A new account of the semantic function (character) of ‘real’ and ‘really’ is defended. ‘Really’ as a sentential operator typically indicates that a report of what has been represented elsewhere ends and subsequent discourse is to be taken as making claims about the world. ‘Real’ and ‘really’ as applied to nouns or predicate phrases indicate that something is not being called an F merely because it represents an F. A way of drawing the distinction between realism and anti-realism based on (...) this new account is also defended. (shrink)

This paper responds to Stroud's important The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. The author defends a view in which statements in a natural language have truth-evaluable content only in concrete contexts. It is argued that just what counts as a concrete possibility that must be defeated before one can say that one knows something is a highly context-sensitive matter, and that Stroud's alternative to this context-sensitive account of the way the verb "know" functions seems to be either a semantics in which (...) knowledge claims (about the "external world") are trivially logically false or no intelligible semantics at all. (shrink)

According to the received view in philosophy of mind, mental states or properties are _realized_ by brain states or properties but are not identical to them. This view is often called _realization_ _physicalism_. Carl Gillett has recently defended a detailed formulation of the realization relation. However, Gillett’s formulation cannot be the relation that realization physicalists have in mind. I argue that Gillett’s “dimensioned” view of realization fails to apply to a textbook case of realization. I also argue Gillett counts as (...) realization some cases that should not count if realization physicalism is to be distinguished from its competitors in the usual ways. I conclude that the relation described by Gillett cannot be realization. (shrink)

This symposium contribution discusses the conception of ontology which is used in Hilary Putnam's book Ethics without Ontology.

This paper examines the metaphysical status of the fact-value entanglement. According to Hilary Putnam, among others, this is a major theme in both classical and recent pragmatism, but its relevance obviously extends beyond pragmatism scholarship. The pragmatic naturalist must make sense of the entanglement thesis within a broadly non-reductively naturalist account of reality. Two rival options for such metaphysics are discussed: values may be claimed to emerge from facts (or normativity from factuality), or fact and value may be considered continuous. (...) Thus, pragmatic naturalism about fact and value may be based on either emergentism or Peircean synechism. This is a crucial tension not only in pragmatist philosophy of value but in pragmatically naturalist metaphysics generally. (shrink)

This paper argues that McDowell is right to claim that disjunctivism has anti-sceptical implications. While the disjunctive conception of experience leaves unaffected the Cartesian sceptical challenge, it undermines another type of sceptical challenge. Moreover, the sceptical challenge against which disjunctivism militates has some philosophical urgency in that it threatens the very notion that perceptual experience can acquaint us with the world around us.

The most basic divide amongst analytic metaphysicians separates realists from anti-realists. By examining certain characteristic and problematic features of these two families of views, we uncover their underlying metametaphysicalorientations, which turn out to coincide. This shared philosophical picture that underlies both the realist and the anti-realist project we call the Modern Picture. It rests on a crucial distinction between reality as it is for us and reality as it is in itself. It is argued that this distinction indeed generates the (...) realism/anti-realism dichotomy, and is also responsible for the problematic aspects highlighted earlier. We conclude by sketching an alternative philosophical picture that rejects the distinction between reality as it is for us and reality as it is in itself, which we call the Aristotelian Picture, and consider whether it is able to avoid the issues to which the Modern Picture gives rise. (shrink)

It is well known that the process of scientific inquiry, according to Peirce, is drivenby three types of inference, namely abduction, deduction, and induction. What isbehind these labels is, however, not so clear. In particular, the common identificationof abduction with Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) begs the question,since IBE appears to be covered by Peirce's concept of induction, not that of abduction.Consequently, abduction ought to be distinguished from IBE, at least on Peirce's account. The main aim of the paper, (...) however, is to show that this distinction is most relevant with respect to current problems in philosophy of science and epistemology (like attempts to supply suitable notions of realism and truth as well as related concepts like coherence and unification). In particular, I also try to show that (and in what way) Peirce's inferential triad can function as a method that ensures both coherence and correspondence. It is in this respect that his careful distinction between abduction and induction (or IBE) ought to be heeded. (shrink)

