In this paper I display a general metaphysical assumption that characterizes basic naturalistic views and that is inherited, in a residual form, by their leading teleological rivals. The assumption is that intentional states require identifiable inner vehicles and that to explain intentional properties we must develop accounts that bind specific contents to specific vehicles. I show that this assumption is deeply rooted in representationalist and reductionist theories of content and I argue that it is deeply inappropriate. I sketch the main (...) features of plausible alternatives: such alternatives are either anti-representationalist (Dynamical Systems' models) or anti-reductionist (institution-based approaches), and are not committed to any such metaphysical premise. (shrink)

If psychology requires a taxonomy that categorizes mental states according to their causal powers, the common sense method of individuating mental states (a taxonomy by intentional content) is unacceptable because mental states can have different intentional content, but identical causal powers. This difference threatens both the vindication of belief/desire psychology and the viability of scientific theories whose posits include intentional states. To resolve this conflict, Fodor has proposed that for scientific purposes mental states should be classified by their narrow content. (...) Such a classification is supposed to correspond to a classification by causal powers. Yet a state's narrow content is also supposed to determine its (broad) intentional content whenever that state is 'anchored' to a context. I examine the two most plausible accounts of narrow content implicit in Fodor's work, arguing that neither account can accomplish both goals. (shrink)

Cet article envisage deux types de fondements possibles pour une « économie du bien-être néo-samuelsonnienne ». On défend l’idée que l’approche néo-samuelsonnienne en économie mène à un problème de réconciliation entre l’économie positive et l’économie normative, en raison du fait que l’agent économique n’est plus nécessairement l’unité normativement pertinente. Deux formes de réconciliation ayant des implications radicalement différentes pour le statut de l’économie normative sont envisagées. La première consiste à adopter une approche normative en termes de « welfarisme formel » (...) prétendant à une complète neutralité quant à l’identité du sujet et l’unité de mesure de l’analyse normative. L’implication principale est de faire de l’économie du bien-être une branche de l’économie positive. Une seconde approche consiste à une donner une importance axiologique particulière aux personnes, non parce qu’elles sont des prototypes d’agents économiques, mais parce qu’elles sont dotées de la capacité de se représenter, auprès des autres et d’elles-mêmes, comme des entités raisonnables au travers de processus de construction narrative. Cette capacité donne une justification à la vision selon laquelle le bien-être est constituée des préférences d’une personne, dans le sens où ces préférences sont fondées sur des raisons et valeurs définissant l’identité personnelle. (shrink)

A principal source of interest in behavioral economics has been its advertised contributions to policies aimed at ‘nudging’ people away from allegedly natural but self-defeating behavior toward patterns of response thought more likely to improve their welfare. This has occasioned controversies among economists and philosophers around the normative limits of paternalism, especially by technical policy advisors. One recent suggestion has been that ‘boosting,’ in which interventions aim to enhance people’s general cognitive skills and representational repertoires instead of manipulating their choice (...) environments behind their backs, avoids the main normative challenges. A limitation in most of this literature is that it has focused on relatively sweeping policy recommendations and consequently on strong polar alternatives of general paternalism and strict laissez faire. We review a real instance, drawn from a consulting project we conducted for an investment bank, of a proposed intervention that is more typical of the kind that economists are more often actually called upon to offer. In this example, the sophistication of current tools for preference attribution, combined with philosophical externalism about the semantics of preferences that makes it less plausible to attribute their literal self-conscious representation to people as propositional attitude content becomes more tightly refined, blocks applicability of the distinction between nudging and boosting. This seems to call for irreducible, context-specific ethical judgment in assessing the appropriateness of the forms of paternalism that economists must actually wrestle with in going about their everyday business. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (Analysis 58(1):7–19, 1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way of thinking about these dividing lines. (...) With reference to Brandom’s (1994, 2000, Inquiry 47:236–253, 2008) broad semantic inferentialism, we show that a theory of meaning can be at the same time a variety of active externalism. While we grant that supporters of other varieties of content externalism (e.g., Putnam 1975 and Burge (Philosophical Review 95:3–45, 1986) can deny active externalism, this is not an option for semantic inferentialists: On this latter view, the role of the environment (both in its social and natural form) is not ‘passive’ in the sense assumed by the alternative approaches to content externalism. (shrink)

