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Supervenience and mind: selected philosophical essays

New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press (1993)

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  1. Are normative properties descriptive properties?Bart Streumer - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 154 (3):325 - 348.
    Some philosophers think that normative properties are identical to descriptive properties. In this paper, I argue that this entails that it is possible to say which descriptive properties normative properties are identical to. I argue that Frank Jackson's argument to show that this is possible fails, and that the objections to this argument show that it is impossible to say which descriptive properties normative properties are identical to. I conclude that normative properties are not identical to descriptive properties. I then (...)
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  • The role of ignorance in the problem of consciousness: Critical review of Daniel Stoljar, ignorance and imagination: The epistemic origin of the problem of consciousness (oxford university press, 2006).Brie Gertler - 2009 - Noûs 43 (2):378-393.
    The plain man thinks that material objects must certainly exist, since they are evident to the senses. Whatever else may be doubted, it is certain that anything you can bump into must be real; this is the plain man’s metaphysic. This is all very well, but the physicist comes along and shows that you never bump into anything: even when you run your hand along a stone wall, you do not really touch it. When you think you touch a thing, (...)
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  • Humean Supervenience in the Light of Contemporary Science.Vassilios Karakostas - 2009 - Metaphysica 10 (1):1-26.
    It is shown that Lewis’ ontological doctrine of Humean supervenience incorporates at its foundation the so-called separability principle of classical physics. In view of the systematic violation of the latter within quantum mechanics, the claim that contemporary physical science may posit non-supervenient relations beyond the spatiotemporal ones is reinforced on a foundational basis concerning constraints on the state representation of physical systems. Depending on the mode of assignment of states to quantum systems — unit state vectors versus statistical density operators (...)
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  • Nonreductive physicalism or emergent dualism : the argument from mental causation.John Ross Churchill - 2010 - In Robert C. Koons & George Bealer (eds.), The waning of materialism. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Throughout the 1990s, Jaegwon Kim developed a line of argument that what purport to be nonreductive forms of physicalism are ultimately untenable, since they cannot accommodate the causal efficacy of mental states. His argument has received a great deal of discussion, much of it critical. We believe that, while the argument needs some tweaking, its basic thrust is sound. In what follows, we will lay out our preferred version of the argument and highlight its essential dependence on a causal-powers metaphysic, (...)
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  • Reduction in real life.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2008 - In Jakob Hohwy & Jesper Kallestrup (eds.), Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation. New York: Oxford University Press.
    The main message of the paper is that there is a disconnect between what many philosophers of mind think of as the scientific practice of reductive or reductionist explanation, and what the most relevant scientific work is actually like. I will sketch what I see as a better view, drawing on various ideas in recent philosophy of science. I then import these ideas into the philosophy of mind, to see what difference they make.1 At the end of the paper I (...)
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  • Reductive theories of modality.Theodore Sider - 2003 - In Michael J. Loux & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), The Oxford handbook of metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 180-208.
    Logic begins but does not end with the study of truth and falsity. Within truth there are the modes of truth, ways of being true: necessary truth and contingent truth. When a proposition is true, we may ask whether it could have been false. If so, then it is contingently true. If not, then it is necessarily true; it must be true; it could not have been false. Falsity has modes as well: a false proposition that could not have been (...)
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  • We are living in a material world (and I am a material girl).Esa Diaz-Leon - 2008 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 27 (3):85-101.
    In this paper I examine the question of whether the characterization of physicalism that is presupposed by some influential anti-physicalist arguments, namely, the so-called conceivability arguments, is a good characterization of physicalism or not. I compare this characterization with some alternative ones, showing how it can overcome some problems, and I defend it from several objections. I conclude that any arguments against physicalism characterised in that way are genuine arguments against physicalism, as intuitively conceived.
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  • Color realism revisited.Alex Byrne & David R. Hilbert - 2003 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (6):791-793.
    Our reply is in four parts. The first part, R1, addresses objections to our claim that there might be “unknowable” color facts. The second part, R2, discusses the use we make of opponent process theory. The third part, R3, examines the question of whether colors are causes. The fourth part, R4, takes up some issues concerning the content of visual experience.
