RESUMEN Trabajos recientes han propuesto un tratamiento de la fundación “a la imagen de la causalidad”. Hay importantes analogías entre la fundación y la causalidad: ambas parecen ser relaciones de ‘construcción’, ambas parecen ser órdenes estrictos y ambas parecen ser representables por modelos de ecuaciones estructurales. Pero también parece que hay importantes diferencias, porque la causalidad es usualmente considerada como una relación externa, mientras que la fundación es interna; hay casos de causalidad probabilística, pero no hay nada como una fundación (...) probabilística; la fundación se considera una relación ‘bien fundada’, pero no la causalidad; la fundación implica superveniencia ontológica, pero no la causalidad. Se argumenta aquí que la mayoría de estas supuestas diferencias están motivadas por una concepción humeana de la causalidad en la que no hay conexiones necesarias entre causa y efecto. Una perspectiva no humeana de la causalidad, sin embargo, hace que la unificación de la fundación y la causalidad sea mucho más razonable que cualquier tratamiento separado. ABSTRACT Recent works have proposed a treatment of grounding “in the image of causation”. There are important analogies between grounding and causation: both seem to be ‘building’ relations, both seem to be strict orders, and both seem amenable to representation by models of structural equations. But it seems also that there are important differences, because causation is usually considered as an external relation, while grounding is internal; there are cases of probabilistic causation, but there is nothing like probabilistic grounding; grounding is taken to be a well-founded relation, but not causation; grounding entails ontological supervenience, but not causation. It is argued here that most of those supposed differences are motivated by a Humean conception of causation in which there are no necessary connections between cause and effect. A non-Humean view of causation, though, makes the unification of grounding and causation much more reasonable that any separate treatment. (shrink)

Quite a few cognitive scientists are working towards a naturalisation of phenomenology. Looking more closely at the relevant literature, however, the 'naturalising phenomenology' proposals show the presence of different conceptions, assumptions, and formalisms, further differentiated by different philosophical and/or scientific concerns. This paper shows that the original Husserlian stance is deeper, clearer and more advanced than most supposed contemporary improvements. The recent achievements of experimental phenomenology show how to 'naturalise' phenomenology without destroying the guiding assumptions of phenomenology. The requirements grounding (...) the scientific explanation of subjective experience are discussed, such as the nature of the stimuli, their variables, and their manipulation by properly phenomenological methods. (shrink)

Artikel ini bertujuan untuk memaparkan bagaimana penyebaban sosial dapat terjadi dalam perspektif individualisme non-reduktif (Non-reductive Individualism/NRI) R. Keith Sawyer. NRI adalah perluasan argumen fisikalisme non-reduktif dari filsafat akal budi untuk memberikan bingkai (framework) baru dalam melihat debat ontologis dan metodologis filsafat ilmu sosial. Cara yang digunakan adalah membasiskan landasan ontologis ilmu sosial pada eksistensi individu (individualisme ontologis), sekaligus mengiyakan dua level analisis properti, yakni level individual (bawah) dan sosial (atas) (dualisme properti). Mengingat posisi non-reduktif selalu dibayangi problem overdeterminasi dan epifenomena (...) saat berbicara tentang daya kausal level atas, Sawyer mengkombinasikan argumen supervenien (supervenience), perealisasian berlipat (multiple realizability/mr), disjungsi tak beraturan (wild disjunction/wd), serta kemunculan kolaboratif (collaborative emergence), untuk memperkuat pandangan penyebaban supervenien (supervenient causation/sv) dalam domain sosial. (shrink)

This book contains a representationalist theory of self-consciousness and of the phenomenal first-person perspective. It draws on empirical data from the cognitive and neurosciences.

