Recently, a revival of phenomenological approaches has been gaining ground in the literature of cognition and human understanding. Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World plays a decisive role here. Instead of viewing the mind as an independent entity separated from the “outer” world, these approaches assert an immediate understanding of a meaningful environment. Such an immediate understanding is seen in the light of embodied practices, when humans are engaged in skillful absorbed coping. An analysis of Heidegger’s concept of truth provides a more sophisticated view. (...) Being-in-the-World does not always grant direct access to an immediate understanding of a meaningful environment. Often, other objects in the world conceal themselves from human view. In a first approach, this understanding of truth will be elaborated on the basis of an exegesis of Heidegger’s text concerning his question of truth. What this actually means for a phenomenological understanding will be explained by a closer look at two central topics in Being and Time: disturbance and anxiety. The idea is to show that Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World—properly interpreted—can offer a “third way” beyond the limits of a mindless coping and an understanding of the mind as a self-standing entity detached from other entities in the world. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with representational explanations of how one experiences and acts with one’s body as an integrated whole. On the standard view, accounts of bodily experience and action must posit a corresponding representational structure: a representation of the body as an integrated whole. The aim of this paper is to show why we should instead favour the minimal view: given the nature of the body, and representation of its parts, accounts of the structure of bodily experience and action (...) need not appeal to a representation of the body as an integrated whole. The argument proceeds by distinguishing two kinds of explanatory roles for representations: standing-in for absent targets and structuring ambiguous sensory information concerning a target. Representations of body-parts are suited to fulfil both kinds of explanatory role, whereas a representation of the body as an integrated whole is only suited to fulfil the latter, as a means of coordinating representations of body-parts. It is then argued that the structure of the body can itself serve as a means of coordinating body-part representations, rendering representation of the body as an integrated whole explanatorily superfluous. (shrink)

Based on more than 24 months of ethnographic research among Maya ritualists in the western highlands of Guatemala, this article examines howpajooneem, ortz’ite’seed divination, facilitates decision-making and distributes cognition between client, diviner, and ritual techniques.Tz’ite’seed divination exhibits a stylized routine that draws on important ‘mediating structures,’ including the 260-day ritual calendar known throughout Mesoamerica. Because it is both a ritual and cognitive practice, Maya divination grounds decision-making in a perennially relevant set of cultural values.

According to most Evolutionary Psychologists, human moral attitudes are rooted in cognitive modules that evolved in the Stone Age to solve problems of social interaction. A crucial component of their view is that such cognitive modules remain unchanged since the Stone Age, and I question that here. I appeal to evolutionary rollback, the phenomenon where an organ becomes non-functional and eventually atrophies or disappears—e.g. cave-dwelling fish losing their eyes. I argue that even if cognitive modules evolved in the Stone Age (...) to solve problems of social interaction, conditions since then have favoured rollback of those modules. This is because there are institutions that solve those problems—e.g. legal systems. Moreover, evidence suggests that where external resources are available to perform cognitive tasks, humans often use them instead of internal ones. In arguing that Stone Age cognitive modules are unchanged, Evolutionary Psychologists say that evolutionary change is necessarily slow, and that there is high genetic similarity between human populations worldwide. I counter-argue that what is necessarily slow is the building-up of complex mechanisms. Undoing this can be much quicker. Moreover, rollback of cognitive mechanisms need not require any genetic change. Finally, I argue that cross-cultural similarity in some trait need not be rooted in genetic similarity. This is not intended as decisive evidence that rollback has occurred. To finish, I suggest ways we might decide whether moral attitudes are likely to be rooted in unchanged Stone Age modules, given that I have argued that cross-cultural similarity is not enough. (shrink)