We think that certain of our mental states represent the world around us, and represent it in determinate ways. My perception that there is salt in the pot before me, for example, represents my immediate environment as containing a certain object, a pot, with a certain kind of substance, salt, in it. My belief that salt dissolves in water represents something in the world around me, namely salt, as having a certain observational property, that of dissolving. But what exactly is (...) the relation between such states and the world beyond the surfaces of our skins? Specifically, what exactly is the relation between thecontentsof those states, and the world beyond our bodies? (shrink)

The existence of quantum correlates of consciousness (QCC) is doubtful from a scientific perspective. But even if their existence were verified, philosophical problems would remain. On the other hand, there could be more to QCC than meets the sceptic's eye: • QCC might be useful or even necessary for a better understanding of conscious experience or quantum physics or both. The main reasons for this are: the measurement problem (the nature of observation, the mysterious collapse of the wave function, etc.), (...) ostensibly shared features of quantum phenomena and conscious phenomena (e.g., complementarity, nonspatiality, acausality, spontaneity, and holism) and connections (ontology, causation, and knowledge), the qualia problem (subjectivity, explanatory gap etc.). But there are many problems, especially questions regarding realism and the nature and role of conscious observers; • QCC are conceptually challenging, because there are definitory problems and some crucial ontological and epistemological shortcomings. It is instructive to compare them with recent proposals for understanding neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). QCC are not sufficient for a quantum theory of mind, nor might they be necessary except perhaps in a very broad sense; • QCC are also empirically challenging. Nevertheless, QCC could be relevant and important for the mindbody problem: QCC might reveal features that are necessary at least for behavioral manifestations of human consciousness. But QCC are compatible with very different proposals for a solution of the mind-body problem. This seems to be both advantageous and detrimental. QCC restrict accounts of nomological identity. The discovery of QCC cannot establish a naturalistic theory of mind alone. But there are also problems with QCC in the framework of other ontologies. (shrink)

I sketch an explanatory framework that fits a variety of contemporary research programs in cognitive science. I then investigate the scope and the implications of this framework. The framework emphasizes (a) the explanatory role played by the semantic content of cognitive representations, and (b) the important mechanistic, non-intentional dimension of cognitive explanations. I show how both of these features are present simultaneously in certain varieties of cognitive explanation. I also consider the explanatory role played by grounded representational content, that is, (...) content evaluated by appeal to its truth, falsity, accuracy, inaccuracy and other relational properties. (shrink)

The first thesis is that beliefs play a role in explaining behavior. This is reasonably uncontroversial, though it has been controverted. Why did I raise my arm? Because I wanted to emphasize a point, and believed that I could do so by raising my arm. The belief that I could emphasize a point by raising my arm is central to the most natural explanation of my action.

Psychological individualism is motivated by two taxonomic principles: (i) that psychological states are individuated by their causal powers, and (ii) that causal powers supervene upon intrinsic physiological state. I distinguish two interpretations of individualism--the 'orthodox' and the 'alternative'--each of which is consistent with these motivating principles. I argue that the alternative interpretation is legitimately individualistic on the grounds that it accurately reflects the actual taxonomic practices of bona fide individualistic sciences. The classification of homeobox genes in developmental genetics provides an (...) illustration. When applied to the taxonomy of psychological kinds, alternative individualism has some surprising consequences. In particular, externalist taxonomies of thought are consistent with the alternative interpretation, and hence consistent with individualism. I conclude, on this basis, that the individualism/externalism dispute which has long preoccupied philosophy of psychology is an empty one. (shrink)

In _On The Soul_ (425a-b), Aristotle drew a distinction between those qualities that are perceptible only via a single sense and those that are perceptible by more than one. The latter qualities he called.