What could Arthur Schopenhauer, the German pessimist and speculative metaphysician of the irrational will, possibly have in common with Thomas Reid, the staid and pious apostle of common sense? Unlike their contemporaries, both philosophers distinguished carefully between sensation and perception. In this essay I examine their respective formulations of the sensation / perception distinction, and I attempt to explain where they agree and where they diverge. Such an examination seems long overdue, for no-one – to the best of my knowledge (...) – has bothered to compare their views on this subject. (shrink)

Realism has been a central object of attention among analytical philosophers for some decades. Starting from analytical philosophy, the return of realism has spread into other contemporary philosophical traditions and given birth to new trends in current discussions, as for example in the debates about “new realism.” Discussions about realism focused on linguistic meaning, epistemology, metaphysics, theory of action and ethics. The implications for politics of discussion about realism in action theory and in ethics, however, are not much discussed.

Composition as identity is the view that a whole is identical to its parts taken collectively. Such a view raises the question of how the same portion of reality can be both one thing and many things. A primitivist view holds that there is no explanation to be had and that we simply need to accept that being one thing and being many things are compatible. One might think that we can do better by resorting to relativization. A relativist view (...) may seem to explain how the same portion of reality can be both one thing and many things on the basis of the assumption that the portion of reality is these ways relative to different ‘concepts’ or ‘counts’. This paper discusses whether relativization truly leads to a satisfactory explanation of how something can be both one thing and many things. The conclusion will be that, when we consider the current accounts of the involved parameters, these relativizations make no explanatory progress. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to demonstrate the structure of Sellars' critical direct realism in the philosophy of perception. This position is original because it attempts to balance two claims that many have thought to be incompatible: (1) that perceptual knowledge is direct, i.e., not inferential, and (2) that perceptual knowledge is irreducibly conceptual. Even though perceptual episodes are not the result of inferences, they must still stand within the space of reasons if they are to be counted not only (...) as knowledge, but also as thoughts directed at the world. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how Sellars elaborates and defends this position. (shrink)

Rosenberg has recently argued that explanations supplied by (what he calls) functional biology are mere promissory notes for macromolecular adaptive explanations. Rosenberg's arguments currently constitute one of the most substantial challenges to the autonomy, irreducibility, and indispensability of the explanations supplied by functional biology. My responses to Rosenberg's arguments will generate a novel account of the autonomy of functional biology. This account will turn on the relations between counterfactuals, scientific explanations, and natural laws. Crucially, in their treatment of the laws' (...) relation to counterfactuals, Rosenberg's arguments beg the question against the autonomy of functional biology. This relation is considerably more subtle than is suggested by familiar slogans such as Laws support counterfactuals; accidents don't. (shrink)

The article offers formal and doctrinal reasons that prove the existence of the “Harvard Philosophical School” as a real historico-philosophical phenomenon. The author includes Willard Van Orman Quine, Nelson Goodman, and Hilary Putnam in this school. The aim of this article is to compare the conceptualism, relativism and anti-realism of Quine, Goodman and Pantem, on the basis of pragmatic tendencies in their philosophical studies. Formal reasons: all these philosophers were professors at Harvard University; in addition, Quine was a teacher of (...) Goodman and Putnam, Goodman was a teacher of Putnam. Doctrinal reasons: Quine, Goodman, and Putnam, each in his own specific pragmatic way, stood on the positions of relativism, anti-realism, conceptualism, and tried to separate themselves from “cultural relativism”; common touchstone concepts and tendencies in particular in their philosophical investigations are: conceptual scheme, indeterminacy of translation, internal criteria, ontological relativity and others; the obvious analogy between Quine's standards of similarity, Goodman's standards of correctness, and standards for Putnam's conceptual schemes. Thus, we have strong reasons to consider Quine, Goodman and Putnam as representatives of a common philosophical school. The role played in their doctrines by the ideas of William James, who also taught at Harvard, at least hypothetically allows us to expand the boundaries of this school. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to develop a critical and extended understanding of creative practices in organisation from a phenomenological point of view. To develop such an understanding of practice, this paper will first outline a phenomenological understanding of creative practice, understood particularly with Merleau-Ponty as an embodied and situated nexus of action. Subsequently, the paper will show the contribution of pragmatism to an interpretation of practice as an experience-based reality and will describe the significance of habits. After briefly (...) comparing common characteristics of both pro-experiential philosophies, some perspectives on a creative "inter-practice" and an inclusive "pheno-pragma-practice" will be explored. Furthermore, improvisation is discussed as a form and medium for the actual realisation of an embodied, situational inter-practice. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on creative pheno-pragmatic practices in organisation will be outlined. (shrink)

