If mental anomalism is to be interpreted as a thesisunique to psychology, the anomalousness must begrounded in some feature unique to the mental,presumably its rational nature. While the ground forsuch arguments from normativity has been notoriouslyslippery terrain, there are two recently influentialstrategies which make the argument precise. The firstis to deny the possibility of psychophysical bridgelaws because of the different constitutive essences ofmental and physical laws, and the second is to arguethat mental anomalism follows from (...) the uncodifiabilityof rationality. In this paper I argue that bothstrategies fail – the latter because it conflates primafacie and all things considered rationality and theformer because it rests on a false premise, theprinciple of the rational character of belief. Idistinguish four different formulations of thisprinciple and argue that those formulations which areplausible cannot support the argument for mentalanomalism. (shrink)

In ‘Mental Events’ Donald Davidson argued for the anomalism of the mental on the basis of the operation of incompatible constitutive principles in the mental and physical domains. Many years later, he has suggested that externalism provides further support for the anomalism of the mental. I examine the basis for that claim. The answer to the question in the title will be a qualified ‘Yes’. That is an important result in the metaphysics of mind (...) and an interesting consequence of externalism. (shrink)

In two of his more recent papers, Donald davidson has argued for the "a priori" truth of what he calls "the principle of the anomalism of the mental." my concern in this paper is with examining that principle and davidson's defense of it. After clarifying the principle, I discuss three considerations which davidson gives in its defense and argue that they are not persuasive. Then I argue that although the principle of the anomalism of the mental (...) cannot be known "a priori" to be true, There are some arguments and some neurophysiological evidence which make it reasonable to believe that the principle is, Indeed, True. (shrink)

Davidson's token-Token identity theory is based on the indeterminacy of translation. I argue that psychological theories, Like other theories, Are underdetermined by the evidence, And that their reduction, Like other reductions, Is subject to the indeterminacy of translation. This does not invalidate reduction, But it does raise epistemic difficulties. Accepting a claim as law-Like involves uncertainty and risk. There are ideological reasons for thinking that psychophysical reduction involves risks we should not take.

The paper gives a reconstruction of Donald Davidson’s theory of primary reasons in the context of the unified theory of meaning and action and its ontology of individual events. This is a necessary task to understand this philosophy of language and action because since his article “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” he has developed and modified his proposal on describing and explaining actions. He has expanded the “unified theory” to a composite theory of beliefs and desires as a total theory of (...) behavior. At first, the anomalous monism was a byproduct. Yet, the step to this philosophy of the mental is not contingent. It will be shown that the anomalous monism as the primary feature of the mental does not lead us to a materialic monism in our ontology. If the evidence of radical interpretation has no echo in natural science, we have to give up materialism.Following this, I will argue for a pure anomalism. Or, in other words, for the ascription of propositional attitudes given by the semantical analysis of sentences of such attitudes does not commit us to a materialistc framework in our ontological thinking. Yet, to understand Davidson’s unified theory, we have to grasp the role of individual events in this framework since the ontological reduction of individual events explains par example the relation between the mind and the body, and the possibility of autonomous action in the world of causality. I do not argue for a dualism of properties between the physical of the mental in the manner of other philosophers, since from the radical interpreters point the empirical restrictions of the speaker’s attitudes and behavior cannot be fixed for all cases. (shrink)

Examines the arguments for the anomalism of the mental. It is argued that the basis for the anomalism of the mental is the principle that rationality is uncodifiable, and that principle is defended. It is shown that the anomalism of the mental, and the uncodifiability of rationality that underlies it, is compatible with the supervenience of the mental on the physical, but that it rules out most varieties of functionalism. It is argued that (...) the uncodifiability of rationality rules out token identity or token correlation between particular mental states or events and particular physical states or events. (shrink)

Supervenience is compatible with anomalism: biconditional laws are ruled out by the disjunctive base, and the wideness of mental states rules out one-way psychophysical laws, as there's no single property in the base.

