A central problem for any truthmaker theory is the problem of negative truths. In this paper, I develop a novel, piecemeal strategy for solving this problem. The strategy puts central focus on a truth-relevant notion of aboutness within a metaphysically modest version of truthmaker theory and uses key conceptual tools gained by taking a deeper look at the best attempts to solve the problem of intentionality. I begin this task by critically discussing past proposed solutions to P-NEG in light of (...) Russell’s debate with Demos. This reveals a central difficulty with addressing the problem, specifically that one cannot be committed to incompatibility facts in one’s account of negation and of the truth of negative truths. I then present an aboutness-based version of truthmaker theory. Utilising what I call the strict and full account of aboutness, I extract aboutness-based theories of truth and falsity. I use this machinery to present a promising new strategy for solving P-NEG which does not have the problems of alternative approaches. Finally, I present and respond to some potential objections. (shrink)

According to what I call the reductive standard-causal theory of agency, the exercise of an agent's power to act can be reduced to the causal efficacy of agent-involving mental states and events. According to a non-reductive agent-causal theory, an agent's power to act is irreducible and primitive. Agent-causal theories have been dismissed on the ground that they presuppose a very contentious notion of causation, namely substance-causation. In this paper I will assume, with the proponents of the agent-causal approach, that substance-causation (...) is possible, as I will argue against that theory on the ground that it fails as a theory of agency. I will argue that the non-reductive agent-causal theory fails to account for agency, because it fails to account for agential control: it cannot explain why the stipulated irreducible relation between the agent and an action constitutes the agent's exercise of control over the action. This objection, I will argue, applies to the agent-causal theory in particular, and to the non-reductive approach in general. (shrink)

Hursthouse :57–68, 1991) argues that arational actions—e.g. kicking a door out of anger—cannot be explained by belief–desire pairs. The Humean Response to Hursthouse :25–38, 2000b) defends the Humean model from Hursthouse’s challenge. We argue that the Humean Response fails because belief–desire pairs are neither necessary nor sufficient for causing emotional actions. The Emotionist Response is to embrace Hursthouse’s conclusion that emotions provide an independent source of explanation for intentional actions. We consider Döring’s :214–230, 2003) feeling-based Emotionist account and argue that (...) it fails to explain arational actions. Finally, we develop our own Emotionist account, grounded in the Motivational Theory of Emotions one of us has developed. On our account, arational actions form a non-homogeneous class, some members of which must be understood as instrumental actions and some members of which must be understood as displacement behaviors of the kind animals display when their motivations are thwarted or in conflict. (shrink)

This article responds to two unresolved and crucial problems of cognitive science: (1) What is actually accomplished by functions of the nervous system that we ordinarily describe in the intentional idiom? and (2) What makes the information processing involved in these functions semantic? It is argued that, contrary to the assumptions of many cognitive theorists, the computational approach does not provide coherent answers to these problems, and that a more promising start would be to fall back on mathematical communication theory (...) and, with the help of evolutionary biology and neurophysiology, to attempt a characterization of the adaptive processes involved in visual perception. Visual representations are explained as patterns of cortical activity that are enabled to focus on objects in the changing visual environment by constantly adjusting to maintain levels of mutual information between pattern and object that are adequate for continuing perceptual control. In these terms, the answer proposed to (1) is that the intentional functions of vision are those involved in the establishment and maintenance of such representations, and to (2) that semantic features are added to the information processes of vision with the focus on objects that these representations accomplish. The article concludes with proposals for extending this account of intentionality to the higher domains of conceptualization and reason, and with speculation about how semantic information-processing might be achieved in mechanical systems. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ : John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus et Charles Taylor défendent la thèse voulant qu’il y ait des formes de «compréhension» ou de «savoir» qui, contrairement aux formes courantes, ne sont pas de nature représentationnelle ou conceptuelle mais sont plutôt du type des «savoir-faire». Cet article examine l’argument avancé en faveur de cette thèse ainsi que l’affirmation de ces auteurs suivant laquelle les Recherches philosophiques de Wittgenstein démontrent que celui-ci, au moins implicitement, l’acceptait. Les conclusions qui découlent de cet examen sont, (...) d’une part, que l’argument n’est pas concluant et, de l’autre, qu’il aurait été récusé par l’auteur des Recherches. ABSTRACT : A thesis held by John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor is that there is a kind of “understanding” or “knowledge” that differs from ordinary knowledge in being by nature non-representational or non-conceptual and rather a kind of “know-how.” The aim of this article is to examine the argument in support of their common thesis and their claim that it was endorsed, at least implicitly, by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations. This examination shows that the argument is not convincing and that Wittgenstein would have rejected it. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of perception that reconciles representationalism and relationalism by relying on pragmatist ideas. I call it the pragmatic view of perception. I argue that fully reconciling representationalism and relationalism requires, first, providing a theory in which how we perceive the world involves representations; second, preserving the idea that perception is constitutively shaped by its objects; and third, offering a direct realist account of perception. This constitutes what I call the Hybrid Triad. I discuss how Charles Peirce’s (...) theory of perception can provide a framework for such a view and I devote the rest of the paper to developing my own pragmatic and Peircean theory of perception. In particular, I argue that considering perception as a continuous temporal process, which essentially involves interaction with the environment, allows us to do justice to the Hybrid Triad. I motivate this view by discussing how a pragmatic theory of perception would deal with issues such as the distinction between veridical and non-veridical experiences and the nature of perceptual objects. (shrink)