In this paper, two alternative naturalistic standpoints on the relations between language, human consciousness and social life are contrasted. The first, dubbed “intrinsic naturalism,” is advocated among others by the realist philosopher John Searle; it starts with intrinsic intentionality and consciousness emerging from the brain, explains language as an outgrowth of consciousness and ends with institutional reality being created by language-use. That standpoint leans on what may be described as the standard interpretation of Darwinian evolution. The other type of naturalism, (...) in contrast, making use of the concept of evolutionary niches, suggests that the search for the explanatory mechanisms of language and consciousness should begin with the human community, because that is the cultural niche for everything distinctively human to evolve, including language and human consciousness. (shrink)

I defend a view of the structure of visual property-awareness by considering the phenomenon of perceptual constancy. I argue that visual property-awareness is a three-place relation between a subject, a property, and a manner of presentation. Manners of presentation mediate our visual awareness of properties without being objects of visual awareness themselves. I provide criteria of identity for manners ofpresentation, and I argue that our ignorance of their intrinsic nature does not compromise the viability of a theory that employs them. (...) In closing, I argue that the proposed manners of presentation are consistent with key direct-realist claims about the structure of visual awareness. (shrink)

Abhidharma, the genre of knowledge concerned with putting into systematic shape what the Buddha taught, can seem a forbidding subject. In this essay, taking Skandhila’s Introduction to Abhidharma and Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya as touchstones, I will try to shed a little philosophical light on Abhidharma as a variety of epistemic culture in the long fifth century C.E. in South Asia. To think of Abhidharma as an epistemic culture is not only to think of what goes into the making of knowledge and (...) its justification. It is also a way to counter-point presentations of domains of inquiry which stress the retroactive organization and unity of knowledge at the expense of the heterogeneity that goes into its making. More particularly, what is at stake is a feel for the diversity of epistemic machinery Abhidharma can involve and why such diversity can matter. The essay concludes with a consideration of Vasubandhu’s closing remarks, which suggest the importance of temporal contexts of intellectual practice in which certain styles of knowledge and virtues associated with knowledge may acquire variable salience. (shrink)

The view (held, e.g., by Davidson) that the having of beliefs and desires presupposes the having of reflective capacities is sometimes supported by appealing to the idea that the concept of belief is a concept of a mental state which involves a normative aspect: beliefs can be “successful” or “unsuccessful” from the perspective of their possessors, and sometimes discarded in light of their “failure.” This naturally invites the idea that believers must be capable of reflecting on their beliefs. Desires presuppose (...) reflectivity if only in virtue of their essential linkage with beliefs. This paper suggests a sense in which mental states—including those of non-reflective creatures—can have such a normative aspect. On this suggestion, the intelligible relations that obtain between cognitive states and conative states open the door for the possibility of normativity without reflectivity. Due to these relations, a creature's beliefs can be successful or unsuccessful from its own perspective even without its conceiving of them. (shrink)

Mark Johnston claims the pragmatist theory of truth is inconsistent with the way we actually employ and talk about that concept. He is, however, sympathetic enough to attempt to rescue its respectable core using ‘response-dependence’, a revisionary form of which he advocates as a method for clarifying various philosophically significant concepts. But Johnston has misrepresented pragmatism; it does not require rescuing, and as I show here, his ‘missing explanation argument’ against pragmatism therefore fails. What Johnston and other critics including Putnam (...) have overlooked is the distinctive nature of the pragmatist strategy, specifically, that it is non-reductive, a characteristic it shares with a more promising form of response-dependence; what Johnston calls ‘Descriptive Protagoreanism’ (DP). In this paper I offer a defence of pragmatism and show how it might be re-articulated as a form of DP. (shrink)

