Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. The new evil demon problem at 40.Peter J. Graham - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (2):478-504.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Why Mereological Essentialism Applies to Mereological Aggregates.James Porter Moreland - 2023 - Metaphysica 24 (2):339-357.
    This article’s purpose is to defend the depiction of ordinary-sized physical objects as mereological aggregates (MAs), to clarify what the ontology of an MA is, and to show why mereological essentialism (ME) applies to MAs that seem to be ubiquitous if we are to adopt what Frank Jackson calls “Serious Metaphysics” and refuse to broaden our ontology beyond what is (allegedly) bequeathed to us by physics and chemistry. To accomplish this goal, first, I clarify certain background issues that inform what (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The selective advantage of representing correctly.Bence Nanay - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (3):706-717.
    Here is a widespread but controversial idea: those animals who represent correctly are likely to be selected over those who misrepresent. While various versions of this claim have been traditionally endorsed by the vast majority of philosophers of mind, recently, it has been argued that this is just plainly wrong. My aim in this paper is to argue for an intermediate position: that the correctness of some but not all representations is indeed selectively advantageous. It is selectively advantageous to have (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • From Unobservable to Observable: Scientific Realism and the Discovery of Radium.Simon Allzén - 2022 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 53 (4):307-321.
    I explore the process of changes in the observability of entities and objects in science and how such changes impact two key issues in the scientific realism debate: the claim that predictively successful elements of past science are retained in current scientific theories, and the inductive defense of a specific version of inference to the best explanation with respect to unobservables. I provide a case-study of the discovery of radium by Marie Curie in order to show that the observability of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Proper Functionalism and the Organizational Theory of Functions.Peter J. Graham - 2023 - In Luis R. G. Oliveira (ed.), Externalism about Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 249-276.
    Proper functionalism explicates epistemic warrant in terms of the function and normal functioning of the belief-forming process. There are two standard substantive views of the sources of functions in the literature in epistemology: God (intelligent design) or Mother Nature (evolution by natural selection). Both appear to confront the Swampman objection: couldn’t there be a mind with warranted beliefs neither designed by God nor the product of evolution by natural selection? Is there another substantive view that avoids the Swampman objection? There (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • A dose of reality for moral twin earth.Jeffrey Wisdom - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (6):784-804.
    Nearly 30 years ago, Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons published a now- popular article that combines Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth scenario with G.E. Moore’s open question argument in an effort to show that moral naturalism – the view that moral facts are at bottom ordinary, natural facts of some sort – is probably false. Responses to Horgan and Timmons’s “revised open question argument” have been legion, but surprisingly, no one has attempted to test the core assumption upon which the argument (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Desire's Own Reasons.Uku Tooming - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (2):259-277.
    In this essay I ask if there are reasons that count in favor of having a desire in virtue of its attitudinal nature. I call those considerations desire's own reasons. I argue that desire's own reasons are considerations that explain why a desire meets its constitutive standard of correctness and that it meets this standard when its satisfaction would also be satisfactory to the subject who has it. Reasons that bear on subjective satisfaction are fit to regulate desires through experience (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Butler and Postanalytic Philosophy.Paul Giladi - 2021 - Hypatia 36 (2):276-301.
    This article has two aims: to bring Judith Butler and Wilfrid Sellars into conversation; and to argue that Butler's poststructuralist critique of feminist identity politics has metaphilosophical potential, given her pragmatic parallel with Sellars's critique of conceptual analyses of knowledge. With regard to, I argue that Butler's objections to the definitional practice constitutive of certain ways of construing feminism is comparable to Sellars's critique of the analytical project geared toward providing definitions of knowledge. Specifically, I propose that moving away from (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Materialism and the Moral Status of Animals.Jonathan Birch - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (4):795-815.
    Consciousness has an important role in ethics: when a being consciously experiences the frustration or satisfaction of its interests, those interests deserve higher moral priority than those of a behaviourally similar but non-conscious being. I consider the relationship between this ethical role and an a posteriori (or “type-B”) materialist solution to the mind-body problem. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, if type-B materialism is correct, then the reference of the concept of phenomenal consciousness is radically indeterminate between a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • How beliefs are like colors.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7889-7918.
    Double dissociations between perceivable colors and physical properties of colored objects have led many philosophers to endorse relationalist accounts of color. I argue that there are analogous double dissociations between attitudes of belief—the beliefs that people attribute to each other in everyday life—and intrinsic cognitive states of belief—the beliefs that some cognitive scientists posit as cogs in cognitive systems—pitched at every level of psychological explanation. These dissociations provide good reason to refrain from conflating attitudes of belief with intrinsic cognitive states (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • El pragmatismo biológico de las creencias.Miguel Cabrera Machado - 2019 - Caracas: Amazon.
