Durante los últimos años, el problema de cómo justificar aquellas creencias que se originan en testimonios ha ocupado un lugar central en la epistemología. Sin embargo, muy pocas de esas reflexiones son conocidas en el derecho probatorio. En el presente ensayo analizo la prueba testimonial a la luz de estas reflexiones con el fin de poner de manifiesto los supuestos epistemológicos de algunos principios procesales. En concreto, analizo la legislación colombiana y la estadounidense en el marco de la disputa entre (...) el reduccionismo y el antirreduccionismo en la filosofía del testimonio. Al final sugiero una nueva aproximación epistemológica que replantea los términos de la disputa y que tiene implicaciones importantes para la valoración de la prueba testimonial en los procesos judiciales. (shrink)

The relation between probabilistic and explanatory reasoning is a classical topic in philosophy of science. Most philosophical analyses are concerned with the compatibility of Inference to the Best Explanation with probabilistic, Bayesian inference, and the impact of explanatory considerations on the assignment of subjective probabilities. This paper reverses the question and asks how causal and explanatory considerations are affected by probabilistic information. We investigate how probabilistic information determines the explanatory value of a hypothesis, and in which sense folk explanatory practice (...) can be said to be rational. Our study identifies three main factors in reasoning about a explanatory hypothesis: cognitive salience, rational acceptability and logical entailment. This corresponds well to the variety of philosophical accounts of explanation. Moreover, we show that these factors are highly sensitive to manipulations of probabilistic information. This finding suggests that probabilistic reasoning is a crucial part of explanatory inferences, and it motivates new avenues of research in the debate about Inference to the Best Explanation and probabilistic measures of explanatory power. (shrink)

Science advances by means of argument and debate. Based on a formal model of complex argumentation, this article assesses the interplay between evidential and inferential drivers in scientific controversy, and explains, in particular, why both evidence accumulation and argumentation are veritistically valuable. By improving the conditions for applying veritistic indicators , novel evidence and arguments allow us to distinguish true from false hypotheses more reliably. Because such veritistic indicators also underpin inductive reasoning, evidence accumulation and argumentation enhance the reliability of (...) inductive inference, for example, inference to the best explanation. 1 Introduction2 Theory of Dialectical Structures3 Debate Simulations4 From Evidence and Arguments to Truth: The First Route5 From Evidence to Truth: The Second Route6 Conclusion. (shrink)

I develop an account of scientific representations building on Charles S. Peirce's rich, and still underexplored, notion of iconicity. Iconic representations occupy a central place in Peirce's philosophy, in his innovative approach to logic and in his practice as a scientist. Starting from a discussion of Peirce's approach to diagrams, I claim that Peirce's own representations are in line with his formulation of iconicity, and that they are more broadly connected to the pragmatist philosophy he developed in parallel with his (...) scientific work. I then defend the contemporary relevance of Peirce's approach to iconic representations, and specifically argue that Peirce offers a useful ‘third way’ between what Mauricio Suárez has recently described as the ‘analytical’ and ‘practical’ inquiries into the concept of representation. As a philosophically minded scientist and an experimentally inclined philosopher, Peirce never divorced the practice of representing from questions about what counts as a representation... (shrink)

John Bickle recently proposed a metascientific reading of certain neuroscientific practices related to phenomena traditionally studied by psychology. According to this view, the dominant explanatory proceeding in neuroscience is to apply empirical reductions to explain psychological phenomena in cellular and molecular terms, relegating the role of psychology to a mere heuristic, without explanatory power. Thus, according to the strength of the conclusions reached by this method, it puts in check the value of psychological functional explanations. In this work, we seek (...) to reformulate some of these challenging proposals in philosophy of neuroscience. To this end, the main weaknesses of Bickle's proposal will be shown. Also, here will put into perspective some (reductionist, eliminativists?) features of ruthless reductionism, showing that this model maybe represent only a reading of the pragmatic use of certain methods in neuroscience, rather than a statement of principles generalizable to all cognitive science. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a surge in interest in metaphilosophy. In particular there has been an interest in philosophical methodology. Various questions have been asked about philosophical methods. Are our methods any good? Can we improve upon them? Prior to such evaluative and ameliorative concerns, however, is the matter of what methods philosophers actually use. Worryingly, our understanding of philosophical methodology is impoverished in various respects. This article considers one particular respect in which we seem to be missing an important (...) part of the picture. While it is a received wisdom that the word “ intuition ” has exploded across analytic philosophy in recent decades, the article presents evidence that the explosion is apparent across a broad swathe of academia. It notes various implications for current methodological debates about the role of intuitions in philosophy. (shrink)

