In this paper, I discuss Eugene Gendlin’s contribution to radically temporal discourse , situating it in relation to Husserl and Heidegger’s analyses of time, and contrasting it with a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that draw inspiration from, but fall short in their interpretation of the phenomenological work of Husserl and Heidegger. Gendlin reveals the shortcomings of these approaches with regard to the understanding of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, intersubjectivity, attention , (...) reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior. Gendlin traces the weaknesses of these approaches in the above areas to the way these perspectives construe time. (shrink)

Eugene Gendlin claims that he wants "to think with more than conceptual structures, forms, distinctions, with more than cut and presented things" (WCS 29).1 He wants situations in their concreteness to be something we can think with, not just analyze conceptually. He wants to show that "conceptual patterns are doubtful and always exceeded, but the excess seems unable to think itself. It seems to become patterns when we try to think it. This has been the problem of twentieth (...) century philosophy" (WCS 29). As a result he has "long been concerned with what is not formed although always in some form" (TAD 1). In this essay I would like to explore some of the issues surrounding the relation of the unformed and the formed. Gendlin says that "we get beyond the forms by thinking precisely in them" (TAD 1). The two emphasized words have to be considered separately as well as together. In many essays Gendlin's main concern is with the "precisely": can something that is not fully formed and definite still direct us as we carry forward language and action? My discussion begins with that issue; I suggest ways that Gendlin's proposal connects with and differs from some current ideas in epistemology and the philosophy of language. Then my discussion moves to the "in": what sense can we make of the formed being unformed? Finally I suggest that Gendlin's program runs into some difficulties in this connection. (shrink)

Welcome to my philosophy page. My central research focus is the elucidation of what I call the radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below I endeavor to articulate the varying ways that radical temporality manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive project and George Kelly’s personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and further defining the nature (...) of this orientation , I have delineated the important ways in which it differs from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism. Among the authors whose work I have submitted to critique from the radically temporal perspective are: Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Thomas Fuchs (enactive, embodied ('4EA') cognition), John Protevi (Deleuzian biopolitics), Kym Maclaren ( critical phenomenology) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience). -/- I argue that these authors’ accounts of intersubjectivity and empathy, and their integration of affect, motivation, intentionality and will, remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal philosophies of Heidegger et al put into question. -/- . (shrink)

The complexity, subtlety, interlinking, and scale of many problems faced individually and collectively in today's rapidly changing world requires an epistemology--a way of thinking about our knowing--capable of facilitating new kinds of responses that avoid recapitulation of old ways of thinking and living. Epistemology, which implicitly provides the basis for engagement with the world via the fundamental act of distinction, must therefore be included as a central facet of any practical attempts at self/world transformation. We need to change how we (...) think, not just what we think. The new epistemology needs to be of a higher order than the source of the problems we face. -/- This theoretical, transdisciplinary dissertation argues that such a new epistemology needs to be recursive and process-oriented. This means that the thoughts about thinking that it produces must explicitly follow the patterns of thinking by which those thoughts are generated. The new epistemology is therefore also phenomenological, requiring the development of a reflexivity in thinking that recursively links across two levels of order--between content and process. The result is an epistemology that is of (and for) the whole human being. It is an enacted (will-imbued) and aesthetic (feeling-permeated) epistemology (thinking-penetrated) that is sensitive to and integrative of material, soul, and spiritual aspects of ourselves and our world. I call this kind of epistemology aesthetic, because its primary characteristic is found in the phenomenological, mutually fructifying and transformative marriage between the capacity for thinking and the capacity for feeling. -/- Its foundations are brought forward through the confluence of multiple domains: cybernetic epistemology, the esoteric epistemology of anthroposophy (the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner), and the philosophy of the implicit as developed by Eugene Gendlin. -/- The practice of aesthetic epistemology opens new phenomenal domains of experience, shedding light on relations between ontology and epistemology, mind and body, logic and thinking, as well as on the formation (and transformation) of identity, the immanence of thinking in world-processes, the existence of different types of logic, and the nature of beings, of objects, and most importantly of thinking itself and its relationship to spirit. (shrink)

Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper (...) I show how Heidegger, Derrida and Gendlin help us think from this more intimate process to transform current views of metaphor, the unconscious, and the relation between affect and cognition. (shrink)

