In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalizing” processes (Heyes, 2014). Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate (...) controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalizing processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g. arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze-following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalizing interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct. (shrink)

We apply spatialized game theory and multi-agent computational modeling as philosophical tools: (1) for assessing the primary social psychological hypothesis regarding prejudice reduction, and (2) for pursuing a deeper understanding of the basic mechanisms of prejudice reduction.

When the benefits of surgery do not outweigh the harms or where they do not clearly do so, surgical interventions become morally contested. Cutting to the Core examines a number of such surgeries, including infant male circumcision and cutting the genitals of female children, the separation of conjoined twins, surgical sex assignment of intersex children and the surgical re-assignment of transsexuals, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery.

Nuestro interés en el contenido mental no-conceptual es, principalmente, la articulación de una versión sustantiva (no-trivial) de esta clase de contenido en la experiencia perceptual. El debate acerca del contenido no-conceptual ha girado, en su mayor parte, alrededor de su existencia; y los argumentos que se han ofrecido en su favor abogan por una versión no sustantiva según la cual el contenido no-conceptual es aquel que no satisface ciertos requisitos conceptuales. Así, para desarrollar una versión sustantiva del contenido mental no-conceptual (...) hemos apelado a la versión de la experiencia perceptual de propiedades espaciales ofrecida por Evans (1982 cap. 6). A partir de esto desarrollamos un nuevo argumento a favor del contenido no-conceptual de la experiencia perceptual que lo vincula a la actividad característica de la experiencia perceptual. Por último, exponemos uno de los ataques de McDowell (1996) a la noción de contenido no-conceptual y presentamos nuestras réplicas a este ataque, mostrando su insuficiencia. Al mostrar que la crítica de McDowell no es exitosa, consideramos que podríamos tener una versión del contenido no-conceptual de la experiencia que es inmune a esta línea de argumentación. (shrink)

This paper is largely exegetical/interpretive. My goal is to demonstrate that some criticisms that have been leveled against the program Gareth Evans constructs in The Varieties of Reference (Evans 1980, henceforth VR) misfire because they are based on misunderstandings of Evans’ position. First I will be discussing three criticisms raised by Tyler Burge (Burge, 2010). The first has to do with Evans’ arguments to the effect that a causal connection between a belief and an object is (...) insufficient for that belief to be about that object. A key part of Evans’ argument is to carefully distinguish considerations relevant to the semantics of language from considerations relevant to the semantics (so to speak) of thought or belief (to make the subsequent discussion easier, I will henceforth use ‘thought’ as a blanket term for the relevant mental states, including belief). I will argue that Burge’s criticisms depend on largely not taking account of Evans’ distinctions. Second, Burge criticizes Evans’ account of ‘informational content’ taking it to be inconsistent. I will show that the inconsistency Burge finds depends entirely on a misreading of the doctrine. Finally, Burge takes Evans to task for a perceived over-intellectualization in a key aspect of his doctrine. Burge incorrectly reads Evans as requiring that the subject holding a belief be engaged in certain overly intellectual endeavors, when in fact Evans is only attributing these endeavors to theorists of such a subject. Next, I turn to two criticisms leveled by John Campbell (Campbell, 1999). I will argue that Campbell’s criticisms are based on misunderstandings – though they do hit at deeper elements of Evans’ doctrine. First, Campbell reads Evans’ account of demonstrative thought as requiring that the subject’s information link to an object allows her to directly locate that object in space. Campbell constructs a case in which one tomato (a) is, because of an angled mirror, incorrectly seen as being at a location that happens to be occupied by an identical tomato (b). Campbell claims that Evans’ doctrines require us to conclude that the subject cannot have a demonstrative thought about the seen tomato (a), though it seems intuitively that such a subject would be able to have a demonstrative thought about that tomato, despite its location is inaccurately seen. I show that Evans’ position in fact allows that the subject can have a demonstrative thought about the causal-source tomato in this case because his account does not require that the location of demonstratively identified objects be immediately accurately assessed. What is crucial is that the subject have the ability to accurately discover the location. Second, Campbell criticizes Evans’ notion of a fundamental level of thought. I show that this criticism hinges on view of the nature and role of the fundamental level of thought that mischaracterizes Evans’ treatment of the notion. (shrink)

John MacFarlane defends a radical form of truth relativism that makes the truth of assertions relative not only to contexts of utterance but also to contexts of assessment, or perspectives. Making sense of assessment-sensitive truth is a matter of making sense of the normative commitments undertaken by speakers in using assessment sensitive sentences. This paper argues against the possibility of making sense of such a practice. Evans raised a challenge to the coherence of relative truth. A modification of (...) the challenge can be given against MacFarlane’s revised views on assertion. The main objection to the relativist is that rational and earnest speakers are not bound by assessment-relative standards of correctness. (shrink)

