Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psychology and Neuroscience.Ned Block - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5):481--548.
    How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We can see the problem in stark form if we ask how we could tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases when subjects are completely confident and we have no reason to doubt their (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   429 citations  
  • Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory.Dan Sperber - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (2):57.
    Short abstract (98 words). Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given humans’ exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   428 citations  
  • The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need.Matthieu Queloz - 2025 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • The definition of assertion: Commitment and truth.Neri Marsili - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (4):540-560.
    According to an influential view, asserting a proposition involves undertaking some “commitment” to the truth of that proposition. But accounts of what it is for someone to be committed to the truth of a proposition are often vague or imprecise, and are rarely put to work to define assertion. This article aims to fill this gap. It offers a precise characterisation of assertoric commitment, and applies it to define assertion. On the proposed view, acquiring commitment is not sufficient for asserting: (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Lying, speech acts, and commitment.Neri Marsili - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3245-3269.
    Not every speech act can be a lie. A good definition of lying should be able to draw the right distinctions between speech acts that can be lies and speech acts that under no circumstances are lies. This paper shows that no extant account of lying is able to draw the required distinctions. It argues that a definition of lying based on the notion of ‘assertoric commitment’ can succeed where other accounts have failed. Assertoric commitment is analysed in terms of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • The Logic of Explanatory Power.Jonah N. Schupbach & Jan Sprenger - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (1):105-127.
    This article introduces and defends a probabilistic measure of the explanatory power that a particular explanans has over its explanandum. To this end, we propose several intuitive, formal conditions of adequacy for an account of explanatory power. Then, we show that these conditions are uniquely satisfied by one particular probabilistic function. We proceed to strengthen the case for this measure of explanatory power by proving several theorems, all of which show that this measure neatly corresponds to our explanatory intuitions. Finally, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   127 citations  
  • Can there be a Bayesian explanationism? On the prospects of a productive partnership.Frank Cabrera - 2017 - Synthese 194 (4):1245–1272.
    In this paper, I consider the relationship between Inference to the Best Explanation and Bayesianism, both of which are well-known accounts of the nature of scientific inference. In Sect. 2, I give a brief overview of Bayesianism and IBE. In Sect. 3, I argue that IBE in its most prominently defended forms is difficult to reconcile with Bayesianism because not all of the items that feature on popular lists of “explanatory virtues”—by means of which IBE ranks competing explanations—have confirmational import. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  • Fictions that don’t tell the truth.Neri Marsili - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (5):1025-1046.
    Can fictions lie? According to a classic conception, works of fiction can never contain lies, since their content is not presented as true, nor is it meant to deceive us. But this classic view can be challenged. Sometimes fictions appear to make claims about the actual world, and these claims can be designed to convey falsehoods, historical misconceptions, and even pernicious stereotypes. Should we conclude that some fictional statements are lies? This article introduces two views that support a positive answer, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Theses on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena to a Theoretical Biology.Kalevi Kull, Terrence Deacon, Claus Emmeche, Jesper Hoffmeyer & Frederik Stjernfelt - 2009 - Biological Theory 4 (2):167-173.
    Theses on the semiotic study of life as presented here provide a collectively formulated set of statements on what biology needs to be focused on in order to describe life as a process based on semiosis, or sign action. An aim of the biosemiotic approach is to explain how life evolves through all varieties of forms of communication and signification (including cellular adaptive behavior, animal communication, and human intellect) and to provide tools for grounding sign theories. We introduce the concept (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   83 citations  
  • Inference to the best explanation, coherence and other explanatory virtues.Adolfas Mackonis - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):975-995.
    This article generalizes the explanationist account of inference to the best explanation. It draws a clear distinction between IBE and abduction and presents abduction as the first step of IBE. The second step amounts to the evaluation of explanatory power, which consist in the degree of explanatory virtues that a hypothesis exhibits. Moreover, even though coherence is the most often cited explanatory virtue, on pain of circularity, it should not be treated as one of the explanatory virtues. Rather, coherence should (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   44 citations  
  • Uncertainty and the de Finetti tables.Jean Baratgin, David E. Over & Guy Politzer - 2013 - Thinking and Reasoning 19 (3-4):308-328.
