Results for ' situational explanations'

976 found
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  1. Beyond Explanation: Understanding as Dependency Modeling.Finnur Dellsén - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (4):1261-1286.
    This paper presents and argues for an account of objectual understanding that aims to do justice to the full range of cases of scientific understanding, including cases in which one does not have an explanation of the understood phenomenon. According to the proposed account, one understands a phenomenon just in case one grasps a sufficiently accurate and comprehensive model of the ways in which it or its features are situated within a network of dependence relations; one’s degree of understanding is (...)
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  2. Mathematics, explanation and reductionism: exposing the roots of the Egyptianism of European civilization.Arran Gare - 2005 - Cosmos and History 1 (1):54-89.
    We have reached the peculiar situation where the advance of mainstream science has required us to dismiss as unreal our own existence as free, creative agents, the very condition of there being science at all. Efforts to free science from this dead-end and to give a place to creative becoming in the world have been hampered by unexamined assumptions about what science should be, assumptions which presuppose that if creative becoming is explained, it will be explained away as an illusion. (...)
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  3. Salience and metaphysical explanation.Phil Corkum - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10771-10792.
    Metaphysical explanations, unlike many other kinds of explanation, are standardly thought to be insensitive to our epistemic situation and so are not evaluable by cognitive values such as salience. I consider a case study that challenges this view. Some properties are distributed over an extension. For example, the property of being polka-dotted red on white, when instantiated, is distributed over a surface. Similar properties have been put to work in a variety of explanatory tasks in recent metaphysics, including: providing (...)
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  4. Grounding Perspectivalism: Metaphysical Explanation in the Eye of the Beholder.Joaquim Giannotti - 2024
    Theorists of grounding believe that this notion has an intimate connection with metaphysical explanation. However, they struggle to harmonize the objective mind-independent features of grounding and the context-sensitive aspects of metaphysical explanation. As a reconciliatory approach, I offer a framework of metaphysical explanation that draws from perspectival realist views in the philosophy of science. According to the proposed view, our understanding of grounding claims is inescapably situated in agent-dependent perspectives that aim to aptly latch onto a grounding structure out there. (...)
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  5. When do circumstances excuse? Moral prejudices and beliefs about the true self drive preferences for agency-minimizing explanations.Simon Cullen - 2018 - Cognition 180 (C):165-181.
    When explaining human actions, people usually focus on a small subset of potential causes. What leads us to prefer certain explanations for valenced actions over others? The present studies indicate that our moral attitudes often predict our explanatory preferences far better than our beliefs about how causally sensitive actions are to features of the actor's environment. Study 1 found that high-prejudice participants were much more likely to endorse non-agential explanations of an erotic same-sex encounter, such as that one (...)
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  6. Neo-Naturalism, Conciliatory Explanations, and Spatiotemporal Surprises.Uziel Awret - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
    Some materialists believe that physics is rich enough to bridge Levine's Explanatory Gap1, while others believe that it is not. Here I promote an intermediate position holding that physics is rich enough to explain why this gap seems more intractable than similar inter-theoretic explanatory gaps, without providing a full-blown “physical” explanation of consciousness. At a minimum, such an approach needs to explore the prospects of empirical discoveries that can diminish the power of anti-physicalist arguments like Chalmers's “conceivability argument”2 and Jackson's (...)
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  7. (1 other version)The pragmatic-rhetorical theory of explanation.Jan Faye - 2007 - In Johannes Persson & Petri Ylikoski (eds.), Rethinking Explanation. Series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science Vol. 252. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag. pp. 43-68.
    The pragmatic theory of explanation is an attempt to see explanation as a linguistic response to a cognitive problem where the content of the response depends on the context of the scientific inquiry. The present paper draws on the rhetorical situation, as it is defined by Loyld Bitzer, in order to understand how the context may influence the content as well as the acceptability of the response.
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  8. Naturalism, non-factualism, and normative situated behaviour.Manuel Heras-Escribano & Manuel de Pinedo-García - 2018 - South African Journal of Philosophy 37 (1):80-98.
