This dissertation explores issues in the philosophy of psychology and metaphysics through the lens of the emotion of disgust, and its corresponding property, disgustingness. The first chapter organizes an extremely large body of data about disgust, imposes two constraints any theory must meet, and offers a cognitive model of the mechanisms underlying the emotion. The second chapter explores the evolution of disgust, and argues for the Entanglement thesis: this uniquely human emotion was formed when two formerly distinct mechanisms, one dedicated (...) to monitoring food intake and protecting against poisons, the other dedicated to protecting against parasitic infection, where driven together until they became functionally integrated. The third chapter explores the sorts of acquisition mechanisms that could give rise to the patterns of individual and cultural level variation we find with disgust elicitors. It argues for the Empathic Acquisition thesis, which holds that one important route for the social acquisition and transmission of disgust elicitors is linked to empathic recognition of facial expressions of the emotion. The fourth chapter builds on the Entanglement thesis, and embeds the emotion of disgust in gene-culture coevolutionary theory and the tribal instincts hypothesis. The Co-opt thesis is defended, which maintains that disgust was co-opted to play an important role in our moral psychology, particularly in our cognition of social norms and ethnic boundary markers. In doing so, however, it brings to bear many features initially linked to poisons and parasites. This explains the puzzling and troublesome character of moral judgments linked to disgust. After shifting gears from psychology to metaphysics, the fifth chapter recasts the Humean tradition of projectivism in the terminology of cognitive science. Using examples such as disgust, I argue that a psychologized projectivism is able to make sense of the idea that some properties are projected onto the world, rather than found there to begin with. The final chapter criticizes three other accounts of the property of disgustingness, two inspired by functionalism in the philosophy of color, one inspired by fittingness accounts in metaethics. I argue that none provide nearly as satisfactory account of the property as the psychologized projectivism articulated previously. (shrink)

This thesis is an empirical and theoretical exploration of the surprising finding that people often may fail to notice dramatic mismatches between what they want and what they get, a phenomenon my collaborators and I have named choice blindness. The thesis consists of four co-authored papers, dealing with different aspects of the phenomenon. Paper one presents an initial set of studies using a computerised choice procedure, and discusses the relation of choice blindness to the parent phenomenon of change blindness. Paper (...) two is the most central paper of the thesis. In this study, participants were shown pairs of pictures of female faces, and were instructed to choose which face in each pair they found most attractive. In addition, on some trials, immediately after their choice, they were asked to verbally describe the reasons for choosing the way they did. Unknown to the participants, on certain trials, a double-card ploy was used to covertly exchange one face for the other. On these trials, the outcome of the choice became the opposite of what they intended. Counting across all conditions of the experiment no more than a fourth of all such manipulated trials were detected. But not only were the participants in the experiment blind to the manipulation of their choices, they also offered introspectively derived reasons for preferring the alternative they were given instead. A second major conclusion of this paper is that normal participants may produce confabulatory reports when asked to describe the reasons behind their choices. Paper three applies this form of analysis of introspection and confabulation to a second corpus of reports collected within the choice blindness paradigm. In this paper we use word-frequency and latent semantic analysis to contrast the introspective reasons given in non-manipulated and manipulated trials, but very few differences between these two groups of reports were found. In paper four, passer-by shoppers in a local supermarket were invited to sample two different varieties of jam and tea, and to decide which alternative in each pair they preferred the most. After their choice, the participants were asked to again sample to chosen alternative and describe why that one was preferred. At this point, the content of the sample containers were secretly switched, so that the outcome of the choice became the opposite of what the participants intended. No more than a third of the manipulated trials were detected, thus demonstrating considerable levels of choice blindness for the taste and smell of two different consumer goods. (shrink)

According to a classic position in analytic philosophy of mind, we must interpret agents as largely rational in order to be able to attribute intentional mental states to them. However, adopting this position requires clarifying in what way and by which criteria agents can still be irrational. In this paper I will offer one such criterion. More specifically, I argue that the kind of rationality methodologically required by intentional interpretation is to be specified in terms of psychological efficacy. Thereby, this (...) notion can be distinguished from a more commonly used notion of rationality and hence cannot be shown to be undermined by the potential prevalence of a corresponding kind of irrationality. (shrink)

Rosenberg does not provide arguments for some crucial premises in his argument against physicalism. In particular, he gives no independent argument to show that physicalists must accept the entry-by-entailment thesis. The arguments provided establish weaker premises than those that are needed. As a consequence, Rosenberg.

