Hume’s understanding of sympathy in section 2.1.11 of the Treatise—that it is a mental mechanism by means of which one sentient being can come to share the psychological states of another—has a particularly interesting implication. What the sympathizer receives, according to this definition, is the passing psychological “affection” that the object of his sympathy was experiencing at the moment of observation. Thus the psychological connection produced by Humean sympathy is not between the sympathizer and the “other” as a “whole person” (...) existing through time, but between the sympathizer and the other’s current mental state, detached from his or her diachronic psychological life. Some commentators profess themselves dissatisfied with the impersonality of this “limited sympathy”. John Bricke, for example, argues that the Humean sympathizer sympathizes with “atomistically rendered desires of some individual who is, thus far, of no further concern,” while Philip Mercer writes more bluntly that Hume’s definition omits the “practical concern for the other” that is the essence of sympathy’s contribution to moral psychology. (shrink)

It is now common to distinguish Metaphysical from Epistemological Disjunctivism. It is equally common to suggest that it is at least not obvious that the latter requires a commitment to the former: at the very least, a suitable bridge principle will need to be identified which takes one from the latter to the former. This paper identifies a plausible-looking bridge principle that takes one from the version of Epistemological Disjunctivism defended by John McDowell and Duncan Pritchard, which I label (...) Reflective Epistemological Disjunctivism, or (RED), to Metaphysical Disjunctivism. Moreover, it identifies a modification the proponent of (RED) could, and should, make to the Internalist component of their theory, and argues that the commitment to Metaphysical Disjunctivism remains, even if such a modification is made. The upshot is that the commitment to Metaphysical Disjunctivism on the part of (RED) is shown to be particularly robust. (shrink)

This chapter argues that scientific and philosophical progress in our understanding of the living world requires that we abandon a metaphysics of things in favour of one centred on processes. We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We show how taking a processual stance in the philosophy of biology enables us to ground existing critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and mechanicism, all of which have traditionally been associated with (...) substance ontology. We illustrate the consequences of embracing an ontology of processes in biology by considering some of its implications for physiology, genetics, evolution, and medicine. And we attempt to locate the subsequent chapters of the book in relation to the position we defend. (shrink)

The notion of Simulative Reasoning in the study of propositional attitudes within Artificial Intelligence (AI) is strongly related to the Simulation Theory of mental ascription in Philosophy. Roughly speaking, when an AI system engages in Simulative Reasoning about a target agent, it reasons with that agent’s beliefs as temporary hypotheses of its own, thereby coming to conclusions about what the agent might conclude or might have concluded. The contrast is with non-simulative meta-reasoning, where the AI system reasons within a detailed (...) theory about the agent’s (conjectured) reasoning acts. The motive within AI for preferring Simulative Reasoning is that it is more convenient and efficient, because of a simplification of the representations and reasoning processes. The chapter discusses this advantage in detail. It also sketches the use of Simulative Reasoning in an AI natural language processing system, ATT-Meta, that is currently being implemented. This system is directed at the understanding of propositional attitude reports. In ATT-Meta, Simulative Reasoning is yoked to a somewhat independent set of ideas about how attitude reports should be treated. Central here are the claims that (a) speakers often employ commonsense (and largely metaphorical) models of mind in describing agents’ attitudes, (b) the listener accordingly needs often to reason within the terms of such models, rather than on the basis of any objectively justifiable characterization of the mind, and (c) the commonsense models filter the suggestions that Simulative Reasoning comes up with concerning target agents’ reasoning conclusions. There is a yet tighter connection between the commonsense models and the Simulative Reasoning. It turns out that Simulative Reasoning can be rationally reconstructed in terms of a more general type of reasoning about the possibly-counterfactual “world” that the target agent believes in, together with an assumption that that agent has a faithful representation of the world. In the ATT-Meta approach, the reasoner adopts that assumption when it views the target agent through a particular commonsense model (called IDEAS-AS-MODELS). (shrink)

[Edited from Conclusion section:] We have looked at various challenging issues to do with getting connectionism to cope with high-level cognitive activities such a reasoning and natural language understanding. The issues are to do with various facets of generalization that are not commonly noted. We have been concerned in particular with the special forms these issues take in the arena of propositional attitude processing. The main problems we have looked at are: (1) The need to construct explicit representations of generalizations, (...) not just generalize correctly to individual cases; (2) The need to be able to match two or more complex short-term information structures, to enable rapid generalization from recent examples rather than from long-term memories; (3) The need to represent and reason with anomalous combinations of concepts; (4) The need to perform embedded reasoning. This presents special problems for systems using non-concatenative representations (as in mainstream connectionist approaches). We also touched on vague quantification in attitude report complements. Neither this topic nor that of analogies between short-term structures (point 2) has been adequately addressed in the symbolic framework, let alone in connectionism. -/- The opportunities and problems covered are put forward as things worth being optimistic about or pessimistic about, respectively. They are not put forward as decisive arguments for or against connectionism. The hope is that this chapter contributes to a greater understanding of the connectionist/symbolist gap by presenting some unusual issues and by throwing new light on some well known ones. (shrink)