The creative aspect of language use provides a set of phenomena that a science of language must explain. It is the “central fact to which any signi- ficant linguistic theory must address itself” and thus “a theory of language that neglects this ‘creative’ aspect is of only marginal interest” (Chomsky 1964: 7–8). Therefore, the form and explanatory depth of linguistic science is restricted in accordance with this aspect of language. In this paper, the implications of the creative aspect of language (...) use for a scientific theory of language will be discussed, noting the possible further implications for a science of the mind. It will be argued that a corollary of the creative aspect of language use is that a science of language can study the mechanisms that make language use possible, but that such a science cannot explain how these mechanisms enter into human action in the form of language use. (shrink)

A primary function of mind is to form and manipulate representations to identify and choose survival-enhancing behaviors. Representations are themselves physical systems that can be manipulated to reason about, predict, or plan actions involving the objects they designate. The field of knowledge representation and reasoning turns representation upon itself to study how representations are formed and used by biological and computer systems. Some of the most versatile and successful KRR methods have been imported from computational physics. Features of a problem (...) are mapped onto dimensions of an imaginary physical system in which solution quality is inversely related to energy. Simulating the fictitious physical system on a digital computer yields a low-energy, and hence high-quality, solution to the original problem. This paper suggests a rethinking of the traditional metaphor of cognition as execution of algorithms on a digital computer. It may be both more fruitful and more accurate to conceive of representation as mapping problem features to an energy surface, learning as identifying representations that map good solutions to low free energy, and problem solving as efficient search for low free energy states. This conception of cognition is in natural accord with Stapp's theory of efficacious conscious choice. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}. (shrink)

Thought experiments have been influential in philosophy at least since Plato, and they have contributed to science at least since Galileo. Some of this influence is appropriate, because thought experiments can have legitimate roles in generating and clarifying hypotheses, as well as in identifying problems in competing hypotheses. I will argue, however, that philosophers have often overestimated the significance of thought experiments by supposing that they can provide evidence that supports the acceptance of beliefs. Accepting hypotheses merely on the basis (...) of thinking about them constitutes a kind of epistemic hubris with many negative consequences, including the acquisition of false beliefs and the blocking of .. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to defending philosophical studies of mind, especially traditional ones. In my view, human mentality is a dialogue with myself, which has a social aspect that is never explained nor predicted by scientific studies. We firstly derive this picture from Descartes’ classical argmuments (§§2-3), and then develop it in the context of Kantian ethics (§4). Some readers think this combination arbitrary. However, these two philosophers agree on mind/body dualism (§5), and further, the fact that the dialogue is (...) often made in an ethical situation leads us to Kantian ethics. We shall draw this developed picture within the format of modern practical syllogisms (§§5-13). Finally, we shall refer to Nick Zangwill’s normative essentialism for the completion of our whole picture (§§7-8). (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the use of scientific models that attribute intentional content to complex systems bears a striking similarity to the way in which statistical descriptions are used. To demonstrate this, I compare and contrast an intentional model with a statistical model, and argue that key similarities between the two give us compelling reasons to consider both as a type of phenomenological model. I then demonstrate how intentional descriptions play an important role in scientific methodology as a (...) type of phenomenal model, and argue that this makes them as essential as any other model of this type. (shrink)

Two of the most influential theories about scientific inference are inference to the best explanation and Bayesianism. How are they related? Bas van Fraassen has claimed that IBE and Bayesianism are incompatible rival theories, as any probabilistic version of IBE would violate Bayesian conditionalization. In response, several authors have defended the view that IBE is compatible with Bayesian updating. They claim that the explanatory considerations in IBE are taken into account by the Bayesian because the Bayesian either does or should (...) make use of them in assigning probabilities to hypotheses. I argue that van Fraassen has not succeeded in establishing that IBE and Bayesianism are incompatible, but that the existing compatibilist response is also not satisfactory. I suggest that a more promising approach to the problem is to investigate whether explanatory considerations are taken into account by a Bayesian who assigns priors and likelihoods on his or her own terms. In this case, IBE would emerge from the Bayesian account, rather than being used to constrain priors and likelihoods. I provide a detailed discussion of the case of how the Copernican and Ptolemaic theories explain retrograde motion, and suggest that one of the key explanatory considerations is the extent to which the explanation a theory provides depends on its core elements rather than on auxiliary hypotheses. I then suggest that this type of consideration is reflected in the Bayesian likelihood, given priors that a Bayesian might be inclined to adopt even without explicit guidance by IBE. The aim is to show that IBE and Bayesianism may be compatible, not because they can be amalgamated, but rather because they capture substantially similar epistemic considerations. 1 Introduction2 Preliminaries3 Inference to the Best Explanation4 Bayesianism5 The Incompatibilist View : Inference to the Best Explanation Contradicts Bayesianism5. 1 Criticism of the incompatibilist view6 Constraint - Based Compatibilism6. 1 Criticism of constraint - based compatibilism7 Emergent Compatibilism7. 1 Analysis of inference to the best explanation7. 1. 1 Inference to the best explanation on specific hypotheses7. 1. 2 Inference to the best explanation on general theories7. 1. 3 Copernicus versus Ptolemy7. 1. 4 Explanatory virtues7. 1. 5 Summary7. 2 Bayesian account8 Conclusion. (shrink)

