Recent accounts of teleological naturalism hold that organisms are intrinsically goaldirected entities. We argue that supporters and critics of this view have ignored the ways in which it is used to address quite different problems. One problem is about biology and concerns whether an organism-centered account of teleological ascriptions would improve our descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena. This is different from the philosophical problem of how naturalized teleology would affect our conception of nature, and of ourselves as natural beings. (...) The neglect of this metatheoretic distinction has made it difficult to understand the criteria we should use for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology. We argue that a clearer distinction between scientific and philosophical contexts shows that we need more than one set of criteria for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology, and that taking these into account might advance or dissolve recurring debates in the literature. (shrink)

The rise of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology—the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind—could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by “teleology” as well as what is meant “nature”. I shall examine a specific episode in the history of this debate in the twentieth century with the rise of cybernetics: the science of seemingly “self-controlled” systems. Against cybernetics, Hans Jonas argued that cybernetics (...) failed as a naturalistic theory of teleology and that the reality of teleology is grounded in phenomenology, not in scientific explanations. I shall argue that Jonas was correct to criticize cybernetics but that contemporary work in biological organization succeeds where cybernetics failed. I will then turn to contemporary uses of Jonas’s phenomenology in enactivism and argue that Jonas’s phenomenology should be avoided by enactivism as a scientific research program, but that it remains open whether enactivism as a philosophy of nature should also avoid Jonas. (shrink)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

There has recently been a focus on the question of statue removalism. This concerns what to do with public history statues that honour or otherwise celebrate ethically bad historical figures. The specific wrongs of these statues have been understood in terms of derogatory speech, inapt honours, or supporting bad ideologies. In this paper I understand these bad public history statues as history, and identify a distinctive class of public history-specific wrongs. Specifically, public history plays an important identity-shaping role, and bad (...) public history can commit specifically ontic injustice. Understanding bad public history in terms of ontic injustice helps understand not just to address bad public history statues, but also understand the value of public history more broadly. (shrink)

I argue that Sellars’s naturalization of Kant should be understood in terms of how he used behavioristic psychology and cybernetics. I first explore how Sellars used Edward Tolman’s cognitive-behavioristic psychology to naturalize Kant in the early essay “Language, Rules, and Behavior”. I then turn to Norbert Wiener’s understanding of feedback loops and circular causality. On this basis I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing, which he introduces in “Being and Being Known,” can be understood in terms of what (...) I call cybernetic behaviorism. I interpret picturing in terms of cycles of cybernetic behavior and signifying in terms of coordination between cybernetic behavior systems, or what I call triangulated cybernetic behavior. This leads to a formal, naturalistic understanding of personhood as the capacity to engage in triangulated cybernetic behavior. I conclude by showing that Sellars’s thought has the resources, which he did not exploit, for introducing the concept of second-order cybernetics. This suggests that Sellars’s philosophy of mind could be developed in the direction of autopoiesis and enactivism. (shrink)

When an agent suffers in their capacity as a knower, they are a victim of epistemic injustice. Varieties of epistemic injustices have been theorised. A salient feature across these theories is that perpetrators and victims of epistemic injustice belong to different social groups. In this paper, I argue for a form of epistemic injustice that could occur between members of the same social group. This is a form of epistemic injustice where the knower is first a victim of historical and (...) continuing oppression. Secondly, they internalise and appreciate the systems that harm them as a knower. This is possible because the victim subscribes to perniciously formed epistemic systems. This form of epistemic injustice is a valuable explanatory tool for non-standard and obscure instances of epistemic injustice where the victim a) accepts and appreciates the injustice they experience and b) is even the seeming perpetrator of the injustice against themselves. (shrink)

Why should we decolonise knowledge? One popular rationale is that colonialism has set up a single perspective as epistemically authoritative over many equally legitimate ones, and this is a form of...