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  • On physicalism and downward causation in developmental and cancer biology.A. M. Soto, C. Sonnenschein & P. A. Miquel - 2008 - Acta Biotheoretica 56 (4):257-274.
    The dominant position in Philosophy of Science contends that downward causation is an illusion. Instead, we argue that downward causation doesn’t introduce vicious circles either in physics or in biology. We also question the metaphysical claim that “physical facts fix all the facts.” Downward causation does not imply any contradiction if we reject the assumption of the completeness and the causal closure of the physical world that this assertion contains. We provide an argument for rejecting this assumption. Furthermore, this allows (...)
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  • What is global supervenience?Stephan Leuenberger - 2009 - Synthese 170 (1):115 - 129.
    The relation of global supervenience is widely appealed to in philosophy. In slogan form, it is explained as follows: a class of properties A supervenes on a class of properties B if no two worlds differ in the distribution of A-properties without differing in the distribution of B-properties. It turns out, though, that there are several ways to cash out that slogan. Three different proposals have been discussed in the literature. In this paper, I argue that none of them is (...)
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  • The interactivist model.Mark H. Bickhard - 2009 - Synthese 166 (3):547 - 591.
    A shift from a metaphysical framework of substance to one of process enables an integrated account of the emergence of normative phenomena. I show how substance assumptions block genuine ontological emergence, especially the emergence of normativity, and how a process framework permits a thermodynamic-based account of normative emergence. The focus is on two foundational forms of normativity, that of normative function and of representation as emergent in a particular kind of function. This process model of representation, called interactivism, compels changes (...)
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  • Images, spaces, representations.Liliana Albertazzi - 2009 - Axiomathes 19 (1):103-111.
    The contribution deals with some key problems of cognitive science, whose plurality transcends the boundaries of the disciplines drawn by classical epistemology. In particular, it addresses the issues of mental images, spaces of representation, and the architecture of cognitive processes in vision theory. The thesis presented is that a proper treatment of vision within psychophysics entails an analysis of a series of interconnected spaces, objects and methodologies, from psychophysics to the many virtual realities of representation.
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  • The role of dispositions in explanations.Agustín Vicente - 2010 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 19 (3):301-310.
    According to a model defended by some authors, dispositional concepts can be legitimately used in causal explanations, although such a use is not necessary. I argue, however, that there is a kind of use of dispositions in explanations that does not fall within this model: we will miss some explanations if we forsake dispositional concepts and explanations.
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  • Special Sciences, Conspiracy and the Better Best System Account of Lawhood.Jonathan Cohen & Craig Callender - 2010 - Erkenntnis 73 (3):427 - 447.
    An important obstacle to lawhood in the special sciences is the worry that such laws would require metaphysically extravagant conspiracies among fundamental particles. How, short of conspiracy, is this possible? In this paper we'll review a number of strategies that allow for the projectibility of special science generalizations without positing outlandish conspiracies: non-Humean pluralism, classical MRL theories of laws, and Albert and Loewer's theory. After arguing that none of the above fully succeed, we consider the conspiracy problem through the lens (...)
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  • Non-reductive physicalism and degrees of freedom.Jessica Wilson - 2010 - British Journal for Philosophy of Science 61 (2):279-311.
    Some claim that Non- reductive Physicalism is an unstable position, on grounds that NRP either collapses into reductive physicalism, or expands into emergentism of a robust or ‘strong’ variety. I argue that this claim is unfounded, by attention to the notion of a degree of freedom—roughly, an independent parameter needed to characterize an entity as being in a state functionally relevant to its law-governed properties and behavior. I start by distinguishing three relations that may hold between the degrees of freedom (...)
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  • Mentaalinen kausaatio.Panu Raatikainen - 2007 - In Heta Gylling, Ilkka Niiniluoto & Risto Vilkko (eds.), Syy. Gaudeamus.
    Ajatus mentaalisesta kausaatiosta – siitä että mentaaliset ominaisuudet, tilat tai tapahtumat aiheuttavat fysikaalisia vaikutuksia, esimerkiksi ruumiinliikkeitä ja käyttäytymistä – on keskeinen osa niin arkiajattelua kuin tieteellistä psykologiaakin. Itsessään se tuntuu lähes latteudelta. Tarkemmassa filosofisessa tarkastelussa se kuitenkin synnyttää huomattavia filosofisia ongelmia (ks. esim. Block 1990; Heal & Mele 1993; Crane 1995).