The introduction to the volume and the overview of the idea of naturalizing the mind.

This paper defines in a formal and computational way the notion of ‘consilience’, a term introduced by Whewell in 1847 for the evaluation of scientific theories. Informally, as has been used to date, a model or theory is ‘consilient’ if it is predictive, explanatory and unifies the evide-nce. Centred in a constructive framework, where new terms can be intro-duced, we essay a formalisation of the idea of unification based on the avoidance of ‘sepa-ration’. However, it is soon manifest that this (...) classical approach is vulnerable to the introduction of fantastic concepts to unify disparate sub-theories. Our second approach is constructed by using a detailed evaluation of the relationship between the theory and the evid-ence by means of reinforcement propagation. With the use of reinfor-cement, fantastic concepts can be better detected and the role of con-silience for theory construction and revision can be specialised for dif-ferent inference mechanisms like explanatory induction, abduction, deduc-tion and analogy. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to argue that abductive reasoning is part of a cognitive process of interpreting something as being something. The paper holds two fundamental claims. First, it proposes a definition of interpretation as a type of cognitive event. Second, it is argued that in some cases the activity of interpreting is a process to search for plausible assumptions for consistent explanatory hypotheses formation. As a result of these two theses, it is concluded that logic of interpretation (...) could enrich and extend the study of so-called reproduction or hypothesis generation. The treatment given here to abduction is contrasted and integrated into the history of studies on logical pattern of abduction and its applications. (shrink)

Peter Lipton has argued that understanding can exist in the absence of explanation. We argue that this does not denigrate explanation's importance to understanding. Specifically, we show that all of Lipton's examples are consistent with the idea that explanation is the ideal of understanding, i.e. other modes of understanding ought to be assessed by how well they replicate the understanding provided by a good and correct explanation. We defend this idea by showing that for all of Lipton's examples of non-explanatory (...) understanding of why p , there exists a correct and reasonably good explanation that would provide greater understanding of p. (shrink)

I examine the warrants we have in light of the empirical successes of a kind of model I call ‘ hybrid models ’, a kind that includes climate models among its members. I argue that these warrants ’ strengths depend on inferential virtues that are not just explanatory virtues, contrary to what would be the case if inference to the best explanation provided the warrants. I also argue that the warrants in question, unlike those IBE provides, guide inferences only to (...) model implications about which there is real uncertainty. My conclusion provides criteria of adequacy for epistemologies of climate and other hybrid models. (shrink)

This article argues that the basic account of mechanism and mechanistic explanation, involving sequential execution of qualitatively characterized operations, is itself insufficient to explain biological phenomena such as the capacity of living organisms to maintain themselves as systems distinct from their environment. This capacity depends on cyclic organization, including positive and negative feedback loops, which can generate complex dynamics. Understanding cyclically organized mechanisms with complex dynamics requires coordinating research directed at decomposing mechanisms into parts and operations with research using computational (...) models to recompose mechanisms and determine their dynamic behavior. This coordinated endeavor yields dynamic mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

Modern medicine has produced many successful theories concerning the causes of diseases. For example, we know that tuberculosis is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and that scurvy is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C. This chapter discusses the nature of medical theories from the perspective of the philosophy, history, and psychology of science. I will review prominent philosophical accounts of what constitutes a scientific theory, and develop a new account of medical theories as representations of mechanisms that explain (...) disease. An account of the nature of medical theories should illuminate many aspects of the development and application of medical knowledge. Most importantly, it should contribute to understanding of medical explanation, both at the general level of causes of diseases and at the individual level of diagnosis of particular cases of a disease. Medical researchers seek to explain the causes of diseases such as tuberculosis, while physicians seek to identify diseases that explain symptoms such as fever. A medical theory such as the bacterial theory of tuberculosis provides good explanations at both the general and individual levels. The primary aim of this chapter is to show how these explanations work. A secondary aim is to show how an account of medical theories can shed light on other aspects of medical research and practice, including the nature of medical discovery, the process of evaluation of competing medical theories, and the ways in which effective treatments of disease depend on the development of good mechanistic theories about diseases. (shrink)