Two arguments Paul Snowdon has brought against the causal theory of perception are examined. One involves the claim that, based on the phenomenology of perceptual situations, it cannot be the case that perception is an essentially causal concept. The other is a reductio , according to which causal theorists’ arguments imply that a proposition Snowdon takes to be obviously non-causal ( A is married to B ) can be analyzed into some sort of indefinite ‘spousal connection’ plus a causal ingredient (...) . I conclude that neither argument is sound. The reason that Snowdon’s critiques fail is that, since causal theories need not be about ‘effect ends’ that are internally manifest to perceivers, no such ostensibly separable, non-causal property as it being to S as if he were perceiving O need be an essential element in a causal theory of perception. (shrink)

Realism takes many forms. The aim of this paper is to show that the “Critique of pure Reason” is the founding document of realism and that to the present-day Kant’s discussion of realism has shaped the theoretical landscape of the debates over realism. Kant not only invents the now common philosophical term ‘realism’. He also lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality. The paper explores this by analysis (...) of Kant’s methodological procedure to distinguish between empirical and transcendental realism. This methodological procedure is still of great help in contemporary philosophy, although it has its limits. (shrink)

In this essay, I address the question of whether the indisputable progress being made by the neurosciences poses a genuine threat to the language game of responsible agency. I begin by situating free will as an ineliminable component of our practices of attributing responsibility and holding one another accountable, illustrating this via a discussion of legal discourse regarding the attribution of responsibility for criminal acts. I then turn to the practical limits on agents' scientific self-objectivation, limits that turn out to (...) be mirrored philosophically in the conceptual problems that plague reductionist strategies. Having shown that free will is rooted in unavoidable performative presuppositions belonging to agents' participant perspective, I then take up the difficult issue of how to reconcile an epistemic dualism of participant and observer perspectives with the assumption of ontological monism. I critically review a range of proposed physicalist solutions, including non-reductionist and (standard) compatibilist approaches. An underlying problem with scientistic, physicalist approaches is the methodological fiction of an exclusive ?view from nowhere? which relies on the problematic move of disengaging the objectivating perspective of the scientific observer from the investigators' participant perspective of those engaged in scientific practice. Since there is no way of getting around the requisite complementarity of both the observer's encounter with the objective world and the participant's involvement in shared lifeworld practices, the remaining option is to take an epistemological turn. But even the recognition that science is ultimately constituted from within the lifeworld still leaves us with the question as to how the human mind can understand itself as the product of natural evolution. I conclude with some tentative suggestions as to how this difficult question might be addressed. (shrink)

An attempt was made to show how we can plausibly commit to mathematical realism. For the purpose of illustration, a defence of natural realism for arithmetic was developed that draws upon the American pragmatist’s, Hillary Putnam’s, early and later writings. Natural realism is the idea that truth is recognition-transcendent and knowable. It was suggested that the natural realist should embrace, globally, what N. Tennant has identified as M-realism (Tennant 1997, 160). M-realism is the idea that one rejects bivalence and assents (...) to the recognition-transcendent requirement. It was argued that over-all—for all domains—the natural realist should be a M-realist, with the aim of clarifying the realist debate for arithmetic. (shrink)

Hutchinson, Read, and Sharrock have provided an important analysis of the work of Peter Winch. They succeed in rescuing his philosophy from many of the distorting characterizations and categorizations to which it has been subjected, and they provide a fresh account of its relevance for thinking about the theory and practice of social science.