I criticize an account of perceptual warrant proposed by [Burge, Tyler. 2003. “Perceptual Entitlement.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (3): 503–548]. Burge contends that a subject's beliefs are entitled only if that subject's perceptual system represents its normal environment in a reliably veridical manner. The normal environment, according to Burge, is the environment in which the contents of the subject's perceptual experiences were fixed. I present a case that shows that the contents of a subject's perceptual experiences can remain fixed (...) while features of its perceptual system relevant to its representational reliability change. This leads to problematic consequences for Burge's view. (shrink)

In a recent and provocative paper, Matthew Fisher, Mariel Goddu and Frank Keil (2015) have argued, on the basis of experimental evidence, that ‘searching the internet leads people to conflate information that can be found online with knowledge “in the head”’ (2015, 675), specifically, by inclining us to conflate mere access to information for personal knowledge (2015, 674). This chapter has three central aims. First, we briefly detail Fisher et al.’s results and show how, on the basis of recent work (...) in virtue epistemology (e.g., Tiberius and Walker 1998; Roberts and Wood 2007; Tanesini 2016), their interpretation of the data supports the thesis that searching the internet is conducive to the vice of intellectual arrogance. Second, we argue that this arrogance interpretation of the data rests on an implicit commitment to cognitive internalism. Thirdly, we show how the data can be given a very different explanation in light of the hypothesis of extended cognition (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008) – one which challenges the extent to which Fisher et al. are entitled to insist that subjects are actually conflating access to knowledge for personal knowledge in the first place. We conclude by suggesting how, against the background of extended cognition rather than cognitive internalism, we have some reason to think that searching the internet might actually foster (in certain circumstances) virtuous intellectual humility. (shrink)

Research seeking to explain the perpetration of violence and atrocities by humans against other humans offers both social and individualistic explanations, which differ namely in the roles attributed to empathy. Prominent social models suggest that some manifestations of inter-human violence are caused by parochial attitudes and obedience reinforced by within-group empathy. Individualistic explanations of violence, by contrast, posit that stable intra-individual characteristics of the brain and personality of some individuals lead them to commit violence and atrocities. An individualistic explanation argues (...) that the chief cause of violence is the perpetrator’'s lack of empathy with the victim. To offer the rudiments of a critique of the individualistic approach, I critically examine a model stating that violence is caused by empathy erosion. Specifically, the discussion of the empathy-erosion model is applied to the case of honour-based violence, a type of violence known for its communal character. Building from prior enquiries into violence and social cognition, I argue that an empathy-erosion explanation of HBV is defective because it does not consider important cultural and historical enablers of violence. Finally, as an alternative to individualism, I propose a psychohistorical approach to HBV in the migration context. This alternative combines psychological and philosophical enquiry with historical and ethnographical analysis. The psychohistorical approach hypothesises that distinct processes of cultural learning of honour codes both scaffold HBV and modulate the perpetrators’ emotions and empathy. (shrink)

Our experience of the qualities Locke classified as secondary qualities generates a problem, a version of which Aristotle raised. I call this problem “the problem of common sensibles.” The problem, as I discuss it, concerns cross-modal experienced togetherness or unity. On the view that we undergo distinct sense-specific experiences as we hear, smell, taste, see, and touch things, there seems no room for cross-modal unity at the experiential level. But cross-modal unity is real and it necessitates that we give up (...) the usual separatist view of sense experiences. (shrink)

In this paper, I will analyze certain aspects of imaginative content, namely the content of the representational mental state called “imagining.” I will show that fully accounting for imaginative content requires acknowledging that, in addition to imagining, an imaginative project—the overall mental activity we engage in when we imagine—includes another infrastructural component in terms of which content should be explained. I will then show that the phenomenon of imaginative immersion can partly be explained in terms of the proposed infrastructure of (...) imaginative projects. (shrink)

Many philosophers and scientists take perceptual experience, whatever else it involves, to be representational. In ‘The Silence of the Senses’, Charles Travis argues that this view involves a kind of category mistake, and consequently, that perceptual experience is not a representational or intentional phenomenon. The details of Travis’s argument, however, have been widely misinterpreted by his representationalist opponents, many of whom dismiss it out of hand. This chapter offers an interpretation of Travis’s argument from looks that it is argued presents (...) a genuine and important challenge to orthodox representational views of experience. Whilst this challenge may not be insurmountable, it places a substantial burden upon the representationalist to explain not only how experiences come to have the contents that they do, but how those contents come to feature in our conscious mental lives. (shrink)