My central research focus over the past 30 years has been the articulation of what I call a radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below, written between 2001 and 2022, I treat the varying ways in which radically temporal thinking manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida's deconstructive project and George Kelly's personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of (...) clarifying and further defining the nature of this family of orientations, I have delineated the important ways in which it differs from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, social constructionism, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism. Among the authors whose work I have submitted to critique from the radically temporal perspective are: Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Michel Bitbol, Thomas Fuchs (enactive, embodied ('4EA') cognition), Gilles Deleuze (Deleuzian biopolitics), Ken Gergen and John Shotter ( social constructionism), Kym Maclaren ( critical phenomenology) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience). I argue that these authors' accounts of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, attention , reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior, and the relation between the body, language and culture remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal philosophies of Heidegger et al put into question. (shrink)

While many scholars join in the call for an experiential shift in thinking and living, it is not always clear how it could be done. Recent environmental philosophy has illuminated the significance of re-animating human–environment relations on an experiential level for endeavouring a new (or renewed) ethical, experiential, and, indeed, existential stance of the human as part of the environed embodiment. In relation to this call, I explore embodied critical thinking (ECT) as a tool for recognising, revitalising, and reflecting embodied, (...) enactive, and embedded thinking that comes from a felt sense. Thus, this chapter employs some of the TAE (Thinking at the Edge) steps for ECT research as a practical approach to facilitating and embracing a new way of thinking that is crucial for reconnecting humans with their lived environments, but also for emancipating research practices to enable research that goes out from such a renewed connectivity. In particular, the chapter traces the application of Eugene Gendlin’s move of instancing to showcase the use of embodied knowing and felt sense in environmental contexts. Thus, it showcases how, in fundamental ways that speak directly to and from our embodied embeddedness, ECT has an emancipatory impact in ways that resonate with lived experiences. (shrink)

The author’s practice-led research explores “the act of living.” In order to advance this idea, the author has acquired skills in investigation and expressed her thinking through a descriptive and explanatory visual language. The author’s learning journey, while not unique, has not been an ordinary one. Initial academic failure to achieve in the school education system contributes to choosing a life working on the land and harbouring the belief that she is unable to learn academically. Still, the author has gained (...) a rich base of physical knowledge and experience through the traditional oral route including learning interpersonal communication through body language and vocal tonality. The author has used this intuitive knowledge to develop an arts practice where she explores the bio-cultural links between people and the lands they inhabit, creating works that aim to extend knowing through emphasising the experience and atmosphere of landscape. At this time, when our lives have become increasingly encoded and intellectually based, the author shares a belief with American philosopher Eugene Gendlin (b. 1926) that the “felt sense” can be developed in order to enable us to engage more fully with the world around us. The author explores this idea in her visual art but also realizes the need to express it in writing, both in order to reach a wider public and because of the possibilities offered by the written word to make public which is private and held deep within. (shrink)

This book delves into the embodied ground of thinking, illuminating the transition from theorising about the embodied mind to actively practising embodied thinking in research, teaching, and learning. The authors speak from immersing themselves in novel methods that engage the felt, experiential dimensions of cognition in inquiry. -/- The turn to embodiment has sparked the development of new methodologies within phenomenology, pragmatism, and cognitive science. Drawing on Eugene Gendlin’s philosophical work on felt understanding, and Francesco Varela’s enactivist approach, (...) contributors explore innovative embodied thinking methods such as Focusing, Thinking at the Edge, micro-phenomenology, and mindfulness practices. They demonstrate the practical applications of these methods in research, teaching, and learning, highlighting their liberating and empowering potential for researchers and students. In an age marked by information overload and societal polarisation, methods of embodied thinking provide an innovative edge to critique, complementing more traditional approaches to critical thinking with listening skills and reflexive care. -/- This book shows how heeding the essential, yet often overlooked, embodied grounds of critical and creative thinking can deepen and strengthen each of research, teaching, and learning. It will interest philosophers of education and educators in higher education in particular, as well as researchers and postgraduate students from philosophy, and the cognitive and social sciences, who are curious about how embodied thinking can enrich research, teaching, and learning. (shrink)