I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing should be taken seriously by philosophers of mind, language, and cognition. I begin with interpretations of key Sellarsian texts in order to show that picturing is best understood as a theory of non-linguistic cognitive representations through which animals navigate their environments. This is distinct from the kind of discursive cognition that Sellars called ‘signifying’ and which is best understood in terms of socio-linguistic inferences. I argue that picturing is required because reflection (...) on signifying cannot adequately explain our need for cognitive friction. I then show how the idea of picturing is further developed by Paul Churchland, Ruth Garrett Millikan, and Huw Price. I finally turn to predictive processing as a theory of cognitive representation, and in particular Andy Clark’s ‘radical predictive processing’, to further characterize picturing. However, doing so has the cost of pushing picturing and signifying further apart than Sellars intended. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin introduced the idea of epochal and ongoing progression in interaction between mind and the built environment. Since early antiquity, the present study suggests, Benjamin’s notion has been manifest in metaphors of gender in city-form, whereby edifices and urban voids have represented masculinity and femininity, respectively. At the onset of interaction between mind and the built environment are prehistoric myths related to the human body and to the sky. During antiquity gender projection can be (...) detected in western perceptions linking natural and built environments, commencing with Plato’s Atlantis and his Myth of Er, and later as a likely import of the Chinese yin-yang mythology. Culminating with the Age of Discovery, alongside advances in experiential awareness of the Earth’s sphericity, respective feminine and masculine earmarks can be detected in early modern perspicacity of the Earth’s southern and northern hemispheres. Our conceptions of natural and built environments inherently continue to contain gender traits. Yet urban voids, as the feminine face of city-form, have been severely understated in the built environment. Through design and configuration of urban voids, allegories of femininity in city-form ought to be celebrated, not discarded. (shrink)

This chapter explores the unifying themes of “the Pittsburgh School” of Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell: a social pragmatist account of intentionality, the rejection of the Myth of the Given, and the partial rehabilitation of Hegel for analytic philosophy. In addition this chapter also discusses three points of disagreement within the Pittsburgh School: whether or not we should posit sense-impressions, whether perceptual intentionality is world-relational, and whether the natural sciences have epistemic authority over other ways of thinking about nature. The chapter (...) concludes with a metaphilosophical concern about the status of a return to Hegel within analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy follows an anti-Hegelian neo-Kantian institution of a divide between philosophy and the social and natural sciences. Hegel would reject such a divide, since he conceives of philosophy as investigating “shapes of a world” and not just “shapes of consciousness”. In these terms the Pittsburgh School marks a return to Hegel trimmed to suit the needs of analytic philosophy rather than questioning those needs. (shrink)

Instances of epistemic injustice elicit resistance, anger, despair, frustration or cognate emotional responses from their victims. This sort of response to the epistemic injustices that accompanied historical systems of oppression such as colonialism, for example, is normal. However, if their victims have internalised these oppressive situations, we could get the counterintuitive response of appreciation. In this paper, I argue for the phenomenon of appreciative silencing to make sense of instances like this. This is a form of epistemic silencing that happens (...) when the accepted hegemonic intuitions of the oppressed are formed/influenced by the ideologies of the oppressors over time. Here, we have a resilient, oppressive and hegemonic epistemic system. Put together, it creates a variant of epistemic injustice and silencing that is obscure since its victims are neither resistant nor aware of the injustice they face but are appreciative. (shrink)

My concern here is to motivate some theses in the philosophy of mind concerning the interpersonal character of intentions. I will do so by investigating aspects of shared agency. The main point will be that when acting together with others one must be able to act directly on the intention of another or others in a way that is relevantly similar to the manner in which an agent acts on his or her own intentions. What exactly this means will become (...) clearer once we understand what it is to act directly on one’s own intentions. But I take it to be a fundamental assumption of the prevailing individualism of the theory of action— one at the core of its conception of the separateness of individuals— that one person cannot act directly on another’s intention. I agree that there is an important way in which we are or can be separate and autonomous thinkers and agents. But the way the individualist tries to capture this separateness is misguided. (shrink)

Abstract McDowell's contributions to epistemology and philosophy of mind turn centrally on his defense of the Aristotelian concept of a ?rational animal?. I argue here that a clarification of how McDowell uses this concept can make more explicit his distance from Davidson regarding the nature of the minds of non-rational animals. Close examination of his responses to Davidson and to Dennett shows that McDowell is implicitly committed to avoiding the following ?false trichotomy?: that animals are not bearers of semantic content (...) at all, that they are bearers of content in the same sense we are, and that they are bearer of "as if" content. Avoiding the false trichotomy requires that we understand non-rational animals as having concepts but not as making judgments. Furthermore, we need to supplement McDowell's distinction between the logical spaces of reasons and of the realm of law with what Finkelstein calls ?the logical space of animate life?. Though McDowell has taken some recent steps to embrace a view like this, I urge a more demanding conception than what McDowell has thus far suggested. (shrink)