In this doctoral dissertation I consider, and reject, the claim that recent varieties of non-reductive physicalism, particularly Donald Davidson's anomalous monism, are committed to a new kind of epiphenomenalism. Non-reductive physicalists identify each mental event with a physical event, and are thus entitled to the belief that mental events are causes, since the physical events with which they are held to be identical are causes. However, Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa and others have argued that if we follow the non-reductive physicalist (...) in denying that mental features can be reduced to physical properties, then we must regard mental properties as being causally irrelevant to their bearers' effects, In short, the non-reductive physicalist is said to be committed to the belief that while there are mental causes, they do not cause their effects in virtue of being the types of mental state that they are. It is in this sense that non-reductive physicalists are thought to represent a new form of epiphenomenalism. After a brief survey of the history of epiphenomenalism, and its mutation into the contemporary strain that is believed to afflict non-reductive physicalism, 1 argue against the counterfactual criterion of the sort of causal relevance that we take mental features to enjoy. I then criticize the 'trope' response to the epiphenomenalist threat, and conclude that much of the current debate on this topic is premised on the mistaken belief that there is some variety of causal relevance that is not simply a brand of explanatory relevance. Once this is seen, it will seem much less plausible that mental properties are excluded from relevance to the phenomena of which we typically take them to be explanatory. (shrink)

Arguably no concept is more fundamental to science than that of causality, for investigations into cases of existence, persistence, and change in the natural world are largely investigations into the causes of these phenomena. Yet the metaphysics and epistemology of causality remain unclear. For example, the ontological categories of the causal relata have been taken to be objects (Hume 1739), events (Davidson 1967), properties (Armstrong 1978), processes (Salmon 1984), variables (Hitchcock 1993), and facts (Mellor 1995). (For convenience, causes and effects (...) will usually be understood as events in what follows.) Complicating matters, causal relations may be singular (Socrates’s drinking hemlock caused Socrates’s death) or general (Drinking hemlock causes death); hence the relata might be tokens (e.g., instances of properties) or types (e.g., types of events) of the category in question. Other questions up for grabs are: Are singular causes metaphysically and/or epistemologically prior to general causes or vice versa (or neither)? What grounds the intuitive asymmetry of the causal relation? Are macro-causal relations reducible to micro-causal relations? And perhaps most importantly: Are causal facts (e.g., the holding of causal relations) reducible to non-causal facts (e.g., the holding of certain spatiotemporal relations)? (shrink)

According to a popular ‘explanationist’ argument for moral or mathematical realism the best explanation of some phenomena are moral or mathematical, and this implies the relevant form of realism. One popular way to resist the premiss of such arguments is to hold that any supposed explanation provided by moral or mathematical properties is in fact provided only by the non-moral or non-mathematical grounds of those properties. Many realists have responded to this objection by urging that the explanations provided by the (...) higher-level, moral and mathematical, properties are informative in a way in which their supposed replacements are not, and that this is because moral and mathematical properties are multiply realizable. This chapter responds to this manoeuvre by proposing a way in which moral and mathematical explanations might preserve the distinctive import that multiple realizability brings, without committing those who accept them to the existence of moral and mathematical properties. (shrink)

Many hope that our values, purged of messy human contingency, could aspire to correspond with mind-independent, rationally obligatory, and eternal ethical facts. But if the arguments of this thesis are on the right track, we should reject the search for non-natural and mind-independent moral truths.

Lewis's notion of a "natural" property has proved divisive: some have taken to the notion with enthusiasm, while others have been sceptical. However, it is far from obvious what the enthusiasts and the sceptics are disagreeing about. This paper attempts to articulate what is at stake in this debate.

The Elephant and the Blind is a book about why we need a new culture of consciousness, and how to get it. A culture of consciousness (or Bewusstseinskultur) is a culture that values and cultivates the mental states of its members in an ethical and evidence-based way.

This paper is a survey of the supervenience challenge to non-naturalist moral realism. I formulate a version of the challenge, consider the most promising non-naturalist replies to it, and suggest that no fully effective reply has yet been given.

The theory that all processes in the universe are computational is attractive in its promise to provide an understandable theory of everything. I want to suggest here that this pancomputationalism is not sufficiently clear on which problem it is trying to solve, and how. I propose two interpretations of pancomputationalism as a theory: I) the world is a computer and II) the world can be described as a computer. The first implies a thesis of supervenience of the physical over computation (...) and is thus reduced ad absurdum. The second is underdetermined by the world, and thus equally unsuccessful as theory. Finally, I suggest that pancomputationalism as metaphor can be useful. – At the Paderborn workshop in 2008, this paper was presented as a commentary to the relevant paper by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic " Info-Computationalism and Philosophical Aspects of Research in Information Sciences". (shrink)

The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal evidence (...) from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory? Landgrebe and Smith show how a widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on an error. There is still, as they demonstrate in a final chapter, a great deal that AI can achieve which will benefit humanity. But these benefits will be achieved without the aid of systems that are more powerful than humans, which are as impossible as AI systems that are intrinsically "evil" or able to "will" a takeover of human society. (shrink)

When Ken Malone investigates a case of something causing mental static across the United States, he is teleported to a world that doesn't exist.