Common to different versions of social constructionism is the definition of discourse as taking place between persons. Experiences which take place in the absence of immediate others, such as thinking to oneself or reading a text, are treated as secondary phenomena, as introjected versions of social utterance-gestures. This article asserts that representative constructionist articulations of between-person relationality rest on abstractions masking a more primary locus of sociality. I offer an alternative formulation of the social as the embodiment of sensate experience, (...) borrowing from Merleau-Ponty's and Gendlin's accounts. Sensate experience is already radically relational before and beyond any notion of sociality as between-person voices-gestures, generating more intimate and mobile possibilities of interpersonal understanding than is offered via discursive readings of terms like social, language and embodiment. Note; Although this paper pertains to social constructionist positions, my central criticism of these approaches applies as well to Deleuze's bio-political notion of sociality. While constructionists restrict their focus to inter-personal communication, Deleuze broadens the notion of language to include the living and material world, which includes the body. This places the site of otherness and sociality within intentionality itself via its entanglement with affect. Nevertheless, Deleuze's treatment of affective-intentional dynamics, rather than dismantling social constructionism's between-person abstractions, manages to import them into bodily process. (shrink)

This essay investigates a particular form of “affection” that has been neglected by the phenomenological tradition. This particular phenomenon is often referred to as the vibe, vibrations, or some variation thereof. This essay rearticulates “the vibe” as bodily emanation: human beings emanate feeling that is experienced by and through our bodies. My study of bodily emanation begins with Edmund Husserl’s notion of affectivity and then moves to Eugene T. Gendlin’s notion of the sentient body. This discussion enables my (...) own argument: Our bodies do not simply respond to the world in a sentient fashion, but also solicit sentience from one another. This solicitation of sentience is the basis of bodily emanation. I explicate bodily emanation through two realms of experience: the pre-conscious and the conscious. The first realm designates the manner in which our bodies summon emanation from one another in a continuous, multilateral fashion. Such preconscious solicitation precedes our conscious control and recognition. The second realm designates our ability to willfully project and direct particular vibes for particular purposes. This latter realm is what most people think of when they refer to “the vibe.” In general, this essay provides a detailed account of a particular phenomenon that most of us experience, but do not fully consider or attend to. (shrink)

Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue are artefacts of (...) fallacious reasoning. The approach is capable, and in need of, empirical development. Proceeding from a case-study on Austin’s paradigmatic treatment of the problem of perception, this paper identifies the key empirical assumptions informing the approach, assesses them in the light of empirical findings about default inferences, contextualisation failures, and belief fragmentation, and explores how these findings can be deployed to address the problem of perception. This facilitates a novel resolution of the problem of perception. Proceeding from this paradigm, the paper proposes ‘experimental critical OLP’ as a new research program in experimental philosophy that avoids apparent non-sequiturs of OLP, extends and transforms experimental philosophy’s ‘sources program’, and provides a promising new strategy for deploying empirical findings about how people ordinarily talk and think about phenomena, to address longstanding philosophical problems. (shrink)

How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by (...) empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities. (shrink)

An important strand of current experimental philosophy promotes a new kind of methodological naturalism. This chapter argues that this new ‘metaphilosophical naturalism’ is fundamentally consistent with key tenets of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy, and can provide empirical foundations for therapeutic conceptions of philosophy. Metaphilosophical naturalism invites us to contribute to the resolution of philosophical problems about X by turning to scientific findings about the way we think about X – in general or when doing philosophy. This new naturalism encourages us to use (...) resources from psychology that can empirically vindicate precisely some of the most controversial aspects of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy: They can establish the need, and provide key tools, for something worth calling ‘therapy’, in philosophy. As ‘pudding proof’ this chapter shows how methods and findings from psycholinguistics motivate and facilitate a therapeutic approach to a characteristically philosophical problem: ‘the problem of perception’. (shrink)

In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences have us routinely infer what else is also true of the cases described. We consider how such routine inferences from polysemous words can generate zombie intuitions: intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias. Extending ‘evidentiary’ experimental philosophy, this paper examines whether the ‘zombie argument’ against materialism (...) is built on zombie intuitions. We examine the hypothesis that contextually defeated stereotypical inferences from the noun ‘zombie’ influence intuitions about ‘philosophical zombies’. We document framing effects (‘zombie’ vs ‘duplicate’) predicted by the hypothesis. Findings undermine intuitions about the conceivability of ‘philosophical zombies’ and address the philosophical ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Findings support a deflationary response: The impression that principled obstacles prevent scientific explanation of how physical processes give rise to conscious experience is generated by philosophical arguments that rely on epistemically deficient intuitions. (shrink)

