Aesthetic non-cognitivists deny that aesthetic statements express genuinely aesthetic beliefs and instead hold that they work primarily to express something non-cognitive, such as attitudes of approval or disapproval, or desire. Non-cognitivists deny that aesthetic statements express aesthetic beliefs because they deny that there are aesthetic features in the world for aesthetic beliefs to represent. Their assumption, shared by scientists and theorists of mind alike, was that language-users possess cognitive mechanisms with which to objectively grasp abstract rules fixed independently of human (...) responses, and that cognizers are thereby capable of grasping rules for the correct application of aesthetic concepts without relying on evaluation or enculturation. However, in this article I use Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations to argue that psychological theories grounded upon this so-called objective model of rule-following fail to adequately account for concept acquisition and mastery. I argue that this is because linguistic enculturation, and the perceptual learning that’s often involved, influences and enables the mastery of aesthetic concepts. I argue that part of what’s involved in speaking aesthetically is to belong to a cultural practice of making sense of things aesthetically, and that it’s within a socio-linguistic community, and that community’s practices, that such aesthetic sense can be made intelligible. (shrink)

This paper argues that various phenomenological considerations support a non-representational causal account of visual experience. This position claims that visual experiences serve as a non-representational causally efficacious medium for the production of beliefs concerning the external world. The arguments are centered on defending a non-representational causal account’s understanding of the cognitive significance of visual experience. Among other things, such an account can easily explain the inextricable role that background beliefs and conceptual capacities play in perceptually-based external world belief-formation processes, the (...) fact that visual mental states constrain beliefs because of their presentational phenomenology, and the phenomenon known as the transparency of visual experience. (shrink)

I consider a new, non-disjunctive strategy for ‘relational’ or ‘naïve realist’ theories to respond to arguments from ‘perfect’ (causally matching) hallucinations. The strategy, in a nutshell, is to treat such hypothetical cases as instances of perception rather than hallucination. After clarifying the form and dialectic of such arguments, I consider three objections to the strategy. I provide answers to the first two objections but concede that the third — based on the possibility of ‘chaotic’ (uncaused) perfect hallucinations — cannot obviously (...) be dealt with by the proposed strategy. However, such ‘chaotic’ scenarios are also problematic for standard representational accounts of experience. Thus I conclude that perfect hallucinations pose no more of a threat to the relational theory than to its main representational rival. (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)

One claim reiterated with increasing boldness by the “analytic” tradition in philosophy is that what sets it apart from long-time rivals is a shared adherence to proper norms of argumentation. Gradated deviancy from this canon by English-speaking practitioners has therefore raised important questions about who can repair under the banner “professional philosopher.” We will portray as deeply worrisome the idea that argumentation should secure not just conclusions, but disciplinary membership as well.

In this paper I argue that the work of the unorthodox Stoic Posidonius - as reported to us by Galen - can be seen as making an interesting contribution to contemporary debates about the nature of emotion. Richard Sorabji has already argued that Posidonius' contribution highlights the weaknesses in some well-known contemporary forms of cognitivism. Here I argue that Posidonius might be seen as advocating a theory of the emotions which sees them as being, in at least some cases, two-level (...) intentional phenomena. One level involves judgments, just as the orthodox Stoic account does. But Posidonius thinks that emotions must also include an element sometimes translated as an "irrational tug". I suggest that we see the "irrational tug" as involving a second level of intentional, but non-conceptual representation. This view satisfies two desiderata: it is a view which would have been available to Posidonius and which is compatible with the views reported to us; and it is a view which is independently attractive. It also makes Posidonius' position less far removed from that of orthodox Stoics than it might otherwise do, while remaining genuinely innovative. (shrink)

