After identifying the discipline of psychology’s history of contributing pioneers and leaders to the field of race research, epistemological problems in empirical psychology are identified including an adherence to a naïve empiricist philosophy of science. The reconstruction focuses on the underdetermined relationship between data and interpretation. It is argued that empirical psychology works under a hermeneutic deficit and that this deficit leads to the advancement of interpretations regarding racialized groups that are detrimental to those groups. Because these interpretations are understood (...) as actions that bring harm to certain racialized groups, and because these actions are made in the name of science and knowledge, the term epistemological violence is applied. Reflections regarding the meanings and consequences of this term in empirical psychology and the human sciences are presented. (shrink)

It is sometimes objected that anti-individualism, because of its assumption of the constitutive role of natural and social environments in the individuation of intentional attitudes, raises sceptical worries about first-person authority--that peculiar privilege each of us is thought to enjoy with respect to non-Socratic self-knowledge. Gary Ebbs believes that this sort of objection can be circumvented, if we give up metaphysical realism and scientific naturalism and adopt what he calls a “participant perspective” on our linguistic practices. Drawing on broadly Wittgensteinian (...) considerations, I argue that Ebbs is right about this, and I show how two likely objections to his view can be circumvented. I also argue that mere adoption of the participant perspective does not serve to refute external-world sceptic. (shrink)

Definitions of stronger and weaker versions of physical realism are offered, The first relating to the existence of physical objects and the second to the independence of their properties. It is argued that recent debates about the commensurability and convergence of scientific theories and the causal theory of reference are irrelevant to the truth of these theses, Although their proponents seem to think them linked. It is then argued that support for realist positions must be inductive. Such support is provided (...) for both the weaker and stronger theses. (shrink)

Paul Roth claims that “interpretivists” in the philosophy of social sciences like Charles Taylor assume a positivist caricature of natural science to motivate their arguments against naturalism in the social sciences. Roth argues that not only is adopting the view of meaning relied upon by those he sometimes refers to as the “friends of understanding” unmotivated once the critique of positivism has been taken on board, he argues further that Quine has shown why this “meaning realism” is unavailable in principle. (...) Roth bolsters his use of Quine against interpretivists by referring to Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein on rule-following. But McDowell has shown how Kripke overlooks an alternative reading of those remarks, which provides “interpretivists” with arguments against mainstream naturalism and which makes no use of anything resembling “meaning realism.” This opening for interpretivists is actually already present in Roth’s discussion of the distinction between “thin” and “thick” description. This suggests how mainstream naturalism itself might be rethought to accommodate interpretivism. (shrink)

I argue that science will be better, by its own criteria, if it pursues multiculturalism, by which I mean an ethnic- and gender-diverse set of scientists. I argue that minority and women scientists will be more likely to recognize false, prejudiced assumptions about race and gender that infect theories. And the kinds of changes that society will undergo in pursuing multiculturalism will help reveal these faulty assumptions to scientists of all races and genders.

How do humans manage to keep track of a gradually changing object or person as the same persisting individual despite the fact that the extraction of information about this individual must often rely on heterogeneous information sources and heterogeneous tracking methods? The article introduces the Empirical Tracking of Individuals theory to address this problem. This theory proposes an analysis of the concept of integrated tracking, which refers to the capacity to acquire, store, and update information about the identity and location (...) of individuals in our environment. It hypothesizes that certain functions of attention are a key to explaining how the cognitive flexibility of the human mind overcomes the heterogeneity of sources and methods in integrated tracking. At least two premises lend support to this hypothesis. First, heterogeneity of tracking sources is overcome by the combination of information from multiple perceptual modalities and a phenomenon of multisensory 'transparency'. Second, heterogeneity of tracking sources and methods may also be overcome by inferences that combine information across domains to acquire reasons to believe propositions about the target's location and identity. (shrink)