This paper is a commentary on the target article by Lokendra Shastri & Venkat Ajjanagadde [S&A]: “From simple associations to systematic reasoning: A connectionist representation of rules, variables and dynamic bindings using temporal synchrony” in same issue of the journal, pp.417–451. -/- It puts S&A's temporal-synchrony binding method in a broader context, comments on notions of pointing and other ways of associating information - in both computers and connectionist systems - and mentions types of reasoning that are a challenge to (...) S&A's system (amongst many other connectionist systems, recognizing that S&A's is much more capable as regards reasoning than most other contemporary systems). (shrink)

This paper is a commentary on the target article by Dana H. Ballard, “Cortical connections and parallel processing: Structure and function”, in the same issue of the journal, pp. 67–120. -/- I raise some issues about the connectionist or neural-network implementation of information and information processing. Issues include the sharing of information by different parts of a connectionist/neural network, the copying of complex information from one place to another in a network, the possibility of connection weights not being synaptic weights, (...) and the possibility of fast communication within single neurons as complex systems in their own right. (shrink)

The paper is a commentary on the target article by Christine A. Skarda & Walter J. Freeman, “How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world”, in the same issue of the journal, pp.161–195. -/- I confine my comments largely to some philosophical claims that Skarda & Freeman make and to the relationship of their model to connectionism. Some of the comments hinge on what symbols are and how they might sit in neural systems.

This paper is a commentary on the target article by Michael Arbib, “Levels of modeling of mechanisms of visually guided behavior”, in the same issue of the journal, pp. 407–465. -/- I focus on the importance of the inclusion of an ability of a system to entertain, at a given time, multiple instantiations of a given schema (situation template, frame, script, action plan, etc.), and complications introduced into neural/connectionist network systems by such inclusion.

How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for (...) its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being “meta-dynamism” (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time. (shrink)

I present considerations surrounding pre-reflective self-consciousness, arising in work I am conducting on a new physicalist, process-based account of [phenomenal] consciousness. The account is called the meta-causal account because it identifies consciousness with a certain type of arrangement of meta-causation. Meta-causation is causation where a cause or effect is itself an instance of causation. The proposed type of arrangement involves a sort of time-spanning, internal reflexivity of the overall meta-causation. I argue that, as a result of the account, any conscious (...) process has PRSC. Hence, PRSC does not need to be taken as a stipulation or argued for on purely phenomenological grounds or as a necessary support for reflective consciousness. I also show how it is natural to the account that PRSC is not an additional, peripheral, sort of consciousness, but is intrinsic to all consciousness, thereby fitting claims about self-intimation and co-constitution by various authors, and also being amenable to an adverbial account. As part of this, consciousness of an external object is just the form that current self-consciousness takes, the meta-causal constitution of it being inextricably modulated by the causal relationship with the object. The article also discusses how MCA helps explore issues of for-me-ness, transparency of perceptual consciousness, and possible immediacy and non-relationality of self-consciousness. (shrink)

The book is thought-provoking and informative, wide in scope while also being technically detailed, and still relevant to modem AI [at least as of 1998, the time of writing this review, but probably also at the time of posting this entry here, 2023] even though it was published in 1989. This relevance lies mainly in the book’s advocacy of distributed computation at multiple levels of description, its combining of neural networks and other techniques, its emphasis on the interplay between action (...) and perception, and its particular approach to natural language processing. The criticisms I have occasionally made above are relatively minor, and one of the major shortcomings of schema theory at least at the time of the book’s publication -- namely the lack of a detailed, preferably neural, mechanism for schema instantiation -- is one of which Arbib is well aware. The book is well produced, for the most part clearly written, and has useful summaries at the beginning of each chapter. Both general readers and AI researchers (mainly but not exclusively those working on robotics, vision and neural networks) could benefit from reading the book. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Drawing inspiration from Fred Dretske, L. S. Carrier, John A. Barker, and Robert Nozick, we develop a tracking analysis of knowing according to which a true belief constitutes knowledge if and only if it is based on reasons that are sensitive to the fact that makes it true, that is, reasons that wouldn’t obtain if the belief weren’t true. We show that our sensitivity analysis handles numerous Gettier-type cases and lottery problems, blocks pathways leading to skepticism, and validates (...) the epistemic closure thesis that correct inferences from known premises yield knowledge of the conclusions. We discuss the plausible views of Ted Warfield and Branden Fitelson regarding cases of knowledge acquired via inference from false premises, and we show how our sensitivity analysis can account for such cases. We present arguments designed to discredit putative counterexamples to sensitivity analyses recently proffered by Tristan Haze, John Williams and Neil Sinhababu, which involve true statements made by untrustworthy informants and strange clocks that sometimes display the correct time while running backwards. Finally, we show that in virtue of employing the paradox-free subjunctive conditionals codified by Relevance Logic theorists instead of the paradox-laden subjunctive conditionals codified by Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis. (shrink)

