The idea that our recognition of others’ mental states is beset, not only by contingent but constitutional uncertainty is one to which Wittgenstein returns throughout his later work. And yet it remains an underexplored component of that work. The primary aim of this paper is to better understand what Wittgenstein means when he describes the mental as constitutively uncertain, and his conception of the kind of knowledge of others' mental lives consistent with it. The secondary aim is to connect Wittgenstein’s (...) discussion of the constitutive uncertainty of the mental with two further components of his later thought—specifically, his remarks on aspect perception and on the pattern-like nature of the emotions. (shrink)

Islamic building codes require mosques to face Mecca. The further Islam spreads, the more apt are believers to fall into a quandary. X faces Y only when the front of X is closer to Y than any other side of X. So the front of the mosque should be oriented along a shortest path to Mecca. Which way is that? Does the path to Mecca tunnel through the earth? Or does the path follow the surface of the earth?

A problem that has troubled both neo-Darwinists and neo-Lamarckians is whether instincts involve knowledge. This paper discusses the contributions to this problem of the evolutionary biologist August Weismann and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Weismann discussed an empirical homunculus fallacy: Lamarck’s theory mistakenly presupposes a homunculus in the germ cells. Wittgenstein discussed a conceptual homunculus fallacy which applies to Lamarck’s theory: it is mistaken to suppose that knowledge is stored in the brain or DNA. The upshot of these two fallacies is (...) that instincts arise through a neo-Darwinian process but are not cognitions in the sense that they involve knowledge. Although neo-Lamarckians have rightly argued that learning processes may contribute to the development of instincts, their ideas about the role of knowledge in the evolution and development of instincts are mistaken. (shrink)

While interactions with other animate beings seem mostly to serve our own human interests, there are, at times, fugitive glimpses, passing contacts, momentary motions, and fleeting feelings of vital connection with other life forms. Life phenomenology attempts to realize these relational, interactive and intercorporeal possibilities. It challenges the language game of presuming the muteness and bruteness of non-human creatures and, at best, of speaking for them. It critiques the capture of non-human species within the inhibiting ring of human functions and (...) forms to reveal feelings and flows of interspecies commonality. It brings to expression the experiences of being moved to act and speak with others who do not share the human tongue. In part a critique of the logocentric, anthropocentric phenomenologies of intentionality, life phenomenology is more positively a means of coming to terms with the life-affirming kinetic, kinesthetic and affective dynamics of interspecies relationality. I take up the interrogation of this phenomenality, this humanimality, with the assistance of phenomenological scholarship that lends fuller credence to the experiences we have of moving in concert with other animate beings. In doing so, I aim to show the important insights that life phenomenology offers us in fostering not only greater appreciation of, responsivenss to and connection with other animals, but also in indicating the qualitative dynamics of relating with greater animate consciousness to one anotherof our own animal kind. (shrink)

This essay develops three key claims made in my 2018 book, Exceptional Technologies. Part one argues for ‘trivialising the transcendental’, to remove stigmas attached to the word ‘transcendental’ in philosophy in general and philosophy of technology in particular. Part two outlines the concept of ‘exceptional technologies’. These are artefacts and practices that show up as limit cases for our received pictures of what constitutes a ‘technology’ and that force us to reassess the conditions for the possibility of these pictures. I (...) focus on the case of autonomous vehicles here, arguing that Google Street View provides a relatively better picture for approaching philosophical issues at stake than the famous ‘Trolley Problem’. Part three then concludes with a focus on Heidegger’s ‘Question Concerning Technology’ essay. Heidegger asserts that philosophical questioning ‘builds a way’. I argue that philosophical approaches to technologies might better be considered in terms of a multidimensional problem space. (shrink)

This paper builds a three-part argument in favour of a more transcendentally focused form of ‘postphenomenology’ than is currently practised in philosophy of technology. It does so by problematising two key terms, ‘constitution’ and ‘postphenomenology’, then by arguing in favour of a ‘transcendental empiricist’ approach that draws on the work of Foucault, Derrida, and, in particular, Deleuze. Part one examines ‘constitution’, as it moves from the context of Husserl’s phenomenology to Ihde and Verbeek’s ‘postphenomenology’. I argue that the term tends (...) towards different senses in these contexts, and that this renders its sense more problematic than the work of Ihde and Verbeek makes it appear. Part two examines ‘postphenomenology’. I argue that putatively ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze may be better characterised as ‘postphenomenologists’, and that approaching them in this way may allow better access to their work from a philosophy of technology perspective. Part three argues for a ‘transcendental empiricist’ approach to philosophy of technology. In doing so, it argues for a rewriting of contemporary philosophy of technology’s political constitution: since an ‘empirical turn’ in the 1990s, I argue, philosophy of technology has been too narrowly focused on ‘empirical’ issues of fact, and not focused enough on ‘transcendental’ issues concerning conditions for these facts. (shrink)

