Shoemaker (1996) presenteda prioriarguments against the possibility of ‘self‐blindness’, or the inability of someone, otherwise intelligent and possessed of mental concepts, to introspect any of her concurrent attitude states. Ironically enough, this seems to be a position that Gopnik (1993) and Carruthers (2006, 2008, 2009a,b) have proposed as not only possible, but as the actual human condition generally! According to this ‘Objectivist’ view, supposed introspection of one's attitudes is not ‘direct’, but an ‘inference’ of precisely the sort we make about (...) the attitudes of others, an inference that has the advantage in our own case ofonlyour own sensory data and memories, our behavior, and of the context we are in; i.e. we are all substantially self‐ blind. After sorting out a number of methodological and verbal issues, I argue, first, that thea prioriarguments against Objectivism don't succeed, and that Gopnik and Carruthers are right to regard the issue as an empirical one. On the other hand, I think they seriously underestimate the difficulty of establishing Objectivism. It is unlikely there is an inferential procedure from the data of pure sensation, behavior and context to the relevant self‐attributions that would be as spectacularly reliable as people manifestly seem to be. Moreover, there is a simpler model: the mind very likely consists of a panoply of sub‐routines some of whose outputs are ‘tagged’ for their having been so processed, rather in the way that software ‘documents’ are on standard computers. Introspection plausibly consists in a person's simply attending to distinctive constellations of these tags, even though they may lack phenomenal feels. This draws attention to an important independent fact: that much of phenomenology (or ‘what it's like’ to be in a certain state) may be constituted by facts that are not phenomenal. (shrink)

Shoemaker (1996) presenteda prioriarguments against the possibility of ‘self‐blindness’, or the inability of someone, otherwise intelligent and possessed of mental concepts, to introspect any of her concurrent attitude states. Ironically enough, this seems to be a position that Gopnik (1993) and Carruthers (2006, 2008, 2009a,b) have proposed as not only possible, but as the actual human condition generally! According to this ‘Objectivist’ view, supposed introspection of one's attitudes is not ‘direct’, but an ‘inference’ of precisely the sort we make about (...) the attitudes of others, an inference that has the advantage in our own case ofonlyour own sensory data and memories, our behavior, and of the context we are in; i.e. we are all substantially self‐ blind. After sorting out a number of methodological and verbal issues, I argue, first, that thea prioriarguments against Objectivism don't succeed, and that Gopnik and Carruthers are right to regard the issue as an empirical one. On the other hand, I think they seriously underestimate the difficulty of establishing Objectivism. It is unlikely there is an inferential procedure from the data of pure sensation, behavior and context to the relevant self‐attributions that would be as spectacularly reliable as people manifestly seem to be. Moreover, there is a simpler model: the mind very likely consists of a panoply of sub‐routines some of whose outputs are ‘tagged’ for their having been so processed, rather in the way that software ‘documents’ are on standard computers. Introspection plausibly consists in a person's simply attending to distinctive constellations of these tags, even though they may lack phenomenal feels. This draws attention to an important independent fact: that much of phenomenology (or ‘what it's like’ to be in a certain state) may be constituted by facts that are not phenomenal. (shrink)

This paper closes a gap in joint acceptance accounts of the mental life of groups by presenting a theory of group self-knowledge in the joint acceptance framework. I start out by presenting desiderata for a theory of group self-knowledge. Any such theory has to explain the linguistic practice of group avowals, and how self-knowledge can play a role in practical and moral considerations. I develop an account of group self-knowledge in the joint acceptance framework that can explain these desiderata. I (...) argue that a group has self-knowledge of its own attitude A if and only if (i) the operative members jointly accept that the group has attitude A; and (ii) that joint acceptance is non-deviantly caused by the operative group members’ belief that the members jointly accepted attitude A; and (iii) the group has attitude A. Together (i) to (iii) give us conditions for a group having a justified, non-lucky, true belief about its own attitude. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering and consider consequences for how to understand epistemic normativity. Though the view that there are such norms seems intuitive, it has found surprisingly little defense. Rather, many philosophers have argued that norms on evidence-gathering can only be practical or moral. On a prominent evidentialist version of this position, epistemic norms only apply to responding to the evidence one already has. Here we challenge the orthodoxy. First, we argue that (...) there is no significant normative difference between responding to evidence you have and gathering more evidence. Second, we argue that our practices of epistemically criticizing agents for their poor evidence-gathering indicate the existence of epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Finally, we show that our thesis has important implications for recent debates about the relationship between epistemic norms and inquiry. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of self-knowledge of beliefs by investigating the relationship between self-knowledge of beliefs and one's knowledge of other people's beliefs. It introduces and defends a new account of self-knowledge of beliefs according to which this type of knowledge is developmentally interconnected with and dependent on resources already used for acquiring knowledge of other people's beliefs, which is inferential in nature. But when these resources are applied to oneself, one attains and subsequently frequently uses a method for (...) acquiring knowledge of beliefs that is non-inferential in nature. The paper argues that this account is preferable to some of the most common empirically motivated theories of self-knowledge of beliefs and explains the origin of the widely discussed phenomenon that our own beliefs are often transparent to us in that we can determine whether we believe that p simply by settling whether p is the case. (shrink)

Suppose we know our own attitudes, e.g. judgments and decisions, only by unconsciously interpreting ourselves. Would this undermine the assumption that there are conscious attitudes? Carruthers has argued that if the mentioned view of selfknowledge is combined with either of the two most common approaches to consciousness, i.e. the higher-order state account or the global workspace theory , then the conjunction of these theories implies that there are no conscious attitudes. I shall show that Carruthers' argument against the existence of (...) conscious attitudes doesn't succeed, and mention studies on autism and logical reasoning under cognitive load that suggest that there are conscious attitudes. (shrink)