Human beings seem to capture time and the temporal properties of events and things in thought by having beliefs usually expressed with statements using tense, or notions such as ‘now’, ‘past’ or ‘future’. Tensed beliefs like these seem indispensable for correct reasoning and timely action. For instance, my belief that my root canal is over seems inexpressible with a statement that does not use tense or a temporal indexical. However, the dominant view on the nature of time is that it (...) forms, with space, a four-dimensional continuum where time does not encompass private perspectives or an absolute, fixed present. This ‘tenseless’ theory of time encounters a challenge in integrating tensed belief, because it cannot easily explain what constitutes a tensed belief in a tenseless world and how such a belief works inside our cognitive network to bring about the actions it does. Providing such an account is the main goal of this dissertation. -/- I argue here that the correct way to proceed would be to utilize philosophical theories dealing with indexicality, as the puzzling features of tensed belief are shared with beliefs expressed by first-person or spatial indexicals. In chapters II and III I expand the dominant theories about indexicality (Lewis, Perry, Kaplan) and apply them to tensed belief. I show that each is in certain respects incomplete or inadequate. -/- My preferred account critiques the preceding theories as mis-attributing the indexicality involved to a fully conceptual element in the way people think about time. I argue that we should instead connect tensed belief to not fully conceptual elements thought. For support I turn to work in perceptual psychology that connects beliefs about space to perceptions of spatial features. In chapter IV I develop an analogous argument about temporal thought and discuss how mental representations involved in perceptions are constitutively related to the formation and preservation of tensed beliefs. Combining this story with a tenseless theory of time should give us a complete, metaphysically uncontroversial, account of the way a tensed belief functions in reasoning and produces timely action. (shrink)

Jaspers’s binary distinction between understanding and explanation has given way first to a proliferation of explanatory levels and now, in John Campbell’s recent work, to a conception of explanation with no distinct levels of explanation and no inbuilt rationality requirement. I argue that there is still a role for understanding in psychiatry and that is to demystify the assumption that the states it concerns are mental. This role can be fulfilled by placing rationality at the heart of understanding without a (...) commitment to the attempt to use rationality to shed light on interpretation and mindedness as though from outside those notions. Delusions still present a significant challenge to philosophical attempts at understanding, but this merely reflects the genuine clinical difficulties such states present. (shrink)

Vít Gvoždiak published a reconciliatory analysis of Searle’s social ontology with semiotics in Gvoždiak (2012). Without prior knowledge of his paper, an analysis of the same subject appeared in Msimang (2014). Even though Searle’s social ontology is a common point of reference in the formulation of semiotics in these papers, it also serves as a point of departure in their understanding of semiotics and its development. The semiotic theory expressed in Gvoždiak (2012) is an inherently linguistic (speech act centred) theory, (...) whereas the semiotic theory presented in Msimang (2014) tends more towards a general theory of communicative systems in which social ontology, which follows from speech act theory, is an interesting part. It is my purpose in this note to contrast the two positions of semiotic theory as they appear in the aforementioned papers in reference to their appropriation of Searle’s social ontology. (shrink)

In this paper, I reject that animal reasoning, negation in particular, necessarily involves the representation of absences, as suggested by Bermúdez (2003, 2006, 2007), since this would still work as a logical negation (unavailable for non-linguistic creatures). False belief, pretense, and communication experiments show that non-human animals (at least some primates) have difficulties representing absent entities or properties. I offer an alternative account resorting to the sub-symbolic similarity judgments proposed by Vigo & Allen (2009) and expectations: animal proto-negation takes place (...) through the incompatibility between an expected and the actual representation. Finally, I propose that the expectation paradigm be extrapolated to other experi-ments in cognitive psychology (both with pre-linguistic children and animals) in order to design fair experiments that test other minds considering their true abilities. (shrink)

I defend the claim that some things genuinely matter to human beings. This involves overcoming a series of arguments which suggest that the things that matter to us are arbitrary. These arguments arise out of Nagel’s claim that life is absurd. The thesis also discusses different senses in which life can be said to have meaning. I put religious accounts of the meaning of life to one side. Instead, I focus on outlining how someone can experience their own life as (...) meaningful. My main aim is to show that some things genuinely matter. I argue that some things genuinely matter from the perspective of the individual in virtue of the fact that they can become conscious of their own needs. So, there are facts about human nature that, taken together, show that some things genuinely matter to us. These include our vital needs, our happiness and positive relationships with others. I argue that these things matter to us not simply in virtue of the fact that we happen to think that they matter. Rather, they genuinely matter to us given our nature. (shrink)

The question “What is the nature of experience?” is of perennial philosophical concern. It deals not only with the nature of experience qua experience, but additionally with related questions about the experiencing subject and that which is experienced. In other words, to speak of the philosophical problem of experience, one must also address questions about mind, world, and the various relations that link them together. Both William James and Kitarō Nishida were deeply concerned with these issues. Their shared notion of (...) “pure experience” is the conceptual cornerstone of their attempt to deal with the philosophical problem of experience. This dissertation is an analysis of “pure experience” and its relevance to several issues in contemporary hilosophy of mind. Drawing upon James’s and Nishida’s “pure experience”, I argue both for a sensorimotor-based, “extended” conception of consciousness and a bodily skills-based account of moral psychology. (shrink)