    This paper argues that the normative character of our unreflective situated behaviour is not factual. We highlight a problematic assumption shared by the two most influential trends in contemporary philosophy of cognitive science, reductionism and enactivism. Our intentional, normative explanations are referential, descriptive or factual. Underneath this assumption lies the idea that only facts can make true or false our attributions of cognitive, mental and agential abilities. We will argue against this view by describing the main features and problems (...)
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  9. Du Châtelet on Sufficient Reason and Empirical Explanation.Aaron Wells - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (4):629-655.
    For Émilie Du Châtelet, I argue, a central role of the principle of sufficient reason is to discriminate between better and worse explanations. Her principle of sufficient reason does not play this role for just any conceivable intellect: it specifically enables understanding for minds like ours. She develops this idea in terms of two criteria for the success of our explanations: “understanding how” and “understanding why.” These criteria can respectively be connected to the determinateness and contrastivity of (...). The crucial role Du Châtelet’s principle of sufficient reason plays in identifying good explanations is often overlooked in the literature, or else run together with questions about the justification and likelihood of explanations. An auxiliary goal of the article is to situate Du Châtelet’s principle of sufficient reason with respect to some of the general epistemological and metaphysical commitments of her Institutions de Physique, clarifying how it fits into the broader project of that work. (shrink)
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  10. Folk intuitions of Actual Causation: A Two-Pronged Debunking Explanation.David Rose - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (5):1323-1361.
    How do we determine whether some candidate causal factor is an actual cause of some particular outcome? Many philosophers have wanted a view of actual causation which fits with folk intuitions of actual causation and those who wish to depart from folk intuitions of actual causation are often charged with the task of providing a plausible account of just how and where the folk have gone wrong. In this paper, I provide a range of empirical evidence aimed at showing just (...)
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  11.  92
    The “placebo” paradox and the emotion paradox: Challenges to psychological explanation.Phil Hutchinson - 2020 - Theory and Psychology 30 (5):617-637.
    Philosophical debates about how best to explain emotion or placebo are debates about how best to characterise and explain the distinctive form of human responsiveness to the world that is the object of interest for each of those domains of inquiry. In emotion research, the cognitive theory of emotion faces several intractable problems. I discuss two of these: the problem of epistemic deficit and the problem of recalcitrant emotions. Cognitive explanations in Placebo Studies, such as response-expectancy and belief-based (...), also face the problem of epistemic deficit in addition to the problem of logically self-destructive true belief. While such considerations might motivate a retreat to affect, this brings its own problems. I argue that it is a particular version of cognitivism, representational cognitivism (Rep-Cog), that generates the paradoxes we encounter in emotion and placebo research. I propose that turning to nonrepresentational accounts of cognition will dissolve these paradoxes. As I move toward conclusion, I propose drawing on the ethnomethodological tradition to respecify human responsiveness to loci of significance in the lifeworld by undertaking ethnographies of members’ own situated methods for making intelligible and accountable their attitudinal and nonattitudinal responsiveness to loci of significance in their environment. (shrink)
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  12. Origin and Resolution of Theory-Choice Situations in Modern Theory of gravity.Rinat M. Nugayev - 1987 - Methodology and Science 20 (4):177-197.
    A methodological model of origin and settlement of theory-choice situations (previously tried on the theories of Einstein and Lorentz in electrodynamics) is applied to modern Theory of Gravity. The process of origin and growth of empirically-equivalent relativistic theories of gravitation is theoretically reproduced. It is argued that all of them are proposed within the two rival research programmes – (1) metric (A. Einstein et al.) and (2) nonmetric (H. Poincare et al.). Each programme aims at elimination of the cross-contradiction between (...)
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  13. Self and other in the explanation of behavior: 30 years later.Joshua Knobe & Bertram Malle - 2002 - Psychologica Belgica 42:113-130.