    La teleosemántica es una teoría teleológica de las representaciones mentales, propugnada por David Papineau, que tiene como propósito ofrecer una explicación naturalista y evolucionista de dichas representaciones, en particular de las creencias. Mi objetivo será analizar las creencias y su relación con la verdad en la obra de Papineau. Según Papineau, los contenidos y las representaciones mentales, específicamente las creencias, cumplen funciones derivadas de la evolución biológica de la especie, y correlativamente, la finalidad de las creencias y los contenidos proviene (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Conceptual analysis without concepts.Max Deutsch - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):11125-11157.
    “Conceptual analysis” is a misnomer—it refers, but it does not refer to a method or practice that involves the analysis of concepts. Once this is recognized, many of the main arguments for skepticism about conceptual analysis can be answered, since many of these arguments falsely assume that conceptual analyses target concepts. The present paper defends conceptual analysis from skepticism about its viability and, positively, presents an argument for viewing conceptual analyses as targeting philosophical phenomena, not our concepts of these phenomena.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Physicalism without supervenience.Lei Zhong - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (5):1529-1544.
    It is widely accepted that supervenience is a minimal commitment of physicalism. In this article, however, I aim to argue that physicalism should be exempted from the supervenience requirement. My arguments rely on a parallel between ontological dependence and causal dependence. Since causal dependence does not require causal determination, ontological dependence should not require ontological determination either. Moreover, my approach has a significant theoretical advantage: if physicalism is not committed to supervenience, then the metaphysical possibility of zombies—which is still wide (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Beyond black dots and nutritious things: A solution to the indeterminacy problem.Marc Artiga - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (3):471-490.
    The indeterminacy problem is one of the most prominent objections against naturalistic theories of content. In this essay I present this difficulty and argue that extant accounts are unable to solve it. Then, I develop a particular version of teleosemantics, which I call ’explanation-based teleosemantics’, and show how this outstanding problem can be addressed within the framework of a powerful naturalistic theory.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Is Metaphysics Immune to Moral Refutation?Alex Barber - 2020 - Acta Analytica 35 (4):469-492.
    When a novel scientific theory conflicts with otherwise plausible moral assumptions, we do not treat that as evidence against the theory. We may scrutinize the empirical data more keenly and take extra care over its interpretation, but science is in some core sense immune to moral refutation. Can the same be said of philosophical theories (or the non-ethical, ‘metaphysical’ ones at least)? If a position in the philosophy of mind, for example, is discovered to have eye-widening moral import, does that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Communities of Judgment : Towards a Teleosemantic Theory of Moral Thought and Discourse.Karl Bergman - 2019 - Dissertation, Uppsala University
    This thesis offers a teleosemantic account of moral discourse and judgment. It develops a number of views about the function and content of moral judgments and the nature of moral discourse based on Ruth Millikan’s theory of intentional content and the functions of intentional attitudes. Non-cognitivists in meta-ethics have argued that moral judgments are more akin to desires and other motivational attitudes than to descriptive beliefs. I argue that teleosemantics allows us to assign descriptive content to motivational attitudes and hence (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • How to think about mental content.Frances Egan - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 170 (1):115-135.
    Introduction: representationalismMost theorists of cognition endorse some version of representationalism, which I will understand as the view that the human mind is an information-using system, and that human cognitive capacities are representational capacities. Of course, notions such as ‘representation’ and ‘information-using’ are terms of art that require explication. As a first pass, representations are “mediating states of an intelligent system that carry information” (Markman and Dietrich 2001, p. 471). They have two important features: (1) they are physically realized, and so (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   80 citations  
  • The Nature of Appearance in Kant’s Transcendentalism: A Seman- tico-Cognitive Analysis.Sergey L. Katrechko - 2018 - Kantian Journal 37 (3):41-55.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • What Acquaintance Teaches.Alex Grzankowski & Michael Tye - 2019 - In Jonathan Knowles & Thomas Raleigh (eds.), Acquaintance: New Essays. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 75–94.
    In her black and white room, Mary doesn’t know what it is like to see red. Only after undergoing an experience as of something red and hence acquainting herself with red can Mary learn what it is like. But learning what it is like to see red requires more than simply becoming acquainted with it. To be acquainted with something is to know it, but such knowledge, as we argue, is object-knowledge rather than propositional-knowledge. To know what it is like (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • (1 other version)Kim on Causation and Mental Causation.Panu Raatikainen - 2018 - E-Logos Electronic Journal for Philosophy 25 (2):22–47.