Einstein considered general covariance to characterize the novelty of his General Theory of Relativity (GTR), but Kretschmann thought it merely a formal feature that any theory could have. The claim that GTR is ``already parametrized'' suggests analyzing substantive general covariance as formal general covariance achieved without hiding preferred coordinates as scalar ``clock fields,'' much as Einstein construed general covariance as the lack of preferred coordinates. Physicists often install gauge symmetries artificially with additional fields, as in the transition from Proca's to (...) Stueckelberg's electromagnetism. Some post-positivist philosophers, due to realist sympathies, are committed to judging Stueckelberg's electromagnetism distinct from and inferior to Proca's. By contrast, physicists identify them, the differences being gauge-dependent and hence unreal. It is often useful to install gauge freedom in theories with broken gauge symmetries (second-class constraints) using a modified Batalin-Fradkin-Tyutin (BFT) procedure. Massive GTR, for which parametrization and a Lagrangian BFT-like procedure appear to coincide, mimics GTR's general covariance apart from telltale clock fields. A generalized procedure for installing artificial gauge freedom subsumes parametrization and BFT, while being more Lagrangian-friendly than BFT, leaving any primary constraints unchanged and using a non-BFT boundary condition. Artificial gauge freedom licenses a generalized Kretschmann objection. However, features of paradigm cases of artificial gauge freedom might help to demonstrate a principled distinction between substantive and merely formal gauge symmetry. (shrink)

Using a version of situation semantics, this article argues that bare and complex demonstratives are interpreted as individual concepts.

In this commentary I argue that Byrne & Hilbert commit a number of philosophical solecisms: They beg the question of “realism,” they take the phenomenon and the theoretical model to be the same thing, and they surreptitiously substitute data sets for the life-world.

Byrne & Hilbert conceive of color perception as the representation of a physical property “out there.” In our view, their approach does not only have various internal problems, but is also apt to becloud both the intricate and still poorly understood role that “ color ” plays within perceptual architecture, and the complex coupling to the “external world” of the perceptual system as an entirety. We propose an alternative perspective, which avoids B&H's misleading dichotomy between a purely subjective and a (...) realist conception of “ color.”. (shrink)

The role of transcendental idealism in Kant's theory of knowledge has been both deliberately underrated and inadvertently exaggerated. If conceivably not necessary, its role in Kant's explanation of the possibility of a priori knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason is at least pivotal to the success of the explanation. On the other hand, though transcendental idealism depends on Kant's epistemological criterion of an existing object, or, simply, his criterion of existence, the criterion for its part is actually independent of (...) the idealism. In fact, it may be because this independence has hardly been recognized that commentators have been unaware of the role the criterion may actually be playing in the continuing controversy over the correct interpretation of the idealism. Altogether, this article addresses both shortcomings – the underestimation and the exaggeration of the role of the idealism in Kant's epistemology. While it places the idealism at the centre of the epistemology, it also separates the criterion of existence from the idealism. In highlighting this contrast, the article explains how the criterion may actually be contributing to the persistence of the ongoing dispute over the correct interpretation of the idealism. (shrink)

In part one, I give an (unsystematic) overview of the development of logical tools which have been employed in the course of the analysis of referring expressions, i.e. definite and (specific) indefinite singular terms, of natural language. I present Russell's celebrated theory of definite descriptions which I see as an attempt to explain definite reference in terms of unique existence (and reference in general in terms of existence simpliciter); and I present Hilbert's E-calculus as an attempt to explain existence in (...) terms of choice. Then I turn to contemporary, dynamic approaches to the analysis of singular terms and point out that only within a dynamic framework can the Russellian and Hilbertian ideas yield a truly satisfactory analysis of singular terms, and consequently of reference and coreference. I call attention to the fact that current results of formal semantics demonstrate the advantages of viewing singular terms as denoting updates, i.e. as a means of changing the context (information state), and especially that part of the context which I call the individually. (shrink)

For many reasons mainstream Hegel scholarship has disregarded Hegel's interests in epistemology, hence also his response to scepticism. From the points of view of defenders and critics alike, it seems that 'Hegel' and 'epistemology' have nothing to do with one another. Despite this widespread conviction, Hegel was a very sophisticated epistemologist whose views merit contemporary interest. This article highlights several key features and innovations of Hegel's epistemology-including his anti-Cartesianism, fallibilism, realism (sic) and externalism both about mental content and about justification-by (...) considering his systematic responses to Pyrrhonian, Humean, Cartesian and Kantian scepticism. (shrink)