Although social scientists have been devoted to discovering specific realities of social life, many theorists devoted to critical judgment have turned to philosophy in search of universal grounds of truth and reality. They have, however, worried about the problem of relativism. Although Wittgenstein has often been characterized as a relativist, Cora Diamond, inspired by G. E. M Anscombe, argues that his work, despite internal tensions, provides rational grounds for external criticism of social practices. Her argument and her critique of the (...) work of Peter Winch and Ilham Dilman are, however, neither adequately supported by Wittgenstein’s texts nor sufficiently developed on their own terms. (shrink)

Despite the extensive commentary on the work of Peter Winch, there has been inadequate recognition of how his Idea of a Social Science discerned the implications of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for confronting issues regarding the nature and interpretation of social phenomena. Winch’s subsequent confrontation with anthropology can be further illuminated by examining one of the most contentious contemporary debates in this field. This case illustrates the paradoxes involved in meta-practices such as philosophy and social science seeking to make descriptive and normative (...) claims about conceptually preconstituted forms of life, and it indicates the limitations of philosophical realism as a social scientific meta-theory. (shrink)

John McDowell’s original motivation of disjunctivism occurs in the context of a problem regarding other minds. Recent commentators have insisted that McDowell’s disjunctivism should be classed as an epistemological disjunctivism about epistemic warrant, and distinguished from the perceptual disjunctivism of Hinton, Snowdon and others. In this paper I investigate the relation between the problem of other minds and disjunctivism, and raise some questions for this interpretation of McDowell.

Perceptual disjunctivism, as I regard it in this paper, is the view that veridical perceptions and hallucinations, while indistinguishable via introspection, are states of fundamentally different kinds. This fundamental difference can be spelled out in various ways. According to the view I will be concerned with, it is a fundamental difference in the personal-level structure of both states. Against this version of disjunctivism, I will raise a new challenge. It is a variant of what can be seen as the standard (...) challenge against disjunctivism: how to do justice to the indistinguishability of veridical perceptions and hallucinations. It differs, however, from common versions of this challenge in where it locates the potential incompatibility of disjunctivism with the relevant fact of indistinguishability. Commonly, it is the disjunctivist assumption of a fundamental difference between both kinds of states which is regarded as incompatible with the indistinguishability of these states. In contrast, I will suggest that if hallucinations and veridical perceptions differed in the way proposed by structural disjunctivism, this difference would induce a corresponding difference in the psychological processes of their introspection and that the assumption of such a difference in the manner of introspection is most likely incompatible with a properly formulated indistinguishability claim. (shrink)

This essay accounts for the notion of _Lebensform_ by assigning it a _logical _role in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Wittgenstein’s additions of the notion to his manuscripts of the _PI_ occurred during the initial drafting of the book 1936-7, after he abandoned his effort to revise _The Brown Book_. It is argued that this constituted a substantive step forward in his attitude toward the notion of simplicity as it figures within the notion of logical analysis. Next, a reconstruction of his later (...) remarks on _Lebensformen_ is offered which factors in his reading of Alan Turing’s “On computable numbers, with an application to the _Entscheidungsproblem_“, as well as his discussions with Turing 1937-1939. An interpretation of the five occurrences of _Lebensform_ in the PI is then given in terms of a logical “regression” to _Lebensform_ as a fundamental notion. This regression characterizes Wittgenstein’s mature answer to the question, “What is the nature of the logical?”. (shrink)

Abstract: How exactly should the relation between a veridical perception and a corresponding hallucination be understood? I argue that the epistemic notion of ‘indiscriminability’, understood as lacking evidence for the distinctness of things, is not suitable for defining this relation. Instead, we should say that a hallucination and a veridical perception involve the same phenomenal properties. This has further consequences for attempts to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity of phenomenal properties in terms of indiscriminability, and for considerations (...) about the phenomenal sorites. (shrink)

The tradition of pragmatism has, especially since Dewey, been characterized by a commitment to nonreductive naturalism. The notion of emergence, popular in the early decades of the twentieth century and currently re-emerging as a central concept in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, may be useful in explicating that commitment. The present paper discusses the issue of the reality of emergent properties, drawing particular attention to a pragmatic way of approaching this issue. The reality of emergents can be defended as (...) a pragmatically-useful ontological commitment; hence, pragmatism can be employed as a tool in the debate over the structure and reality of emergence. This strategy of justifying ontological commitments is examined through historical and systematic discussions of the pragmatist tradition. It turns out, among other things, that while classical pragmatists did not specify any technical notion of emergence in the contemporary sense, their non-reductively naturalist views are relevant to the more recent emergence discussions -- especially because they rejected the metaphysical realism typical of today’s ontologically-oriented emergence theories. (shrink)