Closure is the epistemological thesis that if S knows that P and knows that P implies Q, then if S infers that Q, S knows that Q. Fred Dretske acknowledges that closure is plausible but contends that it should be rejected because it conflicts with the plausible thesis: Conclusive reasons (CR): S knows that P only if S believes P on the basis of conclusive reasons, i.e., reasons S wouldn‘t have if it weren‘t the case that P. Dretske develops an (...) analysis of knowing that centers on CR, and argues that the requirement undermines skepticism by implying the falsity of closure. We develop a Dretske-style analysis of knowing that incorporates CR, and we argue that this analysis not only accords with closure, but also implies it. In addition, we argue that the analysis accounts for the prima facie plausibility of closure-invoking skeptical arguments, and nonetheless implies that they are fallacious. If our arguments turn out to be sound, the acceptability of Dretske‘s analysis of knowing will be significantly enhanced by the fact that, despite implying closure, it undermines closure-based skepticism. (shrink)

The science of the mind, and of consciousness in particular, needs carefully to consider people's common-sense views of the mind, not just what the mind really is. Such views are themselves an aspect of the nature of (conscious) mind, and therefore part of the object of study for a science of mind. Also, since the common-sense views allow broadly successful social interaction, it is reasonable to look to the common-sense views for some rough guidance as to the real nature of (...) the mind. On the other hand, to the extent that common-sense views are inaccurate, and perhaps even in gross conflict with the true nature of the mind, one interesting scientific question is: why do we hold such views, given our access to our own minds? Why should introspection be limited in a way that allows inaccurate views to hold sway? Now, common-sense views of the mind are revealed in natural language discourse that describes mental states, and such descriptions are largely metaphorical. The metaphors are used within thinking about the mind as well as in language. Therefore the study of metaphor is central to the study of mind. The present article is a preliminary study of the importance of metaphor in the scientific study of consciousness. It concentrates on analysing the nature of a range of important metaphors of mind, briefly discussing the extent to which they can be used to describe or qualify states of consciousness, and pointing to important questions about the nature of consciousness that the study of the metaphors raises. The article further conjectures that the reason people use metaphors in describing themselves is often not (just) that they have intellectually worked out some structural analogy --- e.g., between interactions of physical objects in physical space and interactions of ideas in the mind --- but rather that they {\it feel} their own minds to be as described by the metaphor --- e.g., they feel that the ideas in their minds are interacting physical entities. This matter of how a mind feels to itself is an aspect of the central issue of consciousness, namely its phenomenal quality. -/- (NB: The archived file is a preprint. However, it is substantially the same as the published version.). (shrink)

The representation of propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.) and the analysis of natural-language, propositional-attitude reports presents difficult problems for cognitive science and artificial intelligence. In particular, various representational approaches to attitudes involve the incorrect “imputation,” to cognitive agents, of the use of artificial theory-laden notions. Interesting cases of this problem are shown to occur in several approaches to attitudes. The imputation problem is shown to arise from the way that representational approaches explicate properties and relationships, and in particular from the (...) way they explicate propositional attitudes themselves. Another factor contributing to imputation is the compositional nature of typical semantic approaches to propositional-attitude reports. Some strategies for avoiding undesirable imputation are examined. One of the main conclusions is that the importance of imputations that arise in a representation scheme depends strongly on the use to which the scheme is put -- on whether, for instance, the scheme is used as part of a formal, objective account of natural language, or is used rather as a representational tool within an agent. (shrink)

We consider the varieties and directions of influence that the source and target domains involved in a conceptual metaphor can have on each other during the course of understanding metaphorical utterances based on the metaphor. Previous studies have been restricted both as to direction of influence and as to type of influence. They have been largely confined to the “forward” (source to target) direction of influence, and they have concentrated on the transfer of features or propositions and (to some extent) (...) the highlighting of aspects of a domain. By contrast, this article stresses the importance both of other varieties of influence (e.g., transfer of queries and uncertainty effects) and of “reverse” influence (target to source). We seek to curb the natural tendency to think that, because metaphor involves an overall move from source to target, therefore all inter-domain influences in the course of understanding go in that direction. The bulk of the article explores the theoretical issues involved. These issues have arisen out of a reasoning-based approach to metaphor, seeking to make best use of information from metaphorical utterance, context, source and target domains, and known metaphorical mappings, by applying a complex overall reasoning process. The article briefly explains the thorough implementation of reverse influence in a computer program for metaphorical reasoning called ATT-Meta, although the theoretical considerations are relevant to all disciplines concerned with metaphor. We make some suggestions for further computational and psychological research on metaphor. (shrink)