The current dispute between causalists and simulationists in philosophy of memory has led to opposing attempts to characterize the relationship between memory and imagination. In a recent overview of this debate, Perrin and Michaelian have suggested that the dispute over the continuity between memory and imagination boils down to the question of whether a causal connection to a past event is necessary for remembering. By developing an argument based on an analogy to perception, I argue that this dispute should instead (...) be viewed as a dispute about the nature of the attitudes involved in remembering and imagining. The focus on attitudes, rather than on causal connections, suggests a new way of conceiving of the relationship between memory and imagination that has been overlooked in recent philosophy of memory. (shrink)

This paper describes a class of social acts called “violent acts” and distinguishes them from damaging acts. The former are successfully performed if they are apprehended by the victim, while the latter, being not social, are successful only as long as the intended damage is realized. It is argued that violent acts, if successful, generate a social relation which include the aggressor, the victim and, if the concomitant damaging act is satisfied, the damage itself.

The ascription of intentional states to the self involves knowledge, or at least claims to knowledge. Armed with the working definition of knowledge as 'the ability to do things, or refrain from doing things, or believe, or want, or doubt things, for reasons that are facts' [Hyman, J. Philos. Quart. 49:432—451], I sketch a simple competence model of acting and believing from knowledge and when knowledge is defeated by un-experienced changes of state. The model takes the form of three concentric (...) circles. The 'periphery' is analogous to Fodor's [(1983), The modularity of mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] input systems. The 'core' contains copies of peripheral representations, and between these representations there is executive competition. At the 'nucleus', operations are performed on the core representations of, at least, negation and recursion. I argue that this provides a fruitful way in which to conceptualise why theory-of-mind tasks challenge pre-school children, how some degree of first-person authority is mental state attribution is possible, and how executive inhibition is achieved. (shrink)

In the Monadology Leibniz has us imagine a thinking machine the size of a mill in order to show that matter can’t think. The argument is often thought to rely on the unity of consciousness and the notion of simplicity. Leibniz himself did not see matters this way. For him the argument relies on the view that the qualities of a substance must be intimately connected to its nature by being modifications, limitations of its nature. Leibniz thinks perception is not (...) a modification of matter because it is active and matter is passive. At the same time, there are traces in Leibniz of a different argument that relies on the notion of internal action, which may involve the notion of simplicity. Critics have sometimes charged that the Mill Argument is an argument from ignorance, but Leibniz was aware of this problem and made clear that he did not make that mistake. (shrink)

In this paper I study two ways of transforming decision problems on the basis of previously adopted intentions, ruling out incompatible options and imposing a standard of relevance, with a particular focus on situations of strategic interaction. I show that in such situations problems arise which do not appear in the single-agent case, namely that transformation of decision problems can leave the agents with no option compatible with what they intend. I characterize conditions on the agents’ intentions which avoid such (...) problematic scenarios, in a way that requires each agent to take account of the intentions of others. (shrink)

