Reductionists about dispositions must either say the natural properties are all dispositional or individuate properties hyperintensionally. Lewis stands in as an example of the sort of combination I think is incoherent: properties individuated by modal profile + categoricalism.

In recent years, an increasing number of contemporary artists have incorporated live animals into their work. Although this development has attracted a great deal of attention in the artworld and among animal rights activists, it has not been much discussed in the philosophy of art—which is quite remarkable, given the serious ethical and artistic questions that these artworks prompt. I focus on answering two such questions. First, is the use of animals in these artworks ethically objectionable? Or are such (...) artworks instead morally permissible or even laudable? Second, what might be the distinctive value or good of incorporating animals into artworks in this way? In response to both questions, I argue that one distinctive value of some of the artworks I discuss is their ability to facilitate a relationship of moral concern and respect on the part of an audience toward the animals that are a part of the artwork. Insofar as artworks facilitate such relationships, they are not simply artistically important; they are also, to that extent, morally good. (shrink)

From playing basketball to ordering at a food counter, we frequently and effortlessly coordinate our attention with others towards a common focus: we look at the ball, or point at a piece of cake. This non-verbal coordination of attention plays a fundamental role in our social lives: it ensures that we refer to the same object, develop a shared language, understand each other’s mental states, and coordinate our actions. Models of joint attention generally attribute this accomplishment to (...) gaze coordination. But are visual attentional mechanisms sufficient to achieve joint attention, in all cases? Besides cases where visual information is missing, we show how combining it with other senses can be helpful, and even necessary to certain uses of joint attention. We explain the two ways in which non-visual cues contribute to joint attention: either as enhancers, when they complement gaze and pointing gestures in order to coordinate joint attention on visible objects, or as modality pointers, when joint attention needs to be shifted away from the whole object to one of its properties, say weight or texture. This multisensory approach to joint attention has important implications for social robotics, clinical diagnostics, pedagogy and theoretical debates on the construction of a shared world. (shrink)

This paper provides a categorization of cross-modal experiences. There are myriad forms. Doing so allows us to think clearly about the nature of different cross-modal experiences and allows us to clearly formulate competing hypotheses about the kind of experiences involved in different cross-modal phenomena.

Objective: Evidence suggests people experience an oral size illusion and commonly perceive oral size inaccurately; however, the nature of the illusion remains unclear. The objectives of the present study were to confirm the presence of an oral size illusion, determine the magnitude (amount) and direction (underestimation or overestimation) of the illusion, and determine whether immediately prior crossmodal perceptual experiences affected the magnitude and direction. Design: Participants (N = 27) orally assessed 9 sizes of stainless steel spheres (1/16 in to 1/2 (...) in) categorized as small, medium, or big, and matched them with digital and visual reference sets. Each participant completed 20 matching tasks in 3 assessments. For control assessments, 6 oral spheres were matched with reference sets of same-sized spheres. For primer-control assessments, similar to control, 6 matching tasks were preceded by cross-modal experiences of the same-sized sphere. For experimental assessments, 8 matching tasks were preceded by a cross-modal experience of a differently sized sphere. Results: For control assessments, small and medium spheres were consistently underestimated, and big spheres were consistently overestimated. For experimental assessments, magnitude and direction of the oral size illusion varied according to the size of the sphere used in the cross-modal experience. Conclusion: Results seemed to confirm an oral size illusion, but direction of the illusion depended on the size of the object. Immediately prior cross-modal experiences influenced magnitude and direction of the illusion, suggesting that aspects of oral perceptual experience are dependent upon factors outside of oral perceptual anatomy and the properties of the oral stimulus. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that the capacity to think of one’s perceptions as cross-modally integrated is incompatible with a reductionist account of the self. In §2 I distinguish three versions of the argument from cross-modality. According to the ‘unification’ version of the argument, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity to identify an object touched as the same as an object simultaneously seen. According to the ‘recognition’ version, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity, (...) having once seen an object, to reidentify that same object by touch alone. According to the ‘objectivity’ version, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity to think of one’s perceptions in different modalities as perceptions of one and the same object. The third version seems to establish that one must conceive of oneself substantially, as the numerically identical owner of one’s experiences, a conclusion in agreement with recent work in developmental psychology claiming to show that an infant’s cross-modal capacities are essentially implicated in their development of a sense of self. There is further work to be done if this is to be tumed into an argument against reductionism: there is no swift route from the epistemology of self-consciousness to the metaphysics of the self. In the §3, I will claim that there is, nevertheless, an argument linking the two. What I propose is an argument derived, not from the token-reflexive rule for the first-person, but resting on its anaphoric behaviour spanning intensional operators. (shrink)

