In The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans describes the acquisition of beliefs about one’s beliefs in the following way: ‘I get myself in a position to answer the question whether I believe that p by putting into operation whatever procedure I have for answering the question whether p.’ In this paper I argue that Evans’s remark can be used to explain first person authority if it is supplemented with the following consideration: Holding on to the content of a belief and (...) ‘prefixing’ it with ‘I believe that’ is as easy as it is to hold on to the contents of one’s thoughts when making an inference. We do not, usually, have the problem, in going, for example, from ‘p’ and ‘q’ to ‘p and q’, that one of our thought contents gets corrupted. Self-ascription of belief by way of Evans’s procedure is based on the same capacity to retain and re-deploy thought contents and therefore should enjoy a similar degree of authority. However, is Evans’s description exhaustive of all authoritative self-ascription of belief? Christopher Peacocke has suggested that in addition to Evans’s procedure there are two more relevant ways of self-ascribing belief. I argue that both methods can be subsumed under Evans’s procedure. (shrink)

So-called "transparency theories" of self-knowledge, inspired by a remark of Gareth Evans, claim that we can obtain knowledge of our own beliefs by directing out attention towards the world, rather than introspecting the contents of our own minds. Most recent transparency theories concentrate on the case of self-knowledge concerning belief and desires. But can a transparency account be generalised to knowledge of one's own perceptions? In a recent paper, Alex Byrne (2012) argues that we can know what we see by (...) inferring from visual facts about our environment because such facts can exclusively be known by us through vision. I discuss his proposal and object that visual facts, as conceived of by Byrne, are odd: they cannot be remembered and we cannot, as yet, write them down. More needs to be said about them to make his account plausible. (shrink)

Alex Byrne and Jordi Fernández propose two different versions of a transparency theory of self-knowledge. According to Byrne, we self-attribute beliefs by an inference from what we take to be facts about the world (following a rule he calls BEL). According to Fernández, we self-attribute the belief that p on the basis of a prior mental state, a state which constitutes our grounds for the belief that p (thereby realizing a procedure he calls Bypass). In this paper, I present the (...) two theories in outline and discuss various objections concerning their normative (Can the procedure give us knowledge?) and metaphysical aspects (Is the procedure functional?). I conclude that especially the metaphysical objections against Bypass are somewhat more difficult to counter than those against BEL and that the modifications required of Fernández’s theory make it very similar to Byrne’s. -/- Alex Byrne y Jordi Fernández proponen dos diferentes versiones de la teoría de la transparencia del autoconocimiento. Según Byrne, para autoatribuir creencias inferimos qué es lo que creemos a partir lo que tomamos como hechos sobre el mundo (siguiendo una regla que Byrne llama BEL). Según Fernández, autoatribuimos la creencia de que p con base en un estado anterior a esta creencia, un estado que fundamenta la creencia de que p (realizando un procedimiento que él llama Bypass). En este artículo expongo las dos teorías y discuto objeciones que conciernen su aspecto normativo (¿puede el procedimiento darnos conocimiento?) y metafísico (¿es funcional el procedimiento?). Concluyo que en especial las objeciones metafísicas son más graves en el caso de Bypass que en el de BEL y que las modificaciones requeridas de la teoría de Fernández la asemejan mucho a la de Byrne. (shrink)

In this paper, I reconstruct Davidson’s explanation of first person authority and criticize it in three main points: (1) The status of the theory is unclear, given that it is phenomenologically inadequate. (2) The theory explains only that part of the phenomenon of first person authority which is due to the fact that no two speakers speak exactly the same idiolect. But first person authority might be a more far-reaching phenomenon than this. (3) Davidson’s argument depends on the claim that (...) “not getting one’s words wrong” is the same as “knowing what one’s words mean”. I argue that the two are not the same. In conclusion, I sketch some alternatives to Davidson’s account. I argue that the most promising one attempts to explain first person authority by examining how we acquire second-order beliefs. A well-known remark of Evans’s proves useful for such an account. (shrink)

