Would it be possible to have an alternative to the physicalist world-view? If any type of dualism is not an option, I am tempted to consider an integrational world view, which was first claimed by Confucius under the notion of cheng. I would propose an integrational thesis that cheng of an entity is a power to realize the embedded objective of it in the context where it interacts with all others. The notion of compassion may be said to be both (...) dispositional and mental. Then, this notion is one candidate to shed lights on the integrational thesis. The thesis doesn't exclude roles the causal notion has to play in the integrational system. Rather it allows the causal notion in its proper place, not having to exclude other relational notions in the system. What it denies is that the causal relation is all there is among what is there. The notion of compassion is essentialist in two senses. The first is the sense in which Mencius said that compassion is necessary for one to be a human. The second is the sense that compassion is an essentialist disposition. "Compassion" does neither refer to a mental state nor reflect a human relation, but it denotes an abstract property, or a theoretical notion, which can be singled out by a Ramsey sentence. There are many challenges for the integrational thesis to meet. Some of them are how the integrational thesis could allow an essentialism of a kind?, Is there a way for the integrational view of language to meet the requirements of modal semantics?, and so on. The present paper may not able to explain all of these questions but it will try to suggest how to approach toward the task. (shrink)

“Naturalized epistemology” is a recent attempt to transform the theory of knowledge into a branch of natural science. Traditional epistemologists object to this proposal on the grounds that it eliminates the distinctively philosophical content of epistemology. In this thesis, I argue that traditional philosophers are justified in their reluctance to accept naturalism, but that their ongoing inability to refute it points to deeper problems inherent in traditional epistemology. I establish my thesis first by critiquing three versions of naturalism, showing that (...) each version either fails to implement its objectives consistently or starts from dubious objectives. “Optimistic naturalism” attempts to use naturalistic methods to give positive answers to traditional epistemological questions (such as by affirming that our beliefs can be justified). This fails because the form of traditional questions requires the concept “belief,” a concept that I argue naturalistic methodology cannot countenance (because of the severe constraints of naturalistic semantic theory). “Pessimistic naturalism,” the version advocated by Quine, is more consistent with naturalistic methodology, but fails because hidden behind its conclusions are assumptions (such as the underdetermination thesis) that cannot themselves be naturalized in the full context of scientific evidence. A final attempt to naturalize epistemology, deflationary naturalism, dispenses with traditional questions entirely, urging that the terms “knowledge” and “justification” be taken as mere pragmatic devices whose use can, nevertheless, be studied scientifically. Curiously, this view fails to take account of important facts about the actual use of those terms, as studied by psychologists. In the end, despite problems with each of these versions, traditional philosophers can learn something from their encounter with naturalism. In the course of showing how various naturalistic doctrines cannot themselves be naturalized, I identify the flaws in traditional epistemology (such as its reliance on a priorism, and its resulting inability to articulate a workable empirical foundationalist theory of justification) that make naturalism harder to challenge. These flaws must be corrected if philosophers are to preserve the autonomy of their discipline. (shrink)

A significant and interesting part of the post-Gettier literature regarding the analysis of propositional knowledge is the attempt to supplement the traditional tripartite analysis by employing a fourth condition regarding the defeasibility of evidence and thus to preclude the counterexamples displayed in Gettier’s original article. My aim in this paper is to critically examine the sort of externalism that accompanies the most promising of the proposed fourth conditions, due to Pollock, in order to offer some fresh insights on this old (...) epistemological issue. I argue that Pollock’s paradigmatic treatment of the matter gives rise to a critical problem with regard to the exact role of the fourth condition and its relation with the onto-semantic or alethic condition of propositional knowledge, to wit, truth. In the light of this discussion, I draw certain conclusions about epistemic externalism and point out some of its theoretical shortcomings. (shrink)

If you put chimpanzees from different communities together you can expect mayhem - they are not keen on treating each other nicely. There is closely related species of apes, however, whose members have countless encounters with unrelated specimen on a daily basis and yet almost all get through the day in one piece - that species is us, homo sapiens. But what makes us get along, most of the time? Morality as such is, perhaps surprisingly, not a mainstream research topic (...) in social psychology. Most textbooks in the field do not even mention the term morality at all (and focus on 'prosociality' instead). This relative lack of 'coverage' might have to do with the difficulty of operationalising 'morality' in a fitting way (more on this below). However, morality certainly is a social phenomenon and therefore the collection of Fargas, Jussim, and Van Lange is certainly a step in the right direction; it offers an extensive overview of the field and is suggestive of the vast potential of studying morality through the lens of social psychology. (shrink)

The nature of color is an open philosophical and scientific question. In this work I develop a physicalist relationist theory of color. So far, attempts to identify color as a physical property of objects have not been convincing because no physical property used by scientists seems to be well correlated with color sensations. I define a new physical property which I call transformance and show that transformance is 100% correlated with color sensations. Intuitively, transformance is a very general abstract physical (...) property that describes how a system transforms or modifies light or information that characterizes light. It turns out that transformance is a relational property of objects like velocity and weight. Transformance is related to surface reflectance as weight is related to mass. Transformance is a much better candidate to be color than surface reflectance because it is 100% correlated with color sensations, precisely models surround effects and fully explains all issues that relate to perceptual variation or the lack thereof. Several concrete examples are provided that show how the transformance of different systems should be modeled. After defining transformance, I defend the theory that color is transformance against possible objections while contrasting my theory with the theory that color is surface reflectance. I then discuss the relations between color and color sensation and the more general objections to any physicalist theory of color. The final part of the thesis deals with epistemological issues related to my theory of color including two apparent paradoxes that I believe every theory of color must answer: 1) How is it that human beings get along so well with an erroneous theory of color? 2) How can science, which is based on the common sense theory of color, conclude that the common sense theory is wrong? I show that my theory provides answers to these questions. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present a formal model of social net- works suitable for studying questions in social epistemology. We show how to use this model, in conjunction with a computer program for simulating groups of inquirers, to draw conclusions about the epistemological prop- erties of different social practices. This furnishes us with the beginnings of a systematic research program in social epistemology, from which to approach problems pertaining to epistemic value, optimal organization, and the dynamics of (...) multi-agent inquiry. (shrink)