    The new paradigm in the psychology of reasoning adopts a Bayesian, or prob- abilistic, model for studying human reasoning. Contrary to the traditional binary approach based on truth functional logic, with its binary values of truth and falsity, a third value that represents uncertainty can be introduced in the new paradigm. A variety of three-valued truth table systems are available in the formal literature, including one proposed by de Finetti. We examine the descriptive adequacy of these systems for natural language (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   50 citations  
  • Lewis Carroll’s regress and the presuppositional structure of arguments.Carlotta Pavese - 2021 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (1):1-38.
    This essay argues that the main lesson of Lewis Carroll's Regress is that arguments are constitutively presuppositional.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Abduction − the context of discovery + underdetermination = inference to the best explanation.Mousa Mohammadian - 2021 - Synthese 198 (5):4205-4228.
    The relationship between Peircean abduction and the modern notion of Inference to the Best Explanation is a matter of dispute. Some philosophers, such as Harman :88–95, 1965) and Lipton, claim that abduction and IBE are virtually the same. Others, however, hold that they are quite different :503, 1998; Minnameier in Erkenntnis 60:75–105, 2004) and there is no link between them :419–442, 2009). In this paper, I argue that neither of these views is correct. I show that abduction and IBE have (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Consensus versus Unanimity: Which Carries More Weight?Finnur Dellsén - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Around 97% of climate scientists endorse anthropogenic global warming (AGW), the theory that human activities are partly responsible for recent increases in global average temperatures. Clearly, this widespread endorsement of AGW is a reason for non-experts to believe in AGW. But what is the epistemic significance of the fact that some climate scientists do not endorse AGW? This paper contrasts expert unanimity, in which virtually no expert disagrees with some theory, with expert consensus, in which some non-negligible proportion either rejects (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • The genesis of possible worlds semantics.B. Jack Copeland - 2002 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 31 (2):99-137.
    This article traces the development of possible worlds semantics through the work of: Wittgenstein, 1913-1921; Feys, 1924; McKinsey, 1945; Carnap, 1945-1947; McKinsey, Tarski and Jónsson, 1947-1952; von Wright, 1951; Becker, 1952; Prior, 1953-1954; Montague, 1955; Meredith and Prior, 1956; Geach, 1960; Smiley, 1955-1957; Kanger, 1957; Hintikka, 1957; Guillaume, 1958; Binkley, 1958; Bayart, 1958-1959; Drake, 1959-1961; Kripke, 1958-1965.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   58 citations  
  • (1 other version)Types and tokens.Linda Wetzel - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The distinction between a type and its tokens is a useful metaphysical distinction. In §1 it is explained what it is, and what it is not. Its importance and wide applicability in linguistics, philosophy, science and everyday life are briefly surveyed in §2. Whether types are universals is discussed in §3. §4 discusses some other suggestions for what types are, both generally and specifically. Is a type the sets of its tokens? What exactly is a word, a symphony, a species? (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   63 citations  
  • On artifacts and works of art.Risto Hilpinen - 1992 - Theoria 58 (1):58-82.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   67 citations  
  • Mind and material engagement.Lambros Malafouris - 2019 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (1):1-17.
    Material Engagement Theory, which forms the focus of this special issue, is a relatively new development within cognitive archaeology and anthropology, but one that has important implications for many adjacent fields of research in phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. In How Things Shape the Mind I offered a detail exposition of the major working hypotheses and the vision of mind that it embodies. Here, introducing this special issue, more than just presenting a broad overview of MET, I seek to enrich (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs: How Peircean Semiotics Combines Phenomenal Qualia and Practical Effects.Marc Champagne - 2018 - Cham: Springer.