    It has been hypothesized that actors tend to attribute behavior to the situation whereas observers tend to attribute behavior to the person (Jones & Nisbett 1972). The authors argue that this simple hypothesis fails to capture the complexity of actual actor-observer differences in people’s behavioral explanations. A new framework is proposed in which reason explanations are distinguished from explanations that cite causes, especially stable traits. With this framework in place, it becomes possible to show that there are (...)
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  14. Hearts of darkness: 'perpetrator history' and why there is no why.Paul A. Roth - 2004 - History of the Human Sciences 17 (2-3):211-251.
    Three theories contend as explanations of perpetrator behavior in the Holocaust as well as other cases of genocide: structural, intentional, and situational. Structural explanations emphasize the sense in which no single individual or choice accounts for the course of events. In opposition, intentional/cutltural accounts insist upon the genocides as intended outcomes, for how can one explain situations in which people ‘step up’ and repeatedly kill defenseless others in large numbers over sustained periods of time as anything other (...)
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  15. Pluralistic ignorance in the bystander effect: informational dynamics of unresponsive witnesses in situations calling for intervention.Rasmus Kraemmer Rendsvig - 2014 - Synthese 191 (11):2471-2498.
    The goal of the present paper is to construct a formal explication of the pluralistic ignorance explanation of the bystander effect. The social dynamics leading to inaction is presented, decomposed, and modeled using dynamic epistemic logic augmented with ‘transition rules’ able to characterize agent behavior. Three agent types are defined: First Responders who intervene given belief of accident; City Dwellers, capturing ‘apathetic urban residents’ and Hesitators, who observe others when in doubt, basing subsequent decision on social proof. It is shown (...)
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  16. Predictive brains: forethought and the levels of explanation.Giuseppe Boccignone & Roberto Cordeschi - 2012 - Frontiers in Psychology 3.
    Is any unified theory of brain function possible? Following a line of thought dat- ing back to the early cybernetics (see, e.g., Cordeschi, 2002), Clark (in press) has proposed the action-oriented Hierarchical Predictive Coding (HPC) as the account to be pursued in the effort of gain- ing the “Grand Unified Theory of the Mind”—or “painting the big picture,” as Edelman (2012) put it. Such line of thought is indeed appealing, but to be effectively pursued it should be confronted with experimental (...)
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  17. Moods and Atmospheres: Affective States, Affective Properties, and the Similarity Explanation.Íngrid Vendrell-Ferran - 2021 - In Dylan Trigg (ed.), Atmospheres and Shared Emotions. Routledge.
    In ordinary language, “calmness”, “melancholy”, “cheerfulness”, and “sadness” are employed to describe affective states experienced by sentient beings. More precisely, these terms are used to report instances of moods. Yet, the very same terms are used to describe what seem to be properties of certain objects (e.g., things, situations) which, unlike sentient beings, are unable to feel. We usually describe atmospheres employing these terms: We speak about the calmness of a forest, the melancholy of a painting, the cheerfulness of a (...)
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  18. From Life-Like to Mind-Like Explanation: Natural Agency and the Cognitive Sciences.Alex Djedovic - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Toronto, St. George Campus
    This dissertation argues that cognition is a kind of natural agency. Natural agency is the capacity that certain systems have to act in accordance with their own norms. Natural agents are systems that bias their repertoires in response to affordances in the pursuit of their goals. -/- Cognition is a special mode of this general phenomenon. Cognitive systems are agents that have the additional capacity to actively take their worlds to be certain ways, regardless of whether the world is really (...)
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  19. Dynamical causes.Russell Meyer - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-21.
    Mechanistic explanations are often said to explain because they reveal the causal structure of the world. Conversely, dynamical models supposedly lack explanatory power because they do not describe causal structure. The only way for dynamical models to produce causal explanations is via the 3M criterion: the model must be mapped onto a mechanism. This framing of the situation has become the received view around the viability of dynamical explanation. In this paper, I argue against this position and show (...)
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  20. The Phenomenology of REM-sleep Dreaming: The Contributions of Personal and Perspectival Ownership, Subjective Temporality and Episodic Memory.Stan Klein - 2018 - Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 6:55-66.