Accepting a promise is normatively significant in that it helps to secure promissory obligation. But what is it for B to accept A’s promise to φ? It is in part for B to intend A’s φ-ing. Thinking of acceptance in this way allows us to appeal to the distinctive role of intentions in practical reasoning and action to better understand the agency exercised by the promisee. The proposal also accounts for rational constraints on acceptance, and the so-called directedness of promissory (...) obligation. Finally, the proposal, conjoined with Cognitivism about intentions, addresses recent criticism of Scanlon’s expectation-based view of promissory obligation. (shrink)

Here I show that Sellars’ radicalization of the Kantian distinction between concepts and intuitions is vulnerable to a challenge grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. Sellars argues that Kant’s concept of ‘intuition’ is ambiguous between singular demonstrative phrases and sense-impressions. In light of the critique of the Myth of the Given, Sellars argues, in the ‘Myth of Jones’, that sense-impression are theoretical posits. I argue that Merleau-Ponty offers a way of understanding perceptual activity which successfully avoids both the Myth of (...) the Given and the Myth of Jones. I also argue that Merleau-Ponty’s approach provides an alternative to McDowell’s critique of Sellars. Merleau-Ponty shows, first, that perceptual activity can be characterized as having a unity and structure of its own which is importantly different from that of concepts; secondly, that the unity and structure of perception can be revealed phenomenologically rather than as a theoretical posit. (shrink)

Shared activity is often simply willed into existence by individuals. This poses a problem. Philosophical reflection suggests that shared activity involves a distinctive, interlocking structure of intentions. But it is not obvious how one can form the intention necessary for shared activity without settling what fellow participants will do and thereby compromising their agency and autonomy. One response to this problem suggests that an individual can have the requisite intention if she makes the appropriate predictions about fellow participants. I argue (...) that implementing this predictive strategy risks derailing practical reasoning and preventing one from forming the intention. My alternative proposal for reconciling shared activity with autonomy appeals to the idea of acting directly on another's intention. In particular, I appeal to the entitlement one sometimes has to another's practical judgment, and the corresponding authority the other sometimes has to settle what one is to do. (shrink)

While Plantinga has famously argued that acceptance of neo-Darwinian theory commits one to the rejection of naturalism, Plantinga’s argument is vulnerable to an objection developed by Evan Fales. Not only does Fales’ objection undermine Plantinga’s original argument, it establishes a general challenge which any attempt to revitalize Plantinga’s argument must overcome. After briefly laying out the contours of this challenge, we attempt to meet it by arguing that because a purely naturalistic account of our etiology cannot explain the correlation between (...) our preference for simplicity and simplicity’s ability to serve as a veridical method of theory selection, the scientific realist is committed to the rejection of naturalism. (shrink)

I examine why Carnap ended his "The Overcoming of Metaphysics" with admiration for Nietzsche, and contextualize his admiration for Nietzsche within their shared commitment to 'modernism.' I show that Carnap's modernism helps explain his enthusiasm for symbolic logic and his attitude towards metaphysics. However, I also argue that Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics may also apply to Carnap's own distinction between what is essential to language and how language appears.

It is generally recognized that Adorno and Levinas should both be read as urging a rethinking of ethics in light of Auschwitz. This demand should be understood in terms of the acknowledgement of transcendence. A phenomenological account of the event of Auschwitz developed by Todes motivates my use of Cavell’s distinction between acknowledgement and knowledge. Both Levinas and Adorno argue that an ethically adequate acknowledgement of transcendence requires that the traditional concept of transcendence as represented in theodicy must be rejected. (...) This rejection takes the form of a rejection of theodicy (Levinas) and a negative theodicy (Adorno). I argue that Adorno’s response is superior because it is a response to the specificity and particularity of the event of Auschwitz as the destruction of, rather than merely the denial of, the humanity of both perpetrators and victims. (shrink)

I examine John McDowell's attitude towards naturalism in general, and evolutionary theory in particular, by distinguishing between "transcendental descriptions" and "empirical explanations". With this distinction in view we can understand why McDowell holds that there is both continuity and discontinuity between humans qua rational animals and other animals -- there is continuity with regards to empirical explanations and discontinuity with regards to transcendental descriptions. The result of this examination is a clearer assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of McDowell's contribution (...) to philosophical naturalism. (shrink)