The representational theory of phenomenal experience is often stated in terms of a supervenience thesis: Byrne recently characterises it as the thesis that “there can be no difference in phenomenal character without a difference in content”, while according to Tye, “[a]t a minimum, the thesis is one of supervenience: necessarily, experiences that are alike in their representational contents are alike in their phenomenal character.” Consequently, much of the debate over whether representationalism is true centres on purported counter-examples – that is (...) to say, purported failures of supervenience. The refutation of putative counter-examples has been, it seems to me, by and large successful. But there is a certain class of these for which the representationalist response has been something less than completely convincing. These are the cross-modality cases. I will explain what I mean, and then argue that the response in question is not only unconvincing but actually undermines the representationalist position. (shrink)

Divers (2014) argues that a Lewisian theory of modality which includes both counterpart theory and modal realism cannot account for the truth of certain intuitively true modal sentences involving cross-world comparatives. The main purpose of this paper is to defend the Lewisian theory against Divers’s challenge by developing a response strategy based on a degree-theoretic treatment of comparatives and by showing that this treatment is compatible with the theory.

The main aim of Lupyan’s paper is to claim that perception is cognitively penetrated and that this is consistent with the idea of perception as predictive coding. In these remarks I will focus on what Lupyan says about whether perception is cognitively penetrated, and set aside his remarks about epistemology. I have argued (2012) that perception can be cognitively penetrated and so I am sympathetic to Lupyan’s overall aim of showing that perception is cognitively penetrable. However, I will be critical (...) of some of Lupyan’s reasoning in arguing for this position. I will also call for clarification of that reasoning. First, I will discuss what is meant by cognitive penetration and, in light of this, the sort of evidence that can be used to establish its existence. Second, I will question whether Lupyan establishes that all cases of cross-modal effects are cases of cognitive penetration. In doing so, I will suggest a form of cognitive penetration that has heretofore not been posited, and give an example of how one might test for its existence. Third, I will question whether Lupyan puts forward convincing evidence that categorical knowledge and language affect perception in a way that conclusively shows that cognitive penetration occurs. Fourth, I will closely examine Lupyan’s reply to the argument against cognitive penetration from illusion. I show that his reply is not adequate and that he misses a more straightforward reply that one could give. Fifth, I briefly concur with the remarks that Lupyan makes about the role of attention with respect to cognitive penetration. And finally, sixth, I spell out exactly what I think the relationship is between the thesis that predictive coding is the correct model of perception and the thesis that there is cognitive penetration. (shrink)

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law? In a between‐subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and (...) also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross‐culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice. (shrink)

Our sense of smell pervasively influences our most common behaviors and daily experience, yet little is known about olfactory consciousness. Over the past decade and a half research in both the fields of Consciousness Studies and Olfaction has blossomed, however, olfactory consciousness has received little to no attention. The olfactory systems unique anatomy, functional organization, sensory processes, and perceptual experiences offers a fecund area for exploring all aspects of consciousness, as well as a external perspective for re-examining the assumptions (...) of contemporary theories of consciousness. It has even been suggested that the olfactory system may represent the minimal neuroanatomy that is required for conscious processing. Here, we seek contributions that should serve as the foundation for future research concerning consciousness using olfaction as a model. -/- Given the variegated nature of research on consciousness, we seek original papers including review articles, original research, and theoretical contributions concerning the nature of olfactory consciousness. The scope of the special edition widely incorporates olfaction as it relates to Consciousness, Awareness, Attention, Phenomenal- or Access-Consciousness, and Qualia. Research concerning olfaction and cross-modal integration as it relates to conscious experience is also welcome. -/- As the initial foray into this uncharted area of research, we welcome contributions from across all disciplines contributing to cognitive neuroscience, including neurobiology, neurology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer sciences. It is our hope that this special edition will serve as the impetus for future interdisciplinary research on olfaction and consciousness. (shrink)

Intellectual humility can be broadly construed as being conscious of the limits of one’s existing knowledge and capable to acquire more knowledge, which makes it a key virtue of the information age. However, the claim “I am (intellectually) humble” seems paradoxical in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typically volunteer it. There is an explanatory gap between the meaning of the sentence and the meaning the speaker ex- presses by uttering it. We therefore suggest analyzing intellectual (...) humility semantically, using a psycholexical approach that focuses on both synonyms and antonyms of ‘intellectual humili- ty’. We present a thesaurus-based methodology to map the semantic space of intellectual hu- mility and the vices it opposes as a heuristic to support philosophical and psychological anal- ysis of this disposition. We performed the mapping both in English and German in order to test for possible cultural differences in the understanding of intellectual humility. In both lan- guages, we find basically the same three semantic dimensions of intellectual humility (sensi- bility, discreetness, and knowledge dimensions) as well as three dimensions of its related vic- es (self-overrating, other-underrating and dogmatism dimensions). The resulting semantic clusters were validated in an empirical study with English (n=276) and German (n=406) par- ticipants. We find medium to high correlations (0.54-0.72) between thesaurus similarity and perceived similarity, and we can validate the labels of the three dimensions identified in the study. But we also find indications of the limitations of the thesaurus methodology in terms of cluster plausibility. We conclude by discussing the importance of these findings for construct- ing psychometric scales for intellectual humility. (shrink)