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;This thesis defends the claim that the principle of methodological solipsism can play no role in the formation of the theories of cognitive psychology. Corresponding to this negative claim, but assuming a comparatively minor role, will be the positive claim that a scientific psychology ought to deal in explanations which relate mental states in virtue of their semantic contents. ;The basis of the case against methodological solipsism is (...) the claim that the explanatory properties invoked by this principle are individuation dependent on properties of semantic content. In Chapter I the idea of methodological solipsism will be discussed, and two forms distinguished. One of the versions of methodological solipsism identified invokes the explanatory notion of the narrow content of a mental state. The other version invokes the notion of formal or syntactic properties possessed by mental states. In both cases it will be argued that these properties can be identified only by way of the semantic contents of their associated mental states. The notion of narrow content will be discussed in Chapter II. The case against that version of methodological solipsism which invokes syntactic properties will be constructed in Chapters III-V. The latter argument constitutes the bulk of the thesis, and derives from considerations centred around the principles of anomalism, supervenience, and the relation between them. These arguments are intended to be of independent interest as solutions to certain persistent problems in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

According to Davidson, his Principle of the Anomalism of the Mental, which states that there are no strict laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted or explained, supports the claim that psychology is anomalous among the sciences. The paper argues that this latter claim is based on a conception of psychological explanation as the subsumption of behavioral events under laws, and presents an alternative conception of psychological explanation as the analysis of cognitive capacities.

The thesis that mental properties are dependent, or supervenient, on physical properties, but this dependence is not lawlike, has been influential in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is put forward explicitly in Donald Davidson's seminal ‘Mental Events.’ On the one hand, Davidson claims that the mental is anomalous, that ‘there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained’ (1970, 208), and, in particular, that there are no strict (...) psychophysical laws. On the other hand, he insists that the mental supervenes on the physical; that ‘mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics’ (1970, 214). (shrink)

The thesis that mental properties are dependent, or supervenient, on physical properties, but this dependence is not lawlike, has been influential in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is put forward explicitly in Donald Davidson's seminal ‘Mental Events.’ On the one hand, Davidson claims that the mental is anomalous, that ‘there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained’, and, in particular, that there are no strict psychophysical laws. (...) On the other hand, he insists that the mental supervenes on the physical; that ‘mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics’. (shrink)

I explore a Davidsonian proposal for the reconciliation of two theses. One is the supervenience of the mental on the physical, the other is the anomalism of the mental. The gist of the proposal is that supervenience and anomalism are theses about interpretation. Starting with supervenience, the claim is that it should not be understood in terms of deeper metaphysical relations, but as a constraint on the relations between the applications of physical and mental predicates. (...) Regarding anomalism, the claim is that psychophysical laws have to satisfy certain counterfactual cases, in which an interpreter evaluates her past attributions in the light of new pieces of evidence. The proposed reconciliation is that supervenience entails that an interpreter will always attribute the same mental predicates to two individuals with the same physical states. However, supervenience does not imply that an interpreter cannot revise her past attributions to the two individuals. (shrink)

When one says, “I had a desire to have a glass of water and this was followed by my action to fetch the glass of water” then the common sense observation would assume that one’s mind caused this action. In this paper, I assume that there is a mind or there are ‘mental states’ which either belong to an enduring self or constitute a selfless stream of consciousness. I will provide the debate between Advaita Vedanta and Abhidharma Buddhism to (...) present this tension between enduring self and selfless stream of consciousness clearly. However, the aim of this paper is to look at how the mind is assumed to have causal powers. Is this assumption valid or not? Jaegwon Kim presents three problems that arise out of this assumption: “mental anomalism,” content externalism and causal exclusion. I shall look at these problems in detail in part I. In part II, I shall provide Buddhist arguments in favour of mind especially consciousness that can escape the reductionist arguments formulated by Kim by looking at the recent debates in contemporary physics especially quantum mechanics. (shrink)

This is an encyclopedia entry on accounts of mental causation, starting from Descartes to the present.