Online collection of papers by Devitt, Dretske, Guarino, Hochberg, Jackson, Petitot, Searle, Tye, Varzi and other leading thinkers on philosophy and the foundations of cognitive Science. Topics dealt with include: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science, Content and Object, Logic and Foundations, Language and Linguistics, and Ontology and Mereology.

This thesis aims to bring methodological issues in the debate about the nature of fictional characters to the fore. I show how the arguments fictional realists have offered in favour of their views rely on crucial ‘metaontological’ assumptions about what ontological questions are and how they should be answered. In addition to casting doubt on some of the more orthodox approaches to ontological inquiry, my positive goal is to deploy an independently motivated metaontology to defend a novel version of fictional (...) anti-realism. On the view I develop and defend, the central task we face is that of explaining truths concerning fictional characters, where the relevant notion of explanation is distinctively metaphysical in character. Fictional anti-realism emerges as the plausible thesis that truths about fictional entities can be completely explained in terms of the existence and features of other things. (shrink)

Emergence is a notorious philosophical term of art. A variety of theorists have appropriated it for their purposes ever since George Henry Lewes gave it a philosophical sense in his 1875 Problems of Life and Mind. We might roughly characterize the shared meaning thus: emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them. (For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.) Each (...) of the quoted terms is slippery in its own right, and their specifications yield the varied notions of emergence that we discuss below. There has been renewed interest in emergence within discussions of the behavior of complex systems and debates over the reconcilability of mental causation, intentionality, or consciousness with physicalism. (shrink)

This chapter considers potential applications of grounding to the formulation of physicalism. I begin with an overview of competing conceptions of the physical and of physicalism. I then consider whether grounding physicalism overcomes well-known and seemingly fatal problems with supervenience physicalism. I conclude that while grounding physicalism improves upon supervenience physicalism in certain respects, it arguably falls victim to some of the same difficulties.

Tim Crane's ‘Cosmic Hermeneutics vs. Emergence: The Challenge of the Explanatory Gap’ claims that non‐reductive physicalism must either close the explanatory gap, addressing the challenge famously posed by Levine's argument, or become identical to emergentism. Since no way to close the gap is available, the result is that there can be no interesting philosophical position intermediate between physicalism and emergentism. This chapter argues that if we look at the relation between physicalism and emergentism from the vantage point of reduction, Crane's (...) analysis is rather persuasive. However, if we switch from reduction to causality, its conclusions appear more disputable. In particular, if we shift from ‘novelty and explanation’ to ‘novelty and causality’ as key features of emergent properties, we may introduce a distinction between two kinds of emergentism (moderate and radical) based on their attitude towards the causal inheritance principle. If the causal inheritance principle is accepted (some versions of) moderate emergentism may be considered as non‐trivial forms of non‐reductive physicalism. (shrink)

The paper discusses Noordhof' point on emergence, by arguing against an emergentist view of properties.

The claim that the having of aesthetic properties supervenes on the having of non-aesthetic properties has been widely discussed and, in various ways, defended. In this paper, I will show that even if it is sometimes true that a supervenience relation holds between aesthetic properties and the 'subvenient' non-aesthetic ones, it is not the interesting relation in the neighbourhood. As we shall see, a richer, asymmetric and irreflexive relation is required, and I shall defend the claim that the more-and-more-popular relation (...) of grounding does a much better job than supervenience. (shrink)