I argue that phenomenology should take seriously what Wilfrid Sellars calls “the Myth of the Given”. Phenomenologists have either ignored this idea or misunder-stood it. I argue that the Myth of the Given, if understood correctly, could be an objection to phenomenological method. Specifically I argue that Husserl’s static phenomenology is vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism. However, I also show that Merleau-Ponty is not vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism because of how he navigates the relationship between phenomenology and science. This (...) shows that the question as to whether phenomenology is vulnerable to the Sellarsian criticism is more complicated than has been assumed by phenomenologists or their critics. (shrink)

One important thesis Ásta defends in Categories We Live By is that social properties and categories are somehow dependent on our thoughts, attitudes, or practices—that they are inventions of the mind, projected onto the world. Another important aspect of her view is that the social properties are related to certain base properties; an individual is placed in a category when the relevant base properties are thought to hold of them. I see the relationship between the social and the base as (...) connected to the problem of explaining how the social properties are sufficiently stable so as to be taken seriously, both in theoretical endeavors as well as in practical matters of how we relate to each other. In this light, I identify stability constraints for an adequate account of social categories. I argue that certain distinctive aspects of Ásta's conferralist view of social categories, such as the radical contextualism in her account of gender, undermine the stability of categories and are at odds with taking social categories seriously. I end with the suggestion that a distinctive “sheltered” form of normativity might help us do justice to Ásta's insights while avoiding some of the destabilizing elements of conferralism. (shrink)

Does trust play a significant role in the appreciation of art? If so, how does it operate? We argue that it does, and that the mechanics of trust operate both at a general and a particular level. After outlining the general notion of ‘art-trust’—the notion sketched is consistent with most notions of trust on the market—and considering certain objections to the model proposed, we consider specific examples to show in some detail that the experience of works of art, and the (...) attribution of art-relevant properties or characterisations to works of art, very often involves the notion of trust; in such cases—perhaps most or even, implicitly, all—the question ‘Do I trust the artist (or art-maker)?’, is inescapable. (shrink)

Rorty regards himself as furthering the project of the Enlightenment by separating Enlightenment liberalism from Enlightenment rationalism. To do so, he rejects the very need for explicit metaphysical theorizing. Yet his commitments to naturalism, nominalism, and the irreducibility of the normative come from the metaphysics of Wilfrid Sellars. Rorty's debt to Sellars is concealed by his use of Davidsonian arguments against the scheme/content distinction and the nonsemantic concept of truth. The Davidsonian arguments are used for Deweyan ends: to advance secularization (...) and anti-authoritarianism. However, Rorty's conflation of theology and metaphysics conceals the possibility of post-theological metaphysics. The key distinction lies between “metaphysics” and “Metaphysics.” The former provisionally models the relations between different vocabularies; the latter continues theology by other means. Sellars shows how to do metaphysics without Metaphysics. This approach complements Rorty's prioritization of cultural politics over ontology and his vision of Enlightenment liberalism without Enlightenment rationalism. (shrink)

The reasons for which I act are normally my reasons; I represent goal states and the means to attaining them, and these guide me in action. Can your reason ever be the reason why I act? If I haven’t yet taken up your reason and made it mine by representing it for myself, then it may seem mysterious how this could be possible. Nevertheless, the paper argues that sometimes one is entitled to another’s reason and that what one does is (...) to be explained in terms of it. The case for this draws on aspects of the interplay between reasons and intentions in individual agency that have not received the attention they deserve. The paper closes by exploring the limits of interpersonal entitlement to reasons by formulating a hypothesis about which reasons one might be entitled to, and by considering how defeaters can undermine entitlement. (shrink)

What makes public history more than just another hill to fight over in culture war politics? In this paper I propose a novel way of understanding the political significance of how public history creates and shapes identities: a contractarian one. I argue that public history can be sensibly understood as representing groups as a society’s contracting parties. One particular value of the contractarian approach is that it helps to elucidate the phenomenon of “signing on,” where a marginalized or oppressed group (...) is offered membership in a society without the social order being meaningfully changed. (shrink)

I argue that Richard Rorty was mistaken to argue that Sellars's commitment to picturing undermined his commitment to pragmatism. Instead, I argue that Sellarsian picturing, correctly interpreted, is itself continuous with pragmatism's emphasis on organism-environment interaction. I trace the origins of Rorty's misunderstanding of picturing to his misunderstanding of Kant, and hence to a misunderstanding of what it would mean to naturalize Kant.