Recent research on algebraic models of _quasi-Nelson logic_ has brought new attention to a number of classes of algebras which result from enriching (subreducts of) Heyting algebras with a special modal operator, known in the literature as a _nucleus_. Among these various algebraic structures, for which we employ the umbrella term _intuitionistic modal algebras_, some have been studied since at least the 1970s, usually within the framework of topology and sheaf theory. Others may seem more exotic, for (...) their primitive operations arise from algebraic terms of the intuitionistic modal language which have not been previously considered. We shall for instance investigate the variety of _weak implicative semilattices_, whose members are (non-necessarily distributive) meet semilattices endowed with a nucleus and an implication operation which is not a relative pseudo-complement but satisfies the postulates of Celani and Jansana’s strict implication. For each of these new classes of algebras we establish a representation and a topological duality which generalize the known ones for Heyting algebras enriched with a nucleus. (shrink)

The philosophy of necessity and possibility has flourished in the last half-century, but much less attention has been paid to the question of how we know what can be the case and what must be the case. Many friends of modal metaphysics and many enemies of modal metaphysics have agreed that while empirical discoveries can tell us what is the case, they cannot shed much light on what must be the case or on what non-actual possibilities there (...) are. In this paper, in contrast, I discuss and defend naturalistic approaches to discovering the facts about necessity and possibility. After some remarks about what methodological naturalism in philosophy might amount to, I argue that naturalistic method in modal investigations may not need to be particularly revisionary of much of what is currently being done in modal investigation. I then discuss a number of respects in which a naturalistic orientation in modal investigation may improve on our current epistemic situation. (shrink)

In this article I provide and defend a solution to the problem of moral luck. The problem of moral luck is that there is a set of three theses about luck and moral blameworthiness each of which is at least prima facie plausible, but that, it seems, cannot all be true. The theses are that (1) one cannot be blamed for what happens beyond one’s control, (2) that which is due to luck is beyond one’s control, and (3) we rightly (...) blame each other for events that are due to luck. I suggest that the response which distinguishes between degree and scope of blameworthiness is promising. The main objection that one might level against this approach is that it seems to lead to the absurd conclusion that we, in the actual world, are as blameworthy as the person we could have been and who performs all sorts of heinous acts in a far away possible world. For, we in the actual world and our counterpart in a far away possible world are both such that we would perform certain heinous acts in particular circumstances. I argue that this objection can be met, namely by paying attention to the nature of luck. By using the insights into the nature of luck that have been gained by epistemologists, we can solve the problem of luck as it has been formulated by ethicists. For, epistemologists have argued that some event is due to luck only if it fails to occur in a substantial number of nearby possible worlds. I defend this account of luck and argue that the problem of moral luck can be solved if we pay attention to the nature of luck. I, therefore, call my solution to the problem of moral luck a modal solution. (shrink)

The Brock-Rosen problem has been one of the most thoroughly discussed objections to the modal fictionalism bruited in Gideon Rosen’s ‘Modal Fictionalism’. But there is a more fundamental problem with modal fictionalism, at least as it is normally explained: the position does not resolve the tension that motivated it. I argue that if we pay attention to a neglected aspect of modal fictionalism, we will see how to resolve this tension—and we will also find a (...) persuasive reply to the Brock-Rosen objection. Finally, I discuss an alternative reading of Rosen, and argue that this position is also able to fend off the Brock-Rosen objection. (shrink)

The modal collapse objection to classical theism has received significant attention among philosophers as of late. My aim in this paper is to advance this blossoming debate. First, I briefly survey the modal collapse literature and argue that classical theists avoid modal collapse if and only if they embrace an indeterministic link between God and his effects. Second, I argue that this indeterminism poses two challenges to classical theism. The first challenge is that it collapses God’s (...) status as an intentional agent who knows and intends what he is bringing about in advance. The second challenge is that it collapses God’s providential control over which creation obtains. (shrink)

Philosophy is experiencing a resurgence of property (PD) and generic substance dualism (SD). One important argument for SD that has played a role in this resurgence is some version of a modal argument. Until recently, premise (3) of the argument (Possibly, I exist, and no wholly physical objects exist.) has garnered most of the attention by critics. However, more recently, the focus has also been on (2) (Wholly physical objects are essentially, wholly, and intrinsically physical and wholly spiritual (...) substances are essentially, wholly, and intrinsically immaterial.). Andrew Bailey has provided one of the best criticisms of (2) on offer. In what follows, I present and clarify one form of the argument and defend premise (2) by responding to important defeaters proffered by Andrew Bailey and his contingent physicalism. (shrink)

