When someone presents an argument on a charged topic and it is alleged that the arguer has a strong personal interest and investment in the conclusion, the allegation, directed to the reception or evaluation of the argument, typically gives rise to two seemingly conflicting reactions:I. The allegation is an unwarranted diversion. The prejudices or biases of the arguer are irrelevant to the cogency of the argument. In particular, it is a distraction from the crucial judgment of whether the argument is (...) cogent to press the question of whether the arguer truly holds his conclusion on the grounds that he offers, or whether he believes it on some illicit or suspect basis. (shrink)

I examine the way in which Daniel Dennett (1987, 1995) uses his 'intentional' and 'design' stances to make the claim that intentionality is derived from design. I suggest that Dennett is best understood as attempting to supply an objective, nonintentional, naturalistic rationale for our use of intentional concepts. However, I demonstrate that his overall picture presupposes prior application of the intentional stance in a preconditional, ineliminable,'sense-giving' role. Construed as such, Dennett's account is almost identical to the account of biological teleology (...) offered by Kant in The Critique of Judgement, with the consequence that Dennett's naturalism is untenable. My conclusions lead to doubts concerning the legitimacy of any account attempting to naturalise intentionality by extracting normativity from biology and also point to a novel account of biological function. (shrink)

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions (...) of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness. (shrink)

Tacit knowing as a concept and legitimate topic of scholarship came up in philosophical research in the second half of the 20th century in the form of some influential works by Michael Polanyi (although similar concepts had been discussed before). Systematic epistemological studies on the topic are still scarce, however. In this article, I support the thesis that tacit knowing pervades all our common major divisions of knowledge and that it therefore must not be neglected in epistemological research. By this (...) approach I am simultaneously giving a systematic back-up for Polanyi's claim that the tacit component is found in all knowledge. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay aims to bring two important lines of inquiry and criticism together. It first lays out an institutionally enriched account of what a just world economic order will look like. That account prescribes, via the requisites to that mechanism which most directly instantiates the account, “three realms of equal treatment and market completion”—the global products, services, and labor markets; the global investment/financial markets; and the global preparticipation opportunity allocation. The essay then suggests how, with minimal if any departure from (...) familiar canons of traditional international legal mandate interpretation, each of the Bretton Woods institutions—particularly the GATT/WTO and the IMF—can be viewed at least in part as charged with the task of fostering equal treatment and ultimate market completion within one of those three realms. The piece then argues that one of the institutions in particular—the World Bank—has, for reasons of at best negligent and at worst willful injustice on the part of influential state actors in the world community, fallen farthest short in pursuit of what should be viewed as its proper mandate. The article accordingly concludes that a fuller empowerment of the Bank to effect its ideal mission will press the Bretton Woods system more nearly into ethical balance, and with it the world into justice; and that full empowerment of the GATT/WTO and IMF should be partly conditioned upon the fuller empowerment of the Bank. (shrink)

It is argued that philosophers can contribute indirectly to the cure of psychopathology by helping to resolve problems that impede the development of effective treatments. Two such problems are discussed. The first arises because different schools of therapy use conflicting criteria in evaluating therapeutic outcomes. A theory of Defective Desires is developed to deal with this problem. The second issue, which divides the field of psychotherapy, concerns the need for experiments, especially in validating claims of therapeutic efficacy. An epistemological foundation (...) is developed to support the need for experiments. (shrink)

This paper discusses several philosophical problems with the use of randomized clinical trials in psychotherapy outcome research. The problems include: the impermanence problem, the identification problem, and idiographic problems. The paper concludes with an assessment of the overall case for and against the use of RCTs in psychotherapy outcome research.

When someone presents an argument on a charged topic and it is (credibly) alleged that the arguer has a strong personal interest and investment in the conclusion, the allegation, directed to the reception or evaluation of the argument, typically gives rise to two seemingly conflicting reactions:I. The allegation is an unwarranted diversion (a species ofargumentum ad hominemorgenetie fallacy).The prejudices or biases of the arguer are irrelevant to thecogencyof the argument. ('Cogency’ is used broadly to refer both to correct support relations, (...) validity, in the case of deductive arguments, and to the soundness, warrant, and relevance of the premises.) In particular, it is a distraction from the crucial judgment of whether the argument is cogent to press the question of whether the arguer truly holds his conclusion on the grounds that he offers, or whether he believes it on some illicit or suspect basis (prejudice, ideology, self-interest, wishful thinking, bias). (shrink)