What does environmental ethics have to say about the urban context? Is the city an environment that has only negative value or is it possible, and in fact necessary, to develop ethical recommendations about how to design it? In this paper, I argue for the second of these disjuncts and sketch some ideas for an environmental city ethics. I try to show that the most important principle of such an ethics is procedural: anyone affected by a decision about the urban (...) environment must have the possibility to participate in the process of making it. This principle has certain preconditions and there are also limitations on its applicability. For example, it is plausible that there are certain ecocentric ethical obligations, which are valid independently of the implementation of the principle. I sketch an idea for how a city’s green areas can help to raise citizens’ awareness of these obligations. -/- ¿Qué se puede decir, desde la ética ambiental, acerca del contexto urbano? ¿Se trata de un ambiente únicamente con valor negativo o es posible, e incluso necesario, desarrollar recomendaciones éticas sobre cómo diseñarlo? En este texto argumento en favor de la segunda afirmación y esbozo algunas ideas respecto de una ética ambiental para la ciudad. Defiendo que el principio más importante es procedimental: toda persona afectada debe tener la posibilidad de participar en la toma de las decisiones sobre el ambiente urbano. Este principio tiene ciertas precondiciones y también algunas restricciones. Por ejemplo, es plausible pensar en obligaciones éticas ecocéntricas válidas independientemente de la implementación del principio. Esbozo cómo las áreas verdes de una ciudad pueden ayudar a sensibilizar a los citadinos con estas obligaciones. (shrink)

What is the relation between reasoning and self-knowledge? According to Shoemaker (1988), a certain kind of reasoning requires self-knowledge: we cannot rationally revise our beliefs without knowing that we have them, in part because we cannot see that there is a problem with an inconsistent set of propositions unless we are aware of believing them. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. A second account, versions of which can be found in Shoemaker (1988 and 2009) and Byrne (...) (2005), claims that we can reason our way from belief about the world to self-knowledge about such belief. While Shoemaker’s “zany argument” fails to show how such reasoning can issue in self-knowledge, Byrne’s account, which centres on the epistemic rule “If p, believe that you believe that p”, is more successful. Two interesting objections are that the epistemic rule embodies a mad inference (Boyle 2011) and that it makes us form first-order beliefs, rather than revealing them (Gertler 2011). I sketch responses to both objections. (shrink)

According to Fernández, we self-attribute beliefs on the basis of their grounds, “bypassing” the beliefs to be attributed. My paper argues that this procedure runs into normative and metaphysical problems if certain changes in the subject’s ways of forming beliefs occur. If the change is accidental, the problem is normative: self-attributing the resulting belief by way of Bypass cannot be justified. The metaphysical problem is that it is unclear how the procedure can reflect any change in belief-formation at all, given (...) that it is not supposed to take into account anything but the (changing) grounds of the beliefs, not the beliefs themselves. (shrink)

En este pequeño texto, resumo brevemente tres experimentos psicológicos que Peter Carruthers (2010) cita como evidencia para la tesis según la cual no tenemos un acceso introspectivo y exclusivo de la primera persona a nuestras actitudes proposicionales, sino sólo uno interpretativo. Si Carruthers tiene razón, sólo conocemos nuestras creencias, intenciones y otras actitudes a través de un proceso inconsciente de interpretación de nuestro propio comportamiento y, por ende, de la misma manera en que conocemos las mentes de otras personas. Esta (...) exposición tiene el propósito de mostrar la utilidad y necesidad de acercarse al problema del autoconocimiento desde una perspectiva interdisciplinaria. (shrink)

Dieter Henrich’s reconstruction of the transcendental deduction in "Identität und Objektivität" has been criticised (probably unfairly) by Guyer and others for assuming that we have a priori Cartesian certainty about our own continuing existence through time. In his later article "The Identity of the Subject in the Transcendental Deduction", Henrich addresses this criticism and proposes a new, again entirely original argument for a reconstruction. I attempt to elucidate this argument with reference to Evans’s theory of the Generality Constraint and a (...) remark of Strawson’s in Individuals. Its logical form of a sentence-operator requires that the "I think" be capable of accompanying every thought that we can form. Henrich seems to rely on this point, claiming in addition that we must be aware of this property of the "I think". I object that we cannot assume everyone to be capable of doing the philosophy of her own situation. (shrink)

Las teorías lockeanas de la identidad personal afirman que una persona persiste en el tiempo si su conciencia persiste y los criterios para la persistencia de su conciencia son principalmente psicológicos. Una posible motivación para tal teoría es la idea de que “la identidad de una persona no debería ser distinta de lo que la persona misma considera que es”(Rovane 1990, 360). ¿Pero es posible que la propia identidad dependa de lo que uno mismo piensa que es? En este trabajo (...) se investigan tres posibles maneras de interpretar esta afirmación: la identidad temporal de una persona podría depender 1)del conocimiento que ella tiene de su propia identidad, 2) de alguna creencia que tiene sobre su identidad o 3) de lo que ella ha decidido sobre su identidad. Se argumenta que 1) es incoherente, 2) no es plausible y 3) incompatible con la lógica de nuestro concepto de identidad. Como alternativa se esboza una teoría animalista de la identidad temporal de las personas. (shrink)

