In the direct realist tradition of Reid and Austin, disjunctivism has joined its precursors inproudly trumpeting its allegiance with naïve realism. And the theory gains plausibility, par-ticularly as compared with adverbialism, if one considers a Wittgensteinian line of argumentregarding the use of sensation words. But ‘no common factor’ doctrines can be shown to beinconsistent with the naïve realism that has served as their main support. This does notmean that either disjunctivism or the Wittgensteinian perspective on language acquisitionthat informed it must (...) be false. It does indicate, however, that linguistic arguments againstprivate or internal meanings do not imply perceptual directness and that the espousal of direct realism—naïve or not—does not require adherence to disjunctivism. (shrink)

‘Injustiça epistêmica’ é o termo usado por Miranda Fricker para descrever um tipo de injustiça que ocorre quando excluímos a contribuição de uma ou mais pessoas à produção, disseminação e manutenção do conhecimento. Em seu livro de mesmo nome (2007), e em uma série de outros trabalhos, Fricker examina de que modo interações interpessoais e sistemas sociais estruturais podem ser responsáveis por influenciar nossa prática cotidiana, consciente ou não, de atribuir status epistêmico a membros de uma comunidade. Seu trabalho se (...) insere em um campo particular da epistemologia contemporânea, conhecido como Epistemologia Social. Um ramo do trabalho filosófico que tem como objetivo uma investigação sobre a dimensão social e sobre a moralidade das nossas práticas epistêmicas, do ponto de vista da sua influência na aquisição de conhecimento e justificação, e da formação racional de crenças. Fricker aporta neste campo com um tratamento do papel que a injustiça de tipo epistêmico desempenha nessas atividades. E ela o faz, particularmente, através do exame de duas formas primárias deste tipo de injustiça: a injustiça testemunhal e a injustiça hermenêutica. Sua proposta consiste, em larga medida, em mostrar que algumas das normas que governam as nossas práticas epistêmicas podem ser limitadas por estruturas de poder que se manifestam socialmente. De acordo com essa proposta, a concepção do sujeito conhecedor é essencialmente social, no sentido em que ela está sujeita a inúmeras considerações sociopolíticas. Uma dessas considerações está na possibilidade de pressões sociais advindas de relações de poder exercerem alguma influência nas normas epistêmicas de credibilidade que utilizamos para avaliar a autoridade racional de interlocutores em uma troca epistêmica cotidiana. Segundo Fricker, é possível que as normas que regulam a concessão de credibilidade a indivíduos ou grupos envolvidos nessas trocas reproduzam estruturas de poder constituídas socialmente. Ou seja, é possível que pessoas ou grupos que detêm algum tipo de vantagem ou poder social tendam a negar credibilidade a agentes epistêmicos que possuem autoridade racional de fato acerca de determinado assunto. Uma recusa em reconhecer tal autoridade por conta de preconceitos identitários é um dos modos de conceber o que Fricker chama de injustiça epistêmica. Neste artigo, pretendo apresentar alguns detalhes da proposta de Fricker, caracterizando mais cuidadosamente os dois tipos de injustiças que ela examina em seu trabalho principal e apresentando algumas das soluções que ela oferece como estratégias para dirimir as consequências supostamente perniciosas de práticas epistêmicas reguladas por preconceitos de identidade e pela exclusão de agentes de aspectos importantes de uma comunidade epistêmica. Em seguida, discutirei duas críticas mais pontuais às soluções que Fricker oferece, que surgem menos como objeções, no sentido mais forte do termo, e mais como contribuições adicionais a essas estratégias de remediação dos danos de uma prática epistêmica injusta. Particularmente, quero defender que as duas contribuições que apresentarei podem ser pensadas como frutos da mesma preocupação com o escopo estreito da proposta de Fricker, e podem ser pensadas também como oferecendo leituras complementares sobre que caminhos devemos seguir para buscar práticas e comunidades epistêmicas marcadas pela justiça e não pela injustiça. (shrink)