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  • Access denied to zombies.Gualtiero Piccinini - 2008 - Unpublished (1):1-13.
    According to the zombie conceivability argument, phenomenal zombies are conceivable, and hence possible, and hence physicalism is false. Critics of the conceivability argument have responded by denying either that zombies are conceivable or that they are possible. Much of the controversy hinges on how to establish and understand what is conceivable, what is possible, and the link between the two—matters that are at least as obscure and controversial as whether consciousness is physical. Because of this, the debate over physicalism is (...)
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  • Putnam, Context, and Ontology.Steven Gross - 2004 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (4):507 - 553.
    When a debate seems intractable, with little agreement as to how one might proceed towards a resolution, it is understandable that philosophers should consider whether something might be amiss with the debate itself. Famously in the last century, philosophers of various stripes explored in various ways the possibility that at least certain philosophical debates are in some manner deficient in sense. Such moves are no longer so much in vogue. For one thing, the particular ways they have been made have (...)
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  • Contextual Emergence in the Description of Properties.Robert C. Bishop & Harald Atmanspacher - 2006 - Foundations of Physics 36 (12):1753-1777.
    The role of contingent contexts in formulating relations between properties of systems at different descriptive levels is addressed. Based on the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions for interlevel relations, a comprehensive classification of such relations is proposed, providing a transparent conceptual framework for discussing particular versions of reduction, emergence, and supervenience. One of these versions, contextual emergence, is demonstrated using two physical examples: molecular structure and chirality, and thermal equilibrium and temperature. The concept of stability is emphasized as a (...)
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  • A New Map of Theories of Mental Content: Constitutive Accounts and Normative Theories.Mark Greenberg - 2005 - Philosophical Issues 15 (1):299-320.
    In this paper, I propose a new way of understanding the space of possibilities in the field of mental content. The resulting map assigns separate locations to theories of content that have generally been lumped together on the more traditional map. Conversely, it clusters together some theories of content that have typically been regarded as occupying opposite poles. I make my points concrete by developing a taxonomy of theories of mental content, but the main points of the paper concern not (...)
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  • Supervenience in metaphysics.Stephan Leuenberger - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (4):749-762.
    Supervenience is a topic-neutral, broadly logical relation between classes of properties or facts. In a slogan, A supervenes on B if and only if there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference. The first part of this paper considers different ways in which that slogan has been cashed out. The second part discusses applications of concepts of supervenience, focussing on the question whether they may provide an explication of determination theses such as physicalism.
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  • The normative force of reasoning.Ralph Wedgwood - 2006 - Noûs 40 (4):660–686.
    What exactly is reasoning? Like many other philosophers, I shall endorse a broadly causal conception of reasoning. Reasoning is a causal process, in which one mental event (say, one’s accepting the conclusion of a certain argument) is caused by an antecedent mental event (say, one’s considering the premises of the argument). Just like causal accounts of action and causal accounts of perception, causal accounts of reasoning have to confront a version of what has come to be known as the problem (...)
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  • Who's afraid of undermining?Peter B. M. Vranas - 2002 - Erkenntnis 57 (2):151-174.
    The Principal Principle (PP) says that, for any proposition A, given any admissible evidence and the proposition that the chance of A is x%, one's conditional credence in A should be x%. Humean Supervenience (HS) claims that, among possible worlds like ours, no two differ without differing in the spacetime-point-by-spacetime-point arrangement of local properties. David Lewis (1986b, 1994a) has argued that PP contradicts HS, and the validity of his argument has been endorsed by Bigelow et al. (1993), Thau (1994), Hall (...)
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  • How dispositions can be causally relevant.Agustin Vicente - 2002 - Erkenntnis 56 (3):329-344.
    The problem this paper deals with is the problem of how dispositional properties can have causal relevance. In particular, the paper is focused on the question of how dispositions can have causal relevance given that the categorial bases that realise them seem to be sufficient to bring about the effects that dispositions explain. I show first that this problem of exclusion has no general solution. Then, I discuss some particular cases in which dispositions are causally relevant, despite of this exclusion (...)