While standard first-order modal logic is quite powerful, it cannot express even very simple sentences like “I could have been taller than I actually am” or “Everyone could have been smarter than they actually are”. These are examples of cross-world predication, whereby objects in one world are related to objects in another world. Extending first-order modal logic to allow for cross-world predication in a motivated way has proven to be notoriously difficult. In this paper, I argue (...) that the standard accounts of cross-world predication all leave something to be desired. I then propose an account of cross-world predication based on quantified hybrid logic and show how it overcomes the limitations of these previous accounts. I will conclude by discussing various philosophical consequences and applications of such an account. (shrink)

A solid foundation of modal logic requires a clear conception of the notion of modality. Modern modal logic treats modality as a propositional operator. I shall present an alternative according to which modality applies primarily to illocutionary force, that is, to the force, or mood, of a speech act. By a first step of internalization, modality applied at this level is pushed to the level of speech-act content. By a second step of internalization, we reach a propositional operator (...) validating the modal logic S4. After a brief discussion of problematic modality and possibility, the article concludes with an extension of the account that identifies modality with illocutionary force. Throughout, close attention is paid to the intended interpretation of the formalism. All of the rules stipulated will be justified on the basis of this interpretation. (shrink)

There are three theories in the epistemology of modality that have received sustained attention over the past 20 years: conceivability-theory, counterfactual-theory, and deduction-theory. In this paper we argue that all three face what we call the problem of modal epistemic friction. One consequence of the problem is that for any of the three accounts to yield modal knowledge, the account must provide an epistemology of essence. We discuss an attempt to fend off the problem within the context (...) of the internalism versus externalism debate about epistemic justification. We then investigate the effects that the PMEF has on reductive and non-reductive theories of the relation between essence and modality. (shrink)

Is the flavor of mint reducible to the minty smell, the taste, and the menthol-like coolness on the roof of one’s mouth, or does it include something over and above these—something not properly associated with any one of the contributing senses? More generally, are there features of perceptual experiences—so-called novel features—that are not associated with any of our senses taken singly? This question has received a lot of attention of late. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to (...) the question of what it means to say that a feature is associated with a sensory modality in the first place. Indeed, there is only one fully developed proposal in the literature, due to Casey O’Callaghan. I argue that this proposal is too permissive to inform the debate over novel features. I go on to argue that all attempts to formulate a better proposal along these lines fail. The corollary of my arguments is that the question of the existence of novel features is poorly formed. Furthermore, the problem generalizes, with the result that we should not rely on our pre-theoretical notions of the senses as the basis of theorizing about the features of perceptual experiences. (shrink)

Modal collapse arguments are all the rage in certain philosophical circles as of late. The arguments purport to show that classical theism entails the absurdly fatalistic conclusion that everything exists necessarily. My first aim in this paper is bold: to put an end to action-based modal collapse arguments against classical theism. To accomplish this, I first articulate the ‘Simple Modal Collapse Argument’ and then characterize and defend Tomaszewski’s criticism thereof. Second, I critically examine Mullins’ new modal (...) collapse argument formulated in response to the aforementioned criticism. I argue that Mullins’ new argument does not succeed. Third, I critically examine a powers-based modal collapse argument against classical theism that has received much less attention in the literature. Fourth, I show why God’s being purely actual, as well God’s being identical to each of God’s acts, simply cannot entail modal collapse given indeterministic causation. This, I take it, signals the death of modal collapse arguments. But not all hope is lost for proponents of modal collapse arguments—for the death is a fruitful one insofar as it paves the way for new inquiry into at least two new potential problems for classical theism. Showing this is my paper’s second aim. (shrink)

This essay calls attention to a set of linguistic interactions between counterfactual conditionals, on one hand, and possibility modals like could have and might have, on the other. These data present a challenge to the popular variably strict semantics for counterfactual conditionals. Instead, they support a version of the strict conditional semantics in which counterfactuals and possibility modals share a unified quantificational domain. I’ll argue that pragmatic explanations of this evidence are not available to the variable analysis. And putative (...) counterexamples to the unified strict analysis, on careful inspection, in fact support it. Ultimately, the semantics of conditionals and modals must be linked together more closely than has sometimes been recognized, and a unified strict semantics for conditionals and modals is the only way to fully achieve this. (shrink)