The opposition between nature and culture has always been paradigmatic in the philosophy of society, and in this sense it is certainly striking that, in contemporary theories of collective acceptance in social ontology—theories which actually entail the presence of individual mental content in the form of beliefs—the shaping role of culture has not found significant recognition. However, it cannot but be trivially true that cultural presuppositions play a role in the maintenance and development of beliefs on rules and other kinds (...) of abstract artifacts. But once we recognize that the reality of social institutions is at least culturally-dependent, the question emerges whether there is still room for nature as a possible determinant of social reality. Many authors maintain that there is and argue that there are objective natural features shared by human beings which are necessary conditions to explain the emergence of institutional structures within society. This is a culture-independent relation between nature and social institutions. In this paper, however, I will try to argue that there is another, very peculiar, way in which nature can work as a possible determinant of social reality, a way which is instead culture-dependent. In particular, I will give three examples of this kind of culture-dependent relations—examples about states, corporations, and contracts—and I will introduce a new concept to account for it, that of “institutional mimesis.” I will then provide an explanation of how institutional mimesis can have an impact on the content of collective acceptance by appealing to two influential theories in contemporary cognitive psychology. Finally, I will explain the ontological significance of institutional mimesis using Ian Hacking’s concept of historical ontology. (shrink)

Eliminativism about intentional content argues for its conclusion from the partial correctness of all three of the theses Hutto and Satne seek to combine: neo-Cartesianism is correct to this extent: if there is intentional content it must originally be mental. Neo-Behaviorism is correct to this extent: attribution of intentional content is basically a heuristic device for predicting the behavior of higher vertebrates. Neo-Pragmatism is right to this extent: the illusion of intentionality in language is the source of the illusion of (...) intentionality in thought. Eliminativists employ the insights of all three “neo”-theses to explain why there is no such thing and why the systematic illusion that there is intentional content runs so deep. (shrink)

In Ruling Passions, Simon Blackburn contends that we should reject sensibility theory because it serves to support a conservative complacency. Blackburn's strategy is attractive in that it seeks to win this metaethical dispute – which ultimately stems from a deep disagreement over antireductionism – on the basis of an uncontroversial normative consideration. Therefore, Blackburn seems to offer an easy solution to an apparently intractable debate. We will show, however, that Blackburn's argument against sensibility theory does not succeed; it is no (...) more supportive of conservative complacency than Blackburn's noncognitivism. A victory for noncognitivism cannot be so easily won. (shrink)

The purely retributive moral justification of punishment has a gap at its centre. It fails to explain why the offender should not be protected from punishment by the intuitively powerful moral idea that afflicting another person (other than to avoid a greater harm) is always wrong. Attempts to close the gap have taken several different forms, and only one is discussed in this paper. This is the attempt to push aside the ‘protecting’ intuition, using some more powerful intuition specially invoked (...) by the situations to which criminal justice is addressed. In one aspect of his complex defence of pure retributivism, Michael S. Moore attempts to show that the emotions of well-adjusted persons provide evidence of moral facts which justify the affliction of culpable wrongdoers in retribution for their wrongdoing. In particular, he appeals to the evidential significance of emotions aroused by especially heinous crimes, including the punishment-seeking guilt of the offender who truly confronts the reality of his immoral act. The paper argues that Moore fails to vindicate this appeal to moral realism, and thus to show that intrinsic personal moral desert (as distinct from ‘desert’ in a more restricted sense, relative to morally justified institutions) is a necessary and sufficient basis for punishment. Other theories of the role of emotions in morality are as defensible as Moore’s, while the compelling emotions to which he appeals to clinch his argument can be convincingly situated within a non-retributivist framework, especially when the distinction between the intuitions of the lawless world, and those of the world of law, is recognised. -/- . (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to offer a new theory of moods, according to which moods are perceptual experiences that represent undetermined objects as possessing specific evaluative properties. I start by listing a series of features that moods are typically taken to possess and claim that a satisfactory theory of moods must be able either to explain why moods genuinely possess these features or to explain these appearances away in a non-ad hoc way. I show that my account provides (...) a plausible explanation of all the main features of moods. I conclude by addressing some objections against my account. (shrink)