This papers aims at clarifying some misunderstandings that seem to block an adequate account of de re thoughts within the Fregean framework. It is usually assumed that Fregean senses cannot be de re, or dependent upon objects. Contrary to this assumption, Gareth Evans and John McDowell have claimed that Fregean de re senses are not just possible, but in fact the most promising alternative for accounting for de re thoughts. The reasons blocking this alternative can be traced back (...) to Russellian considerations that contaminated the interpretation of Frege. This contaminated understanding is first detected in Tyler Burge’s distinction between de dicto and de re, then connected to the motivations behind David Kaplan’s notion of character, and finally found in John Searle’s descriptivist account. The difficulty in understanding de re thoughts is, roughly speaking, a side effect of the misunderstanding of the boundaries separating internal and external elements of thoughts, as well as the distinction between mental content and means of representation. (shrink)

The paper presents a new theory of perceptual demonstrative thought, the property-dependent theory. It argues that the theory is superior to both the object-dependent theory (Evans, McDowell) and the object-independent theory (Burge).

According to indexical contextualism, the perspectival element of taste predicates and epistemic modals is part of the content expressed. According to nonindexicalism, the perspectival element must be conceived as a parameter in the circumstance of evaluation, which engenders “thin” or perspective-neutral semantic contents. Echoing Evans, thin contents have frequently been criticized. It is doubtful whether such coarse-grained quasi-propositions can do any meaningful work as objects of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I assess recent responses by Recanati, Kölbel, Lasersohn and (...) MacFarlane to the “incompleteness worry”. None of them manages to convince. Particular attention is devoted to an argument by John MacFarlane, which states that if perspectives must be part of the content, so must worlds, which would make intuitively contingent propositions necessary. I demonstrate that this attempt to defend thin content views such as nonindexical contextualism and relativism conflates two distinct notions of necessity, and that radical indexicalist accounts of semantics, such as Schaffer’s necessitarianism, are in fact quite plausible. (shrink)

Book synopsis: New work on a hot topic by an outstanding team of authors At the intersection of several central areas of philosophy It is the linguistic job of singular terms to pick out the objects that we think or talk about. But what about singular terms that seem to fail to designate anything, because the objects they refer to don't exist? We can employ these terms in meaningful thought and talk, which suggests that they are succeeding in fulfilling their (...) representational task. A team of leading experts presents new essays on the much-debated problem of empty reference and thought. In the 1960s and 1970s Keith Donnellan, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam initiated a revolution in the then standard conception of reference—a concept at the core of philosophical inquiry. The repercussions of the revolution, particularly felt in metaphysics and epistemology, were soon refined by other influential writers such as Tyler Burge, Gareth Evans, and John Perry. They argued that some linguistic and mental representations have contents individuated by what they are about—by ordinary referents of expressions such as proper names, indexicals, definite descriptions and common nouns, i.e. by planets, people or natural kinds. The view was at odds with a central philosophical presumption at that time: that cognitive and linguistic access to objective reality is indirect and accidental, mediated by general descriptive characterizations, the only constitutive semantic feature of the expressions; hence its ontological and epistemological repercussions. A turning-point in the debate about how linguistic and mental representation reach external contents concerned the nature of empty mental and linguistic representations, framed by means of the very same expressions crucially invoked in the Donnellan-Kaplan-Kripke-Putnam arguments. The papers in this volume address different aspects of reference and thought about the non-existent. (shrink)

Perception enables us to think demonstrative thoughts about the world around us, but what must perception be like in order to play this role? Does perception enable demonstrative thought only if it is conscious? This paper examines three accounts of the role of consciousness in demonstrative thought, which agree that consciousness is essential for demonstrative thought, but disagree about why it is. First, I consider and reject the accounts proposed by Gareth Evans in The Varieties of Reference and by (...) John Campbell in Reference and Consciousness before offering an alternative proposal of my own. My proposal is that consciousness plays an essential epistemic role in explaining the capacity for demonstrative thought about an object by enabling the subject to form immediately justified beliefs about the object. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that it is open to semicompatibilists to maintain that no ability to do otherwise is required for moral responsibility. This is significant for two reasons. First, it undermines Christopher Evan Franklin’s recent claim that everyone thinks that an ability to do otherwise is necessary for free will and moral responsibility. Second, it reveals an important difference between John Martin Fischer’s semicompatibilism and Kadri Vihvelin’s version of classical compatibilism, which shows that the dispute between them (...) is not merely a verbal dispute. Along the way, I give special attention to the notion of general abilities, and, though I defend the distinctiveness of Fischer’s semicompatibilism against the verbal dispute charge, I also use the discussion of the nature of general abilities to argue for the falsity of a certain claim that Fischer and coauthor Mark Ravizza have made about their account. (shrink)

