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  1. Philosophical Problems in the Classroom. The Clash Strategy for Planning and Facilitating Dialogic Inquiry.Luca Zanetti - 2023 - Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 11 (1):321-351.
    The aim of this paper is to clarify under what conditions a philosophical problem arises. I will describe two ways in which we might perceive a question as a problem. First, when we fnd ourselves inclined to believe in propositions that appear incompatible with each other. Second, when we fnd ourselves inclined to believe in propositions that seem incompatible with our desires. I will discuss both of these cases and articulate a didactic strategy – the Clash Strategy – which can (...)
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  • Quasi-Metacognitive Machines: Why We Don’t Need Morally Trustworthy AI and Communicating Reliability is Enough.John Dorsch & Ophelia Deroy - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (2):1-21.
    Many policies and ethical guidelines recommend developing “trustworthy AI”. We argue that developing morally trustworthy AI is not only unethical, as it promotes trust in an entity that cannot be trustworthy, but it is also unnecessary for optimal calibration. Instead, we show that reliability, exclusive of moral trust, entails the appropriate normative constraints that enable optimal calibration and mitigate the vulnerability that arises in high-stakes hybrid decision-making environments, without also demanding, as moral trust would, the anthropomorphization of AI and thus (...)
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  • Belief revision in psychotherapy.J. P. Grodniewicz - 2024 - Synthese 203 (4):1-22.
    According to the cognitive model of psychopathology, maladaptive beliefs about oneself, others, and the world are the main factors contributing to the development and persistence of various forms of mental suffering. Therefore, the key therapeutic process of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—a therapeutic approach rooted in the cognitive model—is cognitive restructuring, i.e., a process of revision of such maladaptive beliefs. In this paper, I examine the philosophical assumptions underlying CBT and offer theoretical reasons to think that the effectiveness of belief revision (...)
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  • Introduction to the topical collection ‘locating representations in the brain: interdisciplinary perspectives’.Sarah K. Robins & Felipe De Brigard - 2024 - Synthese 203 (5):1-18.
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  • Inquiry, Questions, and Actions.Benoit Guilielmo - forthcoming - Dialogue.
    This article aims to contribute to the elucidation of the nature of inquiry. I start with some common desiderata for any theory of inquiry. I then categorize inquiry as a structured process. By focusing on its essential components, I advance a new characterization of inquiry as a combination of questioning attitudes guiding actions. Finally, I turn to the recent objection that questioning attitudes are not necessary for inquiry. I argue that inquiry is a structured process essentially constituted by questioning attitudes (...)
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  • The Weirdness of the World.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2024 - Princeton University Press.
    How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental (...)
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  • Neural representations unobserved—or: a dilemma for the cognitive neuroscience revolution.Marco Facchin - 2023 - Synthese 203 (1):1-42.
    Neural structural representations are cerebral map- or model-like structures that structurally resemble what they represent. These representations are absolutely central to the “cognitive neuroscience revolution”, as they are the only type of representation compatible with the revolutionaries’ mechanistic commitments. Crucially, however, these very same commitments entail that structural representations can be observed in the swirl of neuronal activity. Here, I argue that no structural representations have been observed being present in our neuronal activity, no matter the spatiotemporal scale of observation. (...)
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  • Decoupling Accuracy from Fitness.Roberto de sá Pereira - 2023 - Argumenta 1:1-14.
    Tyler Burge (2010) provided a scathing critique of all programs for naturalizing concepts of representation, especially teleological naturalizing programs. He tended to demonstrate that “representational content” is a concept that cannot be reduced to more fundamental biological or physical ideas. According to him, since the 1970s, the concept of representational content has been firmly established in cognitive psychology as a mature science and utilized inadequate explanations. Since Dretske’s program is Burge’s primary objective, this paper concentrates on Dretske’s perspective. Following Burge’s (...)
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  • Beliefs as Self-Verifying Fictions.Angela Mendelovici - forthcoming - In Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), What is Belief? Oxford University Press.