In the second Meditation, Descartes argues that, because he thinks, he must exist. What are his reasons for accepting the premise of this argument, namely that he thinks? Some commentators suggest that Descartes has a ‘logic’ argument for his premise: It is impossible to be deceived in thinking that one thinks, because being deceived is a species of thinking. In this paper, I argue that this ‘logic’ argument cannot contribute to the first certainty that supposedly stops the Cartesian doubt. Rather, (...) this certainty must be based on another type of access to our own minds, possibly a faculty of introspection. Applying this result to contemporary constitutive theories of self-knowledge (Wright), I show that these cannot be part of what justifies the ascription of particular mental states to a subject. -/- En la segunda de sus "Meditaciones metafísicas", Descartes argumenta que, porque piensa, debe existir. ¿Cuáles son sus razones para aceptar la premisa de este argumento, a saber el que piensa? Algunos comentaristas sugieren que Descartes tiene un argumento 'lógico' para su premisa: No es posible ser engañado en creer que uno piensa, porque el ser engañado también es una especie de pensamiento. En mi ponencia arguyo que este argumento 'lógico' no puede contribuir a la certeza que supuestamente para la duda cartesiana. Más bien, esta certeza debe fundarse en otro tipo de acceso, talvez de forma introspectiva, que tenemos a nuestra propia mente. Aplicando este resultado a teorías contemporáneas constitutivas del autoconocimiento (Wright), muestro que éstas no pueden contribuir a la justificación de la adscripción de estados mentales particulares. (shrink)

Conocemos la propia mente mejor que la mente de otras personas. Explicaciones racionalistas dicen que este fenómeno se debe a nuestra racionalidad: Somos capaces de ajustar nuestras creencias e intenciones racionalmente en vista de su coherencia o de nueva evidencia y tal ajuste requiere que conozcamos nuestras creencias e intenciones con la autoridad de la primera persona. Examino pasajes de McGinn, Shoemaker y Burge, criticando el argumento en tres puntos: (1) Es posible pensar racionalmente sin autoconocimiento. (2) Los requerimientos racionalistas (...) parecen ser incoherentes. (3) Los racionalistas no explican cómo es posible que tengamos un autoconocimiento autoritativo. Como alternativa a las teorías racionalistas, ofrezco una explicación de la autoridad de la primera persona inspirada en una observación de Evans. (shrink)


Someone who believes “I believe it will rain” can easily be mistaken about the rain. But it does not seem likely, and might even be impossible, that he is wrong about the fact that he believes that it is going to rain. How can we account for this authority about our own beliefs – the phenomenon known as first person authority? In this paper I examine a type of theory proposed, in distinct forms, by Crispin Wright and Jane Heal for (...) an explanation of our authority. Both authors claim that our second-order beliefs (of the form “I believe that p”) are constitutive of the first-order beliefs that are self-ascribed in them (beliefs of the form “p”) and both try to derive the necessity of first person authority from this constitutive relation. My paper analyses and criticizes the two proposals and suggests a non-constitutive, alternative account of first person authority. (shrink)

Determinism which denies freedom of action is a common philosophical view. Is the action of such determinists incompatible with Kant’s claim that a rationally willed being “cannot act otherwise than under the idea of freedom” [G 4, 448]? In my paper, I examine Kant’s argument for this claim at the beginning of the Third Section of the Groundwork and argue that it amounts to the assertion that one cannot act while being aware of being guided by invalid principles. Belief in (...) determinism does not necessarily amount to such awareness. A structurally similar argument based on the contrast between deliberation and prediction is examined and similarly found wanting. (shrink)

This paper examines theories of first person authority proposed by Dorit Bar-On (2004), Crispin Wright (1989a) and Sydney Shoemaker (1988). What all three accounts have in common is that they attempt to explain first person authority by reference to the way our language works. Bar-On claims that in our language self-ascriptions of mental states are regarded as expressive of those states; Wright says that in our language such self-ascriptions are treated as true by default; and Shoemaker suggests that they might (...) arise from our capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances. I argue that Bar-On’s expressivism and Wright’s constitutive theory suffer from a similar problem: They fail to explain how it is possible for us to instantiate the language structures that supposedly bring about first person authority. Shoemaker’s account does not suffer from this problem. But it is unclear whether the capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances really yields self-knowledge. Also, it might be that self-knowledge explains why we have this capacity rather than vice versa. (shrink)