The paper discusses Ted Honderich's ?Hypothesis of Psychoneural Correlation?, one of the three fundamental ?hypotheses? of his Theory of Determinism. This doctrine holds that there is a pervasive system of psychoneural laws connecting every mental event with a neural correlate. Various questions are raised and discussed concerning the formulation of the thesis, Honderich's concepts of ?mental? and ?physical?, and the possible grounds for accepting the thesis. Finally, Honderich's response to Donald Davidson's well?known arguments for psychophysical anomalism is (...) discussed. (shrink)

Donald Davidson's argument for the nonlawlike nature of psycho-physical generalizations is discussed and refuted. It is shown that his appeals to the rational and holistic character of intentional description do not support his conclusion of anomalism. An alternative methodological role is suggested for the concept of rationality in application to current empirical research in cognitive psychology.

Donald Davidson has two central aims in his celebrated paper ‘Mental Events.’ First, he argues for the impossibility of ‘strict … laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained’. I shall call the resulting view ‘mental anomalism.’ Second, he argues, based partially on this impossibility, for a version of monism which holds that every mental event is token-identical with some physical event. This second aim puts constraints on how the argument (...) for mental anomalism can plausibly proceed. That argument cannot assume anything that presupposes monism or adversely affects the argument for it. When elaborated, this constraint by itself rules out otherwise attractive conceptions of how the argument for mental anomalism works. More generally, in order to be compelling, the overall argument for anomalous monism ought not to incorporate excessively controversial presuppositions even if they do not themselves beg any questions about monism. The argument needs to be built upon relatively intuitive premises. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore anomalous dualism about consciousness, a view that has not previously been explored in any detail. We can classify theories of consciousness along two dimensions: first, a theory might be physicalist or dualist; second, a theory might endorse any of the three following views regarding causal relations between phenomenal properties (properties that characterize states of our consciousness) and physical properties: nomism (the two kinds of property interact through deterministic laws), acausalism (they do not causally interact), and (...) anomalism (they interact but not through deterministic laws). I suggest that a kind of anomalous dualism, nonreductive anomalous panpsychism, promises to offer the best overall answer to two pressing issues for dualist views, the problem of mental causation and the mapping problem (the problem of predicting mind-body associations). (shrink)

Donald Davidson has two central aims in his celebrated paper ‘Mental Events.’ First, he argues for the impossibility of ‘strict … laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained’. I shall call the resulting view ‘mental anomalism.’ Second, he argues, based partially on this impossibility, for a version of monism which holds that every mental event is token-identical with some physical event. This second aim puts constraints on how the argument (...) for mental anomalism can plausibly proceed. That argument cannot assume anything that presupposes monism or adversely affects the argument for it. When elaborated, this constraint by itself rules out otherwise attractive conceptions of how the argument for mental anomalism works. More generally, in order to be compelling, the overall argument for anomalous monism ought not to incorporate excessively controversial presuppositions even if they do not themselves beg any questions about monism. The argument needs to be built upon relatively intuitive premises. (shrink)

I argue that the explanatory gap is generated by factors consistent with the view that qualia are physical properties. I begin by considering the most plausible current approach to this issue based on recent work by Valerie Hardcastle and Clyde Hardin. Although their account of the source of the explanatory gap and our potential to close it is attractive, I argue that it is too speculative and philosophically problematic. I then argue that the explanatory gap should not concern physicalists because (...) it makes excessive demands on physical theory. (shrink)

In ‘Three Varieties of Knowledge’, D. Davidson distinguishes three types of knowledge: knowledge of the self, of others’ thoughts, and knowledge of the world. He notes that the Cartesian tradition privileged the first type of knowledge believing that the other two could be derived from it. Against Cartesianism and logical positivism, Davidson maintains that these three modes of knowledge are irreducible, although complementary. I am particularly interested here in one of the arguments brought up by Davidson against the reduction of (...) any one of these modes of thoughts. I will begin my analysis with his views on the characterization and explanation of intentional behavior. according to Davidson, the normative character of rationality and of the concepts used in the characterization and explanation of behavior constitute an inevitable obstacle to their reduction to an explanation using nonnormative concepts, and more particularly, to strict laws. The thesis of the irreducibility of explanations by rationalizations of the explanatory type found in physics but also in biology and neurophysiology, refers, of course, to his theory of identity, and more particularly, to his third principle: the anomalism of the mental. As we all know, this doctrine has been the object of numerous debates in contemporary philosophy. However, it is not my intention to add to this debate. My goal is to examine whether the normative character of rationality, which is also an argument in support of the anomalism of the mental, can support the thesis of the irreducibility of explanations through reasons. (shrink)