It is typically assumed that while we know other people’s mental states by observing and interpreting their behavior, we know our own mental states by introspection, i.e., without interpreting ourselves. In his latest book, The opacity of mind: An integrative theory of self-knowledge, Peter Carruthers (2011) argues against this assumption. He holds that findings from across the cognitive sciences strongly suggest that self-knowledge of conscious propositional attitudes such as intentions, judgments, and decisions involves a swift and unconscious process of self-interpretation (...) that utilizes the same sensory channels that we employ when working out other people’s mental states. I provide an overview of Carruthers’ book before discussing a pathological case that challenges his account of self-knowledge and mentioning empirical evidence that undermines his use of a particular kind of data in his case against introspection of conscious attitudes. (shrink)

How do we know about other minds on the basis of perception? The two most common answers to this question are that we literally perceive others’ mental states, or that we infer their mental states on the basis of perceiving something else. In this paper, I argue for a different answer. On my view, we don’t perceive mental states, and yet perceptual experiences often immediately justify mental state attributions. In a slogan: other minds are neither seen nor inferred. I argue (...) that this view offers the best explanation of our deeply equivocal intuitions about perception-based mental state attributions, and also holds substantial interest for the epistemology of perception more generally. (shrink)

Virtue epistemologists define knowledge as true belief produced by intellectual virtue. In this paper, I review how this definition fails in three important ways. First, it fails as an account of the ordinary knowledge concept, because neither belief nor reliability is essential to knowledge ordinarily understood. Second, it fails as an account of the knowledge relation itself, insofar as that relation is operationalized in the scientific study of cognition. Third, it serves no prescriptive purpose identified up till now. An alternative (...) theory, abilism, provides a superior account of knowledge as it is ordinarily and scientifically understood. According to abilism, knowledge is an accurate representation produced by cognitive ability. (shrink)

“Gettier cases” have played a major role in Anglo-American analytic epistemology over the past fifty years. Philosophers have grouped a bewildering array of examples under the heading “Gettier case.” Philosophers claim that these cases are obvious counterexamples to the “traditional” analysis of knowledge as justified true belief, and they treat correctly classifying the cases as a criterion for judging proposed theories of knowledge. Cognitive scientists recently began testing whether philosophers are right about these cases. It turns out that philosophers were (...) partly right and partly wrong. Some “Gettier cases” are obvious examples of ignorance, but others are obvious examples of knowledge. It also turns out that much research in this area of philosophy is marred by experimenter bias, invented historical claims, dysfunctional categorization of examples, and mischaracterization by philosophers of their own intuitive judgments about particular cases. Despite these shortcomings, lessons learned from studying “Gettier cases” are leading to important insights about knowledge and knowledge attributions, which are central components of social cognition. (shrink)

This chapter discusses some of Anscombe’s contributions to the philosophy of practical reason. It focuses particularly on Anscombe’s view of what it is to act for reasons. I begin by discussing the relationship between acting intentionally and acting for reasons in Anscombe's theory of action. I then further explicate her view by discussing her rejection of two related views about acting for reasons: causalism (the view that reasons are a kind of cause of actions) and psychologism (the view that reasons (...) are mental states like desires and beliefs). In the process, I try to show that Anscombe’s rejection of these theses does not leave us with mystery, but rather sheds light on an interesting and serious heterodox view of acting for reasons. I conclude by suggesting that though Anscombe's views have been taken sufficiently seriously by philosophers of action, they should be taken more seriously by philosophers of practical reason. (shrink)

The interpretive-sensory access theory of self-knowledge claims that we come to know our own minds by turning our capacities for knowing other minds onto ourselves. Peter Carruthers argues that two of the theory’s advantages are empirical adequacy and scientific fruitfulness: it leaves few of the old discoveries unexplained and makes new predictions that provide a framework for new discoveries. A decade has now passed since the theory’s introduction. I review the most important developments during this time period regarding the two (...) criteria: whether the theory’s six main predictions were supported, and whether the theory’s predictions contributed to new empirical studies. I argue that the interpretive-sensory access theory of self-knowledge remains empirically adequate and scientifically fruitful. (shrink)

Groups can be epistemically vicious just like individuals. And just like individuals, groups sometimes want to do something about their vices. They want to change. However, intentionally combating one’s own vices seems impossible without detecting those vices first. Self-knowledge seems to provide a first step towards changing one’s own epistemic vices. I argue that groups can acquire self-knowledge about their epistemic vices and I propose an account of such collective self-knowledge. I suggest that collective self-knowledge of vices is partially based (...) on evidence that a group can generate by performing internal promptings. Whereas these promptings are done mentally in individual self-knowledge, these promptings are done by interactions of group members in the collective case. The group can then acquire inferential self-knowledge of their vices based on the evidence generated by the interactions within the group. Groups thereby bring themselves into a position from which they can combat and change those vices intentionally. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that one's own mental states are metaphysically privileged vis-à-vis the mental states of others, even if only subjectively so. This is an instance of a more general view called Subjectivism, according to which reality is only subjectively the way it is. After characterizing Subjectivism in analogy to two relatively familiar views in the metaphysics of modality and time, I compare the Subjectivist View of the Mental with Egocentric Presentism, a version of Subjectivism recently advocated by (...) Caspar Hare. I argue that the Subjectivist View of the Mental goes a considerable way towards solving certain long-standing philosophical puzzles having to do with the unity of consciousness, the contents of self-awareness and the intransmissibility of experiential knowledge through testimony. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that joint action permits a certain degree of luck. The cases I have in mind exhibit the following structure: each participant believes that the intended ends of each robustly support the joint action. This belief turns out to be false. Due to lucky circumstances, the discordance in intention never becomes common knowledge. However, common knowledge of the relevant intentions would have undermined the joint action altogether. The analysis of such cases shows the extent to which (...) common knowledge of the participants’ intentions can be harmful to joint action. This extends a recent line of research that has questioned the necessity of common knowledge in joint action. (shrink)