To be acquainted with something (in the philosophical sense of “acquainted” discussed here) is to be directly aware of it. The idea that we are acquainted with certain things we experience has been discussed throughout the history of Western Philosophy, but in the early 20th century it gained especially focused attention among analytic philosophers who drew their inspiration from Bertrand Russell's work on acquaintance. Since then, many philosophers—particularly those working on self‐knowledge or perception—have used the notion of acquaintance to explain (...) various facts about human experience and knowledge. In this paper, I offer an overview of this work, with particular focus on the resurgent literature on acquaintance in contemporary analytic philosophy. After more fully explaining what acquaintance is (or is supposed to be), I describe some reasons for thinking that we are indeed acquainted with certain things we experience, and then I survey some of the facts about experience and knowledge that acquaintance may help explain. (shrink)

Predictive approaches to the mind claim that perception, cognition, and action can be understood in terms of a single framework: a hierarchy of Bayesian models employing the computational strategy of predictive coding. Proponents of this view disagree, however, over the extent to which perception is direct on the predictive approach. I argue that we can resolve these disagreements by identifying three distinct notions of perceptual directness: psychological, metaphysical, and epistemological. I propose that perception is plausibly construed as psychologically indirect on (...) the predictive approach, in the sense of being constructivist or inferential. It would be wrong to conclude from this, however, that perception is therefore indirect in a metaphysical or epistemological sense on the predictive approach. In the metaphysical case, claims about the inferential properties of constructivist perceptual mechanisms are consistent with both direct and indirect solutions to the metaphysical problem of perception (e.g. naïve realism, representationalism, sense datum theory). In the epistemological case, claims about the inferential properties of constructivist perceptual mechanisms are consistent with both direct and indirect approaches to the justification of perceptual belief. In this paper, I demonstrate how proponents of the predictive approach have conflated these distinct notions of perceptual directness and indirectness, and I propose alternative strategies for developing the philosophical consequences of the approach. (shrink)

Presentists have typically argued that the Block View is incapable of explaining our experience of time. In this paper I argue that the phenomenology of our experience of time is, on the contrary, against presentism. My argument is based on a dilemma: presentists must either assume that the metaphysical present has no temporal extension, or that it is temporally extended. The former horn leads to phenomenological problems. The latter renders presentism metaphysically incoherent, unless one posits a discrete present that, however, (...) suffers from the same difficulties that the instantaneous present is prone to. After introducing the main phenomenological models of our experience of time that are discussed in the literature, I show that none of them favors presentism. I conclude by arguing that if even the phenomenology of time sides against presentism, the latter metaphysical theory has no scientific evidence in its favor and ought to be dropped. (shrink)

Algunos defensores del realismo científico, particularmente Ilkka Niiniluoto y Philip Kitcher, han intentado moderar las tesis ontológicas más fuertes del realismo buscando la integración de la teoría de la verdad como correspondencia con alguna versión matizada del relativismo conceptual propugnado por Putnam, según el cual el mundo carece de una estructura propia y, por tanto, la ontología depende de nuestros esquemas conceptuales. No es claro, sin embargo, que ambas cosas se puedan armonizar fácilmente. Si nuestro conocimiento del mundo está mediado (...) por nuestras categorías y conceptos, y si además la elección de esas categorías y conceptos puede variar en función de nuestros intereses y no obedecen a la existencia de unos supuestos géneros naturales o a una estructura propia del mundo, se torna entonces problemático establecer a qué corresponden nuestros enunciados verdaderos. ¿Corresponden al mundo independiente de nuestra mente o al mundo estructurado por nosotros mediante nuestras categorías y conceptos? En este artículo se presentarán las principales dificultades que encuentra este proyecto de realismo moderado tanto en Niiniluoto como en Kitcher, se analizarán sus propuestas para solventar dichas dificultades, mostrando sus insuficiencias y, finalmente, se propondrá una modalidad de realismo ontológico moderado que, recogiendo algo del espíritu de la relatividad conceptual de Putnam, es lo suficientemente fuerte como para sustentar una teoría de la verdad como correspondencia. Replucación autorizada. Publicado por primera vez en Contrastes vol. XII. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson argued that ‘mature sensible experience (in general) presents itself as … an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside us’ (1979: 97). He began his defence of this very natural idea by asking how someone might typically give a description of their current visual experience, and offered this example of such a description: ‘I see the red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches of the elms; I see the dappled deer (...) grazing in groups on the vivid green grass…’ (1979: 97). In other words, in describing experience, we tend to describe the objects of experience – the things which we experience – and the ways they are when we are experiencing them. Some go further. According to Heidegger. (shrink)