U. T. Place claims that philosophical problems concerning the true nature of mind-brain relationship disappears or is settled adhering to materialism, especially type identity theory of mind. He takes above claim as a reasonable scientific hypothesis. I shall argue why it is not as he claims. At first, to pave the way for refutation, I will briefly clarify Place's approach to the subject in hand; although the rest of the paper will also contain more details about his position. Then, I (...) will reduce his position into four theses and try to prove that the main claim of type identity theory is neither reasonable nor a mere scientific problem in disguise. I think that we ought to regard type identity theory, at most, just as a hypothesis which approximately displays the function of mind-brain relationship but tells us nothing justifiably about its true nature. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the meaning of color terms within the framework of Kaplan's character theory (which, when generalized to a treatment of hidden indexicality or dependence on the context world, can perfectly accommodate Kripke's notions of apriority and of (metaphysical) necessity). It explains this framework and why it might be fruitfully applied to color terms. Then it defends six theses: that (1) the predicate "is red" and (2) even the relation "appears red to" are hidden indexicals (i.e., have, as used (...) in English, different extensions in different context worlds), that (3) the phenomenal, the comparative, and the epistemic reading of "appears red to" are not three different readings, but reflect the context world dependence of this term, that (4) the statement "x is red iff x would appear red to most English-speaking people under normal conditions" is a priori in English, but analytic only in one reading and not in another, and that these observations account well for the epistemology of color terms and allow us to be metaphysically conservative by claiming that our context world is presumably such that (5) the statement "x appears red to y iff x (appropriately) causes y to be in a certain (disjunctive) neural state N" is necessarily true and (6) the statement "x is red iff the reflectance spectrum of the surface of x is of some (disjunctive) kind R" is necessarily true as well. (shrink)

My aim is to challenge recent attempts at reconciling moral realism and naturalism by pushing ethical naturalists into a dilemma. According to one horn of the dilemma, ethical naturalists must either build unique facts and properties about divergent social structures into their subvenient sets of natural facts and properties, and so jeopardize the objectivity of moral truths, or insist, in the face of all possible worlds in which people have different moral beliefs than ours, that they are all mistaken—this despite (...) the fact that the belief-forming mechanism responsible for their moral beliefs was never concerned with the truth of those beliefs in the first place. This will bring me to suggest that moral properties might only weakly supervene upon natural phenomena. But, according to the other horn of the dilemma, weak supervenience is a defeater for moral knowledge. (shrink)

Understanding a normative concept like oppression requires attention to not only its harms but also the causes of those harms. In other words, a complete understanding of such a concept requires a proper causal explanation. This causal explanation can also inform and constrain our moral response to such harms. Therefore, the conceptual explanatory framework that we use to inform our moral diagnosis and our moral response become significant. The first goal of this dissertation is to propose complexity theory as the (...) proper framework for not only explaining a social phenomenon like oppression but also understanding the proper sites for social change. The second goal of this dissertation is to answer three interrelated questions about how we should respond, morally, to a chronic and complex social problem like racial or gender inequality: (1) Why do the current interventions to address these problems fail? (2) Do social movements play any unique role in addressing these problems? (3) What is our individual responsibility to participate in social movements? In response, I argue that the explanatory frameworks that we choose to understand the cause(s) of social problems can be the source of the inadequacy of our intervention. I argue that a proper social and moral intervention needs to capture the complex and dynamic nature of the social world. I also show that changing the explanatory framework allows us to see the unique role social movements play in making effective and sustainable social change possible. Finally, I conclude supporting such movements is a moral imperative. (shrink)

Artikkelissa tarkastellaan perusteellisesti ja kriittisesti David Chalmersin vaikutusvaltaista fenomenaaliseen tietoisuuden liittyvää argumenttia materialismia vastaan. Argumentissa tunnistetaan useampikin kuin yksi heikko lenkki.

In the thesis I offer an analysis of the metaphysical underpinnings of the extended cognition thesis via an examination of standard views of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations. -/- In summary form, the extended cognition thesis is a view put forth in naturalistic philosophy of mind stating that the physical basis of cognitive processes and cognitive processing may, in the right circumstances, be distributed across neural, bodily, and environmental vehicles. As such, the extended cognition thesis breaks substantially with the still (...) widely held view in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, namely that cognitive processes and cognitive processing take place within the skin-and-skull of individual organisms. The standard view of metaphysical building relations can be expressed as the conjunction of two theses. First, that a metaphysical building relation – such as composition, constitution, realization, supervenience or emergence – is a relation of ontological dependence, because if a metaphysical building relation holds between X (or the Xs) and Y, then it is in virtue of X (or the Xs) that Y exists. Second, metaphysical building relations are synchronic (durationless) relations of ontological dependence. In the thesis, I propose an alternative diachronic framework by which to extend the standard synchronic accounts of metaphysical dependence relations, and by which to reformulate the metaphysical foundation of the extended cognition thesis. The project fills an important gap between analytical metaphysics (in particular, the metaphysics of dependence relations) and naturalistic philosophy of mind (especially the extended cognition thesis). To my knowledge there has been no attempt to establish a robust diachronic account of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations such as, e.g., composition and constitution. However, this is precisely what I argue is required to properly advance and ground the metaphysics of extended cognition. Ultimately, my aim of reformulating the metaphysics of extended cognition consists in taking several steps toward a third-wave of extended cognition. (shrink)

Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so, they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, (...) Internet search engine queries for expressions of interest have become quite popular. Apparently, philosophers attempt to surpass the limits of their own linguistic intuitions by appealing to experts or to factual uses of language. I argue that this attempt is commendable but that its execution is wanting. Instead of appealing to dictionaries or Internet queries, philosophers should employ computer-based linguistic corpora in order to confirm or falsify hypotheses about the factual use of language. This approach also has some advantages over methods employed by experimental philosophers. If the importance of ordinary language is stressed, the use of linguistic corpora is hardly avoidable. (shrink)

Distributive egalitarians believe that distributive justice is to be explained by the idea of distributive equality (DE) and that DE is of intrinsic value. The socio-relational critique argues that distributive egalitarianism does not account for the “true” value of equality, which rather lies in the idea of “equality as a substantive social value” (ESV). This paper examines the socio-relational critique and argues that it fails because – contrary to what the critique presupposes –, first, ESV is not conceptually distinct from (...) DE, and second, the idea of ESV cannot serve as a “foundation” or “root” of distributive egalitarianism. (shrink)

I offer an explicit account of the underdetermination thesis as well as of the many challenges it poses to scientific realism; a way to answer to these challenges is explored and outlined, by shifting attention to the content of theories. I argue that, even if we have solid grounds (as I contend we do) to support that some varieties of the underdetermination thesis are true, scientific realism can still offer an adequate picture of the aims and achievements of science.

The debate about the ontological innocence of mereology has generally been framed as a debate about the plausibility of Universal Fusion. Ontologically loaded fusions must be more than the sum of their parts, and this seems to violate parsimony if fusion is universal. Less attention has been paid to the question of what sort of emergence mereological fusions must exhibit if they are irreducible to their parts. The philosophy of science literature provides several models of such strong emergence. Examining those (...) models suggests that the difficulty with emergent fusions has at least as much to do with extensionality as it does with Universal Fusion. Some accounts of emergence fail to ensure irreducibility when combined with extensional mereologies. The most promising model for the strong emergence of ontologically loaded fusions fails to validate Anti-Symmetry, which naturally leads to failures of extensionality. These results suggest that the focus on Universal Fusion may have been misplaced. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have argued that nonreductive physicalism is a false, unstable, and incoherent position. I argue that the position these critics are attacking is a straw one. To help explain why let us distinguish three issues about which nonreductive physicalists might plausibly be thought to have an opinion: ontological considerations about the types of things that exist at a world, issues involving the existence and nature of any dependency relationships between the types of things that exist at a world, (...) and epistemological questions regarding the best way to describe, explain, or characterize the types of things that exist at a world. I argue that reductive and nonreductive physicalists essentially agree with respect to the first two issues, but disagree with respect to the last issue. Nonreductive physicalists advocate a position that is ontologically or metaphysically reductive, but epistemologically or representationally nonreductive. Although this position could prove false on empirical grounds, it is neither unstable nor incoherent. (shrink)

The topics that I shall consider are these: (1) Causal Explanatoriness of the Attitudes (Dretske, Elugardo); (2) The “Brain-Explain” Thesis and Metaphysical Constraints on Explanation (Antony, Elugardo); (3) Causal Powers of Beliefs (Meyering); (4) Microreduction (Beckermann); (5) Non-Emergent, Non-Reductive Materialism (Antony); (6) The Master Argument Against the Standard View (Dretske, Antony, Elugardo); (7) Practical Realism Extended (Meijers); (8) Alternative to Both the Standard View and Practical Realism (Newen).

*A shortened version of this paper will appear in Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science, Dasgupta and Weslake, eds. Routledge.* This paper describes the case that can be made for a high-dimensional ontology in quantum mechanics based on the virtues of avoiding both nonseparability and non locality.

An updated survey of the research scope in Integral Biomathics.