Attention to the conversational role of alethic terms seems to dominate, and even sometimes exhaust, many contemporary analyses of the nature of truth. Yet, because truth plays a role in judgment and assertion regardless of whether alethic terms are expressly used, such analyses cannot be comprehensive or fully adequate. A more general analysis of the nature of truth is therefore required – one which continues to explain the significance of truth independently of the role alethic terms play in discourse. (...) We undertake such an analysis in this paper; in particular, we start with certain elements from Kant and Frege, and develop a construct of truth as a normative modality of cognitive acts (e.g., thought, judgment, assertion). Using the various biconditional T-schemas to sanction the general passage from assertions to (equivalent) assertions of truth, we then suggest that an illocutionary analysis of truth can contribute to its locutionary analysis as well, including the analysis of diverse constructions involving alethic terms that have been largely overlooked in the philosophical literature. Finally, we briefly indicate the importance of distinguishing between alethic and epistemic modalities. (shrink)

Relative to any reasonable frame, satisfiability of modal quantificational formulae in which “= ” is the sole predicate is undecidable; but if we restrict attention to satisfiability in structures with the expanding domain property, satisfiability relative to the familiar frames (K, K4, T, S4, B, S5) is decidable. Furthermore, relative to any reasonable frame, satisfiability for modal quantificational formulae with a single monadic predicate is undecidable ; this improves the result of Kripke concerning formulae with two monadic (...) predicates. (shrink)

This paper introduces a framework for direct surface composition by online update. The surface string is interpreted as is, with each morpheme in turn updating the input state of information and attention. A formal representation language, Logic of Centering, is defined and some crosslinguistic constraints on lexical meanings and compositional operations are formulated.

The paper is concerned with the meaning of two modal postbases in Uummarmiutun, hungnaq ‘probably’ and ȓukȓau ‘should’. Uummarmiutun is an Inuktut dialect spoken in the Western Arctic. The analyses are founded on knowledge shared by native speakers of Uummarmiutun. Their statements and elaborations are quoted throughout the paper to show how they have explained the meaning nuances of modal expressions in their language. The paper also includes a comparison with cognates in Utkuhikšalingmiutut, which belongs to the eastern (...) part of the Western Canadian dialect group (Dorais, 2010). Using categories from Cognitive Functional Linguistics (Boye, 2005, 2012), the paper shows which meanings are covered by hungnaq and ȓukȓau. This allows us to discover subtle differences between the meanings of Uummarmiutun hungnaq and ȓukȓau and their Utkuhikšalingmiutut cognates respectively. (shrink)

Our visual experience of the world is one of diverse objects and events, each with particular colors, shapes, and motions. This experience is so coherent, so immediate, and so effortless that it seems to result from a single system that lets us experience everything in our field of view. But however appealing, this belief is mistaken: there are severe limits on what can be visually experienced. -/- For example, in a display for air-traffic control it is important to track all (...) moving items. For a single item, this can be done without problem. Three or four can also be tracked, although some degree of effort may be needed. As the number is increased further, accurate tracking becomes more and more difficult—and eventually, impossible. Performance is evidently affected by a factor within the observer which enables certain kinds of perception to occur, but is limited in some way. This factor is generally referred to as attention. -/- At various times, attention has been associated with clarity of perception, intensity of perception, consciousness, selection, or the allocation of a limited “resource” enabling various operations (see Hatfield, 1998). During the past several decades, considerable progress has been achieved by focusing on the idea of selection (Broadbent, 1982). In particular, attention can be productively viewed as contingently selective processing. This can be embodied in various ways by various processes—there need not be a single quantity identified with all forms of attention, or a single site where it operates (Allport, 1993; Tsotsos, 2011). Although “paying attention” is often considered to be a unitary operation, it may simply refer to the control of one or more selective processes, ideally in a co-ordinated way. While this view has some cost in terms of conceptual simplicity, it can help make sense of a large set of phenomena. -/- This article surveys several of the major issues in our understanding of attention and how it relates to perception. It focuses on vision, since many—if not all—considerations are similar for all sensory modalities, and the level of understanding achieved in this domain is currently the most advanced. (shrink)

During the last quarter of a century, a number of philosophers have become attracted to the idea that necessity can be analyzed in terms of a hyperintensional notion of essence. One challenge for proponents of this view is to give a plausible explanation of our modal knowledge. The goal of this paper is to develop a strategy for meeting this challenge. My approach rests on an account of modality that I developed in previous work, and which analyzes modal (...) properties in terms of the notion of a metaphysical law. I discuss what information about the metaphysical laws is required for modal knowledge. Moreover, I describe two ways in which we might be able to acquire this information. The first way employs inference to the best explanation. The metaphysical laws, including the essential truths, play a crucial role in causal and grounding explanations and we can gain knowledge of these laws by abductive inferences from facts of which we have perceptual or a priori knowledge. The second way of gaining information about the metaphysical laws rests on knowledge that is partly constitutive of competence with the concepts that are needed to express the relevant information. Finally, I consider how knowledge of the metaphysical laws can be used to establish modal claims, paying special attention to the much-discussed connection between conceiving and possibility. (shrink)