Although explanation is widely regarded as an important concept in the study of rational inquiry, it remains largely unexplored outside the philosophy of science. This, I believe, is not due to oversight as much as to institutional resistance. In analytic philosophy it is basic that epistemic rationality is a function of justification and that justification is a function of argument. Explanation, however, is not argument nor is belief justification its function. I argue here that the task of incorporating explanation into (...) the theory of rational inquiry poses a serious challenge to our basic concept of epistemic rationality as well as the a priori method of inquiry that still lies at the heart of analytic philosophy. Specifically, it pushes us toward a much stronger form of naturalism than is generally thought necessary, one in which argument and explanation are recognized as distinct and equally fundamental cognitive processes whose dynamic relationship is one of the central issues in the theory of rationality. (shrink)

This paper examines some of the most important metaphors and analogies that epistemologists have used to discuss the structure and validity of knowledge. After reviewing foundational, coherentist, and other metaphors for knowledge, we discuss the metaphilosophical significance of the prevalence of such metaphors. We argue that they support a view of philosophy as akin to science rather than poetry or rhetoric. Keywords: epistemology, metaphor, analogy, metaphilosophy, foundations, coherence.

Die Frage, was eine wissenschaftliche Erklärung ist, stellt seit mehr als einem halben Jahrhundert ein zentrales Thema der Wissenschaftsphilosophie dar. Die heutige Diskussion begann mit einer richtungsweisenden Arbeit von Carl Hempel im Jahre 1942 über den Erklärungsbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft. In dieser Arbeit gab Hempel, frühere Überlegungen von John Stuart Mill, Karl Popper und anderen präzisierend, eine formale Definition der Erklärung eines singulären Faktums.1 Mit seiner dem zugrunde liegenden Auffassung, dass die Wissenschaften sehr wohl in der Lage sind, Erklärungen zu (...) liefern, setzt sich Hempel ab von den zur damaligen Zeit vorherrschenden antimetaphysisch gestimmten Erklärungsskeptikern wie Pierre Duhem. Es ist jedoch wichtig zu betonen, dass Hempels Definition des Konzeptes der wissenschaftlichen Erklärung nicht wesentlich über das Deskriptive hinaus geht und damit auch und gerade von Empiristen akzeptiert werden kann. Bekanntlich versteht man unter einer Erklärung in Hempels Deduktiv-Nomologischen (D-N) Modell ein deduktiv gültiges Argument, zu dessen Prämisse (dem sog. Explanans) mindestens ein universelles Gesetz und eine Menge von singulären Sätzen gehört und dessen Konklusion das zu erklärende Faktum (das sog. Explanandum) ist. (shrink)

The concept of preadaptation, though useful, continues to trouble evolutionary scientists. Usually, it is treated as if it were really adaptation, prompting such diverse theorists as Gould and Vrba, and Dennett to suggest its removal from evolutionary theory altogether. In this paper, I argue that the as-if sense is ill-founded, and that the sense of preadaptation as a process may be defended as unequivocal and generally useful in evolutionary explanations, even in such problem areas as human evolution.

Scientists and laypeople alike use the sense of understanding that an explanation conveys as a cue to good or correct explanation. Although the occurrence of this sense or feeling of understanding is neither necessary nor sufficient for good explanation, it does drive judgments of the plausibility and, ultimately, the acceptability, of an explanation. This paper presents evidence that the sense of understanding is in part the routine consequence of two well-documented biases in cognitive psychology: overconfidence and hindsight. In light of (...) the prevalence of counterfeit understanding in the history of science, I argue that many forms of cognitive achievement do not involve a sense of understanding, and that only the truth or accuracy of an explanation make the sense of understanding a valid cue to genuine understanding. (shrink)

To examine Heidegger's pedagogy is to be invited into a particular era and cultural reality—starting in Weimar Germany and progressing into the rise and fall of the Third Reich. In his attempt to reform the German university in a strictly hierarchical, authoritarian and nationalistic mold, Heidegger addressed one group of students and professors and not another. The petit‐bourgeois student and the future philosophers he invited with his ‘logic of recruitment’ into the corps of instructors, would share his coded language with (...) its built‐in taboos and censorship. The result was a rhetoric of absolute self‐reference and a semiotic of pure propaganda, based on the evocation of the ancient Greeks in which the philosopher meant to project all that was properly Germanic. Heidegger's rhetoric is exclusionary; its politics and its philosophy are interpenetrating. His lecture courses grew increasingly poeticized, and thus mired in ambiguity, evasion, elision, avoidance, grandiloquence. Parallels are drawn in this essay between Heidegger and our time. Is Heidegger's insistence on autocratic controls within the German university comparable to the corporate positions taken today by some educators? How does the shifting relation between disciplines affect the role of the specialist? How might the sciences morales or humanities, along with the much maligned ‘humanism’, be redefined morally and holistically? (shrink)