The representative theory of perception is one of the realist theories of perception which maintains we do not have direct access to the objects of perception; our ideas represent some objective objects in the world. In this paper, I will address the question about the representative nature of mental ideas from a Thomistic perspective. I will explore if some Thomists are entitled to claim that Aquinas’ theory of knowledge based on his metaphysics can provide a basis for resolving this issue. (...) I will argue that this question is wrong-headed and it should be replaced with the following question: If we assume the existence of a real world and that we are not under the influence of hallucination, how we can know that our ideas truly represent the world? (shrink)

Many philosophers have been attracted to the idea that meaning is, in some way or other, determined by use—chief among them, perhaps, Michael Dummett. But John McDowell has argued that Dummett, and anyone else who would seek to draw serious philosophical conclusions from this claim, must face a dilemma: Either the use of a sentence is characterized in terms of what it can be used to say, in which case profound philosophical consequences can hardly follow, or it will be impossible (...) to make out the sense in which the use of language is a rational activity. The paper evaluates McDowell's arguments and, in so doing, attempts to offer an initial sketch of how the notion of use might be so understood that the claim that use determines meaning is a substantive one. (I do not take any stand here on whether one should accept that claim.). (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce and defend the recurrent model for understanding bodily spatial phenomenology. While Longo, Azañón and Haggard (2010) propose a bottom-up model, Bermúdez (2017) emphasizes the top-down aspect of the information processing loop. We argue that both are only half of the story. Section 1 intro- duces what the issues are. Section 2 starts by explaining why the top- down, descending direction is necessary with the illustration from the ‘body-based tactile rescaling’ paradigm (de Vignemont, Ehrsson and Haggard, (...) 2005). It then argues that the bottom-up, ascending direction is also necessary, and substantiates this view with recent research on skin space and tactile field (Haggard et al., 2017). Section 3 discusses the model’s application to body ownership and bodily self-representation. Implications also extend to topics such as sense modality individuation (Macpherson, 2011), the constancy- based view of perception (Burge, 2010), and the perception/cognition divide (Firestone and Scholl, 2016). (shrink)

In 1982 Saul A. Kripke proposed a reconstruction of the central insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following. The reconstruction prominently featured a sceptical challenge which soon was recognised as a new and very radical form of scepticism. According to the challenge there is no fact of the matter which constitutes meaning. As there is no such fact, the first-person authority people intuitively seem to have concerning what they mean is also baseless. In response to the sceptic, many solutions have (...) been proposed. This thesis is about one family of solutions, according to which facts about meaning are sui generis and can neither be reduced to other facts about the world nor to non-semantic facts about the human mind. The non-reductionist proposals by Colin McGinn and Crispin Wright will be assessed in detail and arguments against both will be introduced. The arguments stem only partially from Kripke himself, some are based on recent literature, others are completely new. The emerging situation will be used as a basis to propose an alternative non-reductionism about meaning-facts. (shrink)

Michael Bergmann (2006) has argued that an internalistic view of justification faces a dilemma. Assuming as internalism does that to have a justified belief, subjects must be aware of the justifiers of the belief and of their relevance to the truth of the belief, Bergmann notes that one is either aware of this relevance conceptually or not. But, says Bergmann, if the required awareness is conceptual, internalism is encumbered with an infinite regress. If it is not-if it is only "weak (...) awareness"—then internalism lacks any dialectical advantage over externalism. In this paper, I explore DePoe's (2012) defense of the dialectical advantage of weak awareness, and show how the case for its ability to account for awareness of the relevance of the justifiers can be improved by supplementation from a direct realist theory of perception and a theory of concept-formation and application informed by that theory of perception. (shrink)

What is the distinctively philosophical problem of perception? Here it is argued that it is the conflict between the nature of perceptual experience as it intuitively seems to us, and certain possibilities which are implicit in the very idea of experience: possibilities of illusion and to the world' which involves direct awareness of existing objects and their properties. But if one can have an experience of the same kind without the object being there -- a hallucination of an object -- (...) then it seems that perceptual experience cannot essentially be such a relation. This is the fundamentally philosophical problem of perception; the various philosophical theories of perception in the 20th and 21st centuries can be seen as responses to it. (shrink)

In giving an account of the content of perceptual experience, several authors, including Fred Dretske, Gareth Evans, Christopher Peacocke, and Michael Tye, have employed the notion of nonconceptual representational content.[1].