Taking the formal analogies between black holes and classical thermodynamics seriously seems to first require that classical thermodynamics applies in relativistic regimes. Yet, by scrutinizing how classical temperature is extended into special relativity, I argue that the concept falls apart. I examine four consilient procedures for establishing the classical temperature: the Carnot process, the thermometer, kinetic theory, and black-body radiation. I argue that their relativistic counterparts demonstrate no such consilience in defining the relativistic temperature. As such, classical temperature doesn’t appear (...) to survive a relativistic extension. I suggest two interpretations for this situation: eliminativism akin to simultaneity, or pluralism akin to rotation. (shrink)

Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for positive states of affairs to be located in the future not the past, and for negative states of affairs to be located in the past not the future. Three explanations for future-bias have been posited: the temporal metaphysics explanation, the practical irrelevance explanation, and the three mechanisms explanation. Understanding what explains future-bias is important not only for better understanding the phenomenon itself, but also because many philosophers think that which explanation is (...) the correct one has implications for our evaluation of the normative status of future-bias. In this paper we focus on the connection between future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry. The latter refers to the fact that people tend to assign more value to a state of affairs when it is located in the future, as opposed to being equidistant in the past. All three candidate explanations offered for future-bias proceed by explaining the temporal value asymmetry, and then supposing that future-bias is simply a manifestation of that asymmetry. Recently, however, it has been argued that the conditions under which people display the temporal value asymmetry and future-bias are different, and that this is reason to doubt that the latter is a manifestation of the former. In this paper we empirically test one response to this argument against the manifestation thesis—the simulation response—according to which once we control for the degree to which people can simulate the object of their preference, we find that people display future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry in the same conditions. We find no evidence in favour of the simulation response. Moreover, our results support some previous research that suggests that the temporal value asymmetry is less robust than previously thought, and this in itself casts doubt on the idea that future bias is just a manifestation of this asymmetry. (shrink)

Preparing general relativity for quantization in the Hamiltonian approach leads to the `problem of time,' rendering the world fundamentally timeless. One proposed solution is the `thermal time hypothesis,' which defines time in terms of states representing systems in thermal equilibrium. On this view, time is supposed to emerge thermodynamically even in a fundamentally timeless context. Here, I develop the worry that the thermal time hypothesis requires dynamics -- and hence time -- to get off the ground, thereby running into worries (...) of circularity. (shrink)

Traditional approaches to conflict are oriented towards establishing consensus, either in the form of a resolution of the conflict or in the form of an ‘agree-to-disagree’ standstill between the stakeholders. In this paper, we criticize these traditional approaches, each for specific reasons, and we propose and develop the agonistic approach to conflict. Based on Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democratic theory, the agonistic approach to conflict is more welcoming of dissensus, replacing discussion stoppers with discussion starters and replacing standstills with contestation. We (...) illustrate such replacements and develop this approach, we analyse technological conflicts in a concrete R&D setting: the global hydrogen economy. From this context, we focus on the conflict between the proponents of blue hydrogen and those of green hydrogen. We conclude by highlighting the advantage of the agonistic approach but also drawing attention to its own specific risk, namely, antagonism. (shrink)

Stereotypes shape inferences in philosophical thought, political discourse, and everyday life. These inferences are routinely made when thinkers engage in language comprehension or production: We make them whenever we hear, read, or formulate stories, reports, philosophical case-descriptions, or premises of arguments – on virtually any topic. These inferences are largely automatic: largely unconscious, non-intentional, and effortless. Accordingly, they shape our thought in ways we can properly understand only by complementing traditional forms of philosophical analysis with experimental methods from psycholinguistics. This (...) paper seeks, first, to bring out the wider philosophical relevance of stereotypical inference, well beyond familiar topics like gender and race. Second, we wish to provide philosophers with a toolkit to experimentally study these ubiquitous inferences and what intuitions they may generate. This paper explains what stereotypes are, and why they matter to current and traditional concerns in philosophy – experimental, analytic, and applied. It then assembles a psycholinguistic toolkit and demonstrates through two studies how potentially questionnaire-based measures can be combined with process measures to garner evidence for specific stereotypical inferences and study when they ‘go through’ and influence our thinking. (shrink)