What is the relation between coherence and truth? This paper rejects numerous answers to this question, including the following: truth is coherence; coherence is irrelevant to truth; coherence always leads to truth; coherence leads to probability, which leads to truth. I will argue that coherence of the right kind leads to at least approximate truth. The right kind is explanatory coherence, where explanation consists in describing mechanisms. We can judge that a scientific theory is progressively approximating the truth if it (...) is increasing its explanatory coherence in two key respects: broadening by explaining more phenomena and deepening by investigating layers of mechanisms. I sketch an explanation of why deepening is a good epistemic strategy and discuss the prospect of deepening knowledge in the social sciences and everyday life. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a place for logic inscientific methodology, at the same level asthat of computational and historicalapproaches. While it is well known that a awhole generation of philosophers dismissedLogical Positivism (not just for the logicthough), there are at least two reasons toreconsider logical approaches in the philosophyof science. On the one hand, the presentsituation in logical research has gone farbeyond the formal developments that deductivelogic reached last century, and new researchincludes the formalization of several othertypes of (...) reasoning, like induction andabduction. On the other hand, we call for abalanced Philosophy of Science, one inwhich both methods, the formal and thehistorical may be complementary, togetherproviding a pluralistic view of science, inwhich no method is the predominant one. (shrink)

Rational analysis (Anderson 1990, 1991a) is an empiricalprogram of attempting to explain why the cognitive system isadaptive, with respect to its goals and the structure of itsenvironment. We argue that rational analysis has two importantimplications for philosophical debate concerning rationality. First,rational analysis provides a model for the relationship betweenformal principles of rationality (such as probability or decisiontheory) and everyday rationality, in the sense of successfulthought and action in daily life. Second, applying the program ofrational analysis to research on human reasoning (...) leads to a radicalreinterpretation of empirical results which are typically viewed asdemonstrating human irrationality. (shrink)

Epistemologists have debated at length whether scientific discovery is a rational and logical process. If it is, according to the Artificial Intelligence hypothesis, it should be possible to write computer programs able to discover laws or theories; and if such programs were written, this would definitely prove the existence of a logic of discovery. Attempts in this direction, however, have been unsuccessful: the programs written by Simon's group, indeed, infer famous laws of physics and chemistry; but having found no new (...) law, they cannot properly be considered discovery machines. The programs written in the Turing tradition, instead, produced new and useful empirical generalization, but no theoretical discovery, thus failing to prove the logical character of the most significant kind of discoveries. A new cognitivist and connectionist approach by Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett and Thagard, looks more promising. Reflection on their proposals helps to understand the complex character of discovery processes, the abandonment of belief in the logic of discovery by logical positivists, and the necessity of a realist interpretation of scientific research. (shrink)

Fodor argues that our minds must have epistemic limitations because there must be endogenous constraints on the class of concepts we can acquire. However, his argument for the existence of these endogenous constraints is falsified by the phenomenon of the deferential acquisition of concepts. If we allow for the acquisition of concepts through deferring to experts and scientific instruments, then our conceptual capacity will be without endogenous constraints, and there will be no reason to think that our minds are epistemically (...) bounded. (shrink)

Como área interdisciplinar, as Ciências Cognitivas começam a se desenvolver em meados da década de 1950 a partir de uma concepção compartilhada sobre a mente, hoje chamada de cognitivista. Esses pesquisadores concebiam a mente com uma natureza representacional que opera por meio de computações simbólicas. Atualmente, há uma multiplicidade de abordagens e teorias sobre a mente. Nesse espectro de posições, há desde abordagens tradicionais, que concebem a mente como representacional, até abordagens bastante radicais, que negam qualquer natureza representacional para a (...) mente. Após introduzir este tema, apresentamos as críticas de William Ramsey à representação enquanto definidora das Ciências Cognitivas ou, em outros termos, à representação enquanto critério de demarcação do cognitivo. Desenvolveremos uma hipótese interpretativa para a crítica de Ramsey mobilizando o conceito de estratégia de pesquisa, de Hugh Lacey. Apresentaremos a distinção de Lacey entre adoção de uma estratégia e aceitação de uma teoria, discutindo a suposta independência avaliativa entre estratégia e teoria. Finalizaremos com a defesa de um pluralismo de estratégias nas Ciências Cognitivas. Diferente de concepções que buscam reduzir prematuramente as Ciências Cognitivas a uma única estratégia, o pluralismo que defendemos equilibra a eficiência na resolução de problemas com outros valores considerados importantes, como a abrangência empírica e a neutralidade no sentido de inclusividade e equitatividade de valores. No atual momento das ciências cognitivas, o pluralismo de estratégias constitui o caminho mais promissor. (shrink)