Many philosophers and scientists have argued that the difference between phenomenally conscious states and other kind of states lies in the implicit self-awareness that conscious states have. Higher-Order Representationalist theories, attempt to explain such a self-awareness by means of a higher-order representation. Consciousness relies on our capacity to represent our own mental states, consciousness depends on our Theory of Mind. Such an ability can, at least conceptually, be decomposed into another two: mindreading and metacognition. In this paper I will argue (...) that consciousness cannot depend on mindreading. The tenability of HOR theories depends, therefore, on the relation between mindreading and metacognition. I analyze several views on such a relation and argue that none of them seem to be a plausible option for HOR theories. (shrink)

Psychologists and neuroscientists have delivered a lot of bad news about the inner workings of our minds, raising challenging questions about the extent to which we are rational in important domains of our judgments. I will focus on a central case of an unsettling effect on our perception, and primarily aim to establish that there actually is no impact from it on the rationality of our perceptual beliefs. To reach my goal, I will start with a rough review of different (...) ways bad news about our minds might negatively affect our rationality. I’ll then propose a test for when negative consequences would follow from the truth of some bad news about our minds, and I will argue that the test is not passed in a paradigmatic case of influence of bias on perception. I will then close by looking at potential wider implications of the psychological bad news for debates about internalism vs. externalism in epistemology. (shrink)

अमेरिका और दुनिया अत्यधिक जनसंख्या वृद्धि से पतन की प्रक्रिया में हैं, यह सबसे पिछली सदी के लिए और अब यह सब 3 दुनिया के लोगों के कारण । संसाधनों की खपत और एक या दो अरब अधिक सीए के अलावा औद्योगिक सभ्यता का पतन होगा और भुखमरी, बीमारी, हिंसा और युद्ध को चौंका देने वाले पैमाने पर लाएगा । अरबों मर जाएगा और परमाणु युद्ध सब लेकिन निश्चित है । अमेरिका में यह बेहद बड़े पैमाने पर आव्रजन और आप्रवासी (...) प्रजनन द्वारा त्वरित किया जा रहा है, लोकतंत्र द्वारा संभव बनाया गाली के साथ संयुक्त । भ्रष्ट मानव प्रकृति निष्ठुरता से लोकतंत्र और विविधता के सपने को अपराध और गरीबी के दुःस्वप्न में बदल देता है । पतन का मूल कारण हमारे जन्मजात मनोविज्ञान की अक्षमता आधुनिक दुनिया है, जो लोगों को असंबंधित व्यक्तियों के इलाज के रूप में हालांकि वे आम हितों था जाता है के लिए अनुकूल है । यह, प्लस बुनियादी जीव विज्ञान और मनोविज्ञान की अज्ञानता, आंशिक रूप से शिक्षित जो लोकतांत्रिक समाजों को नियंत्रित के सामाजिक इंजीनियरिंग भ्रम की ओर जाता है । कुछ समझते हैं कि यदि आप किसी व्यक्ति की मदद करते हैं तो आप किसी और को नुकसान पहुंचाते हैं - कोई मुफ्त दोपहर का भोजन नहीं है और हर एक आइटम किसी को भी मरम्मत से परे पृथ्वी को नष्ट कर देता है। नतीजतन, हर जगह सामाजिक नीतियां अधारणीय हैं और स्वार्थ पर कड़े नियंत्रण के बिना एक-एक करके सभी समाज अराजकता या तानाशाही में ढह जाएंगे । नाटकीय और तत्काल परिवर्तन के बिना, अमेरिका, या किसी भी देश है कि एक लोकतांत्रिक प्रणाली के बाद के पतन को रोकने के लिए कोई उंमीद नहीं है । इसलिए मेरा निबंध "लोकतंत्र द्वारा आत्महत्या" । अब यह भी स्पष्ट है कि चीन पर शासन करने वाले सात समाजपथ विश्व युद्ध 3 जीत रहे हैं, और इसलिए उन पर मेरा समापन निबंध है । केवल अधिक खतरा आर्टिफिशियल इंटेलिजेंस है जो मैं संक्षेप में टिप्पणी है । हमारे बारे में सब कुछ करने के लिए महत्वपूर्ण जीव विज्ञान है, और यह इसके लिए बेखबर है कि ओबामा, Chomsky,क्लिंटन, डेमोक्रेटिक पार्टी और पोप की तरह स्मार्ट शिक्षित लोगों के लाखों की ओर जाता है आत्मघाती काल्पनिक आदर्शों का समर्थन है कि निष्ठुरता पृथ्वी पर नरक के लिए सीधे सीसा । के रूप में डब्ल्यू ने कहा, यह है जो हमेशा हमारी आंखों के सामने है कि सबसे मुश्किल देखने के लिए है । हम सचेत विमर्श भाषाई प्रणाली 2 की दुनिया में रहते हैं, लेकिन यह बेहोश है, स्वचालित सजगता प्रणाली 1 कि नियम । यह सेरले के फेनोमेनोलॉजिकल भ्रम (टीपीआई), पिंकर के ब्लैंक स्लेट और टॉबी और कॉस्मिड्स के स्टैंडर्ड सोशल साइंस मॉडल द्वारा वर्णित सार्वभौमिक अंधापन का स्रोत है। लेख के पहले समूह के लिए कैसे हम व्यवहार है कि काफी सैद्धांतिक भ्रम से मुक्त है में कुछ अंतर्दृष्टि देने का प्रयास । अगले तीन समूहों में मैं एक टिकाऊ दुनिया-प्रौद्योगिकी, धर्म और राजनीति (सहकारी समूहों) को रोकने के प्रमुख भ्रम के तीन पर टिप्पणी । लोगों का मानना है कि समाज उनके द्वारा बचाया जा सकता है, तो मैं पुस्तक के बाकी में कुछ सुझाव प्रदान के रूप में क्यों यह छोटे लेख और प्रसिद्ध लेखकों द्वारा हाल ही में पुस्तकों की समीक्षा के माध्यम से संभावना नहीं है । एक अन्य खंड धार्मिक भ्रम का वर्णन करता है - कि कुछ सुपर पावर है जो हमें बचाएगी। अगला खंड डिजिटल भ्रम का वर्णन करता है, जो सिस्टम एक के ऑटोमैटिक्स के साथ सिस्टम 2 के भाषा खेलों को भ्रमित करता है, और इसलिए अन्य प्रकार की मशीनों (यानी कंप्यूटर) से जैविक मशीनों (यानी, लोगों) को अलग नहीं कर सकता है। अन्य डिजिटल भ्रम यह है कि हम सिस्टम 2 द्वारा बनाई गई कंप्यूटर/एआई/रोबोटिक्स/नैनोटेक/जेनेटिक इंजीनियरिंग द्वारा सिस्टम 1 की शुद्ध बुराई (स्वार्थ) से बच जाएंगे । कोई मुफ्त दोपहर के भोजन के प्रिंसिपल हमें बताता है कि वहां गंभीर और संभवतः घातक परिणाम होगा । अंतिम खंड एक बड़ा खुश परिवार भ्रम का वर्णन करता है, यानी, कि हम हर किसी के साथ सहयोग के लिए चुने जाते हैं, और यह कि लोकतंत्र, विविधता और समानता के व्योमवादी आदर्शों हमें स्वप्नलोक में ले जाएगा, अगर हम सिर्फ चीजों को सही ढंग से प्रबंधित (राजनीति की संभावना) । फिर, कोई मुक्त दोपहर के भोजन के सिद्धांत हमें चेतावनी देना चाहिए यह सच नहीं हो सकता है, और हम इतिहास भर में और समकालीन दुनिया भर में देखते हैं, कि सख्त नियंत्रण, स्वार्थ और मूर्खता के बिना ऊपरी हाथ लाभ और जल्द ही किसी भी राष्ट्र है कि इन भ्रम गलेलगाती नष्ट। इसके अलावा, बंदर मन तेजी से भविष्य छूट, और इसलिए हम अस्थाई आराम के लिए हमारे वंशज विरासत बेचने में सहयोग, बहुत समस्याओं को बढ़ा । . (shrink)