A collection of material on Husserl's Logical Investigations, and specifically on Husserl's formal theory of parts, wholes and dependence and its influence in ontology, logic and psychology. Includes translations of classic works by Adolf Reinach and Eugenie Ginsberg, as well as original contributions by Wolfgang Künne, Kevin Mulligan, Gilbert Null, Barry Smith, Peter M. Simons, Roger A. Simons and Dallas Willard. Documents work on Husserl's ontology arising out of early meetings of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy.

When we say that good parenting is an ethical and not a technical matter, what is the nature of the warrant we can give for identifying one way of parenting as good and another as bad? There is, of course, a general issue here about the giving of reasons in ethics. The issue may seem to arise with peculiar force in parenting since parenting casts our whole being into uncertainty: here, above all, it seems, we do not scrutinise our commitments (...) from a moral standpoint that is itself secure, and such moral judgements as we make must be tentative. I attempt to illustrate this from the point of view not of parenting but of owning a dog, where the uncertainty and the tentativeness are more marked still and can be deeply disconcerting. A strong case, however, can be made for saying that these are inevitable and proper features of the essentially dialogic and self-reflexive nature of ethical discourse. When we appreciate this, parenting appears less an especially problematic or marginal field of ethical inquiry than a paradigm case of it. (shrink)

It has become commonplace to interpret 'Easter Island' in terms of an environmental allegory, a Malthusian morality tale of the consequences of over-exploitation of limited natural resources. There are, however, ethical dangers in treating places and peoples allegorically, as moralized means (lessons) to satisfy others' edificatory ends. Allegory reductively appropriates the past, presenting a specific interpretation as 'given' (fixed) and exemplary, wrongly suggesting that meanings and morals, like islands, are there to be 'discovered' ready-formed. Gadamer's hermeneutics suggests an alternative understanding (...) which expresses something of the ethical ambiguities involved in giving meaning to the environmental history of Easter Island. (shrink)

International Journal of Philosophical Studies 0967-2559 (print)/1466-4542 (online) Original Article.

A key phrase in working with horses, “bringing up life” is taken in its literal sense of moving expressively and energetically in order to animate the movements of the horses. The phrase also points to both what the radical phenomenologist Michel Henry referred to as the auto-affectivity of life and the vital powers of an essential hetero-affectivity. “Bringing up life” is the kinetic, kinaesthetic, affective expression of this fundamental impression that life is shared with other animate beings and that it (...) is all the more powerfully felt for being so. Working with horses – in spite of all the human conceits that groundwork, liberty training, and the riding disciplines hold – can thus reveal what it means to “bring up life” as more than a topic of very practical interest and specific phenomenological description. Through the impressional investigation of this expression we may well begin to feel our way toward more life-affirming, life-enhancing interactions with others of our own and many other animal kinds. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that what I call the simple theory of introspection can be extended to account for our introspective knowledge of what we believe as well as what we consciously experience. In section one, I present the simple theory of introspection and motivate the extension from experience to belief. In section two, I argue that extending the simple theory provides a solution to Moore’s paradox by explaining why believing Moorean conjunctions always involves some degree (...) of irrationality. In section three, I argue that it also solves the puzzle of transparency by explaining why it’s rational to answer the question whether one believes that p by answering the question whether p. Finally, in section four, I defend the simple theory against objections by arguing that self-knowledge constitutes an ideal of rationality. (shrink)

Wayne Martin’s Theories of Judgment marks a significant advance in the philosophical analysis of judgment. He understands that the domain of judgment is so large that it allows only a selective treatment. We can expand Martin’s insight by acknowledging that this domain is, in fact, hypercomplex and therefore unsurveyable in Wittgenstein’s sense. Martin’s treatment of judgments can, however, be extended in a number of directions. Of particular importance is it to understand the linguistic aspect of theoretical judgments, the challenges to (...) the synthetic conception of judgment constituted not only by existential, but also by impersonal and negative judgments, and the exploration of the links between the notions of judgment and truth. (shrink)