Enactivism has, perhaps, come to mean different things to different people. The version of enactivism that I am going to build on in this paper is that defended in my book The New Science of the Mind (henceforth NSM). That view is, I think, recognizably enactivist. Others might disagree, and I myself not only characterized it in other terms but was careful to distinguish it from other views that fall under the rubric "enactivist." However, the view I defended is, I (...) think, recognizably enactivist to the extent it regards cognition as, in part, made up of processes whereby an individual manipulates, transforms, and/or exploits structures in its environment. These structures carry information that is relevant to the cognitive task in which the individual is engaged, and the processes are ones that transform this information from information that is merely present to information that is available to the individual. This was a common theme of all my ruminations on this topic, all the way back to The Body in Mind. (shrink)

Suppose for a moment, that J.R.R. Tolkien, the famous author of the cult fantasy saga Lord of the Rings, did not publish anything of his writings during his lifetime; suppose that after his death the manuscripts of all his writings are lying on his table. Where, then, is the Middlearth, the glorious land of hobbits, dwarfs, elfs and human heroes, situated? We might be tempted to say that it is within our world, namely inside the pile of the papers on (...) the writer’s table - for it exists solely through the letters written on these papers. However, to say this would be wrong - surely we do not expect that should the heroes of the book walk in a straight line long enough, they would cross the boundaries of the book and appear in Mr. Tolkien’s room. Middlearth is, of course, not within our world - despite existing solely due to certain things which are within it. Now the situation is not substantially different actually, when Middlearth does not exist solely through a single pile of papers, but rather through millions of printed copies of Tolkien’s books and through the minds of millions of their readers. Again, the land exists exclusively through the existence of entities which are parts of our world, but this does not mean that the land itself is a part of our world. The point of this anecdotal excursion is now that this relationship between our world and Middlearth is, in a sense, similar to the relationship between our physical space of things and „the space of reasons“ ; or between „the causal story“ and „the justificatory story“. Like Middlearth, the space of reasons exists exclusively due to us, humans, and our minds, and in this sense we might be tempted to situate it in our world, to see it as a certain, perhaps scattered, compartment of the world of things within which we live; but just as in the case of Middlearth, this might be dangerously misguiding. (shrink)

I show that there are good arguments and evidence to boot that support the language as an instrument of thought hypothesis. The underlying mechanisms of language, comprising of expressions structured hierarchically and recursively, provide a perspective (in the form of a conceptual structure) on the world, for it is only via language that certain perspectives are avail- able to us and to our thought processes. These mechanisms provide us with a uniquely human way of thinking and talking about the world (...) that is different to the sort of thinking we share with other animals. If the primary function of language were communication then one would expect that the underlying mechanisms of language will be structured in a way that favours successful communication. I show that not only is this not the case, but that the underlying mechanisms of language are in fact structured in a way to maximise computational efficiency, even if it means causing communicative problems. Moreover, I discuss evidence from comparative, neuropatho- logical, developmental, and neuroscientific evidence that supports the claim that language is an instrument of thought. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers are committed – either implicitly or explicitly – to Propositionalism about thought-experimental intuitions. According to this view, thought-experimental intuitions are phenomenally conscious, spontaneous, and non-theoretical; most importantly, Propositionalists claim that intuitions bear consciously accessible propositional content. The negative project of this essay is a critique of, the rejection of which is tantamount to rejecting Propositionalism. In addition, I propose an alternative position – namely, Interpretationalism. According to Interpretationalism, intuitions possess the features ascribed in -; however, they do (...) not bear consciously accessible propositional content. Instead, intuitions acquire cognitive significance by virtue of being interpreted in light of a subject’s background beliefs. (shrink)