    Although the dream narrative, of (bio)logical necessity, originates with the dreamer, s/he typically does not know this. For the dreamer, the dream world is the real world. In this article I argue that this nightly misattribution is best explained in terms of the concept of mental ownership (e.g., Albahari, 2006; Klein, 2015a; Lane, 2012). Specifically, the exogenous nature of the dream narrative is the result of an individual assuming perspectival, but not personal, ownership of content s/he authored (i.e., “The content (...)
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  21. Un extractor de jugo teórico. El papel de las matemáticas en la explicación científica.Manuel Barrantes - 2022 - Epistemologia E Historia de la Ciencia 7 (1):6-21.
    "A theoretical juice extractor: The role of mathematics in scientific explanation". There have recently been proposed cases where, supposedly, mathematics would play a genuinely explanatory role in science. These have been divided into those situations where the explanatory role would be played by mathematical operations, and those where it would be played by mathematical entities. In this article, I analyze some of these purported cases and argue that claims that mathematics can be genuinely explanatory are unfounded. Throughout my discussion, I (...)
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  22. Situatedness and Embodiment of Computational Systems.Marcin Miłkowski - 2017 - Entropy 19 (4):162.
    In this paper, the role of the environment and physical embodiment of computational systems for explanatory purposes will be analyzed. In particular, the focus will be on cognitive computational systems, understood in terms of mechanisms that manipulate semantic information. It will be argued that the role of the environment has long been appreciated, in particular in the work of Herbert A. Simon, which has inspired the mechanistic view on explanation. From Simon’s perspective, the embodied view on cognition seems natural but (...)
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  23. Where is the understanding?Adam Toon - 2015 - Synthese 192 (12):3859-3875.
    Recent work in epistemology and philosophy of science has argued that understanding is an important cognitive state that philosophers should seek to analyse. This paper offers a new perspective on understanding by looking to work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Understanding is normally taken to be inside the head. I argue that this view is mistaken. Often, understanding is a state that criss-crosses brain, body and world. To support this claim, I draw on extended cognition, a burgeoning framework (...)
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  24. How Public Statues Wrong: Affective Artifacts and Affective Injustice.Alfred Archer - 2024 - Topoi 43 (3):809-819.
    In what way might public statues wrong people? In recent years, philosophers have drawn on speech act theory to answer this question by arguing that statues constitute harmful or disrespectful forms of speech. My aim in this paper will be add a different theoretical perspective to this discussion. I will argue that while the speech act approach provides a useful starting point for thinking about what is wrong with public statues, we can get a fuller understanding of these wrongs by (...)
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  25. The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (Open Access).Matthieu Queloz - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? This book presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts (...)
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  26. Explanatory Rivals and the Ultimate Argument.Finnur Dellsén - 2015 - Theoria 82 (3):217-237.
    Although many aspects of Inference to the Best Explanation have been extensively discussed, very little has so far been said about what it takes for a hypothesis to count as a rival explanatory hypothesis in the context of IBE. The primary aim of this article is to rectify this situation by arguing for a specific account of explanatory rivalry. On this account, explanatory rivals are complete explanations of a given explanandum. When explanatory rivals are conceived of in this way, (...)
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  27. How we think and act together.Shannon Spaulding - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (3):298-314.
    In this paper, I examine the challenges socially extended minds pose for mainstream, individualistic accounts of social cognition. I argue that individualistic accounts of social cognition neglect phenomena important to social cognition that are properly emphasized by socially extended mind accounts. Although I do not think the evidence or arguments warrant replacing individualistic explanations of social cognition with socially extended explanations, I argue that we have good reason to supplement our individualistic accounts so as to include the ways (...)