Quine has developed two reasons for thinking that our ontology should not include the ontological category of properties. His first point is that the criterion for individuating properties is unclear, and the second is that postulating the existence of properties would not explain anything. In what follows I critically examine these two themes, which I will call the clarity argument and the parsimony argument. Although I will suggest that these two arguments are defective, I also will try to show that (...) certain related arguments on behalf of the existence of properties are likewise flawed. This will set the stage for the discussion in the fourth section of the perspective provided by evolutionary theory on the question of the ontological status of properties. It will emerge that evolutionary theory provides reason for thinking that properties exist, and, additionally, gives an interesting point of view on the epistemological and metaphysical issues that Quine has addressed. (shrink)

I use modal logic and transfinite set-theory to define metaphysical foundations for a general theory of computation. A possible universe is a certain kind of situation; a situation is a set of facts. An algorithm is a certain kind of inductively defined property. A machine is a series of situations that instantiates an algorithm in a certain way. There are finite as well as transfinite algorithms and machines of any degree of complexity (e.g., Turing and super-Turing machines and more). There (...) are physically and metaphysically possible machines. There is an iterative hierarchy of logically possible machines in the iterative hierarchy of sets. Some algorithms are such that machines that instantiate them are minds. So there is an iterative hierarchy of finitely and transfinitely complex minds. (shrink)

Many solutions of the Goodman paradox have been proposed but so far no agreement has been reached about which is the correct solution. However, I will not contribute here to the discussion with a new solution. Rather, I will argue that a solution has been in front of us for more than two hundred years because a careful reading of Hume’s account of inductive inferences shows that, contrary to Goodman’s opinion, it embodies a correct solution of the paradox. Moreover, the (...) account even includes a correct answer to Mill’s question of why in some cases a single instance is sufficient for a complete induction, since Hume gives a well-supported explanation of this reliability phenomenon. The discussion also suggests that Bayesian theory by itself cannot explain this phenomenon. Finally, we will see that Hume’s explanation of the reliability phenomenon is surprisingly similar to the explanation given lately by a number of naturalistic philosophers in their discussion of the Goodman paradox. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:F.H. Bradley, Collected Works Volumes 1–5.

This paper is to a large extent an exercise in philosophical geography. It traces the way in which a resilient naturalist orientation has derived support, specifically in the analytic tradition, from a central structuring tenet of transcendental idealism. It attempts to bring out the philosophical reasons that drive this Kantian alliance. Attention then turns to the identification of two salient problems that confront this alliance in its most acceptable form. To the extent that a resilient naturalism is desirable, these problems (...) need to be addressed. (shrink)

What is the relation of epistemology, understood as the study of the evaluation of knowledge claims, and empirical psychology, understood as the study of the causal generation of a person's beliefs? Quine maintains that the relation is one of “mutual containment”.Epistemology in its new setting, conversely, is contained in natural science, as a chapter of psychology. … We are studying how the human subject of our study posits bodies and projects his physics from his data, and we appreciate that our (...) position in the world is just like his. Our very epistemological enterprise, therefore, and the psychology wherein it is a component chapter, and the whole of natural science wherein psychology is a component book—all this is our own construction or projection from stimulations like those we were meting out to our epistemological subject. There is thus reciprocal containment, though containment in different senses: epistemology in natural science and natural science in epistemology. (shrink)

A number of those that have advocated for theoretical pluralism in epistemology suggest that naturalistic arguments from cognitive science can support their case. Yet these theorists have traditionally faced two pressing needs. First, they have needed a cognitive science adequate to the task. Second, they have needed a bridge between whatever scientific account of cognition they favor and the normative claims of a pluralistic epistemology. Both of these challenges are addressed below in an argument for theoretical pluralism that brings together (...) two recent prototype-activation approaches to cognition. The paper dovetails Paul Churchland's neuro-computational approach with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's image schematic approach, and shows how they mutually support each other in an increasingly persuasive naturalistic case for theoretical pluralism in epistemology. (shrink)