The continued presence and importance of Christian moral values in our daily lives, coupled with the fact that faith in Christianity is in continual decline, raises the question as to why having lost faith in Christianity, we have also not lost faith in our Christian moral values. This question is also indicative of a more pressing phenomenon: not only have we maintained our faith in Christian values, we fail to see that the widespread collapse of Christianity should affect this faith. (...) To tackle this latter phenomenon, I claim, we have to pose the Nietzschean question of the value of our moral values, so as to see that this value can be a possible object of questioning. In chapter one, I consider different approaches found in the history of moral philosophy that look like potential candidates for this task. I argue that, ultimately, the task requires simultaneously taking our familiarity with Christian moral values as both sui generis and a questionable phenomenon. In chapter two, I articulate in detail the sui generis nature of this familiarity with moral values,in terms of the phenomena of habituation and sedimentation. In chapter three, I consider the possibility of estrangement that is built into our familiarity with moral values, by focusing on the role of cognition. I demonstrate how cognition, in the form of self-consciousness, can disrupt the sedimented, habituated nature of our moral values through a form of ironic disruption. In chapter four, I develop this account by considering the possibility of an appeal to an alternative moral outlook. To do so, I draw upon the structural isomorphism that is present between the process of estrangement and a rite of passage. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is to offer a practice-based account of intentionality. My aim is to examine what sort of practices agents have to engage in so as to count as talking and thinking about the way the world is – that is, what sort of practices count as representational. Representational practices answer to the way the world is: what is correct within such practices depends on the way things are, rather than on the attitudes of agents. An account (...) of representation must explain how such objective standards of correctness are introduced in human practices: one must explain how the world gets to have a say in what is correct in human discursive practices. Roughly, my proposal is that human discursive practices become responsive to the way things are by virtue of involving practical interactions with the world. The outcomes of these interactions depend on the way the world is and the evaluation of such outcomes contributes to determining which moves within the practice count as correct. Due to our practical engagement with the environment, thus, the world gets to constrain discursive practices. In order to flesh out my proposal, I develop a practice-based characterization of intentional or representational content. On this sort of approach, expressing intentional contents is seen as a matter of playing a certain role in relevant practices, rather than as a matter of engaging in some word-world relation. The expression of content, thus, is explained in terms of use. In particular, I adopt an inferentialist perspective, according to which discursive moves express contents because of their role in practices of giving and asking for reasons. I investigate how practical engagement with the environment introduces friction with the world in these practices of giving and asking for reasons. One of the main conclusions reached in the dissertation is that defeasibility is an essential feature of objective representational practices – so that attributions of representational correctness are revisable in an open-ended way. The discussion of defeasible reasoning – and of the way in which defeasibility shapes human representational practices – is a central point of this dissertation. (shrink)

The objectives of this article are twofold. First, by denying the dualism inherent in attempts to load metaphysical significance on the inner/outer distinction, it defends the view that scientific investigation can approach consciousness in itself, and is not somehow restricted in scope to the outward manifestations of a private and hidden realm. Second, it provisionally endorses the central tenets of global workspace theory, and recommends them as a possible basis for the sort of scientific understanding of consciousness thus legitimised. However, (...) the article goes on to argue that global workspace theory alone does not constitute a fully worked-out objective account of the conscious subject. This requires additional attention to be paid to the issue of embodiment, and to the possibility of indexicality that arises when an instantiation of the global workspace architecture inhabits a spatially localised body. (shrink)

The thesis is intended to contribute to the growing understanding of the indispensable role played by phenomenal consciousness in human cognition, and specifically in making our concepts of the external world available. The focus falls on so called observational concepts, a type of rudimentary, perceptually-based objective concepts in our repertoire — picking out manifest properties such as colors and shapes. A theory of such concepts gets provided, and, consequently, the exact role that perceptual consciousness plays in making concepts of this (...) sort available gets settled. In the first half of the thesis, observational concepts get construed as a special type of recognitional concepts. On an analogy with perceptual demonstratives, having such concepts would involve having non-trivial knowledge of their reference. The experiential basis of such concepts would, among other things, provide for such constitutive knowledge. The theoretical background relevant to the hypothesis gets provided in the first chapter. A defence of the hypothesis follows in the second. In the second half of the thesis, care is taken to distinguish among two ways in which the constitutive knowledge of the reference of an observational concept could be fleshed out. In the third chapter, perceptual experience is shown to provide the basis both for knowledge of observational properties by acquaintance, and for knowledge of the essence of such properties — provided that knowledge of essence gets construed in the right, modest way. It might be natural to take knowledge by acquaintance to be the sort relevant to observational concept possession, especially given that in the case of perceptual demonstratives this is the role likely played by experience. However, this initial impression proves to be mistaken. The constitutive knowledge of the referent of an observational concept turns out to consist in the capacity to determine a priori the essence of the respective property. To show this, an argument gets provided in the penultimate fourth chapter, based on the key role played by experiences of instances of observational properties in optimal viewing conditions in enabling the possession of the respective observational concept. (shrink)