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  28. Sculpting the space of actions. Explaining human action by integrating intentions and mechanisms.Machiel Keestra - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Amsterdam
    How can we explain the intentional nature of an expert’s actions, performed without immediate and conscious control, relying instead on automatic cognitive processes? How can we account for the differences and similarities with a novice’s performance of the same actions? Can a naturalist explanation of intentional expert action be in line with a philosophical concept of intentional action? Answering these and related questions in a positive sense, this dissertation develops a three-step argument. Part I considers different methods of explanations (...)
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  29. The Concept of Mechanism in Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1):152-163.
    The concept of mechanism in biology has three distinct meanings. It may refer to a philosophical thesis about the nature of life and biology (‘mechanicism’), to the internal workings of a machine-like structure (‘machine mechanism’), or to the causal explanation of a particular phenomenon (‘causal mechanism’). In this paper I trace the conceptual evolution of ‘mechanism’ in the history of biology, and I examine how the three meanings of this term have come to be featured in the philosophy of biology, (...)
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  30. Une conception néo-poppérienne de l’explication en sciences sociales et ses difficultés internes.Philippe Mongin - 2012 - Dialogue 51 (3):503-515.
    This article discusses the rationality principle, especially in Popper's version, on the occasion of a commentary of Maurice Lagueux's book, Rationality and Explanation in Economics (2010).
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  31. Logical Abductivism on Abductive Logic.Filippo Mancini - 2024 - Synthese 203 (188):1-23.
    Logical abductivism is the epistemic view about logic according to which logical theories are justified by abduction (or Inference to the Best Explanation), that is on how well they explain the relevant evidence, so that the correct logical theory turns out to be the one that explains it best. Arguably, this view should be equally applied to both deductive and non-deductive logics, abduction included. But while there seems to be nothing wrong in principle in using abduction to determine the correct (...)
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  32. Thabo Mbeki, postmodernism, and the consequences.Robert Kowalenko - 2015 - South African Journal of Philosophy 34 (4):441-461.
    Explanations of former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s public and private views on the aetiology of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country remain partial at best without the recognition that the latter presuppose and imply a postmodernist/postcolonialist philosophy of science that erases the line separating the political from the scientific. Evidence from Mbeki’s public speeches, interviews, and private and anonymous writings suggests that it was postmodernist/postcolonialist theory that inspired him to doubt the “Western” scientific consensus on HIV/AIDS and to (...)
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  33. How Quantum Theory Helps Us Explain.Richard Healey - 2012 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (1):axt031.
    I offer an account of how the quantum theory we have helps us explain so much. The account depends on a pragmatist interpretation of the theory: this takes a quantum state to serve as a source of sound advice to physically situated agents on the content and appropriate degree of belief about matters concerning which they are currently inevitably ignorant. The general account of how to use quantum states and probabilities to explain otherwise puzzling regularities is then illustrated by showing (...)
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  34. What is Mindreading?Shannon Spaulding - 2019 - WIREs Cognitive Science 11 (3).
    Theory of mind, also known as mindreading, refers to our ability to attribute mental states to agents in order to make sense of and interact with other agents. Recently, theorists in this literature have advanced a broad conception of mindreading. In particular, psychologists and philosophers have examined how we attribute knowledge, intention, mentalistically-loaded stereotypes, and personality traits to others. Moreover, the diversity of our goals in a social interaction – precision, efficiency, self/in-group protection – generates diversity in the mindreading processes (...)
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  35. The Situationalist Account of Change.Martin Pickup - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics.
    In this paper I propose a new solution to the problem of change: situationalism. According to this view, parts of reality fundamentally disagree about what is the case and reality as a whole is unsettled (i.e. metaphysically indeterminate). When something changes, parts of the world irreconcilably disagree about what properties it has. From this irreconcilable disagreement, indeterminacy arises. I develop this picture using situations, which are parts of possible worlds; this gives it the name situationalism. It allows a B-theory endurance (...)
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  36. Peer Disagreement and the Bridge Principle.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2021 - Topoi 40 (5):1213-1223.