This article arises indirectly out of the development of a particular approach, called ATT-Meta, to the understanding of some types of metaphorical utterance. However, the specifics of the approach are not the focus of the present article, which concentrates on some general issues that have informed, or arisen from, the development of the approach. The article connects those issues to the questions of metaphorical meaning and truth. -/- A large part of the exploration of metaphor in fields such as Cognitive (...) Linguistics and natural language Pragmatics takes metaphor to rest on complex mappings between a target subject matter and a source subject matter (see, e.g., Lakoff 1993, 2008). This is one main way in which some aspects of the source, generally including some structural aspects, can have parallels in the target. It is typical for much, and perhaps the whole, of the meaning of a metaphorical expression to be explained by means of these parallels. We will talk about “parallelism” rather than “isomorphism,” or even “analogy,” because “isomorphism” implies a strict one-to-one correspondence between items in the source scenario and items in the target scenario, and analogy theorists often hold that analogy rests on isomorphism. We wish not to prejudge the question of whether looser, messier forms of parallelism are sometimes needed. Also, we will talk about parallels rather than mappings, because our discussion will embrace the question of parallelism that may be discernible, albeit implicitly, in accounts of metaphor that are not presented as being based on mappings. Three main cases of such accounts are Relevance Theory (RT: e.g., Sperber & Wilson 2008, Wilson & Carston 2006), the categorization-based or "class-inclusion“ approach (Glucksberg 2008), and Ritchie’s (2006) CLST account (Context-Limited Simulation Theory). -/- One main issue we will address is that of substantial non-parallelism that can exist between source and target subject-matters in metaphor: more precisely, the issue that there may be source aspects that are exploited by the utterance and have a deep effect on metaphorical interpretation but that do not themselves have a natural parallel in the target subject-matter (although we will point out that artificial parallels can generally be created). This is part of a broader point that the content of metaphorical discourse should often be seen as being derived in a rather holistic way from several metaphorical bits of the discourse, which conspire to describe some source-domain scenario, rather than being derived by putting together metaphorical meanings of each metaphorical bit (even if each bit could in principle be assigned its own separate metaphorical meaning). As a result, we suggest that it is misguided to think of the propositions making up the content (or, if you like, "meaning“) about the target scenario that is being described is a matter of metaphorical meaning of specific grammatical units such as sentences, clauses or other constituents that a traditional semantic theory would assign propositional meaning to. Rather, grammatical units (that are to be taken metaphorically) have meanings in source-domain terms; content in target-domain terms is derived from the source-domain scenario depicted by those units and fleshed out through inference; and the target-domain content is only (in general) fuzzily relatable to particular grammatical units. This view is on a spectrum at whose extreme point we could place Davidson’s (1984) view that metaphors only have literal (i.e., source-domain) meanings, with other effects on the understander not being a matter of propositional content. However, on our view it is proper to take metaphorical discourse as having non-literal meaning, couched as a collection of propositions, among other things possibly; it is just that the propositions are not to be thought of (in general) as meaning of specific sentences, clauses or other grammatical units rather than of a possibly only fuzzily delineated piece of discourse. -/- A second main concern of the article is the question of how much, and what types of, inference are involved in the derivation of metaphorical meaning. While our own ATT-Meta approach accords with, amongst other accounts, Relevance Theory (RT) as to the centrality of inference in metaphor interpretation, we disagree with RT on its claim that metaphor interpretation is a matter of (a relatively high degree of) concept "broadening“ and (often) "narrowing“. We argue that almost all inference can in fact be theoretically re-described as concept broadening and/or narrowing, and what is left over should be included in the metaphor interpretation process anyway. Thus, the RT claim about broadening and narrowing really just says that inference, of unrestricted type, is involved in metaphor understanding, in accord with what ATT-Meta claims. (shrink)

Although Paul Churchland and Jerry Fodor both subscribe to the so-called theory-theory– the theory that folk psychology (FP) is an empirical theory of behavior – they disagree strongly about FP’s fate. Churchland contends that FP is a fundamentally flawed view analogous to folk biology, and he argues that recent advances in computational neuroscience and connectionist AI point toward development of a scientifically respectable replacement theory that will give rise to a new common-sense psychology. Fodor, however, wagers that FP will be (...) largely preserved and vindicated by scientific investigations of behavior. Recent findings by developmental psychologists, I argue, will push both Churchlandians and Fodorians toward the pessimistic view that FP is a misguided theory that will never be displaced, because it is, so to speak, built into our cognitive systems. I explore the possibility of preserving optimism by rejecting the theory-theory and adopting the simulation theory, a competing view developed by Robert Gordon, Alvin Goldman, and Jane Heal. According to simulationists, common-sense interpretation of behavior is accomplished by means of pretense-like operations that deploy the cognitive system’s own reasoning capabilities in a disengaged manner. Since on this view no theory-like set of principles would be needed, the simulation theory seems to enjoy a simplicity advantage over the theory-theory. Steven Stich and Shawn Nichols, however, contend that as the cognitive system would require special mechanisms for disengaged operation, the simplicity question cannot be resolved until suitable computational models are developed. I describe a set of models I have constructed to meet this need, and I discuss the contribution such models can make to determining FP’s fate. (shrink)

Reasoning about mental states and processes is important in various subareas of the legal domain. A trial lawyer might need to reason and the beliefs, reasoning and other mental states and processes of members of a jury; a police officer might need to reason about the conjectured beliefs and reasoning of perpetrators; a judge may need to consider a defendant's mental states and processes for the purposes of sentencing and so on. Further, the mental states in question may themselves be (...) about the mental states and processes of other people. Therefore, if AI systems are to assist with reasoning tasks in law, they may need to be able to reason about mental states and processes. Such reasoning is riddled with uncertainty, and this is true in particular in the legal domain. The article discusses how various different types of uncertainty arise, and shows how they greatly complicate the task of reasoning about mental states and processes. The article concentrates on the special case of states of belief and processes of reasoning, and sketches an implemented, prototype computer program (ATT-Meta) that copes with the various types of uncertainty in reasoning about beliefs and reasoning. In particular, the article outlines the system's facilities for handling conflict between different lines of argument, especially when these lie within the reasoning of different people. The system's approach is illustrated by application to a real-life mugging example. [NB: The date on the archived preprint avail via this Phil* page has an incorrect date, 2011, on it. The correct date is 2001.]. (shrink)

In a recent very interesting and important challenge to tracking theories of knowledge, Williams & Sinhababu claim to have devised a counter-example to tracking theories of knowledge of a sort that escapes the defense of those theories by Adams & Clarke. In this paper we will explain why this is not true. Tracking theories are not undermined by the example of the backward clock, as interesting as the case is.