The first section of the chapter will address the philosophy of modality among Spinoza’s medieval Jewish predecessors, and, primarily, in Hasdai Crescas (1340-1410/11), a bold and original, anti-Aristotelian philosopher. This section should both complement the discussion of modality in medieval Christian and Islamic philosophy in the previous chapters of this volume and provide some lesser-known historical background to Spinoza’s own engagement with modal philosophy. Following a section on Spinoza’s definitions of his main modal concepts and his understanding of (...) contingency, I will turn, in the third section, to discuss the extent of Spinoza’s commitment to necessitarianism. The recent debate about whether Spinoza was a strict necessitarian has resulted in quite a few insights about Spinoza’s modal philosophy, but it has also detracted attention from some basic questions about Spinoza’s modal philosophy, and in the fourth and last section of the chapter, I will attempt to chart the foundational questions that still have been barely explored. The primary aim of this chapter it to provide a survey and outline of the chief elements of Spinoza’s modal philosophy. Still, beyond the mere overview of Spinoza’s arguments (and some major scholarly debates), I will also advance two original theses. First, I will show that Spinoza makes a distinction between two notions of contingency, and that once this important distinction is observed, Spinoza’s various assertions about contingency turn out to be consistent. Secondly, I will discuss the text (E2a1) which is commonly taken to be the strongest and most stubborn proof against the reading of Spinoza as strict necessitarianism; I will show that the basic meaning of this text has been widely misunderstood, and that E2a1 is perfectly compatible with strict necessitarianism. (shrink)

Buddhism originated and developed in an Indian cultural context that featured many first-person practices for producing and exploring states of consciousness through the systematic training of attention. In contrast, the dominant methods of investigating the mind in Western cognitive science have emphasized third-person observation of the brain and behavior. In this chapter, we explore how these two different projects might prove mutually beneficial. We lay the groundwork for a cross-cultural cognitive science by using one traditional Buddhist model of (...) the mind – that of the five aggregates – as a lens for examining contemporary cognitive science conceptions of consciousness. (shrink)

Over the last fifteen years, linguists and philosophers of language have reexamined the canonical, Kratzerian semantics for modal expressions, with special attention paid to their epistemic and deontic uses. This article is an overview of the literature on deontic modal expressions. Section 1 provides an overview of the canonical semantics, noting some of its main advantages. Section 2 introduces a set of desiderata that have achieved the status of fixed points in the debates about whether the canonical (...) semantics is correct. These include the observations that deontic modal sentences have both deliberative and evaluative readings and both information-sensitive and -insensitive readings. Adequate resolutions of certain puzzles in deontic logic and resolving the Frege-Geach problem for Expressivism have also achieved this status. The third section provides an opinionated overview of some of the main extant rivals to the canonical semantics, including Cariani, Kaufmann, and Kaufmann’s (2013) complex contextualism , Yalcin’s (2012) Expressivism, Willer’s (2014) dynamic semantics, and Starr’s (2016) dynamic Expressivism. Section 4 provides an assessment of each of the views discussed in terms of the desiderata introduced in section 2. Section 5 is an overview of remaining issues that require more attention in the literature. (shrink)

This is an excerpt from a report on the workshop on mind and attention in Indian philosophy at Harvard University, on September 21st and 22nd, 2013, written by Kevin Connolly, Jennifer Corns, Nilanjan Das, Zachary Irving, and Lu Teng, and available at http://networksensoryresearch.utoronto.ca/Events_%26_Discussion.html This portion of the report explores the question: Are there cross-cultural philosophical themes?

This report highlights and explores five questions that arose from the workshop on mind and attention in Indian philosophy at Harvard University, September 21st to 22nd, 2013: 1. How does the understanding of attention in Indian philosophy bear on contemporary western debates? 2. How can we train our attention, and what are the benefits of doing so? 3. Can meditation give us moral knowledge? 4. What can Indian philosophy tell us about how we perceive the world? 5. (...) Are there cross-cultural philosophical themes? (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent debate over the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic modals has focused on intuitions about cross-contextual truth-value assessments. In this paper, we advocate a different approach to evaluating theories of epistemic modals. Our strategy focuses on judgments of the incompatibility of two different epistemic possibility claims, or two different truth value assessments of a single epistemic possibility claim. We subject the predictions of existing theories to empirical scrutiny, and argue that existing contextualist and relativist theories are unable to account (...) for the full pattern of observed judgments. As a way of illustrating the theoretical upshot of these results, we conclude by developing a novel theory of epistemic modals that is able to predict the results. (shrink)

Nominalizations of modal predicates have received little, if any, attention in the semantic or philosophical literature. This paper will argue that nominalizations of modal predicates require recognizing a novel ontological category of modal objects and it will outline a new semantics of modals based on modal objects.