En su artículo “On Knowing One’s Own Mind” (1988), Shoemaker argumenta en favor de tres afirmaciones: (1) se requiere un autoconocimiento directo (self-acquaintance) para la cooperación racional con otras personas (porque ésta depende de que podamos decirles qué es lo que creemos e intentamos hacer); (2) el autoconocimiento directo es necesario para la deliberación sobre qué creer y qué hacer (porque no podemos ajustar racionalmente creencias y deseos sin saber qué creencias y deseos tenemos); y (3) el autoconocimiento directo es (...) una consecuencia inmediata de nuestra capacidad para reconocer el carácter paradójico de oraciones que ejemplifican la paradoja de Moore. En este capítulo trato de mostrar que las afirmaciones (1) y (2) no son correctas; la cooperación se puede llevar acabo comunicándonos exclusivamente sobre (supuestos) hechos y acciones y el ajuste racional de creencias normalmente sucede de una manera automática a un nivel de primer orden. Sin embargo, la afirmación (3) indica una relación interesante entre nuestras capacidades conceptuales y lingüísticas, por un lado, y, por el otro, nuestra capacidad de “contestar la pregunta de si creo que p poniendo en marcha el proceso (cualquiera que éste sea) mediante el cual respondo a la pregunta de si p” (Evans, 1982: 225). (shrink)

Self-knowledge presents a challenge for naturalistic theories of mind. Peter Carruthers’s (2011) approach to this challenge is Rylean: He argues that we know our own propositional attitudes because we (unconsciously) interpret ourselves, just as we have to interpret others in order to know theirs’. An alternative approach, opposed by Carruthers, is to argue that we do have a special access to our own beliefs, but that this is a natural consequence of our reasoning capacity. This is the approach of transparency (...) theories of self-knowledge, neatly encapsulated in Byrne’s epistemic rule (BEL): If p, believe that you believe that p (Byrne 2005). In this paper, I examine an objection to Carruthers’s theory in order to see whether it opens up space for a transparency theory of self-knowledge: Is it not the case that in order to interpret someone I have to have some direct access to what I believe (cf. Friedman and Petrashek 2009)? (shrink)

Four different notions of freedom can be distinguished in Kant's philosophy: logical freedom, practical freedom, transcendental freedom and freedom of choice ("Willkür"). The most important of these is transcendental freedom. Kant's argument for its existence depend on the claim that, necessarily, the categorical imperative is the highest principle of reason. My paper examines how this claim can be made plausible.

El capítulo introduce al debate sobre la naturaleza del espacio entre Leibniz y Clarke/Newton y a la posición que adopta Kant más tarde. En particular, se exponen los dos principales argumentos de Leibniz, basados en los Principios de Razón Suficiente e Identidad de Indiscernibles, en favor del relacionismo así como algunas respuestas de Clarke/Newton. También se presenta el argumento basado en la orientación del espacio que propuso Kant en 1768 para refutar el relacionismo de Leibniz. Se concluye con una breve (...) exposición del idealismo trascendental de Kant en su Primera Crítica. (shrink)

What is the relation between first person authority and knowledge of one’s own actions? On one view, it is because we know the reasons for which we act that we know what we do and, analogously, it is because we know the reasons for which we avow a belief that we know what we believe. Carlos Moya (2006) attributes some such theory to Richard Moran (2001) and criticises it on the grounds of circularity. In this paper, I examine the view (...) attributed to Moran. I rebut the charge of circularity, but also reject the theory as an adequate interpretation of Moran. (shrink)

In "Individuals", Peter Strawson talks about identifying, discriminating and picking out particular objects, regarding discriminating and picking out as ways of identifying. I object that, strictly speaking, identification means to say of two things that they are the same. In contrast, discriminating an object from all others can be done by just ascribing some predicate to it that does not apply to the others. Picking out an object does not even seem to require to distinguish it from all others. The (...) object picked is distinct in that it is the picked one, but it is not clear - even in the context of sensorily picking out - that I have to be aware of this in order to do the picking. (shrink)