The study of reference often leads to addressing fundamental issues in semantics, metaphysics and epistemology; this suggests that reference is closely linked to the three realms. The overall purpose of this study is to elucidate the structure of some of these links, through a close examination of the “mechanism” of reference. As in many other enquiries, considering the possible (i.e., the modal,) in addition to the actual proves very helpful in clarifying and explicating insights. The reference of a term with (...) respect to possible worlds is commonly called “intension”; so this is a study of intensions. The main contribution of the study is an outline for a “calculator” of intensions. It is argued that the intension of a term is a function of three variables: (a) the way in which the term “picks out” its referent in different possible worlds (semantics); (b) criteria of identity (metaphysics); and (c) the actual state of affairs (actuality). While considering different possible values for these variables, it is demonstrated how the variables combine to generate the term’s intension. In other words, the result is a calculator that when provided with the required values, yields the reference of the term in different possible worlds. By taking into account the possible gap between what we take the values of these variables to be and what they may in fact be, we also gain important insights into the epistemic aspect of reference. In addition, since a rigid designator is a term with constant intension, the proposed thesis provides an elaborate account of rigidity. The first chapter is devoted to the development of the calculator of intensions. Each of the following three chapters elaborates on one aspect of intensions, namely, the semantic, metaphysical and epistemic aspects. In the course of these chapters, various familiar puzzles pertaining to the respective philosophical realms are addressed (many of these puzzles are discussed in Kripke’s Naming and Necessity – a work that considerably inspired this study). In the fifth and last chapter the analysis of intensions is applied to two case-studies from relatively recent philosophical literature: the Kripke-Lewis debate over the identity theory of mind, and the debate over the significance of Donnellan’s referential/attributive distinction. The novel accounts that these applications generate purport to illustrate the importance and originality of the proposed thesis. (shrink)

Theory and Reality is about the connection between true theories and the world. A mathematical framefork for such connections is given, and it is shown how that framework can be used to infer facts about the structure of reality from facts about the structure of true theories, The book starts with an overview of various approaches to metaphysics. Beginning with Quine's programmatic "On what there is", the first chapter then discusses the perils involved in going from language to metaphysics. It (...) criticises contemporary intuition-driven metaphysics, comments on naturalistic approaches, and then presents the main proposition put forward in the thesis: we should base metaphysics on model theory. In chapters 2 to 5, mathematical treatments are given of concepts that we need: theories, metaphysics, necessitation and semantics. These are used in chapters 6 and 7 to prove that, seen from a certain informative view point, any true theory will give rise to an isomorphism between that theory and the world. This conclusion is similar to Wittgenstein's in the Tractatus, but differs in that it places the structural relationship on the level of whole theories, rather than single propositions. (shrink)

This thesis articulates a novel interpretation of Heidegger’s explication of the being (Seins) of gear (Zeugs) in §15 of his masterwork Being and Time (1927/2006) and develops and applies the position attributed to Heidegger to explain three phenomena of unreflective action discussed in recent literature and articulate a partial Heideggerian ecological metaphysics. Since §15 of BT explicates the being of gear, Part 1 expounds Heidegger’s concept of the ‘being’ (Seins) of beings (Seienden) and two issues raised in the ‘preliminary methodological (...) remark’ in §15 of BT regarding explicating being. §1.1 interprets the being (Sein) or synonymously constitution of being (Seinsverfassung) of a being (Seienden) as a regional essence: a property unifying a region (Region), district (Bezirk), or subject-area (Sachgebiet) – a highly general (‘regional’) class of entities. Although Heidegger posits two components of the being of a being, viz. material-content (Sachhaltigkeit, Sachgehalt) and mode-of-being (Seinsart) or way-of-being (Seinsweise, Weise des Seins, Weise zu sein) (1927/1975, 321), the unclarity of this distinction means that it does not figure prominently herein. §1.2 addresses Heidegger’s distinction between ontological and ontic investigations and his notion of ‘modes of access’ (Zugangsarten, Zugangsweisen). Part 2 expounds §15 of BT’s explication of the being of gear. §2.1 analyses Heidegger’s two necessary and sufficient conditions for being gear and three core basic concepts (Grundbegriffe) enabling comprehension of these conditions and therewith a foundational comprehension of gear. Heidegger explicates the being of gear through content of unreflectively purposeful, non-intersubjective intentional states. I term such states ‘mundane concern’, which is almost synonymous with Hubert Dreyfus’s term ‘absorbed coping’ (1991, 69). Heidegger’s explication highlights around-for references (Um-zu-Verweisungen) as the peculiar species of property figuring in mundanely concernful intentional content. §2.2 clarifies Heidegger’s position on the relationship between to-hand-ness (Zuhandenheit) and extantness (Vorhandenheit) in the narrow sense: two of Heidegger’s most widely discussed concepts. I reject Kris McDaniel’s recent reading of Heidegger as affirming that nothing could be both to-hand and extant simultaneously (McDaniel 2012). Part 3 develops and applies Heidegger’s phenomenology of mundane concern. §3.1 explains the phenomena of situational holism, situated normativity, and mundanely concernful prospective control. §3.2 undertakes the metaphysical accommodation of around-for references, which §3.1 posited as featuring prominently within mundanely concernful intentional content. This thesis thus contributes not only to Heidegger scholarship, but also to contemporary debates within the philosophy of action and cognitive science. (shrink)

