We distinguish between two different strategies in methodology of economics. The big picture strategy, dominant in the twentieth century, ascribed to economics a unified method and evaluated this m...

We make the case that the Prisoner’s Dilemma, notwithstanding its fame and the quantity of intellectual resources devoted to it, has largely failed to explain any phenomena of social scientific or biological interest. In the heart of the paper we examine in detail a famous purported example of Prisoner’s Dilemma empirical success, namely Axelrod’s analysis of WWI trench warfare, and argue that this success is greatly overstated. Further, we explain why this negative verdict is likely true generally and not just (...) in our case study. We also address some possible defenses of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. (shrink)

In this Introduction we introduce the central themes of the Evaluative Perception volume. After identifying historical and recent contemporary work on this topic, we discuss some central questions under three headings: (1) Questions about the Existence and Nature of Evaluative Perception: Are there perceptual experiences of values? If so, what is their nature? Are experiences of values sui generis? Are values necessary for certain kinds of experience? (2) Questions about the Epistemology of Evaluative Perception: Can evaluative experiences ever justify evaluative (...) judgments? Are experiences of values necessary for certain kinds of justified evaluative judgments? (3) Questions about Value Theory and Evaluative Perception: Is the existence of evaluative experience supported or undermined by particular views in value theory? Are particular views in value theory supported or undermined by the existence of value experience? (shrink)

The 1994 US spectrum auction is now a paradigmatic case of the successful use of microeconomic theory for policy-making. We use a detailed analysis of it to review standard accounts in philosophy of science of how idealized models are connected to messy reality. We show that in order to understand what made the design of the spectrum auction successful, a new such account is required, and we present it here. Of especial interest is the light this sheds on the issue (...) of progress in economics. In particular, it enables us to get clear on exactly what has been progressing, and on exactly what theory has – and has not – contributed to that. This in turn has important implications for just what it is about economic theory that we should value. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

Robert Hartman’s parallelism argument aims to show that resultant moral luck exists. The gist of the argument is this: because there is circumstantial moral luck in a particular circumstantial luck scenario and that scenario is analogous in important ways to a particular resultant luck scenario, the resultant luck scenario is plausibly an instance of resultant moral luck. I argue that there is a principled way of denying that circumstantial moral luck is present in the circumstantial luck scenario. Doing so is (...) not enough, however, to reject Hartman’s general analogical line of reasoning since an alternative parallelism argument based on a resultant luck scenario and a circumstantial luck scenario of another kind can be made. Nevertheless, I argue that the analogy between the circumstantial luck scenario and the resultant luck scenario in both the alternative parallelism argument and its original counterpart is too weak to support the claim that resultant moral luck is present in the resultant luck scenario. (shrink)

W niniejszym tekście autorka podjęła próbę analizy początku, jako jedynej opublikowanej do tej pory części, zapowiadanej przez Roberta Schindla powieści Der Kalte. Chodziło m. in. o odnalezienie odniesień do wcześniejszych utworów Roberta Schindla, w szczególności zaś do opublikowanej w roku 1992 i przeniesionej na ekran w roku 2001 powieści Gebürtig. Z jednej strony zwrócono uwagę na symbolikę „zimna”, obecną w obu utworach, z drugiej strony na tematykę rozliczenia z narodowosocjalistyczną przeszłością Austrii. W artykule wskazano również na nawiązania w Der Kalte (...) do wcześniejszych tradycji literackich, w tym przypadku do użytej dla wyrażenia własnych treści tradycji romantyzmu. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow argues that genome editing is unlikely to be person-affecting for the foreseeable future and, as a result, will neither benefit nor harm edited individuals. We regard Sparrow’...