It is a matter of fact that Europe is facing more and more crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and the current economic context. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has stressed this situation even further, thus highlighting the need for taking action. Active and Assisted Living technologies come as a viable approach to help facing these challenges, thanks to the high potential they have in enabling remote care and support. Broadly speaking, AAL can be referred (...) to as the use of innovative and advanced Information and Communication Technologies to create supportive, inclusive and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. AAL capitalizes on the growing pervasiveness and effectiveness of sensing and computing facilities to supply the persons in need with smart assistance, by responding to their necessities of autonomy, independence, comfort, security and safety. The application scenarios addressed by AAL are complex, due to the inherent heterogeneity of the end-user population, their living arrangements, and their physical conditions or impairment. Despite aiming at diverse goals, AAL systems should share some common characteristics. They are designed to provide support in daily life in an invisible, unobtrusive and user-friendly manner. Moreover, they are conceived to be intelligent, to be able to learn and adapt to the requirements and requests of the assisted people, and to synchronise with their specific needs. Nevertheless, to ensure the uptake of AAL in society, potential users must be willing to use AAL applications and to integrate them in their daily environments and lives. In this respect, video- and audio-based AAL applications have several advantages, in terms of unobtrusiveness and information richness. Indeed, cameras and microphones are far less obtrusive with respect to the hindrance other wearable sensors may cause to one’s activities. In addition, a single camera placed in a room can record most of the activities performed in the room, thus replacing many other non-visual sensors. Currently, video-based applications are effective in recognising and monitoring the activities, the movements, and the overall conditions of the assisted individuals as well as to assess their vital parameters. Similarly, audio sensors have the potential to become one of the most important modalities for interaction with AAL systems, as they can have a large range of sensing, do not require physical presence at a particular location and are physically intangible. Moreover, relevant information about individuals’ activities and health status can derive from processing audio signals. Nevertheless, as the other side of the coin, cameras and microphones are often perceived as the most intrusive technologies from the viewpoint of the privacy of the monitored individuals. This is due to the richness of the information these technologies convey and the intimate setting where they may be deployed. Solutions able to ensure privacy preservation by context and by design, as well as to ensure high legal and ethical standards are in high demand. After the review of the current state of play and the discussion in GoodBrother, we may claim that the first solutions in this direction are starting to appear in the literature. A multidisciplinary debate among experts and stakeholders is paving the way towards AAL ensuring ergonomics, usability, acceptance and privacy preservation. The DIANA, PAAL, and VisuAAL projects are examples of this fresh approach. This report provides the reader with a review of the most recent advances in audio- and video-based monitoring technologies for AAL. It has been drafted as a collective effort of WG3 to supply an introduction to AAL, its evolution over time and its main functional and technological underpinnings. In this respect, the report contributes to the field with the outline of a new generation of ethical-aware AAL technologies and a proposal for a novel comprehensive taxonomy of AAL systems and applications. Moreover, the report allows non-technical readers to gather an overview of the main components of an AAL system and how these function and interact with the end-users. The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely lifelogging and self-monitoring, remote monitoring of vital signs, emotional state recognition, food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, activity and personal assistance, gesture recognition, fall detection and prevention, mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted. The report ends with an overview of the challenges, the hindrances and the opportunities posed by the uptake in real world settings of AAL technologies. In this respect, the report illustrates the current procedural and technological approaches to cope with acceptability, usability and trust in the AAL technology, by surveying strategies and approaches to co-design, to privacy preservation in video and audio data, to transparency and explainability in data processing, and to data transmission and communication. User acceptance and ethical considerations are also debated. Finally, the potentials coming from the silver economy are overviewed. (shrink)

The objective of Working Group 4 of the COST Action NET4Age-Friendly is to examine existing policies, advocacy, and funding opportunities and to build up relations with policy makers and funding organisations. Also, to synthesize and improve existing knowledge and models to develop from effective business and evaluation models, as well as to guarantee quality and education, proper dissemination and ensure the future of the Action. The Working Group further aims to enable capacity building to improve interdisciplinary participation, to promote knowledge (...) exchange and to foster a cross-European interdisciplinary research capacity, to improve cooperation and co-creation with cross-sectors stakeholders and to introduce and educate students SHAFE implementation and sustainability. To enable the achievement of the objectives of Working Group 4, the Leader of the Working Group, the Chair and Vice-Chair, in close cooperation with the Science Communication Coordinator, developed a template to map the current state of SHAFE policies, funding opportunities and networking in the COST member countries of the Action. On invitation, the Working Group lead received contributions from 37 countries, in a total of 85 Action members. The contributions provide an overview of the diversity of SHAFE policies and opportunities in Europe and beyond. These were not edited or revised and are a result of the main areas of expertise and knowledge of the contributors; thus, gaps in areas or content are possible and these shall be further explored in the following works and reports of this WG. But this preliminary mapping is of huge importance to proceed with the WG activities. In the following chapters, an introduction on the need of SHAFE policies is presented, followed by a summary of the main approaches to be pursued for the next period of work. The deliverable finishes with the opportunities of capacity building, networking and funding that will be relevant to undertake within the frame of Working Group 4 and the total COST Action. The total of country contributions is presented in the annex of this deliverable. (shrink)