Two criticisms of Davidson's argument for monism are presented. The first is that there is no obvious way for the anomalism of the mental to do any work in his argument. Certain implicit premises, on the other hand, entail monism independently of the anomalism of the mental, but they are question-begging. The second criticism is that even if Davidson's argument is sound, the variety of monism that emerges is extremely weak at best. I show that by (...) constructing ontologically ``hybrid'' events that are consistent with the premises and assumptions of Davidson's argument, but entail ontological dualism. (shrink)

Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism has been repeatedly criticized since its initial defense in the paper Mental Events, which was published in 1970. Despite the widespread rejection, there seems to be no agreement on why anomalous monism fails. This paper systematizes two strong objections to anomalous monism. First, Davidson’s argument for monism requires the problematic assumption that physics can provide strict causal laws for causal relations in general. Second, Davidson’s monism requires an ontology of events for which no satisfactory criterion (...) of identity has been provided. Despite these problems, the paper argues that the theses on the anomalism and irreducibility of the mental remain acceptable, despite the difficulty of reconstructing precisely the arguments Davidson uses to defend them. (shrink)

Abstract Intentional mental states have causes and effects. Davidson has shown that this fact alone does not entail the existence of psycho?physical laws, but his anomalism makes the connection between the content and causation of intentional states utterly mysterious. By defining intentional states in terms of their causes and effects, functionalism promises to explain this connection. If intentional states have their causes and effects in virtue of their contents, then there must be intrinsic states (of the people who (...) have them) which are ?local causal surrogates? for the propositions believed, desired, or whatever. We can define these intrinsic states in terms of the laws that govern them, but these laws alone are not sufficient to account for intentional content. To do that we need to invoke laws which link these intrinsic states with their contents. Such a ?wide? functional account is sketched; it combines a suggestion of Ramsey's about truth conditions with a ?feedback? account of the content of desires. (shrink)

Because every single one of us will die, most of us would like to know what—if anything—awaits us afterward, not to mention the fate of lost loved ones. Given the nearly universal vested interest we personally have in deciding this question in favor of an afterlife, it is no surprise that the vast majority of books on the topic affirm the reality of life after death without a backward glance. But the evidence of our senses and the ever-gaining strength of (...) scientific evidence strongly suggest otherwise. -/- In The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death, Michael Martin and Keith Augustine collect a series of contributions that redress this imbalance in the literature by providing a strong, comprehensive, and up-to-date casebook of the chief arguments against an afterlife all in one place. Divided into four separate sections, this essay collection opens the volume with a broad overview of the issues, as contributors consider the strongest available evidence as to whether or not we survive death—in particular the biological basis of all mental states and their grounding in brain activity that ceases to function at death. Next contributors consider a host of conceptual and empirical difficulties that confront the various ways of "surviving" death—from bodiless minds to bodily resurrection to any form of posthumous survival. Then essayists turn to internal inconsistencies between traditional theological conceptions of an afterlife—Heaven, Hell, karmic rebirth—and widely held ethical principles central to the belief systems undergirding those notions. In the final section, authors offer critical evaluations of the main types of evidence for an afterlife. -/- Fully interdisciplinary, The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death brings together a variety of fields of research to make that case, including cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, personal identity, philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, psychical research, and anomalistic psychology. As the definitive casebook of arguments against life after death, this collection is required reading for any instructor, researcher, and student in philosophy, religious studies, and theology. It is sure to raise provocative issues new to readers, regardless of background, from those who believe fervently in the reality of an afterlife to those who do not or are undecided on the matter. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a tension between the two components of Davidson's anomalous monism--the supervenience of the mental on the physical and the anomalism of the mental. While the anomalism of the mental denies the possibility of strict psychophysical laws, the principle of supervenience sometimes suggests that such laws do exist and that they are responsible for the dependence of the mental on the physical.

An argument is offered which purports to show that Davidson's argument for Physical Monism is inconsistent with the thesis of Anomalism of the Mental.