John Protevi’s project aims to combine the embodied school of affective cognition with Deleuze’s poststructuralist philosophy. I examine the validity of Protevi’s claim that his reading of Deleuze manages to “sharpen, extend and / or radicalize some of their [4EA] explicit presuppositions, that Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the abstract subject of embodied cognitive psychology, “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. I argue that rather than radicalizing phenomenologically-informed 4EA, Protevi’s reductive reading of Deleuze falls short of (...) both Deleuze and phenomonogical-4EA in his understanding of what it means for living systems to be “radically relational”. Protevi’s treatment of living systems splits mind, body and world into externally and weakly interacting encapsulated redundancies: bodily affect modules are encapsulated off from the conscious subject which they motivate, outside of awareness, from below. Meanwhile, individual subjective intentionalities are encapsulated off from the group intentionality that enculturates them from above. We are not given a way to see affective and cognitive-intentional processes of persons as co-implicating each other as an inseparable mesh, nor the joint activities of discursive groups as an enriching furthering of self-constitution rather than as an invading impingement from ‘above’ the self. (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)

This is a forthcoming section for the book "Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy", edited by Graham Oppy, Gregory Dawes, Evan Fales, Joseph Koterski, Mashhad Al-Allaf, Robert Fastiggi, and David Shatz. I was asked to write a brief essay on divine hiddenness and divine inscrutability. I argue that theism is trapped between two opposite poles. On one end, we encounter an argument developed by John Schellenberg. God is understood as a being who, in virtue of God's perfect love, (...) would have relationship with any of Her creatures who are open to loving relationship with God. If so, we would not expect there to exist non-resistant non-believers. Yet there are non-resistant non-believers. So, this sort of God does not exist. On the other pole, God is completely incomprehensible. But if God is incomprehensible, then this leads to a series of theological problems. For example, if God is incomprehensible, then it is difficult to understand how any human could rationally endorse God's existence. I argue that both poles are problematic for the theist and that it is difficult to see how to construct a road through the middle that would not inherit the problems of either pole. (shrink)

O debate em torno do não conceitualismo kantiano ganhou notoriedade nas pesquisas em filosofia kantiana contemporânea desde a publicação do artigo de Robert Hanna, em 2005, Kant and nonconceptual content (“Kant e o conteúdo não conceitual”). Desde então, muito tem sido discutido sobre essa nova leitura da doutrina do idealismo transcendental que busca compatibilizá-la com os argumentos não conceitualistas da filosofia analítica. Procuramos mostrar de que forma a intuição pura do espaço, enquanto forma a priori da sensibilidade, introduz uma estrutura (...) espacial-egocêntrica na experiência perceptiva, que não requere a função da síntese governada por conceitos, própria da faculdade do entendimento, e que permite estruturar um tipo de conteúdo cuja natureza é não conceitual. Para atingir tal objetivo, esta dissertação foi dividida em três capítulos. No primeiro, abordamos o desenvolvimento da doutrina da idealidade transcendental do espaço e do tempo que culmina na tese das formas puras não conceituais da sensibilidade. No segundo capítulo, fazemos um apanhado do debate entre conceitualistas e não conceitualistas na contemporaneidade. Mais especificamente, abordamos os problemas que regem a posição conceitualista padrão, pautada principalmente por John McDowell, e as respostas não conceitualistas que se desenvolveram a partir da posição de Gareth Evans, com foco especial na teoria do espaço egocêntrico. No terceiro capítulo, por fim, abordamos os principais problemas que a posição não conceitualista kantiana precisa enfrentar quando propõe que a doutrina da idealidade transcendental do espaço e do tempo seja compatível com a tese do conteúdo não conceitual da experiência. (shrink)

Is the fact that our universe contains fine-tuned life evidence that we live in a multiverse? Ian Hacking and Roger White influentially argue that it is not. We approach this question through a systematic framework for self-locating epistemology. As it turns out, leading approaches to self-locating evidence agree that the fact that our own universe contains fine-tuned life indeed confirms the existence of a multiverse. This convergence is no accident: we present two theorems showing that, in this setting, any updating (...) rule that satisfies a few reasonable conditions will have the same feature. The conclusion that fine-tuned life provides evidence for a multiverse is hard to escape. (shrink)

I argue against the orthodox view of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification. The view under criticism is: if p is propositionally justified for S in virtue of S's having reason R, and S believes p on the basis of R, then S's belief that p is doxastically justified. I then propose and evaluate alternative accounts of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification, and conclude that we should explain propositional justification in terms of doxastic justification. If correct, this (...) proposal would constitute a significant advance in our understanding of the sources of epistemic justification. (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 analysis of desire ascriptions has been a central topic of research for philosophers of language and mind. This work has mostly focused on providing a theory of want reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S wants p’. In this paper, we turn from want reports to a closely related but relatively understudied construction, namely hope reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S hopes p’. We present two contrasts involving hope reports and show that existing approaches to desire (...) fail to explain these contrasts. We then develop a novel account that combines some of the central insights in the literature. We argue that our theory provides an elegant account of our contrasts and yields a promising analysis of hoping. (shrink)