Navigating the ontology of color used to be a simple affair. There was the naive view that colors really are in objects the way they appear, and the view that they are secondary qualities to cause certain experiences in us. Today, there are myriad well-developed views but no satisfactory taxonomy of philosophical theories on color. In this article, I first examine the two newest taxonomies on offer and argue that they are inadequate. In particular, I look at Brogaard’s taxonomy and (...) then Cohen’s. One of the reasons I am displeased with Brogaard and Cohen’s taxonomies is that I find it implausible that dispositions are relational properties. I provide an argument against this way of classifying dispositions. Having learned from the vices and virtues of Brogaard and Cohens’ taxonomies, I provide what I believe is a much-enhanced way of taxonomizing philosophical views on color. My taxonomy rules out certain views, clarifies others, and shows that there is an unnoticed view worthy of consideration. (shrink)

In July 2017, China’s State Council released the country’s strategy for developing artificial intelligence, entitled ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’. This strategy outlined China’s aims to become the world leader in AI by 2030, to monetise AI into a trillion-yuan industry, and to emerge as the driving force in defining ethical norms and standards for AI. Several reports have analysed specific aspects of China’s AI policies or have assessed the country’s technical capabilities. Instead, in this article, we focus on (...) the socio-political background and policy debates that are shaping China’s AI strategy. In particular, we analyse the main strategic areas in which China is investing in AI and the concurrent ethical debates that are delimiting its use. By focusing on the policy backdrop, we seek to provide a more comprehensive and critical understanding of China’s AI policy by bringing together debates and analyses of a wide array of policy documents. (shrink)

As technology improves, artificial systems are increasingly able to behave in human-like ways: holding a conversation; providing information, advice, and support; or taking on the role of therapist, teacher, or counsellor. This enhanced behavioural complexity, we argue, encourages deeper forms of affective engagement on the part of the human user, with the artificial agent helping to stabilise, subdue, prolong, or intensify a person’s emotional condition. Here, we defend a fictionalist account of human/AI interaction, according to which these encounters involve an (...) elaborate practise of imaginative pretence: a make-believe in which the artificial agent is attributed a life of its own. We attend, specifically, to the temporal characteristics of these fictions, and to what we imagine artificial agents are doing when we are not looking at them. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an analysis of the structure and content of loneliness. We argue that this is an emotion of absence-an affective state in which certain social goods are regarded as out of reach for the subject of experience. By surveying the range of social goods that appear to be missing from the lonely person's perspective, we see what it is that can make this emotional condition so subjectively awful for those who undergo it, including the profound sense (...) of being unable to realise oneself, in collaboration with others. (shrink)

Loneliness is a near-universal experience. It is particularly common for individuals with (so-called) psychopathological conditions or disorders. In this paper, we explore the experiential character of loneliness, with a specific emphasis on how social goods are experienced as absent in ways that involve a diminished sense of agency and recognition. We explore the role and experience of loneliness in three case studies: depression, anorexia nervosa, and autism. We demonstrate that even though experiences of loneliness might be common to many psychopathologies, (...) these experiences nevertheless have distinctive profiles. Specifically, we suggest that: (i) loneliness is often a core characteristic of depressive experience; (ii) loneliness can drive, and even cement, disordered eating practices and anorectic identity in anorexia nervosa; iii) loneliness is neither a core characteristic of autism nor a driver but is rather commonly experienced as stemming from social worlds, environments, and norms that fail to accommodate autistic bodies and their distinctive forms of life. We aim to do justice to the pervasiveness of loneliness in many — if not all — psychopathologies, while also highlighting the need to attend to psychopathology-specific experiences of loneliness, agency, and (non-)recognition. (shrink)

Are the following propositions true of the colors: No object can be more than one determinable or determinate color all over at the same time (Incompatibility); the colors of objects are mind-independent (Objectivism); and most human observers usually perceive the colors of objects veridically in typical conditions (Veridicality)? One reason to think not is that the empirical literature appears to support the proposition that there is mass perceptual disagreement about the colors of objects amongst human observers in typical conditions (P-Disagreement). (...) In this article, we defend Incompatibility, Objectivism, and Veridicality by calling into question whether the empirical literature really supports P-Disagreement. (shrink)