The twelve original studies collected in this volume examine different aspects of Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations. They are authored by scholars and specialists internationally recognized for their expertise in the fields of phenomenology, logic, history of philosophy and philosophy of mind. They approach Husserl's groundwork from different angles and perspectives and shed new light on a number of issues such as meaning, intentionality, ontology, logic, etc. They also explore questions such as the place of the Logical Investigations within the whole (...) of Husserl's work, its sources in 19th century philosophy and in particular in the philosophical work of Franz Brentano and Bernard Bolzano, its reception amongst the so-called members of the Munich Circle and its influence on contemporary philosophy. In short, this volume constitutes a "companion" to Husserl's Logical Investigations. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

Saying that psychological states are functional states, the functionalist claims more than that psychological states have functions. Rather, functionalism is the theory that psychological states are defined and constituted by their functions. On this view, what it is to be a psychological state of a certain sort just is and consists entirely of having a certain function. Anything that has that function in a suitable system would therefore be that psychological state. If storing information for later use is the essential (...) function of memory, then anything that has that function counts as a memory. Similarly, one might say that anything that traps or kills mice counts as a mouse trap. (shrink)

Qualia inversion thought experiments are ubiquitous in contemporary philosophy of mind. The most popular kind is one or another variant of Locke's hypothetical case of.

Aristotle’s Naïve Somatism is a re-interpretation of Aristotle’s cognitive psychology in light of certain presuppositions he holds about the living animal body. The living animal body is presumed to be sensitive, and Aristotle grounds his account of cognition in a rudimentary proprioceptive awareness one has of her body. With that presupposed metaphysics under our belts, we are in a position to see that Aristotle in de Anima (cognition chapters at least) has a di erent explanatory aim in view than that (...) which the literature generally imputes to him. He is not explicating what we would call the “mental”—the private, inner realm which some take to be of a di erent kind than the physical—as most take him to be. His explanandum is content acquisition; the explanans is showing how the body becomes like various aspects of objects. Although he famously describes the mind (nous) as unmixed with the body, he is guided by functional constrains—nous cannot be limited or qualified if it is to potentially think all things. Thus, his inquiry into cognition is philosophically limited from a contemporary perspective. Aristotle is not doing philosophy of mind, for he doesn’t seem to find the “mental” philosophically perplexing. (shrink)

Western science claims to provide unique, objective information about the world. This is supported by the observation that peoples across cultures will agree upon a common description of the physical world. Further, the use of scientific instruments and mathematics is claimed to enable the objectification of science. In this work, carried out by reviewing the scientific literature, the above claims are disputed systematically by evaluating the definition of physical reality and the scientific method, showing that empiricism relies ultimately upon the (...) human senses for the evaluation of scientific theories and that measuring instruments cannot replace the human sensory system. Nativist and constructivist theories of human sensory development are reviewed, and it is shown that nativist claims of core conceptual knowledge cannot be supported by the findings in the literature, which shows that perception does not simply arise from a process of maturation. Instead, sensory function requires a long process of learning through interactions with the environment. To more rigorously define physical reality and systematically evaluate the stability of perception, and thus the basis of empiricism, the development of the method of dimension analysis is reviewed. It is shown that this methodology, relied upon for the mathematical analysis of physical quantities, is itself based upon empiricism, and that all of physical reality can be described in terms of the three fundamental dimensions of mass, length and time. Hereafter the sensory modalities that inform us about these three dimensions are systematically evaluated. The following careful analysis of neuronal plasticity in these modalities shows that all the relevant senses acquire from the environment the capacity to apprehend physical reality. It is concluded that physical reality is acquired rather than given innately, and leads to the position that science cannot provide unique results. Rather, those it can provide are sufficient for a particular environmental setting. (shrink)

