Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 6, Page 935-948, December 2021.

This article considers the personal and philosophical relationship between two philosophers, Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle. I show that a letter from MacDonald to Ryle found at Linacre Colleg...

Considerable work during the past two decades has focused on modeling the structure of semantic memory, although the performance of these models in complex and unconstrained semantic tasks remains relatively understudied. We introduce a two‐player cooperative word game, Connector (based on the boardgame Codenames), and investigate whether similarity metrics derived from two large databases of human free association norms, the University of South Florida norms and the Small World of Words norms, and two distributional semantic models based on large language (...) corpora (word2vec and GloVe) predict performance in this game. Participant dyads were presented with 20‐item word boards with word pairs of varying relatedness. The speaker received a word pair from the board (e.g., exam‐algebra) and generated a one‐word semantic clue (e.g., math), which was used by the guesser to identify the word pair on the board across three attempts. Response times to generate the clue, as well as accuracy and latencies for the guessed word pair, were strongly predicted by the cosine similarity between word pairs and clues in random walk‐based associative models, and to a lesser degree by the distributional models, suggesting that conceptual representations activated during free association were better able to capture search and retrieval processes in the game. Further, the speaker adjusted subsequent clues based on the first attempt by the guesser, who in turn benefited from the adjustment in clues, suggesting a cooperative influence in the game that was effectively captured by both associative and distributional models. These results indicate that both associative and distributional models can capture relatively unconstrained search processes in a cooperative game setting, and Connector is particularly suited to examine communication and semantic search processes. (shrink)

In this article, I consider Alkis Kontos’ and Allan Bäck’s critiques to Suits that his theory of games and good living lack ontological grounds or rests on the wrong foundations. Taking these criti...

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-021-09793-2.

This article brings to light how AI research has benefited from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. My research shows that Wittgenstein’s work began to engage the attention of AI researchers not only in the 1970s down to the present but right from the early beginnings of computational research in the 1950s. More specifically, his later philosophy inspired a group of researchers called the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) to start one of the first programs in machine translation, information retrieval, mechanical abstracting, and knowledge (...) representation technologies in the early 1950s, all of which have later been claimed for AI and cognitive science. I focus on the philosophical work of CLRU founder Margaret Masterman and her extraordinary but forgotten contributions to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 1, Page 21-39, January 2022.

Beginning with Barry Hoffmaster’s charge that we reclaim bioethics from the moral philosopher’s top-down theorizing, I discuss two moral philosophy contexts that offer resources for the kind of complex attention Hoffmaster demands: Iris Murdoch and Cora Diamond in moral philosophy and Margaret Urban Walker, Hilde Lindeman, and Marian Verkerk’s joint take on bioethics. My aim is: 1) to dispel a simplified notion of philosophy in bioethics; 2) to unite two strands of philosophy, which converge on important issues relevant to contemporary (...) bioethics; and 3) to explore these strands in terms of enabling, maieutic work on our ethical points of departure. (shrink)

У статті здійснено порівняльний аналіз рефлексій Вітгенштайна проблеми «дії за правилом» і спроб Бурдьє пояснити регулярні соціальні поведінки, які не піддаються безпосередній регламентації, за допомогою понять габітусу і практичного глузду. Виявлена відмінність контекстів, в яких розвиваються рефлексії обох авторів, ідентифіковані їхні головні опоненти: якщо Вітгенштайн критикує інтелектуалістське і механістичне розуміння правила, Бурдьє полемізує з методологічним обʼєктивізмом (структуралізм) і субʼєктивізмом (феноменологічна соціологія) в соціальних науках. Встановлено, що спільним для обох авторів демаршем у спробах уникнути апорій розуміння людської впорядкованої дії стає перенесення (...) проблеми дії за правилом з теоретичної площини в площину практичну. Головна відмінність їхніх підходів і концептів зумовлена тим, що думки Вітгенштайна розгортаються в концептуальній площині, тоді як Бурдьє аналізує конкретні соціально-історичні феномени і виробляє необхідну для цього термінологію й методологію. (shrink)

