Radical skepticism is the view that we know nothing or at least next to nothing. Nearly no one actually believes that skepticism is true. Yet it has remained a serious topic of discussion for millennia and it looms large in popular culture. What explains its persistent and widespread appeal? How does the skeptic get us to doubt what we ordinarily take ourselves to know? I present evidence from two experiments that classic skeptical arguments gain potency from an interaction between two (...) factors. First, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly than perceptual belief. Second, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly when its content is negative (i.e., that something is not the case) than when it is positive (i.e., that something is the case). It just so happens that potent skeptical arguments tend to focus our attention on negative inferential beliefs, and we are especially prone to doubt that such beliefs count as knowledge. That is, our cognitive evaluations are biased against this specific combination of source and content. The skeptic sows seeds of doubt by exploiting this feature of our psychology. (shrink)

English: In this paper I indicate why I consider 'experimental philosophy' to be good news, though not as good as it could be, and not as all that new. I'll argue that there is no need to restrict experimental philosophy to eliciting intuitions through questionnaires. I'll indicate that good examples of experimental philosophy already exist in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Neuroscience. Dutch: Hieronder wil ik proberen aan te geven waarom ik de experimentele filosofie weliswaar als goed nieuws beschouw, maar niet (...) half zo goed als zou kunnen, en ook niet als echt nieuw. Qua filosofische experimenten beperkt de XF-beweging zich vooralsnog onnodig door haar focus op het eliciteren van intuïties, terwijl er reeds lang diverse goede voorbeelden van XF bestaan op het gebied van de kunstmatige intelligentie en de cognitieve neurowetenschap. (shrink)

The discovery of so-called ‘mirror neurons’ - found to respond both to own actions and the observation of similar actions performed by others - has been enormously influential in the cognitive sciences and beyond. Given the self-other symmetry these neurons have been hypothesized as underlying a ‘mirror mechanism’ that lets us share representations and thereby ground core social cognitive functions from intention understanding to linguistic abilities and empathy. I argue that mirror neurons are important for very different reasons. Rather than (...) a symmetric ubiquitous or context- independent mechanism, I propose that these neurons are part of broader sensorimotor circuits, which help us navigate and predict the social affordance space that we meet others in. To develop both the critical and positive project I analyze the interpretive choices and the debate surrounding the mirror neuron research and show how the field is marred by highly questionable assumptions about respectively motor and social cognition. The discovery of mirror neurons - and the sensorimotor circuits of which these neurons are a part – actually empirically challenge many of these tacit assumptions. Findings of sensorimotor goal representations at levels of abstraction well beyond actual sensory information and kinetic movements challenge the idea of motor cognition as primarily output production. Additionally, the focus on 3rd person mindreading of hidden mental states is misguiding the field of social cognition. Much ‘mind-reading’ seems rooted in sensorimotor representations and a developmentally primary 2nd person understanding of actions and the mental lives of others, which precisely breaks the assumed dichotomy between mind and behavior. I propose a Social Affordance model where parallel fronto-parietal sensorimotor circuits support representations not just of other people’s actions but of the overall social affordance space. It is a process that monitors concrete goals and teleological possibilities that the environment affords respectively oneself and other present agents. With this model I hypothesize that the complex spectrum of sensorimotor integrations are indeed essential not only to normal action choice calibration but also to social cognitive abilities, as the sensorimotor teleological representations let us relate to others and understand their action choices in a shared pragmatic and intentional context. (shrink)

When do the folk think that mereological composition occurs? Many metaphysicians have wanted a view of composition that fits with folk intuitions, and yet there has been little agreement about what the folk intuit. We aim to put the tools of experimental philosophy to constructive use. Our studies suggest that folk mereology is teleological: people tend to intuit that composition occurs when the result serves a purpose. We thus conclude that metaphysicians should dismiss folk intuitions, as tied into a benighted (...) teleological view of nature. (shrink)