The dominant account of agency takes actions to be brought about and guided by intentions that represent the agent's performance of the action. Merleau-Ponty offers an alternative view that denies intentions are essential for action. He holds instead that the agent's activity is brought about by her apprehension of her environment, without the need for any intervening thoughts that represent her performance of it. I argue that two considerations advanced in favour of the thesis that human cognition is embodied are (...) in tension with the dominant account of agency, and speak in favour of Merleau-Ponty's view. (shrink)

Los diversos estudios que circundan en la literatura de la filosofía de la mente nos acercan a la comprensión de la conciencia desde estudios fisicalistas, naturalistas, y eliminativistas, los cuales, en su mayoría, terminan por sucumbir en el problema del dualismo. La teoría del emergentismo searleano realiza su aporte sobre la comprensión de la naturaleza de la conciencia desde la contribución de las neurociencias, sin caer en reduccionismos y presenta una alternativa de superación del dualismo. Pese a ello, al analizar (...) la teoría naturalista de Searle se evidencia que esta resulta ser insuficiente para comprender la naturaleza del fenómeno mental, además de caer en un nuevo dualismo: naturaleza/sociedad. Razón por la cual, en este escrito se realizará un análisis de la teoría searleana de la conciencia, con el fin de proponer al lenguaje como elemento constitutivo de la naturaleza de este estado mental y no como producto derivado de la mente. Es decir, se propone una concepción biopragmática de la conciencia; estudio en el que se sustenta que biología y pragmática del lenguaje son condiciones sine qua non para la existencia de niveles superiores de la conciencia y superar el dualismo natural/social. (shrink)

Andrew Cling presents a new version of the epistemic regress problem, and argues that intuitionist foundationalism, social contextualism, holistic coherentism, and infinitism fail to solve it. Cling’s discussion is quite instructive, and deserving of careful consideration. But, I argue, Cling’s discussion is not in all respects decisive. I argue that Cling’s dilemma argument against holistic coherentism fails.

In a series of famous experiments, Benjamin Libet claimed to have shown that there is no scientific basis for our commonsensical understanding of freedom of the will. The actions we are about to undertake register in our brains before they register in our conscious minds. And yet, all that Libet may have shown is that long-invoked notions such as “the will” and “freedom” are poor explanations of how actions are initiated. Actions take place as we respond to the call of (...) the mood of the situation in which we find ourselves. Action is a way of attuning ourselves. Simple actions happen as long established habits kick in, and complex actions happen as the mood of a situation comes to correspond to the mood of a story we have been telling ourselves. When it feels right, we just act. (shrink)

Michael Dummett has interpreted and expounded upon intuitionism under the influence of Wittgensteinian views on language, meaning and cognition. I argue against the application of some of these views to intuitionism and point to shortcomings in Dummett's approach. The alternative I propose makes use of recent, post-Wittgensteinian views in the philosophy of mind, meaning and language. These views are associated with the claim that human cognition exhibits intentionality and with related ideas in philosophical psychology. Intuitionism holds that mathematical constructions are (...) mental processes or objects. Constructions are, in the first instance, forms of consciousness or possible experience of a particular type. As such, they must be understood in terms of the concept of intentionality. This view has a historical basis in the literature on intuitionism. In a famous 1931 lecture Heyting in fact identifies constructions with fulfilled or fulfillable mathematical intentions. I consider some of the consequences of this identification and contrast them with Dummett's views on intuitionism. (shrink)

Archaeology is currently bound to a series of metaphysical principles, one of which claims that reality is composed of a series of discrete objects. These discrete objects are fundamental metaphysical entities in archaeological science and posthumanist/new Materialist approaches and can be posited, assembled, counted, and consequently included in quantitative models (e.g. Big Data, Bayesian models) or network models (e.g. Actor-Network Theory). The work by Sørensen and Marila shows that archaeological reality is not that discrete, that some objects cannot be easily (...) identified, and that perhaps reality is not always necessarily composed of discrete objects. The aim of this article is to take Sørensen and Marila’s arguments to their ultimate logical consequences: most archaeological theory today operates under the illusion of a general metaphysics. This illusion dictates not only that all of reality is composed of discrete objects, but that since reality manifests in a certain way, there has to be a methodology that accurately represents that reality. A brief discussion on the notion of “conjecture,” as conceived in certain historical theories, is also presented. (shrink)