This article examines the relations between methods used in both animal work and study and concepts of animal mind. By "animal work" the authors mean humans and animals working together, and by "animal study" they mean the discipline of ethology, especially the emerging area of cognitive ethology. Within these areas the wide range of conceptions of animal mind includes varying emphases on intelligence, forms of rationality and language, cognition, consciousness, and intentionality. The authors' central concern is to elucidate the vocabulary (...) and the concepts which seem necessary to establishing successful working relationships with sheepdogs and gundogs. Their argument moves toward an emphasis on the appreciation of particular intentional states and recognizes that they invariably deploy elements of a moral vocabulary in achieving creative teamwork performances with dogs and other animals. The article concludes by consid enng the relevance of accounts of work with animals for associated considerations of intentionality. (shrink)

Despite its ground-breaking character, Castoriadis’s theory of society remains, in some respects, caught up in conceptual difficulties common to social theory generally, particularly the problem of conceptualizing social unity without resort to an understanding of society that downplays heterogeneity and over-emphasizes the homogeneous. Unlike many other theoretical approaches and traditions, Castoriadis’s work also offers a possible path out of this dilemma in the form of philosophical innovations which could enable us to conceptualize social unity without flattening the heterogeneous characteristics of (...) the social. Castoriadis sometimes fails to recognize the full implications of his own rejection of ontological determinism, and so ends up proposing a far too deterministic and homogeneous model of social types. This essay aims to show how this might be remedied by drawing on Castoriadis’s own fundamental insights. (shrink)

I defend Putnam’s modal structuralist view of mathematics but reject his claims that Wittgenstein’s remarks on Dedekind, Cantor, and set theory are verificationist. Putnam’s “realistic realism” showcases the plasticity of our “fitting” words to the world. The applications of this—in philosophy of language, mind, logic, and philosophy of computation—are robust. I defend Wittgenstein’s nonextensionalist understanding of the real numbers, showing how it fits Putnam’s view. Nonextensionalism and extensionalism about the real numbers are mathematically, philosophically, and logically robust, but the two (...) perspectives are often confused with one another. I separate them, using Turing’s work as an example. (shrink)

In this article, I outline a relational-developmental conception of emotion that situates emotional activity within a broader conception of persons as holistic, relational beings. In this model, emotions consist of felt forms of engagement with the world. As felt aspects of ongoing action, uninhibited emotional experiences are not private states that are inaccessible to other people; instead, they are revealed directly through their bodily expressions. As multicomponent processes, emotional experiences exhibit both continuity and dramatic change in development. Building on these (...) ideas, I describe an intersubjective methodology for studying developmental changes in the structure of emotional experience. I illustrate the approach with an analysis of developmental changes in the structure of anger from birth to adulthood. (shrink)

This article aims to defend the need to recognize the independent role of those cognitive abilities on whose behalf linguistic meaning is introduced from the proper institution of language. I call this capacity “private pattern recognition” (PPR) and argue that it plays an essential part not just in the instauration of linguistic meaning but also in other relevant cognitive phenomena such as artistic creation and understanding. Moreover, it is precisely the failure to separate both aspects that gives rise to important (...) perplexities associated with the underdetermination of meaning. The first part of the article makes a case for this thesis and addresses its compatibility with Wittgenstein's private language argument. It then focuses on the example of art to illustrate the differing roles of private pattern recognition and shared linguistic meaning. The second part of the article focuses on the paradox of resemblance (RP). It (i) considers the difficulties of Williamson's response, (ii) illustrates how they instead support the current thesis, (iii) attempts to delineate how the role of meaning should be understood, and (iv) briefly revisits the rule‐following paradox (RFP). (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)

The paper addresses a prima facie tension between two popular views about concepts. The first is the doctrine that some concepts are constitutively perceptual/experiential, so that they can be possessed only by suitably experienced subjects. This is a classic empiricist theme, but its most conspicuous recent appearance is in literature on phenomenal concepts. The second view is anti-individualism: here, the view that concept possession depends not only on a thinker’s internal states and relations to the concepts’ referents, but also on (...) certain of her relations to sociolinguistic peers. In recent works, Derek Ball and Michael Tye have in effect argued that the doctrines are incompatible, and their conclusion is that no concepts depend on experience. In reply, Bénédicte Veillet endorses those authors’ incompatibilism, but argues that it is anti-individualism that we should reject. I develop an approach to reconciliation that is more promising than any considered by these theorists. Against Veillet, I defend a version of anti-individualism about phenomenal concepts, but against Ball and Tye, I argue that they can be possessed only by suitably experienced thinkers. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