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  • Local theories of causation and the a posteriori identification of the causal relation.Alexander Rueger - 1998 - Erkenntnis 48 (1):25-38.
    The need to find an intrinsic characterization of what makes a relation between events causal arises not only in local theories of causation like Salmon's process theory but also in global approaches like Lewis' counterfactual theory. According to the localist intuition, whether a process connecting two events is causal should depend only on what goes on between the events, not on conditions that hold elsewhere in the world. If such intrinsic characterizations could be found, an identification of the causal relation (...)
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  • What the deflationist may say about truthmaking.Matthew Mcgrath - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (3):666–688.
    The correspondence theory of truth is often thought to be supported by the intuition that if a proposition (sentence, belief) is true, then something makes it true. I argue that this appearance is illusory and is sustained only by a conflation of two distinct notions of truthmaking, existential and non-existential. Once the conflation is exposed, I maintain, deflationism is seen to be adequate for accommodating truthmaking intuitions.
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  • Normative Appeals to the Natural.Pekka Väyrynen - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (2):279 - 314.
    Surprisingly, many ethical realists and anti-realists, naturalists and not, all accept some version of the following normative appeal to the natural (NAN): evaluative and normative facts hold solely in virtue of natural facts, where their naturalness is part of what fits them for the job. This paper argues not that NAN is false but that NAN has no adequate non-parochial justification (a justification that relies only on premises which can be accepted by more or less everyone who accepts NAN) to (...)
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  • Non-egalitarianism.Michael Huemer - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 114 (1-2):147 - 171.
    Equality of welfare among persons has no intrinsic value. This follows from three axiological principles: (i) a principle of the indifference of the distribution of utility across time within an individual’s life, (ii) a strong supervenience principle for value, and (iii) a principle of the additivity of value across disjoint time periods. (iii) is the most likely target for attack by the egalitarian; but the rejection of (iii) creates decision-theoretic paradoxes.
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  • The nonexistence of determinables: Or, a world of absolute determinates as default hypothesis.Carl Gillett & Bradley Rives - 2005 - Noûs 39 (3):483–504.
    An electron clearly has the property of having a charge of þ1.6 10 19 coulombs, but does it also have the property of being charged ? Philosophers have worried whether so-called ‘determinable’ predicates, such as ‘is charged’, actually refer to determinable properties in the way they are happy to say that determinate predicates, such as ‘has a charge of þ1.6 10 19 coulombs’, refer to determinate properties. The distinction between determinates and determinables is itself fairly new, dating only to its (...)
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  • An unstable eliminativism.John W. Carroll & William R. Carter - 2005 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 86 (1):1–17.
    In his book Objects and Persons, Trenton Merricks has reoriented and fine-tuned an argument from the philosophy of mind to support a selective eliminativism about macroscopic objects.1 The argument turns on a rejection of systematic causal overdetermination and the conviction that microscopic things do the causal work that is attributed to a great many (though not all) macroscopic things. We will argue that Merricks’ argument fails to establish his selective eliminativism.
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  • Interdiscourse or supervenience relations: The primacy of the manifest image.J. Brakel - 1996 - Synthese 106 (2):253 - 297.
    Amidst the progress being made in the various (sub-)disciplines of the behavioural and brain sciences a somewhat neglected subject is the problem of how everything fits into one world and, derivatively, how the relation between different levels of discourse should be understood and to what extent different levels, domains, approaches, or disciplines are autonomous or dependent. In this paper I critically review the most recent proposals to specify the nature of interdiscourse relations, focusing on the concept of supervenience. Ideally supervenience (...)
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  • Supervenience, reduction, and infinite disjunction.Nick Zangwill - 1998 - Philosophia 26 (1-2):321-330.
    Can a certain sort of property supervene on another sort of property without reducing to it? Many philosophers find the superveniencel irreducibility combination attractive in the philosophy of mind and in moral philosophy (Davidson 1980 and Moore 1903). They think that mental properties supervene upon physical properties but do not reduce to them, or that moral properties supervene upon natural properties without reducing to them. Other philosophers have tried to show that the combination is ultimately untenable, however attractive it might (...)