भौतिकवाद, रिडक्शनिज्म, व्यवहारवाद, कार्यवाद, गतिशील प्रणाली सिद्धांत और अभिकलनवाद लोकप्रिय विचार हैं, लेकिन उन्हें विटगेनस्टीन द्वारा असंबद्ध होने के लिए दिखाया गया था। व्यवहार के अध्ययन मानव जीवन के सभी शामिल हैं, लेकिन व्यवहार काफी हद तक स्वत: और बेहोश और यहां तक कि सचेत हिस्सा है, ज्यादातर भाषा में व्यक्त (जो Wittgenstein मन के साथ समानता), perspicous नहीं है, तो यह महत्वपूर्ण है एक रूपरेखा जो Searle Rationality के तार्किक संरचना (LSR) कहते हैं और मैं उच्च आदेश सोचा (DPHOT) (...) के वर्णनात्मक मनोविज्ञान कहते हैं. रूपरेखा का सारांश के बाद Wittgenstein और Searle द्वारा बाहर काम किया, के रूप में आधुनिक तर्क अनुसंधान द्वारा बढ़ाया, मैं Carruther विचार है, जो व्यवहार के सबसे विचारों व्याप्त में अक्षमता दिखाने के समकालीन व्यवहार सहित विज्ञान. मेरा मानना है कि उनकी किताब दो पुस्तकों का एक मिश्रण है, एक संज्ञानात्मक मनोविज्ञान का सारांश और अन्य कुछ नए शब्दजाल के साथ मन पर मानक दार्शनिक भ्रम का सारांश जोड़ा. मेरा सुझाव है कि बाद के असंबद्ध या जीवन के एक कार्टून दृश्य के रूप में माना जाना चाहिए और है कि अपने शब्द पर Wittgenstein ले, हम मन के बारे में सफल आत्म चिकित्सा अभ्यास कर सकते हैं / आधुनिक दो systems दृश्यसे मानव व्यवहार के लिए एक व्यापक अप करने के लिए तारीख रूपरेखा इच्छुक लोगों को मेरी पुस्तक 'दर्शन, मनोविज्ञान, मिनडी और लुडविगमें भाषा की तार्किक संरचना से परामर्श कर सकते हैं Wittgenstein और जॉन Searle '2 एड (2019). मेरे लेखन के अधिक में रुचि रखने वालों को देख सकते हैं 'बात कर रहेबंदर- दर्शन, मनोविज्ञान, विज्ञान, धर्म और राजनीति पर एक बर्बाद ग्रह --लेख और समीक्षा 2006-2019 3 एड (2019) और आत्मघाती यूटोपियान भ्रम 21st मेंसदी 4वें एड (2019) . (shrink)

Why do we engage in folk psychology, that is, why do we think about and ascribe propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires, intentions etc. to people? On the standard view, folk psychology is primarily for mindreading, for detecting mental states and explaining and/or predicting people’s behaviour in terms of them. In contrast, McGeer (1996, 2007, 2015), and Zawidzki (2008, 2013) maintain that folk psychology is not primarily for mindreading but for mindshaping, that is, for moulding people’s behavior and minds (e.g., (...) via the imposition of social norms) so that coordination becomes easier. Mindreading is derived from and only as effective as it is because of mindshaping, not vice versa. I critically assess McGeer’s, and Zawidzki’s proposal and contend that three common motivations for the mindshaping view do not provide sufficient support for their particular version of it. I argue furthermore that their proposal underestimates the role that epistemic processing plays for mindshaping. And I provide reasons for favouring an alternative according to which, in social cognition involving ascriptions of propositional attitudes, neither mindshaping nor mindreading is primary but both are complementary in that effective mindshaping depends as much on mindreading as effective mindreading depends on mindshaping. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a possible solution to the puzzle unveiled by Kornblith about the sources and the possibility of knowledge of epistemic norms. The puzzle is: if such norms cannot be discovered solely by reflection, and if there are correct ways of thinking and inferring, then such norms can only be discovered by investigating the world —a counterintuitive conclusion. To avoid skepticism about normativity, I argue that we create normative correctness and discover normative demands by investigating the world (...) and reflecting about our epistemic practices. This is done by an exposition of the method known as reflective equilibrium, which is defended against Kornblith’s thesis that the appeal to reflective equilibrium is doomed to failure because it implies reflection. (shrink)