To Doubt in Our Hearts: The Substance Dualism in the Light of Peirce’s Criticism of "the Spirit of Cartesianism" -/- In this article, the author addresses the problem of Cartesian dualism through the prism of Peirce’s criticism of the "spirit of Cartesianism". The faith in the intuitive knowledge and the strong emphasis on individualism Peirce sees as its two main features, therefore, they are the focus of the paper. The underlying idea is to show that, in the light of the (...) pragmatic critique, the Cartesian substance dualism appears to be foremost an epistemological and methodological problem, and not a metaphysical problem of disparate substances. (shrink)

In filosofia spesso si segue un metodo stando al quale una tesi o teoria che sia più in sintonia con il senso comune deve essere preferita alle posizioni meno in sintonia con esso, per lo meno fino a quando non si mostri che quella tesi o teoria è inadeguata e che una delle posizioni avverse costituisce un adeguato sostituto. Nel presente contributo si vuole offrire una caratterizzazione della nozione di senso comune generalmente in uso nei dibattiti filosofici contemporanei; illustrare criticamente (...) i principali metodi impiegabili per determinare contenuti filosoficamente rilevanti del senso comune; chiarire e giustificare il metodo filosofico dell'appello al senso comune; presentare, d'altro canto, alcune delle strategie argomentative attuabili da chi si trovi a sostenere una tesi o teoria contrastante con il senso comune. (shrink)

Disease transmission is a fruitful domain in which to examine how scientific and folk theories interrelate, given laypeople’s access to multiple sources of information to explain events of personal significance. The current paper reports an in-depth survey of U.S. adults’ causal reasoning about two viral illnesses: a novel, deadly disease that has massively disrupted everyone’s lives, and a familiar, innocuous disease that has essentially no serious consequences. Participants received a series of closed-ended and open-ended questions probing their reasoning about disease (...) transmission, with a focus on causal mechanisms underlying disease contraction, transmission, treatment, and prevention; non-visible biological processes; and ontological frameworks regarding what kinds of entities viruses are. We also assessed participants’ attitudes, such as their trust in scientific experts and willingness to be vaccinated. Results indicated complexity in people’s reasoning, consistent with the co-existence of multiple explanatory frameworks. An understanding of viral transmission and viral replication existed alongside folk theories, placeholder beliefs, and lack of differentiation between viral and non-viral disease. For example, roughly 40% of participants who explained illness in terms of the transmission of viruses also endorsed a non-viral folk theory, such as exposure to cold weather or special foods as curative. Additionally, participants made use of competing modes of construal when explaining how viruses operate, such as framing the immune system response as cells trying to fight off the virus. Indeed, participants who displayed greater knowledge about viral transmission were significantly more likely to anthropomorphize bodily processes. Although comparisons of COVID-19 and the common cold revealed relatively few differences, the latter, more familiar disease elicited consistently lower levels of accuracy and greater reliance on folk theories. Moreover, for COVID-19 in particular, accuracy positively correlated with attitudes, self-protective behaviors, and willingness to be vaccinated. For both diseases, self-assessed knowledge about the disease negatively predicted accuracy. The results are discussed in relation to challenges for formal models of explanatory reasoning. (shrink)

In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this paper, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism. We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau's comparison between what they call the “perceptual practice” and the “moral intuition practice”, which we take to raise some difficult (...) normative and meta‐normative questions for theorists of all stripes. (shrink)

Structural requirements of rationality prohibit various things, like having inconsistent combinations of attitudes, having means-end incoherent combinations of attitudes, and so on. But what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? And do we fall under an obligation to be structurally rational? These issues have been at the heart of significant debates over the past fifteen years. Some philosophers have recently argued that we can unify the structural requirements of rationality by analyzing what is constitutive of our attitudes (...) (Lee, 2020; Worsnip, 2018a). It has also been suggested that, in the course of good first-personal deliberation, agents should treat structurally irrational combinations of attitudes as off-limits (Worsnip, 2021). In this paper, I raise a worry for these two theses concerning structural rationality. Roughly, I argue that some imperfect epistemic agents (like us) can be disposed to have structurally irrational combinations of attitudes. Also, when these imperfect agents deliberate, they should not treat structurally irrational combinations of attitudes as off-limits. Given our imperfections, being structurally irrational can very well be the best option we have. More generally, these observations reveal that structural rationality should not always be theorized independently from more “substantive” norms, like responsiveness to reasons or expected value optimization. (shrink)