Trust between a patient and a medical doctor is normally both justified and taken for granted, but sometimes it may need to be negotiated. In this paper I will present how trust can be interpreted as both an explicit and implicit phenomenon, drawing on literature from the social sciences and philosophy. The distinction between explicit and implicit interpretations of trust will be used to address problems that may arise in clinical consultations. Negotiating trust in any way very easily brings distrust (...) into a situation, but sometimes this can be helpful for building a more functional patient-doctor relationship. (shrink)

Positivism has been used to establish a standard that Information Systems (IS) research must meet to be scientific. According to such positivistic beliefs in IS, scientific research should: 1) be generalizable, 2) focus on stable independent variables, 3) have certain ontological assumptions, and 4) use statistical or quantitative methods rather than qualitative methods. We argue that logical positivist philosophers required none of these. On the contrary, logical positivist philosophers regarded philosophizing in general and ontological considerations in particular as nonsense. Moreover, (...) the positivists’ preferred empirical research method was not a survey, but rather a qualitative observation recorded by field notes. In addition, positivist philosophers required neither statistical nor nonstatistical generalizability. At least some positivist philosophers also acknowledged the study of singular cases as being scientific. Many research orientations (e.g., single-setting research, examination of change, qualitative research) that are deemed “unscientific” by positivism in IS seem to be “scientific” (in principle) according to logical positivism. In turn, generally speaking, what has been justified as scientific by positivism in IS (e.g., requirements of statistical or nonstatistical generalizability, surveys, independent variables, ontological views) were either not required by logical positivists or were regarded as nonsensical by logical positivists. Furthermore, given that positivism is sometimes associated (or confused) with logical empiricism in IS, we also briefly discuss logical empiricism. Finally, realizing that certain influential, taken-forgranted assumptions that underlie IS research are unwarranted could have ground-breaking implications for future IS research. (shrink)

Conceptual confusions permeate all forms of intellectual pursuit. Many have contended that multilingual legislation, i.e., one law enacted in different languages, is unviable when carried out by means of translation. But not many have realized that the same would also be true of drafting if their contention could be justified. My involvement in the translation of Hong Kong laws into Chinese in the run-up to 1997 exposed me to a whole world of myths and misconceptions about legal translation arising from (...) our failure to command a clear view of the workings of language. Over the years I have endeavoured to come to grips with the problems inherent in legal translation, showing that the arguments against the possibility of exact translation, against the possibility of achieving equivalence between different language texts of the law, and against the possibility of bridging the conceptual gap between legal terminologies in different languages, are all ill-grounded and misguided. There are indeed enormous difficulties in drafting and translating multilingual law, but they are essentially of a technical nature, by no means theoretically irresolvable. The viability of multilingual legislation is simply grounded in our innate communicative intention to use signs and symbols to convey meaning. As language users, we are capable of making language work for us for any particular purpose. Just as we can translate the rules of chess from one language to another whereby players speaking different languages can play the same game called “chess”, we don’t see why we can’t do the same with multilingual legislation. The door has always been open! (shrink)

Ever since Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, most philosophers have taken the distinction between science and philosophy to depend upon the existence of a class of truths especially amenable to philosophical investigation. In recent times, Quine’s arguments against the analytic-synthetic distinction have cast doubt over the existence of such a class of special philosophical truths and consequently many now doubt that there is a sharp distinction between science and philosophy. In this paper, I present a perfectly sharp distinction (...) between science and philosophy that does not depend upon any distinction between philosophical and scientific truths. (shrink)

I hope to clarify and explicate an account of how a creature comes to be brought into the space of reasons – that is, comes to take its place as a rational agent in social practices. My ultimate interest, however, is with a tension apparently generated by the emphasis on training coupled with this attack on cognitivism. If one’s coming to maturity depends on one being embedded in a practice, so that one comes to adopt, with ‘comfortable certainty’, the common (...) ground of that practice’s language games, then there seems to be no position from which to frame a critique of a practice. (shrink)

NeoFregeanism is an intriguing but elusive philosophy of mathematical existence. At crucial points, it goes cryptic and metaphorical. I want to put forward an interpretation of neoFregeanism—perhaps not one that actual neoFregeans will embrace—that makes sense of much of what they say. NeoFregeans should embrace quantifier variance.

Shamik Dasgupta has argued that realists about natural properties (and laws, grounding, etc.) cannot account for their epistemic value. For "properties are cheap": in addition to natural properties and any value the realist might attach to them, there are also "shmatural" properties (standing to natural properties like charge and mass as Goodman's grue and bleen stand to green and blue) and a corresponding "shmvalue" of theorizing in terms of them. Dasgupta's challenge is one of objectivity: the existence of the "shmamiked" (...) network of concepts threatens the objectivity of facts stated using the unshmamiked network. But the challenge can be repelled given a proper understanding of objectivity itself. (shrink)

Currently, our official rationality is still of a Cartesian kind; we are still embedded in a mechanistic order that takes it that separate, countable entities (spatial forms), related logically to each other, are the only ‘things’ that matter to us—an order clearly suited to advances in robotics. Unfortunately, it is an order that renders invisible ‘relational things’, non-objective things that exist in time, in the transitions from one state of affairs to another, things that ‘point’ toward possibilities in the future, (...) which mean something to us. I have called such things, hermeneutical–dialogical ‘things’ as they gradually emerge in our back-and-forth, step-by-step relations to the others and otherneses in our surroundings; they consist in the ‘promissory’ things sustaining our trust in each other and in our authorities, in our social organizations and social institutions, and in our culture. Clearly, we need to understand better, not only what robots can, and cannot do, but also the long-term ethical and political implications of inserting robotic activities into our everyday ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings if we are to avoid the dystopian futures envisaged by some. Descartes’ aim of “making ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature,” forgets our larger task of our making ourselves into human beings—of doing together in dialog what we cannot do apart. (shrink)

Classically, we have treated talk of such things as meaning, understanding, and thinking, etc., as raising problems about mental states assumed to exist inside people's heads. And in our philosophical inquiries, we have sought determinate in-principle solutions to these problems. In the dialogical, relational-responsive view of language use presented here — influenced by Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov — a very different view of such talk is presented. Our 'inner lives' are not hidden 'inside' us, but are 'displayed' out 'in' the (...) unfolding, living encounters spontaneously occurring between us and the others around us as we live out our lives. (shrink)

Wittgenstein is not primarily concerned with anything mysterious going on inside people's heads, but with us simply going on with each other; that is, with us being able to inter-relate our everyday, bodily activities in unproblematic ways in with those of others, in practice. Learning to communicate with clear and unequivocal meanings; to send messages; to fully understand each other; to be able to reach out, so to speak, from within language-game entwined forms of life, and to talk in theoretical (...) terms of the contacts one has made., as an individual, with what is out there; and so on — all these abilities are, or can be, later developments. Wittgenstein's investigations into our pre-individual, pre-theoretical, embodied, compulsive activities are utterly revolutionary. They open up a vast new realm for empirical study to do with the detailed and subtle nature of the bodily activities in the background to everything that we do. The relational character of such pre-theoretical, Ur-linguistic, spontaneous bodily activities—and the way in which they display us as seeing connections from within a synopsis of trivialities — is explored through the paradigm of currently fashionable 3–13 random dot autostereograms. (shrink)

Abstract.Legal philosophy must consider the way in which laws function as reasons for action. “Simple positivism” considers laws as merely reasons in the balance of reasons. Joseph Raz, as a representative of “sophisticated positivism,” argues that laws are exclusionary reasons for action, not merely reasons in the balance of reasons. This paper discusses Raz's arguments for his view. The Functional Argument provides no more reason for positivism than against it. The Phenomenological Argument is best supported by an account of how (...) character traits function in explaining behaviour. But then the distinction between exclusionary reasons and expressive reasons is obliterated. Legal positivism cannot absorb laws as expressive reasons for action. Raz's positivism implies the correctness of an anti‐positivistic legal theory. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a novel analysis of Quine's indeterminacy puzzle and an unorthodox approach to its resolution. It is argued that the ultimate roots of indeterminacy lie not in behaviorism per se, but rather in Quine's commitment to a fundamental assumption about the nature of perceptual input, namely, the assumption that sensory information is strictly extensional. Calling this assumption the 'principle of input extensionalism' (PIE) I first demonstrate the fundamental role that it plays in generating Quine's argument for (...) the indeterminacy of translation. It is then argued that a tacit acceptance of PIE is prevalent among contemporary theories of cognition and representation, making Quine's puzzle a living challenge for cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. A standard way of responding to the challenge consists of the idea that the indeterminacy generated at the perceptual level is canceled out courtesy of the contribution of higher cognitive processes. However, I argue that such a top-down solution leaves much to be desired. As an alternative, I offer a bottom-up solution, which consists of a systematic rejection of PIE in favor of an intensional view of perceptual input rooted in contemporary action-based theories of perception, and in particular in the notion of perceptual invariants. (shrink)

This paper presents the Functional/Emotional approach to language development, which explains the process leading up to the core capacities necessary for language; shows how this process leads to the formation of internal symbols; and how it shapes and is shaped by the child’s development of language.

In this article the standard philosophical method involving intuition-driven conceptual analysis is challenged in a new way. This orthodox approach to philosophy takes analysanda to be the specifications of the content of concepts in the form of sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. Here it is argued that there is no adequate account of what necessary and sufficient conditions are. So, the targets of applications of the standard philosophical method so understood are not sufficiently well understood for this method to (...) be dependable. (shrink)

The Greeks had a ready answer for what happens when the mind suddenly finds the answer to a question for which it had been searching: insight was regarded as a gift of the Muses, its origins were divine. It served to highlight the Greeks'' belief that there are some things which are not meant to be scientifically explained. The essence of insight is that it comes from some supernatural source: unpredicted and unfettered. In other words, the origins of insight are (...) unconscious, and hence, unexplainable. Wittgenstein felt that, as long as there continues to be a noun expression like to have a moment of insight which functions in the same way as the expression to have a hunger pang, thereby inducing us to treat moment of insight as the name of an experience, then people will keep stumbling over the same puzzling difficulties and find themselves staring at something which no explanation seems capable of clearing up. To the founders of AI, this argument reeked of obscurantism. The moment of insight, they felt, is indeed a mystery, but it is one that begs to be explained in causal terms. Indeed, the problem of insight served as one of the leading problems in the evolution of AI. Hence anyone interested in the foundations of AI is compelled to examine the manner in which the early pioneers of the field sought to explain the eureka experience. In this paper I will look at some of the key conceptual developments which paved the way for Newell and Simon''s theory of GPS: the fundamental changes in the notion of the unconscious — the emergence of the cognitive unconscious — which took place in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. In so doing, I hope to clarify what Wittgenstein may have had in mind in his strictures against mechanist attempts to analyse the nature of insight. (shrink)

Reading through Mechanica1 Intelligence, volume III of Alan Turing's Collected Works, one begins to appreciate just how propitious Turing's timing was. If Turing's major accomplishment in ‘On Computable Numbers’ was to expose the epistemological premises built into formalism, his main achievement in the 1940s was to recognize the extent to which this outlook both harmonized with and extended contemporary psychological thought. Turing sought to synthesize these diverse mathematical and psychological elements so as to forge a union between ‘embodied rules’ and (...) ‘learning programs’. Through their joint service in the Mechanist Thesis each would validate the other: and the frameworks from whence each derived. In this paper I will try to show how Turing's psychological thesis forces us to reassess the consequences of establishing AI on the epistemological foundation that underlies behaviourism. (shrink)

Review of Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-8 DOI 10.1007/s11097-012-9255-1 Authors Dominic Shaw, Department of Philosophy, The University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD UK Journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Online ISSN 1572-8676 Print ISSN 1568-7759.

The idea that logic and reasoning are somehow related goes back to antiquity. It clearly underlies much of the work in logic, as witnessed by the development of computability, and formal and mechanical deductive systems, for example. On the other hand, a platitude is that logic is the study of correct reasoning; and reasoning is cognitive if anything Is. Thus, the relationship between logic, computation, and correct reasoning makes an interesting and historically central case study for mechanism. The purpose of (...) this article is to begin the articulation of this relationship, pointing out its sources and its limitations. (shrink)

. Reproducible results and repeatable measurements at the same location are fundamental to science, yet of grave concern to scientists. Involvement in biological re-surveys under MVZ-Berkeley, Harvard-LTER and Hamaarag elucidated “replication” and “location” and untangled “incommensurability” from “no fact of the matter” and “indeterminacy.” All cases revealed incommensurability without indeterminacy on the smallest scale and indeterminacy without incommensurability on higher scales, with communication failure in the former and successful workarounds in the latter. I argue that an involved philosophy helps clarify (...) fundamental concepts in this case, and since it could also help other cases it therefore should be examined in every case before being ruled out. (shrink)

The primary focus here is romantic love, but it may be applied to other cases of love such as those within a family. The first issue is whether love is a non-rational occurrence leading to a state of affairs to which the normative constrains of reason do not apply. If one assumes that reasons are relevant to determining love, then the second issue is the manner in which love is and should be reasonable and governed by the indications of reason. (...) It is contended that our conception of love is inherently contradictory. Depending on circumstances, we want love to be both a non-rational occurrence beyond reason and something normative such that the indications of reasons are relevant to determining and assessing it. We alternate between the two treatments of love and in so doing love can function in our lives. The incoherence is accommodated by each treatment or view of love being one of as if. This allows us to live with love in a manner whereby we do not have to definitively commit to either alternative, so we have a dipolar as if concept of love. Sometimes we view love as if reasons were beside the point and at others we view love as if it were rightly subject to the indications of reason. (shrink)

Rule following is often made an unnecessary mystery in the philosophy of social science. One form of mystification is the issue of 'rule finitism', which raises the puzzle as to how a learner can possibly extend the rule to applications beyond those examples which have been given as instruction in the rule. Despite the claim that this problem originated in the work of Wittgenstein, it is clear that his philosophical method is designed to evaporate, not perpetuate, such problems. The supposed (...) problem of rule finitism is malformed, deriving from misconceptions about the relation between understanding a rule and making an application of it. (shrink)

According to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, propositions of natural science are all meaningful propositions of language therefore there is no ethical proposition because alleged ones do not fulfil the criterion of meaningfulness of propositions, which is empirical verifiability. In addition, Wittgenstein somewhere considers Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to have an important ethical point. There seems to be a conflict between Wittgenstein's recent claim, on the one hand, and the meaninglessness of ethics, on the other. In the face of this apparent conflict, we try (...) to ponder the question of what is the ethical point of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In answer to this question, we will pay attention to Kevin Cahill's interpretation of Wittgenstein. In Wittgenstein's view, modern culture prevents what he calls the experience of the wonder of the world. Cahill interprets the ethical point of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in connection with Wittgenstein's view on modern culture. What objection would Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus be subject to if Cahill's interpretation were correct? How defensible is the dependence of Cahill's interpretation of Tractatus on other Wittgenstein's works? At the end of our study, we will answer these questions. (shrink)

One of the objections against the thesis of underdetermination of theories by observations is that it is unintelligible. Any two empirically equivalent theories — so the argument goes—are in principle intertranslatable, hence cannot count as rivals in any non-trivial sense. Against that objection, this paper shows that empirically equivalent theories may contain theoretical sentences that are not intertranslatable. Examples are drawn from a related discussion about incommensurability that shows that theoretical non-intertranslatability is possible.

In this four part exchange, Evan Selinger starts by stating that Collins’s empirical evidence in respect of linguistic socialization and its bearing on artificial intelligence and expertise is valuable; it advances philosophical and sociological understanding of the relationship between knowledge and language. Nevertheless, he argues that Collins mischaracterizes the data under review and thereby misrepresents how knowledge is acquired and understates the extent to which expert knowers are embodied. Selinger reconstructs the case for the importance of the body in the (...) initial acquisition of language and challenges Collins to show how a disembodied entity could become fluent in any language at all.Collins responds by accepting that his approach does not demonstrate quite as much about the irrelevance of the body as he thought it did but that even though he accepts all of Selinger’s claims, ‘the body’ as needed by the philosophical approach set out by Selinger is still a vestigial thing. Collins’s main point, however, is that the philosophical view of the body—the world is divided into embodied agents and unembodied entities—distracts attention from the more interesting empirically researchable question of how the ability to become socialized diminishes, if it does, as the body become more and more minimal. The right research question is not about whether a person can extrapolate from minimal sensory input but how much extrapolation is possible under different circumstances and how it is done.Dreyfus, having seen the whole of the exchange so far, agrees that both have a point but argues that Collins’s approach still misses the well established importance of bodily engagement for full understanding.Collins responds to this by trying to set out more clearly the position associated with the idea of interactional expertise.Keywords: Interactional expertise; Phenomenology; Turing test; Embodiment; Tacit knowledge; Socialization. (shrink)

Communication is a fundamentally interactive phenomenon. Evolutionary biology recognises this fact in its definition of communication, in which signals are those actions that cause reactions, and where both action and reaction are designed for that reason. Where only one or the other is designed then the behaviours are classed as either cues or coercion. Since mutually dependent behaviours are unlikely to emerge simultaneously, the symmetry inherent in these definitions gives rise to a prediction that communication will only emerge if cues (...) or coercive behaviours do so first. They will then be co-opted for communication. A range of case studies, from animal signalling, evolutionary robotics, comparative psychology, and evolutionary linguistics are used to test this prediction. The first three are found to be supportive. However in the Embodied Communication Game, a recent experimental approach to the emergence of communication between adult humans, communication emerges even when cues or coerced behaviours are not possible. This suggests that humans are exceptional in this regard. It is argued that the reason for this is the degree to which we are able and compelled to read and interpret the behaviour of others in intentional terms. (shrink)

Elvira Schnabel; Wittgenstein on Rules: what follows and what does not, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 25, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 83–94, https.

This article argues that two significant implications of Wittgenstein’s writings for social thought are (1) that people are constitutively social beings and (2) that the social context of an individual life is nexuses of practice. Part one concretizes these ideas by examining the constitution of action within practices. It begins by criticizing three arguments of Winch’s that suggest that action is inherently social. It then spells out two arguments for the practice constitution of action that are extractable from Wittgenstein’s remarks. (...) Part two contrasts the conception of the social context of individual life as practices with three historically significant conceptions of such a context: totality; sui generis reality; and abstract structure. It also circumscribes that contemporary movement - practice theory - that develops the Wittgensteinian position and represents, perhaps, his most significant legacy for social thought. (shrink)

Prior to A Process Model, Gendlin’s theoretical and practical work focused on the interfacing of bodily-felt meaningfulness and symbolization. In A Process Model, Gendlin does something much wider and more philosophically primary. The hermeneutic and pragmatist distinction between the concept of experience, on the one hand, and actual experiential process, on the other, becomes for Gendlin the methodological basis for a radical reconceptualization of the body. Wittgenstein’s formulation of “meaning” as “language-use in situations” is spelled out by Gendlin in embodied (...) terms, yielding a profound new grasp of language, meaning, situation, language-use and culture as interactional body-process. Gendlin, in building his text, answers the pragmatist critique of a wrong progression of thinking where the results of an inquiry are read back to be its premises. With his central concept “eveving” Gendlin shows how the seeming determinacy of preceding structure is opened in the actual occurring. He thereby elaborates a new conception of continuity where the possibility for responsive novelty is emergent in the event itself. The conceptual development of the text itself instances this kind of emergent novelty. We will somewhat follow Gendlin’s own path in using language-in-situations as entry-point into his more fundamental process-thinking, thereby asking ourselves how to engage his new kind of model. In the last part, we introduce some of the philosophical roots of Gendlin’s A Process Model. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Making Things Up, Bennett defends the intriguing idea that causation should be included among the building relations. I critique Bennett’s arguments for inclusion, and claim that inclusion distorts her own treatments of causation, relative fundamentality, and absolute fundamentality. Instead, I argue for treating causation and grounding as separate species of generative, explanatory difference-making.

Some philosophers hold that the neuroscience of action is, in practice or in principle, incapable of touching debates in action theory and moral psychology. The role of desires in action, the existence of basic actions, and the like are topics that must be sorted out by philosophers alone: at least at present, and perhaps by the very nature of the questions. This paper examines both philosophical and empirical arguments against the relevance of neuroscience to such questions and argues that neither (...) succeeds. In practice, there is already a stable body of findings from neuroanatomy and neurophysiology that warrants attention. And as a matter of principle, the ‘causal map’ of action production derivable from these findings requires the study of action theorists and moral psychologists because every such philosopher has commitments to the shape of this causal map: commitments that might be in conflict with reality. (shrink)