There is a widespread view that in order to be rational we must mostly know what we believe. In the probabilistic tradition this is defended by arguments that a person who failed to have this knowledge would be vulnerable to sure loss, or probabilistically incoherent. I argue that even gross failure to know one's own beliefs need not expose one to sure loss, and does not if we follow a generalization of the standard bridge principle between first-order and second-order beliefs. (...) This makes it possible for a subject to use probabilistic decision theory to manage in a rational way cases of potential failure of this self-knowledge, as we find in implicit bias. Through such cases I argue that it is possible for uncertainty about what our beliefs are to be not only rationally permissible but advantageous. (shrink)

America and the world are in the process of collapse from excessive population growth, most of it for the last century and now all of it due to 3rd world people. Consumption of resources and the addition of one or two billion more ca. 2100 will collapse industrial civilization and bring about starvation, disease, violence and war on a staggering scale. Billions will die and nuclear war is all but certain. In America this is being hugely accelerated by massive immigration (...) and immigrant reproduction, combined with abuses made possible by democracy. Depraved human nature inexorably turns the dream of democracy and diversity into a nightmare of crime and poverty. The root cause of collapse is the inability of our innate psychology to adapt to the modern world, which leads people to treat unrelated persons as though they had common interests. This, plus ignorance of basic biology and psychology, leads to the social engineering delusions of the partially educated who control democratic societies. Few understand that if you help one person you harm someone else—there is no free lunch and every single item anyone consumes destroys the earth beyond repair. Consequently, social policies everywhere are unsustainable and one by one all societies without stringent controls on selfishness will collapse into anarchy or dictatorship. Without dramatic and immediate changes, there is no hope for preventing the collapse of America, or any country that follows a democratic system. Hence my essay “Suicide by Democracy”. It is also now clear that the seven sociopaths who rule China are winning world war 3, and so my concluding essay on them. The only greater threat is Artificial Intelligence which I comment on briefly. The key to everything about us is biology, and it is obliviousness to it that leads millions of smart educated people like Obama, Chomsky, Clinton, the Democratic Party and the Pope to espouse suicidal utopian ideals that inexorably lead straight to Hell on Earth. As W noted, it is what is always before our eyes that is the hardest to see. We live in the world of conscious deliberative linguistic System 2, but it is unconscious, automatic reflexive System 1 that rules. This is the source of the universal blindness described by Searle’s The Phenomenological Illusion (TPI), Pinker’s Blank Slate and Tooby and Cosmides’ Standard Social Science Model. The first group of articles attempt to give some insight into how we behave that is reasonably free of theoretical delusions. In the next three groups I comment on three of the principal delusions preventing a sustainable world— technology, religion and politics (cooperative groups). People believe that society can be saved by them, so I provide some suggestions in the rest of the book as to why this is unlikely via short articles and reviews of recent books by well-known writers. Another section describes the religious delusion – that there is some super power that will save us. The next section describes the digital delusions, which confuse the language games of System 2 with the automatisms of System one, and so cannot distinguish biological machines (i.e., people) from other kinds of machines (i.e., computers). Other digital delusions are that we will be saved from the pure evil (selfishness) of System 1 by computers/AI/robotics/nanotech/genetic engineering created by System 2. The No Free Lunch principal tells us there will be serious and possibly fatal consequences. The last section describes The One Big Happy Family Delusion, i.e., that we are selected for cooperation with everyone, and that the euphonious ideals of Democracy, Diversity and Equality will lead us into utopia, if we just manage things correctly (the possibility of politics). Again, the No Free Lunch Principle ought to warn us it cannot be true, and we see throughout history and all over the contemporary world, that without strict controls, selfishness and stupidity gain the upper hand and soon destroy any nation that embraces these delusions. In addition, the monkey mind steeply discounts the future, and so we cooperate in selling our descendant’s heritage for temporary comforts, greatly exacerbating the problems. (shrink)

One distinct interest in self-knowledge concerns whether one can know about one’s own mental states and processes, how much, and by what methods. One broad distinction is between accounts that centrally claim that we look inward for self-knowledge (introspective methods) and those that claim that we look outward for self-knowledge (transparency methods). It is here argued that neither method is sufficient, and that we see this as soon as we move beyond questions about knowledge of one’s beliefs, focusing instead on (...) how one distinguishes, for oneself, one’s veridical visual memories from mere (non-veridical) visual images. Given robust psychological and phenomenal similarities between episodic memories and mere imagery, the following is a genuine question that one might pose to oneself: “Do I actually remember that happening, or am I just imagining it?” After critical analysis of the transparency method (advocated by Byrne 2010, following Evans 1982) to this latter epistemological question, a brief sketch is offered of a more holistic and inferential method for acquisition of broader self-knowledge (broadly following the interpretive-sensory access account of Carruthers 2011). In a slogan, knowing more of the mind requires using more of the mind. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence has historically been conceptualized in anthropomorphic terms. Some algorithms deploy biomimetic designs in a deliberate attempt to effect a sort of digital isomorphism of the human brain. Others leverage more general learning strategies that happen to coincide with popular theories of cognitive science and social epistemology. In this paper, I challenge the anthropomorphic credentials of the neural network algorithm, whose similarities to human cognition I argue are vastly overstated and narrowly construed. I submit that three alternative supervised learning (...) methods—namely lasso penalties, bagging, and boosting—offer subtler, more interesting analogies to human reasoning as both an individual and a social phenomenon. Despite the temptation to fall back on anthropomorphic tropes when discussing AI, however, I conclude that such rhetoric is at best misleading and at worst downright dangerous. The impulse to humanize algorithms is an obstacle to properly conceptualizing the ethical challenges posed by emerging technologies. (shrink)