'Mindfulness' is arguably the most important concept to have transplanted from Buddhist thought to contemporary Western psychology. However, whilst mindfulness was already an ambiguous term in the original context, specified more by a set of practices than by a clear definition, its cross-cultural transmission has blurred its content even further. In this paper, I assess the recent criticism of the widespread definition of mindfulness as non-elaborative, purely receptive 'bare attention'. According to the critics of bare attention, what (...) can be characterized as purely receptive is the automatic turning of attention toward an object. But should mindfulness be a quality of consciousness that is to be established and developed by the reflexive practice of meditation, it must be something more than this automatic turning of attention. This paper shows how the definition of mindfulness as bare attention can be defended by explicating it in terms of the phenomenological model of attention. (shrink)

Embodied cognitive theories predict that linguistic conceptual representations are grounded and continually represented in real world, sensorimotor experiences. However, there is an on-going debate on whether this also holds for abstract concepts. Grammar is the archetype of abstract knowledge, and therefore constitutes a test case against embodied theories of language representation. Former studies have largely focussed on lexical-level embodied representations. In the present study we take the grounding-by-modality idea a step further by using reaction time (RT) data from the linguistic (...) processing of nominal classifiers in Chinese. We take advantage of an independent body of research, which shows that attention in hand space is biased. Specifically, objects near the hand consistently yield shorter RTs as a function of readiness for action on graspable objects within reaching space, and the same biased attention inhibits attentional disengagement. We predicted that this attention bias would equally apply to the graspable object classifier but not to the big object classifier. Chinese speakers (N = 22) judged grammatical congruency of classifier-noun combinations in two conditions: graspable object classifier and big object classifier. We found that RTs for the graspable object classifier were significantly faster in congruent combinations, and significantly slower in incongruent combinations, than the big object classifier. There was no main effect on grammatical violations, but rather an interaction effect of classifier type. Thus, we demonstrate here grammatical category- specific effects pertaining to the semantic content and by extension the visual and tactile modality of acquisition underlying the acquisition of these categories. We conclude that abstract grammatical categories are subjected to the same mechanisms as general cognitive and neurophysiological processes and may therefore be grounded. (shrink)

Charles Peirce's diagrammatic logic — the Existential Graphs — is presented as a tool for illuminating how we know necessity, in answer to Benacerraf's famous challenge that most ‘semantics for mathematics’ do not ‘fit an acceptable epistemology’. It is suggested that necessary reasoning is in essence a recognition that a certain structure has the particular structure that it has. This means that, contra Hume and his contemporary heirs, necessity is observable. One just needs to pay attention, not merely to (...) individual things but to how those things are related in larger structures, certain aspects of which relations force certain other aspects to be a certain way. (shrink)

I argue that modal epistemology should pay more attention to questions about the structure and function of modal thought. We can treat these questions from synchronic and diachronic angles. From a synchronic perspective, I consider whether a general argument for the epistemic support of modal though can be made on the basis of modal thoughs’s indispensability for what Enoch and Schechter (2008) call rationally required epistemic projects. After formulating the argument, I defend it from various (...) objections. I also examine the possibility of considering the indispensability of modal thought in terms of its components. Finally, I argue that we also need to approach these issues from a diachronic perspective, and I sketch how to approach this task. (shrink)

In a world of ever growing specialization, the idea of a unity of science is commonly discarded, but cooperative work involving cross-disciplinary points of view is encouraged. The aim of this paper is to show with some textual support that Charles S. Peirce not only identified this paradoxical situation a century ago, but he also mapped out some paths for reaching a successful solution. A particular attention is paid to Peirce's classification of the sciences and to his conception (...) of science as a collective and cooperative activity of all those whose lives are animated by the desire to discover the truth. -/- . (shrink)

There are two types of theories regarding many worlds: one is modal, while the other is temporal. The former regards reality as consisting of many possible worlds, while the latter holds that reality consists of many momentary worlds, which are usually called moments. I compare these two theories, paying close attention to the concept of transworld identity and compare trans-possible world identity with trans-momentary world identity (or transmoment identity). I characterize time from the point of many-worlds view, believing (...) this to be one of the best ways of grasping the reality of time. First, I show that there is reason to adopt the many-worlds view because transworld identity is meaningful for both of them, while it is not for space. Second, I argue that transmoment identity is different from transpossible world identity concerning reality. The former is a realistic relation, while the latter is not. Thus, I find that the reality of time is in the relation of transmoment identity. Such a view, I contend, has merit on the basis that it recognizes the reality of time in a sense that is not true of space. (shrink)