    Abstract In slogan form, the thesis of this paper is that beliefs are self-verifying fictions: We make them up, but in so doing, they come to exist, and so the fiction of belief is in fact true. This picture of belief emerges from a combination of three independently motivated views: (1) a phenomenal intentionalist picture of intentionality, on which phenomenal consciousness is the basis of intentionality; (2) what I will call a “self-ascriptivist” picture of derived representation, on which non-fundamental representational (...)
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  • An Integration Challenge to Strong Representationalism.I.-Sen Chen - 2022 - Disputatio 14 (67):326-352.
    By “strong representationalism” (“SR” hereafter), I mean a version of naturalistic philosophy of mind which first naturalizes intentionality by identifying it with causation to physical properties and then naturalizes phenomenology by identifying it with intentionality or making them co-supervene on each other (Montague [2010]). Most specifically, SR will be taken as the conjunction of causal-function semantics and the intentionality-phenomenology identity thesis, the latter of which entails what I call “converse intentionalism”, the principle that experiential content supervenes on phenomenology. Because of (...)
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  • Autonomy as Practical Understanding.Reza Hadisi - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper, I offer a theory of autonomous agency that relies on the re-sources of a strongly cognitivist theory of intention and intentional action. On the proposed account, intentional action is a graded notion that is ex-plained via the agent’s degree of practical knowledge. In turn, autonomous agency is also a graded notion that is explained via the agent’s degree of practical understanding. The resulting theory can synthesize insights from both the hierarchical and the cognitivist theories of autonomy with (...)
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  • A new low: Reassessing (and revising) the local recurrency theory of consciousness.Benjamin Kozuch - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Local Recurrency Theory (LR) holds that recurrent loops of neural activity localized to the visual cortex are necessary and sufficient for visual consciousness (if certain background conditions obtain). LR’s popularity has recently waned in favor of theories holding that higher-level types of processing are necessary for consciousness (for example, the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Higher-order Theory). This has been in part because of empirical evidence thought to disconfirm LR. However, these competing theories now face challenges of their own, often (...)
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  • Real Sparks of Artificial Intelligence and the Importance of Inner Interpretability.Alex Grzankowski - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The present paper looks at one of the most thorough articles on the intelligence of GPT, research conducted by engineers at Microsoft. Although there is a great deal of value in their work, I will argue that, for familiar philosophical reasons, their methodology, ‘Black-box Interpretability’ is wrongheaded. But there is a better way. There is an exciting and emerging discipline of ‘Inner Interpretability’ (also sometimes called ‘White-box Interpretability’) that aims to uncover the internal activations and weights of models in order (...)
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  • A structuralist theory of phenomenal intentionality.Ben White - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper argues for a theory of phenomenal intentionality (herein referred to as ‘Structuralism’), according to which perceptual experiences only possess intentional content when their phenomenal components are appropriately related to one another. This paper responds to the objections (i) that Structuralism cannot explain why some experiences have content while others do not, or (ii) why contentful experiences have the specific contents that they have. Against (i), I argue that to possess content, an experience must present itself as an experience (...)
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  • Emergent Mental Properties are Not Just Double-Preventers.Andrei A. Buckareff & Jessica Hawkins - 2023 - Synthese 202 (2):1-22.
    We examine Sophie Gibb’s emergent property-dualist theory of mental causation as double-prevention. Her account builds on a commitment to a version of causal realism based on a powers metaphysic. We consider three objections to her account. We show, by drawing out the implications of the ontological commitments of Gibb’s theory of mental causation, that the first two objections fail. But, we argue, owing to worries about cases where there is no double-preventive role to be played by mental properties, her account, (...)
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  • Altruistic Motivation Beyond Ultimate Desires.Junior Mendonca - 2023 - Dissertation, The University of Western Australia
    The term “altruism” is used in many ways. In this thesis, I discuss altruism as a motivation, which is an influential notion in philosophy and the social sciences. Questions about the nature and the possibility of altruistic motivation have inspired much debate, both in academia and in everyday conversations. How can we know when we are truly altruistic and when we are merely helping others as a means to some egoistic goal? Are humans even capable of genuine altruistic motivation or (...)