In addiction, apparently causally significant phenomena occur at a huge number of levels; addiction is affected by biomedical, neurological, pharmacological, clinical, social, and politico-legal factors, among many others. In such a complex, multifaceted field of inquiry, it seems very unlikely that all the many layers of explanation will prove amenable to any simple or straightforward, reductive analysis; if we are to unify the many different sciences of addiction while respecting their causal autonomy, then, what we are likely to need is (...) an integrative framework. In this paper, we propose the theory of “Externalist” or “4E” – for extended, embodied, embedded, and enactive – cognition, which focuses on the empirical and conceptual centrality of the wider extra-neural environment to cognitive and mental processes, as a candidate for such a framework. We begin in Section 2 by outlining how such a perspective might apply to psychiatry more generally, before turning to some of the ways it can illuminate addiction in particular: Section 3 points to a way of dissolving the classic dichotomy between the “choice model” and “disease model” in the addiction literature; Section 4 shows how 4E concepts can clarify the interplay between the addict’s brain and her environment; and Section 5 considers how these insights help to explain the success of some recovery strategies, and may help to inform the development of new ones. (shrink)

Phrase structure trees have a hierarchical structure. In many subjects, most notably in {\bf taxonomy} such tree structures have been studied using ultrametrics. Here syntactical hierarchical phrase trees are subject to a similar analysis, which is much simpler as the branching structure is more readily discernible and switched. The occurrence of hierarchical structure elsewhere in linguistics is mentioned. The phrase tree can be represented by a matrix and the elements of the matrix can be represented by triangles. The height at (...) which branching occurs is not prescribed in previous syntactic models, but it is by using the ultrametric matrix. In other words the ultrametric approach gives a complete description of phrase trees, unlike previous approaches. The ambiguity of which branching height to choose, is resolved by postulating that branching occurs at the lowest height available. An ultrametric produces a measure of the complexity of sentences: presumably the complexity of sentences increases as a language is acquired so that this can be tested. All ultrametric triangles are equilateral or isosceles. Here it is shown that \={X} structure implies that there are no equilateral triangles. Restricting attention to simple syntax a minimum ultrametric distance between lexical categories is calculated. A matrix constructed from this ultrametric distance is shown to be different than the matrix obtained from features. It is shown that the definition of {\sc c-command} can be replaced by an equivalent ultrametric definition. The new definition invokes a minimum distance between nodes and this is more aesthetically satisfying than previous varieties of definitions. From the new definition of {\sc c-command} follows a new definition of of the central notion in syntax namely {\sc government}. (shrink)

Standard linguistic analysis of syntax uses the T-model. This model requires the ordering: D-structure > S-structure > LF, where D-structure is the sentences deep structure, S-structure is its surface structure, and LF is its logical form. Between each of these representations there is movement which alters the order of the constituent words; movement is achieved using the principles and parameters of syntactic theory. Psychological analysis of sentence production is usually either serial or connectionist. Psychological serial models do not accommodate the (...) T-model immediately so that here a new model called the P-model is introduced. The P-model is different from previous linguistic and psychological models. Here it is argued that the LF representation should be replaced by a variant of Frege'sA three qualities (sense, reference, and force), called the FregeA representation or F-representation. In the F-representation the order of elements is not necessarily the same as that in LF and it is suggested that the correct ordering is: F-representation > D-structure > S-structure. This ordering appears to lead to a more natural view of sentence production and processing. Within this framework movement originates as the outcome of emphasis applied to the sentence. The requirement that the F-representation precedes the D-structure needs a picture of the particular principles and parameters which pertain to movement of words between representations. In general this would imply that there is a preferred or optimal ordering of the symbolic string in the F-representation. The standard ordering is retained because the general way of producing such an optimal ordering is unclear. In this case it is possible to produce an analysis of movement between LF and D-structure similar to the usual analysis of movement between S-structure and LF. The necessity of analyzing corrupted data suggests that a maximal amount of information about a language's grammar and lexicon is stored. (shrink)

There is a problem regarding God and perception right at the heart of Berkeley ’s metaphysics. With respect to this problem, I will argue for : It is intractable. Berkeley has no solution to this problem, and neither can we hope to offer one on his behalf. However, I will also argue for : The truth of need not be seen as threatening the viability of Berkeley ’s metaphysics. In fact, it may even be seen as speaking in its favor.