The social welfare functional approach to social choice theory fails to distinguish a genuine change in individual well-beings from a merely representational change due to the use of different measurement scales. A generalization of the concept of a social welfare functional is introduced that explicitly takes account of the scales that are used to measure well-beings so as to distinguish between these two kinds of changes. This generalization of the standard theoretical framework results in a more satisfactory formulation of welfarism, (...) the doctrine that social alternatives are evaluated and socially ranked solely in terms of the well-beings of the relevant individuals. This scale-dependent form of welfarism is axiomatized using this framework. The implications of this approach for characterizing classes of social welfare orderings are also considered. (shrink)

The traditional use of conventional media by businesses for audience targeting has shifted with the rise of influencer marketing, notably on platforms like TikTok, posing challenges in content adaptation and technological adaptation. Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory examines factors shaping purchasing behavior, particularly relevant for young professionals. A quantitative correlational study focused on young professionals engaging with TikTok and influenced by Filipino TikTok creators, revealing education level as a key determinant of purchasing behavior. Extended TikTok engagement positively correlates with increased (...) purchasing likelihood. Filipino TikTok influencers significantly impact young professionals' purchasing decisions, emphasizing the need for tailored marketing strategies targeting this demographic. Recommendations were provided for effective influencer and digital marketing strategies targeting young professionals. (shrink)

In “Beat the (Backward) Clock,” we argued that John Williams and Neil Sinhababu’s Backward Clock Case fails to be a counterexample to Robert Nozick’s or Fred Dretske’s Theories of Knowledge. Williams’ reply to our paper, “There’s Nothing to Beat a Backward Clock: A Rejoinder to Adams, Barker and Clarke,” is a further attempt to defend their counterexample against a range of objections. In this paper, we argue that, despite the number and length of footnotes, Williams is still wrong.

ArgumentIn the United States, scientific knowledge is brought before the courts by way of testimony – the testimony of scientific experts. We argue that this expertise is best understoodfirstas related to the quality of the underlying scienceand thenin terms of who delivers it. Bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA), a contemporary forensic science, serves as the vaulting point for our exploration of objectivity as a metric for the quality of a science in judicial contexts. We argue that BPA fails to meet the (...) minimal standard set by Helen Longino’s social-procedural account of objectivity (1990, 2002). In light of some pressing issues for social-procedural accounts, we offer an infrastructural account of objectivity. This account offers what amounts to a friendly amendment to Longino’s account and adds to the ways in which we might analyze social-procedural objectivity. Finally, we address an issue that is pressing in the legal context: given that scientific knowledge is delivered by individuals, not communities, at least in U.S. courts, we (may) need a way to evaluate individual scientific and epistemic agents. We suggest a means for making this evaluation that is derived from our infrastructural account of objectivity. (shrink)

Joint attention is a social-cognitive phenomenon in which two or more agents direct their attention together towards the same object. Definitions range from this rather broad conception to more specific definitions which require that, in addition, attention be directed to the same aspect of that object and that agents need to be mutually aware of their jointly attending. Joint attention is an important coordination mechanism in joint action. The capacity for engaging in joint attention, in particular in the sense of (...) this narrower definition, is frequently taken to indicate the presence of theory of mind in the participating agents, and is also implicated in the development of theory of mind. However, the prominence of sensorimotor components in establishing and sustaining episodes of joint attention — e.g., eye and head movements, pointing and vocalizations — suggests that sensorimotor approaches to social interaction may be well-placed to account for important parts of joint attention without invoking theory-of-mind abilities, and may therefore provide a valuable alternative to approaches emphasizing theory of mind. In particular, sensorimotor accounts may explain aspects of joint attention through the dynamics and regularities in the sensorimotor processes that coordinate the activities of the agents. (shrink)

Here is a surprisingly neglected question in contemporary epistemology: what is it for an agent to believe that p in response to a normative reason for them to believe that p? On one style of answer, believing for the normative reason that q factors into believing that p in the light of the apparent reason that q, where one can be in that kind of state even if q is false, in conjunction with further independent conditions such as q’s being (...) a normative reason to believe that p. The primary objective of this paper is to demonstrate that that style of answer cannot be right, because we must conceive of believing for a normative reason as constitutively involving a kind of rationality-involving relation that can be instantiated at all only if there is a known fact on the scene, which the agent treats as a normative reason. A secondary objective, achieved along the way, is to demonstrate that in their Prime Time Errol Lord and Kurt Sylvan do not succeed in undermining the factoring picture in general, only a simple-minded version of it. (shrink)