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  • Models of intentional explanation.Robrecht Vanderbeeken - 2004 - Philosophical Explorations 7 (3):233 – 246.
    The controversy about intentional explanation of action concerns how these explanations work. What kind of model allows us to capture the dependency or relevance relation between the explanans, i.e. the beliefs and desires of the agent, and the explanandum, i.e. the action? In this paper, I argue that the causal mechanical model can do the job. Causal mechanical intentional explanations consist in a reference to the mechanisms of practical reasoning of the agent that motivated the agent to act, i.e. to (...)
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  • Popper, laws, and the exclusion of biology from genuine science.David N. Stamos - 2007 - Acta Biotheoretica 55 (4):357-375.
    The primary purpose of this paper is to argue that biologists should stop citing Karl Popper on what a genuinely scientific theory is. Various ways in which biologists cite Popper on this matter are surveyed, including the use of Popper to settle debates on methodology in phylogenetic systematics. It is then argued that the received view on Popper—namely, that a genuinely scientific theory is an empirically falsifiable one—is seriously mistaken, that Popper’s real view was that genuinely scientific theories have the (...)
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  • The Causal Theory of Properties and the Causal Theory of Reference, or How to Name Properties and Why It Matters.Robert D. Rupert - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (3):579 - 612.
    forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
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  • Troubles with truth-making: Necessitation and projection.Benjamin Schnieder - 2006 - Erkenntnis 64 (1):61-74.
    The main question of this paper is how to understand the notion of a truth-maker. In section 1, I show that the identification of truth-making with necessitation cannot capture the pretheoretic understanding of notions such as ‘x makes something true’. In section 2, I examine Barry Smith’s reaction to this problem: he defines truth-making as the combination of necessitation and projection. I focus on the formal part of Smith’s account, which is shown to yield undesired results. However, in section 3, (...)
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  • The Limitations of Kim’s Reductive Physicalism in Accounting for Living Systems and an Alternative Nonreductionist Ontology.Slobodan Perovic - 2007 - Acta Biotheoretica 55 (3):243-267.
    Jaegwon Kim’s exclusion argument is a general ontological argument, applicable to any properties deemed supervenient on a microproperty basis, including biological properties. It implies that the causal power of any higher-level property must be reducible to the subset of the causal powers of its lower-level properties. Moreover, as Kim’s recent version of the argument indicates, a higher-level property can be causally efficient only to the extent of the efficiency of its micro-basis. In response, I argue that the ontology that aims (...)
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  • Truthmakers for negative truths.George Molnar - 2000 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 78 (1):72 – 86.
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  • No objects, no problem?Matthew McGrath - 2005 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (4):457 – 486.
    One familiar form of argument for rejecting entities of a certain kind is that, by rejecting them, we avoid certain difficult problems associated with them. Such problem-avoidance arguments backfire if the problems cited survive the elimination of the rejected entities. In particular, we examine one way problems can survive: a question for the realist about which of a set of inconsistent statements is false may give way to an equally difficult question for the eliminativist about which of a set of (...)
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  • Armstrong on the spatio-temporality of universals.Ernâni Magalhães - 2006 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (2):301 – 308.
    Provocatively, David Armstrong's properties are supposed to be both universals and spatio-temporal. What does this amount to? I consider four of Armstrong's views, in order of ascending plausibility: (1) the exemplification account, on which universals are exemplified by space-times; (2) the location account, on which universals are located at space-times; (3) the first constituent account, on which spatio-temporal relations are elements of what I call the form of time; and, the true view, (4) the second constituent account, on which universals (...)
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  • Dispositions.John Heil - 2005 - Synthese 144 (3):343-356.
    Appeals to dispositionality in explanations of phenomena in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, require that we first agree on what we are talking about. I sketch an account of what dispositionality might be. That account will place me at odds with most current conceptions of dispositionality. My aim is not to establish a weighty ontological thesis, however, but to move the discussion ahead in two respects. First, I want to call attention to the extent to which assumptions philosophers have (...)
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  • When is a brain like the planet?Clark Glymour - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (3):330-347.