Empirical evidence shows that people have multiple time-biases. One is near-bias, another is future-bias, and a third is present-bias. Philosophers are concerned with the normative status of these time-biases. They have argued that, at least in part, the normative status of these biases depends on the extent to which they tend to promote, or frustrate, wellbeing, where “wellbeing” is taken to be of fundamental value. Since near-bias is thought to be associated with impulsivity, lack of self-control, and poor long-term health (...) and financial outcomes, it has often been supposed that it is associated with lower wellbeing. On those grounds, philosophers have argued that near-bias is rationally impermissible. By contrast, philosophical views about the normative status of future-bias have been mixed, with some arguing that future-bias is impermissible because, they think, it frustrates wellbeing, and others arguing that it is at least permissible (and perhaps obligatory) because it is the product of mechanisms whose functioning can be expected to promote wellbeing. However, to date there are no studies that have directly probed how time-biases correlate with wellbeing. Since it's not a settled matter which psychological mechanisms underlie time-biases, it is not uncontroversial which things serve as proxies for these preferences. We directly empirically investigate the connection between time-biases and measures of wellbeing, to see which of these biases is associated with promoting, or frustrating wellbeing. Contrary to expectation, we found no evidence that near-bias or present-bias are associated with frustrating wellbeing on any of the constructs we measured. On the other hand, and contrary to what some philosophers have supposed, we found that future-bias was associated with higher measures of wellbeing on several measures. We consider the implications of these findings for the evaluation of the normative status of these time biases. (shrink)

When a technology is seen as the right solution to a recognized problem, the development of alternative technologies comes under threat. To secure much-needed resources, proponents of alternative technologies must, in these conditions, restart societal discussion on the status quo, a process at once technological and discursive known as ‘path creation’. In this article, we investigate discussion-restarting strategies employed by supporters of emerging technologies in the field of solar fuels, particularly the advocates of a technology referred to as ‘artificial photosynthesis’. (...) For illustrative purposes we explore four such strategies: revisiting weak spots, resizing the problem, redefining the game, and renegotiating labels. We conclude with a methodological reflection on the empirical study of discursive strategies in a socio-technical system. We further suggest a more systematic application of discourse-analytical and argumentation-theoretical insights that can complement current scholarship on path dependence and path creation. (shrink)

In Everettian quantum mechanics, justifications for the Born rule appeal to self-locating uncertainty or decision theory. Such justifications have focused exclusively on a pure-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a wave function. Recent works in quantum foundations suggest that it is viable to consider a mixed-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a (mixed-state) density matrix. Here, we develop the conceptual foundations for decoherence and branching in a mixed-state multiverse, and extend the standard Everettian justifications for the Born rule to this setting. This (...) extended framework provides a unification of 'classical' and 'quantum' probabilities, and additional theoretical benefits, for the Everettian picture. (shrink)

This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers cannot help making (...) stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception, suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy. (shrink)

"Our literature is replete with complaints about the chaotic state of the systematics of psychoses and every psychiatrist knows that it is impossible to come to any common understanding on the basis of the old diagnostic labels. ... Thus, not even the masters of science can make themselves understood on the basis of the old concepts and with many patients the number of diagnoses made equals the number of institutions they have been too. ... Errors are the greatest obstacles to (...) the progress of science; to correct such errors is of more practical value than to achieve new knowledge. We have here eliminated chaos of terms behind which useful concepts of disease were mistakenly sought; we have eliminated a veritable forest of boundary posts, not one of which indicated any natural line of demarcation. ... By the term „dementia praecox“ or „schizophrenia“ we designate a group of psychoses whose course is at times chronic, at times marked by intermittent attacks, and which can stop or retrograde at any stage, but does not permit a full restitutio ad integrum. The disease is characterized by a specific type of alteration of thinking, feeling, and relation to the external world which appears nowhere else in this particular fashion." Eugen Bleuler. Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias. Translated by Joseph Zinkin. International Universities Press, New York, 1950. (shrink)

Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from several areas of (...) experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Intuitive judgments elicited by verbal case-descriptions play key roles in philosophical problem-setting and argument. Experimental philosophy's ‘sources project’ seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess our warrant for accepting them. This article develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception, trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension, and employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to elicit the relevant (...) stereotypical associations of perception- and appearance-verbs. We obtain a debunking explanation that resolves the philosophical paradox. (shrink)