    One explanation of rational peer disagreement is that agents find themselves in an epistemically permissive situation. In fact, some authors have suggested that, while evidence could be impermissive at the intrapersonal level, it is permissive at the interpersonal level. In this paper, I challenge such a claim. I will argue that, at least in cases of rational disagreement under full disclosure, there cannot be more interpersonal epistemically permissive situations than there are intrapersonal epistemically permissive situations. In other words, with respect (...)
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  37. From Wide Cognition to Mechanisms: A Silent Revolution.Marcin Miłkowski, Robert Clowes, Zuzanna Rucińska, Aleksandra Przegalińska, Tadeusz Zawidzki, Joel Krueger, Adam Gies, Marek McGann, Łukasz Afeltowicz, Witold Wachowski, Fredrik Stjernberg, Victor Loughlin & Mateusz Hohol - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
    In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives towards building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in (...)
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  38. Understanding as an Epistemic Goal.Stephen Grimm - 2005 - Dissertation, University of Notre Dame
    Among epistemologists and philosophers of science, one often hears that someone with understanding is able to “see” or “grasp” how the elements of a subject “cohere” or “fit together”—but just what is involved in the seeing or the grasping is usually left to the imagination. I argue that the most productive way to make progress on this issue is by first identifying the kind of explanation-seeking why-questions that drive the search for understanding in the first place. In particular, I suggest (...)
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  39. The Phylogeny Fallacy and Teleosemantics: Types, Tokens, and the Explanatory Gap in the Naturalization of Intentionality.Tiago Rama - manuscript
    The use of evolutionary explanations to explain phenomena at the individual level has been described by various authors as an explanatory error, the so-called Phylogeny Fallacy. In this paper, this fallacy will be analyzed in the context of teleosemantics, a central project of the philosophy of mind whose main aim is to naturalize intentional systems by appealing to their biological teleofunctions. I will argue that those teleosemantics projects that invoke evolutionary functions generally commit the fallacy. First, I will point (...)
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  40. From the agent’s point of view: the case against disjunctivism about rationalisation.Edgar Phillips - 2021 - Philosophical Explorations 24 (2):262-280.
    ABSTRACT A number of authors have recently advanced a ‘disjunctivist’ view of the rationalising explanation of action, on which rationalisations of the form ‘S A’d because p’ are explanations of a fundamentally different kind from rationalisations of the form ‘S A’d because she believed that p’. Less attempt has been made to explicitly articulate the case against this view. This paper seeks to remedy that situation. I develop a detailed version of what I take to be the basic argument (...)
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  41. When Affective Relation Weighs More Than the Mug Handle: Investigating Affective Affordances.Marta Caravà & Claudia Scorolli - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11:536329.
    Philosophers of embodied and situated cognition have provided convincing explanations of what objects do in affective processes (e.g., in emotion regulation). They have often used the concept of 'affective affordance' to account for the affective role of objects but it is not clear how this concept relates to other concepts of affordance, in particular those used in empirical works in cognitive science. We start to fill this gap by providing a new definition of affective affordances and we suggest a (...)
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  42. From Völkerpsychologie to the Sociology of Knowledge.Martin Kusch - 2019 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 9 (2):250-274.
    This article focuses on two developments in nineteenth-century (philosophy of) social science: Moritz Lazarus’s and Heymann Steinthal’s Völkerpsychologie and Georg Simmel’s early sociology of knowledge. The article defends the following theses. First, Lazarus and Steinthal wavered between a “strong” and a “weak” program for Völkerpsychologie. Ingredients for the strong program included methodological neutrality and symmetry; causal explanation of beliefs based on causal laws; a focus on groups, interests, tradition, culture, or materiality; determinism; and a self-referential model of social institutions. Second, (...)
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  43. Computationalism under attack.Roberto Cordeschi & Marcello Frixione - 2007 - In M. Marraffa, M. Caro & F. Ferretti (eds.), Cartographies of the Mind: Philosophy and Psychology in Intersection. Springer.