El propósito de Levinas coincide con el intento moderno de recuperación de la verdad y del sentido aunque en una dirección y contenidos distintos. Si en Hegel la Aufhebung tendía a la Totalidad y lo Mismo , para Husserl será esencial la apertura de Mundo que tiene lugar ya en la experiencia de conciencia del ego trascendental, mientras que Heidegger, por su parte, primará la pregunta por el Ser. El intento de Levinas, en cambio, no será recomponer la relación entre (...) el yo, por un lado, y el mundo, lo absoluto, las cosas o el ser, por el otro, sino la recuperación de la relación entre yo-y-otro. No es un simple cambio en la dirección o en el contenido del sentido de la reflexión filosófica, sino un intento serio de encontrar una nueva significación, «otra manera que ser» que no termine siendo otro proyecto más de integración y síntesis. Lo que propone Levinas es una auténtica salida para la que traza el itinerario que va del ser al otro, recurriendo sencillamente a la experiencia que cotidianamente se nos impone a cada uno de nosotros con un peso incontestable, a saber: la presencia de las diferencias, de lo asimétrico, en definitiva, la manifestación del otro en tanto que otro. Es esta experiencia heterónoma ordinaria, esta vivencia diaria de la alteridad como dato primordial del fenómeno de la intersubjetividad el ámbito que ha intentado explorar nuestro autor. ¿Acaso es esta responsabilidad así sentida conjugable con una experiencia filosófica universal? ¿La responsabilidad puede llevarse hasta el límite de la substitución por el otro, hasta la de-posición del Yo sin identidad? ¿Qué tipo de relación puede darse con algo absolutamente asimétrico, exterior, previo e irreductible? ¿De dónde viene esa asignación apremiante de responsabilidad que llega hasta arrojarme en la obsesión y el asedio? ¿Cómo puede ser éticamente plausible un mandato tan traumatizante y violento que termina por convertir al sujeto en rehén, sustituido ya por los otros? ¿Es posible conciliar la libertad y la autónoma decisión del sujeto con una consideración de la subjetividad como «heme aquí», absoluta pasividad expuesta a los otros y vulnerabilidad de una piel que se ofrece al ultraje y la herida?. En definitiva: ¿es la subjetividad algo de lo que partimos o a lo que llegamos? (shrink)

Being in a mood—such as an anxious, irritable, depressed, tranquil, or cheerful mood—tends to alter the way we react emotionally to the particular objects we encounter. But how, exactly, do moods alter the way we experience particular objects? Perceptualism, a popular approach to understanding affective experiences, holds that moods function like "colored lenses," altering the way we perceive the evaluative properties of the objects we encounter. In this essay, I offer a phenomenological analysis of the experience of being in a (...) mood that illustrates the limitations of the colored lens metaphor and demonstrates the basic inadequacy of the perceptualist account of moods. I argue that when we are in a mood, it is common to experience a kind of "emotional disconnection" in which we perceive evaluative properties that would normally elicit strong emotional reactions from us, but nonetheless we find that, in our present mood, we remain emotionally numb to these perceptions. Such experiences of "seeing but not feeling" are difficult to understand from within the perceptualist paradigm. Building on the work of Martin Heidegger, I sketch an alternative, phenomenological analysis of moods that can better account for experiences of emotional disconnection. On this alternative account, being in a mood does not merely alter the content of our perceptions but, rather, alters the way we interpret the overall significance of what we perceive, relative to a certain situational context. (shrink)

Gianni Vattimo's Non-religious Christianity. Weakening of being, secularization and divine kenosis.

Impresionante. En el otro lado del mundo, en un país que fue comunista durante un par de décadas y que aun pretende serlo, aunque su economía sea más abierta y de mercado que la argentina, sus académicos también parecen tener más claro dónde buscar teorías económicas para entender el fenómeno empresarial que allí ocurre.