    Time series of macroscopic quantities that are aggregates of microscopic quantities, with unknown one‐many relations between macroscopic and microscopic states, are common in applied sciences, from economics to climate studies. When such time series of macroscopic quantities are claimed to be causal, the causal relations postulated are representable by a directed acyclic graph and associated probability distribution—sometimes called a dynamical Bayes net. Causal interpretations of such series imply claims that hypothetical manipulations of macroscopic variables have unambiguous effects on variables “downstream” (...)
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  • The operator theory of instantiation.Peter Forrest - 2006 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (2):213 – 228.
    Armstrong holds the Supervenience Theory of instantiation, namely that the instantiation of universals by particulars supervenes upon what particulars and what universals there are, where supervenience is stipulated to be explanatory or dependent supervenience. I begin by rejecting the Supervenience Theory of instantiation. Having done so it is then tempting to take instantiation as primitive. This has, however, an awkward consequence, undermining one of the main advantages universals have over tropes. So I examine another account hinted at by Armstrong. This (...)
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  • Color Primitivism.David R. Hilbert & Alex Byrne - 2006 - Erkenntnis 66 (1-2):73 - 105.
    The typical kind of color realism is reductive: the color properties are identified with properties specified in other terms (as ways of altering light, for instance). If no reductive analysis is available — if the colors are primitive sui generis properties — this is often taken to be a convincing argument for eliminativism. That is, realist primitivism is usually thought to be untenable. The realist preference for reductive theories of color over the last few decades is particularly striking in light (...)
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  • Social constructionism as cognitive science.Thomas E. Dickins - 2004 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34 (4):333–352.
    Social constructionism is a broad position that emphasizes the importance of human social processes in psychology. These processes are generally associated with language and the ability to construct stories that conform to the emergent rules of "language games". This view allows one to espouse a variety of critical postures with regard to realist commitments within the social and behavioural sciences, ranging from outright relativism to a more moderate respect for the "barrier" that linguistic descriptions can place between us and reality. (...)
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  • Moral facts as configuring causes.Terence Cuneo - 2006 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (2):141–162.
    The overarching aim of this essay is to argue that moral realists should be "causalists" or claim that moral facts of certain kinds are causally efficacious. To this end, I engage in two tasks. The first is to develop an account of the sense in which moral facts of certain kinds are causally efficacious. After having sketched the concept of what I call a "configuring" cause, I contend that the exercise of the moral virtues is plausibly viewed as a configuring (...)
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  • Ontological dependence.Fabrice Correia - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (5):1013-1032.
    'Ontological dependence' is a term of philosophical jargon which stands for a rich family of properties and relations, often taken to be among the most fundamental ontological properties and relations. Notions of ontological dependence are usually thought of as 'carving reality at its ontological joints', and as marking certain forms of ontological 'non-self-sufficiency'. The use of notions of dependence goes back as far as Aristotle's characterization of substances, and these notions are still widely used to characterize other concepts and to (...)
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  • Consciousness: A mathematical treatment of the global neuronal workspace model.Harald Atmanspacher - 2006 - Acta Biotheoretica 54 (2):157-160.
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  • Ontological aspects of information modeling.Robert L. Ashenhurst - 1996 - Minds and Machines 6 (3):287-394.
    Information modeling (also known as conceptual modeling or semantic data modeling) may be characterized as the formulation of a model in which information aspects of objective and subjective reality are presented (the application), independent of datasets and processes by which they may be realized (the system).A methodology for information modeling should incorporate a number of concepts which have appeared in the literature, but should also be formulated in terms of constructs which are understandable to and expressible by the system user (...)
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  • Semiosis as an emergent process.Joao Queiroz & Charbel Nino El-Hani - 2006 - Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42 (1):78-116.
    : In this paper, we intend to discuss if and in what sense semiosis (meaning process, cf. C. S. Peirce) can be regarded as an "emergent" process in semiotic systems. It is not our problem here to answer when or how semiosis emerged in nature. As a prerequisite for the very formulation of these problems, we are rather interested in discussing the conditions which should be fulfilled for semiosis to be characterized as an emergent process. The first step in this (...)
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