    Since the early eighties, computationalism in the study of the mind has been “under attack” by several critics of the so-called “classic” or “symbolic” approaches in AI and cognitive science. Computationalism was generically identified with such approaches. For example, it was identified with both Allen Newell and Herbert Simon’s Physical Symbol System Hypothesis and Jerry Fodor’s theory of Language of Thought, usually without taking into account the fact ,that such approaches are very different as to their methods and aims. Zenon (...)
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  44. Difficult Circumstances: Situationism and Ability.Marcela Herdova & Stephen Kearns - 2019 - Journal of Ethical Urban Living 2 (1):63-91.
    Certain aspects of our situations often influence us in significant and negative ways, without our knowledge (call this claim “situationism”). One possible explanation of their influence is that they affect our abilities. In this paper, we address two main questions. Do these situational factors rid us of our abilities to act on our sufficient reasons? Do situational factors make it more difficult for us to exercise our abilities to act for sufficient reasons? We argue for the answer ‘sometimes’ (...)
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  45. The Eucharist according to Gunk-relational Ontology.Damiano Migliorini - 2023 - Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift 74 (3):315-330.
    The rational explanation of the Eucharist is at the centre of a revived debate in philosophical theology. After describing gunk-relational ontology, I show how it allows us to understand transubstantiation differently than other traditional and contemporary accounts, from which it draws a few points but combining them in a new way. In gunk-relational ontology every substance is its own relations, which constitute a gunky fundamental reality. The liturgical celebration of the Last Supper therefore creates a new relational situation for the (...)
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  46. Narrative self-constitution as embodied practice.Katsunori Miyahara & Shogo Tanaka - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Narrative views of the self argue that we constitute our self in self-narratives. Embodied views hold that our self is shaped through embodied experiences. In that case, what is the relation between embodiment and narrativity in the process of self-constitution? The question demands a clear definition of embodiment, but existing studies remains unclear on this point (section 2). We offer a correction to this situation by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body that highlights its habituality. On this account, the (...)
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  47. Uncertainty, ‘irrational exuberance’ and the psychology of bubbles: an argument over the legitimacy of financial regulation for bounded rational agents.Ramiro Ávila Peres - 2019
    One of the explanations for the Great Crisis of 2007-2008 was that financial authorities should have issued stricter regulations to prevent the housing bubble. However, according to Alan Greenspan, President of the Federal Reserve System (FED) from 1987 to 2006, this is to judge with hindsight. No one can guess when a “bubble” begins, nor when it ends; they happen because of the “irrational exuberance” in investors’ behavior, which causes boom and bust cycles. Regulators are not in a better (...)
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  48. Disagreeing in Context.Teresa Marques - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6:1-12.
    This paper argues for contextualism about predicates of personal taste and evaluative predicates in general, and offers a proposal of how apparently resilient disagreements are to be explained. The present proposal is complementary to others that have been made in the recent literature. Several authors, for instance (López de Sa, 2008; Sundell, 2011; Huvenes, 2012; Marques and García-Carpintero, 2014; Marques, 2014a), have recently defended semantic contextualism for those kinds of predicates from the accusation that it faces the problem of lost (...)
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  49. A simple definition of ‘intentionally’.Tadeg Quillien & Tamsin C. German - 2021 - Cognition 214 (C):104806.
    Cognitive scientists have been debating how the folk concept of intentional action works. We suggest a simple account: people consider that an agent did X intentionally to the extent that X was causally dependent on how much the agent wanted X to happen (or not to happen). Combined with recent models of human causal cognition, this definition provides a good account of the way people use the concept of intentional action, and offers natural explanations for puzzling phenomena such as (...)
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  50. Consistency of belief.Howard Darmstadter - 1971 - Journal of Philosophy 68 (10):301-310.
    A rational man’s beliefs are not logically consistent, and he does not believe all the logical consequences of his beliefs. This is because in any situational context, we only accept certain believed sentences. Within that context, we insist that sentences be logically consistent, and we accept the logical consequences of the other sentences we accept in that context. But such sentences do not have to be consistent with sentences we accept in other contexts, nor will we always accept in (...)
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