I argue that influential recent discussions have whitewashed blame, characterizing it in ways that deemphasize or ignore its morally problematic features. I distinguish “definitional,” “creeping,” and “emphasis” whitewash, and argue that they play a central role in overall endorsements of blame by T.M. Scanlon, George Sher, and Miranda Fricker. In particular, these endorsements treat blame as appropriate by definition (Scanlon), or as little more than a wish (Sher), and infer from blame's having one useful function that it is a good (...) practice overall (Fricker). I use an analogy with revenge to illustrate the mechanisms of whitewashing, including broadening a concept to include available alternatives to it and inference from one feature of a practice to an overall conclusion about that practice. Several features of blame make it particularly prone to whitewashing, including blamers' personal or emotional stake in blaming and widespread disagreement about the nature of blame. I argue that a non‐whitewashing treatment of blame must pay closer attention both to blame's harms, and to comparisons between blame and alternative, non‐blaming reactions. (shrink)

Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate inferences from descriptions of unusual (stereotype-divergent) cases. We conduct an experiment that combines plausibility ratings (...) with pupillometry to document this “salience bias.” We find that under certain conditions, competent speakers automatically make stereotypical inferences they know to be inappropriate. (shrink)

Dematerialization can be taken variously as meaning less materials used in objects technically, a less materialistic outlook on consumption, or as the virtualization of communication and interaction. These ideas are reviewed here. Considering material culture and technoculture in this light raises questions about contemporary materialism and technology more generally as well, where smaller is not necessarily simpler, and where smaller may not even be less.

We blame faulty brakes for a car crash, or rain for our bad mood. This “merely causal” blame is usually seen as uninteresting. I argue that it is crucial for understanding the interpersonal blame with which we target ourselves and each other. The two are often difficult to distinguish, in a way that plagues philosophical discussions of blame. And interpersonal blame is distinctive, I argue, partly in its causal focus: its attention to a person as cause. I argue that this (...) causal focus helps explain several central characteristics of interpersonal blame: its tendency to exaggerate a person’s causal role, its weakening through attention to personal history or thoughts about determinism, its characteristic ‘force’ or ‘sting’, and our sense that blame is often harmful or unfair. I conclude by drawing out one implication of blame's causal focus: in a certain range of cases, blame is partly under our voluntary control. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom holds that the von Neumann entropy corresponds to thermodynamic entropy, but Hemmo and Shenker (2006) have recently argued against this view by attacking von Neumann's (1955) argument. I argue that Hemmo and Shenker's arguments fail due to several misunderstandings: about statistical-mechanical and thermodynamic domains of applicability, about the nature of mixed states, and about the role of approximations in physics. As a result, their arguments fail in all cases: in the single-particle case, the finite particles case, and the (...) infinite particles case. (shrink)

: Two common ways of explaining akrasia will be presented, one which focuses on strength of desire and the other which focuses on action issuing from practical judgment. Though each is intuitive in a certain way, they both fail as explanations of the most interesting cases of akrasia. Spinoza 's own thoughts on bondage and the affects follow, from which a Spinozist explanation of akrasia is constructed. This account is based in Spinoza 's mechanistic psychology of cognitive affects. Because Spinoza (...) 's account explains action asissuing from modes of mind that are both cognitive and affective, it captures the intuitions that motivate the two traditional views while avoiding the pitfalls that result from their one‐sided approaches. This project will allow us a fuller understanding of Spinozist moral psychology. In addition to this historical value, the Spinozist theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of certain hard cases of akrasia while avoiding the problems be set by other theories. For this reason, the Spinozist account could also be seen as a useful contribution to our philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of akrasia. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy’s much-discussed ‘restrictionist’ program seeks to delineate the extent to which philosophers may legitimately rely on intuitions about possible cases. The present paper shows that this program can be (i) put to the service of diagnostic problem-resolution (in the wake of J.L. Austin) and (ii) pursued by constructing and experimentally testing psycholinguistic explanations of intuitions which expose their lack of evidentiary value: The paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of paradoxical intuitions that are prompted by verbal case-descriptions, and presents two (...) experiments that support the explanation. This debunking explanation helps resolve philosophical paradoxes about perception (known as ‘arguments from hallucination’). (shrink)