The explanatory role of natural selection is one of the long-term debates in evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, the consensus has been slippery because conceptual confusions and the absence of a unified, formal causal model that integrates different explanatory scopes of natural selection. In this study we attempt to examine two questions: (i) What can the theory of natural selection explain? and (ii) Is there a causal or explanatory model that integrates all natural selection explananda? For the first question, we argue that (...) five explananda have been assigned to the theory of natural selection and that four of them may be actually considered explananda of natural selection. For the second question, we claim that a probabilistic conception of causality and the statistical relevance concept of explanation are both good models for understanding the explanatory role of natural selection. We review the biological and philosophical disputes about the explanatory role of natural selection and formalize some explananda in probabilistic terms using classical results from population genetics. Most of these explananda have been discussed in philosophical terms but some of them have been mixed up and confused. We analyze and set the limits of these problems. (shrink)

A ‘lottery belief’ is a belief that a particular ticket has lost a large, fair lottery, based on nothing more than the odds against it winning. The lottery paradox brings out a tension between the idea that lottery beliefs are justified and the idea that that one can always justifiably believe the deductive consequences of things that one justifiably believes – what is sometimes called the principle of closure. Many philosophers have treated the lottery paradox as an argument against the (...) second idea – but I make a case here that it is the first idea that should be given up. As I shall show, there are a number of independent arguments for denying that lottery beliefs are justified. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is with the claim that knowledge is a mental state – a claim that Williamson places front and centre in Knowledge and Its Limits. While I am not by any means convinced that the claim is false, I do think it carries certain costs that have not been widely appreciated. One source of resistance to this claim derives from internalism about the mental – the view, roughly speaking, that one’s mental states are determined by one’s (...) internal physical state. In order to know that something is the case it is not, in general, enough for one’s internal physical state to be a certain way – the wider world must also be a certain way. If we accept that knowledge is a mental state, we must give up internalism. One might think that this is no cost, since much recent work in the philosophy of mind has, in any case, converged on the view that internalism is false. This thought, though, is too quick. As I will argue here, the claim that knowledge is a mental state would take us to a view much further from internalism than anything philosophers of mind have converged upon. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer reasons for thinking that two prominent sceptical arguments in the literature – the underdetermination-based sceptical argument and the closure-based sceptical argument – are less philosophically interesting than is commonly supposed. The underdetermination-based argument begs the question against a non-sceptic and can be dismissed with little fanfare. The closure-based argument, though perhaps not question-begging per se, does rest upon contentious assumptions that a non-sceptic is under no pressure to accept.

Argument mapping is a way of diagramming the logical structure of an argument to explicitly and concisely represent reasoning. The use of argument mapping in critical thinking instruction has increased dramatically in recent decades. This paper overviews the innovation and provides a procedural approach for new teaches wanting to use argument mapping in the classroom. A brief history of argument mapping is provided at the end of this paper.

Material from this paper appears in Chap. 7 of my book Reason and Being, but there is also stuff here that isn't in the book. In particular, it discusses the claims that, for Spinoza, conceiving implies explaining and that existence is identical to or reducible to conceivability. So, if you're interested in those issues, this paper might be worth a read.

Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a 'good' model. When addressing global properties of the Universe or its initial state this becomes a particularly pressing issue. How to assess the probability of the Universe as a whole is empirically ambiguous, since we can examine only part of a single realisation of the system under investigation: at some point, data will (...) run out. We review the basics of applying Bayesian statistical explanation to the Universe as a whole. We argue that a conventional Bayesian approach to model inference generally fails in such circumstances, and cannot resolve, e.g., the so-called 'measure problem' in inflationary cosmology. Implicit and non-empirical valuations inevitably enter model assessment in these cases. This undermines the possibility to perform Bayesian model comparison. One must therefore either stay silent, or pursue a more general form of systematic and rational model assessment. We outline a generalised axiological Bayesian model inference framework, based on mathematical lattices. This extends inference based on empirical data (evidence) to additionally consider the properties of model structure (elegance) and model possibility space (beneficence). We propose this as a natural and theoretically well-motivated framework for introducing an explicit, rational approach to theoretical model prejudice and inference beyond data. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a philosophical and theoretical account of biological communication grounded in the notion of organisation. The organisational approach characterises living systems as organised in such a way that they are capable to self-produce and self-maintain while in constant interaction with the environment. To apply this theoretical framework to the study of biological communication, we focus on a specific approach, based on the notion of influence, according to which communication takes place when a signal emitted by a (...) sender triggers a change in the behaviour of the receiver that is functional for the sender itself. We critically analyse the current formulations of this account, that interpret what is functional for the sender in terms of evolutionary adaptations. Specifically, the adoption of this etiological functional framework may lead to the exclusion of several phenomena usually studied as instances of communication, and possibly even of entire fields of investigation such as synthetic biology. As an alternative, we reframe the influence approach in organisational terms, characterising functions in terms of contributions to the current organisation of a biological system. We develop a theoretical account of biological communication in which communicative functions are distinguished from other types of biological functions described by the organisational account (e.g. metabolic, ecological, etc.). The resulting organisational-influence approach allows to carry out causal analyses of current instances of phenomena of communication, without the need to provide etiological explanations. In such a way it makes it possible to understand in terms of communication those phenomena which realise interactive patterns typical of signalling interactions – and are usually studied as such in scientific practice – despite not being the result of evolutionary adaptations. Moreover, this approach provides operational tools to design and study communicative interactions in experimental fields such as synthetic biology. (shrink)