    It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Inference to the Best Explanation - An Overview.Frank Cabrera - 2023 - In Lorenzo Magnani, Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer. pp. 1-34.
    In this article, I will provide a critical overview of the form of non-deductive reasoning commonly known as “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE). Roughly speaking, according to IBE, we ought to infer the hypothesis that provides the best explanation of our evidence. In section 2, I survey some contemporary formulations of IBE and highlight some of its putative applications. In section 3, I distinguish IBE from C.S. Peirce’s notion of abduction. After underlining some of the essential elements of IBE, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Possibilities as the foundation of reasoning.P. N. Johnson-Laird & Marco Ragni - 2019 - Cognition 193 (C):103950.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • Foundations of Representation: Where Might Graphical Symbol Systems Come From?Simon Garrod, Nicolas Fay, John Lee, Jon Oberlander & Tracy MacLeod - 2007 - Cognitive Science 31 (6):961-987.
    It has been suggested that iconic graphical signs evolve into symbolic graphical signs through repeated usage. This article reports a series of interactive graphical communication experiments using a ‘pictionary’ task to establish the conditions under which the evolution might occur. Experiment 1 rules out a simple repetition based account in favor of an account that requires feedback and interaction between communicators. Experiment 2 shows how the degree of interaction affects the evolution of signs according to a process of grounding. Experiment (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   62 citations  
  • Efforts and their feelings.Juan Pablo Bermúdez & Olivier Massin - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 18 (1):e12894.
    Effort and the feeling of effort play important roles in many theoretical discussions, from perception to self-control and free will, from the nature of ownership to the nature of desert and achievement. A crucial, overlooked distinction within the philosophical and scientific literatures is the distinction between theories that seek to explain effort and theories that seek to explain the feeling of effort. Lacking a clear distinction between these two phenomena makes the literature hard to navigate. To advance in the unification (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Origins of Biological Teleology: How Constraints Represent Ends.Miguel García-Valdecasas & Terrence W. Deacon - 2024 - Synthese 204 (75):1-28.
    To naturalize the concept of teleological causality in biology it is not enough to avoid assuming backward causation or positing the existence of an inscrutable te- leological essence like the élan vital. We must also specify how the causality of or- ganisms is distinct from the causality of designed artifacts like thermostats or asym- metrically oriented processes like the ubiquitous increase of entropy. Historically, the concept of teleological causality in biology has been based on an analogy to the familiar experience (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Creative thinging.Lambros Malafouris - 2014 - Pragmatics and Cognition 22 (1):140-158.
    Humans are organisms of a creative sort. We make new things that scaffold the ecology of our minds, shape the boundaries of our thinking and form new ways to engage and make sense of the world. That is, we are creative ‘thingers’. This paper adopts the perspective of Material Engagement Theory and introduces the notion ‘thinging’ to articulate and draw attention to the kind of cognitive life instantiated in acts of thinking and feeling with, through and about things. I will (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   37 citations  
  • The Folk Probably Don’t Think What You Think They Think: Experiments on Causation by Absence.Jonathan Livengood & Edouard Machery - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):107–127.
    Folk theories—untutored people’s (often implicit) theories about various features of the world—have been fashionable objects of inquiry in psychology for almost two decades now (e.g., Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994), and more recently they have been of interest in experimental philosophy (Nichols 2004). Folk theories of psy- chology, physics, biology, and ethics have all come under investigation. Folk meta- physics, however, has not been as extensively studied. That so little is known about folk metaphysics is unfortunate for (at least) two reasons. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   41 citations  
  • What is it to have an inquisitive attitude?Benoit Gaultier - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Following a common assumption, when one inquires into a question, one has an inquisitive attitude towards it. More precisely, I shall assume that there is an inquisitive attitude towards Q that all of those who inquire into Q have in common and in virtue of which they can be said to be in an inquisitive state of mind towards Q. This paper is about the nature of this attitude. I elucidate it by examining whether it boils down to doubt, curiosity, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Above and beyond the concrete: The diverse representational substrates of the predictive brain.Michael Gilead, Yaacov Trope & Nira Liberman - 2020 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43:e121.
