“Terms that have histories cannot be defined.” – Nietzsche“[T]he reality to which we were attending seemed to resist our thinking it.” – Cora Diamond[1] Much has been learned in recent decades about the behaviour and abilities of many species of non-human animals. Increasingly many who reflect on the abilities of languageless animals are uncomfortable with a once prevalent dichotomy of either assigning these abilities to the realm of mere mechanism or granting such creatures full rationality and more or less the (...) entire range of abilities that involves. This has lead to no little reflection and debate regarding how to proceed in studying animal “cognition,” and about what counts as adequately or accurately explaining animal behaviour. I cautiously hope herein to contribute to the clarity of what is already a discussion too rich and complex to do any justice to here. Little of what I say will be original, but the particular way of approaching the issues herein may shed some light on why certain issues have endured. (shrink)

How do individuals guide their activities towards some goal? Harry Frankfurt once identified the task of explaining guidance as the central problem in action theory. An explanation has proved to be elusive, however. In this paper, I show how we can marshal empirical research to make explanatory progress. I contend that human agents have a primitive capacity to guide visual attention, and that this capacity is actually constituted by a sub-individual psychological control-system: the executive system. I thus illustrate how we (...) can explain exercises of individual-level guidance by appeal to its sub-individual constitution. This opens up a new avenue for explicating agency. (shrink)

In paradigm exercises of agency, individuals guide their activities toward some goal. A central challenge for action theory is to explain how individuals guide. This challenge is an instance of the more general problem of how to accommodate individuals and their actions in the natural world, as explained by natural science. Two dominant traditions–primitivism and the causal theory–fail to address the challenge in a satisfying way. Causal theorists appeal to causation by an intention, through a feedback mechanism, in explaining guidance. (...) Primitivists postulate primitive agential capacities in their explanations. The latter neglect to explain how primitive capacities integrate with findings from natural science. The former do not explain why some feedback mechanism’s activity amounts to the agent’s guidance. In this paper I argue that both traditions should acknowledge a capacity to guide, as actually constituted by the executive system. I argue that appeals to this empirically discovered psychological system explain how individuals guide in a way that integrates with explanations from cognitive science. Individuals’ capacity to guide is embedded in the natural world through the activity of its constituent (mechanistic) components. (shrink)

The argument from causal overdetermination is considered to be the shortest route to token monism. It only assumes that:1.Efficacy: Mental events are causes of physical events.2.Closure: Every physical event has a sufficient physical cause.3.Exclusion: Systematic Causal Overdetermination is impossible: if an event x is a sufficient cause of an event y then no event x* distinct from x is a cause of y.4.Identity: Therefore, mental events are physical events.Exclusion does not deny the possibility of two gunmen that fi re at (...) a victim at the same time. But event-dualism is like a systematic fi ringsquad case — whenever I want to raise my arm, my arm is raised, and that is intolerable. (shrink)

The argument from causal overdetermination is considered to be the shortest route to token monism. It only assumes that:1.Efficacy: Mental events are causes of physical events.2.Closure: Every physical event has a sufficient physical cause.3.Exclusion: Systematic Causal Overdetermination is impossible: if an event x is a sufficient cause of an event y then no event x* distinct from x is a cause of y.4.Identity: Therefore, mental events are physical events.Exclusion does not deny the possibility of two gunmen that fi re at (...) a victim at the same time. But event-dualism is like a systematic fi ringsquad case — whenever I want to raise my arm, my arm is raised, and that is intolerable. (shrink)

Concerns about ‘mental causation’ are concerns about how it is possible for mental states to cause anything to happen. How does what we believe, want, see, feel, hope, or dread manage to cause us to act? Certain positions on the mind-body problem—including some forms of physicalism—make such causation look highly problematic. This entry sketches several of the main reasons to worry, and raises some questions for further investigation.

This article takes up the proposal that action and expression enable perceptual knowledge of other minds, a proposal that runs counter to a tradition of thinking that other minds are special in that they are essentially unobservable. I argue that even if we accept this proposal regarding perceptual knowledge, there is still a difference between knowing another person and knowing other things. I articulate this difference by pointing out that I can know another person by sharing knowledge with her. Such (...) sharing is expressed in the use of the second-person pronoun. Thus, I argue, other minds are indeed special as objects of knowledge, but not in the way the tradition has supposed. (shrink)