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  • Agential Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2022 - Dissertation, Autonomous University of Barcelona
    The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...)
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  • Theories of Perceptual Content and Cases of Reliable Spatial Misperception.Andrew Rubner - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):430-455.
    Perception is riddled with cases of reliable misperception. These are cases in which a perceptual state is tokened inaccurately any time it is tokened under normal conditions. On the face of it, this fact causes trouble for theories that provide an analysis of perceptual content in non-semantic, non-intentional, and non-phenomenal terms, such as those found in Millikan (1984), Fodor (1990), Neander (2017), and Schellenberg (2018). I show how such theories can be extended so that they cover such cases without giving (...)
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  • What is social structural explanation? A causal account.Lauren N. Ross - 2023 - Noûs 1 (1):163-179.
    Social scientists appeal to various “structures” in their explanations including public policies, economic systems, and social hierarchies. Significant debate surrounds the explanatory relevance of these factors for various outcomes such as health, behavioral, and economic patterns. This paper provides a causal account of social structural explanation that is motivated by Haslanger (2016). This account suggests that social structure can be explanatory in virtue of operating as a causal constraint, which is a causal factor with unique characteristics. A novel causal framework (...)
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  • Are There Really Social Causes?August Faller - 2023 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 53 (2):83-102.
    This article investigates the causal efficacy of social properties, which faces the following puzzle. First, for both intuitive and scientific reasons, it seems social properties have causal import. But, second, social properties are also characteristically extrinsic: to have some social property depends, in typical cases, on what one’s society is like around them. And, third, there is good reason to doubt that extrinsic properties make a genuine causal contribution. After elaborating on these three claims, I defend the following resolution to (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Elusive Role of Normal-Proper Function in Cognitive Science.Frances Egan - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105:468-475.
    Comments on Karen Neander's A Mark of the Mental.
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  • Merely statistical evidence: when and why it justifies belief.Paul Silva - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2639-2664.
    It is one thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _sometimes_ insufficient for rational belief, as in typical lottery and profiling cases. It is another thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _always_ insufficient for rational belief. Indeed, there are cases where statistical evidence plainly does justify belief. This project develops a dispositional account of the normativity of statistical evidence, where the dispositions that ground justifying statistical evidence are connected to the goals (= proper function) of objects. There (...)
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  • What do we see in pictures? The sensory individuals of picture perception.Bence Nanay - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3729-3746.
    When I am looking at an apple, I perceptually attribute certain properties to certain entities. Two questions arise: what are these entities (what is it that I perceptually represent as having properties) and what are these properties (what properties I perceive this entity as having)? This paper is about the former, less widely explored, question: what does our perceptual system attribute properties to? In other words, what are these ‘sensory individuals’. There have been important debates in philosophy of perception about (...)
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  • Moral Agency.Timothy Nailer - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Adelaide
    While there is a vast philosophical literature exploring the conditions under which it is appropriate to hold individuals morally responsible for their actions, relatively little attention has been paid to the related question of which kinds of individuals merit these responsibility ascriptions. Under normal circumstances, typical adult human beings are held morally responsible for their behaviour but infants and nonhuman animals are not. In this thesis, I aim to account for this difference. That is, I aim to give an analysis (...)
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  • Stop and smell the what? Two kinds of olfactory representation.Christopher F. Masciari - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-21.
    There are many accounts of representation in the philosophical literature. However, regarding olfaction, Burge’s (2010) account is widely endorsed. According to his account, perceptual representation is always of an objective reality, that is, perception represents objects as such. Many authors presuppose this account of representation and attempt to show that the olfactory system itself issues in representations of that sort. The present paper argues that this myopia is a mistake and, moreover, that the various arguments in favor of olfactory objects (...)
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  • The proximate-ultimate distinction and the active role of the organism in evolution.Bendik Hellem Aaby & Grant Ramsey - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (4):1-20.