I use the distinction between sentience and sapience to reconstruct the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell. I argue that Dreyfus's critique of McDowell's conceptualism relies on conflating detached contemplation with conceptual activity as such. I then argue that McDowell's conceptualism can be enriched and brought into deeper conversation with pragmatism and phenomenology if we take reasons to be a special kind of affordance. Contra Dreyfus, reasons need not disrupt affordances but do so only in specific contexts. I conclude (...) with a suggestion about how to understand the emergence of rational animality within the hominid lineage. (shrink)

I distinguish between two phases of Rorty’s naturalism: “nonreductive physicalism” (NRP) and “pragmatic naturalism” (PN). NRP holds that the vocabulary of mental states is irreducible to that of physical states, but this irreducibility does not distinguish the mental from other irreducible vocabularies. PN differs by explicitly accepting a naturalistic argument for the transcendental status of the vocabulary of agency. Though I present some reasons for preferring PN over NRP, PN depends on whether ‘normativity’ can be ‘naturalized’.

You and I are going to die. We are aware that it is going to happen, but not exactly when—in which there is relief, but also anxiety. What happens to us when we know with some precision what our last day will be? In this text, we discern the process of our own death, once we have reliable information about the approximate moment of the cessation of our life. Tú y yo vamos a morir. Estamos al tanto de que va (...) a ocurrir, pero no exactamente cuándo —en lo cual hay alivio, pero también angustia—. ¿Qué nos ocurre al saber con cierta precisión cuál será nuestro último día? En este texto, discernimos el proceso de nuestra propia muerte, una vez que tenemos información confiable sobre el momento aproximado del cese de nuestra vida. (shrink)

There is a way of talking that would appear to involve ascriptions of purpose, goal directed activity, and intentional states to groups. Cases are familiar enough: classmates intend to vacation in Switzerland, the department is searching for a metaphysician, the Democrats want to minimize losses in the upcoming elections, and the US intends to improve relations with such and such country. But is this talk to be understood just in terms of the attitudes and actions of the individuals involved? Is (...) the talk, to take an overly simple proposal as an example, a mere summary of familiar individual attitudes of the group members? Or is the ascription of attitudes and actions to groups to be taken more literally, as suggesting that the group for example believes that P, or intends to A, over and above what the members individually think and do? In short, are there groups with minds of their own? Philip Pettit has deployed the “discursive dilemma” to defend the thesis that there are such group minds. In what follows, I explore the relationship between the group allegedly with a mind of its own and the individuals it comprises, and I consider just how this relationship must be understood in order to give Pettit’s argument for group minds its best chance for success. As I understand it, the discursive dilemma has to be used in conjunction with what might be called an indispensability argument for group minds. It is useful to distinguish two forms of this argument. The explanatory version of the indispensability argument is, very schematically, as follows: there is a compelling explanatory theory T concerning the social, certain indispensable elements of T entail the group mind thesis, so the group mind thesis is true. Several questions immediately arise: What sort of theory is T? In what sense is it indispensable? Are there other forms of indispensability? I don’t have definitive answers to these questions. But how we settle them will have implications for the interaction and support the discursive dilemma provides the indispensability argument. In particular, using the discursive dilemma to defend what I characterize below as a practical version of the indispensability argument commits us to the rationality of individual participants in a way that the explanatory version of the indispensability argument does not. My point in the first part of the paper is that if Pettit wants to avoid the weaknesses of the explanatory indispensability argument and pursue the practical version, then he owes us a story about the rationality of individual participation in groups. Pettit also owes us a story about the agency an individual exercises as part of a group. If it takes the actions of individuals to execute the intentions of the group, how are we to understand those actions in order for the group to count as having a mind of its own? How must group intentions figure in the practical or deliberative perspective of individuals who execute those intentions? I will argue that the proponent of the group mind thesis must proceed with some care here, because some natural ways of answering these questions will undermine the thesis. But in the end, I think that these questions are interesting independently of whether Pettit is right to think that groups do have minds of their own. That’s because investigating Pettit’s arguments might lead to new ideas about how the rationality and agency of individuals can be exercised, and suggests new ways of understanding how individuals can act together, irrespective of whether the groups they compose ever have minds of their own. (shrink)