This article argues for an epistemology of music, stating that dealing with music can be considered as a process of knowledge acquisition. What really matters is not the representation of an ontological musical reality, but the generation of music knowledge as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world. Three major positions are brought together: the epistemological claims of Jean Piaget, the biological methodology of Jakob von Uexküll, and the constructivistic conceptions of Ernst von Glasersfeld, each ingstress the role of (...) the music user rather than the music. Dealing with music, in this view, is not a matter of representation, but a process of semiotization of the sonorous environment as the outcome of interactions with the sound. Hence the role of enactive cognition and perceptual-motor interaction with the sonic environment. What is considered a central issue is the way how listeners as subjects experience their own phenomenal world or Umwelt, and how they can make sense out of their sonic environment. Umwelt-research, therefore, is highly relevant for music education in stressing the role of the listener and his/her listening strategies. (shrink)

Block's P-/A-consciousness distinction rules out P's involving a specific kind of cognitive access and commits him to a “strong” Pconsciousness. This not only confounds plausible research in the area but betrays an anosognosia about Wittgenstein's diagnosis about our philosophical “introspection” of mysterious inner processes.

In this commentary, I point out some weaknesses in Gray's target article and, in the light of that discussion, I attempt to delineate the kinds of problem a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness faces on its way to a scientific understanding of subjective experience.

I criticize Block's examples of P-consciousness and A-consciousness for being flawed and the notion of A-consciousness for not being a notion of consciousness at all. I argue that an empirically important distinction can be made between behavior that is supported by an underlying conscious experience and behavior that is brought about by nonconscious action-control mechanisms. This distinction is different from that made by Block.

Memories and emotions are both vital parts of everyday life, yet crucial interactions between the two have scarcely been explored. While there has been considerable research into how emotions can influence how well things are remembered, whether or not emotions themselves can be remembered is still a largely uncharted area of research. Philosophers and scientists alike have diverging views on this question, which seems to stem, at least in part, from different accounts of the nature of emotions. Here, I try (...) to answer this question in a way that takes an intuitive notion of emotion and includes both scientific as well as philosophical aspects of both emotions and memory. To do this, I first distinguish between two different ways emotions can be expressed: as certain physiological responses, or as certain conscious experiences. Next, I show how each of these expressions of emotions can be remembered. Finally, I bring these two ways of expressing emotions, and the ways of remembering each of them, together into an explanation that also includes aspects often ascribed to emotions such as cognition. This interdisciplinary endeavor aims to serve as a starting point on what it could mean to remember emotions, and in doing so tries to build a bridge between scientific research and philosophical investigation of the memory of emotions. (shrink)

Sensorimotor psychology studies the mental processes that control goal-directed bodily motion. Recently, sensorimotor psychologists have provided empirically successful Bayesian models of motor control. These models describe how the motor system uses sensory input to select motor commands that promote goals set by high-level cognition. I highlight the impressive explanatory benefits offered by Bayesian models of motor control. I argue that our current best models assign explanatory centrality to a robust notion of mental representation. I deploy my analysis to defend intentional (...) realism, to rebut eliminativism and instrumentalism regarding mental representation, and to explore the relation between intentionality and normativity. (shrink)

Gray, like other recent authors, seeks a scientific approach to consciousness, but fails to provide a biologically convincing description, partly because he implicitly bases his model on a computationalist foundation that embeds the contents of thought in irreducible symbolic representations. When patterns of neural activity instantiating conscious thought are shorn of homuncular observers, it appears most likely that these patterns and the circuitry that compares them with memories and plans should be found distributed over large regions of neocortex.