This paper empirically raises and examines the question of ‘conceptual control’: To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason properly, only if competent language users are able to abide (...) by the relevant explanations, in language comprehension and verbal reasoning. This paper examines to what extent we have such ‘conceptual control’ in reasoning with new senses. The paper draws on psycholinguistic findings about polysemy processing to render this question empirically tractable and builds on recent findings from experimental philosophy to address it. The paper identifies a philosophically important gap in thinkers’ control over the key process of stereotypical enrichment and discusses how conceptual engineers can use empirical methods to work around this gap in conceptual control. The paper thus empirically demonstrates the urgency of the question of conceptual control and explains how experimental philosophy can empirically address the question, to render conceptual engineering feasible as an ameliorative enterprise. (shrink)

This piece continues ideas developed in my essay, Mind Matters, through responding to the critique of that essay by Peter K. Manning. Manning cannot conceive that human conduct involves full-bodied semiosis rather than disembodied conceptualism, and that the study of human signification requires a full-bodied understanding. The ancient Greek root phren, basis for the concept of phronesis, is rooted in the heart-lungs-solar plexus basis of bodily awareness, and provides a metaphor for a discussion of bio-developmental, biosemiotic capacities as crucial for (...) human culture. Manning’s use of Wittgenstein is contrasted with the outlook of Charles Peirce. The intense attunement to and reverence for animals and plants in hunter-gatherer peoples is more than some conceptual collective representations system or interaction order or psychological belief system, explainable by Durkheim or Goffman, or Jung’s universal structure of the “collective unconscious,” or by neural net theory. It exemplifies how those peoples are in real learning relationships to the instinctive intelligence of their habitats, deep learning expressed not only in trial-and-error experience but also in the sense of wonder, communicated in ritual life. Mind is found literally in those transactions, not in isolate brains or disembodied conceptualism. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility (...) ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work in psychology, I argue that there are not one but several distinct virtues pertaining to willpower or strength of will: (1) the disposition to exercise willpower; (2) a distinctively volitional kind of modesty, or moderation in exposing oneself to volitional strain; and (3) a distinctively volitional kind of confidence, or proper inattention to the possibility of volitional failure. A multiple-virtue conception of willpower, I argue, provides a useful framework for cultivating a good relationship to one’s own (...) volitional limitations; resists an unhealthy emphasis on ‘powering through’ volitional obstacles; and avoids controversial empirical assumptions without giving up on making progress in ethical thought about willpower. I answer objections that the latter two virtues are incompatible, and that they add little of value to hope or belief in success. I then argue that combining these virtues requires a kind of flexible attention which, while difficult, is both psychologically possible and desirable. (shrink)

The article deals with currents and tides. We look at the history of their observation in antiquity as well as alternative theories, designed to explain their nature. Major theories accessed are those by Aristotle, Posidonius and Seneca. Special attention is given to ancient explanation of the phenomenon of the periodical change of the stream in Euripus’ channel. Throughout we refl ect on an analogy between natural phenomena and the processes occurring in living organisms, common to our philosophers of nature, as (...) well as the peculiarities of their interpretation of the theory of mutual transformation of the elements. Besides, it is important to note the place of the method of analogy in their observations and theoretical constructions. (shrink)

Notes on and excerpted quotations from Eugene Halton’s theory of the self (and mind) as continuous with and involved in its objective surroundings as extensions of the self. These notes provide evidence for Halton’s multiple works as the earlier basis for what Russell Belk later called "the extended self" in 1988, for which he got credit while Halton’s original ideas were marginalized or excluded. In addition, Halton also developed some of these ideas as "critical animism," (see text) a predecessor (...) to what is now termed, "the new animism." First example: "We create environments that are extensions of our selves; that serve to tell us who we are, and act as role models for what we can become." Eugene Halton, quoted in Joan Kron, Home Psych, 1983. (shrink)

The second article, in which the author suggests an analysis of other three authors' state of nature models and tries to define the role of the models in their respective law concepts. The analysis demonstrates that all three models share same basic idea, which is the concept of an independent reasonable individual; this very idea is what these different models are based upon. The concept of an individual itself does not have a substantiation.