    The validity and utility of the proximate-ultimate distinction in biology have recently been under debate. Opponents of the distinction argue that it rules out individual-level organismic processes from evolutionary explanations, thereby leading to an unfounded separation between organismic causation and evolutionary causation. Proponents of the proximate-ultimate distinction, on the other hand, argue that it serves an important epistemological role in forming different kinds of explanation-seeking questions in biology. In this paper we offer an interpretation the proximate-ultimate distinction not only as (...)
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  • Phenomenology: What’s AI got to do with it?Alessandra Buccella & Alison A. Springle - 2023 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (3):621-636.
    Nowadays, philosophers and scientists tend to agree that, even though human and artificial intelligence work quite differently, they can still illuminate aspects of each other, and knowledge in one domain can inspire progress in the other. For instance, the notion of “artificial” or “synthetic” phenomenology has been gaining some traction in recent AI research. In this paper, we ask the question: what (if anything) is the use of thinking about phenomenology in the context of AI, and in particular machine learning? (...)
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  • Phenomenal transparency, cognitive extension, and predictive processing.Marco Facchin - 2024 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 23 (2):305-327.
    I discuss Clark’s predictive processing/extended mind hybrid, diagnosing a problem: Clark’s hybrid suggests that, when we use them, we pay attention to mind-extending external resources. This clashes with a commonly accepted necessary condition of cognitive extension; namely, that mind-extending resources must be phenomenally transparent when used. I then propose a solution to this problem claiming that the phenomenal transparency condition should be rejected. To do so, I put forth a parity argument to the effect that phenomenal transparency cannot be a (...)
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  • The problem with appealing to history in defining neural representations.Ori Hacohen - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (3):1-17.
    Representations seem to play a major role in many neuroscientific explanations. Philosophers have long attempted to properly define what it means for a neural state to be a representation of a specific content. Teleosemantic theories of content which characterize representations, in part, by appealing to a historical notion of function, are often regarded as our best path towards an account of neural representations. This paper points to the anti-representationalist consequences of these accounts. I argue that assuming such teleosemantic views will (...)
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  • Organism-Environment Interactions in Evolutionary Theory.Bendik Hellem Aaby - 2021 - Dissertation, Ku Leuven
    This dissertation concerns the active role of the organism in evolutionary theory. In particular, it concerns how our conception of the relationship between organism and environment, and the nature of natural selection, influences the causal and explanatory role of organismic activity and behavior in evolutionary explanations. The overarching aim is to argue that the behaviors and activities of organisms can serve both as the explananda (that which is explained) and the explanantia (that which explains) in evolutionary explanations. I attempt to (...)
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  • Normal‐proper functions in the philosophy of mind.Andrew Rubner - 2022 - Philosophy Compass (7):1-11.
    This paper looks at the nature of normal-proper functions and the role they play in theories of representational content. More specifically: I lay down two desiderata for a theory which tries to capture what's distinctive of normal-proper functions and discuss two prominent theories which claim to satisfy them. I discuss the advantages of having normal-proper functions ground a theory of representational content. And, I look at both orthodox and heterodox versions of such theories.
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  • (1 other version)Book review: Papineau, D. the metaphysics of sensory experience, (oxford: Oxford university, 2021, 176 pages). [REVIEW]Roberto Horácio de Sá Pereira & Sérgio Farias de Souza Filho - 2022 - Manuscrito 45 (2):267-276.
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  • Mapping representational mechanisms with deep neural networks.Phillip Hintikka Kieval - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-25.
    The predominance of machine learning based techniques in cognitive neuroscience raises a host of philosophical and methodological concerns. Given the messiness of neural activity, modellers must make choices about how to structure their raw data to make inferences about encoded representations. This leads to a set of standard methodological assumptions about when abstraction is appropriate in neuroscientific practice. Yet, when made uncritically these choices threaten to bias conclusions about phenomena drawn from data. Contact between the practices of multivariate pattern analysis (...)
