by philosophers of science in the 1960s (the theory theory).This essay discusses some of the philosophical background to analternative, more popular, ``modular'''' or ``maturational'''' account ofdevelopment, dismisses an array of philosophical objections to the theorytheory, suggests that the theory theory offers an undeveloped project forartificial intelligence, and, relying on recent psychological work oncausation, offers (...) suggestions about how principles of causal inference mayprovide a developmental solution to the ``frame problem''''. (shrink)

The idea that moral imperatives are categorical is commonly used to support internalist claims about moral judgment. I argue that the categorical quality of moral requirements shows at most that moral motivation need not flow from a background desire to be moral. It does not show that moral judgments can motivate by themselves, or that amoralism is impossible.

This article defends linguistic descent in contrast to the possibility of linguistic ascent or the formal mode in metaphysics. We can go both ways, but metaphysics metaphysically defined presupposes metaphysics conceptualstically defined, which presupposes metaphysicas ontologially defined. Predicates implie abstract concepts (categories in metaphysics), and abstract oncepts presuppose the concrete qualities from which they are abstracted. A distinction is made between any quality and that which has the quality. This article contains a refutation of Kant on the ontological argument. Being, (...) conceived as instantiation, is a predicate once we posit universal properties instantiated by whatever is. The article, in the author's subequent work, leads to an explicit nominalism which asserts universals only as practical postulates of theoretical reason, i.e., logical discourse. Qualities are unique, not open to multiple instantiation. (shrink)

In this essay it is shown that the imaginative art of scientific theorizing – at its technical best – animates Quine's philosophy as importantly as the more Spartan norms honored in his present pantheon of virtues. By drawing a contrast between the standing of theories in philosophy and theories in science, it will be shown that the speculative reaches of philosophy, along with developments in semantic theory, now oblige an internal revision of Quine's stance against meaning as it was announced (...) in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” So, corollary to this proposed revision, I argue that in natural philosophy, the muse of the “art of science” deserves an address along with the more Spartan norms in Quine's present philosophical pantheon. As semantic theory and analyticity thus gain a measure of philosophical tenability, Quine's holism emerges as the more central doctrine of his mature vision. (shrink)

Moore held that to call something good is to ascribe a property to it. But he denied that the property could be expressed in non-evaluative terms. Can one accept this view of the meaning of good without falling into skepticism about whether anything can be, or be known to be, good? I suggest a way of doing this. The strategy combines the idea that good is semantically entangled, as opposed to semantically isolated, with the idea that rational agents have a (...) generic disposition to follow reasons. (shrink)

Drawing substantive conclusions from linear causal models that perform acceptably on statistical tests is unreasonable if it is not known how alternatives fare on these same tests. We describe a computer program, TETRAD, that helps to search rapidly for plausible alternatives to a given causal structure. The program is based on principles from statistics, graph theory, philosophy of science, and artificial intelligence. We describe these principles, discuss how TETRAD employs them, and argue that these principles make TETRAD an effective tool. (...) Finally, we illustrate TETRAD's effectiveness by applying it to a multiple indicator model of Political and Industrial development. A pilot version of the TETRAD program is described in this paper. The current version is described in our forthcoming Discovering Causal Structure: Artificial Intelligence for Statistical Modeling. (shrink)

The last ten years have seen an increasing interest, within cognitive science, in issues concerning the physical body, the local environment, and the complex interplay between neural systems and the wider world in which they function. --œPhysically embodied, environmentally embedded--� approaches thus loom large on the contemporary cognitive scientific scene. Yet many unanswered questions remain, and the shape of a genuinely embodied, embedded science of the mind is still unclear. I begin by sketching a few examples of the approach, and (...) then raise a variety of critical questions concerning its nature and scope. A distinction is drawn between two kinds of appeal to embodiment: 'simple' cases, in which bodily and environmental properties merely constrain accounts that retain the focus on inner organization and processing, and more radical appeals, in which attention to bodily and environmental features is meant to transform both the subject matter and the theoretical framework of cognitive science. (shrink)