The article provides a summary of the author's book Understanding People: Normativity and Rationalizing Explanation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). It details three areas in which the notion of a normative commitment is made central. These are (1) believing and intending, (2) practices conceived as essentially rule-governed activities, and (3) meaning and concepts. An account is given of how we may best explain the commitments incurred by beliefs and intentions. It is held that those states are themselves essentially normative. A problem (...) of the relevance of rationalizing to rationalizing explanation is explored and the relation between normative commitments and normative reasons is discussed. (shrink)

En un pasaje famoso, Kant dijo que "los pensamientos sin contenido son vacíos, las intuiciones sin conceptos son ciegas", lo cual ha dado lugar -de la mano de filósofos y exégetas clásicos y contemporáneos como McDowell- a la idea de que los estados mentales que Kant denomina intuiciones poseen ya un contenido conceptual. En este artículo se propone una lectura que hace énfasis en la independencia o separabilidad de intuiciones y conceptos, y cómo las primeras constituyen un tipo de cognición (...) que, sin ser conceptual, es suficiente para la individuación de particulares. In a famous passage, Kant said that "the thoughts without content are empties, the intuitions without concepts are blind", which has given place, from the hand of classical and contemporaries philosophers and scholars, like McDowell, to the idea that the mental states which Kant calls intuitions have conceptual content. This article proposes a lecture that makes emphasis on independence or separability between intuitions and concepts, and how the firsts constitutes a kind of cognition that while is non-conceptual, is enough for the individuation of particulars. (shrink)

En varios pasajes de sus obras psicológicas, Avicena sugiere que los animales no humanos tienen un yo. Aquí argumentaré que, a partir de las características que le atribuye a la percepción, hay razones de peso para sospechar que los animales no humanos efectivamente tienen un yo: el impulso natural en ellos hacia la supervivencia, la familiaridad con su propio cuerpo, su capacidad para tender hacia aquello que les resulta conveniente y huir de lo peligroso de acuerdo con sus propias circunstancias, (...) así como el modo de relacionarse con el mundo, son conductas que, como se verá, requerirían la presencia de un yo. In several passages from his psychological works Avicenna suggests that non-human animals have a self. Here I argue that from the Avicennian description of perception, there are strong reasons to suspect that non-human animals have a self: their natural self-preservation impulse, the familiarity they have with their own body, their capacity to move towards what they perceive as convenient and to avoid what is dangerous according to their own circumstances, and the way each one relates to the world, are behaviors that, as will be shown, would require the presence of a self. (shrink)

In this article I look at some the issues, problems and self-imposed dilemmas that emerge from Harry Frankfurt’s well-known essay ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’. That essay has exerted a widespread influence on subsequent thinking in ethics and philosophy of mind, especially through its central idea of ‘second-order’ desires and volitions. Frankfurt’s approach promises a third-way solution to certain longstanding issues – chiefly those of free-will versus determinism and the mind/body problem – that have up (...) to now resisted the best efforts of philosophical deliverance or therapy. It looks very much like the kind of answer that would avoid the ‘high priori road’ of any Kantian or suchlike metaphysical approach by adopting a broadly naturalized conception of human moral agency while not going so far down the path toward wholesale ethical naturalism as to lose the benefits that come with the Kantian conception. However I suggest that this appearance is deceptive and that Frankfurt’s way of addressing these issues – especially his leading idea of second-order desires and volitions – lies open to a long-familiar range of objections from both a naturalist and a strong autonomist quarter. More specifically, I show that his notion of moral will as possessing a multiplex structure whereby higher-order volitions can reject or countermand the promptings of unregenerate first-order desire is one that must inherently give rise to various problems of a logical, metaphysical, and – most importantly in this context – ethical character. I conclude that a thoroughgoing naturalism is the only response that can meet the kinds of challenge increasingly mounted from various scientific quarters, notably those of neurophysiology and cognitive psychology.U ovome članku razmatram neka pitanja, probleme i, kako mi se čini, samonametnute dileme koje proizlaze iz dobro poznatog ogleda Harryja Frankfurta “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”. Taj je ogled izvršio široki utjecaj na kasnije mišljenje u etici i filozofiji uma, naročito svojom središnjom idejom želja i htijenja “drugog reda”. Frankfurtov pristup obećava rješenje u obliku trećeg puta određenih starih problema – uglavnom problema odnosa slobodne volje i determinizma te odnosa uma i tijela – koji su se dosad opirali najboljim naporima filozofskog rješavanja ili terapije. On veoma nalikuje onoj vrsti odgovora koji apriorni put bilo kakva kantovskog ili sličnog metafizičkog pristupa želi izbjeći usvajanjem u širokom smislu naturalizirane koncepcije ljudskog moralnog djelovanja, ali tako da ne ode toliko daleko u smjeru etičkog naturalizma da izgubi prednosti koje su povezane s kantovskim pristupom. Tvrdim, međutim, da takav izgled vara i da je Frankfurtov način pristupanja tim pitanjima – a naročito njegova glavna ideja želja i htijenja drugog reda – podložna odavno poznatim prigovorima koji dolaze kako od strane naturalistâ tako i od strane strogih autonomista . Konkretnije, pokazujem da njegov pojam moralne volje kao nečega što posjeduje kompleksnu strukturu, čime htijenja višeg reda mogu odbaciti ili poništiti poticaje pokvarene želje prvog reda, jest takav da inherentno mora izazvati različite logičke, metafizičke i – što je u ovome kontekstu najvažnije – etičke probleme. Zaključujem da je posvemašnji naturalizam jedini odgovor koji može izaći na kraj s izazovima koji se sve više upućuju iz različitih znanstvenih krugova, naročito iz područja neurofiziologije i kognitivne psihologije. (shrink)