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  • Actual Control - Demodalising Free Will.David Heering - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Leeds
    Plausibly, agents act freely iff their actions are responses to reasons. But what sort of relationship between reason and action is required for the action to count as a response? The overwhelmingly dominant answer to this question is modalist. It holds that responses are actions that share a modally robust or secure relationship with the relevant reasons. This thesis offers a new alternative answer. It argues that responses are actions that can be explained by reasons in the right way. This (...)
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  • Proper Functionalism and the Organizational Theory of Functions.Peter J. Graham - 2023 - In Luis R. G. Oliveira (ed.), Externalism about Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 249-276.
    Proper functionalism explicates epistemic warrant in terms of the function and normal functioning of the belief-forming process. There are two standard substantive views of the sources of functions in the literature in epistemology: God (intelligent design) or Mother Nature (evolution by natural selection). Both appear to confront the Swampman objection: couldn’t there be a mind with warranted beliefs neither designed by God nor the product of evolution by natural selection? Is there another substantive view that avoids the Swampman objection? There (...)
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  • (1 other version)Towards a Mechanistically Neutral Account of Acting Jointly: The Notion of a Collective Goal.Stephen A. Butterfill & Corrado Sinigaglia - 2022 - Mind 132 (525):1-29.
    Many of the things we do are, or could be, done with others. Mundane examples favoured by philosophers include painting a house together (Bratman 1992), li.
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  • Are Propositional Attitudes Mental States?Umut Baysan - 2022 - Minds and Machines 32 (3):417-432.
    I present an argument that propositional attitudes are not mental states. In a nutshell, the argument is that if propositional attitudes are mental states, then only minded beings could have them; but there are reasons to think that some non-minded beings could bear propositional attitudes. To illustrate this, I appeal to cases of genuine group intentionality. I argue that these are cases in which some group entities bear propositional attitudes, but they are not subjects of mental states. Although propositional attitudes (...)
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  • Quantitative Character and the Composite Account of Phenomenal Content.Kim Soland - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
    I advance an account of quantitative character, a species of phenomenal character that presents as an intensity (cf. a quality) and includes experience dimensions such as loudness, pain intensity, and visual pop-out. I employ psychological and neuroscientific evidence to demonstrate that quantitative characters are best explained by attentional processing, and hence that they do not represent external qualities. Nonetheless, the proposed account of quantitative character is conceived as a compliment to the reductive intentionalist strategy toward qualitative states; I argue that (...)
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  • Causes with material continuity.Lauren N. Ross - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (6):1-17.
    Recent philosophical work on causation has focused on distinctions across types of causal relationships. This paper argues for another distinction that has yet to receive attention in this work. This distinction has to do with whether causal relationships have “material continuity,” which refers to the reliable movement of material from cause to effect. This paper provides an analysis of material continuity and argues that causal relationships with this feature are associated with a unique explanatory perspective, are studied with distinct causal (...)
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  • Crane and the mark of the mental.Andrea Raimondi - 2022 - Analysis 81 (4):683-693.
    Brentano’s suggestion that intentionality is the mark of the mental is typically spelled out in terms of the thesis that all and only mental states are intentional. An influential objection is that intentionality is not necessary for mentality. What about the idea that only mental states are intentional? In his 2008 paper published in Analysis, Nes shows that on a popular characterization of intentionality, notably defended by Crane, some non-mental states come out as intentional. Crane replies that the concept of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Better Scared than Sorry: The Pragmatic Account of Emotional Representation.Kris Goffin - 2021 - Erkenntnis (6):1-18.
    Some emotional representations seem to be unreliable. For instance, we are often afraid when there is no danger present. If emotions such as fear are so unreliable, what function do they have in our representational system? This is a problem for representationalist theories of emotion. I will argue that seemingly unreliable emotional representations are reliable after all. While many mental states strike an optimal balance between minimizing inaccurate representations and maximizing accurate representations, some emotional representations only aim at maximizing accuracy. (...)
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  • Niche construction and teleology: organisms as agents and contributors in ecology, development, and evolution.Bendik Hellem Aaby & Hugh Desmond - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (5):1-20.