One of the driving questions in philosophy of mind is whether a person can be understood in purely physical terms. In this presentation, I wish to continue the project initiated by Donald Davidson, whose subtle position on this question has left many more perplexed than enlightened. The main reason for this perplexity is Davidson’s rather obscure pronouncements about the normativity of intentionality and its role in supporting psychophysical anomalism – the claim that there are no laws bridging our intentional (...) states with states of our brain. Insofar as Davidson’s thesis is an ontological one – about the existence of laws or otherwise modally significant connections between the mental and the physical – I think his critics are correct: Davidson has not provided us with a successful argument for psychophysical anomalism. There is, however, a different argument, also based upon considerations about the normativity of intentionality that lead to an equally important conclusion. The conclusion is not ontological but rather epistemic: if thoughts do indeed display normativity, it is hard to understand how they would arise out of mere mechanical occurrences in the brain. To borrow a well-worn phrase, there is an “explanatory gap” between the mental and the physical. Originally coined to capture the epistemic darkness we confront in our attempt to understand phenomenal experiences in purely physical terms, the idea has yet to be explored in the area of contentful mental states or intentionality in general. My argument shall be this: considerations about the normativity of intentionality demonstrate that there is an explanatory gap between the intentional and the physical. In fact, if there were laws of the kind Davidson denies, then the world be more mysterious than if no such laws existed. The presence of an explanatory gap explains why this is so. (shrink)

In this book, each of the possible positions concerning the relationship between mind and body is clearly explained and thoroughly critiqued. It is concluded that, although mental events are identical with physical events, mentalistic statements are not equivalent with physicalistic statements. It is also shown that the way in which mentalistic statements are non-equivalent with physicalistic statements is deeper than the way in which biological statements are non-equivalent with microphysical statements. In other words, the sense in which mind and (...) body lie on opposite sides of an 'explanatory gap' is much stronger than the sense in which biology and microphysics do so. (shrink)

During the last decade, children have shown an increasing need for mental wellbeing interventions due to their anxiety and depression issues, which the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated. Socially Assistive Robotics have been shown to have a great potential to support children with mental wellbeing-related issues. However, understanding how robots can be used to aid the measurement of these issues is still an open challenge. This paper presents a narrative review of child-robot interaction (cHRI) papers (IEEE ROMAN proceedings from (...) 2016–2021 and keyword-based article search using Google Scholar) to investigate the open challenges and potential knowledge gaps in the evaluation of mental wellbeing or the assessment of factors affecting mental wellbeing in children. We exploited the SPIDER framework to search for the key elements for the inclusion of relevant studies. Findings from this work (10 screened papers in total) investigate the challenges in cHRI studies about mental wellbeing by categorising the current research in terms of robot-related factors (robot autonomy and type of robot), protocol-related factors (experiment purpose, tasks, participants and user sensing) and data related factors (analysis and findings). The main contribution of this work is to highlight the potential opportunities for cHRI researchers to carry out measurements concerning children’s mental wellbeing. (shrink)

The controversy between the Anomalists and Analogists has not, I think, attracted as much of the attention of scholars as it deserves. It was perhaps not a very practical matter, though, as I shall point out presently, it probably had indirectly some important practical results. The interest of the controversy lies rather in the spirit in which it was conducted. Anyone who reads for instance Varro, De Ling. Lat. VIII. 31–32, where the anomalist argues that as in life variety of (...) furniture and the like is necessary for aesthetic enjoyment, so in language anomaly is desirable; or IX. 24, etc., where the analogist argues from the unchanging order that prevails in the heavenly bodies, in the tides, in the continuity of species, will feel that he is moving in a world of thought very different in one way from our own, though in another rather like it. By the analogist language is conceived as a world in itself, much as we conceive of the visible world. Its phenomena are being laid bare and constantly reveal fresh signs of law and order. The investigator sometimes finds facts which prima facie suggest anomaly, but he is as confident that behind them must lie some unifying principle as the scientific man of to-day is with regard to the phenomena of the visible world, as impatient of the suggestion of disorder as he is of any miraculous interference with the order of nature. Even the anomalist, sceptic as he is, approaches the question not in a spirit of mere denial, but of aesthetic consideration. We get a glimpse of a lost point of view. The world of words had a glamour and a wonder for them which it cannot have for us. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists argue that out everyday ability to predict and explain the actions and mental states of others is grounded in out possession of a primitive 'folk' psychological theory. Recently however, this theory has come under challenge from the simulation alternative. This alternative view says that human beings are able to predict and explain each other's actions by using the resources of their own minds to simulate the psychological aetiology of the actions of the others. This book (...) and the companion volume Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate together offer a richly woven fabric of philosophical and psychological theory, which promises to yield real insights into the nature of our mental lives. (shrink)