A Constructivist Foundation of the Objects of Scientific Empirical Theories. The following considerations are guided by the assumption that the objects of any scientific empirical theory are constructs as well as the theories themselves, the construction of these object-constructs being fundamentally dependent on the theories' functioning in the provision of practically relevant empirical explanations. The relevance of these explanations consists in their contribution to the improvement of at least one practical capacity through enabling the invention of at least one improving (...) kind of practical actions. In an excursus on the origination and the development of the notion of theory within human history the view is held, in contrast to Aristotle, that theorization has always aimed at practical relevance, however in a broader sense of "practical" than that in which Aristotle uses the term "πρακτικός", and that only the practical functions of theory-construction have changed over the times, and their object-constructs correspondingly. The latest form of theory with the above-mentioned function in the development of social practice is the scientific explanatory empirical theory with the descriptive empirical theory now no longer fulfilling a practical function of its own, but only a service-function of data acquisition for the explanatory theory. The object-constructs of strictly scientific empirical theories in the sense of explanatory theories for the improvement of practical capacities are here considered to be empirical quasi-actions, those of the dependent descriptive empirical theories either quasi-instruments or quasi-products or quasi-materials of the respective kind of quasi-actions of the explanatory theory. The empirical quasi-action is here conceived as the latest in a sequence of developing object-constructs that have resulted from different and successively more effective attempts at better survival of human beings and even from prehuman stages of evolution. The author envisages a differentiation of empirical quasi-actions into further sub-categories to provide the conceptual bases for the construction of objects of new kinds of scientific explanatory empirical theories that might become practically relevant for the improvement of new kinds of practical capacities to be preferably improved for the advancement of social practice: Beside the already relevant category of empirical processes (as I named it) are here proposed the further categories of empirical originations of meaning and of empirical originations of practical actions as conceptual bases for object-constructs of future scientific empirical theories. (shrink)

A naturalistic account of the strengths and limitations of cladistic practice is offered. The success of cladistics is claimed to be largely rooted in the parsimony-implementing congruence test. Cladists may use the congruence test to iteratively refine assessments of homology, and thereby increase the odds of reliable phylogenetic inference under parsimony. This explanation challenges alternative views which tend to ignore the effects of parsimony on the process of character individuation in systematics. In a related theme, the concept of homeostatic property (...) cluster natural kinds is used to explain why cladistics is well suited to provide a traditional, verbal reference system for the evolutionary properties of species and clades. The advantages of more explicitly probabilistic approaches to phylogenetic inference appear to manifest themselves in situations where evolutionary homeostasis has for the most part broken down, and predictive classifications are no longer possible. (shrink)

This paper argues that phenomenal or internal metrical spaces are redundant posits. It is shown that we need not posit an internal space-time frame, as the physical space-time suffices to explain geometrical perception, memory and planning. More than the internal space-time frame, the idea of a phenomenal colour space has lent credibility to the idea of internal spaces. It is argued that there is no phenomenal colour space that underlies the various psychophysical colour spaces; it is parasitic upon physical and (...) psychophysical colour spaces. The argumentation is further extended to other sensory spaces and generalised quality spaces. (shrink)

Information modeling (also known as conceptual modeling or semantic data modeling) may be characterized as the formulation of a model in which information aspects of objective and subjective reality are presented (the application), independent of datasets and processes by which they may be realized (the system).A methodology for information modeling should incorporate a number of concepts which have appeared in the literature, but should also be formulated in terms of constructs which are understandable to and expressible by the system user (...) as well as the system developer. This is particularly desirable in connection with certain intimate relationships, such as being the same as or being a part of. (shrink)

Cohen (1981) and others have made an interesting argument for the thesis that humans are rational: normative principles of reasoning and actual human reasoning ability cannot diverge because both are determined by the same process involving our intuitions about what constitutes good reasoning as a starting point. Perhaps the most sophisticated version of this argument sees reflective equilibrium as the process that determines both what the norms of reasoning are and what actual cognitive competence is. In this essay, I will (...) evaluate both the general argument that humans are rational and the reflective equilibrium argument for the same thesis. While I find both accounts initially appealing, I will argue that neither successfully establishes that humans are rational. (shrink)

Argues that natural kind terms are token-reflexive, with reference ultimately fixed to the underlying explanatory properties of the surface qualities of local matter.