Completeness is an important but misunderstood norm of explanation. It has recently been argued that mechanistic accounts of scientific explanation are committed to the thesis that models are complete only if they describe everything about a mechanism and, as a corollary, that incomplete models are always improved by adding more details. If so, mechanistic accounts are at odds with the obvious and important role of abstraction in scientific modelling. We respond to this characterization of the mechanist’s views about abstraction and (...) articulate norms of completeness for mechanistic explanations that have no such unwanted implications. _1_ Introduction _2_ A Balancing Act: When Do Details Matter? _3_ The Norms of Causal Explanation _4_ The Norms of Constitutive Explanation _5_ Salmon-Completeness _6_ From More Details to More Relevant Details _7_ Non-explanatory Virtues of Abstraction _8_ From Explanatory Models to Explanatory Knowledge _9_ Mechanistic Completeness Reconsidered _10_ Conclusion. (shrink)

Levinas is usually discussed as a philosopher wrestling with the nature of our experience of others, ethical obligation, and the divine. Unlike other phenomenologists, such as Husserl and Heidegger, he is not often mentioned in discussions about issues in philosophy of mind. His work in that area, especially on perception, is underappreciated. He gives an account of the nature of perceptual experience that is remarkable both in how it departs from that of others in the phenomenological tradition and for how (...) it fits in among presently available views about the nature of perceptual experience, namely, as a form of naïve realism. (shrink)

This article discusses the tension between social relationality and self-relationality central to Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein and the possible ways of reconciling this tension. Arguing that this is a tension between communicability and existential commitments, the article poses the question: How are existential commitments responsive to communication? After problematizing the quasi-Kantian and communitarian ways of settling the tension, the article uses Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle to develop a third hermeneutic model of ethical relationality according to which existential commitments are (...) shareable in communication, since ethos – the existential posture towards the good – arises out of pathos that exposes Dasein to coexistence. The account of ethical relationality found in Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle thus takes the world to be a shared and dynamic ontological condition and emphasize that the world constitutes selfhood in a way that is constantly at stake in ethical communication. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a gap in the interpretive resources available to members of a society due to the marginalization of members of a social group from sense‐making practices. In this paper, I address two questions about hermeneutical injustice that are undertheorized in the recent literature: (1) what do we mean when we say that someone lacks the interpretive resources for making sense of an experience? and (2) how do marginalized individuals develop interpretive resources? In response to (1), (...) I argue that to lack interpretive resources is to lack conceptual skill or know how. In response to (2), I draw on resources from Gilbert Ryle and Andy Clark and provide a model of how marginalized individuals develop new conceptual skills by naming their shared experience and using it as a tool for scaffolding each other's conceptual performance. At the same time, I draw on the work of Gaile Pohlhaus and Kristie Dotson to show how these practices succeed only through the redistribution of epistemic power across differently situated social groups. (shrink)

I articulate and argue for a modest use to which philosophers who are not historians of philosophy might put the history of philosophy. That use is in conceptual cartography. I understand conceptual cartography to be the practice of mapping how concepts, including those as complex as philosophical views, relate. Using the history of philosophy in conceptual cartography uses that history to situate landmarks on a conceptual map, and then situates other views (historical or contemporary) relative to those landmarks. After articulating (...) and arguing for this use, I consider objections. (shrink)

In the 1940s, Gilbert Ryle argued for anti-intellectualism about know how. More recently, new intellectualists have challenged the canonical status of Ryle's arguments, and in the ensuing debate Ryleans appear to be on their back foot. However, contributors on both sides of the debate tend to ignore or misconstrue Ryle's own positive account of know how. In this paper, I develop two aspects of Ryle's positive account that have been overlooked. For Ryle, S knows how to Φ iff (1) S (...) is able to reliably live up to the norms for Φ-ing, and (2) S Φ’s responsibly. In the first half of the paper, I argue that the two conditions rule out the various counter-examples to the simple ability view attributed to Ryle. In the second half of the paper, I argue that Ryle's second condition provides us with an account of warrant related to know how. (shrink)

Long-exposure photographs present distinctive philosophical challenges. They do not quite look like things in motion. Experiences of such photos take time, but not in a way that mimics the time of the motion depicted. In fact, it would not be off base to worry that these photos fail, strictly speaking, to depict motion or things-in-time. And if they fail to depict motion, then it is an interesting question what, if anything, they succeed in depicting. These timeless traces of temporal patterns (...) are thus a challenge to how we understand pictures. In addition to being representations, however, such photographs are recordings. They witlessly register aspects of scenes in a manner that can be replayed. The following shows that recording is a valuable and neglected tool for investigating representational practices. Aspects of what photos record also figure in their representational contents, and this provides a way of approaching the photography of events in time. This article proceeds by framing, and then answering, three questions. First, what do photos record about temporal patterns? Second, which aspects of such recordings also show up in photos’ representational contents? And third, do these pictures depict, rather than merely represent, such temporal patterns? (shrink)