This paper explores the current obstacles that a cognitive theory of humor faces. More specifically, I argue that the nebulous and ill-defined nature of humor makes it difficult to tell what counts as clear instances of, and deficits in, the phenomenon.Without getting clear on this, we cannot identify the underlying cognitive mechanisms responsible for humor. Moreover, being too quick to draw generalizations regarding the ubiquity of humor, or its uniqueness to humans, without substantially clarifying the phenomenon and its occurrences is (...) not only unwise but can actually be a detriment to our study of humor. As such, these sorts of claims must be resisted. I conclude the paper by pointing the way forward to addressing these obstacles. -/- . (shrink)

At the close of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Richard Rorty lays out a contrast between what he calls 'systematic' and 'edifying' philosophical anthropologies. Whereas the systematic philosopher aims to speak for the ages, the edifying philosopher addresses herself to issues of her day, often by way of shattering conventional idols. Rorty sees these two approaches as mutually exclusive. The aim of this paper is to defend a conception of philosophy as both systematic and edifying in the relevant senses. (...) I first respond to Rorty's argument that Wilfrid Sellars' account of picturing, as an isomorphic relation between the world and states of the central nervous system, involves an illicit 'mind as mirror' metaphor. I then lay out some of the philosophical anthropology that motivates Sellars' account of picturing, and I connect this anthropology to philosophical and scientific work undertaken in Europe and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On this basis I argue that we are left with a (systematic) project handed down to us by earlier generations, and that in taking up this project we are in the (edifying) business of creating new ways of thinking about ourselves as part of the natural world. (shrink)

Various writings by the later Wittgenstein on the philosophy of psychology, published posthumously, express his basic critical attitude toward certain concepts and issues in the philosophy of psychology. His attitude towards folk psychology is negative in principle, leaving him opposed to the foundation of current psychological research. This critique of folk psychology and of the philosophy of psychology in general is in accord with the general method of his later philosophy, that is, dealing with philosophical problems by dissolving them. However, (...) his critical attitude towards folk psychology has been less influential in the development of contemporary philosophy, and is in opposition to the philosophy of psychology and folk psychology as practiced today. In this paper I will analyze Wittgenstein's understanding of the concept of psychology, offering a different interpretation from that of other scholars, and explain why and how contemporary philosophers of psychology misunderstand Wittgenstein. (shrink)

The coherence of independent reports provides a strong reason to believe that the reports are true. This plausible claim has come under attack from recent work in Bayesian epistemology. This work shows that, under certain probabilistic conditions, coherence cannot increase the probability of the target claim. These theorems are taken to demonstrate that epistemic coherentism is untenable. To date no one has investigated how these results bear on different conceptions of coherence. I investigate this situation using Thagard’s ECHO model of (...) explanatory coherence. Thagard’s ECHO model provides a natural representation of the evidential significance of multiple independent reports. (shrink)

Especialistas em desenvolvimento de Inteligência Artificial prevêem que o avanço no desenvolvimento de sistemas e agentes inteligentes irá remodelar áreas vitais em nossa sociedade. Contudo, se tal avanço não for realizado de maneira prudente e crítico-reflexiva, pode resultar em desfechos negativos para a humanidade. Por este motivo, diversos pesquisadores na área têm desenvolvido uma concepção de IA robusta, benéfica e segura para a preservação da humanidade e do meio-ambiente. Atualmente, diversos dos problemas em aberto no campo de pesquisa em IA (...) advêm da dificuldade de evitar comportamentos indesejados de agentes e sistemas inteligentes, e ao mesmo tempo especificar o que realmente queremos que tais sistemas façam, especialmente quando prospectamos a possibilidade de agentes inteligentes atuarem em vários domínios ao longo prazo. É de suma importância que agentes inteligentes artificiais tenham seus valores alinhados com os valores humanos, dado ao fato de que não podemos esperar que uma IA desenvolva valores morais humanos por conta de sua inteligência, conforme é discutido na Tese da Ortogonalidade. Talvez tal dificuldade venha da maneira que estamos abordando o problema de expressar objetivos, valores e metas, utilizando de métodos cognitivos representacionais. Uma solução para este problema seria a abordagem dinâmica proposta por Dreyfus, que com base na filosofia fenomenológica mostra que a experiência humana do ser-no-mundo em diversos aspectos não é bem representada pelo método cognitivo simbólico ou conexionista, especialmente na questão de aprendizagem de valores. Uma possível abordagem para esse problema seria a utilização de modelos téoricos como SED para abordar o porblema de aprendizagem de valores em IA. (shrink)