Tässä artikkelissa käsittelen Descartesin ikuisten totuuksien välttämättömyyteen liittyvää ongelmaa. Teoksessa Mietiskelyjä ensimmäisestä filosofiasta (1641–1642) Descartes nostaa esiin käsitteen ikuisista totuuksista, käyttäen esimerkkinään kolmiota. Kolmion muuttumattomaan ja ikuiseen luontoon kuuluu esimerkiksi, että sen kolme kulmaa ovat yhteenlaskettuna 180°. Se on totta kolmiosta, vaikka yhtään yksittäistä kolmiota ei olisi koskaan ollutkaan olemassa. Eräät ajattelemieni asioiden piirteet ovat siis Descartesin mukaan ajattelustani riippumattomia. Ikuisia totuuksia ovat ainakin matemaattiset ja geometriset tosiseikat sekä ristiriidan laki. Samoin Descartesin kuuluisa lause “ajattelen, siis olen” lukeutuu ikuisten totuuksien (...) joukkoon. Descartesin ikuiset totuudet olisivatkin siis loogisesti välttämättömiä. Niillä on kyseinen olemus riippumatta ulkoisten kohteiden olemassaolosta tai siitä, ajattelenko niitä lainkaan. Kuitenkin kirjeenvaihdossaan Descartes pitää itsepintaisesti kiinni käsityksestään, että ikuiset totuudet ovat Jumalan vapaasti luomia ja Jumala olisi voinut luoda ne erilailla. Näin ollen luodut ikuiset totuudet eivät tarkkaan ottaen olisikaan välttämättömiä vaan kontingentteja. Ne voisivat olla myös toisella tavalla. Artikkelin alkuun esittelen Descartesin modaalista metafysiikkaa sekä luotujen ikuisten totuuksien kontingenttiudesta seuraavia tulkinnallisia vaikeuksia. Tämän jälkeen pureudun kolmeen erilaiseen ratkaisuyritykseen kommentaarikirjallisuudessa (Frankfurt 1977; Curley 1984 & Bennett 1994) ja osoitan, miksi ne eivät riitä vastaamaan ongelmaan. Lopussa vedän johtopäätöksiä ja luonnostelen mahdollisen ratkaisun. (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)

This thesis analyses the ontological nature of quantum particles. In it I argue that quantum particles, despite their indistinguishability, are objects in much the same way as classical particles. This similarity provides an important point of continuity between classical and quantum physics. I consider two notions of indistinguishability, that of indiscernibility and permutation symmetry. I argue that neither sort of indistinguishability undermines the identity of quantum particles. I further argue that, when we understand in distinguishability in terms of permutation symmetry, (...) classical particles are just as indistinguishable as quantum particles; for classical physics also possesses permutation symmetry. (shrink)

Weak emergence has been offered as an explication of the ubiquitous notion of emergence used in complexity science (Bedau 1997). After outlining the problem of emergence and comparing weak emergence with the two other main objectivist approaches to emergence, this paper explains a version of weak emergence and illustrates it with cellular automata. Then it explains the sort of downward causation and explanatory autonomy involved in weak emergence.