Fragments is a verse and narrative work of phenomenological and existential ontology focusing on mind-world unity and mind-world dislocation in the experience of self through time. Pivotal experiential and historical moments -- moments when normative guardrails and unreflective models of the world may be compromised -- are approached as fundamental markers of how we transact with evolving versions of ourselves and world.

What is critical thinking, especially in the context of higher education? How have research and scholarship on the matter developed over recent past decades? What is the current state of the art here? How might the potential of critical thinking be enhanced? What kinds of teaching are necessary in order to realize that potential? And just why is this topic important now? These are the key questions motivating this volume. We hesitate to use terms such as “comprehensive” or “complete” or (...) “definitive,” but we believe that, taken in the round, the chapters in this volume together offer a fair insight into the contemporary understandings of higher education worldwide. We also believe that this volume is much needed, and we shall try to justify that claim in this introduction. (shrink)

La posverdad es un fenómeno mediático referido a la tergiversación de la verdad en los medios de comunicación, especialmente por la proliferación de noticias falsas. En este artículo definiré los principales elementos de este fenómeno, los hechos que han generado su aparición, y un marco filosófico para su análisis ético profundo. Explico además por qué la simple asociación de la posverdad con la mentira es insuficiente, y planteo que la ampliación del marco conceptual para su análisis, con la introducción de (...) la idea de charlatanería desarrollada por el filósofo Harry Frankfurt, junto con la noción de emotivismo de Alasdair MacIntyre, nos pueden ayudar a entender mejor sus efectos perjudiciales. Afirmo que sin estos conceptos no es posible entender la intrínseca complejidad de la posverdad, y sus repercusiones más nocivas en la sociedad. Finalmente, muestro los principales peligros de la posverdad en la era poscovid debidos, especialmente, a la desconfianza generada por la evidente manipulación de la verdad, y la fragilidad ética y antropológica en la que se encuentra el ser humano en la actualidad. (shrink)

This book explores a question central to philosophy--namely, what does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is, given one's evidence. In this book this view is rejected and replaced with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a proposition, one's evidence must normically support it--roughly, one's evidence must make the falsity of that proposition (...) abnormal in the sense of calling for special, independent explanation. This conception of justification bears upon a range of topics in epistemology and beyond. Ultimately, this way of looking at justification guides us to a new, unfamiliar picture of how we should respond to our evidence and manage our own fallibility. This picture is developed here. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to criticisms of my book Being and Reason recently made by Yitzhak Melamed.

Seen from the point of view of evaluation conditions, a usual way to obtain a connexive logic is to take a well-known negation, for example, Boolean negation or de Morgan negation, and then assign special properties to the conditional to validate Aristotle’s and Boethius’ Theses. Nonetheless, another theoretical possibility is to have the extensional or the material conditional and then assign special properties to the negation to validate the theses. In this paper we examine that possibility, not sufficiently explored in (...) the connexive literature yet.We offer a characterization of connexive negation disentangled from the cancellation account of negation, a previous attempt to define connexivity on top of a distinctive negation. We also discuss an ancient view on connexive logics, according to which a valid implication is one where the negation of the consequent is incompatible with the antecedent, and discuss the role of our idea of connexive negation for this kind of view. (shrink)

There is something puzzling about statistical evidence. One place this manifests is in the law, where courts are reluctant to base affirmative verdicts on evidence that is purely statistical, in spite of the fact that it is perfectly capable of meeting the standards of proof enshrined in legal doctrine. After surveying some proposed explanations for this, I shall outline a new approach – one that makes use of a notion of normalcy that is distinct from the idea of statistical frequency. (...) The puzzle is not, however, merely a legal one. Our unwillingness to base beliefs on statistical evidence is by no means limited to the courtroom, and is at odds with almost every general principle that epistemologists have proposed as to how we ought to manage our beliefs. (shrink)