Recently it has been argued that autocatalytic theory could be applied to the origin of culture. Here possible application to a theory of meaning in the philosophy of language, called radical interpretation, is commented upon and compared to previous applications.

It is argued that colour name strategy, object name strategy, and chunking strategy in memory are all aspects of the same general phenomena, called stereotyping, and this in turn is an example of a know-how representation. Such representations are argued to have their origin in a principle called the minimum duplication of resources. For most the subsequent discussions existence of colour name strategy suffices. It is pointed out that the BerlinA- KayA universal partial ordering of colours and the frequency of (...) traffic accidents classified by colour are surprisingly similar; a detailed analysis is not carried out as the specific colours recorded are not identical. Some consequences of the existence of a name strategy for the philosophy of language and mathematics are discussed: specifically it is argued that in accounts of truth and meaning it is necessary throughout to use real numbers as opposed to bi-valent quantities; and also that the concomitant label associated with sentences should not be of unconditional truth, but rather several real-valued quantities associated with visual communication. The implication of real-valued truth quantities is that the Continuum Hypothesis of pure mathematics is side-stepped, because real valued quantities occur ab initio. The existence of name strategy shows that thought/sememes and talk/phonemes can be separate, and this vindicates the assumption of thought occurring before talk used in psycho-linguistic speech production models. (shrink)

We introduce two concepts—social certainty and social doubt—that help to articulate a variety of experiences of the social world, such as shyness, self-consciousness, culture shock, and anxiety. Following Carel's (2013) analysis of bodily doubt, which explores how a person's tacit confidence in the workings of their body can be disrupted and undermined in illness, we consider how an individual's faith in themselves as a social agent, too, can be compromised or lost, thus altering their experience of what is afforded by (...) the social environment. We highlight how a loss of bodily or social certainty can be shaped and sustained by the environments in which one finds oneself. As such, we show how certain individuals might be more vulnerable to experiences of bodily and social doubt than others. (shrink)

Potentialism is the view that the universe of sets is inherently potential. It comes in two main flavours: height-potentialism and width-potentialism. It is natural to think that height and width potentialism are just aspects of a broader phenomenon of potentialism, that they might both be true. The main result of this paper is that this is mistaken: height and width potentialism are jointly inconsistent. Indeed, I will argue that height potentialism is independently committed to an ultimate background universe of sets, (...) an ultimate V, up to its height. (shrink)

Externalist theories hold that a comprehensive understanding of mental disorder cannot be achieved unless we attend to factors that lie outside of the head: neural explanations alone will not fully capture the complex dependencies that exist between an individual’s psychiatric condition and her social, cultural, and material environment. Here, we firstly offer a taxonomy of ways in which the externalist viewpoint can be understood, and unpack its commitments concerning the nature and physical realization of mental disorder. Secondly, we apply a (...) strongly externalist approach to the case of Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and argue that this condition can be illuminated by appeal to the hypothesis of extended cognition. We conclude by briefly considering the significance this strongly externalist approach may have for psychiatric practice and pedagogy. (shrink)

Draft version of essay. ABSTRACT: Benjamin Whichcote developed a distinctive account of human nature centered on our moral psychology. He believed that this view of human nature, which forms the foundation of “Cambridge Platonism,” showed that the demands of reason and faith are not merely compatible but dynamically supportive of one another. I develop an interpretation of this oft-neglected and widely misunderstood account of human nature and defend its viability against a key objection.