There has been little investigation to date of the way metacognition is involved in conceptual change. It has been recognised that analytic metacognition is important to the way older children acquire more sophisticated scientific and mathematical concepts at school. But there has been barely any examination of the role of metacognition in earlier stages of concept acquisition, at the ages that have been the major focus of the developmental psychology of concepts. The growing evidence that even young children have a (...) capacity for procedural metacognition raises the question of whether and how these abilities are involved in conceptual development. More specifically, are there developmental changes in metacognitive abilities that have a wholescale effect on the way children acquire new concepts and replace existing concepts? We show that there is already evidence of at least one plausible example of such a link and argue that these connections deserve to be investigated systematically. (shrink)

Technological artefacts have, in recent years, invited increasingly intimate ways of interaction. But surprisingly little attention has been devoted to how such interactions, like with wearable devices or household robots, shape our minds, cognitive capacities, and moral character. In this thesis, I develop an embodied, enactive account of mind--technology interaction that takes the reciprocal influence of artefacts on minds seriously. First, I examine how recent developments in philosophy of technology can inform the phenomenology of mind--technology interaction as seen through an (...) enactivist lens. Second, I show how an enactive account of remembering can improve operationalizations of the memory palace mnemonic through virtual reality devices. Third, I draw on virtue ethics to argue that an enactivist approach allows us to better grasp the morally shaping aspects of artefacts by looking at social robots. Fourth, I fend off an underlying metaphysical concern about enactivism by arguing that an embodied, enactive account is compatible with the multiple realization of cognitive processes. This principle is often seen as a crucial test favouring accounts such as extended functionalism over enactivism and I argue that some forms of enactivism pass this test as well. Finally, I conclude by considering what the future relationship between enactivism and functionalism may have in store for the study of mind--technology interaction. (shrink)

According to the thesis of the guise of the normative, all desires are associated with normative appearances or judgments. But guise of the normative theories differ sharply over the content of the normative representation, with the two main versions being the guise of reasons and the guise of the good. Chapter 6 defends the comparative thesis that the guise of reasons thesis is more promising than the guise of the good. The central idea is that observations from the theory of (...) content determination can be used in order to constrain possible theories of the representational contents associated with desire. The authors argue that the initially most promising versions of the guise of the good fail to meet these constraints, and then explain the steep challenge confronting any who wish to craft a new guise of the good theory which meets the constraints while also preserving the initial motivations for adopting any guise of the normative theory at all. But a simple version of the guise of reasons not only avoids the troubles besetting the guise of the good but proceeds immediately from a deep diagnosis of the source of its difficulties. (shrink)

In this essay, I will suggest ways of improving on Davidson’s conception of the explanatory autonomy of folk psychological explanations. For that purpose, I will appeal to insights from the recent theory of mind debate emphasizing the centrality of various forms of empathy for our understanding of another person’s mindedness. While I will argue that we need to abandon Davidson’s position of anomalous monism, I will also show that my account is fully compatible with Davidson’s non-reductive and interpretationist account of (...) meaning and mental content. Indeed, my account does more justice to the empathic capacities underlying our interpretive capacities, which Davidson himself has to acknowledge in thinking about the constitutive features of thought and meaning. More specifically, I will propose a new way of philosophically safeguarding the causal-explanatory autonomy of our ordinary action explanations by showing how our empathic capacities are involved in epistemically delineating the domain of rational agency. (shrink)

This paper analyzes what it means for philosophy of science to be normative. It argues that normativity is a multifaceted phenomenon rather than a general feature that a philosophical theory either has or lacks. It analyzes the normativity of philosophy of science by articulating three ways in which a philosophical theory can be normative. Methodological normativity arises from normative assumptions that philosophers make when they select, interpret, evaluate, and mutually adjust relevant empirical information, on which they base their philosophical theories. (...) Object normativity emerges from the fact that the object of philosophical theorizing can itself be normative, such as when philosophers discuss epistemic norms in science. Metanormativity arises from the kind of claims that a philosophical theory contains, such as normative claims about science as it should be. Distinguishing these three kinds of normativity gives rise to a nuanced and illuminating view of how philosophy of science can be normative. (shrink)