It is often argued that neuroscience can be expected to provide insights of significance for education. Advocates of this view are sometimes committed to ‘brainism’, the view (a) that an individual’s mental life is constituted by states, events and processes in her brain, and (b) that psychological attributes may legitimately be ascribed to the brain. This paper considers the case for rejecting brainism in favour of ‘personalism’, the view that psychological attributes are appropriately ascribed only to persons and that mental (...) phenomena do not occur ‘inside’ the person but are aspects of her mode of engagement with the world. The paper explores arguments for personalism from Russian philosopher Evald Ilyenkov and a number of contemporary Western thinkers, including Peter Hacker and John McDowell. It is argued that, since plausible forms of personalism do not deny that brain functioning is a causal precondition of our mental lives, personalism is consistent with the claim that neuroscience is relevant to education, and not just to the explanation of learning disorders. Nevertheless, it is important that fascination with scientific innovation and technological possibility should not distort our conception of what education is or ought to be, leading us to portray education not as a communicative endeavour, but as an exercise in engineering. (shrink)

This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely (...) tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call phenomenal concepts: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, such as the concept of red. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains and predicts the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism on the basis of the special nature of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Thus we not only show why physicalism is not threatened by such arguments, but also demonstrate its strength in virtue of its ability to predict and explain away such arguments in a principled way. However, we take the main contribution of this work to be what it provides in addition to a response to those conceivability arguments, namely, a substantive account of the interface between sensory and conceptual systems and the mechanisms of introspection as based on the special nature of the information flow between them. (shrink)

Most of the free will debate operates under the assumption that classic determinism and indeterminism are the only metaphysical options available. Through an analysis of Dennett’s view of free will as gradually evolving this article attempts to point to emergentist, interactivist and temporal metaphysical options, which have been left largely unexplored by contemporary theorists. Whereas, Dennett himself holds that “the kind of free will worth wanting” is compatible with classic determinism, I propose that his models of determinism fit poorly with (...) his evolutionary theory and naturalist commitments. In particular, his so-called “intuition pumps” seem to rely on the assumption that reality will have a compositional bottom layer where appearance and reality coincide. I argue that instead of positing this and other “unexplained explainers” we should allow for the heretical possibility that there might not be any absolute bottom, smallest substances or universal laws, but relational interactions all the way down. Through the details of Dennett’s own account of the importance of horizontal transmission in evolution and the causal efficacy of epistemically limited but complex layered “selves,” it is argued that our autonomy is linked to the ability to affect reality by controlling appearances. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that – in order to avoid trivializations – a Philosophy of Birth needs to elaborate a precise concept of transformation and distinguish it carefully from that of adaptation. While transformation goes beyond the limited self-referential perspective of an individual and, on the social level, of the gregarious identity, adaptation aims at strengthening or preserving the old self-referential equilibrium. Transformation is driven by what Zambrano has called, with an exceptionally happy expression, the “hunger to be (...) born completely”. Such a hunger pushes one to continue one’s own birth through the encounter with the Other. Transformation has a creative feature that is made possible by two factors: the surplus of the effect over the cause, and the priority of the real over the possible. These premises lead to a radical questioning of the primacy of the possible on the real, at least as it has been conceived so far in mainstream Western philosophy, with few exceptions, such as Schelling, Bergson and Scheler. In the first part of this text, I shall consider a new Philosophy of Birth in the light of the concept of transformation and in this regard deal with several core themes such as the hunger to be born completely, the new beginning, creative time, the priority of the real over the possible, the limits of finalism, the surplus of effect over cause, and the creative force that expresses itself in the act of ideation. In the second part, I shall analyze the relation between birth and death and focus especially on their intimate and reciprocal connection by referring to the image of the seed that, after falling on the ground, germinates and breaks its own integument. (shrink)

What is the relationship between pain and the body? I claim that pain is best explained as a type of personal experience and the bodily response during pain is best explained in terms of a type of mechanical neurophysiologic operation. I apply the radical philosophy of identity theory from philosophy of mind to the relationship between the personal experience of pain and specific neurophysiologic mechanism and argue that the relationship between them is best explained as one of type identity. Specifically, (...) pain is a specific type of personal experience identical to a specific type of allostatic stress response comprised of interdependent nervous, endocrine and immune mechanical operations. (shrink)

Philosophical interest in intentional action has flourished in recent decades. Typically, action theorists propose necessary and sufficient conditions for a movement's being an action, conditions derived from a conceptual analysis of folk psychological action ascriptions. However, several key doctrinal and methodological features of contemporary action theory are troubling, in particular (i) the insistence that folk psychological kinds like beliefs and desires have neurophysiological correlates, (ii) the assumption that the concept of action is "classical" in structure (making it amenable to definition (...) in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for its proper application), and (iii) the assumption that deferring to intuitions about the application of the concept of action amidst the context of fantastical thought experiments furnishes an effective method for judging the adequacy of proposed analyses. After consideration of these problems it is argued that action theory needs to be reoriented in a more naturalistic direction, the methods and aims of which are continuous with those of the empirical sciences. The paper concludes with a sketch (and defense) of the methodological foundations of a naturalistic approach to intentional action. (shrink)