    In recent years, scientists have increasingly taken to investigate the predictive nature of cognition. We argue that prediction relies on abstraction, and thus theories of predictive cognition need an explicit theory of abstract representation. We propose such a theory of the abstract representational capacities that allow humans to transcend the “here-and-now.” Consistent with the predictive cognition literature, we suggest that the representational substrates of the mind are built as ahierarchy, ranging from the concrete to the abstract; however, we argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • The Mental States First Theory of Promising.Alida Liberman - forthcoming - Dialectica.
    Most theories of promising are insufficiently broad, for they ground promissory obligation in some external or contingent feature of the promise. In this paper, I introduce a new kind of theory. The Mental States First (MSF) theory grounds promissory obligation in something internal and essential: the mental state expressed by promising, or the state that promisors purport to be in. My defense of MSF relies on three claims. First, promising to Φ expresses that you have resolved to Φ. Second, resolving (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Why Images Cannot be Arguments, But Moving Ones Might.Marc Champagne & Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen - 2020 - Argumentation 34 (2):207-236.
    Some have suggested that images can be arguments. Images can certainly bolster the acceptability of individual premises. We worry, though, that the static nature of images prevents them from ever playing a genuinely argumentative role. To show this, we call attention to a dilemma. The conclusion of a visual argument will either be explicit or implicit. If a visual argument includes its conclusion, then that conclusion must be demarcated from the premise or otherwise the argument will beg the question. If (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Symbol Interdependency in Symbolic and Embodied Cognition.Max M. Louwerse - 2011 - Topics in Cognitive Science 3 (2):273-302.
    Whether computational algorithms such as latent semantic analysis (LSA) can both extract meaning from language and advance theories of human cognition has become a topic of debate in cognitive science, whereby accounts of symbolic cognition and embodied cognition are often contrasted. Albeit for different reasons, in both accounts the importance of statistical regularities in linguistic surface structure tends to be underestimated. The current article gives an overview of the symbolic and embodied cognition accounts and shows how meaning induction attributed to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  • How Explanatory Reasoning Justifies Pursuit: A Peircean View of IBE.Rune Nyrup - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (5):749-760.
    This paper defends an account of explanatory reasoning generally, and inference to the best explanation in particular, according to which it first and foremost justifies pursuing hypotheses rather than accepting them as true. This side-steps the problem of why better explanations should be more likely to be true. I argue that this account faces no analogous problems. I propose an account of justification for pursuit and show how this provides a simple and straightforward connection between explanatoriness and justification for pursuit.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • How to Bootstrap a Human Communication System.Nicolas Fay, Michael Arbib & Simon Garrod - 2013 - Cognitive Science 37 (7):1356-1367.
    How might a human communication system be bootstrapped in the absence of conventional language? We argue that motivated signs play an important role (i.e., signs that are linked to meaning by structural resemblance or by natural association). An experimental study is then reported in which participants try to communicate a range of pre-specified items to a partner using repeated non-linguistic vocalization, repeated gesture, or repeated non-linguistic vocalization plus gesture (but without using their existing language system). Gesture proved more effective (measured (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  • Living ethics: a stance and its implications in health ethics.Eric Racine, Sophie Ji, Valérie Badro, Aline Bogossian, Claude Julie Bourque, Marie-Ève Bouthillier, Vanessa Chenel, Clara Dallaire, Hubert Doucet, Caroline Favron-Godbout, Marie-Chantal Fortin, Isabelle Ganache, Anne-Sophie Guernon, Marjorie Montreuil, Catherine Olivier, Ariane Quintal, Abdou Simon Senghor, Michèle Stanton-Jean, Joé T. Martineau, Andréanne Talbot & Nathalie Tremblay - 2024 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 27 (2):137-154.
    Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a “living (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • (1 other version)Prejudice in Testimonial Justification: A Hinge Account.Anna Boncompagni - 2024 - Episteme 21 (1):286-303.