The present study examined the neural substrate of two classes of quantifiers: numerical quantifiers like ” at least three” which require magnitude processing, and logical quantifiers like ” some” which can be understood using a simple form of perceptual logic. We assessed these distinct classes of quantifiers with converging observations from two sources: functional imaging data from healthy adults, and behavioral and structural data from patients with corticobasal degeneration who have acalculia. Our findings are consistent with the claim that numerical (...) quantifier comprehension depends on a lateral parietal-dorsolateral prefrontal network, but logical quantifier comprehension depends instead on a rostral medial prefrontal-posterior cingulate network. These observations emphasize the important contribution of abstract number knowledge to the meaning of numerical quantifiers in semantic memory and the potential role of a logic-based evaluation in the service of non-numerical quantifiers. (shrink)

Of course, words aren’t magic. Neither are sextants, compasses, maps, slide rules and all the other paraphenelia which have accreted around the basic biological brains of homo sapiens. In the case of these other tools and props, however, it is transparently clear that they function so as to either carry out or to facilitate computational operations important to various human projects. The slide rule transforms complex mathematical problems (ones that would baffle or tax the unaided subject) into simple tasks of (...) perceptual recognition. The map provides geographical information in a format well-suited to aid complex planning and strategic military operations. The compass gathers and displays a kind of information that (most) unaided human subjects do not seem to command. These various tools and props thus act to generate information, or to store it, or to transform it, or some combination of the three. In so doing, they impact our individual and collective problem- solving capacities in much the same dramatic ways as various software packages impact the performance of a simple pc. (shrink)

The annual series of Clio Hegel Studies, which has been published since 1981, is to continue under the title Clio Philosophy Studies. The Hegel series numbers were inaugurated at a time when there was no assurance that the Owl would become a journal. Now that the organ of the HSA is a journal of Hegel studies, Clio can best serve by addressing a wider audience, while continuing to encourage and welcome contributions related to Hegel. For the next two years, beginning (...) July 1, 1986, this series will be edited from the University of Strasbourg. Manuscripts by HSA member members and friends may be submitted either to Clio, Indiana-Purdue, Fort Wayne, Indiana 46805, or to Clark Butler, Indiana-Purdue Foreign Study Program, 1b, Rue de Bouxwiller, 67000 Strasbourg, France. The journal remains interested in testing Hegelian theses through interacton with the most important living currents of thought. (shrink)

Mind, it is increasingly fashionable to assert, is an intrinsically embodied and environmentally embedded phenomenon. But there is a potential tension between two strands of thought prominent in this recent literature. One of those strands depicts the body as special, and the fine details of a creature’s embodiment as a major constraint on the nature of its mind: a kind of new-wave body-centrism. The other depicts the body as just one element in a kind of equal-partners dance between brain, body (...) and world, with the nature of the mind fixed by the overall balance thus achieved: a kind of extended functionalism (now with an even broader canvas for multiple realizability than ever before). The present paper displays the tension, scouts the space of possible responses, and ends by attempting to specify what the body actually needs to be, given its complex role in these recent debates. (shrink)

There is a definite challenge in the air regarding the pivotal notion of internal representation. This challenge is explicit in, e.g., van Gelder, 1995; Beer, 1995; Thelen & Smith, 1994; Wheeler, 1994; and elsewhere. We think it is a challenge that can be met and that (importantly) can be met by arguing from within a general framework that accepts many of the basic premises of the work (in new robotics and in dynamical systems theory) that motivates such scepticism in the (...) first place. Our strategy will be as follows. We begin (Section 1) by offering an account (an example and something close to a definition) of what we shall term Minimal Robust Representationalism (MRR). Sections 2 & 3 address some likely worries and questions about this notion. We end (Section 4) by making explicit the conditions under which, on our account, a science (e.g., robot- ics) may claim to be addressing cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

The notion of folk‐psychology as a primitive speculative theory of the mental is called into question. There is cause to believe that folk‐psychology has more in common with a naive physics than with early speculative physical theorising. The distinction between these is elaborated. The conclusion drawn is that commonsense ascription of psychological content, though not a suitable finishing point for cognitive science, should still provide a more reliable source of data than some contemporary theorists are willing to admit.