This paper models knowledge in cases where an agent has multiple experiences over time. Using this model, we introduce a series of observations that undermine the pretheoretic idea that the evidential significance of experience depends on the extent to which that experience matches the world. On the basis of these observations, we model knowledge in terms of what is likely given the agent’s experience. An agent knows p when p is implied by her epistemic possibilities. A world is epistemically possible (...) when its probability given the agent’s experiences is not significantly lower than the probability of the actual world given that experience. (shrink)

Many philosophers favour the simple knowledge account of assertion, which says you may assert something only if you know it. The simple account is true but importantly incomplete. I defend a more informative thesis, namely, that you may assert something only if your assertion expresses knowledge. I call this 'the express knowledge account of assertion', which I argue better handles a wider range of cases while at the same time explaining the simple knowledge account's appeal. §1 introduces some new data (...) that a knowledge account of assertion well explains. §2 explains the simple knowledge account's advantage over two of its main competitors. §3 presents a problem for the simple account and offers a solution, which is to adopt the express knowledge account. §4 encapsulates the case for the express knowledge account, and offers a unifying vision for the epistemology of belief and assertion. §5 answers an objection. §6 briefly sums up. Even those who ultimately reject my conclusion can still benefit from the new data presented in §1, and learn an important lesson from the problem discussed in §3, which demonstrates a general constraint on an acceptable account of the norm of assertion. (shrink)

Many defend the thesis that when someone knows p, they couldn’t easily have been wrong about p. But the notion of easy possibility in play is relatively undertheorized. One structural idea in the literature, the principle of Counterfactual Closure (CC), connects easy possibility with counterfactuals: if it easily could have happened that p, and if p were the case, then q would be the case, it follows that it easily could have happened that q. We first argue that while CC (...) is false, there is a true restriction of it to cases involving counterfactual dependence on a coin flip. The failure of CC falsifies a model where the easy possibilities are counterfactually similar to actuality. Next, we show that extant normality models, where the easy possibilities are the sufficiently normal ones, are incompatible with the restricted CC thesis involving coin flips. Next, we develop a new kind of normality theory that can accommodate the restricted version of CC. This new theory introduces a principle of Counterfactual Contamination, which says roughly that any world is fairly abnormal if at that world very abnormal events counterfactually depend on a coin flip. Finally, we explain why coin flips and other related events have a special status. A central take home lesson is that the correct principle in the vicinity of Safety is importantly normality-theoretic rather than (as it is usually conceived) similarity-theoretic. (shrink)

Epistemic reasons are mental states. They are not propositions or non-mental facts. The discussion proceeds as follows. Section 1 introduces the topic. Section 2 gives two concrete examples of how our topic directly affects the internalism/externalism debate in normative epistemology. Section 3 responds to an argument against the view that reasons are mental states. Section 4 presents two problems for the view that reasons are propositions. Section 5 presents two problems for the view that reasons are non-mental facts. Section 6 (...) argues that reasons are mental states. Section 7 responds to objections. (shrink)

‘There is no place in the phenomenology of fully absorbed coping’, writes Hubert Dreyfus, ‘for mindfulness. In flow, as Sartre sees, there are only attractive and repulsive forces drawing appropriate activity out of an active body’1. Among the many ways in which history animates dynamical systems at a range of distinctive timescales, the phenomena of embodied human habit, skilful movement, and absorbed coping are among the most pervasive and mundane, and the most philosophically puzzling. In this essay we examine both (...) habitual and skilled movement, sketching the outlines of a multidimensional framework within which the many differences across distinctive cases and domains might be fruitfully understood. Both the range of movement phenomena which can plausibly be seen as instances of habit or skill, and the space of possible theories of such phenomena are richer and more disparate than philosophy easily encompasses. We seek to bring phenomenology into contact with relevant movements in psychological theories of skilful action, in the belief that phenomenological philosophy and cognitive science can be allies rather than antagonists. (shrink)

This paper explains what it is to believe something for a reason. My thesis is that you believe something for a reason just in case the reason non-deviantly causes your belief. In the course of arguing for my thesis, I present a new argument that reasons are causes, and offer an informative account of causal non-deviance.