As a site of colonial conquest, sub-Saharan Africa has experienced colonialism’s historic and continuing harms. One of the aspects of this harm is epistemic. In the analytic philosophical tradition, this harm can partly be theorised in line with the literature on epistemic injustice, although it does not fit squarely. I show this by arguing for what can be understood as a colonial state’s specific manifestation of epistemic injustice. This manifestation takes into account the historical context of colonisation and the continuing (...) coloniality of sub-Saharan African countries. From this, I argue for an approach to remediating this epistemic injustice that relies on the fair-minded pursuit of knowledge. This approach, I briefly argue, gains valuable insights from African epistemological traditions and can be beneficial to other epistemic injustice instances that result specifically from historical cases of oppression. (shrink)

I argue that Sellars's philosophy of perception can be reconciled with recent work in enactive cognitive science. Sellars's critical realism holds that we perceive physical objects with perceptible properties as causally mediated by how these objects affect our sensory receptors. I argue that this theory, while basically right, downplays the role of embodiment in perception: perception essentially involves sensorimotor abilities. I argue that embodied critical realism can resolve the debate between Coates and Noe.

The intentions of others often enter into your practical reasoning, even when you’re acting on your own. Given all the agents around you, you’ll come to grief if what they’re up to is never a consideration in what you decide to do and how you do it. There are occasions, however, when the intentions of another figure in your practical reasoning in a particularly intimate and decisive fashion. I will speak of there being on such occasions a practical intersubjectivity of (...) intentions holding between you and the other individual. I will try to identify this practical intersubjectivity, and to take some preliminary steps toward giving a philosophical account of it. Occasions of practical intersubjectivity are usually those where individuals share agency, or do things jointly, such as when they walk together, kiss, or paint a house together. I will not assume that all instances of practical intersubjectivity are instances of shared agency. But the converse is true: any instance of shared agency involves a practical intersubjectivity holding between the participants. An account of shared agency is inadequate if it fails to handle practical intersubjectivity. The paper is structured as follows. In section 1, I present an example to illustrate this idea of practical intersubjectivity, at least as it appears in the context of shared agency. Practical intersubjectivity is a normative phenomenon, and it is on this basis that in section 2 I distinguish it from the mere coordination of intentions some have recognized as essential for shared activity. The task of section 3 is to show how practical intersubjectivity cannot be adequately described in terms of ordinary intentions familiar from the study of individual agency. Such approaches fail to handle the rational dynamics of intention revision when practical.. (shrink)

It is questionable whether counterfeiting in many areas of life contributes to unethical behavior to a wider extent. If the notion is supported by data, then the moral damage in a society could be prevented by reducing the counterfeit self and behavior to a bare minimum. This study aimed at empirically testing the measurement model of counterfeit self of Wood et al. (2008) among Indonesians as well as theoretically reviewing counterfeit self roles in unethical behavior. The participants of this study (...) were 1,655 high school students (764 males, 891 females; Mage = 15.76 years old; SDage = 1.08 years) recruited through a purposive sampling technique in North Sumatera and West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The data analysis technique used was Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results showed that the counterfeit self model--comprised of counterfeit self dimensions, namely Self-alienation (ALIEN), Inauthentic Living (LIVE), and Accepting External Influence (EXT)--was supported by the empirical data. However, the dimension of EXT could not be represented by its indicators. The study contributed to the psychological body of knowledge that the EXT dimension might need to be excluded from the measurement of counterfeit self on teenagers, especially in Indonesia and other Eastern countries. (shrink)

Meillassoux's criticism of correlationism and the alternative he proposes are compared with Sellars's rationalistic pragmatism. I argue that Meillssoux's rejection of the principle of sufficient reason undermines the intelligibility of science itself, contra Meillassou'x own intentions. Sellars shows how to accept what is true about 'weak' correlationism within a materialistic metaphysics that upholds the PSR.