    Although research on epistemic injustice has focused on the effects of prejudice in epistemic exchanges, the account of prejudice that emerges in Fricker's (2007) view is not completely clear. In particular, I claim that the epistemic role of prejudice in the structure of testimonial justification is still in need of a satisfactory explanation. What special epistemic power does prejudice exercise that prevents the speaker's words from constituting evidence for the hearer's belief? By clarifying this point, it will be possible to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • 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 work (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • On the Origin of Language.Marcello Barbieri - 2010 - Biosemiotics 3 (2):201-223.
    Thomas Sebeok and Noam Chomsky are the acknowledged founding fathers of two research fields which are known respectively as Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics and which have been developed in parallel during the past 50 years. Both fields claim that language has biological roots and must be studied as a natural phenomenon, thus bringing to an end the old divide between nature and culture. In addition to this common goal, there are many other important similarities between them. Their definitions of language, for (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • Science, dualities and the phenomenological map.H. G. Solari & Mario Natiello - 2024 - Foundations of Science 29 (2):377-404.
    We present an epistemological schema of natural sciences inspired by Peirce's pragmaticist view, stressing the role of the \emph{phenomenological map}, that connects reality and our ideas about it. The schema has a recognisable mathematical/logical structure which allows to explore some of its consequences. We show that seemingly independent principles as the requirement of reproducibility of experiments and the Principle of Sufficient Reason are both implied by the schema, as well as Popper's concept of falsifiability. We show that the schema has (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Reactionary responses to the Bad Lot Objection.Finnur Dellsén - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 61:32-40.
    As it is standardly conceived, Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is a form of ampliative inference in which one infers a hypothesis because it provides a better potential explanation of one’s evidence than any other available, competing explanatory hypothesis. Bas van Fraassen famously objected to IBE thus formulated that we may have no reason to think that any of the available, competing explanatory hypotheses are true. While revisionary responses to the Bad Lot Objection concede that IBE needs to be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • (1 other version)Prejudice in Testimonial Justification: A Hinge Account.Anna Boncompagni - 2021 - Episteme 1 (Early view):1-18.
    Although research on epistemic injustice has focused on the effects of prejudice in epistemic exchanges, the account of prejudice that emerges in Fricker’s (2007) view is not completely clear. In particular, I claim that the epistemic role of prejudice in the structure of testimonial justification is still in need of a satisfactory explanation. What special epistemic power does prejudice exercise that prevents the speaker’s words from constituting evidence for the hearer’s belief? By clarifying this point, it will be possible to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Explanatory Consolidation: From ‘Best’ to ‘Good Enough’.Finnur Dellsén - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (1):157-177.
    In science and everyday life, we often infer that something is true because it would explain some set of facts better than any other hypothesis we can think of. But what if we have reason to believe that there is a better way to explain these facts that we just haven't thought of? Wouldn't that undermine our warrant for believing the best available explanation? Many philosophers have assumed that we can solve such underconsideration problems by stipulating that a hypothesis should (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Towards a theory of abduction based on conditionals.Rolf Pfister - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-30.
    Abduction is considered the most powerful, but also the most controversially discussed type of inference. Based on an analysis of Peirce’s retroduction, Lipton’s Inference to the Best Explanation and other theories, a new theory of abduction is proposed. It considers abduction not as intrinsically explanatory but as intrinsically conditional: for a given fact, abduction allows one to infer a fact that implies it. There are three types of abduction: Selective abduction selects an already known conditional whose consequent is the given (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Toward a computational theory of social groups: A finite set of cognitive primitives for representing any and all social groups in the context of conflict.David Pietraszewski - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e97.
    We don't yet have adequate theories of what the human mind is representing when it represents a social group. Worse still, many people think we do. This mistaken belief is a consequence of the state of play: Until now, researchers have relied on their own intuitions to link up the conceptsocial groupon the one hand and the results of particular studies or models on the other. While necessary, this reliance on intuition has been purchased at a considerable cost. When looked (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • A laplacean formal semantics for single-case propensities.Ronald N. Giere - 1976 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 5 (3):321 - 353.