Can we learn something interesting about knowledge by examining our concept of knowledge? Quite a bit, many argue. My own view, however, is that the concept of knowledge is of little epistemological interest. In this paper, I critically examine one particularly interesting defense of the view that the concept of knowledge is of great epistemological interest: Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature. A minimalist view about the value of examining our concept of knowledge is defended.

Epistemologists generally think that genuine warrant that is available to anyone must be available to everyone who is exposed to the relevant causal inputs and is able and willing to properly exercise her rationality. The motivating idea behind this requirement is roughly that an objective view is one that is not bound to a particular perspective. In this paper I ask whether the aperspectivality of our warrants is a precondition for securing the objectivity of our claims. I draw upon a (...) Sellarsian account of perception in order to argue that it is not; rather, inquirers can have contingent properties and perspectives that give them access to forms of rational warrant and objective knowledge that others do not have. The universal accessibility of reasons, on my account, is not a precondition for the legitimacy of any actual warrant, but rather a regulative ideal governing inquiry and communication. (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)

Following Gilbert Ryle’s arguments, many philosophers took it for granted that someone knows how to do something just in case they have the ability to do it. Within the last couple decades, new intellectualists have challenged this longstanding anti-intellectualist assumption. Their central contention is that mere abilities aren’t on the same rational, epistemic level as know how. My goal is to intellectualize know how without over-intellectualizing it. Intelligent behavior is characteristically flexible or responsive to novelty, and the distinctive feature of (...) creatures who exhibit flexible behavior is their capacity to learn. As it turns out, Ryle already identified a core characteristic of learning shared widely across the animal kingdom from the lowly rat to the top athlete. Taking my cues from Ryle, I argue that know how is successful performance resulting from self-regulated abilities. To regulate an ability is to be disposed to adjust to error and respond to feedback. While regulating sophisticated human abilities often requires propositional knowledge, in many simpler cases it does not. I focus on the navigational know how of rats and honeybees. Although they possess know how, whether they possess propositional knowledge is at best an open question. (shrink)

This paper discusses the constitution relation within the framework of the mechanistic approach to neurobiological explanation. It develops a regularity theory of constitution as an alternative to the manipulationist theory of constitution advocated by some of the proponents of the mechanistic approach. After the main problems of the manipulationist account of constitution have been reviewed, the regularity account is developed based on the notion of a minimal type relevance theory. A minimal type relevance theory expresses a minimally necessary condition of (...) a given type that consists of a disjunction of minimally sufficient conditions of that type. Afterwards, the attained definition is successfully applied in an analysis of the logical structure of the explanation of spatial learning and memory in rats as a paradigm neurobiological explanation. The overall result is a more robust and more precise version of the mechanistic approach to neurobiological explanations. (shrink)

This paper argues, contrary to Fodor’s well-known position, that the iconic and discursive modes of representation are not mutually exclusive categories. It is argued that there exists at least a third kind of representation which blends the semantic properties of icons and the syntactic properties of discourses. We reason that this iconic-discursive genus behaves differently from other representational formats, such as distributed representations or maps, previously put forward as challenging Fodor’s basic distinction. A reflection follows about how this kind of (...) representation impacts on the Fodorian issues for which the original dual distinction was argumentatively instrumental, namely, the kinds of codes and possible inter-code relations accessible to the representational mind. The suggestion is put forward that iconic-discursive representations may facilitate trade-offs between the world and the representational mind, as well as between the differently complex levels of representation that mediate between percepts and concepts. We conclude that such aspects of the computational mind, which until now appeared to be stubbornly resistant with respect to a conciliation of Hume’s empiricism and Fodor’s computationalism, may be more easily accessed and understood taking advantage of the biosemiotics perspective and acknowledging the richness of the biosemiotics codes accessible to cognition. (shrink)