What is it for a duty or obligation to be directed? Thinking about paradigmatic cases such as the obligations generated by promises will take us only so far in answering this question. This paper starts by surveying several approaches for understanding directed duties, as well as the challenges they face. It turns out that shared agency features something similar to the directedness of duties. This suggests an account of directedness in terms of shared agency – specifically, in terms of the (...) so-called practical intimacy that holds between individuals when they act together. The final section addresses a challenge to the shared agency approach posed by legal wronging in tort law. (shrink)

Among the deeper strata of Rorty’s philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having a privileged relation to reality. The alternative to normative violence is recognizing that cultural politics has priority over ontology. I trace this Rortyan idea to its origins in Nietzsche and Sellars. Rorty’s contribution is to combine Nietzsche on the death of God and Sellars on the Myth of the Given. However, I conclude with (...) a suggestion that Rorty ultimately goes too far in thinking that avoiding normative violence requires abstaining from metaphysics and epistemology as such. (shrink)

Several theorists have defended that unpleasantness can be explained by appealing to (intrinsic, simultaneous, de re) desires for certain experiences not to be occurring. In a nutshell, experiences are unpleasant because we do not want them, and not vice versa. A common criticism for this approach takes the form of a Euthyphro dilemma. Even if there is a solution for this criticism, I argue that this type of approach is limited in two important ways. It cannot provide an explanation for: (...) i) the motivation, from a psychological conscious point of view, nor ii) a non-instrumental justification, for having the relevant desires. The lack of these explanations is relevant since these are precisely the type clarifications that we would expect from a theory about unpleasantness. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of humour standardly account for humour in terms of what happens within a person. On these internalist accounts, humour is to be understood in terms of cognition, perception, and sensation. These accounts, while valuable, are poorly-situated to engage the social functions of humour. They have difficulty engaging why we value humour, why we use it define ourselves and our friendships, and why it may be essential to our self-esteem. In opposition to these internal accounts, I offer a social (...) account of humour. This account approaches humour as a social practice. It foregrounds laughter and participation, and thereby gives an account of humour that helps to understand why we value humour, why we use it as we do, and why we use it to define our relationship to the world. (shrink)

Marriage is one of the most important topics in the education field since life in this world is structured by interaction among families and between families and other social institutions. Dissatisfaction and unsustainability of marriage have led the urgency of premarital education in various countries. The problem is that the spread of virtual reality has made marriage itself to become more complex and experience reinterpretation and reconfiguration, moreover with the emergence of new kind of marriage in the digital era, i.e. (...) virtual marriage. Everybody who has observed, known, or even tried, certainly asks the question, “Could (or: should) I accept virtual marriage?” . This study was aimed to investigate the role of tolerance of ambiguity and illusion of intimacy in online dating in predicting the acceptance of virtual marriage. There were 420 adolescents and young adults (212 males, 208 females; Mage=21.10 years old, SDage=1.459 years; 338 students, 82 employees or entrepreneurs) in the Greater Jakarta, Indonesia, participated in this study. It was found that the acceptance was not predicted by the ambiguity tolerance, but by the illusion of intimacy in online dating. The psychometric issues, substantive discussion, and recommendation are presented at the end of this article. The trend of virtual marriage should not be allowed to roll away, by autopilot, without loaded by strategies in designing an online game as one of the pivotal educational technologies that needs to shape appropriate character and attitude for it. (shrink)

How should we interpret the Constitution? The “positive turn” in legal scholarship treats constitutional interpretation, like the interpretation of statutes or contracts, as governed by legal rules grounded in actual practice. In our legal system, that practice requires a certain form of originalism: our system’s official story is that we follow the law of the Founding, plus all lawful changes made since. Or so we’ve argued. Yet this answer produces its own set of questions. How can practice solve our problems, (...) when there are so many theories of law, each giving practice a different role? Why look to an official story, when on-the-ground practice may be confused or divided—or may even make the story ring false? And why take originalism as the official story, when so many scholars and judges seem to reject it? This Essay offers a response to each. To the extent that legal systems are features of particular societies, a useful theory will have to pay attention to actual social practice, including the aspects of legal practice we describe. This positive focus really can resolve a great many contentious legal disputes, as shared legal premises lead to conclusions that might surprise us or that ultimately establish one side in a dispute as correct. The most serious challenge to our view is the empirical one: whether originalism is or isn’t the official story of our law. Stripped of their jurisprudential confusion, though, the best competing accounts of our law seem to have far less supporting evidence than our own account. Focusing on social practice as it stands today turns out to direct our attention to the Founders and to the changes over time that their law has recognized. (shrink)