The kind of collective improvisation attained by the “free jazz” at the beginning of the sixties sets a challenge to analytic theories of collective intentionality, that emphasize the role played by future-directed plans in the interlocking and interdependent intentions of the individual participants, because in the free jazz case the performers’ interdependence or [interplay] stems from an intuitive understanding between musicians. Otherwise said: what happens musically is not planned in advance, but arises from spontaneous interactions in the group. By looking (...) at the way jazz improvisers take up the challenge of making music together without a pre-conceived notion as to what kind of effect they will achieve and without a pre-set code of agreements, my aim has been to clarify what kind of strategies — other than advanced action plans and joint commitments — are used by improvising musicians to integrate their improvisations into a unified shared activity. In developing this proposal I initially drawn pre-theoretically on one paradigmatic study case — Ornette Coleman’s double quartet Free Jazz, A collective Improvisation and brought it in conversation with Husserl’s phenomenology of time. In a final move, I brought this phenomenological frame into dialogue with some recent readings of the predictive coding model. All in all, what we learned from the Free Jazz case is that the interdependence and interlocking of attitudes among individual participants characteristic of shared intention is not determined by a future-directed plan and the rational pressure to be responsive to and coordinate with others, it typically engages. Rather, in the free jazz case, the performers’ connection and interplay depend on the players’ readiness to feel each other out, by listening to each other playing, in a way that no doubt presupposes the Husserlian retention-protention scheme. (shrink)

In this paper, I address a key argument in favour of logical expressivism, the view that knowing a logical principle such as Modus Ponens is not a cognitive state but a pro-attitude towards drawing certain types of conclusions from certain types of premises. The argument is that logical expressivism is the only view that can take us out of Lewis Carroll's Regress – which suggests that elementary deductive reasoning is impossible. I show that the argument does not hold scrutiny and (...) that logical cognitivism can be vindicated. In the course of the discussion, I draw substantially on a comparison with a similar argument in meta-ethics, for moral expressivism. (shrink)

What is it about relativism that justifies, or at least explains, its continued appeal in the face of relentless attacks through the history of philosophy? This paper explores a new answer to this old question, casting the response in metaphilosophical terms. § i introduces the problem. § ii argues that one part of the answer is that some of the well-known defences of relativism take it to be a philosophical stance—that is, a broad perspective or orientation with normative consequences—rather than (...) a doctrine or a thesis. § iii draws attention to an assumption, not always explicitly stated by its proponents, that the relativist stance leads to the cultivation of some key intellectual virtues. Open-mindedness, tolerance, intellectual humility, and curiosity are examples of the intellectual virtues that relativism can foster. § iv argues that the defence of relativism on the basis of the virtues that are assumed to follow from it, at best, is only partially successful. Moreover, there is a range of epistemic vices, resulting from the stance, that undercuts the virtue-based defence presented in § iii. (shrink)

Recent discussions in critical social epistemology have raised the idea that the concept 'knower' is not only an epistemological concept, but an ethical concept as well. Though this idea plays a central role in these discussions, the theoretical underpinnings of the claim have not received extended scrutiny. This paper explores the idea that 'knower' is an irreducibly ethical concept in an effort to defend its use as a critical concept. In Section 1, I begin with the claim that 'knower' is (...) an irreducibly normative and social concept, drawing from some ideas in Wilfrid Sellars. In Section 2, I argue that one's being a knower involves demands for various sorts of ethically-laden recognition. I develop this thought by arguing that Axel Honneth's threefold typology of recognition—love, respect, and esteem—finds clear expression within the context of socio-epistemic practice. I conclude in Section 3 by arguing that Miranda Fricker's proposed " analogy " between epistemic and moral perception should be modified to indicate a closer relationship than mere analogy. (shrink)