Reliabilism is invoked by a standard causal response to the slow switching argument for incompatibilism about mental content externalism and privileged access. Though the response in question is negative, in that it only establishes that, given such an epistemology, externalism does not rule privileged access out, the appeal to reliabilism involves an assumption about the reliability of introspection, an assumption that in turn grounds a simple argument for the positive conclusion that reliabilism itself implies privileged access. This paper offers a (...) two-part defense of that conclusion: the reliabilist account of privileged access is defended both againstarguments in favor of the rival content inheritance strategy and against an argument turning on empirical considerations concerning the individuation of the belief-producing process of introspection. (shrink)

Alvin Goldman's recent collection (Goldman, 1992) includes many of the important and seminal contributions made by him over the last three decades to epistemology, philosophy of mind, and analytic metaphysics. Goldman is an acknowledged leader in efforts to put material from cognitive and social science to good philosophical use. This is the “liaison” which Goldman takes his own work to exemplify and advance. Yet the essays contained in Liaisons chart an important evolution in Goldman's own views about the relation between (...) philosophy and empirical inquiry. Goldman raises, if only unwittingly, the question of what philosophy per se contributes to the encounter. The way in which Goldman's work problematizes the claim that philosophy forms a working liaison with the cognitive and social sciences is revealed by examining two sets of distinctions prominent in Goldman's analyses in this volume. I trace how each pair of terms—philosophy versus science, individual versus social—is used by Goldman and suggest that it is less clear than one would like how these key notions are or could be distinguished from one another. Doubts about these distinctions, at least as Goldman employs them, suggest more general concerns regarding Goldman's style of naturalism and the status of philosophy as a source of knowledge. Liaisons: philosophy meets the cognitive and social sciences , A. Goldman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. (shrink)

This paper reviews the largely psychological literature surrounding apparent failures of human rationality (sometimes referred to as 'the Rationality Wars') and locates it with respect to concepts and issues within more traditional epistemological inquiry. The goal is to bridge the gap between these two large and typically disconnected literatures – concerning rationality and the psychology of human reasoning, on the one hand, and epistemological theories of justified or rational belief, on the other – and to do so in such as (...) way as to expose interesting points of contact and convergence between them. (shrink)

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary investigation of mind and intelligence, embracing psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. There are many important philosophical questions related to this investigation, but this short chapter will focus on the following three. What is the nature of the explanations and theories developed in cognitive science? What are the relations among the five disciplines that comprise cognitive science? What are the implications of cognitive science research for general issues in the philosophy of science? I will (...) argue that cognitive theories and explanations depend on representations of mechanisms and that the relations among the five disciplines, especially psychology and neuroscience, depend on relations between kinds of mechanisms. These conclusions have implications for central problems in general philosophy of science such as the nature of theories, explanations, and reduction between theories at different levels. (shrink)

My initial scope will be limited: starting from a neurobiological standpoint, I will analyse how actions are possibly represented and understood. The main aim of my arguments will be to show that, far from being exclusively dependent upon mentalistic/linguistic abilities, the capacity for understanding others as intentional agents is deeply grounded in the relational nature of action. Action is relational, and the relation holds both between the agent and the object target of the action , as between the agent of (...) the action and his/her observer . Agency constitutes a key issue for the understanding of intersubjectivity and for explaining how individuals can interpret their social world. This account of intersubjectivity, founded on the empirical findings of neuroscientific investigation, will be discussed and put in relation with a classical tenet of phenomenology: empathy. I will provide an 'enlarged' account of empathy that will be defined by means of a new conceptual tool: the shared manifold of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Is a policy-friendly philosophy of science possible? In order to respond this question, I consider a particular instance of contemporary philosophy of science, the semantic view of scientific theories, by placing it in the broader methodological landscape of the integration of philosophy of science into STS (Science and Technology Studies) as a component of the overall contribution of the latter to science policy. In that context, I defend a multi-disciplinary methodological integration of the special discipline composing STS against a reductionist (...) interdisciplinary unification, arguing that if STS wants to contribute to policy advising by constructing narratives of science practice feasible for science policy both in terms of descriptive completeness and intelligibility, then it must avoid the explanatory reductionism tendencies of special disciplines in interdisciplinary contexts. This would favour, at the same time, a relaxation of esoteric language. On this basis, it seems that the semantic view is one right candidate among other approaches in the philosophy of science for facilitating the integration of the methodologically different contributions to STS toward policy objectives. In fact, besides offering a more realistic and descriptively complete picture of science practice with respect to its predecessor in the philosophy of science, namely the syntactic view, the semantic view is also able to capture some aspects of science practice that elude even sociological approaches to STS, thus inviting different perspective on the same subject matter. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a naturalist account of the Buddhist epistemological discussion of svasaṃvitti ('self-awareness', 'self-cognition') following similar attempts in the domains of phenomenology and analytic epistemology. First, I examine the extent to which work in naturalized epistemology and phenomenology, particularly in the areas of perception and intentionality, could be profitably used in unpacking the implications of the Buddhist epistemological project. Second, I argue against a foundationalist reading of the causal account of perception offered by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Finally, (...) I argue that it is possible to read Dignāga's (and following him Dharmakīrti's) treatment of svasaṃvitti_ as offering something like a phenomenological account of embodied self-awareness. (shrink)