This present study aims at exploring the meaning of the building of Santa Maria de Fatima Catholic Church (abbreviated as: SMFCC) or Toasebio Parish located in District Glodok, Jakarta, Indonesia. The author exposes in advance the meaning of the physical elements of the building SMFCC as understood by history writers and building experts. These meanings are not inseparable from the elements of human activities in the building. Through qualitative methods and literature review, the author describes in the Results section, how (...) those meanings can be further interpreted through the existing studies and expressions of the SMFCC Parish Head. It is found that these meanings are contested − from the direction of religious faith and of culture − but complete our understandings of the church which is well-known as an Indonesian cultural heritage and dominated by Chinese and pastors from Europe. (shrink)

Nick Bostrom considered a number of simulations and contended that the probability that we are living in one of them is high or at least nonzero. I present arguments to refute the claim that we are or might be in any one of them. -/- Here is a highly dense reasoning why we are not in the simulation: -/- Suppose Simon is in the simulation, and he entertains the idea that he is in the simulation. And he thinks about the (...) word 'apple'. But since he is always in the simulation, he has never interacted with an actual apple, which the word 'apple' refers to. -/- Then Simon must think that "if I am in the simulation, then I never interact with an actual apple, and my understanding about the word 'apple' can only be given by the simulator. And this means I never exercise my reason to gain the understanding about the word 'apple', and never exercise my reason to apply the word 'apple'. Consequently, since what I am thinking right now (namely, this entire thought within the double quotation marks) involves the word 'apple', I am not using reason to think what I am thinking." -/- By denying he is using reason to think, Simon is being incoherent in thinking the preceding thought. To avoid being incoherent, Simon must reject the idea that he is in the simulation. -/- For the similar reason, if we think we are in the simulation, we are being incoherent. More simply, to think that we are in the simulation is to be incoherent. Therefore we cannot actually think that we are in the simulation. Hence, we are not in the simulation. -/- The whole paper is to flesh out the reasoning above. (shrink)

What are the implications for agency – and in particular, the idea of acting for reasons – if we are to take seriously the notion of collective responsibility? My thesis is that some cases of individuals subject to a collective form of responsibility and blame will force us to make sense of how it is that an individual can be entitled to collective reasons for action, i.e. entitled to a reason had in the first place by a plurality of individuals (...) together rather than any one of them alone. This entitlement makes it possible for the collective reason to be a reason for which one acts, even if one’s contribution on its own makes little or no difference in the collective effort. Although a full defense of this entitlement cannot be undertaken here, I will gesture at how this might work by suggesting that intentions function to preserve reasons for action. . (shrink)

Open science is the movement to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional.

Title in English: Pastoral Counseling Psychology: Premarital, Marriage, and Family Contexts. "Pastoral counseling" is different from "Christian counseling". Pastoral counseling is a counseling orientation (not a theoretical school) that emphasizes openness to exploration (including tolerating mystery or ambiguity) of spiritual and religious issues (e.g., the concept of God) on clients and between clients and counselors, in which case the issue might be viewed as the root of daily life problems. Pastoral counseling still uses the concepts of counseling psychology or psychotherapy (...) in general, such as the helping relationship or therapeutic relations. Pastoral counseling psychology is demanded to be pro-active, continuous challenging itself to perform critical reflection and to contribute thoughts and praxis "in concreto" in solving psychological problems. (shrink)

Title in English: Psychology of Nationality as A New Studies Umbrella in Indonesia. Abstract: The role of psychology in dealing with issues of and improving the welfare of the nation has often been raised into topics of psychology seminars and conferences, both in subdisciplines of social psychology, clinical-macro psychology, and other subdisciplines. Psychology, as a science that deals with human dimensions, tries to contribute from formulating the definition of "nation" to doing research and social intervention on the nation's problems. This (...) phenomenon is very encouraging because it shows that we are continually questioning ourselves as a nation, a precondition for healthy development, as well as seeing and trying to reach the possibilities of how our nation will "become". Every psychology (assumed that psychology is not singular) that indicates and prescribes adherence of feelings and commitments of citizens with the imagined community of the nation deserve to be called as Psychology of Nationality. (shrink)