This paper addresses the phenomenology of hopelessness. I distinguish two broad kinds of predicament that are easily confused: ‘loss of hopes’ and ‘loss of hope’. I argue that not all hope can be characterised as an intentional state of the form ‘I hope that p’. It is possible to lose all hopes of that kind and yet retain another kind of hope. The hope that remains is not an intentional state or a non-intentional bodily feeling. Rather, it is a ‘pre-intentional’ (...) orientation or ‘existential feeling’, by which I mean something in the context of which certain kinds of intentional state, including intentional hope, are intelligible. I go on to discuss severe depression, lack of aspiration, demoralisation and loss of trust in the world, in order to distinguish some qualitatively different forms that loss of hope can take. (shrink)

John Searle claims that intentional states require a set of non-intentional background capacities in order to function. He insists that this 'Background' should be construed naturalistically, in terms of the causal properties of biological brains. This paper examines the relationship between Searle's conception of the Background and his commitment to biological naturalism. It is first observed that the arguments Searle ventures in support of the Background's existence do not entail a naturalistic interpretation. Searle's claim that external realism is part of (...) the Background is then addressed. It is shown that this claim implies an implicit understanding of reality, which is presupposed by the intelligibility of any objective, scientific description. As a consequence, Searle's account of the Background's role is incompatible with his insistence that it can be comprehensively characterized in terms of biological capacities. I conclude by showing that, if the tension is resolved by rejecting biological naturalism, Searle's position takes a substantial step in the direction of Heideggerian phenomenology, a move Searle has emphatically resisted in his various exchanges with Hubert Dreyfus. (shrink)

I examine the way in which Daniel Dennett (1987, 1995) uses his 'intentional' and 'design' stances to make the claim that intentionality is derived from design. I suggest that Dennett is best understood as attempting to supply an objective, nonintentional, naturalistic rationale for our use of intentional concepts. However, I demonstrate that his overall picture presupposes prior application of the intentional stance in a preconditional, ineliminable,'sense-giving' role. Construed as such, Dennett's account is almost identical to the account of biological teleology (...) offered by Kant in The Critique of Judgement, with the consequence that Dennett's naturalism is untenable. My conclusions lead to doubts concerning the legitimacy of any account attempting to naturalise intentionality by extracting normativity from biology and also point to a novel account of biological function. (shrink)

Enactivist (Embodied, Embedded, etc.) approaches in cognitive science and philosophy of mind are sometimes, though not always, conjoined with an anti-representational commitment. A weaker anti-representational claim is that ascribing representational content to internal/sub-personal processes is not compulsory when giving psychological explanations. A stronger anti-representational claim is that the very idea of ascribing representational content to internal/sub-personal processes is a theoretical confusion. This paper criticises some of the arguments made by Hutto & Myin (2013, 2017) for the stronger anti-representational claim and (...) suggests that the default Enactivist view should be the weaker non-representational position. (shrink)

When do children acquire a propositional attitude folk psychology or theory of mind? The orthodox answer to this central question of developmental ToM research had long been that around age 4 children begin to apply “belief” and other propositional attitude concepts. This orthodoxy has recently come under serious attack, though, from two sides: Scoffers complain that it over-estimates children’s early competence and claim that a proper understanding of propositional attitudes emerges only much later. Boosters criticize the orthodoxy for underestimating early (...) competence and claim that even infants ascribe beliefs. In this paper, the orthodoxy is defended on empirical grounds against these two kinds of attacks. On the basis of new evidence, not only can the two attacks safely be countered, but the orthodox claim can actually be strengthened, corroborated and refined: what emerges around age 4 is an explicit, unified, flexibly conceptual capacity to ascribe propositional attitudes. This unified conceptual capacity contrasts with the less sophisticated, less unified implicit forms of tracking simpler mental states present in ontogeny long before. This refined version of the orthodoxy can thus most plausibly be spelled out in some form of 2-systems-account of theory of mind. (shrink)

Naïve Realism claims that veridical perceptual experiences essentially consist in genuine relations between perceivers and mind-independent objects and their features. The contemporary debate in the philosophy of perception has devoted little attention to assessing one of the main motivations to endorse Naïve Realism–namely, that it is the only view which articulates our ‘intuitive’ conception of perception. In this paper, I first clarify in which sense Naïve Realism is supposed to be ‘naïve’. In this respect, I argue that it is put (...) forward as the only view which can take our introspective knowledge of perception at face value, and I identify the two key features of such introspective knowledge. Second, I challenge the claim that one of these features-namely, that it seems as one could not be in the same perceptual state unless the putative objects of perception existed and were perceived–is introspectively evident. Consequently, I argue that a view of perceptual experience–such as Intentionalism–which denies that this feature is true of perception can still take introspection at face value. This undermines the claim that Naïve Realism is the only account which accommodates our intuitions on the nature of perception. (shrink)