The story of incarceration of some members of the society is a topical and current issue that requires urgent attention. The culture of some societies of the world, and in particular the Yala communities of Cross River State of Nigeria, seems to ignore the essence of human equality and dignity. The aim of this article is the documentation of stratification of the Caste practices among the three Yala communities in Cross River State. From this article, it is (...) obvious that for any society to be peaceful, progressive and to realize its full developmental capabilities and potentials, all forms of discriminatory practices must not exist. Nevertheless, where this is an acceptable socio-cultural practice of a people and in the light of present day realities of religious pluralism and globalization, the time has come that the Yala people should not preserve that aspect of culture which hinders its progress. (shrink)

The ways in which the Aristotelian sciences are related to each other has been discussed in the literature, with some focus on the subalternate sciences. While it is acknowledged that Aristotle, and Plato as well, was concerned as well with how the arts were related to one another, less attention has been paid to Aristotle's views on relationships among the arts. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle's account of the subalternate sciences helps shed light on how Aristotle saw (...) the art of rhetoric relating to dialectic and politics. Initial motivation for comparing rhetoric with the subalternate sciences is Aristotle's use of the language of boundary transgression, germane to the Posterior Analytics, when discussing rhetoric’s boundaries, as well as the language of "over" and "under" found in APo. First, I discuss three passages in Rhetoric Book I and argue that Garver's (1988) account cannot be correct. Second, I look to the subalternate sciences, especially focusing on optics and the distinction between "unqualified" optics and mathematical optics. Third, I discuss rhetoric's dependence on both dialectic and politics. (shrink)

In this review essay, K. Peter Kuchinke uses three recent publications to consider the question of how to educate young people for work and career. Historically, this question has been central to vocational education, and it is receiving renewed attention in the context of concerns over the ability of schools to provide adequate preparation for occupational roles and career success in a rapidly changing economic landscape. Philip Gonon's Quest for Modern Vocational Education provides a historical account of Georg Kerschensteiner's (...) vision of the role of work as a central subject matter for all students. His approach served as the foundation for the dual system in present‐day Germany. Nancy Hoffman's Schooling in the Workplace contrasts the U.S. system of career preparation for non‐college‐bound students with that of five other OECD nations where workforce and academic preparation are more strongly connected to learning in the workplace. Christopher Winch's Dimensions of Expertise, finally, offers a conceptual analysis of central ideas of vocational knowledge and underscores the important role of learning in the context of practice. The three texts offer historical, comparative, and philosophical analyses of the complex task of preparation for work and challenge education scholars to move the subject matter into the center of contemporary educational theory. (shrink)

The movement of people from one country to another in search of greener pasture, peaceful settlement and so on, has become very rampant in the world today. These same reasons have triggered internal migrations as well. Lives have been lost in the bid to circumvent immigration laws of countries by immigrants. The current spate of wars, political crises, natural disasters and hunger has led to increase in illegal migration in the world. Nigeria is not left out. We hear of boundary (...) clashes and insurgencies, which have resulted in illegal emigration to other countries basically in search of job opportunities and better living conditions. Nigerians have severally been repatriated from foreign lands. Recently, over five thousand Nigerians were repatriated from Libya. Nigeria has also played host to migrants from neighbouring countries, and has experienced internal migration in several parts of the country. The frequently asked questions are: “what role can religion play in curbing the spate of illegal migration and refugee crises in Cross River State, Nigeria? The research discovered that religion can be a veritable partner to government in resolving this ever-increasing menace that has become an embarrassment to the state and nation. This work adopted qualitative or explorative research method. It employed the content analysis approach in examining available printed materials on the subject matter. In view of its peculiarity, oral interviews were conducted on specific groups and individuals. This work proposes the involvement of religious organisations in preaching and teaching on the dangers of illegal migration, the provision of vocational training for our teaming youth population to reduce emigration, and the provision of counselling and resettlement programmes for the repatriated and those in refugee camps across the country. The work also encourages the government to evolve modalities to curb the spate of violence and bloodshed that has fuelled refugee crises in Cross River State and Nigeria in general. (shrink)

Resolving to finish reading a novel, staying true to your punk style, or dedicating your life to an artistic project: these are examples of aesthetic commitments. I develop an account of the nature of such commitments, and I argue that they are significant insofar as they help us manage the temporally extended nature of our aesthetic agency and our relationships with aesthetic objects. At the same time, focusing on aesthetic commitments can give us a better grasp on the nature of (...) aesthetic normativity; this is because, in making aesthetic commitments, we are capable of giving aesthetic concerns the weight of obligation. I argue that appealing to aesthetic commitments allows us to account for the existence of aesthetic obligations as well as their grounding. I conclude by arguing that, although the aesthetic domain is a domain of play and freedom of choice, there is nevertheless an important place in it for both aesthetic commitments and the aesthetic obligations they generate. (shrink)

The following is not a successful skeptical scenario: you think you know you have hands, but maybe you don't! Why is that a failure, when it's far more likely than, say, the evil genius hypothesis? That's the question.<br><br>This is an earlier draft.