This thesis begins with a succinct survey of theories of depiction and then turns to two highly influential contemporary philosophical accounts, namely, the aspect-recognition theory proposed by Dominic McIver Lopes, and Robert Hopkins’s experienced resemblance theory. The latter two theories of pictorial representation are presented in detail before objections to both accounts are presented and assessed. One of the central contentions of the thesis is that the aspect-recognition theory succumbs to a number of serious objections. First of all, this account (...) rests upon a philosophically problematic notion of semantic information and consequently fails to account adequately for the possibility of misrepresentation. Arguably the theory entails that all pictures are misrepresentational. It is also argued that Lopes’s claim that all pictures are belief-independent is unsound. Criticisms of Hopkins’s account of depiction developed in the thesis focus on problems raised by photographic depiction as well as ways in which the ambiguity of the notion of ‘experienced resemblance’ blurs the distinction between misrepresentation and indeterminacy of outline shape. It is also contended that a notion that is fundamental to Hopkins’s account--experienced resemblance in outline shape—leads to problems that are at least as serious as those it would appear to solve. The thesis concludes with a brief assessment of the state of the art of philosophical accounts of depiction. While progress has been made, especially with regard to the clarification of key questions, we still do not have anything like a comprehensive final theory of depiction. (shrink)

When someone does something for a reason, what are the reasons for which she does what she does? What is her ‘motivating reason’, as it is sometimes put? The simple answer is: it depends on what is meant by ‘motivating reason’. Non-Psychologists hold that motivating reasons are what the agent believes. I have shown that given that we understand ‘motivating reasons’ as what I term 'grounds', this is quite correct, as what we believe is what plays the role of a (...) ground. However, we have to be careful not to confuse the role of a ground and the role of an explanans. For the conflation of those two roles can occlude the truth in Non-Psychologism. What the Non-Psychologist about Grounds should say is that what plays the role of an explanans, when someone acts on a ground, is a motivation-fact. She should also say that there are two kinds of motivation-facts: those that include normative reasons and those that do not. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam has famously undergone some radical changes of mind with regard to the issue of scientific realism and its wider epistemological bearings. In this paper I defend the arguments put forward by early Putnam in his essays on the causal theory of reference as applied to natural-kind terms, despite his own later view that those arguments amounted to a form of 'metaphysical' realism which could not be sustained against various lines of sceptical attack. I discuss some of the reasons (...) for Putnam's retreat, first to the theory of 'internal (or framework-relative) realism proposed in his middle-period writings, and then to a commonsensepragmatist stance which claims to resituate this whole discussion on ground that has not been trorldden into ruts by the contending philosophical schools. In particular I examine his protracted engagement with various forms of anti-realist doctrine (Michael Dummett's most prominent among them), with Wittgenstein's thinking about language-games or meaning-as-use, and with a range of sceptical- relativist positions adopted in the wake of Quine's influential attack on the two last 'dogmas' of logical empiricism. My paper seeks to show that Putnam has been over-impressed by some of the arguments — from these and other sources — which he takes to constitute a knock-down case against the kind of extemalist and causal-realist approach developed in his early essays. It concludes by re-stating that position in summary form and relating it to other, more recent defences of causal realism in epistemology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