Johnston famously argued that the colors are, more or less inclusively speaking, dispositions to cause color experiences by arguing that this view best accommodates his five proposed core beliefs about color. Since then, Campbell, Kalderon, Gert, Benbaji, and others, have all engaged with at least some of Johnston’s proposed core beliefs in one way or another. Which propositions are core beliefs is ultimately an empirical matter. We investigate whether Johnston’s proposed core beliefs are, in fact, believed by assessing the agreement/disagreement (...) of non-philosophers with them. Two experiments are run each with large sample sizes, the second designed to address criticisms of the first. We find that non-philosophers mostly agree with the proposed core beliefs, but that they agree with some more than others. (shrink)

This essay consists of two parts. Part I offers an explanation of Berkeley's understanding of the relationship between materialism and evil. Berkeley regards materialism as the chief instrumental cause of evil in the world. It is the belief in matter that encourages us to believe that God is not immediately, intimately present in every aspect of our life. Immaterialism, by contrast, makes God's immediate presence vivid and thereby serves to undermine the motivation to vice. Part II locates Berkeley's view on (...) matter and evil within the Christian Neoplatonic tradition. I compare Plotinus' minimalist approach to matter and his identification of matter with evil to Berkeley's eliminitivism about matter and his corresponding identification of materialism as the chief source of evil. (shrink)

I present a novel view on the nature of time: primitivism. This view is the conjunction of two theses: that presence is concreteness and that the present changes, where change is a fundamental process that cannot be analyzed. After explaining this view in-depth, I look at how it explains the flow of time and solves many puzzles, for example, McTaggart’s famous paradox about the unreality of time.

Colour relationalism holds that the colours are constituted by relations to subjects. Anti-relationalists have claimed that this view stands in stark contrast to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. Is this claim right? Cohen and Nichols’ recent empirical study suggests not, as about half of their participants seemed to be relationalists about colour. Despite Cohen and Nichols’ study, we think that the anti-relationalist’s claim is correct. We explain why there are good reasons to suspect that Cohen and Nichols’ experimental design skewed their (...) results in favour of relationalism. We then run an improved study and find that most of our participants seem to be anti-relationalists. We find some other interesting things too. Our results suggest that the majority of ordinary people find it no less intuitive that colours are objective than that shapes are objective. We also find some evidence that when those with little philosophical training are asked about the colours of objects, their intuitions about colour and shape cases are similar, but when asked about people’s colour ascriptions, their intuitions about colour and shape cases differ. (shrink)

Debates surrounding the nature of mental disorder have tended to divide into an objectivist camp that takes psychiatric classification to be a value-free scientific matter, and a normativist camp that takes it to be irreducibly values-based. Here we present an overlooked distinction between _status_ and _constitution_. Questions of the form “What is x?” are ambiguous between status questions (“What gives something the status of an x?”), and constitution questions (“Given that something has the status of an x, what is it (...) made of?”). We elucidate this distinction in detail, and argue that normativism is uniquely well-placed to answer status questions while objectivism provides answers, where they are available, to constitution questions. (shrink)

Objectification involves treating someone as a thing. The role of images in perpetuating objectification has been discussed by feminist philosophers. However, the precise effect that images have on an individual's visual system is seldom explored. Kathleen Stock’s work is an exception—she describes certain images of women as causing viewers to develop an objectifying ‘gestalt’ which is then projected onto real-life women. However, she doesn’t specify the level of visual processing at which objectification occurs. In this paper, I propose that images (...) can affect a viewer's early visual system. I will argue that if a viewer is exposed to a lot of images that depict women as sexual objects, this will bias their early visual selection mechanisms in a way that can result in an objectifying way of seeing. This is an important contribution to work on objectification as it incorporates empirical studies on vision and findings from philosophy of mind. It also examines some of the epistemic and moral consequences of objectification occurring at this early visual stage. (shrink)