Some conceptions of the role of philosophers in climate change focus mainly on theoretical progress in philosophy, or on philosophers as individual citizens. Against these views, I defend a skill view: philosophers should use our characteristic skills as philosophers to combat climate change by integrating it into our teaching, research, service, and community engagement. A focus on theoretical progress, citizenship, expertise, virtue, ability, social role, or power, rather than on skill, can allow for some of these contributions. But the skill (...) view, I argue, uniquely captures the breadth of philosophers’ role in climate change; promises to make us more effective in practice; and offers a compelling way to overcome our own lingering climate denial by integrating climate change into all aspects of philosophical activity. (shrink)

The conditions of hunting and gathering through which one line of primates evolved into humans form the basis of what I term the wild self, a self marked by developmental needs of prolonged human neoteny and by deep attunement to the profusion of communicative signs of instinctive intelligence in which relatively “unmatured” hominids found themselves immersed. The passionate attunement to, and inquiry into, earth-drama, in tracking, hunting, foraging, rhythming, singing, and other arts/sciences, provided the trail to becoming human, and provide (...) external grammatical structures that became the basis of human language and animate mind. I outline my new philosophy of history as a progress in precision, counteracted by a regressive contraction of mind. The progress associated with history since the beginning of agriculturally-based civilizations can be considered as a regressive contraction from animate mind of our hunter-gatherer evolutionary past, to anthropocentric mind, and finally to the ghost in the machine world-view of mechanico-centric mind. Contemporary consumption culture represents an inversion of the original conditions of the human self, and indeed, targets aspects of developmental neoteny to condition conformity to its rational-mechanical system imperatives. (shrink)

Charles Peirce claimed that logically "every true universal, every continuum, is a living and conscious being." Such a claim is precisely what hunter-gatherers believe: a world-view depicted as animism. Suppose animism represents a sophisticated world-view, ineradicably embodied in our physical bodies, and that Peirce's philosophy points toward a new kind of civilization, inclusive of what I term animate mind. We are wired to marvel in nature, and this reverencing attunement does not require a concept of God. Marveling in nature proves (...) to be not only a motive source of human evolution, but key to continued development. (shrink)

My belief that Socrates was wise, and your belief that Socrates was mortal can be said to have a common focus, insofar as both these thoughts are about Socrates. In Peter Geach’s terminology, the objects of our beliefs bear the feature of intentional identity, because our beliefs share the same putative target. But what if it turned out that Socrates never existed? Can a pair of thoughts share a common focus if the object both thoughts are about, does not actually, (...) really exist? Object-centric accounts of intentionality which explain the aboutness or directedness of thought in terms of the intentional object the thought in question is about, contend that thoughts which share a common focus do so in virtue of both thoughts simply being about the same intentional object. However, Alexander Sandgren contends that such theories face difficulties in explaining a puzzle of intentional identity put forward by Walter Edelberg, in which a pair of sentences seem to differ in truth value but are purportedly logically equivalent on the object-centric theory. If this is right, then it seems that any account which explains intentionality with reference to an intentional object is threatened by this result, whether this object be abstract, merely possible, Meinongian, or otherwise. In this paper, I argue that Edelberg’s Puzzle is analogous to Frege’s Puzzle and the same tools conventionally used to solve Frege’s Puzzle can be used to solve Edelberg’s Puzzle. I then propose a new object-centric solution to Edelberg’s Puzzle which takes into account modes of presentation and which is able to accommodate all the relevant linguistic data. (shrink)

Philosophers are often credited with particularly well-developed conceptual skills. The ‘expertise objection’ to experimental philosophy builds on this assumption to challenge inferences from findings about laypeople to conclusions about philosophers. We draw on psycholinguistics to develop and assess this objection. We examine whether philosophers are less or differently susceptible than laypersons to cognitive biases that affect how people understand verbal case descriptions and judge the cases described. We examine two possible sources of difference: Philosophers could be better at deploying concepts, (...) and this could make them less susceptible to comprehension biases (‘linguistic expertise objection’). Alternatively, exposure to different patterns of linguistic usage could render philosophers vulnerable to a fundamental comprehension bias, the linguistic salience bias, at different points (‘linguistic usage objection’). Together, these objections mount a novel ‘master argument’ against experimental philosophy. To develop and empirically assess this argument, we employ corpus analysis and distributional semantic analysis and elicit plausibility ratings from academic philosophers and psychology undergraduates. Our findings suggest philosophers are better at deploying concepts than laypeople but are susceptible to the linguistic salience bias to a similar extent and at similar points. We identify methodological consequences for experimental philosophy and for philosophical thought experiments. (shrink)