Este trabajo examina si la pregunta “¿puede pensar una máquina?” ha sido respondida de manera satisfactoria. La primera sección, justamente, examina el dictum cartesiano según el cual una máquina no puede pensar en principio. La segunda trata sobre una rebelión en contra de Descartes, encabezada por Babbage. A su vez, la tercera describe una segunda rebelión encabezada por Turing. En ambas se examina, primero el lenguaje mentalista/instrumentalista para describir a una máquina programada y segundo, el reemplazo de la pregunta por (...) el Juego de la Imitación. En la cuarta sección sostengo que la evidencia aportada por dicho juego nos devuelve a la pregunta, pese a Turing. Por último, la quinta sección versa sobre cómo la Habitación China de Searle, paradójicamente, apoya el dictum cartesiano, y lo hace porque tal experimento mental se basa en una capacidad mental falible: la introspección. Se concluye que la pregunta acerca de si puede pensar una máquina es derivada de otra pregunta filosófica compleja: la de la naturaleza de lo mental y el problema mente-cuerpo. (shrink)

Two opposed movements of thought threaten philosophy as an autonomous practice from the inside: scientific naturalism and quietism. Naturalism (qua methodological thesis) threatens to turn philosophy into a mere ancilla of the sciences, quietism understood as the prescription to remain silent in philosophy would not countenance any more "positive" philosophy. This book reconstructs naturalism and quietism such that it becomes clear naturalism does have the potential to end philosophy as an autonomous practice and that quietism, correctly understood, does not. To (...) this end, this book provides arguments against the prevailing orthodox status of naturalism and a heterogenous reading of Wittgenstein's metaphilosophical quietism as the rejection of a certain kind of theories in philosophy, namely quasi-scientific theories. (shrink)

Se analiza el debate entre Eleonore Stump y Antonio Damasio a propósito de dos posibles estrategias a la hora de superar el “error” neurocientífico del dualismo cartesiano respecto de la correlación entre mente y cerebro, a saber: o bien se corrige el “error” neurocientífico de Descartes desde un modelo híbrido de tipo monista como el de Spinoza que ahora también se utiliza para justificar un materialismo eliminativo aún más radicalizado, a pesar de seguir manteniendo de un modo meramente heurístico las (...) diferencias entre mente y cerebro, al modo propuesto por Antonio Damasio; o bien se recurre a un modelo dualista vitalista de integración jerarquizada interactiva entre la mente y el cerebro, al modo propuesto por Aquinas, y aún antes Aristóteles, con una indudable ventaja. En este segundo caso sería posible justificar la existencia de diversos niveles de autorregulación deliberativa entre mente y cerebro, sin tener que restringir de un modo apriorista los márgenes de libertad y espontaneidad a un único nivel autoinmune básico de tipo determinista, salvo que se hiciera con fines meramente heurísticos, al modo ahora también señalado por Eleonore Stump. Por su parte la comunicación analiza las consecuencias que cada una de estas propuestas pueden llegar a tener para la justificación de los diversos tipos de autorregulación que hoy día se asignan a la neuroética, neuropolítica y neuroeconomía. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that people often confabulate when they are asked about their choices or reasons for action. The implications of these studies are the topic of intense debate in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. An important question in this debate is whether the confabulation studies pose a serious threat to the possibility of self-knowledge. In this paper we are not primarily interested in the consequences of confabulation for self-knowledge. Instead, we focus on a different issue: what confabulation implies for (...) the special status of self-attributions, i.e. first-person authority. In the first part of the paper, we propose that FPA is based on a capacity for self-regulation. Accordingly, FPA depends on the extent to which we are able to bridge the gap between our sayings and doings by aligning our actions with our avowed self-ascriptions and vice versa. FPA is withheld when we fail at such re-alignment. In the second part of the paper, we contrast our view with the accounts of Scaife and Bortolotti :227–249, 2018). We claim that the apparent fact that we cannot reliably distinguish, from a first-person perspective, when we are confabulating and when we are not, does not necessarily undermine FPA. We argue that a systematic failure to align our actions with our self-ascriptions and vice-versa is a genuine threat to FPA. In the last part of the paper, we introduce the concept of self-know-how—the know-how embodied in the way one is disposed to relate to oneself in making sense of oneself with or in the face of others—and briefly explored the importance of diminished or absent self-know-how in clinical cases. (shrink)

Human beings talk to themselves; sometimes out-loud, other times in inner speech. In this paper, I present a resolution to the following dilemma that arises from self-talk. If self-talk exists then either, we know what we are going to say and self-talk serves no communicative purpose, and must serve some other purpose, or we don’t know what we are going to say, and self-talk does serve a communicative purpose, namely, it is an instance of us communicating with ourselves. Adopting was (...) the strategy taken by Bart Geurts, who claims that the primary purpose of self-talk is to entrain commitments, and is not communicative. While accepting that self-talk can usefully play this role, I criticise the view that entraining commitments is self-talk’s fundamental role. I argue that adopting the view that we are self-blind, at least to a significant degree, means that we can accept that self-talk does play a communicative role. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the relationship between interpretivism about belief and normative standards. Interpretivists have traditionally taken beliefs to be fixed in relation to norms of interpretation. However, recent work by philosophers and psychologists reveals that human belief attribution practices are governed by a rich diversity of normative standards. Interpretivists thus face a dilemma: either give up on the idea that belief is constitutively normative or countenance a context-sensitive disjunction of norms that constitute belief. Either way, interpretivists should embrace the intersubjective (...) indeterminacy of belief. (shrink)