Assuming that there is moral progress, and assuming that the abolition of slavery is an example of it, how does moral progress occur? Is it mainly driven by specific individuals who have gained new moral insights, or by changes in the socio‐economic and epistemic conditions in which agents morally judge the norms and practices of their society, and act upon these judgements? In this paper, I argue that moral progress is a complex process in which changes at the level of (...) belief and changes at the level of institutions and social practices are deeply intertwined, and that changes in the socio‐economic and epistemic conditions of moral agency constitute the main motor of moral progress. I develop my view of moral progress by way of grappling with Michelle Moody‐Adams’ prominent philosophical account of it. My view is less intellectualistic and individualistic than hers, does not presuppose meta‐ethical moral realism, and blurs her distinction between moral progress in beliefs and moral progress in social practices. I point out the limits of humans to progress morally, which are partly grounded in our evolutionary history, and argue that moral progress is always of a ‘local’ nature. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Stanley Cavell’s moral perfectionism places the task of cultivating richer self-understanding and self-expression at the center of corporate life. We show how his approach reframes business as an opportunity for moral soul-craft, achieved through the articulation of increasingly reflective inner life in organizational culture. Instead of norming constraints on business activity, perfectionism opens new possibilities for conducting commercial exchange as a form of conversation, leading to personal growth. This approach guides executives in designing businesses that foster genius and channel creativity, (...) while giving all stakeholders a meaningful voice within a culture of trust. We first give an account of Cavellian perfectionism. Then, we explain how this underrepresented strand of moral reflection challenges and enriches, but does not supplant, prevailing ethical theories—including other versions of perfectionism. We then demonstrate the salience of Cavellian perfectionism to business ethics through examples from marketing, human resources, and executive organizational design and development. (shrink)

In this work, starting from the social practice theory, we identified two kinds of creativity. A \textit{situational creativity} that takes place when a social practice is performed and a \textit{creativity of habit} that concerns the agents’ capacity of evoking different practices from habit. To test this hypothesis the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (Verbal Form A) was analyzed in the light of praxeology.

In this paper the role of images in argumentative settings is analyzed from a cognitive angle. In particular, the proposal of this paper is to see visual argumentation as a specific form of extended and distributed cognition. In order to develop this idea, some of Wittgenstein’s insights are used to put evidence produced by research on temporal-spatial reasoning processes into philosophical perspective. Some contemporary argumentative analyses of visual argumentation are also discussed using commercial and political examples. The paper finishes with (...) the notion of collective minds in order to specify the general idea of arguing with images as extended cognition. (shrink)

I agree with those proponents of bio-medical moral enhancement who claim that we face large-scale global moral problems which are currently un-recognised or un-acted upon. But I argue that the proposed bio-medical means for tackling them is misconceived. I show that both bio-medical and “traditional” conceptions of moral enhancement share a misleading picture of the relation between the moral psychology of individuals and the socially structured moral problems with which they are faced. The argument unfolds in three stages. First I (...) reflect on prominent historical cases of large-scale progressive moral change to assess the role of the agents’ moral psychology in bringing that about and sustaining it. Second, I identify some current cases of people recognising one or more of the “new moral problems” that we face but not acting in accordance with that recognition. Third, I adumbrate an alternative stance to the idea of both traditional and bio-medical moral enhancement. (shrink)

Fogelin’s Wittgensteinian view of deep disagreement as allowing no rational resolution has been criticized from both argumentation theoretic and epistemological perspectives. These criticisms typically do not recognize how his point applies to the very argumentative resources on which they rely. Additionally, more extremely than Fogelin himself argues, the conditions of deep disagreement make each position literally unintelligible to the other, again disallowing rational resolution. In turn, however, this failure of sense is so extreme that it partly cancels its own meaning (...) as a failure of sense. Consequently, it paradoxically opens new possibilities for sense and therefore rationally unexpected resolutions. (shrink)

Here we develop a view of language as a form of material engagement, one that foregrounds its embodied and ecological character. Achieving such a view, however, requires disabusing ourselves of certain received and deeply entrenched notions. We present a thought experiment meant to illuminate the materiality of language, as a technological activity on par with the construction and manipulation of artifacts. We explore its implications, justifying the comparison with actual languages while emphasizing revealing differences. Ultimately, we hope to expose the (...) embodied and enactive nature of language, offering a view of language as continuous with our engagement with the environment, as opposed to a picture of language as an essentially symbolic system or code. (shrink)

In connecting educational theory to a neo-pragmatist social epistemology, we set out to understand education as knowledge practices that yield ‘the cultural world again’ by retelling culture or by making explicit what is implicit in culture. Recent trends in German educational studies towards holistic understanding of education demonstrate that such a holistic, non-representationalist framework is deliberately placed outside the traditional procedure of merely applying knowledge gained in the so-called foundational disciplines such as philosophy, sociology or psychology to the field of (...) education. By constructively relating Brandom's non-representational inferentialism to a re-reading of Mollenhauer's distinction of the presentation and representation of culture in and through education, we try to show that Brandom's philosophy can also be used to point out an inferentialism that is already at work in educational theory. Together, this strengthens a social theoretic account of education that explores how to conceptualise the role of knowledge in educational processes in terms of a holistic epistemology. (shrink)