La visée de ce texte est d’introduire le lecteur francophone à l’interprétation pragmatique de Hegel essentiellement présente dans le monde anglo-saxon. L’intérêt grandissant au sein de la francophonie pour ce genre de lecture nous porte à questionner le sens même du qualificatif « pragmatique » qui la caractérise. Cette précision faite, nous nous attarderons à la figure de la certitude sensible dans la Phénoménologie de l’esprit en y soulignant les thèmes pragmatiques, notamment dans le cas de ce que Wilfrid Sellars (...) aurait appelé une critique du mythe du donné. (shrink)

How can we explain the intentional nature of an expert’s actions, performed without immediate and conscious control, relying instead on automatic cognitive processes? How can we account for the differences and similarities with a novice’s performance of the same actions? Can a naturalist explanation of intentional expert action be in line with a philosophical concept of intentional action? Answering these and related questions in a positive sense, this dissertation develops a three-step argument. Part I considers different methods of explanations in (...) cognitive neuroscience (Bennett & Hacker’s philosophical, conceptual analysis; Marr’s three levels of explanation; Neural Correlates of Consciousness research; mechanistic explanation), defending ‘mechanistic explanation’ as a method that provides the necessary tools for integrating interdisciplinary insights into human action. Furthermore, a dynamic, explanatory mechanism allows the assessment of the impact of learning and development on expert action in a valuable way that other methods don’t. Part II continues by scrutinizing several cognitive neuroscientific theories of learning and development (neuroconstructivism; dual-processing theories; simulation theory; extended mind/cognition hypothesis), arguing for the complex interactions between different types of processing and different action representations involved in expert action performances. Moreover, according to our discussion of a particular ‘simulation theory’ these interactions can be influenced in several ways with the use of language, allowing an agent to configure a specific action representation for performance at a later stage. The results of Parts I and II are then applied in Part III to a parallel discussion of philosophical analyses of intentional action (discussing i.a. Frankfurt, Bratman, Pacherie and Ricoeur) and cognitive neuroscientific insights in it. Both approaches are found to converge in emphasizing the importance for an expert to develop stable patterns of actions that comply maximally not only with his intentions, but also with his motor expertise and with situational conditions. Consequently, his actions – automatic, or not – rely on this ‘sculpted space of actions’. (shrink)

This dissertation proposes the central elements of a Social Enactive Theory of Perception. According to SEP, perception consists in sensory-based practices of interaction with objects, events, and states of affairs that are socially constituted. I oppose the representational view that perception is an indirect contact with the world, consists of the passive receiving and processing of sensory input, is in need of constant assessment of accuracy, and is a matter of individuals alone. I share the basic enactivist insight that perception (...) is a type of activity, but I depart from standard enactivism on the grounds of its individualistic bias and its limited conception of activity. Instead of motor actions, I formulate the concept of perceptual practices as the appropriate framework to understand perception. Perception is woven into socially informed, contextual, sensory-based everyday activities, such as food, dance, and dress, and even seemingly independent, basic perceptual activities and concepts are constituted by such practices. Perceptual individual interactions instantiate social perceptual practices but are not just repetitions of a script. We perceive objects in virtue of perspectives or appearances, not in spite of them, and on this basis I offer SEPâs take on experience, properties, and contents. I conceive perceptual experience as finely grained interactions between subjects and objects, both of which are spatially, temporally, and pragmatically situated. Objects and their sensory properties are perceived dynamically and always in multiple appearances. Perceptual content offers a pragmatic specification of the perceptual objects in the specific ways they appear to subjects. For SEP, perception is normatively structured. SEPâs perceptual normativity is not a worry about a supposed constant threat that our perceptions be nonveridical, but about the placement of perceptual things in a system of possibilities and expectations, cast in terms of degrees of fulfillment of expectations and in a horizon of pragmatic significance, both of which are functions of the socially constituted interactions between a perceiver and a rich theory of appearances. (shrink)