    Niche construction is a concept that captures a wide array of biological phenomena, from the environmental effects of metabolism to the creation of complex structures such as termite mounds and beaver dams. A central point in niche construction theory is that organisms do not just passively undergo developmental, ecological, or evolutionary processes, but are also active participants in them Evolution: From molecules to men, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983; Laland KN, Odling-Smee J, Feldman MW, In: KN Laland and T Uller (...)
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  • Teleosemantics and the Hard Problem of Content.Stephen Francis Mann & Ross Pain - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (1):22-46.
    Hutto and Myin claim that teleosemantics cannot account for mental content. In their view, teleosemantics accounts for a poorer kind of relation between cognitive states and the world but lacks the theoretical tools to account for a richer kind. We show that their objection imposes two criteria on theories of content: a truth-evaluable criterion and an intensionality criterion. For the objection to go through, teleosemantics must be subject to both these criteria and must fail to satisfy them. We argue that (...)
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  • How can representationalism accommodate degrees of belief? A dispositional representationalist proposal.Darrell P. Rowbottom - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8943-8964.
    This paper argues that representationalism of a Fodorian variety can accommodate the fact that beliefs come in degrees. First, it responds to two key arguments to the contrary. Second, it builds upon these responses and outlines a novel representationalist theory of degrees of beliefs. I call this theory dispositional representationalism, as it involves direct appeal to our dispositions to form representations and propositional attitudes concerning them.
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  • Representation, Deflationism, and the Question of Realism.Camil Golub - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7.
    How can we distinguish between quasi-realist expressivism and normative realism? The most promising answer to this question is the “explanation” explanation proposed by Dreier (2004), Simpson (2018), and others: the two views might agree in their claims about truth and objectivity, or even in their attributions of semantic content to normative sentences, but they disagree about how to explain normative meaning. Realists explain meaning by invoking normative facts and properties, or representational relations between normative language and the world, the thought (...)
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  • Intrinsic colors - and what it is like to see them.Zoltan Jakab - 2003 - In R. Mausfeld & D. Heyer (eds.), Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World. Oxford University Press. pp. 303-306.
    This is a commentary on Laurence Maloney’s chapter in Mausfeld R., and Heyer, D. (Eds.): Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. I discuss two related proposals as to the nature of object color formulated by Maloney. On the first proposal colors are photoreceptor excitations; on the second, they are fundamental, universal reflectance characteristics of terrestrial surfaces. I argue that the second proposal is suitable for purposes of color objectivism, whereas the first one is not. (...)
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  • Unity and Application.Geoffrey Hall - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8.
    Propositions represent the entities from which they are formed. This fact has puzzled philosophers and some have put forward radical proposals in order to explain it. This paper develops a primitivist account of the representational properties of propositions that centers on the operation of application. As we will see, this theory wins out over its competitors on grounds of strength, systematicity and unifying power.
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  • Anti-intellectualism, instructive representations, and the intentional action argument.Alison Ann Springle & Justin Humphreys - 2021 - Synthese (3):7919-7955.
    Intellectualists hold that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that, and consequently that the knowledge involved in skill is propositional. In support of this view, the intentional action argument holds that since skills manifest in intentional action and since intentional action necessarily depends on propositional knowledge, skills necessarily depend on propositional knowledge. We challenge this argument, and suggest that instructive representations, as opposed to propositional attitudes, can better account for an agent’s reasons for action. While a propositional-causal theory of action, according (...)
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  • Meaning and Emotion: The Extended Gricean Model and What Emotional Signs Mean.Constant Bonard - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Geneva and University of Antwerp
    This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first part is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. In particular, I show that these latter two models cannot (...)
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  • The disappearing agent as an exclusion problem.Johannes Himmelreich - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6):1321-1347.
    The disappearing agent problem is an argument in the metaphysics of agency. Proponents of the agent-causal approach argue that the rival event-causal approach fails to account for the fact that an agent is active. This paper examines an analogy between this disappearing agent problem and the exclusion problem in the metaphysics of mind. I develop the analogy between these two problems and survey existing solutions. I suggest that some solutions that have received significant attention in response to the exclusion problem (...)
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