    Jaegwon Kim’s views on mental causation and the exclusion argument are evaluated systematically. Particular attention is paid to different theories of causation. It is argued that the exclusion argument and its premises do not cohere well with any systematic view of causation.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Content in Simple Signalling Systems.Nicholas Shea, Peter Godfrey-Smith & Rosa Cao - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (4):1009-1035.
    Our understanding of communication and its evolution has advanced significantly through the study of simple models involving interacting senders and receivers of signals. Many theorists have thought that the resources of mathematical information theory are all that are needed to capture the meaning or content that is being communicated in these systems. However, the way theorists routinely talk about the models implicitly draws on a conception of content that is richer than bare informational content, especially in contexts where false content (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   42 citations  
  • (1 other version)Borderline Experiences One Cannot Undergo.Miguel Ángel Sebastián - 2015 - Critica 47 (140):31-42.
    El representacionismo defiende que el carácter fenoménico de la experiencia queda completamente determinado por su contenido intencional. El representacionismo es una teoría muy atractiva dentro del proyecto de naturalizar la consciencia según la hipótesis de que la relación de representación puede a su vez ser naturalizada. Para este propósito, los representacionistas con inquietudes naturalistas acuden normalmente a teorías teleosemánticas del contenido mental. No se ha prestado, sin embargo, demasiada atención a la interacción entre el representacionismo y las teorías teleosemánticas del (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Strategic Content: Representations of Epistemic Modality in Biosemantics.Gunnar Björnsson - 2018 - Theoria 84 (3):259-277.
    A central idea in Ruth Millikan’s biosemantics is that a representation’s content is restricted to conditions required for the normal success of actions that it has as its function to guide. This paper raises and responds to a problem for this idea. The problem is that the success requirement seems to block us from saying that epistemic modal judgments represent our epistemic circumstances. For the normal success of actions guided by these judgments seems to depend on what is actually the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • The evolution and development of visual perspective taking.Ben Phillips - 2018 - Mind and Language 34 (2):183-204.
    I outline three conceptions of seeing that a creature might possess: ‘the headlamp conception,’ which involves an understanding of the causal connections between gazing at an object, certain mental states, and behavior; ‘the stage lights conception,’ which involves an understanding of the selective nature of visual attention; and seeing-as. I argue that infants and various nonhumans possess the headlamp conception. There is also evidence that chimpanzees and 3-year-old children have some grasp of seeing-as. However, due to a dearth of studies, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • The search of “canonical” explanations for the cerebral cortex.Alessio Plebe - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (3):40.
    This paper addresses a fundamental line of research in neuroscience: the identification of a putative neural processing core of the cerebral cortex, often claimed to be “canonical”. This “canonical” core would be shared by the entire cortex, and would explain why it is so powerful and diversified in tasks and functions, yet so uniform in architecture. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the search for canonical explanations over the past 40 years, discussing the theoretical frameworks informing this research. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Categorical Desires and the Badness of Animal Death.Matt Bower & Bob Fischer - 2018 - Journal of Value Inquiry 52 (1):97-111.
    One way to defend humane animal agriculture is to insist that the deaths of animals aren’t bad for them. Christopher Belshaw has argued for this position in the most detail, maintaining that death is only bad when it frustrates categorical desires, which he thinks animals lack. We are prepared to grant his account of the badness of death, but we are skeptical of the claim that animals don’t have categorical desires. We contend that Belshaw’s argument against the badness of animal (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • How to solve Hume's problem of induction.Alexander Jackson - 2019 - Episteme 16 (2):157-174.
    This paper explains what’s wrong with a Hume-inspired argument for skepticism about induction. Hume’s argument takes as a premise that inductive reasoning presupposes that the future will resemble the past. I explain why that claim is not plausible. The most plausible premise in the vicinity is that inductive reasoning from E to H presupposes that if E then H. I formulate and then refute a skeptical argument based on that premise. Central to my response is a psychological explanation for how (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Can Informational Theories Account for Metarepresentation?Miguel Ángel Sebastián & Marc Artiga - 2020 - Topoi 39 (1):81-94.
    In this essay we discuss recent attempts to analyse the notion of representation, as it is employed in cognitive science, in purely informational terms. In particular, we argue that recent informational theories cannot accommodate the existence of metarepresentations. Since metarepresentations play a central role in the explanation of many cognitive abilities, this is a serious shortcoming of these proposals.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Optimality justifications: new foundations for foundation-oriented epistemology.Gerhard Schurz - 2018 - Synthese 195 (9):3877-3897.