Mental and behavioral disorders represent a significant portion of the public health burden in all countries. The human cost of these disorders is immense, yet treatment options for sufferers are currently limited, with many patients failing to respond sufficiently to available interventions and drugs. High quality ontologies facilitate data aggregation and comparison across different disciplines, and may therefore speed up the translation of primary research into novel therapeutics. Realism-based ontologies describe entities in reality and the relationships between them in (...) such a way that – once formulated in a suitable formal language – the ontologies can be used for sophisticated automated reasoning applications. Reference ontologies can be applied across different contexts in which different, and often mutually incompatible, domain-specific vocabularies have traditionally been used. In this contribution we describe the Mental Functioning Ontology (MF) and Mental Disease Ontology (MD), two realism-based ontologies currently under development for the description of humanmental functioning and disease. We describe the structure and upper levels of the ontologies and preliminary application scenarios, and identify some open questions. (shrink)

Bringing research on collective memory together with research on episodic future thought, Szpunar and Szpunar :376–389, 2016) have recently developed the concept of collective future thought. Individual memory and individual future thought are increasingly seen as two forms of individual mental time travel, and it is natural to see collective memory and collective future thought as forms of collective mental time travel. But how seriously should the notion of collective mental time travel be taken? This article argues (...) that, while collective mental time travel is disanalogous in important respects to individual mental time travel, the concept of collective mental time travel nevertheless provides a useful means of organizing existing findings, while also suggesting promising directions for future research. (shrink)

In this surprising book, Allan V. Horwitz argues that our current conceptions of mental illness as a disease fit only a small number of serious psychological conditions and that most conditions currently regarded as mental illness are cultural constructions, normal reactions to stressful social circumstances, or simply forms of deviant behavior.

Nonreductive physicalism states that actions have sufficient physical causes and distinct mental causes. Nonreductive physicalism has recently faced the exclusion problem, according to which the single sufficient physical cause excludes the mental causes from causal efficacy. Autonomists respond by stating that while mental-to-physical causation fails, mental-to-mental causation persists. Several recent philosophers establish this autonomy result via similar models of causation :1031–1049, 2016; Zhong, J Philos 111:341–360, 2014). In this paper I argue that both of these (...) autonomist models fail on account of the problem of Edwards’s Dictum. However, I appeal to foundational principles of action theory to resuscitate mental-to-mental causation in a manner that is consistent with the models of causation endorsed by these autonomists. (shrink)

Episodic memory (memories of the personal past) and prospecting the future (anticipating events) are often described as mental time travel (MTT). While most use this description metaphorically, we argue that episodic memory may allow for MTT in at least some robust sense. While episodic memory experiences may not allow us to literally travel through time, they do afford genuine awareness of past-perceived events. This is in contrast to an alternative view on which episodic memory experiences present past-perceived events as (...) mere intentional contents. Hence, episodic memory is a way of coming into experiential contact with, or being again aware of, what happened in the past. We argue that episodic memory experiences depend on a causal-informational link with the past events being remembered, and that, assuming direct realism about episodic memory experiences, this link suffices for genuine awareness. Since there is no such link in future prospection, a similar argument cannot be used to show that it also affords genuine awareness of future events. Constructivist views of memory might challenge the idea of memory as genuine awareness of remembered events. We explain how our view is consistent with both constructivist and anti-causalist conceptions of memory. There is still room for an interpretation of episodic memory as enabling genuine awareness of past events, even if it involves reconstruction. (shrink)

Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. (...) For example, the meaning of 'chase' might be said by a molecularist to be try to catch. Atomism characterizes meaning and content in terms of none of the web; it says that sentences and beliefs have meaning or content independently of their relations to other sentences or beliefs. One major motivation for holism has come from reflections on the natures of confirmation and learning. As Quine (1953) observed, claims about the world are confirmed not individually, but only in conjunction with theories of which they are a part. And typically, one cannot come to understand scientific claims without understanding a significant chunk of the theory of which they are a part. For example, in learning the Newtonian concepts of 'force', 'mass', kinetic energy' and 'momentum', one doesn't learn any definitions of these terms in terms that are understood beforehand, for there are no such definitions. Rather, these theoretical terms were all learned together in conjunction with procedures for solving problems. The major problem with holism is that it threatens to make generalization in psychology virtually impossible. If the content of any state depends on all others, it would be extremely unlikely that any two believers would ever share a state with the same content. Moreover, holism would appear to conflict with our ordinary conception of reasoning. What sentences one accepts influence what one infers. if i accept a sentence and then later reject it, i thereby change the inferential role of that sentence, so the meaning of what i accept wouldn't be the same as what i later reject. but then it would be difficult to understand on this view how one could rationally --or even irrationally!-- change one's mind. and agreement and translation are also problematic for much the same reason. holists have responded (1) by proposing that we should think not in terms of "same/different" meaning but in terms of a gradient of similarity of meaning, (2) by proposing "two factor" theories or (3) by simply accepting the consequence that there is no real difference between changing meanings and changing beliefs. (shrink)

Sarah Patterson; III*—The Anomalism of Psychology, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 37–52, https://doi.org/10.109.

A poor understanding of probability may lead people to misinterpret every day coincidences and form anomalistic beliefs. We investigated the relationship between anomalistic beli...

A variety of scientific disciplines have set as their task explaining mental activities, recognizing that in some way these activities depend upon our brain. But, until recently, the opportunities to conduct experiments directly on our brains were limited. As a result, research efforts were split between disciplines such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that investigated behavior, while disciplines such as neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and genetics experimented on the brains of non-human animals. In recent decades these disciplines integrated, and (...) with the advent of techniques for imaging activity in human brains, the term cognitive neuroscience has been applied to the integrated investigations of mind and brain. This book is a philosophical examination of how these disciplines continue in the mission of explaining our mental capacities. (shrink)

This article argues that existing approaches to programming ethical AI fail to resolve a serious moral-semantic trilemma, generating interpretations of ethical requirements that are either too semantically strict, too semantically flexible, or overly unpredictable. This paper then illustrates the trilemma utilizing a recently proposed ‘general ethical dilemma analyzer,’ GenEth. Finally, it uses empirical evidence to argue that human beings resolve the semantic trilemma using general cognitive and motivational processes involving ‘mental time-travel,’ whereby we simulate different possible pasts and futures. (...) I demonstrate how mental time-travel psychology leads us to resolve the semantic trilemma through a six-step process of interpersonal negotiation and renegotiation, and then conclude by showing how comparative advantages in processing power would plausibly cause AI to use similar processes to solve the semantic trilemma more reliably than we do, leading AI to make better moral-semantic choices than humans do by our very own lights. (shrink)

Two thousand years ago, Lucretius said that everything is atoms in the void; it's physics all the way down. Contemporary physicalism agrees. But if that's so how can we—how can our thoughts, emotions, our values—make anything happen in the physical world? This conceptual knot, the mental causation problem, is the core of the mind-body problem, closely connected to the problems of free will, consciousness, and intentionality. Anthony Dardis shows how to unravel the knot. He traces its early appearance in (...) the history of philosophical inquiry, specifically in the work of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and T. H. Huxley. He then develops a metaphysical framework for a theory of causation, laws of nature, and the causal relevance of properties. Using this framework, Dardis explains how macro, or higher level, properties can be causally relevant in the same way that microphysical properties are causally relevant: by their relationship with the laws of nature. Smelling an orange, choosing the orange rather than the cheesecake, reaching for the one on the left instead of the one on the right-mental properties such as these take their place alongside the physical "motor of the world" in making things happen. (shrink)