We can contrast rationalising explanations of the form S φs because p with those of the form S φs because S believes that p. According the Common Kind View, the two sorts of explanation are the same. The Disjunctive View denies this. This paper sets out to elucidate the sense in which the Common Kind Theorist asserts, but the Disjunctivist denies, that the two explanations are the same. I suggest that, in the light of the distinction between kinds of explanation (...) and particular explanations, the relevant sameness thesis is ambiguous, thus giving us two distinct versions of the Common Kind View. I then argue that the only direct arguments for Disjunctivism available in the literature fail because they only succeed in undermining one version of the Common Kind View. I finish, however, by providing a fresh argument for the Disjunctive View which aims to undermine both versions of its competitor. (shrink)

With Spanish the third most widely spoken language in the world, one would expect more Spanish translations of important texts in American philosophy. Given the recent publication of a Spanish translation of The Public and Its Problems (1927), more people have access to John Dewey’s ideas about democracy than ever before. A broader readership might bring greater inclusivity to the existing debate over the significance of Dewey’s legacy for democratic theory. For the past few years, this debate has raged (...) almost exclusively between English-speaking scholars. Many have responded to the arguments of Richard Posner, the law professor and Circuit Court judge who delivered a scathing critique of Dewey’s legacy in his book Law, Pragmatism and Democracy (2003). Even if new readers of The Public and Its Problems fail to join the debate, they will at least be better equipped to evaluate Posner’s arguments with some appreciation for the object of his criticism. Hopefully they will come to acknowledge Dewey’s contribution as a vital thread in the tapestry of thought making up contemporary currents in democratic theory—currents that University of Toronto professor Frank Cunningham collectively labels “democratic pragmatism.” See his Theories of Democracy (Routledge, 2002). Ramon Del Castillo’s introduction to the translation captures the rich context of Dewey’s work on democratic theory. It places the book in the proper historical milieu, 1920s America at the time of the height and decline of American Progressivism. It also juxtaposes The Public and Its Problems against Lippmann’s two earlier works, Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925). (shrink)

The most common approach to the problem of requests for futile treatment – the hospital futility policy – rests on the assumption that demands for futile treatment are both intractable and irrational. But there is another approach to the futility problem, an approach that would be dialogic, piecemeal, and case-by-case. This is the only approach that attempts to deal with both the hospital’s problem and the patient’s or family’s problem that motivates the request/demand for futile treatments. As such, it holds (...) the promise of resolving the problem of demands for futile treatment in a way that does not generate anger and ill will at the hospital staff for what will inevitably strike patients and their families as a blatant assertion of the hospital’s power. (shrink)

Several philosophers believe that with phenomenal consciousness and neurobiological properties, there will always be some kind of epistemic gap between the two that will lead to a corresponding ontological gap. In order to address those who espouse this hard line position, I will first briefly examine certain aspects of the history of scientific explanation. I will put forth a positive thesis that there is what I call a progressivism to scientific explanations in certain fields, where kinds of explanations tend to (...) advance or progress, somewhat analogous to how overall scientific theories also significantly advance or progress. Given the progressivism of kinds of explanations, I provide a new contention that adherents to the hard line view are not justified in making their relevant claims. While progressivism and its use against hard line views may seem intuitively obvious to some readers, I offer its first articulation and attempt to illustrate the novel virtues it brings to the table of the phenomenal consciousness debate. (shrink)

Many philosophical theories of causation are egalitarian, rejecting a distinction between causes and mere causal conditions. We sought to determine the extent to which people's causal judgments discriminate, selecting as causes counternormal events—those that violate norms of some kind—while rejecting non-violators. We found significant selectivity of this sort. Moreover, priming that encouraged more egalitarian judgments had little effect on subjects. We also found that omissions are as likely as actions to be judged as causes, and that counternormative selectivity appears to (...) apply equally to actions and omissions. (shrink)

As he moves closer to half of his term as president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Roa Duterte has continually been in friction with the Catholic Church, specifically with certain members of its hierarchy. Mainly identifiable as the dividing line between Duterte’s administration and the Church is the issue on human rights particularly the extrajudicial killings (EJK) of suspected users and pushers of illegal drugs. This paper argues that Duterte’s attitude and positioning towards the Catholic Church neither strengthen nor advance the (...) Philippine state towards a greater degree of secularization. On the contrary, the Church has become more politically and publicly involved. Consequently, it has remained a key actor or interest group providing an alternative moral discourse to that of the government. (shrink)

Many philosophers have held that it is not possible to experience a spatial object, property, or relation except against the background of an intact awareness of a space that is somehow ‘absolute’. This paper challenges that claim, by analyzing in detail the case of a brain-damaged subject whose visual experiences seem to have violated this condition: spatial objects and properties were present in his visual experience, but space itself was not. I go on to suggest that phenomenological argumentation can give (...) us a kind of evidence about the nature of the mind even if this evidence is not absolutely incorrigible. (shrink)

The word 'reason' as used today is used ambiguous in its meaning. It may denote either of two mental faculties: a lower reason associated with discursive, linear thinking, and a higher reason associated with direct apprehension of first principles of mathematics and logic, and possibly also of moral and religious truths. These two faculties may be provisionally named Reason (higher reason) and rationality (lower reason). Common language and personal experience supply evidence of these being distinct faculties. So does classical philosophical (...) literature, the locus classicus being Plato's Divided Line analogy. -/- The effect of currently using a single word to denote both faculties not only produces confusion, but has had the effect of decreasing personal and cultural awareness of the higher faculty, Reason. Loss of a sense of Reason has arguably contributed to various psychological, social, moral, and spiritual problems of the modern age. This issue was also a central concern of 19th century Transcendentalists, who reacted to the radical empiricism of Locke. It would be advantageous to adopt consistent terms that make explicit a distinction between higher and lower reason. One possibility is to re-introduce the Greek philosophical terms nous and dianoia for the higher and lower reason, respectively. This discussion has certain parallels with the recent theories of McGilchrist (2009) concerning the increasingly left-brain hemisphere orientation of human culture. (shrink)

Yoga is a unique form of expert movement that promotes an increasingly subtle interpenetration of thought and movement. The mindful nature of its practice, even at expert levels, challenges the idea that thought and mind are inevitably disruptive to absorbed coping. Building on parallel phenomenological and ethnographic studies of skilful performance and embodied apprenticeship, we argue for the importance in yoga of mental access to embodied movement during skill execution by way of a case study of instruction and practice in (...) two related traditions, Iyengar and Anusara. Sharing a pose repertoire, they are based on distinctive philosophical systems with different teaching styles and metaphoric structures. To address relations between pedagogy and practice in embodied expertise, and to investigate the reciprocal influences of embodiment and thought, we explore in detail the linguistically mediated learning context where practitioners work with yoga teachers. Here, the mind/body problem comes to practical life. We demonstrate the effects of words on bodies, as knowledge is literally incorporated. We show why interpersonal influence on our movement capacities is sometimes needed to enhance expertise. We theorize and identify ?signature patterns of tension? among practitioners. These patterns have four sources: ghost gestures, innate differences in bodily form, functional fusing, and signature patterns of affective experience, modulation and expression. These patterns of tension produce ?silent zones?, cognitively impenetrable actions, functional fusing of a skilful, compensatory form, and signature patterns of pain and damage. We show how instruction can disrupt these silent zones, enhancing mental and physical flexibility. (shrink)

The most cursory examination of the history of artificial intelligence highlights numerous egregious claims of its researchers, especially in relation to a populist form of ‘strong’ computationalism which holds that any suitably programmed computer instantiates genuine conscious mental states purely in virtue of carrying out a specific series of computations. The argument presented herein is a simple development of that originally presented in Putnam’s (Representation & Reality, Bradford Books, Cambridge in 1988 ) monograph, “Representation & Reality”, which if correct, has (...) important implications for turing machine functionalism and the prospect of ‘conscious’ machines. In the paper, instead of seeking to develop Putnam’s claim that, “everything implements every finite state automata”, I will try to establish the weaker result that, “everything implements the specific machine Q on a particular input set ( x )”. Then, equating Q ( x ) to any putative AI program, I will show that conceding the ‘strong AI’ thesis for Q (crediting it with mental states and consciousness) opens the door to a vicious form of panpsychism whereby all open systems, (e.g. grass, rocks etc.), must instantiate conscious experience and hence that disembodied minds lurk everywhere. (shrink)

While there are numerous differences between the approaches taken by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James J. Gibson, the basic motivation of the two thinkers, as well as the internal logic of their respective views, is extraordinarily close. Both were guided throughout their lives by an attempt to overcome the dualism of subject and object, and both devoted considerable attention to their "Gestaltist" predecessors. There can be no doubt but that it is largely because of this common cause that the subsequent development (...) of their ideas is so similar. It is not my objective in what follows merely to demonstrate a similarity between two lines of thought. Instead, I will try to show that each approach gains considerably from attention to the other. There are numerous ways to begin such a project, each about as arbitrary as the next. For present purposes, I shall take as of central importance the question of the character of the perceived world, both in relation to the traditionally opposed mental and material "substances", and in relation to its identification and individuation of things vis a vis one another and vis a vis ourselves. This will implicate especially Gibson's "affordances" and Merleau-Ponty's thesis concerning the "materiality of meaning.". (shrink)

This paper discusses the history of the confusion and controversies over whether the definition of consequence presented in the 11-page 1936 Tarski consequence-definition paper is based on a monistic fixed-universe framework?like Begriffsschrift and Principia Mathematica. Monistic fixed-universe frameworks, common in pre-WWII logic, keep the range of the individual variables fixed as the class of all individuals. The contrary alternative is that the definition is predicated on a pluralistic multiple-universe framework?like the 1931 Gödel incompleteness paper. A pluralistic multiple-universe framework recognizes multiple (...) universes of discourse serving as different ranges of the individual variables in different interpretations?as in post-WWII model theory. In the early 1960s, many logicians?mistakenly, as we show?held the ?contrary alternative? that Tarski 1936 had already adopted a Gödel-type, pluralistic, multiple-universe framework. We explain that Tarski had not yet shifted out of the monistic, Frege?Russell, fixed-universe paradigm. We further argue that between his Principia-influenced pre-WWII Warsaw period and his model-theoretic post-WWII Berkeley period, Tarski's philosophy underwent many other radical changes. (shrink)