    In this paper a new conception of foundation-oriented epistemology is developed. The major challenge for foundation-oriented justifications consists in the problem of stopping the justificational regress without taking recourse to dogmatic assumptions or circular reasoning. Two alternative accounts that attempt to circumvent this problem, coherentism and externalism, are critically discussed and rejected as unsatisfactory. It is argued that optimality arguments are a new type of foundation-oriented justification that can stop the justificational regress. This is demonstrated on the basis of a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • (1 other version)The Excesses of Teleosemantics.Paul Sheldon Davies - 2001 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (sup1):117-137.
    Teleosemantics asserts that mental content is determined by natural selection. The thesis is that content is fixed by the historical conditions under which certain cognitive mechanisms—those that produce and those that interpret representational states—were selectively successful. Content is fixed by conditions of selective success. The thesis of this paper is that teleosemantics is mistaken, that content cannot be fixed by conditions of selective success, because those conditions typically outnumber the intentional objects within a given representational state. To defend against this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Naturalism, Experience, and Hume’s ‘Science of Human Nature’.Benedict Smith - 2016 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (3):310-323.
    A standard interpretation of Hume’s naturalism is that it paved the way for a scientistic and ‘disenchanted’ conception of the world. My aim in this paper is to show that this is a restrictive reading of Hume, and it obscures a different and profitable interpretation of what Humean naturalism amounts to. The standard interpretation implies that Hume’s ‘science of human nature’ was a reductive investigation into our psychology. But, as Hume explains, the subject matter of this science is not restricted (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Imagination and the Will.Fabian Dorsch - 2005 - Dissertation, University College London
    The principal aim of my thesis is to provide a unified theory of imagining, that is, a theory which aspires to capture the common nature of all central forms of imagining and to distinguish them from all paradigm instances of non-imaginative phenomena. The theory which I intend to put forward is a version of what I call the Agency Account of imagining and, accordingly, treats imaginings as mental actions of a certain kind. More precisely, it maintains that imaginings are mental (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Possibility of Naturalized Metaphysics.Rasmus Jaksland - 2016 - Dissertation, University of Copenhagen
    This project investigates naturalized metaphysics as a recent trend in analytic metaphysics originating in the naturalist attitude of James Ladyman and Don Ross in their seminal work Everything must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (2007). The primary focus, however, will be the more recent article “Neo-Positivist Metaphysics” (2012) by Alyssa Ney that originates in this tradition. The project will conclude that naturalized metaphysics is an unsuccessful attempt at an answer to the question ’how is metaphysics possible’. More precisely, the project will establish (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Physicalism and mental causes: contra Papineau.Paul K. Moser - 1996 - Analysis 56 (4):263-267.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)On Imagism About Phenomenal Thought.Pär Sundström - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (1):43-95.
    Imagism about Phenomenal Thought is (roughly) the view that there is some concept *Q* (for some sensory quality Q) that we can employ only while we experience the quality Q. I believe this view is theoretically significant, is or can be made intuitively appealing, and is explicitly or implicitly accepted by many contemporary philosophers However, there is no good reason to accept it. Or so I argue.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Materialismi, neurotiede ja tahdon vapaus.Panu Raatikainen - 2015 - Ajatus 72.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • VIII—Defending Dualism.Sophie Gibb - 2015 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (2pt2):131-146.
    In the contemporary mental causation debate, two dualist models of psychophysical causal relevance have been proposed which entail that although mental events are causally relevant in the physical domain, this is not in virtue of them causing any physical event. It is widely assumed that the principle of the causal completeness of the physical domain provides a general argument against interactive dualism. But, whether the completeness principle presents a problem for these alternative forms of interactive dualism is questionable. In this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Reductionism Today.Michael Esfeld - 2013 - Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 17:89-101.
    The paper outlines the main argument for ontological reductionism in today’s discussion, claims that ontological and epistemological reductionism stand or fall together and finally sketches out how today’s most widespread form of reduction, namely functional reduction, can be developed into a fullyfl edged theory reduction, thus taking up the programme of the Vienna circle in today’s philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Teleosemantics, Infotel-semantics and Circularity.Marc Artiga - 2014 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (4):583-603.
    Peter Godfrey-Smith and Nicholas Shea have argued that standard versions of teleosemantics render explanations of successful behavior by appealing to true beliefs circular and, consequently, non-explanatory. As an alternative, Shea has recently suggested an original teleosemantic account (that he calls ?Infotel-semantics?), which is supposed to be immune to the problem of circularity. The paper argues that the standard version of teleosemantics has a satisfactory reply to the circularity objection and that, in any case, Infotel-semantics is not better off than standard (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Reliable Misrepresentation and Teleosemantics.Marc Artiga - 2013 - Disputatio (37):265-281.