The aim of this dissertation is to show that, if one is committed to the scientific worldview, one is thereby committed to ethical non-naturalism. In the first chapter I offer the reader an outline of the three primary domains of ethical inquiry: normative ethics, applied ethics, and meta-ethics. I commit myself to a meta-ethical thesis--ethical non-naturalism--and contrast ethical non-naturalism with its competitors. In the second chapter I offer a cursory defense of the moral realist's semantic thesis. I offer reason to (...) think the realist has the correct semantic account and argue against the semantic accounts offered by the realist's primary opponents. In the third chapter of the dissertation I argue that commitment to the scientific worldview requires that one think that the methods of the sciences provide privileged access to facts about the external world and I offer a brief sketch of inference to the best explanation--the primary method I will employ in offering a defense of ethical non-naturalism. In the fourth chapter I develop a method for identifying non-natural properties. The method relies heavily on the predictive power that can be gained by the accurate application of predicates. In the fifth chapter I apply the method developed in the previous chapter. The results are mixed. The method fails to demonstrate that there are non-natural moral facts; however, it does demonstrate that there are non-natural normative facts. Using this result as a lemma, I identify a hypothesis--"[H]"--that, if true, would vindicate ethical non-naturalism. In the sixth chapter I rely on [H] to respond to evolutionary criticisms of ethical non-naturalism and argue that, if morality evolved, we have good reason to believe [H]. In the final chapter, I defend the view I have developed from objections arising from the existence of moral disagreement and I argue that [H] provides the best explanation of the existence of actual moral disagreement. (shrink)

Models of memory in cognitive science and philosophy have traditionally explained human remembering in terms of storage and retrieval. This tendency has been entrenched by reliance on computationalist explanations over the course of the twentieth century; even research programs that eschew computationalism in name, or attempt the revision of traditional models, demonstrate tacit commitment to computationalist assumptions. It is assumed that memory must be stored by means of an isomorphic trace, that memory processes must divide into conceptually distinct systems and (...) phases, and that human remembering consists in inner, cognitive processes that are implemented by distinct neural processes. This dissertation draws on recent empirical work, and on philosophical arguments from Ludwig Wittgenstein and others, to demonstrate that this latent computationalism in the study of memory is problematic, and that it can and should be eliminated. Cognitive psychologists studying memory have encountered numerous data in recent decades that belie archival models. In cognitive neuroscience, establishing the neural basis of storage and retrieval processes has proven elusive. A number of revised models on offer in memory science, that have taken these issues into account, fail to sufficiently extricate the archival framework. Several impasses in memory science are products of these underlying computationalist assumptions. Wittgenstein and other philosophers offer a number of arguments against the need for, and the efficacy of, the storage and retrieval of traces in human remembering. A study of these arguments clarifies the ways that these computationalist assumptions are presently impeding the science of memory, and provides ways forward in removing them. We can and should characterize and model human memory without invoking the storage and retrieval of traces. A range of work in connectionism, dynamical systems theory, and recent philosophical accounts of memory demonstrate how the science of memory can proceed without these assumptions, toward non-archival models of remembering. (shrink)

Twenty years ago Stephen Yablo developed his original theory of mental causation, which has drawn much attention ever since. By providing a detailed reconstruction of Yablo’s approach, this paper first demonstrates that a certain line of critique that has repeatedly been brought forward against Yablo over the last two decades misconstrues the core idea of the model. At the same time, the reconstruction reveals that Yablo’s approach is probably the first explicit version of the “new compatibilism” within the philosophy of (...) mind. This fairly young family of theories essentially claims a non-identity as well as a non-distinctness of mental and physical phenomena. The second part of the paper then demonstrates that the new compatibilist approaches in general, and Yablo’s theory in particular, even though they can resist much of the popular criticism, fall prey to a new theoretical trilemma once the nature of the respective analysantia is made explicit. Finally, a model of the psychophysical relation is developed that may allow the new compatibilists to escape the mentioned trilemma. (shrink)