Many philosophers worry that cognitive scientists apply the concept REPRESENTATION too liberally. For example, William Ramsey argues that scientists often ascribe natural representations according to the “receptor notion,” a causal account with absurd consequences. I rehabilitate the receptor notion by augmenting it with a background condition: that natural representations are ascribed only to systems construed as organisms. This Organism-Receptor account rationalizes our existing conceptual practice, including the fact that scientists in fact reject Ramsey’s absurd consequences. The Organism-Receptor account raises some (...) worrying questions, but as a more faithful characterization of scientific practice it is a better guide to conceptual reform. (shrink)

Questions about the mind and those about politics have conventionally found separate treatments in the philosophical literature. This paper proposes that crucial assumptions about the nature of the human person in politics actually turn on a compatible account of mental content. The particular relation that I will focus on here would be one between a discourse-theoretic model of persons in political ontology and social externalism in philosophy of mind. For the former, I’ll concern myself largely with Philip Pettit’s presentation of (...) it and its expression in terms of intentional systems which, I’ll argue, renders itself to a version of social externalism that emerges out of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. An auxiliary consequence of this exercise is the diagnosis of a familiar problem that is associated with the notion of rule-following—I’ll argue that skepticism about rule-following is only tenable when one holds on to an internalist thesis about the individuation of mental content. This objection is dissolved once a theory of understanding is adopted which works with a distinctly externalist account of mental content. Finally, I will take stock of the implications of this exercise in terms of suggesting basic grounds for a philosophically interesting relationship between political ontology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The dissertation attempts to answer the question of how to theorize resistance from within the philosophy of social science. To answer this question we must consider more than just the philosophy of social science; we also must look to political and moral philosophy. Resistance to the social norms of one’s community is possible to theorize from within the philosophy of social science once we develop a sufficiently nuanced account of social and moral communities, according to which membership in a community (...) is not defined by sharing judgments, conceptual frameworks, or comprehensive worldviews, but by sharing terms of discourse so that discussion about judgments, conceptual frameworks, and comprehensive worldviews is possible. Understanding the structure of one’s moral community is not the same as to endorsing that structure. This suggests that contestation is already present within communities about what ‘we’ do, up to and including who ‘we’—as a ‘community’—are. Challenging communitarian understandings of what makes a community a community, I argue that communities are best understood as forming around common concerns or perceptions of problems. This contestation plays a major role in determining the identities of communities, and these identities are constantly shifting. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper reconstructs and defends a Husserlian transcendental conception of intentionality. Initially, naturalistic conception of intentionality seems attractive, however, a naturalistic understanding conceals the true meaning of the puzzle and the nature of intentionality. Following Kant and primarily Husserl, this paper tries to determine the conditions a transcendental conception of intentionality must satisfy in order to be qualified as “transcendental”. Additionally, following Husserl, this paper argues that the alternative transcendental conception is not only possible, hence plausible; but also necessary, in (...) the sense that a thorough understanding of intentionality can only be achieved if a transcendental conception is adopted. (shrink)

This paper aims to identify the main points that Peter Winch makes, or reminders that he offers, about understanding ourselves and others. It would no doubt be possible to construct a theory out of these ideas, but I try to avoid giving the impression that Winch does so. Instead, the most Wittgensteinian approach to the subject is, as Winch does, to describe, remind and thereby clarify, without putting forward any kind of questionable hypothesis. Winch's work brings out the fact that (...) understanding people is importantly connected to both wisdom and practical being in tune with others, but identical with neither. (shrink)

When defending his doctoral dissertation, Umberto Eco was accused of narrative fallacy because he presented his research as if it were a detective novel. He should have presented only his conclusions. However, this criticism inspired Eco to claim that “[e]very scientific book should be... the report of a quest for some Holy Grail” (Eco, 2011, p. 7). A quest presupposes engagement on both sides of the knowledge exchange. Building upon our own research, we have produced a model-theoretic scheme for management (...) studies in support of the practicability of Eco’s claim. The idea is to re-create the engagement when establishing problem-solving competence in managerial learning: We start with an analysis of real-life cases of successful managerial problem solving (“best practices”). Next, we attempt to find the common denominator of those successful solutions. Lastly, we instantiate the principles found in the previous step in new problem situations, and thus provide new uses for them. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to recover a tradition of political philosophy which has been largely neglected and show its relevance for contemporary political thought. By arguing for the need of rethinking political myth today, the article reconstructs the philosophical reflections on this topic of Cassirer, Sorel and Spinoza, discussing both their strength and shortcomings. By adopting a comparative look backwards, it shows why they provide an ideal starting point for a philosophical approach to political myth which is aimed (...) at both understanding what political myths are and how should they be evaluated. (shrink)

Much has been said about the logical difference between rules and principles, yet few authors have focused on the distinct logical connectives linking the normative conditions of both norms. I intend to demonstrate that principles, unlike rules, are norms whose antecedents are linguistically formulated in a generic fashion, and thus logically described as inclusive disjunctions. This core feature incorporates the relevance criteria of normative antecedents into the world of principles and also explains their aptitude to conflict with opposing norms, namely (...) that their consequents are fulfilled to varying extents more frequently than those of rules. I conclude that the property of genericity should be predicated to the norm antecedent of principles, more precisely to the hypothetical action. This is of paramount importance to explain, in terms of logical implication and exclusion, the expansibility of competing principles, in contrast with the exclusive character of conflicting rules. (shrink)

:This essay brings together work I have done over the past 10 years: on the nature of ethics, on the purpose of ethics, and on its foundations in a way that, I hope, as E.M. Forster put it, connects “the prose and the passion.” I deploy lessons learned in this process to identify and face what I believe to be crucial challenges to science and to freedom. Finally I consider threats to freedom of a different sort, posed by the creation (...) and dissemination of “alternative facts” and by what is sometimes called “super” or “full” artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This essay develops the core intuition that we need to transform the objective condition of globalization into a reflexive consciousness of a cosmopolitan connectedness. We require a cosmopolitan self-understanding that allows us to respond in a normatively guided way to objective processes that undermine the usual venues of political will formation. Since our global connectedness in terms of economic and political integration is ongoing and seemingly inevitable, we need a similarly inclusive and global approach to critically respond to the challenge (...) of these unconstrained forces. The proposal is to develop a dialogical cosmopolitanism which is not based on a new meta-level of abstract universal norms, but grounded in agentive capabilities. Hermeneutic capabilities which comprise contextual perspective-taking are introduced, developing shared yet fallible norms, and critically reflecting on the power relations involved. These agent-based capabilities would allow the situated agents themselves to understand the objective forces that define current globalization and provide normative resources for a different, cosmopolitan globalization. (shrink)

Fundamentismus und Skeptizismus-Anarchismus sind zwei entgegengesetzte Positionen in der traditionellen Erkenntnistheorie und in der modernen Wissenschaftstheorie. Zwischen ihnen gibt es einen dritten Standpunkt, den Evolutionismus. Beispiele sind zwei neuere Arbeiten von Putnam und Stegmüller . Im Gegensatz zum logisch-statischen Fundamentismus berücksichtigt der Evolutionismus auch dynamische und naturalistische Ansätze. Stegmüller folgend entlehnen wir in der vorliegenden Untersuchung aus der Sprachphilosophie pragmatische Gesichtspunkte, um die logische Syntax und Semantik, die Werkzeuge des Fundamentismus, zu ersetzen. Wir zeigen die Kraft der Pragmatik bei der (...) Behandlung von Problemen wie Erkenntniswachstum, Begriffswechsel, Theorien- und Bedeutungsdynamik, wissenschaftliche Entdeckung und besonders beim Problem der Inkommensurabilität. Unser nicht-fundamentistischer Vorschlag ist ein heuristisches Modell, das auf der modernen genetischen Theorie basiert. (shrink)

This volume brings together a number of related contributions on the topic of expertise and education. Expertise is a topic that is beginning to receive more attention in the Philosophy of Education and discussions are closely related to the epistemological debate concerning the nature of know-how which has also burgeoned in recent years within ‘mainstream’ epistemology. More specifically, this volume focuses on the relevance of expertise to professional education and practice, with the aim on shedding light on what is involved (...) in professional expertise and the implications of a sound understanding of professional expertise for professional education. Although all contributions have roots in philosophical discussion, there is an element of cross-disciplinarity among them, reflecting the advances that have been made to our understanding of expertise from psychology in particular. (shrink)

Philosophers of action and perception have reached a consensus: the term ‘intentionality’ has significantly different senses in their respective fields. But Anscombe argues that these distinct senses are analogically united in such a way that one cannot understand the concept if one focuses exclusively on its use in one’s preferred philosophical sub-discipline. She highlights three salient points of analogy: (i) intentional objects are given by expressions that employ a “description under which;” (ii) intentional descriptions are typically vague and indeterminate; and (...) (iii) intentional descriptions may be false. I explore these three features as they apply to both perception and action and defend Anscombe’s view that the analogical concept of intentionality is a grammatical concept. That is, there are two distinctive linguistic/social practices that involve, respectively, a special sense of the question ‘Why?’ and a special sense of the question ‘What?’ To competently ask and answer the questions that constitute these practices not only reflects, but also conveys a grammatical understanding of intentionality’s basic, formal structure. (shrink)

The Editors’ Preface to the fourth edition of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is disparaging of the earlier editorial efforts of G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees and in particular of their inclusion and titling of the material in “Part II”. I argue, on both historical and philosophical grounds, that the Editors have failed to refute the editorial decisions of Rhees and Anscombe – a failure born both of a neglect of the historical circumstances and Wittgenstein's own expressed hopes and intentions (...) for his writings, and of a myopic understanding of his philosophy. Wittgenstein's legacy has not been well served by their interventions, which should be undone in future editions. (shrink)

Self-consciously attempting to shape one's beliefs through deliberation and reasoning requires that one stand in a relation to those beliefs that might be signaled by saying that one must inhabit one's beliefs as one's own view. What does this amount to? A broad swath of philosophical thinking about self-knowledge, norms of belief, self-consciousness, and related areas assumes that this relation requires one to endorse, or be rationally committed to endorsing, one's beliefs. In fact, however, fully self-conscious adherence to epistemic norms (...) requires the ability to self-consciously hold a belief without endorsing that belief as true, as well-supported by the evidence, or as meeting some other epistemic standard, and there are cases in which no such commitment is rationally required. This ability is necessary if there is to be any such thing as a fully self-conscious process of changing one's mind. (shrink)

Computational models have shown that purely statistical knowledge about words’ linguistic contexts is sufficient to learn many properties of words, including syntactic and semantic category. For example, models can infer that “postman” and “mailman” are semantically similar because they have quantitatively similar patterns of association with other words. In contrast to these computational results, artificial language learning experiments suggest that distributional statistics alone do not facilitate learning of linguistic categories. However, experiments in this paradigm expose participants to entirely novel words, (...) whereas real language learners encounter input that contains some known words that are semantically organized. In three experiments, we show that the presence of familiar semantic reference points facilitates distributional learning and this effect crucially depends both on the presence of known words and the adherence of these known words to some semantic organization. (shrink)

Plato's reflections on Forms have generally been overlooked, in contemporary Philosophy of Language, as a serious resource for illuminating the notion of word meaning. In part, this is due to the influence of Wittgenstein's critical reflections on looking for ‘something in common’ as explanatory for use of a general term. I argue that, far from being undermined, appeal to Forms can both help explain, and provide corrective critical insight into, Wittgenstein's observations. Plato's reflections provide insight into word meaning that is (...) relevant for contemporary research. Relevant considerations include an explanation as to why an item is F; looking to ‘what something is’; the compresence of opposites; whether participation in a Form involves approximation to the Form. (shrink)

A fundamental aim in caring practice is to understand patients' experiences of ill‐health. These experiences have a qualitative content and cannot, unlike thoughts and beliefs with conceptual content, directly be expressed in words. Nurses therefore face a variety of interpretive challenges when they aim to understand patients' subjective perspectives on disease and illness. The article argues that theories on social simulation can shed light on how nurses manage to meet these challenges. The core assumption of social simulationism is that we (...) do not understand other people by forming mental representations of how they think, but by putting ourselves in their situation in a more imaginative way. According to simulationism, any attempt to understand a patient's behavior is made on the basis of simulating what it is like to be that patient in the given context. The article argues that this approach to social interpretation can clarify how nurses manage to achieve aims of patient understanding, even when they have limited time to communicate and incomplete knowledge of patients' perspectives. Furthermore, simulation theory provides a normative framework for interpretation, in the sense that its theoretical assumptions constitute ideals for how nurses should seek to understand patients' experiences of illness. (shrink)