Recent research on “causal cognition” in adults and infants shows that we can perceive singular causal relations not previously experienced. In particular, infants that are able to perceive causality seem to rely on innate beliefs and principles that allow a priori inference of a connection between cause and effect. Can causal cognition in infants justify the thesis of causal realism? On the one hand, it weakens the central pillar of the Humean arguments: the impossibility of a synthetic a priori causal (...) inference. On the other hand, if perception is the privileged way of justifying the reality of objects of the external world, that is valid in the case of causal relations as well. Moreover, the perception of causal relations, based on innate principles and beliefs, reflects the selective results of the interaction between the real constraints of the physical structure of the world and the evolution of the human mind. (shrink)

The same neural structures involved in the unconscious modeling of our acting body in space also contribute to our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains. Neuroscientific research also shows that there are neural mechanisms mediating between the multi-level personal experience we entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others. Such personal and body-related experiential knowledge enables us to understand the actions performed by others, and to directly decode (...) the emotions and sensations they experience. A common functional mechanism is at the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding: embodied simulation. It will be shown that the present proposal is consistent with some of the perspectives offered by phenomenology. (shrink)

The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, this idea carne under serious attack, first from philosophy and more recently from developmental psychology. The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growing body (...) of work on “mindreading,” the process of attributing mental states to people. During the last fifteen years, the processes underlying rnindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states toother people.However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states tooneself.This process ofreading one's own mindorbecoming self-awarewill be our primary concern in this paper. (shrink)

My target article did not attribute a pervasive ontological significance to phenomenology, so it escapes Bogdan's “epistemological illusion.” Pust correctly pinpoints an ambiguity between content-inclusive and content-exclusive forms of folk functionalism. Contrary to Fodor, however, only the former is plausible, and hence my third argument against functionalism remains a threat. Van Brakel's charity approach to first-person authority cannot deal with authority vis-a-vis sensations, and it has some extremely odd consequences.

Alvin Goldman (1993) presents three arguments against the psychological plausibility of representational functionalism (RF) as a theory of how subjects self-ascribe mental predicates. Goldman appears to construe RF as an account of attitude type self-ascription. His “combinatorial explosion” argument, however, proves devastating only to an implausible construal of RF as an account of attitude content self-ascription.

Heal (1996a) maintains that evidence of cognitive penetrability doesn't determine whether stimulation theory or theory theory wins. Given the wide variety of mechanisms and processes that get called ‘simulation’, we argue that it's not useful to ask‘who wins?’. The label ‘simulation’picks out no natural or theoretically interesting category. We propose a more fine‐grained taxonomy and argue that some processes that have been labelled ‘simulation’, eg.,‘actual‐situation‐simulation’, clearly do exist, while other processes labelled ‘simulation’, e.g., ‘pretence‐driven‐off‐line‐simulation’are quite controversial. We do concede that (...) evidence of cognitive penetrability isn't decisive evidence against pretence‐driven‐off‐line‐simulation. Nonetheless, advocates of pretence‐driven‐off‐line‐simulation need to provide some explanation of the experimental evidence of penetrability. We argue that Heal's suggestion that simulation is restricted to‘rational’processes is unprincipled, and we offer an alternative proposal for restricted simulation. (shrink)