In my dissertation I analyze the structure of fundamental physical theories. I start with an analysis of what an adequate primitive ontology is, discussing the measurement problem in quantum mechanics and theirs solutions. It is commonly said that these theories have little in common. I argue instead that the moral of the measurement problem is that the wave function cannot represent physical objects and a common structure between these solutions can be recognized: each of them is about a clear three-dimensional (...) primitive ontology that evolves according to a law determined by the wave function. The primitive ontology is what matter is made of while the wave function tells the matter how to move. One might think that what is important in the notion of primitive ontology is their three-dimensionality. If so, in a theory like classical electrodynamics electromagnetic fields would be part of the primitive ontology. I argue that, reflecting on what the purpose of a fundamental physical theory is, namely to explain the behavior of objects in three--dimensional space, one can recognize that a fundamental physical theory has a particular architecture. If so, electromagnetic fields play a different role in the theory than the particles and therefore should be considered, like the wave function, as part of the law. Therefore, we can characterize the general structure of a fundamental physical theory as a mathematical structure grounded on a primitive ontology. I explore this idea to better understand theories like classical mechanics and relativity, emphasizing that primitive ontology is crucial in the process of building new theories, being fundamental in identifying the symmetries. Finally, I analyze what it means to explain the word around us in terms of the notion of primitive ontology in the case of regularities of statistical character. Here is where the notion of typicality comes into play: we have explained a phenomenon if the typical histories of the primitive ontology give rise to the statistical regularities we observe. (shrink)

El artículo plantea la actualidad y pertinencia de la Filosofía de la información de Luciano Floridi, considerada a la luz de las revoluciones científicas de Occidente y de la instauración de nuevos paradigmas, tanto en las ciencias como en la filosofía. La analogía con el “giro matemático” de la Modernidad permite establecer el alcance revolucionario de la obra de Floridi, cuya aceptación implicará superar el obstáculo epistemológico del escolasticismo, en función del dinamismo histórico inherente al progreso científico.

This thesis concerns the metaphysics of scale. It investigates the implications of a physical determinable being dimensionful. In particular, it considers the case study of mass, as it features within Newtonian Gravity. Nevertheless, most of the terminology, methodology and arguments developed should be relatively straightforwardly applicable to other determinables and theories. -/- Weak Absolutism about mass holds that mass ratios obtain in virtue of absolute masses. Weak Comparativism denies this. In the first five chapters I argue in favour of Weak (...) Absolutism over Weak Comparativism. The sixth chapter argues against reducing mass to other non-mass facts. The overall conclusion is Strong Absolutism about mass within Newtonian Gravity: mass ratios obtain in virtue of absolute masses, which themselves are fundamental (i.e. they do not require anything further in order to obtain). -/- Comparativism promises to recover all the virtues of absolutism, in particular its empirical adequacy, but at a lower 'metaphysical cost'. Special attention is given to Dasgupta's recent comparativist proposal. Dasgupta interprets the requirement of empirical adequacy in terms of the undetectability of the absolute mass scale. I argue that undetectability is an unsuitable way of understanding empirical adequacy and that we would do better to understand it in terms of a theory's ability to correctly generate the set of empirically possible worlds (or at least the actual world). I refute Dasgupta's comparativism both on my terms and on his own terms. I subsequently develop and strongly criticise alternative versions of comparativism. Chapter five sheds doubt on the supposed 'metaphysical parsimony' of comparativism. -/- This debate should be of particular interest to readers who engage with the substantivalism-relationalism debate. These debates are much more entwined than previously acknowledged, which provides a significant source of mutual inspiration, although I do also draw out some important disanalogies. -/- . (shrink)

All organised bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substances considered as mere physical agents. To whatever degree we might imagine our knowledge of the properties of the several ingredients of a (...) living body to be extended and perfected, it is certain that no mere summing up of the separate actions of those elements will ever amount to the action of the living body itself. (shrink)

The role of intentions in motor planning is heavily weighted in classical psychological theories, but their role in generating eye movements, and our awareness of these oculomotor intentions, has not been investigated explicitly. In this study, the extent to which we monitor oculomotor intentions, i.e. the intentions to shift one’s gaze towards a specific location, and whether they can be expressed in conscious experience, is investigated. A forced-choice decision task was developed where a pair of faces moved systematically across a (...) screen. In some trials, the pair of faces moved additionally as soon as the participants attempted to gaze at one of the faces, preventing them from ever viewing it. The results of the experiment suggest that humans in general do not monitor their eye movement intentions in a way that allows for mismatches between planned gaze landing target and resulting gaze landing target to be consciously experienced during decision-making. (shrink)