Most people find it obvious that concepts like APPLE, DOG, WATER, CACTUS, SWIM, CHIRP, FURRY, and SMOOTH are acquired from perceptual experiences along with some kind of inferential procedure. Models of how these concepts are inferentially acquired, however, force the acquired concepts to be representationally complex, built from, and composed by, the more primitive representations. Since at least the time of Plato, philosophers and psychologists have struggled to find complex sets of representations that have the same meanings, definitionally or probabilistically, (...) as these concepts. For example, to think about the property-kind being gold is not the same as to think about the complex property-kind being yellowish & shiny & malleable.... I call this Fodor's Challenge: Find an acquisition process that is genuinely inferential and yields a concept that genuinely is one of these lexical concepts. Rather than continue the pursuit of a complex representation that has the same meaning as our concept GOLD. I offer a model on which many lexical concepts are acquired from perception and inference, without being built up from, and composed by, the representations involved. The model, Baptizing Meanings for Concepts, is inspired in part by Saul Kripke's baptism process for assigning meanings to linguistic terms. Many lexical concepts, according to the BMC, are acquired by inferring the presence a new property-kind, picking out the property-kind in terms of those perceptible features, and then assigning a simple mental term, a concept, for that property-kind. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to create a naturalistic philosophical picture of creative capacities that are specific to our species, focusing on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study. By integrating data from diverse domains within a philosophical anthropological framework, I have presented a cognitive and evolutionary approach to the question of why humans, but not other animals engage in such activities. Through an application of cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to the study of these behaviors, I have sought to (...) provide a more solid footing for philosophical anthropological discussions of uniquely human behavior. In particular, I have argued that art, religion and science, which are usually seen as achievements that are quite remote from ordinary modes of reasoning, are subserved by evolved cognitive processes that serve functions in everyday cognitive tasks, that arise early and spontaneously in cognitive development, that are shared cross-culturally, and that have evolved in response to selective pressures in our ancestral past. These mundane cognitive processes provide a measuring rod with which we can assess a diversity of cultural phenomena; they form a unified explanatory framework to approach human culture. I have argued that we can explain uncommon thoughts in terms of interactions between common minds. This dissertation is subdivided into four parts. Part I outlines the problem of human uniqueness, examining theories on how humans conceptualize the world, and what their mental tool box looks like. Part II discusses the evolutionary and cognitive origins of human artistic behavior. Part III focuses on the cognitive science of religion, especially on how it can be applied to the reasoning of theologians and philosophers of religion. Part IV considers the cognitive basis of scientific practice. (shrink)

This thesis is an examination and critique of naturalistic representational theories of phenomenal character. Phenomenal character refers to the distinctive quality that perceptual and sensational experiences seem to have; it is identified with 'what it is like' to undergo experiences. The central claims of representationalism are that phenomenal character is identical with the content of experience and that all representational states, bearing appropriate relations to the cognitive system, are conscious experiences. These claims are taken to explain both how conscious experiential (...) states arise and their nature. After examining the desiderata for naturalistic explanations, I argue that theories which ascribe nonconceptual content to experiences are the most plausible versions of representationalism. Further, causal covariation and teleological theories yield distinctive and interesting representationalist positions, hence, they become the focus of this study. To assess representationalism, I investigate whether all differences in phenomenal character can be correlated with differences in content. I claim that a useful distinction can be drawn between implicit and explicit content, which allows one to best describe the phenomena of perfect and relative pitch. I then argue that ambiguous figures show that two experiences can have the same content but different phenomenal character. I explicate the Inverted Earth hypothesis and claim that to identify content and phenomenal character, representationalists either have to condone the possibility of philosophical zombies, or hold that people lack authoritative first-person knowledge of their current experiences. Both these positions are unpalatable. Finally, I argue that representationalists cannot ascribe contents to experiences of novel colours to account for their phenomenal character. I also question, in light of dissociation phenomena, whether there is one distinctive relationship that all experiences bear to the cognitive system. I conclude that phenomenal character cannot be identical with the type of content under investigation, and that naturalistic representationalist theories cannot fully explain conscious experience. (shrink)

Since the demise of the Sense-Datum independent objects or events to be objects Theory and Phenomenalism in the last cenof perception; however, unlike Direct Retury, Direct Realism in the philosophy of alists, Indirect Realists take this percepperception has enjoyed a resurgence of tion to be indirect by involving a prior popularity.1 Curiously, however, although awareness of some tertium quid between there have been attempts in the literature the mind and external objects or events.3 to refute some of the arguments against (...) Idealists and Phenomenalists agree with Direct Realism, there has been, as of yet, the Indirect Realists. (shrink)