Filosofia limbajului are legătură cu studiul modului în care limbajul nostru se implică și interacționează cu gândirea noastră. Studierea logicii și relația dintre logică și vorbirea obișnuită poate ajuta o persoană să își structureze mai bine propriile argumente și să critice argumentele celorlalți. Înțelesul este modul în care pot fi considerate în mod corespunzător cuvinte, simboluri, idei și convingeri, definiția sa depinzând de teoria abordată, precum teoria corespondenței, teoria coerenței, teoria constructivistă, teoria consensului sau teoria pragmatică. Există mai multe explicații (...) distince despre ceea ce înseamnă un „sens” lingvistic, în funcție de diverse teorii (ideologice, adevăr-condiționale, de utilizare a limbajului, constructiviste, de referință, verificaționiste, pragmatice, etc.) Investigațiile privind modul în care limbajul interacționează cu lumea sunt numite teorii de referință. Sensul unei propoziții este gândul pe care îl exprimă. Un astfel de gând este abstract, universal și obiectiv. Sensurile determină referința și sunt, de asemenea, modurile de prezentare a obiectelor la care se referă expresiile. Referințele sunt obiectele din lume despre care vorbesc cuvintele. Filosofia limbajului explorează relația dintre limbă și realitate, în special filosofia problemelor de studiu lingvistic care nu pot fi abordate de alte domenii. Logica filozofică se ocupă de descrieri formale ale limbajului obișnuit, nespecializat („natural”). -/- CUPRINS: -/- 1. Filosofia limbajului - 1.1 Istorie - - Filosofia antică - - Filosofia medievală - - Filosofia modernă - - Filosofia contemporană - 1.2 Subiecte și sub-domenii majore - - Compoziție și părți - - Natura sensului - - Referinţă - - Mintea și limba - - - Înnăscut și învățat - - - Limba și gândul - - Interacțiunea socială și limba - 1.3 Limbajul și filozofia continentală - 1.4 Probleme în filosofia limbajului - - Imprecizia - - Problema universalului și a compoziției - - Natura limbajului - - Abordări formale versus informale - - Traducere și interpretare - 1.5 Nominalism - - Istorie - - - Filozofia greacă veche - - - Filozofia medievală - - - Filosofia modernă și contemporană - - Problema universalelor - - Tipuri - - - Filosofie analitică și matematică - - Critica originilor istorice ale termenului 2. Înțeles - 2.1 Adevăr și înțeles - - Teorii majore ale înțelesului - - - Teoria corespondenței - - - Teoria coerenței - - - Teoria constructivistă - - - Teoria consensului - - - Teoria pragmatică - - Teorii și comentarii asociate - - - Logica și limbajul - - - Gottlob Frege - - - Bertrand Russell - - - Alte teorii ale adevărului - - - Saul Kripke - - - Criticile teoriilor de adevăr ale înțelesului - 2.2 Bertrand Russell, Despre denotare - - "Fraza care denotă" - - - Concepția lui Russell despre o frază care denotă - - - Referința la ceva care nu există - - - Epistemologie - - Teoria descrierilor - - - Descrierea matematică - - - Ilustrare - - - Meinong - - Rezolvarea problemei existențialelor negative - - - Declarații despre concepte în care obiectul nu există - - - Ambiguitate - - - Nume fictive - - Critici - 2.3 Sens și referință - - Precursori - - - Antistene - - - John Stuart Mill - 2.3.1 Sens - - Sens și descriere - - Traducerea Bedeutung - - Natura sensului - 2.3.2 Referinţă - 2.4 Nume proprii - - Problema - 2.4.1 Teorii - - Teoria lui Mill - - Teoria bazată pe sensul numelor - - Teoria descriptivă - - Teoria cauzală a numelor - - Teorii de referință directă - - Filosofia continentală - 2.5 Gottlob Frege, Despre sens și referință - 2.6 Teorii cauzale ale referinței - - Motivaţie - - Variații - 2.6.1 Teoria cauzală a referinței a lui Saul Kripke - 2.6.2 Teoria cauzală a referinței a lui Gareth Evans - 2.6.3 Teoria cauzală a referinței a lui Michael Devitt - 2.6.4 Blockchain și arborele cauzal al referinței - 2.6.5 Perspective - 2.7 Saul Kripke, Numire și necesitate - 2.7.1 Prelegerea I - 2.7.2 Prelegerea II - 2.7.3 Prelegerea III - 2.7.4 Concluzii - 2.8 Kit Fine, Relaționismul semantic - - A. Antinomia variabilei - - B. Abordarea tarskiană - - C. Respingerea rolului semantic - - D. Abordarea instanțială - - E. Abordarea algebrică - - F. Abordarea relațională - - G. Semantica relațională pentru logica de primul ordin 3. Logica - Concepte - - Forma logică - - Semantică - - Inferență - - Sisteme logice - - Logică și raționalitate - - Concepte rivale - Tipuri - - Logica silogistică - - Logica propozițională - - Logica predicatelor - - Logica modală - - Raționament informal și dialectică - - Logica matematică - - Logica filozofică - - Logica computațională - - Logica non-clasică - Controverse - - "Este logica empirică?" - - Implicare: Strictă sau materială - - Tolerarea imposibilului - - Respingerea adevărului logic - 3.1 Filosofia logicii - - Adevăr - - - Purtătorii de adevăr - - - Adevăruri analitice, adevăr logic, valabilitate, consecință logică și implicare - 3.2 Logica propozițională - - Explicaţie - - Istorie - - Terminologie - - Noțiuni de bază - - - Închiderea sub operații - - - Argument - 3.3 Logica predicatelor - - Introducere - - Sintaxa - - - Alfabetul - - - - Simboluri logice - - - - Simboluri non-logice - - - Regulile formării - - - - Termeni - - - - Formule - - - - Convenții notaționale - - - Variabile libere și legate - - Semantica - - - Structuri de prim ordin - - - Evaluarea valorilor de adevăr - - - Valabilitate, satisfabilitate și consecință logică - - - Algebrizare - - - Teorii, modele și clase elementare de prim ordin - - - Domenii goale - 3.4 Logica modală - - Dezvoltarea logicii modale - - Semantica - - - Teoria modelului - - - Sisteme axiomatice - - - Teoria dovezilor structurale - - - Metode de decizie - - Tipuri de logici modale - - - Logica aletică - - - Logica epistemică - - - Logica temporală - - - Logica deontică - - - Logica doxastică - - - Alte logici modale - - Ontologia posibilității - - Controverse - 3.5 Declarații - - Declarația ca o entitate abstractă - 3.6 Dileme - - Utilizarea dilemei în logică - 3.7 Argumente - - Formal și informal - - Tipuri standard - - - Argumente deductive - - - Argumente inductive - 3.8 Actualism - - Exemplu - - Puncte de vedere filosofice - - Analiza indexicală a actualității - 3.9 Lumi posibile - - Posibilitate, necesitate și contingență - - Semantica formală a logicii modale - - De la logica modală la instrumentul filosofic - - Teoria lumii posibile în studiile literare - 3.9.1 Lumi reale, ne-reale dar posibile, și imposibile - - Lumi posibile logic - - Constituienții lumilor posibile - 3.10 Saul Kripke - - Wittgenstein - - Adevăr - 3.10.1 Logica modală - - Modele canonice - - Modele Carlson - 3.10.2 Logica intuiționistă - - Logica intuiționistă de ordinul întâi - 3.10.3 Nume și Necesitate - - "Un puzzle despre credință" Referințe Despre autor - Nicolae Sfetcu - - De același autor - - Contact Editura - MultiMedia Publishing . 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In this paper, we propose a novel account of desire reports, i.e. sentences of the form 'S wants p'. Our theory is partly motivated by Phillips-Brown's (2021) observation that subjects can desire things even if those things aren't best by the subject's lights. That is, being best isn't necessary for being desired. We compare our proposal to existing theories, and show that it provides a neat account of the central phenomenon.