Despite recent neuroscientific research purporting to reveal that free will is an illusion, this paper will argue that agency is an inescapable feature of rationality and thought. My aim will not be to address the methodology or interpretation of such research, which I will only mention in passing. Rather, I will examine a collection of basic concepts which are presupposed by thought, and propose that these concepts are interrelated in ways that makes them both basic and irreducibly complex. The collection (...) includes such concepts as belief, value, meaning, and truth. I will argue that free will belongs to this collection, and as such is also presupposed by thought. This proposal is opposed to a methodological tendency in analytic philosophy, to eliminate aspects of concepts which can’t be given a clear analysis, and to the wish of many empirical psychologists and cognitive scientists to reduce intentional/mental states to neurons and other mindless phenomena which they regard as more fundamental. Instead of offering a direct critique of either of these methodological attitudes, I will try to place the concept of freedom in its proper conceptual context, and make a positive case for its reality. (shrink)

The problem of consciousness seems to arise from experience itself. As we shall consider in more detail below, we are strongly disposed to contrast conscious experience with the physical states or events by which we take it to be realized. This contrast gives rise to dualism and other problems of mind and body. In this chapter I argue that these problems can usefully be considered in the perspective of evolution.

A dramatic problem facing the concept of the self is whether there is anything to make sense of. Despite the speculative view that there is an essential role for the perceiver in measurement, a physicalist view of reality currently seems to be ruling out the conditions of subjectivity required to keep the concept of the self. Eliminative materialism states this position explicitly. The doctrine holds that we have no objective grounds for attributing personhood to anyone, and can therefore dispense with (...) the concept. That implication would require us to dispense with many of the most basic commitments of our manifest or common sense image of the world. And it would require us to abandon, to maintain as an act of bad faith, or radically to adjust, virtually every significant basic commitment underlying the variety of traditions that have evolved historically from the (natural) platform of common sense. Daniel Dennett’s sympathies seem to be divided over this issue. He is reluctant to eliminate the most fundamental linguistic-conceptual-institutional commitments that have evolved from common sense. Yet, I will argue, the basis of his support for these, beneath the surface of his rhetoric, is a mirage. His view of persons and related (intentional) concepts is a case in point. In place of the eliminative materialist position, Dennett recommends that we regard the self as a highly useful “theorist’s fiction.” He adopts a similar epistemic stance toward intention, belief, mind, and so on. In this paper I aim to show that Dennett’s recommendation is based on a subtle version of the dualism of subject and object (or scheme and content), which he seems to agree that we should transcend. Against Dennett’s view of the self as a “theorist’s fiction,” I argue in favour of a version of Donald Davidson’s realist thesis that, once we properly appreciate the significance of abandoning this pervasive dualism, we can maintain the self and associated intentional items – belief, mind, and so on – within a thoroughly realist ontology. (shrink)

In this note I examine the two main differences between Plato's and Dennett's views of the self as an abstract object. I point out that in the presence of certain forms of ontological realism, abstract-object theories of the self are compatible with the full reality of the self. I conclude with some remarks on the relationship between ontology and ethics.

In this paper I explore the logical relationship between the question of the reality of qualia and the problem of universals. I argue that nominalism is inconsistent with the existence of qualia, and that realism either implies or makes plausible the existence of qualia. Thus, one's position on the existence of qualia is strongly constrained by one's answer to the problem of universals.

In this paper I examine a new variant of the well-known idea that the self is an abstract object. I propose a simple model of the self as a property of temporal slices of a body's history. I argue that this model, when combined with even a modest realism with regard to properties, implies that the self has many of the chief features traditionally attributed to selves. I conclude that this model allows one to reconcile the full reality of the (...) self with even the most deflationary materialistic theories of consciousness. (shrink)