    Mendelovici (forthcoming) has recently argued that (1) tracking theories of mental representation (including teleosemantics) are incompatible with the possibility of reliable misrepresentation and that (2) this is an important difficulty for them. Furthermore, she argues that this problem commits teleosemantics to an unjustified a priori rejection of color eliminativism. In this paper I argue that (1) teleosemantics can accommodate most cases of reliable misrepresentation, (2) those cases the theory fails to account for are not objectionable and (3) teleosemantics is not (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • The Semantic Problem(s) with Research on Animal Mind‐Reading.Cameron Buckner - 2014 - Mind and Language 29 (5):566-589.
    Philosophers and cognitive scientists have worried that research on animal mind-reading faces a ‘logical problem’: the difficulty of experimentally determining whether animals represent mental states (e.g. seeing) or merely the observable evidence (e.g. line-of-gaze) for those mental states. The most impressive attempt to confront this problem has been mounted recently by Robert Lurz. However, Lurz' approach faces its own logical problem, revealing this challenge to be a special case of the more general problem of distal content. Moreover, participants in this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • Can The Mental be Causally Efficacious?Panu Raatikainen - 2013 - In Talmont-Kaminski K. Milkowski M. (ed.), Regarding the Mind, Naturally: Naturalist Approaches to the Sciences of the Mental. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • In Defense of a Broad Conception of Experimental Philosophy.David Rose & David Danks - 2013 - Metaphilosophy 44 (4):512-532.
    Experimental philosophy is often presented as a new movement that avoids many of the difficulties that face traditional philosophy. This article distinguishes two views of experimental philosophy: a narrow view in which philosophers conduct empirical investigations of intuitions, and a broad view which says that experimental philosophy is just the colocation in the same body of (i) philosophical naturalism and (ii) the actual practice of cognitive science. These two positions are rarely clearly distinguished in the literature about experimental philosophy, both (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   34 citations  
  • Tracking Representationalism.David Bourget & Angela Mendelovici - 2014 - In Andrew Bailey (ed.), Philosophy of mind: the key thinkers. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 209-235.
    This paper overviews the current status of debates on tracking representationalism, the view that phenomenal consciousness is a matter of tracking features of one's environment in a certain way. We overview the main arguments for the view and the main objections and challenges it faces. We close with a discussion of alternative versions of representationalism that might overcome the shortcomings of tracking representationalism.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   34 citations  
  • On the Theoretical Motivation for Positing Etiological Functions.Björn Brunnander - 2011 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (3):371-390.
    It is a plain fact that biology makes use of terms and expressions commonly spoken of as teleological. Biologists frequently speak of the function of biological items. They may also say that traits are 'supposed to' perform some of their effects, claim that traits are 'for' specific effects, or that organisms have particular traits 'in order to' engage in specific interactions. There is general agreement that there must be something useful about this linguistic practice but it is controversial whether it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Function and Modality.Osamu Kiritani - 2011 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 32 (1):1-4.
    Naturalistic teleological accounts of mental content rely on an etiological theory of function. Nanay has raised a new objection to an etiological theory, and proposed an alternative theory of function that attributes modal force to claims about function. The aim of this paper is both to defend and to cast a new light on an etiological theory of function. I argue against Nanay’s “trait type individuation objection,” suggesting that an etiological theory also attributes modal force to claims about function. An (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Phenomenal Concepts.Pär Sundström - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (4):267-281.
    It's a common idea in philosophy that we possess a peculiar kind of "phenomenal concept" by which we can think about our conscious states in "inner" and "direct" ways, as for example, when I attend to the way a current pain feels and think about this feeling as such. Such phenomenal ways of thinking figure in a variety of theoretical contexts. The bulk of this article discusses their use in a certain strategy – the phenomenal concept strategy – for defending (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Realization and Physicalism.Robert Francescotti - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (5):601-616.
    Melnyk provides a rigorous analysis of the notion of realization with the aim of defining Physicalism. It is argued here that contrary to Melnyk's Realization Physicalism, the idea that mental phenomena are realized by physical phenomena fails to capture the physicalist belief that the former obtain in virtue of the latter. The conclusion is not that Physicalism is false, but that its truth is best explained with some notion other than realization in Melnyk's sense. I also argue that the problems (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • (1 other version)Review of David Papineau's Thinking about Consciousness. [REVIEW]Pär Sundström - 2006 - Theoria 72 (1):80-86.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Comment on Lockwood.Simon Saunders - 1996 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (2):241-248.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations