In ‘Narrative and Personal Identity’, Mark Schroeder defends an important and exciting account of personal identity. This account starts from insights he finds in Locke and Frankfurt, but moves beyond them in ways that complicate and improve their respective notions of personhood and agency. I argue that he nonetheless retains too much from the views he rejects, especially an undue emphasis on the role of agency in personal identity and an impoverished picture of our embodiment. This paper explains the ways (...) I think Schroeder does not go far enough, and offers an account that takes his insights a step further. (shrink)

Good physical experiments conform to the basic methodological standards of experimental design: they are objective, reliable, and valid. But is this also true of thought experiments? Especially problems of personal identity have engendered hypothetical scenarios that are very distant from the actual world. These imagined situations have been conspicuously ineffective at resolving conflicting intuitions and deciding between the different accounts of personal identity. Using prominent examples from the literature, I argue that this is due to many of these thought experiments (...) not adhering to the methodological standards that guide experimental design in nearly all other disciplines. I also show how empirically unwarranted background assumptions about human physiology render some of the hypothetical scenarios that are employed in the debate about personal identity highly misleading. (shrink)

Naturalist views of persons, such as those of the philosophers Annette Baier and Marjorie Grene, emphasize that human persons are cultural animals: We are living, embodied, organic beings, embedded in nature, the product of Darwinian evolution, but dependent on culture. Such naturalist views of persons typically eschew science fiction and look askance at the philosophical fantasies and thought experiments that often populate philosophical treatments of personal identity. Marge Piercy’s dystopian, cyberpunk, science fiction novel He, She and It weaves a complex (...) tale around the debate over the status of its central character Yod, a cyborg created in a lab but humanized through the efforts of two women, Malkah Shipman and her granddaughter Shira Shipman. Is Yod a person, despite having been engineered in a lab for a specific purpose? Piercy’s tale both challenges and ultimately supports a naturalist view of persons while simultaneously forewarning us of possible new styles of persons to come. (shrink)

Many philosophers hypothesize that our concept of personal identity is partly constituted by the one-person-one-place rule, which states that a person can only be in one place at a time. This hypothesis has been assumed by the most influential contemporary work on personal identity. In this paper, we report a series of studies testing whether the hypothesis is true. In these studies, people consistently judged that the same person existed in two different places at the same time. This result undermines (...) some widely held philosophical assumptions, supports others, and fits well with recent discoveries on identity judgments about inanimate objects and non-human animals. (shrink)

According to hedonistic act utilitarianism, an act is morally right if and only if, and because, it produces at least as much pleasure minus pain as any alternative act available to the agent. This dissertation gives a partial defense of utilitarianism against two types of objections: action guidance objections and intuitive objections. In Chapter 1, the main themes of the dissertation are introduced. The chapter also examines questions of how to understand utilitarianism, including (a) how to best formulate the moral (...) explanatory claim of the theory, (b) how to best interpret the phrase "pleasure minus pain," and (c) how the theory is related to act consequentialism. The first part (Chapters 2 and 3) deals with action guidance objections to utilitarianism. Chapter 2 defines two kinds of action guidance: doxastic and evidential guidance. It is argued that utilitarianism is evidentially but not doxastically guiding for us. Chapter 3 evaluates various action guidance objections to utilitarianism. These are the objections that utilitarianism, because it is not doxastically guiding, is a bad moral theory, fails to be a moral theory, is an uninteresting and unimportant moral theory, and is a false moral theory. The second part (Chapters 4, 5 and 6) deals with intuitive objections to utilitarianism. Chapter 4 presents three intuitive objections: Experience Machine, Transplant, and Utility Monster. Three defenses of utilitarianism are subsequently evaluated. Chapter 5 and 6 introduces two alternative defenses of utilitarianism against intuitive objections, both of which concern the role that imagination plays in thought experimentation. In Chapter 5, it is argued that we sometimes unknowingly carry out the wrong thought experiment when we direct intuitive objections against utilitarianism. In many such cases, we elicit moral intuitions that we believe give us reason to reject utilitarianism, but that in fact do not. In Chapter 6, it is argued that using the right kind of sensory imagination when we perform thought experiments will positively affect the epistemic trustworthiness of our moral intuitions. Moreover, it is suggested that doing so renders utilitarianism more plausible. In Chapter 7, the contents of the dissertation are summarized. (shrink)

Many requirements of rationality rely for their application on facts about identity at a time. Take the requirement not to have contradictory beliefs. It is irrational if a single agent bel...

Well-being measurements are frequently used to support conclusions about a range of philosophically important issues. This is a problem, because we know too little about the intervals of the relevant scales. I argue that it is plausible that well-being measurements are non-linear, and that common beliefs that they are linear are not truth-tracking, so we are not justified in believing that well-being scales are linear. I then argue that this undermines common appeals to both hypothetical and actual well-being measurements; I (...) first focus on the philosophical literature on prioritarianism and then discuss Kahneman’s Peak-End Rule as a systematic bias. Finally, I discuss general implications for research on well-being, and suggest a better way of representing scales. (shrink)

Los experimentos mentales son dispositivos epistémicos de la imaginación, o de análisis de problemas filosóficos, que recorren las fronteras de aquella, desde el sillón. Dichas fronteras tocan dilemas perennes de la filosofía: cuestiones de la metafísica, como el tiempo, el espacio y la realidad, el problema de la libertad y el determinismo, la naturaleza de la mente, la identidad personal, los argumentos acerca del significado, las posibilidades, fuentes y condiciones del conocimiento, las relaciones entre discurso y lógica, la ética, cuestiones (...) de la filosofía social y política, y la estética. Muchos problemas de la filosofía han sido abordados mediante experimentos mentales, una herramienta útil de la caja de herramientas del filósofo. No todas las herramientas son populares, no obstante. Los experimentos mentales son, pese a sus defensores, falibles, incluso si son argumentos bien planteados. Justamente, este libro recopila artículos con las principales defensas y ataques a los experimentos mentales, especialmente en términos de su confiabilidad para llegar a conclusiones, o bien de su relevancia en términos de su origen: el sillón de la filosofía. Este ha sido vapuleado por los nuevos aires de la filosofía analítica, que trata al sillón como un viejo artefacto del análisis a priori. De hecho, hay posturas que critican a los experimentos mentales por constituir bombas de intuiciones no confiables. Por supuesto, no hay razón irrefutable para aceptar los experimentos mentales y las filosofías de sillón. Pero ¿hay alguna en la filosofía? El libro no pretende convencer al lector del valor de los experimentos mentales y las filosofías de sillón. Por el contrario, su objetivo es formar una imagen propia de estos dispositivos epistémicos, tanto en relación con sus virtudes y limitaciones. Si ello se logra, habrá valido el esfuerzo llevado a cabo en esta compilación de artículos, los que muestran los límites, desafíos y críticas de la experimentación mental desde el sillón. (shrink)

Analytic just war theorists often attempt to construct ideal theories of military justice on the basis of intuitions about imaginary and sometimes outlandish examples, often taken from non-military contexts. This article argues for a sharp curtailment of this method and defends, instead, an empirically and historically informed approach to the ethical scrutiny of armed conflicts. After critically reviewing general philosophical reasons for being sceptical of the moral-theoretic value of imaginary hypotheticals, the article turns to some of the special problems that (...) this method raises for appraisals of warfare. It examines some of the hypothetical examples employed in the construction of Jeff McMahan’s revisionist just war theory, and finds that they sometimes stipulate incompre- hensible conditions, lead to argumentative impasses of diverging yet uncertain intuitions, and distract attention away from the real problems of war as we empirically know it. In contrast, empirical and historical studies of warfare rein- force the deep connections between facts and values, and compel theorists to face uncomfortable moral ambiguities. Perhaps most importantly, the analytic method of focusing on imaginary hypothetical examples can not only be distracting, but it can also be genuinely dangerous. Hence, the article pays special attention to the way in which a seemingly innocuous fiction like the famous Ticking Time Bomb scenario can come to frame a new paradigm of inhumanity in the treatment of prisoners of war. (shrink)

I go deep into the biology of the human organism to argue that the psychological features and functions of persons are realized by cellular and molecular parallel distributed processing networks dispersed throughout the whole body. Persons supervene on the computational processes of nervous, endocrine, immune, and genetic networks. Persons do not go with brains.

A central metaphilosophical project seeks to evaluate the reliability of the types of evidence that figure in philosophical arguments and, relatedly, the justificatory status of relying on those types of evidence. Traditionally, metaphilosophers have approached this project via an analysis of intuition. This article argues that the category picked out by “intuition” is both too broad and too heterogeneous to serve as the appropriate target for metaphilosophical inquiry. Intuition is a gerrymandered and disjunctive kind, undeserving of the widespread attention it (...) receives in the literature. Instead, metaphilosophers should examine more finely grained mental states. Three promising strategies for parsing intuitions more finely are proposed: by their causal origins, by their context of employment, and by the exoticism of their content. This more narrow focus may significantly alter the dialectic in three prominent metaphilosophical arguments: the argument from calibration, the argument from self-defeat, and the argument from intuitional sensitivity. (shrink)

Eric T. Olson argues for a position in personal identity called Animalism. Olson's definition of ‘what we are’ is what the biological community currently defines as the ‘human animal’. While Olson argues his definition is determinate and anti-relativist, I object by maintaining that his definition is fundamentally soft relativist. This is accomplished by asking : 1) why favour the biological definition over other cultural definitions? – and by arguing : 2) that nothing stops the biological definition from changing ; 3) (...) that the biological definition is classificatory and not ontologically explanatory ; 4) that biology may drop the concept ‘human animal’ leaving no definition of ‘what we are’. Finally, I look at which ontological decisions Olson makes and ask if there is any hope for Animalism and for the human philosopher with no proven ontology. In my conclusion, I follow Olson’s surprising admission by suggesting that I have no idea what we are. (shrink)

Many experimental findings with split-brain subjects intuitively suggest that each such subject has two minds. The conceptual and empirical basis of this duality intuition has never been fully articulated. This article fills that gap, by offering a reconstruction of early neuropsychological literature on the split-brain phenomenon. According to that work, the hemispheres operate independently of each other insofar as they interact via the mediation of effection and transduction—via behavior and sensation, essentially. This is how your mind and my mind interact (...) with each other, however, giving rise to the intuition that a split-brain subject has two minds. (shrink)

Among your closest associates is a certain human animal – a living, breathing, organism. You see it when you look in the mirror. When it is sick, you don't feel too well. Where it goes, you go. And, one thinks, where you go, it must follow. Indeed, you can make it move through sheer force of will. You bear, in short, an important and intimate relation to this, your animal. So too rest of us with our animals. Animalism says that (...) this relation is nothing short of identity. According to animalists, we do not only coincide with or constitute or inhabit or otherwise hang out with these close associates, our animals: we are them. In this article, I offer an opinionated take on what animalism might be and situate it against contemporary rivals. Then, I outline a simple case for animalism. Finally, I sketch non-standard routes for animalists to take in light of standard challenges. My goal in all of this is to open up some new avenues of animalist thinking. (shrink)

This paper addresses a question concerning psycho­logical continuity, i.e., which features preserve the same psychological subject over time; this is not the same question as the one concerning the necessary and sufficient conditions for personal identity. Marc Slors defends an account of psychological continuity that adds two features to Derek Parfit’s Relation R, namely narrativity and embodiment. Slors’s account is a significant improvement on Parfit’s, but still lacks an explicit acknowledgment of a third feature that I call relationality. Because they (...) are usually regarded as cases of radical discontinuity, I start my discussion from the experiences of psychological disruption undergone by victims of severe violence and trauma. As it turns out, the challenges we encounter in granting continuity to the experiences of violence and trauma victims are germane to those we encounter in granting continuity to the experiences of subjects in non-traumatic contexts. What is missing in the most popular accounts of psychological continuity is an explicit acknowledgment of the links that tie our psychological lives to other subjects. A more persuasive notion of psychological continuity is not only embodied and narrative, as is Slors’s notion, but also explicitly relational. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the concept of cross-temporal personal identity (diachronicity). This particular form of identity has vexed theorists for centuries -- e.g.,how can a person maintain a belief in the sameness of self over time in the face of continual psychological and physical change? I first discuss various forms of the sameness relation and the criteria that justify their application. I then examine philosophical and psychological treatments of personal diachronicity(for example,Locke's psychological connectedness theory; the role of episodic memory) (...) and find each lacking on logical grounds, empirical grounds, or both. I conclude that to achieve a successful resolution of the issue of the self as a temporal continuant we need to draw a sharp distinction between the feeling of the sameness of one's self and the evidence marshaled in support of that feeling. (shrink)

What is creativity? One new idea may be creative, whereas another is merely new: What's the difference? And how is creativity possible? These questions about human creativity can be answered, at least in outline, using computational concepts. There are two broad types of creativity, improbabilist and impossibilist. Improbabilist creativity involves novel combinations of familiar ideas. A deeper type involves METCS: the mapping, exploration, and transformation of conceptual spaces. It is impossibilist, in that ideas may be generated which – with respect (...) to the particular conceptual space concerned – could not have been generated before. The more clearly conceptual spaces can be defined, the better we can identify creative ideas. Defining conceptual spaces is done by musicologists, literary critics, and historians of art and science. Humanist studies, rich in intuitive subtleties, can be complemented by the comparative rigour of a computational approach. Computational modelling can help to define a space, and to show how it may be mapped, explored, and transformed. Impossibilist creativity can be thought of in “classical” Al terms, whereas connectionism illuminates improbabilist creativity. Most Al models of creativity can only explore spaces, not transform them, because they have no self-reflexive maps enabling them to change their own rules. A few, however, can do so. A scientific understanding of creativity does not destroy our wonder at it, nor does it make creative ideas predictable. Demystification does not imply dehumanization. (shrink)

Realist essentialists face a prima facie challenge in accounting for our knowledge of the essences of things, and in particular, in justifying our engaging in thought experiments to gain such knowledge. In contrast, conferralist essentialism has an attractive story to tell about how we gain knowledge of the essences of things, and how thought experiments are a justified method for gaining such knowledge. The conferralist story is told in this essay.

According to Rosenthal’s Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, first-order mental states become conscious only when they are targeted by HOTs that necessarily represent the states as belonging to self. On this view a state represented as belonging to someone distinct from self could not be a conscious state. Rosenthal develops this view in terms of what he calls the ‘thin immunity principle’ (TIP). According to TIP, when I experience a conscious state, I cannot be wrong about whether it is (...) I who I think is in that state. We first suggest that TIP is a direct consequence of the HOT theory. Next we argue that somatoparaphrenia—a pathology in which sensations are sometimes represented as belonging to other people—shows that TIP can be violated. This violation of TIP in turn shows that the HOT theory’s claim that conscious states are necessarily represented as belonging to self is in error. Rosenthal’s attempt to account for pathological cases is found to be inadequate when applied to somatoparaphrenia, and other possible defenses are also shown to be incapable of preserving TIP. We further conclude by suggesting that the HOT theory’s failing in this regard is not a failing that is peculiar to this theory of consciousness. (shrink)

We argue that the inference from dispositional essentialism about a property (in the broadest sense) to the metaphysical necessity of laws involving it is invalid. Let strict dispositional essentialism be any view according to which any given property’s dispositional character is precisely the same across all possible worlds. Clearly, any version of strict dispositional essentialism rules out worlds with different laws involving that property. Permissive dispositional essentialism is committed to a property’s identity being tied to its dispositional profile or causal (...) role, yet is compatible with moderate interworld variation in a property’s dispositional profile. We provide such a model of dispositional essentialism about a property and metaphysical contingency of the laws involving it. (shrink)

I begin with an explication of "thought experiment". I then clarify the role that intuitions play in thought experiments by addressing two important issues: (1) the informativeness of thought experiments and (2) the legitimacy of the method of thought experiments in philosophy and the natural sciences. I defend a naturalistic account of intuitions that provides a plausible explanation of the informativeness of thought experiments, which, in turn, allows thought experiments to be reconstructed as arguments. I also specify criteria for distinguishing (...) bad "intuition pumps" from legitimate thought experiments. These criteria help us to avoid being seduced by the dangerous suggestive power of misleading intuitions. (shrink)

Thought experiments in the history of science display a striking asymmetry between chemistry and physics, namely that chemistry seems to lack well-known examples, whereas physics presents many famous examples. This asymmetry, I argue, is not independent data concerning the chemistry/physics distinction. The laws of chemistry such as the periodic table are incurably special, in that they make testable predictions only for a very restricted range of physical conditions in the universe which are necessarily conditioned by the contingences of chemical investigation. (...) The argument depends on how ‚thought experiment’ is construed. Here, several recent accounts of thought experiments are surveyed to help formulate what I call ‚crucial’ thought experiments. These have a historical role in helping to judge between hypotheses in physics, but are not helpful in chemistry past or present. (shrink)

This article is an accompaniment to Anthony Freeman’s review of Views into the Chinese Room, reflecting on some pertinent outstanding questions about the Chinese room argument. Although there is general agreement in the artificial intelligence community that the CRA is somehow wrong, debate continues on exactly why and how it is wrong. Is there a killer counter-argument and, if so, what is it? One remarkable fact is that the CRA is prototypically a thought experiment, yet it has been very little (...) discussed from the perspective of thought experiments in general. Here, I argue that the CRA fails as a thought experiment because it commits the fallacy of undersupposing, i.e., it leaves too many details to be filled in by the audience. Since different commentators will often fill in details differently, leading to different opinions of what constitutes a decisive counter, the result is 21-plus years of inconclusive debate. (shrink)

John Searle’s Chinese room argument is a celebrated thought experiment designed to refute the hypothesis, popular among artificial intelligence scientists and philosophers of mind, that “the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind”. Since its publication in 1980, the CRA has evoked an enormous amount of debate about its implications for machine intelligence, the functionalist philosophy of mind, theories of consciousness, etc. Although the general consensus among commentators is that the CRA is flawed, and not withstanding the popularity of the (...) systems reply in some quarters, there is remarkably little agreement on exactly how and why it is flawed. A newcomer to the controversy could be forgiven for thinking that the bewildering collection of diverse replies to Searle betrays a tendency to unprincipled, ad hoc argumentation and, thereby, a weakness in the opposition’s case. In this paper, treating the CRA as a prototypical example of a ‘destructive’ thought experiment, I attempt to set it in a logical framework, which allows us to systematise and classify the various objections. Since thought experiments are always posed in narrative form, formal logic by itself cannot fully capture the controversy. On the contrary, much also hinges on how one translates between the informal everyday language in which the CRA was initially framed and formal logic and, in particular, on the specific conception of possibility that one reads into the logical formalism. (shrink)

Mentalistic (or Lockean) accounts of personal identity are normally formulated in terms of causal relations between psychological states such as beliefs, memories, and intentions. In this paper we develop an alternative (but still Lockean) account of personal identity, based on phenomenal relations between experiences. We begin by examining a notorious puzzle case due to Bernard Williams, and extract two lessons from it: first, that Williams's puzzle can be defused by distinguishing between the psychological and phenomenal approaches, second, that so far (...) as personal identity is concerned, it is phenomenal rather than psychological continuity that matters. We then consider different ways in which the phenomenal approach may be developed, and respond to a number of objections. That with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing can join itself, makes the same person, and is one self with it, and with nothing else; and so attributes to itself and owns all the actions of that thing, as its own, as far as that consciousness reaches, and no farther; as every one who reflects will perceive. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding [II.xxvii.17]. (shrink)

Here is a question as intriguing as it is brief: what are we? The animalist’s answer is equal in brevity: we are animals. This stark formulation of the animalist slogan distances it from nearby claims—that we are essentially animals, for example, or that we have purely biological criteria of identity over time. Is the animalist slogan—unburdened by modal or criterial commitments—still interesting, though? Or has it lost its bite? In this article we address such questions by presenting a positive case (...) for the importance of animalism and applying that case to recent critiques. (shrink)

John Rawls’ method of reflective equilibrium is the most influential methodology in contemporary ethics.This paper argues that this influence is undeserved, for two reasons. First, reflective equilibrium fails to accomplish two tasks that give us reason to care about methodology. On the one hand, it fails to explain how (or whether) moral knowledge is possible.This is because the method is explicitly oriented towards the distinct (and less interesting) task of characterizing our moral sensibilities. On the other hand, the method fails (...) to provide an informative way of adjudicating central methodological debates in ethics. Second, where Rawls’ method –and the background methodology he uses to motivate it –do have substance, that substance is implausible. The role of dispositions in the method entails that it endorses obviously irrational inferences. Further, the method makes substantively implausible distinctions between the dispositions that are allowed to play a methodological role. Rawls' background methodology appeals to the idea of a psychology in ‘wide reflective equilibrium’. However, both formal and empirical path-dependence considerations strongly suggest that there is nothing even minimally determinate that is someone’s psychology in ‘wide reflective equilibrium’. I close by exploring salient attempts to salvage the spirit of reflective equilibrium by abandoning elements of Rawls’ approach. I argue that none of these attempts succeed. I conclude that appeal to the method of reflective equilibrium is not a helpful means of addressing pressing methodological questions in ethics. In a slogan, reflective equilibrium is methodologically irrelevant. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJohn Locke is famous for popularizing the method of the philosophical thought experiment in discussions of personal identity; the cases introduced in the second edition of An Essay Concerning Understanding are still employed by contemporary philosophers. Here I argue that Locke’s method is nonetheless importantly different from later efforts in ways that can help us better appreciate his larger projects. Rather than pumping the reader’s intuitions in support of his preferred account, Locke’s thought experiments serve to illustrate common errors in (...) assessments of identity that he sees as particularly prevalent and problematic. Locke defends his idea of ‘person’ otherwise, through what I call his ‘lived experiments’: observations about linguistic usage that serve to illustrate the term’s role in practical reasoning. I focus especially on Locke’s example of the forensic status of the madman. Examples like these do not, for Locke, demonstrate the intuitiveness of his analysis, but rather bolste... (shrink)

: This article seeks to explain how thought experiments work, and also the reasons why they can fail. It is divided into four sections. The first argues that thought experiments in philosophy and science should be treated together. The second examines existing accounts of thought experiments and shows why they are inadequate. The third proposes a better account of thought experiments. According to this account, a thought experimenter manipulates her worldview in accord with the “what if” questions posed by a (...) thought experiment. When all necessary manipulations are carried through, the result is either a consistent model or a contradiction. If a consistent model is achieved, the thought experimenter can conclude that the scenario is possible; if a consistent model cannot be constructed, then the scenario is not possible. The fourth section of the article uses this account to shed light on the circumstances in which thought experiments fail. (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)

Many philosophers have argued against Singer’s claim that all animals are equal. However, none of these responses have demonstrated an appreciation of the complexity of his position. The result is that all of these responses focus on one of his arguments in a way that falls victim to another. This paper is a critical examination of a possible response to the full complexity of Singer’s position that derives from the work of Carl Cohen, Kathleen Wilkes, and F. Ramsey. On this (...) response, a being’s moral status depends not on the capacities and abilities she does in fact have, but instead on the capacities and abilities normal for the members of her species. However, this response is ultimately unacceptable, for it depends on a faulty conception of loss and misfortune and its underlying moral principle is irrational at best and morally objectionable at worst. The failure of even this response to Singer gives us good reason to conclude with Singer that all animals are equal. (shrink)

Philosophical and scientific investigations of the proprietary aspects of self—mineness or mental ownership—often presuppose that searching for unique constituents is a productive strategy. But there seem not to be any unique constituents. Here, it is argued that the “self-specificity” paradigm, which emphasizes subjective perspective, fails. Previously, it was argued that mode of access also fails to explain mineness. Fortunately, these failures, when leavened by other findings (those that exhibit varieties and vagaries of mineness), intimate an approach better suited to searching (...) for an explanation. Having an alternative in hand, one that shows promise of achieving explanatory adequacy, provides an additional reason to suspend the search for unique constituents. In short, a negative and a positive thesis are developed: we should cease looking for unique constituents and should seek to explain mineness in accord with the model developed here. This model rejects attempts to explain the phenomenon in terms of either a narrative or a minimal sense of self; it seeks to explain at a “molecular” level, one that appeals to multiple, interacting dimensions. The molecular-level model allows for the possibility that subjective perspective is distinct from a stark perspective (one that does not imply mineness). It proposes that the confounding of tacit expectations plays an important role in explaining mental ownership and its complement, disownership. But the confounding of tacit expectations is not sufficient. Because we are able to be aware of the existence of mental states that do not belong to self, we require a mechanism for determining degree of self-relatedness. One such mechanism is proposed here, and it is shown how this mechanism can be integrated into a general model of mental ownership. In the spirit of suggesting how this model might be able to help resolve outstanding problems, the question as to whether inserted thoughts belong to the patient who reports them is also considered. (shrink)

I am now typing on a computer I bought two years ago. The computer I bought is identical to the computer on which I type. My computer persists over time. Let us divide our subject matter in two. There is first the question of criteria of identity, the conditions governing when an object of a certain kind, a computer for instance, persists until some later time. There are secondly very general questions about the nature of persistence itself. Here I include (...) the question of temporal parts, as well as certain familiar paradoxes (e.g., the statue and the lump). Following John Perry (1975, Introduction), let us characterize a criterion of identity over time for F s as a way of filling in φ in the following schema: Stages S1 and S2 belong to some continuing F iff φ Defenders of temporal parts (see below) regard S1 and S2 as being temporal parts of the continuing F ; others regard S1 and S2 as different stages in the life history of the continuing F . Thus each camp can make use of Perry’s formula. It is traditional to divide such criteria into those governing persons and those governing anything else. It is further traditional to say that the criterion of identity over time for non-persons involves spatiotemporal continuity. An excellent discussion is Eli Hirsch’s The Concept of Identity1, which utilizes the notion of continuity under a sortal. Kind-terms, or sortals, are terms that specify what kind of or sort of thing an object is. Examples include ‘tree’, ‘car’, and ‘mountain’. Where F is a sortal, Hirsch’s analysis is roughly that stages belong to the same F iff they are connected by a spatiotemporally and qualitatively continuous sequence of F -stages. Unmodified, this analysis prohibits temporally discontinuous entities, such as a watch that is taken apart and then reassembled. Hirsch discusses the necessary modifications. Spatiotemporal continuity analyses face a problem when applied to the persistence of matter. The literature here has been dominated by discussion of examples provided by David Armstrong (1980) and Saul Kripke (unpublished.... (shrink)

This article raises the question of how the ontological status of virtual objects bears on their intrinsic value. If virtual objects are unreal or less real than physical objects, does it mean that they will have less intrinsic value? If they have intrinsic value, what are the explanations for this value, and how do they relate to the ontological status of the virtual objects? First, the article reviews recent work concerning the ontological status of virtual reality and virtual objects. Second, (...) it argues that in some cases the ontological status of virtual objects does undermine the value placed in them, in that the objects can fail to have the properties that ground the value attributions made to them, while in other cases their ontological status is not important. Finally, the article relates the grounding of value attributions to philosophical theories of value, in particular, perfectionism and hedonism. (shrink)

The main concern of this paper is to show that understanding mental variation may prove to be relevant to inquiry into thought experiments. First, I examine why Ernst Mach considered the ability to vary the contents of one's thoughts the principal requirement for thought experimentation. Second, I illustrate the wide applicability of mental variation in thought experiments. Third, I suggest, following Kathleen Wilkes, that variation is frequently employed in “realistic” thought experiments.

The animalist says we are animals. This thesis is commonly understood as the universal generalization that all human persons are human animals. This article proposes an alternative: the thesis is a generic that admits of exceptions. We defend the resulting view, which we call ‘generic animalism’, and show its aptitude for diagnosing the limits of eight case-based objections to animalism.

This piece is a commentary on a precis of Maggie Boden's book "The creative mind" published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

The numerous perspectives offered on consciousness reflect a multifaceted phenomenon that results from a system of relations. An etymological approach identifies linguistic roots of the meanings of consciousness and illustrates their concern with self-referenced informational relationships of an organism with its environment, a "knowing system" formed in the epistemological relations between knower and known. Common elements of contemporary models suggest that consciousness involves interacting components of a system, including: attention-awareness; phenomenal experiences; self reference; action-behavior, including representations and learning; use of (...) information; interpretation of meaning; goal-directed behavior; and systems of social reference. It is suggested that manifestations of consciousness through the physical properties of the brain are universally represented in language. A preliminary systems model of consciousness is outlined with widespread lexical roots proposed as a culture-neutral framework for constructing theories of consciousness and identifying cognitive constructs which reveal the epistemological roots of consciousness within Indo-European traditions. (shrink)

If personhood is the quality or condition of being an individual person, brainhood could name the quality or condition of being a brain. This ontological quality would define the `cerebral subject' that has, at least in industrialized and highly medicalized societies, gained numerous social inscriptions since the mid-20th century. This article explores the historical development of brainhood. It suggests that the brain is necessarily the location of the `modern self', and that, consequently, the cerebral subject is the anthropological figure inherent (...) to modernity (at least insofar as modernity gives supreme value to the individual as autonomous agent of choice and initiative). It further argues that the ideology of brainhood impelled neuroscientific investigation much more than it resulted from it, and sketches how an expanding constellation of neurocultural discourses and practices embodies and sustains that ideology. (shrink)

A point made repeatedly over the last few years is that the Locked-in Syndrome offers unique real-life material for revisiting and challenging certain ingrained philosophical assumptions about the nature of personhood and personal identity. Indeed, the claim has been made that a closer study of LIS will call into question some of the traditional conceptions of personhood that primarily highlight the significance of consciousness, self-consciousness and autonomy and suggest the need for a more interpersonal account of the person. I am (...) skeptical about these claims and will in the following argue that the theoretical relevance of LIS for an understanding of selfhood and personhood has been exaggerated. (shrink)

According to Richard Routley, a comprehensive theory of fiction is impossible, since almost anything is in principle imaginable. In my view, Routley is right: for any purported logic of fiction, there will be actual or imaginable fictions that successfully counterexample the logic. Using the example of ‘impossible’ fictions, I test this claim against theories proposed by Routley’s Meinongian contemporaries and also by Routley himself and his 21st century heirs. I argue that the phenomenon of impossible fictions challenges even today’s modal (...) Meinongians. (shrink)

It is usually claimed that in order to assess a thought experiment we should assess the nomological possibility, or realizability in principle, of its scenario. This is undoubtedly true for many TEs, such as Bohr’s reply to Einstein’s photon box. Nevertheless, in some cases, such as Maxwell’s demon, this requirement should be relaxed. Many accounts of TEs fail in this regard. In particular, experimental and some mental model accounts are too strict, since they always require realizability in principle. This paper (...) aims at analysing the notion of possibility at play in the scenarios of scientific TEs, and sheds some new light on their nature and function. (shrink)