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Recent advances in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience open up new vistas for human enhancement. Central to much of this work is the idea of new human-machine interfaces (in general) and new brain-machine interfaces (in particular). But despite the increasing prominence of such ideas, the very idea of such an interface remains surprisingly under-explored. In particular, the notion of human enhancement suggests an image of the embodied and reasoning agent as literally extended or augmented, rather than the more conservative image (...) of a standard (non-enhanced) agent using a tool via some new interface. In this essay, I explore this difference, and attempt to lay out some of the conditions under which the more radical reading (positing brand new integrated agents or systemic wholes) becomes justified. I adduce some empirical evidence suggesting that the radical result is well within our scientific reach. The main reason why this is so has less to do with the advancement of our science (though that certainly helps) than with our native biological plasticity. We humans, I shall try to show, are biologically disposed towards literal (and repeated) episodes of sensory re-calibration, of bodily re-configuration and of mental extension. Such potential for literal and repeated re-configuration is the mark of what I shall call "profoundly embodied agency," contrasting it with a variety of weaker (less philosophically and scientifically interesting) understandings of the nature and importance of embodiment for minds and persons. The article ends by relating the image of profound embodiment to some questions (and fears) concerning converging technologies for improving human performance. (shrink)

The article explains my third argument for panpsychism, based on disolving all properties, including dispositional physical properties like mass, energy, and force, into phenomenal properties. I thus reject a dual-property version of panpsychism. I seek to show, contrary to Paul Churchland, that the general panpsychist hypothesis has some explanatory value, and makes a cosmology consisting in comparative psychology possible. The mental life even of so-called physical particles in physics is hypothesized to help explain their behavior.

The relationship between corporate executives and shareholders has riveted the attention of business ethicists since the inception of the field. Most ethicists agree that corporate executives owe their investors the duties of loyalty, candor, and care. These fiduciary duties undergird the promises made to shareholders at the time of incorporation, placing on executives moral obligations to engage in fair dealing and to avoid conflicts of interest.We concur that executives owe all of their existing shareholders both promise-keeping and fiduciary duties and (...) argue that some corporateexecutives violate these responsibilities by attempting to withhold information from or limit information to some shareholders while courting others. We analyze the ethical implications of six techniques and tools that executives use to attract certain types of shareholders while deterring others. We conclude with recommended structural and behavioral changes to these current managerial and investor practices. (shrink)

1. Ontological Historical Materialism. The Hegel-Marx relationship remains an issue both for Hegel scholars aware of underlying world historical causes of the recent Hegel Renaissance and Marx scholars attentive to the philosophical roots of Marxism. It may be questioned, however, whether the relation is merely historical and circumstantial or necessary and internal as well. Marx claimed to have overturned the Hegelian system. Yet the classical formula, according to which Marxism shares with Hegelianism its method but not its system, that the (...) Hegelian system contradicts the dialectical methodology it shares with Marxism has exercised wide influence. On numerous issues, e.g., the state, the universal class, the alienation of labor, Hegelian and Marxist doctrines are admittedly not only different but contradictory. To this extent Engels’s classical formula is correct. But surely the more important consideration is method, though doctrine has so overshadowed methodological considerations in both Marxism and Hegelianism that it has been rare to define either school except in terms of specific tenets. Doctrinal definition of any movement resembles a death warrant. If either Marxism or Hegelianism is scientific and thus capable of breaking loose from nineteenth-century chains, it must be defined methodologically, programmatically. Contrary to Engels’s formula, I shall distinguish between Marxist and Hegelian methods, but shall argue that the methods are not only compatible but complementary. (shrink)

How does language (spoken or written) impact thought? One useful way to approach this important but elusive question may be to consider language itself as a cognition-enhancing animal-built structure. To take this perspective is to view language as a kind of self-constructed cognitive niche. These self-constructed cognitive niches play, I suggest, three distinct but deeply interlocking roles in human thought and reason. Working together, these three interlocking routines radically transform the human mind, and mark a genuine discontinuity in the space (...) of anitnal minds. (shrink)

Sensory substitution devices are a type of sensory prosthesis that (typically) convert visual stimuli transduced by a camera into tactile or auditory stimulation. They are designed to be used by people with impaired vision so that they can recover some of the functions normally subserved by vision. In this chapter we will consider what philosophers might learn about the nature of the senses from the neuroscience of sensory substitution. We will show how sensory substitution devices work by exploiting the cross-modal (...) plasticity of sensory cortex: the ability of sensory cortex to pick up some types of information about the external environment irrespective of the nature of the sensory inputs it is processing. We explore the implications of cross-modal plasticity for theories of the senses that attempt to make distinctions between the senses on the basis of neurobiology. (shrink)

Contends that Hegel's reconstruction of valid logic leads to a conception of indirect proof and syllogisms. Clarification of the concept of indirect proof; Reference to previous papers on the subject; Indirect proof as the natural form of deduction.