According to a standard interpretation of Aristotle, a material substance, like a dog, is a hylomorphic composite of matter and form, its “essential” parts. Is such a composite some thing in addition to its essential parts as united? The moderate reductionist says “no,” whereas the anti-reductionist says “yes.” In this paper, I will clarify and defend Durand of St.-Pourçain’s surprisingly influential version of moderate reductionism, according to which hylomorphic composites are nothing over and above their essential parts and the union (...) of those parts, where this union is explained by the presence of two modes: a mode of inherence on the side of form and a mode of substanding on the side of matter. (shrink)

One question about the role of the mental in the determination of practical reason concerns the pro-attitudes: can any set of beliefs, without the help of a desire, rationalize or make reasonable a desire, intention, attempt, or intentional action? After criticizing Michael Smith’s argument for a negative answer to this question, I present two arguments in favor of a positive answer. Another question about the role of the mental in the determination of practical reason concerns belief: what gives you a (...) reason to go to the store, the fact that you’re out of milk or the belief that you’re out of milk? The two questions about the mental are connected. I argue that if we give a positive answer to the first question and reject the Humean Theory of Motivation, we cannot accept the currently favored conception of normative reasons as determined by the facts. For the anti-Humean, normative reasons must be determined by the agent’s perspective. (shrink)

It is proposed that our memory is made up of individual, unconnected Records, to each of which is attached a Heading. Retrieval of a Record can only be accomplished by addressing the attached Heading, the contents of which cannot itself be retrieved. Each Heading is made up of a mixture of content in more or less literal form and context, the latter including specification of environment and of internal states (e.g. drug states and mood). This view of memory allows an (...) easy account of a number of natural memory phenomena as well as a variety of laboratory findings such as the differences between recall and recognition. The theory further proposes that Headed Records can neither be deleted nor modified. Data apparently against such a hypothesis can be accounted for in terms of the retrieval process. (shrink)

Remembering seems, to philosophers and scientists, one of the most mystifying of human activities. Yet natural language users have no problem understanding what is meant by ‘memory’. Memory is simply the ability to recall personally experienced events and certain kinds of information such as facts, names, or faces; or how to perform certain actions, like riding a bike or playing chess. It is on this basis that people sometimes make claims about themselves or others having a good or bad memory, (...) especially for things like names, numbers, or faces. Why then is memory such a mystery? Because, firstly, of its diversity: memory enables us to perform a plethora of different tasks, including the continuous interpretation of every moment of consciousness. Secondly, different forms of memory have different standards of accuracy, and often dramatically different criteria for success. (shrink)

Determined by Reasons: A Competence Account of Acting for a Normative Reason. By Mantel Susanne..).

Nanotechnology, as with many technologies before it, places a strain on existing legislation and poses a challenge to all administrative agencies tasked with regulating technology-based products. It is easy to see how statutory schemes become outdated, as our ability to understand and affect the world progresses. In this article, we address the regulatory problems that nanotechnology posses for the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) classification structure for ‘‘drugs’’ and ‘‘devices.’’ The last major modification to these terms was in 1976, with (...) the enactment of the Medical Device Amendments. There are serious practical differences for a classification as a drug or device in terms of time to market and research. Drugs are classified, primarily, as acting by ‘‘chemical action.’’ We lay out some legal, philosophic, and scientific tools that serve to provide a useful, as well as legally and scientifically faithful, distinction between drugs and devices for the purpose of regulatory classification. These issues we raise are worth the consideration of anyone who is interested in the regulation of nano-products or other novel technologies. (shrink)

It is uncontroversial that something goes wrong with the blaming practices of hypocrites. However, it is more difficult to pinpoint exactly what is objectionable about their blaming practices. I contend that, just as epistemologists have recently done with blame, we can constructively treat hypocrisy as admitting of an epistemic species. This paper has two objectives: first, to identify the epistemic fault in epistemically hypocritical blame, and second, to explain why epistemically hypocritical blamers lose their standing to epistemically blame. I tackle (...) the first problem by appealing to an epistemic norm of consistency. I address the second by arguing that the epistemically hypocritical blamer commits to an opting-out of the set of shared epistemic standards that importantly underlies our standing to epistemically blame. I argue further that being epistemically hypocritical undermines a blamer’s standing even to judge epistemically blameworthy. (shrink)

Chalmers and Hájek argue that on an epistemic reading of Ramsey’s test for the rational acceptability of conditionals, it is faulty. They claim that applying the test to each of a certain pair of conditionals requires one to think that one is omniscient or infallible, unless one forms irrational Moore-paradoxical beliefs. I show that this claim is false. The epistemic Ramsey test is indeed faulty. Applying it requires that one think of anyone as all-believing and if one is rational, to (...) think of anyone as infallible-if-rational. But this is not because of Moore-paradoxical beliefs. Rather it is because applying the test requires a certain supposition about conscious belief. It is important to understand the nature of this supposition. (shrink)