Since the publication of W. V. Quine's classic paper “Epistemology Naturalized” there have been many discussion on the virtues and vices of naturalistic epistemology. Within these discussions not much attention has been paid to a basic question: What makes an epistemology naturalistic? I give an answer by providing a logical geography of competing naturalistic positions. Then I defend naturalistic epistemology against the charge of the so-called causal fallacy. Finally I give a critical appraisal of different naturalistic theories of knowledge and (...) introduce cooperative naturalism as the most promising research strategy. (shrink)

We contend that empathy is best viewed as a kind of analogical thinking of the sort described in the multiconstraint theory of analogy proposed by Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard (1995). Our account of empathy reveals the Theory-theory/Simulation theory debate to be based on a false assumption and formulated in terms too simple to capture the nature of mental state ascription. Empathy is always simulation, but may simultaneously include theory-application. By properly specifying the analogical processes of empathy and their constraints, (...) we are able to show how the amount of theory needed to empathize is determined. (shrink)

One of the well-known theses of Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology of religious belief is his claim about the noetic effects of sin. But Plantinga does not clearly spell out how sin functions to undermine or weaken the believer’s natural knowledge of God. In this paper, I want to suggest a dispositional gloss on his account of religious epistemology that properly identifies the epistemic role of sin and other factors that may undermine knowledge of God. It will be further argued that the (...) dispositional framework provides us with a principled basis for deriving some of the main contours of Plantinga’s general epistemology. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy of the cognitive sciences, proponents of the ‘Hypothesis of Extended Cognition’ have focused on demonstrating how cognitive processes at times extend beyond the boundaries of the human body to include external physical devices. In recent years the HEC framework has been put to use in cases of “socially” extended cognition. The guiding intuition in this paper is that exploring the cognitive incorporations of genuinely social elements may advance HEC debates. The paper provides an analysis of emotion regulation (...) in ‘dyadic synchronic interaction’ between infant and caretaker and argues that some ‘socially extended’ cases of cognition cannot be captured with the HEC. Instead, the ‘Hypothesis of Emergent Extended Cognition’ is introduced that complements the HEC and helps in understanding how cognitive properties are sometimes irreducibly emergent, non-programmed properties of coupled social systems. It will be concluded that operating with the HEEC leads to both a more precise grip on the explanandum and to a more robust explanans. (shrink)

We offer an empirical assessment of description theories of proper names. We examine empirical evidence on lexical and cognitive development, memory, and aphasia, to see whether it supports Descriptivism. We show that description theories demand much more, in terms of psychological assumptions, than what the data suggest; hence, they lack empirical support. We argue that this problem undermines their success as philosophical theories for proper names in natural languages. We conclude by presenting and defending a preliminary alternative account of reference (...) from a developmental perspective. (shrink)

Riassunto: in queste note presentouna breve panoramica della scienza cognitiva, che costituisce a tutt'oggi, a più di vent'anni dalla sua nascita, un coacervo di novità rilevanti nell'ambito della ricerca interdisciplinare. Dopo una prima presentazione generale (§1), traccio una breve storia della disciplina (§2) per passare poi a descrivere nel § 3 uno dei nuclei di fondo della scienza cognitiva: il funzionalismo e l'idea di mente come sistema di rappresentazioni o mappe cognitive. Nel § 4. accenno ad alcune tensioni interne alla (...) scienza cognitiva. Essa è tuttora un campo disciplinare con forti contrasti sui paradigmi da seguire nella descrizione dell'architettura della mente. Una sfida recente è venuta dalla robotica "situata" e dalla tesi che occorre fare a meno delle rappresentazioni mentali nella costruzione di robot intelligenti. Nel § 5 discuto questa sfida mostrando che, nonostante l'entusiasmo suscitato dai primi successi della nuova robotica, il cardine della scienza cognitiva resta solido, anche se bisognoso di completamento. Nella conclusione, al § 6, tocco di sfuggita il tema della coscienza dei sistemi intelligenti (umani e artificiali) e invito a cercare strade per affrontare i problemi che si porranno alle nuove generazioni di studiosi, ormai al di là della frattura tra cultura umanistica e scientifica, frattura che forse trova in Italia uno degli ultimi ambienti in cui sopravvivere. (shrink)