    Even those generally skeptical of propensity interpretations of probability must now grant the following two points. First, the above single-case propensity interpretation meets recognized formal conditions for being a genuine interpretation of probability. Second, this interpretation is not logically reducible to a hypothetical relative frequency interpretation, nor is it only vacuously different from such an interpretation.The main objection to this propensity interpretation must be not that it is too vague or vacuous, but that it is metaphysically too extravagant. It asserts (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  • Learning as Becoming Conscious: A note on Jablonka and Ginsburg’s Notion of Learning.Alin Olteanu - 2022 - Biosemiotics 15 (3):457-467.
    This commentary addresses the concept of learning stemming from Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg’s theory of the emergence of consciousness. Jablonka and Ginsburg find strong support in biosemiotics for their argument that learning offers an evolutionary transition marker for the emergence of consciousness. Indeed, biosemiotics embraces a view on evolution that integrates both phylogeny and ontogeny. It does not polarize learning and evolving. At the same time, Jablonka and Ginsburg’s argument gives both biosemiotics and learning theory a shake, forcing scholarship (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Logic, Models, and Paradoxical Inferences.Isabel Orenes & P. N. Johnson-Laird - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (4):357-377.
    People reject ‘paradoxical’ inferences, such as: Luisa didn't play music; therefore, if Luisa played soccer, then she didn't play music. For some theorists, they are invalid for everyday conditionals, but valid in logic. The theory of mental models implies that they are valid, but unacceptable because the conclusion refers to a possibility inconsistent with the premise. Hence, individuals should accept them if the conclusions refer only to possibilities consistent with the premises: Luisa didn't play soccer; therefore, if Luisa played a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • Husserl's later philosophy of natural science.Patrick A. Heelan - 1987 - Philosophy of Science 54 (3):368-390.
    Husserl argues in the Crisis that the prevalent tradition of positive science in his time had a philosophical core, called by him "Galilean science", that mistook the quest for objective theory with the quest for truth. Husserl is here referring to Gottingen science of the Golden Years. For Husserl, theory "grows" out of the "soil" of the prescientific, that is, pretheoretical, life-world. Scientific truth finally is to be sought not in theory but rather in the pragmatic-perceptual praxes of measurement. Husserl (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   37 citations  
  • Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism: On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson.Marc Champagne - 2020 - Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic.
    Jordan Peterson has attracted a high level of attention. Controversies may bring people into contact with Peterson's work, but ideas are arguably what keep them there. Focusing on those ideas, this book explores Peterson’s answers to perennial questions. What is common to all humans, regardless of their background? Is complete knowledge ever possible? What would constitute a meaningful life? Why have humans evolved the capacity for intelligence? Should one treat others as individuals or as members of a group? Is a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Diagrams of the past: How timelines can aid the growth of historical knowledge.Marc Champagne - 2016 - Cognitive Semiotics 9 (1):11-44.
    Historians occasionally use timelines, but many seem to regard such signs merely as ways of visually summarizing results that are presumably better expressed in prose. Challenging this language-centered view, I suggest that timelines might assist the generation of novel historical insights. To show this, I begin by looking at studies confirming the cognitive benefits of diagrams like timelines. I then try to survey the remarkable diversity of timelines by analyzing actual examples. Finally, having conveyed this (mostly untapped) potential, I argue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • The structure of intentionality. Insights and challenges for enactivism.Pierre Steiner - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The purpose of the paper is twofold. It first aims at clarifying and developing an important tension within enactivism concerning the relations between intentionality and content, once representationalism has been abandoned. In which sense(s) do enactivists (still) say that intentionality is contentful and not contentful? Secondly, it puts this tension in perspective with two paradigmatic ways of defining the relations between intentional states and their objects: Husserl’s theory of intentionality in the Logical Investigations, and Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations