This is an important book precisely because there is none other quite like it.

TWO OPPOSING VIEWS ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP between concepts and the world can be found in the history of philosophy. One view—deriving from Immanuel Kant and endorsed by Karl Popper, among many others—claims that in forming and using concepts we structure the world. Concepts produce or increase order. Hence, the world, insofar as it is knowable by human beings, is necessarily a conceptually structured world. The second, still older view—represented by the Aristotelian tradition and by John Locke, for example—holds that concepts (...) are formed by abstracting from the particularities of the world. By leaving out the accidental or irrelevant features of particular entities, we abstract a concept as a general representative of a kind. (shrink)

Traits like simplicity and explanatory power have traditionally been treated as values internal to the sciences, constitutive rather than contextual. As such they are cognitive virtues. This essay contrasts a traditional set of such virtues with a set of alternative virtues drawn from feminist writings about the sciences. In certain theoretical contexts, the only reasons for preferring a traditional or an alternative virtue are socio-political. This undermines the notion that the traditional virtues can be considered purely cognitive.

Developments in biotechnology and genomics have moved the issue of patenting scientific and technological inventions toward the center of interest. In particular, the patentability of genes of plants, animals, or humans and of genetically modified (parts of) living organisms has been discussed, and questioned, from various normative perspectives. This paper aims to contribute to this debate. For this purpose, it first explains a number of relevant aspects of the theory and practice of patenting. The focus is on a special and (...) increasingly significant type of patents, namely product patents. The paper provides three general arguments against the concept and practice of product patenting. The first argument briefly considers the claim that patents are legitimate because they promote socially useful innovation. Against this claim, it is argued that product patents may hamper rather than promote such innovation. The second and main argument concludes that product patents are not adequately based on actual technological inventions, as they should be according to the usual criteria of patentability. The principal moral issue is that product patents tend to reward patentees for inventions they have not really made available. The final argument proposes a method for patenting the heat of the sun. Assuming that granting this patent will be generally considered absurd, the argument exposes a further, fundamental problem of the concept and practice of product patenting. (shrink)

The nature of cognition is being re-considered. Instead of emphasizing formal operations on abstract symbols, the new approach foregrounds the fact that cognition is, rather, a situated activity, and suggests that thinking beings ought therefore be considered first and foremost as acting beings. The essay reviews recent work in Embodied Cognition, provides a concise guide to its principles, attitudes and goals, and identifies the physical grounding project as its central research focus.

Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of (...) acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The out- side world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the gov- erning laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Sev- eral lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual “filling in,” visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception. (shrink)

Thus far, the philosophical study of patenting has primarily focused on sociopolitical, legal, and ethical issues, such as the moral justifiability of patenting living organisms or the nature of (intellectual) property. In addition, however, the theory and practice of patenting entails many important problems that can be fruitfully studied from the perspective of the philosophy of science and technology. The principal aim of this article is to substantiate the latter claim. For this purpose, I first provide a concise review of (...) the main features of the theory and practice of the patenting of scientific and technological inventions. Second, I discuss several philosophical issues implied by these features and explore the possible contributions of the philosophy of science and technology to the clarification, or resolution, of these issues. The seven features discussed are: patents as commercial monopolies on scientific and technological inventions, the contrast between natural and non-natural subject matter, the distinction between inventions and discoveries, the reproducibility of inventions, the question of the sameness of two inventions, the distinction between the invented and the protected object, and the contrast between material objects versus concepts and theories. The article concludes with some observations on the problems and prospects of the philosophical study of the theory and practice of patenting scientific and technological inventions. (shrink)

The article consists of three main sections, in which I successively discuss the nature and role of realization, interpretation and abstraction in experimental and observational processes. In this way, these sections address several fundamental problems in philosophy of science, ontology and epistemology, and philosophy of language. Section 1 introduces the notion of realization processes, and argues that successful realization requires causal judgments. The second section discusses the role of conceptual interpretation in experiments and observations, explains how realization and interpretation can (...) be distinguished, and emphasizes the significance of different types and ranges of experimental and observational reproducibility. It also includes a subsection on the issue of reproducibility in contemporary social sciences and psychology. Section 3 explains how concepts are abstracted from existing realization processes, and concludes that abstraction bestows a nonlocal meaning on these extensible concepts. In addition, I discuss and criticize some rival views of abstraction and concept meaning (to wit, mentalism and localism). The article concludes with some observations on the notion of a (cognitive) trinity. In my reply, I respond to the points raised in the six commentary papers. The following issues are addressed: the place of causality in physics (Steffen Ducheyne), perception in ordinary life (Monica Meijsing), the role of reproducibility in psychology and the social sciences (Daniël Lakens, Ruud Abma), the significance and implications of conceptual innovation (Lieven Decock), and the relationship between meaning, communication and ontology (Martin Stokhof and Michiel van Lambalgen). (shrink)

Should governments accept the principle of devoting a proportion of their resources to funding basic research? From the standpoint of economics, science should be considered as a public good and for that reason it should be protected from market forces. This article tries to show that this result can only be maintained at the price of abandoning arguments traditionally deployed by economists themselves. It entails a complete reversal of our habitual ways of thinking about public goods. In order to bring (...) this reversal about, this article draws on the central results obtained by the anthropology and sociology of science and technology over the past several years. Science is a public good, not because of its intrinsic properties but because it is a source of diversity and flexibility. (shrink)

Reference to the common good has increased in recent political discourse, not only on the right but also on the left. This development partly reflects genuine limitations in the liberal model of politics, and thus should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. However, appeals to the common good face four difficulties: its social referent; its temporal horizon; its substantive content; and its authoritative identification. The article concludes with a modest suggestion for understanding the common good in complex societies.

THE emphasis of modern and contemporary philosophy on the individual has led to finely honed theories about knowledge, morality, and being. These have produced a variety of insights, despite the fact that the human individual is always and necessarily found in a social context, and has no knowledge, morality, or being apart from a larger whole. The emphasis on the individual, however, has tended to overshadow concern with the social whole.