Supervenience physicalism attempts to combine non-reductionism about properties with a physical determination thesis in such a way as to ensure physicalism. I argue that this attempt is unsuccessful: the specific supervenience relation in question is either strong enough to ensure reductionism, as in the case of strong supervenience, or too weak to yield physical determination, as in the case of global supervenience. The argument develops in three stages. First, I propose a distinction between two types of reductionism, definitional and scientific, (...) a distinction thanks to which we can reply to a standard objection against the ontological reductionism of strong supervenience. Second, I claim that because of "the problem of random distribution," global supervenience needs strengthening to be an adequate relation to capture our physicalistic intuitions; and I show, in accordance with Stalnaker's relevant proof, why a natural strengthening of global supervenience renders it equivalent to strong supervenience. Finally, I argue against Stalnaker about the possibility of a non-reductionist global supervenience. The upshot is that despite appearances, supervenience physicalism is a form of reductive physicalism. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim (1998a, 2005) claims that his exclusion problem follows a priori for the non-reductive physicalist given her commitment to five apparently inconsistent theses: mental causation, non-identity, supervenience, causal closure and non-overdetermination. For Kim, the combination of these theses entails that mental properties are a priori excluded as causes, forcing the non-reductive physicalist to accept either epiphenomenalism, or some form of reduction. In this thesis, I argue that Kim’s exclusion problem depends on a particular conception of causation, namely sufficient production, (...) and that when causation is understood in interventionist terms, the non-reductive physicalist can avoid the exclusion problem. I argue that Woodward’s (2003, 2008a, 2011a) version of interventionism not only provides an account of mental causation that avoids the exclusion problem, but argue that it also upholds all of the minimal commitments of non-reductive physicalism, thereby providing a successful non-reductive physicalist solution to the exclusion problem. In Chapter 2, I argue that all five theses are minimal commitments of non-reductive physicalism that cannot be rejected in order to avoid the exclusion problem. Chapter 3 identifies the assumptions that I take to underlie the exclusion problem. Chapter 4 introduces and outlines the central features of Woodward’s (2003) interventionism and Chapter 5 argues that Woodward’s interventionist account of mental causation provides a solution to the exclusion problem. I examine two alternative interventionist accounts of mental causation[1] that fail to provide satisfactory solutions to the exclusion problem and conclude that Woodward’s account therefore provides the only satisfactory account of mental causation and solution to the exclusion problem. Chapter 6 addresses some challenges proposed by Michael Baumgartner (2009, 2010) and argues that the interventionist is able to defend her position against these objections and uphold the interventionist solution to the exclusion problem outlined in this thesis. [1. Proposed by List and Menzies (2009) and Campbell (2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2010).]. (shrink)

Frank Jackson has famously argued that there is no logical space for the view which understands moral properties as non-natural properties of their own unique kind. His argument is based on two steps: firstly, given supervenience and truth-aptness of moral claims, it is always possible to find a natural property which is necessarily co-instantiated with a given moral property, and secondly that there are no distinct necessarily co-instantiated properties. I argue that this second step of the argument must rely on (...) a controversial nominalist view of properties. In contrast, if we accept universals or tropes, there is logical space also for non-natural moral properties even if they are necessarily co-instantiated with natural properties. (shrink)