When we focus on asymmetries of power in our society, we find that blame and praise are unfairly distributed, partly due to cultural narratives that favour and exonerate the privileged. This paper provides a partial explanation for this skewed distribution of blame and praise. I draw on three analyses of disappearance narratives that erase and exonerate privileged perpetrators and therefore skew the responsibility system in their favour. Then I defend an emancipatory theory of responsibility that treats blame and praise as (...) communicative entities that can, and should, be used to debunk and dismantle these disappearance narratives, along with other oppressive ideologies. Blame and praise, on my emancipatory proposal, serve to identify and take a stand against agents of oppression and to recognize and celebrate resisters. (shrink)

There is widely assumed to be a fundamental epistemological asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of others. They are said to be ’categorically different in kind and manner’ , and the existence of such an asymmetry is taken to be a primitive datum in accounts of the two kinds of knowledge. I argue that standard accounts of the differences between self-knowledge and knowledge of others exaggerate and misstate the asymmetry. The inferentialist challenge to the asymmetry focuses on the extent to which (...) both self-knowledge and knowledge of others are matters of inference and interpretation. In the case of self-knowledge I focus on the so-called ‘transparency method’ and on the extent to which use of this method delivers inferential self-knowledge. In the case of knowledge of others’ thoughts, I discuss the role of perception as a source of such knowledge and argue that even so-called ’perceptual’ knowledge of other minds is inferential. I contend that the difference between self-knowledge and knowledge of others is a difference in the kinds of evidence on which they are typically based. (shrink)

This article examines what is known about the cognitive science of working memory, and brings the findings to bear in evaluating philosophical accounts of central cognitive processes of thinking and reasoning. It is argued that central cognition is sensory based, depending on the activation and deployment of sensory images of various sorts. Contrary to a broad spectrum of philosophical opinion, the central mind does not contain any workspace within which goals, decisions, intentions, or non-sensory judgments can be active.Introduction: philosophers’ commitmentsMost (...) philosophers believe that our so-called “personal-level” propositional attitudes—our personal judgments, beliefs, goals, values, decisions, and intentions—are consciously accessible. Many will also allow, of course, that some of the processing that takes place within our perceptual faculties is inaccessible to us; and many will grant the possibility of unconscious attitudes, as well as processes of inference and decision mak. (shrink)

Various dichotomies have been proposed to characterize the nature and development of human mindreading capacities, especially in light of recent evidence of mindreading in infants aged 7 to 18 months. This article will examine these suggestions, arguing that none is currently supported by the evidence. Rather, the data support a modular account of the domain-specific component of basic mindreading capacities. This core component is present in infants from a very young age and does not alter fundamentally thereafter. What alters with (...) development are the interactions between core mindreading and other systems, including executive systems, and forms of learning that do not require radical conceptual change. (shrink)

Creativity is generally thought to be the production of things that are novel and valuable. Humans are unique in the extent of their creativity, which plays a central role in innovation and problem solving, as well as in the arts. But what are the cognitive sources of novelty? More particularly, what are the cognitive sources of stochasticity in creative production? I will argue that they belong to two broad categories. One is associative, enabling the selection of goal-relevant ideas that have (...) become activated by happenstance in an unrelated context. The other relies on selection processes that leverage stochastic fluctuations in neural activity. At the same time, I will address a central puzzle, which is to understand how the outputs of stochastic processes can nevertheless generally fall within task constraints. While the components appealed to in the accounts that I offer are well established, the ways in which I combine them together are new. (shrink)

Implicit and explicit attitudes manifest themselves as distinct and partly dissociable behavioral dispositions. It is natural to think that these differences reflect differing underlying representations. The present article argues that this may be a mistake. Although non-verbal and verbal measures of attitudes often dissociate, this may be because the two types of outcome-measure are differentially impacted by other factors, not because they are tapping into distinct kinds of representation or distinct storage systems. I arrive at this view through closer consideration (...) than is usual of the mechanisms and processes that underlie overt behavior. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to explore forms of metacognition that have rarely been discussed in the extensive psychological and philosophical literatures on the topic. These would comprise explicit instances of meta-representation of some set of mental states or processes in oneself, but without those representations being embedded in anything remotely resembling a theory of mind, and independent of deployment of any sort of concept-like representation of the mental. Following a critique of some extant suggestions made by Nicholas Shea, (...) the paper argues that appraisals of the value of cognitive effort involve the most plausible instances of this kind of metacognition. (shrink)

There are two extreme poles in the literature on akrasia. Internalists hold that it's impossible to act intentionally against your better judgment, because there's a necessary internal relation between judgment and intentional action. To the contrary, externalists maintain that we can act intentionally against our better judgment, because the will operates independently of judgment. Critics of internalism argue that it fails a realism test—most people seem to think that we can and do act intentionally against our better judgment. And critics (...) of externalism argue that it flirts with incoherence by severing the intimate link between judgment and action. Drawing on resources from phenomenology, the cognitive sciences, analytic action theory, and recent “hybrid models” of skilled action, I argue that one route beyond this theoretical impasse is to understand akrasia as a form of skillful pre-reflective intentional action. This strategy, I argue, preserves the internalist insight that there is indeed an intimate relation between judgment and intentional action; and it also confirms the externalist claim that this relation is defeasible, but it does so without falling into incoherence. (shrink)