In the present article, I show that sounds are properties that are not physical in a narrow sense. First, I argue that sounds are properties using Moorean style arguments and defend this property view from various arguments against it that make use of salient disanalogies between sounds and colors. The first disanalogy is that we talk of objects making sounds but not of objects making colors. The second is that we count and quantify over sounds but not colors. The third (...) is that sounds can survive qualitative change in their auditory properties, but colors cannot survive change in their chromatic properties. Next, I provide a taxonomy of property views of sound. As the property view of sound has been so rarely discussed, many of the views available have never been articulated. My taxonomy will articulate these views and how they are related to one another. I taxonomize sounds according to three characteristics: dispositional/non-dispositional, relational/non-relational, and reductive/non-reductive. Finally, mirroring a popular argument in the color literature, I argue that physical views in the narrow sense are unable to accommodate the similarity and difference relations in which sounds essentially stand. I end replying to three objections. (shrink)

This article is on a precise kind of color primitivism, ‘ostensivism.’ This is the view that it is in the nature of the colors that they are phenomenal, non-reductive, structural, categorical properties. First, I differentiate ostensivism from other precise forms of primitivism. Next, I examine the core belief ‘Revelation,’ and propose a revised version, which, unlike standard statements, is compatible with a yet unstated but plausible core belief: roughly, that there are interesting things to be discovered about the nature of (...) the colors. Finally, I show that ostensivism is the only view on color that can accommodate both proposed core beliefs. (shrink)

Why is it that we respond emotionally to plays, movies, and novels and feel moved by characters and situations that we know do not exist? This question, which constitutes the kernel of the debate on »the paradox of fiction«, speaks to the perennial themes of philosophy, and remains of interest to this day. But does this question entail a paradox? A significant group of analytic philosophers have indeed thought so. Since the publication of Colin Radford's celebrated paper »How Can We (...) Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?« (1975), the number of proposals to solve, explain, reformulate, dismiss or even revitalize this apparent paradox has continued to proliferate. In line with recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, in this paper I will argue against the sustainability of the paradox, claiming that the only reasonable way to continue our discussions about it consists in using it as a heuristic tool to shed light on problems regarding our involvement with fiction. Against this background, I will then focus on one of the problems related to how our emotional responses to fiction contribute to our appreciation of it. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first section shows the parallel evolution of the paradox of fiction and the analytic philosophy of emotion. Here I claim that, although the paradox is epistemically flawed, since one of its premises is rooted in a limited view on the emotions typical of early cognitiv-ism, the discussions it provokes are still epistemically useful. As Robert Stecker (2011, 295), among others, has pointed out, the paradox was formulated during the heyday of cognitive theories of the emotions in which emotion necessarily requires belief. Today, however, only few authors would endorse this premise. If emotion does not always require belief (as the majority of authors in the contemporary debate admit), let alone belief about the existence of the object towards which it is directed, then there is no reason to speak of a paradox. From this first conclusion, however, it does not follow that the paradox is completely without use from the epistemic point of view. A glimpse at the topics touched on during the discussions about how to solve, reformulate, or negate the paradox reveals their value in shedding light on the interrelation between emotion and fiction. The second section elaborates a phenomenologically inspired cognitive account of the emotions by focusing on their cognitive bases, their influence on Emotion in the Appreciation of Fiction 205 cognitions, and their cognitive function. In this model, emotions are responsible for indicating values, for showing what matters to us, and for being appropriate to their objects. My claim is that this view applies not only to reality, but also to our involvement with fiction. In the final section I draw on this account to focus on one kind of appreciation of fiction which necessarily requires our emotional involvement. Following an idea put forward by Susan Feagin (1996, 1), I employ the concept of »appre-ciation« to refer to a set of abilities exercised with the aim of extracting value from the work. There is a long tradition in aesthetics that condemns any focus on the emotions in the appreciation of art and fiction, and defends the necessity of aesthetic appreciation without emotional influence. To refer to this negative attitude towards the emotions, I will borrow an expression coined by Susan Feagin (2013, 636), who refers to »the intellectualized view of appreciation«. Against this widespread view, I will argue that some aspects of the fiction can only be appreciated with the help of our emotions. The cognitive approach developed in the previous section can explain how the emotions might in fact play a significant role in the appreciation of art and fiction. Attention will be paid to three activities involved in appreciation, for all of which emotion is crucial: processing relevant information about the fictional world, understanding aspects of it, and becoming acquainted with the values it presents. My aim here is to argue that there are particular aspects of the fictional world that can only be appreciated if recipients have the appropriate emotions. (shrink)