There are two extreme poles in the literature on akrasia. Internalists hold that it's impossible to act intentionally against your better judgment, because there's a necessary internal relation between judgment and intentional action. To the contrary, externalists maintain that we can act intentionally against our better judgment, because the will operates independently of judgment. Critics of internalism argue that it fails a realism test—most people seem to think that we can and do act intentionally against our better judgment. And critics (...) of externalism argue that it flirts with incoherence by severing the intimate link between judgment and action. Drawing on resources from phenomenology, the cognitive sciences, analytic action theory, and recent “hybrid models” of skilled action, I argue that one route beyond this theoretical impasse is to understand akrasia as a form of skillful pre-reflective intentional action. This strategy, I argue, preserves the internalist insight that there is indeed an intimate relation between judgment and intentional action; and it also confirms the externalist claim that this relation is defeasible, but it does so without falling into incoherence. (shrink)

According to relational views of autonomy, some social relations or forms of dependence are necessary for autonomous agency. Recent relational theorists have primarily focused on autonomy of action or practical autonomy, and the result has been a shift away from individualistic conceptions of autonomy in the practical realm. Despite these trends, individualistic conceptions are still the default when it comes to autonomy of belief or intellectual autonomy. In this paper, I argue for a relational account of intellectual autonomy. Specifically, I (...) claim that intellectual autonomy requires a sense of one’s standing as an equal member of the epistemic community. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to introduce an approach for understanding social cognition that we call the normative approach to social cognition. Such an approach, which results from a systematization of previous arguments and ideas from authors such as Ryle, Dewey, or Wittgenstein, is an alternative to the classic model and the direct social perception model. In section 2, we evaluate the virtues and flaws of these two models. In section 3, we introduce the normative approach, according to (...) which human, socio-cognitive competences rely on a myriad of social norms and routines that mediate our social interactions in such a way that we can make sense of each other without taking into consideration their mental states. In sections 4 and 5, we find some common premises shared by the two prior models and offer some arguments against them. In section 6, we advance some possible arguments against our approach and offer some responses against them. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications for higher education of recent work on narrative theory, distributed cognition and artificial intelligence. These perspectives are contrasted with the educational implications of Heidegger's ontological phenomenology [being‐there and being‐aware (Da‐sein)] and with the classic and classical foundations of education which Heidegger and Gadamer once criticised. The aim is to prompt discussion of what teaching might become if psychological insights (about collective minds let loose to learn) are associated with every realm of higher education (not just (...) teacher training). (shrink)

Being and Time's fundamental ontoogy and existentialism both rest on the A Potiori Claim, which states that originary temporality is, although non-sequential, a genuine and basic concept of time from which we derive our more ordinary, sequential concept of time. In this paper, I develop a new reading and defense of this claim against the readings of William Blattner, which ties originary temporality too tightly to the particular roles and identities we live out and must therefore find Heidegger's project a (...) failure, and Tony Fisher, who implies that our various roles and identities hang together in time in a merely accidental and non-rational way. On my reading, originary temporality is the structure of Dasein's characteristic activity of existential commitment. Through this activity, we each work out, in our own case, what it takes to embody the capacity for sense-making, at all. Here, the non-sequentiality of originary temporality reflects the way in which commitments are revised and sustained through time, while the sequence of nows derives from our need to embody our commitment in a single life that negotiates among the practical demands that our various identities make of us. (shrink)

The anticipation of the typical under the assumption of the non-occurrence of the atypical is the experiential schema governing the individuation of ordinary enduring objects and their properties. Against this background, a primitive form of “if-and-only-if” consciousness is implicit in our everyday perceptual intentions. The thematization of the fact that perception operates under this proto-tentative structure occurs at the level of reflection and is expressed by defeasible judgments of the form “if p, then q, unless r,” or “if p, then (...) q provided that not-r”. Here I will argue that what is made thematic by judgments containing such restrictive clauses is the structure of unpredictability inherent in what Husserl calls the horizon of latency and, indirectly, the world as background of normality. (shrink)