(First paragraphs.) — The notion of “mental time” refers to the experience and awareness of time, including that of past, present, and future, and that of the passing of time. This experience and awareness of time raises a number of puzzling questions. How do we experience time? What exactly do we experience when we experience time? Do we actually experience time? Or do we infer time from something in, or some aspect of our experience? And so forth. These and many (...) related questions in the “philosophy of mental time”, the topic of this special issue of the Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science, are not purely philosophical questions. Or at least, they are not likely to be satisfactorily answered by philosophers alone. Rather, they also need the input of neuroscientists, psychologists, physicists, linguists, and others. And conversely, answers to these questions may have implications outside the scope of philosophy. The papers in this special issue illustrate this inherent multi- or interdisciplinarity of the philosophy and science of mental time. In this theme introduction, we want to give a few more examples to illustrate this interdisciplinarity, but also to point out that much of the field is still wide open—that is, these illustrations raise more questions than answers. (shrink)

In “Real Patterns” Daniel Dennett developed an argument about the reality of beliefs on the basis of an analogy with patterns and noise. Here I develop Dennett’s analogy into an argument for descriptivism, the view that belief reports do no specify belief contents but merely describe what someone believes, and show that this view is also supported by empirical evidence. No description can do justice to the richness and specificity or “noisiness” of what someone believes, and the same belief can (...) be described by different sentences or propositions (which is illustrated by Dennett’s analogy, some Gettier cases, and Frege’s puzzle), but in some contexts some of these competing descriptions are misleading or even false. Faithful (or truthful) description must be guided by a principle (or principles) related to the principle of charity: belief descriptions should not attribute irrationality to the believer or have other kinds of “deviant” implications. (shrink)

This paper is a critical study of Quassim Cassam’s Self-Knowledge for Humans (Oxford University Press, 2014). Cassam claims that theorists who emphasize the “transparency” of questions about our own attitudes to questions about the wider world are committed to an excessively rationalistic conception of human thought. I dispute this, and make some clarificatory points about how to understand the relevant notion of “transparency”. I also argue that Cassam’s own “inferentialist” account of attitudinal self-knowledge entails an unacceptable alienation from our own (...) attitudes. In closing, I make some brief remarks on the value of understanding privileged self-knowledge, and how this topic is connected with more general questions about the nature of subjectivity. (shrink)

Influential views on self-knowledge presuppose that we cannot come to know a resistant belief in a first-personal way. Two theses support this supposition: if a belief self-ascription is grounded in the evidence of the person holding the belief, it is third-personal and we cannot have first-personal knowledge of beliefs we do not control. I object to both of these theses and argue that we can introspect on beliefs of which we lack control even though we cannot assent to their content.

Peter Carruthers argues that the global workspace theory implies there are no facts of the matter about animal consciousness. The argument is easily extended to other cognitive theories of consciousness, posing a general problem for consciousness studies. But the argument proves too much, for it also implies that there are no facts of the matter about human consciousness. A key assumption of the argument is that scientific theories of consciousness must explain away the explanatory gap. I criticize this assumption and (...) point to an alternative strategy for defending scientific theories of consciousness, one that better reflects the ongoing scientific practice. I argue there are introspectable inferential connections from phenomenal concepts to functional concepts that scientists can use to individuate the global workspace in terms of capacities that animals and humans share. (shrink)

The underrepresentation of women, people of color, and especially women of color—and the corresponding overrepresentation of white men—is more pronounced in philosophy than in many of the sciences. I suggest that part of the explanation for this lies in the role played by the idealized rational self, a concept that is relatively influential in philosophy but rarely employed in the sciences. The idealized rational self models the mind as consistent, unified, rationally transcendent, and introspectively transparent. I hypothesize that acceptance of (...) the idealized rational self leads philosophers to underestimate the influence of implicit bias on their own judgments and prevents them from enacting the reforms necessary to minimize the effects of implicit bias on institutional decision-making procedures. I consider recent experiments in social psychology that suggest that an increased sense of one’s own objectivity leads to greater reliance on bias in hiring scenarios, and I hypothesize how these results might be applied to philosophers’ evaluative judgments. I discuss ways that the idealized rational self is susceptible to broader critiques of ideal theory, and I consider some of the ways that the picture functions as a tool of active ignorance and color-evasive racism. (shrink)

I argue that ordinary confabulation is a side-effect of an interpretive faculty that makes sense of the world by rationalising our experience within the context of a personal and cultural narrative. However, I argue that a hyperactivity of the same process manifests as schizotypy—latent schizophrenic tendencies—that can lead to extreme dissociation of interpretation from experience. I first give a phenomenological account of the process of interpretation, arguing that it is enacted through the creation of conceptual cognitive content from an originary (...) non-conceptual experience. I then ground this account in empirical evidence, showing how our direct perception is moulded and adapted as it is conceptualised to fit our individual and collective expectations. Finally, I argue that hyperactive over-interpretation results in schizotypic dissociation, thus suggesting that schizophrenia should be understood as a disorder of interpretation, the extreme end of a spectrum that includes ordinary confabulation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to lay the groundwork for extending the idea of transparent introspection to wishes. First, I elucidate the notion of transparent introspection and highlight its advantages over rival accounts of self-knowledge. Then I pose several problems that seem to obstruct the extension of transparent introspection to wishes. In order to overcome these problems, I call into question the standard propositional attitude analysis of non-doxastic attitudes. My considerations lead to a non-orthodox account of attitudes in general (...) and wishes in particular in light of which the problems presented in Sect. 2 disappear. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of self-knowledge share a presupposition to the effect that the only way to vindicate so-called first-person authority as understood by our folk-psychology is to identify specific “good-making” epistemic features that render our self-ascriptions of mental states especially knowledgeable. In earlier work, I rejected this presupposition. I proposed that we separate two questions: How is first-person authority to be explained? What renders avowals instances of a privileged kind of knowledge?In response to question, I offered a neo-expressivist account that, I (...) argued, is compatible with a variety of non-deflationary, substantive answers to question. Here I re-evaluate the relative merits of the neo-expressivist account in light of some recent attempts to capture first-person authority by appealing to the so-called transparency of mental self-attributions. I then canvass two recent appeals to transparency that give priority to question. Bearing in mind.. (shrink)