This article documents our collaborative ongoing struggle to disrupt the reproduction of the coloniality of knowledge in the teaching of Gender Studies. We document how our decolonial feminist activism is actualised in our pedagogy, which is guided by feminist interpretations of ‘wonder’ (Irigaray, 1999; Ahmed, 2004; hooks, 2010) read alongside decolonial theory, including that of Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter D. Mignolo and María Lugones. Using notions of wonder as pedagogy, we attempt to create spaces in our classrooms where critical self-reflection and (...) critical intellectual and embodied engagement can emerge. Our attempts to create these spaces include multiple aspects or threads that, when woven together, might enable other ways of knowing-being-doing that works towards disrupting feminist complicity with coloniality in the Australian context. (shrink)

As central as the method of forcing is within set theory, it has yet to be incorporated into the philosopher's toolbox. That strikes me as a shame, since it may well have important applications within philosophy. One barrier is that typical presentations of forcing are overly dry and technical and make it seem inherently bound up with its applications within set theory. The purpose of this note is to try to rectify this. In particular, I will explain how the method (...) of forcing can be seen as a way of constructing a certain kind of intensional model that philosophers are already interested in: namely, possibility models. (shrink)

Color relationalism holds that the colors are constituted by relations to subjects. The introspective rejoinder against this view claims that it is opposed to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. The rejoinder seems to be correct about how colors appear when looking at how participants respond to an item about the metaphysical nature of color but not when looking at an item about the ascription of colors. The present article expands the properties investigated to sound and taste and inspects the mentioned asymmetry, (...) with a particular focus on the principle of charity. Using a metaphysical item, we find that color and sound are no different from shape, our control for a clearly anti-relational property. Taste, on the other hand, is no different from likability, our control for a clearly relational property. Importantly, we find that the disparity between metaphysical and ascription items is due to participants using a principle of charity to interpret disagreement cases such that both parties can be correct. (shrink)

(NOTE: This is a transcript of the class. FOR THE FULL PAPER please click on "Maxson J McDowell" above.) An edited transcript of an experiment performed within a class on dream interpretation. Knowing only the dreamer’s age and gender, we interpreted his dream from its text. Our interpretation included predictions about the dreamer's psychological issues, and about his defenses. It also identified a series of jokes within the dream which would tend to penetrate the dreamer's defenses. When we had finished (...) our 'blind' interpretation, the bringer of the dream gave us more information about the dreamer against which we tested the accuracy of our predictions. A paper on this experiment has been submitted for publication. (shrink)

In an online, participatory class, we interpreted The Dream of the White House knowing nothing of the dreamer and having none of the dreamer’s associations. Our interpretation included a series of falsifiable predictions about the dreamer. When it was complete, we asked the bringer of the dream (who had until then been silent and was not visible to us) to give us more information about the dreamer. Of 17 predictions 15 were confirmed. The dreamer suffers dislocation and loss until she (...) asks a female manager for help. This record is another iteration of an experiment that will be described more fully in the paper 'The Dream of the Six-Legged Dog: An Experimental System to Test Meaning,' soon to be published. This iteration repeats and confirms the evidence given in that paper. More than any of the other iterations, it details how talk therapy promotes personality reorganization. It then supports these observations with experimental evidence. Because it demonstrates how talk therapy works, this iteration supports talk therapy against pressure from the drug and insurance corporations. AUDIO-RECORDING OF WHOLE CLASS: link provided on first page of the paper you download here. (shrink)