Is knowledge justified true belief? Most philosophers believe that the answer is clearly ‘no’, as demonstrated by Gettier cases. But Gettier cases don’t obviously refute the traditional view that knowledge is justified true belief (JTB). There are ways of resisting Gettier cases, at least one of which is partly successful. Nevertheless, when properly understood, Gettier cases point to a flaw in JTB, though it takes some work to appreciate just what it is. The nature of the flaw helps us better (...) understand the nature of knowledge and epistemic justification. I propose a crucial improvement to the traditional view, relying on an intuitive and independently plausible metaphysical distinction pertaining to the manifestation of intellectual powers, which supplements the traditional components of justification, truth and belief. (shrink)

In this essay I show how to reconcile epistemic invariantism with the knowledge account of assertion. My basic proposal is that we can comfortably combine invariantism with the knowledge account of assertion by endorsing contextualism about speech acts. My demonstration takes place against the backdrop of recent contextualist attempts to usurp the knowledge account of assertion, most notably Keith DeRose's influential argument that the knowledge account of assertion spells doom for invariantism and enables contextualism's ascendancy.

Conceptualism is the thesis that, for any perceptual experience E, (i) E has a Fregean proposition as its content and (ii) a subject of E must possess a concept for each item represented by E. We advance a framework within which conceptualism may be defended against its most serious objections (e.g., Richard Heck's argument from nonveridical experience). The framework is of independent interest for the philosophy of mind and epistemology given its implications for debates regarding transparency, relationalism and representationalism, demonstrative (...) thought, phenomenal character, and the speckled hen objection to modest foundationalism. (shrink)

How might emerging and future technologies—sex robots, love drugs, anti-love drugs, or algorithms to track, quantify, and ‘gamify’ romantic relationships—change how we understand and value love? We canvass some of the main ethical worries posed by such technologies, while also considering whether there are reasons for “cautious optimism” about their implications for our lives. Along the way, we touch on some key ideas from the philosophies of love and technology.

I consider a serious objection to the knowledge account of assertion and develop a response. In the process I introduce important new data on prompting assertion, which all theorists working in the area should take note of.

One fairly common view about practical reason has it that whether you have a reason to act is not determined by what you know, or believe, or are justified in believing. Your reasons are determined by the facts. Perhaps there are two kinds of reasons, and however it goes with motivating reasons, normative reasons are determined by the facts, not your take on the facts. One fairly common version of this view has it that what's reasonable for you to do (...) is determined by what you know or believe. Any view that drives this kind of wedge between reasons and rationality is inherently unstable. I argue against this view, criticize the arguments typically presented in its favor, and sketch an alternative. (shrink)

Uma pesquisa revisando o pensamento gestáltico se justifica pelo intenso debate em torno da tese emergentista da mente. Sem a pretensão de uma exposição extensiva dos usos de noções emergentistas na análise do conceito de mente, realiza-se uma exposição do conceito com foco nas perspectivas de John R. Searle e de Evan Thompson. Ambos realizam uma defesa da emergência como conceito central na compreensão e explicação da relação mente corpo, mas o primeiro centrado no conceito de propriedades emergentes e (...) o segundo centrado no conceito de processos emergentes. Neste debate entendemos que contribuições da teoria da Gestalt podem se fazer interessantes. Apresenta-se neste contexto o pensamento gestáltico enfatizando o texto “Über ‘Gestaltqualitäten’ ” de 1932, ditado à sua esposa por Chistian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932) no ano de sua morte como um comentário a partir da repercussão de seu artigo “Über ‘Gestaltqualitäten’ ”, publicado em 1890 e comentado pelos três autores de maior repercussão da psicologia da Gestalt; Max Wertheimer (1880-1943), Kurt Koffka (1886-1941) e Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967). (shrink)

This article accomplishes two closely connected things. First, it refutes an influential view about the relationship between perception and knowledge. In particular, it demonstrates that perceiving does not entail knowing. Second, it leverages that refutation to demonstrate that knowledge is not the most general factive propositional attitude.

I argue that you can have a priori knowledge of propositions that neither are nor appear necessarily true. You can know a priori contingent propositions that you recognize as such. This overturns a standard view in contemporary epistemology and the traditional view of the a priori, which restrict a priori knowledge to necessary truths, or at least to truths that appear necessary.

This paper presents a puzzle about justification and withholding. The puzzle arises in a special case where experts advise us to not withhold judgment. My main thesis is simply that the puzzle is genuinely a puzzle, and so leads us to rethink some common assumptions in epistemology, specifically assumptions about the nature of justification and doxastic attitudes. Section 1 introduces the common assumptions. Section 2 presents the puzzle case. Section 3 assesses the puzzle case. Section 4 explains the choice we're (...) faced with. Sections 5 and 6 consider and reject some proposed solutions, and in the process refine and clarify the choice we're faced with. Section 7 considers and rejects a miscellany of different proposed solutions. (shrink)

According to the Self-Location Thesis, one’s own location can be among the things that visual experience represents, even when one’s body is entirely out of view. By contrast, the Minimal View denies this, and says that visual experience represents things only as "to the right", etc., and never as "to the right of me". But the Minimal View is phenomenologically inadequate: it cannot explain the difference between a visual experience of self-motion and one of an oppositely moving world. To show (...) this, I argue (i) that these experiences are different in an important respect, (ii) that this difference is genuinely experiential, (iii) that it is visual, (iv) that it is not purely phenomenal, and (v) that it cannot be identified with anything other than the apparent motion of the self. So the Self-Location Thesis is upheld: reports of one’s own motion can correspond to aspects of visual experiences every bit as basic to their contents as the apparent motion or rest of the things one has in view. (shrink)

What a person is doing often depends on that person’s thought about what they are doing, or about the wider circumstances of their action. For example, whether my killing is murder or manslaughter depends, in part, on whether I understand that what I am doing is killing you, and on whether I understand that my killing is unjustified. Similarly, if I know that the backpack I am taking is yours, then my taking it may be an act of theft; but (...) it is not theft if I simply mistook your backpack for my own. And if I don’t know that in signing a document I’m promising to do some thing, then in signing it I’m not promising to do this at all. -/- According to Elizabeth Anscombe, a central task of philosophical psychology is to articulate this dependency of action on thought. And in a range of papers published during the 1960s, Anscombe sought to elucidate various aspects of this dependency. In this paper we give a systematic overview of how Anscombe understands this dependency, and in the process reveal the conceptual framework underlying Anscombe’s thinking about perception, desire, intention, voluntariness, responsibility, guilt, and sin. (shrink)

There is little question as to whether there is good boring art, though its existence raises a number of questions for both the philosophy of art and the philosophy of emotions. How can boredom ever be a desideratum of art? How can our standing commitments concerning the nature of aesthetic experience and artistic value accommodate the existence of boring art? How can being bored constitute an appropriate mode of engagement with a work of art as a work of art? More (...) broadly, how can there be works of art whose very success requires the experience of boredom? Our goal in this paper is threefold. After offering a brief survey of kinds of boring art, we: i) derive a set of questions that we argue constitutes the philosophical problem of boring art; ii) elaborate an empirically informed theory of boredom that furnishes the philosophical problem with a deeper sense of the affect at the heart of the phenomenon; and iii) conclude by offering and defending a solution to the problem that explains why and how artworks might wish to make the experience of boredom key to their aesthetic and artistic success. (shrink)

Intuitively, the knowledge of one’s own intentional actions is different from the knowledge of actions of other sorts, including those of other people and unintentional actions of one's own. But how are we to understand this phenomenon? Does it pertain to all actions, under every description under which they are known? If so, then how is this possible? If not, then how should we think about cases that are exceptions to this principle? This paper is a critical survey of recent (...) attempts to answer these questions. I consider views under three headings: "special source" views, which hold that the knowledge of one's intentional actions has a non-perceptual source; "special domain" views, which hold that some but not all aspects of one's intentional actions are known in a special way; and "special character" views, which hold that the knowledge of intentional actions is special not because of where it comes from, but because of some other respect in which it is different in kind from the knowledge of other things. (shrink)

Is it possible to misidentify the object of an episode of bodily awareness? I argue that it is, on the grounds that a person can reasonably be unsure or mistaken as to which part of his or her body he or she is aware of at a given moment. This requires discussing the phenomenon of body ownership, and defending the claim that the proper parts of one’s body are at least no less ‘principal’ among the objects of bodily awareness than (...) is the body as a whole. I conclude with some reasons why this should lead us to think that bodily awareness, unlike introspection, is a form of perception. (shrink)

We address the question of whether it is possible to operate a time machine by manipulating matter and energy so as to manufacture closed timelike curves. This question has received a great deal of attention in the physics literature, with attempts to prove no- go theorems based on classical general relativity and various hybrid theories serving as steps along the way towards quantum gravity. Despite the effort put into these no-go theorems, there is no widely accepted definition of a time (...) machine. We explain the conundrum that must be faced in providing a satisfactory definition and propose a resolution. Roughly, we require that all extensions of the time machine region contain closed timelike curves; the actions of the time machine operator are then sufficiently "potent" to guarantee that closed timelike curves appear. We then review no-go theorems based on classical general relativity, semi-classical quantum gravity, quantum field theory on curved spacetime, and Euclidean quantum gravity. Our verdict on the question of our title is that no result of sufficient generality to underwrite a confident "yes" has been proven. Our review of the no-go results does, however, highlight several foundational problems at the intersection of general relativity and quantum physics that lend substance to the search for an answer. (shrink)

According to G.E.M. Anscombe, an agent’s knowledge of his own intentional actions differs from his knowledge of his unintended behaviors as well as the knowledge others can have of what he intentionally does, in being secured “without observation”. I begin by posing a problem for any conception of this theory according to which non-observational knowledge must be independent of sense-perception, and criticize several recent attempts to get around the problem. Having done this, I develop an alternative account of non-observational knowledge (...) according to which its special character consists in the particular causal role of an agent’s self-awareness in bringing his intentional actions about. (shrink)

In this article, following on from earlier debates in the journal regarding the ‘thorny issue’ of epochē and bracketing in sociological phenomenological research, we consider more generally the challenges of engaging in reflexivity and bracketing when undertaking ethnographic ‘insider’ research, or research in familiar settings. We ground our discussion and illustrate some of the key challenges by drawing on the experience of undertaking this research approach with a group of competitive swimmers, who were participating in a British university performance swimming (...) programme at the time of the doctoral study. The primary researcher was highly familiar with the phenomenon of competitive swimming, having been both a competitive swimmer and swimming coach. Some of the key elements of a sociological phenomenological approach to studying physical-cultural embodiment are first delineated, before addressing the considerable challenges of engaging in sustained reflexivity and bracketing, using the swimming research for illustrative purposes. We suggest some practical ways in which researchers in sport and physical cultures might approach epochē and bracketing in ethnographic ‘insider’ research. -/- KEYWORDS: Sociological phenomenology, competitive swimming, insider research, epochē/bracketing. (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)

In this article, we address an existing lacuna in the sociology of the senses, by employing sociological phenomenology to illuminate the under-researched sense of temperature, as lived by a social group for whom water temperature is particularly salient: competitive pool swimmers. The research contributes to a developing ‘sensory sociology’ that highlights the importance of the socio-cultural framing of the senses and ‘sensory work’, but where there remains a dearth of sociological exploration into senses extending beyond the ‘classic five’ sensorium. Drawing (...) on data from a three-year ethnographic study of competitive swimmers in the UK, our analysis explores the rich sensuousities of swimming, and highlights the role of temperature as fundamentally affecting the affordances offered by the aquatic environment. The article contributes original theoretical perspectives to the sociology of the senses and of sport in addressing the ways in which social actors in the aquatic environment interact, both intersubjectively and intercorporeally, as thermal beings. (shrink)

Plato is associated with the idea that the body holds us back from knowing ultimate reality and so we should try to distance ourselves from its influence. This sentiment appears is several of his dialogues including Theaetetus where the flight from the physical world is compared to becoming like God. In some major dialogues of Plato's later career such as Philebus and Laws, however, the idea of becoming like God takes a different turn. God is an intelligent force that tries (...) to create order in the physical world. I argue that likeness to God in these dialogues involves imitating God's effort by trying to order our bodies, souls, and societies as intelligence directs. Becoming like Plato's God is not to abandon the world. It is to improve it. (shrink)