In this paper, I argue that the ecological approach to perception provides resources to overcome the causal argument against disjunctivism. According to the causal argument, since the brain states that proximally cause the perceptual experience and the corresponding hallucinatory one can be of the same type, there would be no good reason to reject that the perceptual experience and the corresponding hallucinatory experience have fundamentally the same nature. Disjunctivism concerning the nature of the experience would then be false. I identify (...) three assumptions that support the causal argument: the indistinguishability assumption, the linearity assumption, and the duplication assumption. According to the ecological approach to disjunctivism, these assumptions should be rejected, opening up room for a version of disjunctivism that I call 'Ecological Disjunctivism'. Perceptual episodes are extended over time and are supervenient to the organism-environment system. They can be distinguished from the 'corresponding' hallucinations because the former results from a controlled process of attunement to the environment, whereas hallucinations are passive and insensible to the exploratory activities of the perceptual system. Finally, ecological disjunctivism, since it is immune to the causal argument, is more advantageous than negative and positive disjunctivism. (shrink)

At the bottom of all human activities are “values,” the conviction that some things “ought to be” and others not. Science, however, with its immense interest in mere facts seems to lack all understanding of such‘requiredness.’… A science … which would seriously admit nothing but indifferent facts … could not fail to destroy itself.

This paper argues that an ecological approach to psychology of the sort advanced by J. J. Gibson provides a coherent and powerful alternative to the computational, information-processing, paradigm. The paper argues for two principles. Firstly, one cannot begin to understand what internal information processing an organism must accomplish until one understands what information is available to the organism in its environment. Secondly, an organism can process information by acting on or manipulating physical structures in its environment. An attempt is made (...) to show how these principles can be extended to cognition as a whole. It is suggested that these principles may have a foundation in evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control (...) of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science. (shrink)