We present experimental evidence that an interpretation was accurate. Current wisdom notwithstanding, we could interpret from the text alone because its information is redundant: repetition provides internal checks. Knowing neither dreamer nor their associations we made falsifiable predictions that we tested by subsequently gathering information about the dreamer. Predictions were supported. Results were repeated with seven additional dreams. Each dream was tightly crafted, used humor, drama or hyperbole to penetrate the dreamer’s defenses, and furthered the emergence of personality. Our experiment (...) compliments fMRI and statistics because it studies a whole text as a unique narrative: one iteration identified healing steps during therapy; another confirmed the psychological meaning of a myth. Our experiment might generate a body of objective knowledge about interpretation and make interpretation itself more accurate. In the US 20% live with mental illness. Our experiment supports talk therapy against pressure from the drug and insurance industries. (shrink)

In an online, participatory class, we interpreted The Dream of the Tabby Cats knowing nothing of the dreamer beyond age and gender, and having none of the dreamer’s associations. Our interpretation included a series of predictions about the dreamer. When it was complete, we asked the bringer of the dream (who had until then been silent and was not visible to us) to give us more information about the dreamer. Later the dreamer herself gave us more information. Of six predictions (...) four were confirmed. The dreamer’s apartment is repeatedly disturbed and, each time, a new cat appears. This record is another iteration of an experiment that will be described more fully in the paper The Dream of the Six-Legged Dog: An Experimental System to Test Meaning, soon to be published. This iteration repeats and confirms the evidence given in that paper. AUDIO RECORD OF CLASS AVAILABLE: link is on first page of the paper you download from this page. (shrink)

(NOTE: This is a transcript of the class. FOR THE FULL PAPER, please click on "Maxson J. McDowell".) A complete transcript of an experiment performed within a class on dream interpretation. Knowing only the dreamers age and gender, we interpreted his dream from its text. Our interpretation included predictions about the dreamer's psychological issues, and about his defenses. It also identified a series of jokes within the dream which would tend to penetrate the dreamer's defenses. When we had finished our (...) 'blind' interpretation, the bringer of the dream gave us more information about the dreamer against which we tested the accuracy of our predictions. A paper on this experiment has been submitted for publication. A link to an AUDIO-RECORDING of this class is given on the first page of this transcript. (shrink)

One prominent criticism of the abstractionist program is the so-called Bad Company objection. The complaint is that abstraction principles cannot in general be a legitimate way to introduce mathematical theories, since some of them are inconsistent. The most notorious example, of course, is Frege’s Basic Law V. A common response to the objection suggests that an abstraction principle can be used to legitimately introduce a mathematical theory precisely when it is stable: when it can be made true on all sufficiently (...) large domains. In this paper, we raise a worry for this response to the Bad Company objection. We argue, perhaps surprisingly, that it requires very strong assumptions about the range of the second-order quantifiers; assumptions that the abstractionist should reject. (shrink)

In an online, participatory class, we interpreted The Dream of the Flaming Sword knowing nothing of the dreamer beyond age and gender, and having none of the dreamer’s associations. Our interpretation included a series of predictions about the dreamer. When it was complete, we asked the bringer of the dream (who had until then been silent and who also gave no visual feedback to our discussion) to give us more information about the dreamer. Eight months later the bringer gave us (...) further information from the dreamer. Our predictions were mostly confirmed. In the dream, the dreamer’s identity is repeatedly questioned. -/- This record is another iteration of an experiment that is described more fully in the paper The Dream of the Six-Legged Dog, soon to be published. This iteration repeats and confirms the evidence given in that paper. -/- AUDIO RECORD OF THE CLASS ABOUT THE FLAMING SWORD: link is on the title page of the paper you can download here. (shrink)