Ita La recensione presenta la prospettiva enattivista difesa da Alva Noë, e ne discute alcuni aspetti specifici. Il pensiero, la coscienza e la cognizione non sono pienamente comprensibili, secondo l’enattivismo di Noë, senza un’adeguata considerazione del ruolo ricoperto dal corpo e dall’ambiente. Sarebbe quindi sbagliato continuare a pensare che il cervello da solo sia responsabile dei processi cognitivi umani: il programma che ricerca i correlati neurali della coscienza sarebbe quindi destinato al fallimento dal principio, perché tralascia in partenza corpo e (...) ambiente; i programmi di ricerca nel campo dell’intelligenza artificiale sarebbero ugualmente compromessi, non solo con una concezione computazionalista della cognizione, ma anche con la vecchia idea che un cervello artificiale sia sufficiente alla cognizione quanto un cervello naturale. Di seguito si prendono in esame due prospettive sperimentali su cui Noë fa grande affidamento: gli studi sulla plasticità neurale dei furetti svolti da Mriganka Sur e altri, e la realizzazione di un sistema di sostituzione visuo-tattile da parte di Paul Bach-Y-Rita. Per Noë si tratta di elementi cruciali in supporto alla propria prospettiva: in realtà, come emerge dalla breve analisi, l’attribuire loro un significato così chiaro e univoco pro-enattivismo è qualcosa di molto meno scontato. Infine, segue un breve bilancio del libro di Noë, dove gli elementi d’interesse del volume sono presentati insieme all’individuazione di alcuni punti deboli, che il testo condivide con la gran parte degli studi che in vario modo fanno leva sull’intuizione legata all’embodiement: da un lato una difficoltà strutturale riguarda la possibilità di identificare con chiarezza gli elementi costitutivi del mentale; dall’altro lato, il riferimento a forme di esternalismo radicale sembra ugualmente comportare diversi problemi. -/- Abstract Eng The review presents Alva Noë’s enactivist view, and aims at discussing some of its ideas. Thought, consciousness, and cognition are not understandable, Noë claims, without taking into proper consideration the role played by the body and the environment. It would be wrong indeed to go on thinking that our brain alone is responsible for human cognitive processes: the program searching for the neural correlates of consciousness is hopeless in principle, because it neglects from the beginning the body and the environment; research programs in artificial intelligence are as well compromised, not only with a computationalist view of cognition, but also with the old idea that an artificial brain will suffice for cognition just like a natural one. Thereafter, two experimental perspectives, that Noë uses to support his view, are examined: Mriganka Sur’s studies on neural plasticity of ferrets, and Paul Bach-Y-Rita’s tactile-visual substitution system. Noë argues that these results are crucial in supporting his view, but, as the discussion highlights, their pro-enactivism meaning is not so clear and unambiguous. Finally, a balance of the book follows, where the many elements of interest are presented together with the acknowledgment of some weak points, that the book shares with the majority of the proposals that deal with the embodiment’s insight: on the one hand, a structural difficulty concerns the possibility to identify clearly the constitutive elements of the mental; on the other hand, the reference to radical versions of externalism seems to entail many difficulties as well. (shrink)

The Linda paradox is a key topic in current debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. We present a novel analysis of this paradox, based on the notion of verisimilitude as studied in the philosophy of science. The comparison with an alternative analysis based on probabilistic confirmation suggests how to overcome some problems of our account by introducing an adequately defined notion of verisimilitudinarian confirmation.