The concept of contextual emergence has been introduced as a speci?c kind of emergence in which some, but not all of the conditions for a higher-level phenomenon exist at a lower level. Further conditions exist in contingent contexts that provide stability conditions at the lower level, which in turn accord the emergence of novelty at the higher level. The purpose of the present paper is to propose that consciousness is a contextually emergent property of self-sustaining systems. The core assumption is (...) that living organisms constitute self-sustaining embodiments of the contingent contexts that accord their emergence. We propose that the emergence of such systems constitutes the emergence of content-bearing systems because the lower-level processes of such systems give rise to and sustain the macro-level whole in which they are nested, while the emergent macro-level whole constitutes the context in which the lower- level processes can be for something . Such embodied functionality is necessarily and naturally about the contexts that it has embodied. It is this notion of self- sustaining embodied aboutness that we propose to represent a type of content capable of evolving into consciousness. (shrink)

In this précis, I review the main points and arguments developed at greater length in Doing without Concepts, and I explain why eliminating the notion of concept would contribute to the progress of the psychology of higher cognition.

Although cognitive scientists have learned a lot about concepts, their findings have yet to be organized in a coherent theoretical framework. In addition, after twenty years of controversy, there is little sign that philosophers and psychologists are converging toward an agreement about the very nature of concepts.Doing without Concepts(Machery 2009) attempts to remedy this state of affairs. In this article, I review the main points and arguments developed at greater length inDoing without Concepts.

Which individuals belong to a racial group, and what determines membership? I argue that questions about membership are importantly different from questions regarding the ontology of racial categories and invite a distinctive line of inquiry. But there's a formidable challenge to providing determinate and consistent answers to membership questions: Many phenomena documented in sociology and psychology generate reasonable and systematic disagreement about membership that cannot be adjudicated by an influential variety of social constructionism. While the puzzle of racial identity remains, (...) we emerge with a new appreciation for how racial membership is a distinctive part of it. (shrink)

Of the many controversial claims in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions perhaps none are more troublesome than those made in his account of the role of a paradigm in perception. For if we take it that “a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself (Kuhn 1970, p. 113) and that “two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction” (Kuhn 1970, p. 150) then we seem to be burdened with all (...) the familiar problems about whether, and how, experimental evidence could possibly serve to promote the acceptance of a paradigm. And, indeed, these problems have been amply discussed in the last several decades. Dudley Shapere, for instance, has questioned Kuhn’s account of how science comes to move between incommensurable paradigms. (Shapere 1964) Still, Kuhn’s discussion of perception has an empirical foundation in psychological research which gives it a certain resilience in the face of surface problems with the consequences of his account. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to explore an affinity between early critical theory and analytical philosophy. The affinity is in a fairly unexpected area: philosophy of science. I argue that early critical theory embraces a view of science which is a natural if somewhat unfamiliar extension of the pragmatist one defended by Quine. In particular, I argue that Horkheimer has a version of the Quine-Duhem thesis (“underdetermination of theory choice by the evidence”). How do the Frankfurt and analytical versions (...) of the underdetermination thesis differ? Quine and others have taken the thesis to motivate a form of pragmatism. What this means is that it is certain interests that ultimately determine the choice of theory: chief among them, an interest in simplicity of our theories. However, the Critical Theorists offer us a distinctly historical materialist version of the underdetermination thesis, in which it is the imperatives of the prevailing mode of production, for example, capitalism, which are decisive. The result is an unfamiliar Marxist version of an otherwise familiar thesis from the analytic tradition. (shrink)

The question how to turn the principles implicitly governing the concept of truth into an explicit definition of the concept hence coalesced with the question how to get a finite grip on the infinity of T-sentences. Tarski's famous and ingenious move was to introduce a new concept, satisfaction, which could be, on the one hand, recursively defined, and which, on the other hand, straightforwardly yielded an explication of truth. A surprising 'by-product' of Tarski's effort to bring truth under control was (...) the breathtaking finding that truth is in a precisely defined sense ineffable, that no non trivial language can contain a truth-predicate which would be adequate for the very 4 language. This implied that truth proved itself to be strangely 'language-dependent': we can have a concept of truth-in-L for any language L, but we cannot have a concept of truth applicable to every language. In a sense, this means, as Quine put it, that truth belongs to "transcendental metaphysics", and Tarski's 'scientific' investigations seem to lead us back towards a surprising proximity of some more traditional philosophical views on truth. 3. TARSKI'S THEORY AS A PARADIGM So far Tarski himself. Subsequent philosophers then had to find out what his considerations of the concept of truth really mean and what are their consequences; and this now seems to be an almost interminable task. (shrink)