In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

In his dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze asserts that: ‘Whether we are individuals or groups, we are made of lines’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 124). In A Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari), Deleuze calls these kinds of ‘lifelines’ or ‘lines of flesh’: break line (or segmental line, or molar line), crack line (or molecular line) and rupture line (also called line of flight) (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 22). We will explain the difference between these three lines and how they are related (...) to the ‘soul’. We will also explain how a singular individual or group can arise from the play of the lines. Eventually, we will introduce the concept of ‘Creal’ to develop the Deleuzian figure of the ‘Anomal’, the so(u)rcerer. (shrink)

Two separate research programs have revealed two different factors that feature in our judgments of whether some entity persists. One program—inspired by Knobe—has found that normative considerations affect persistence judgments. For instance, people are more inclined to view a thing as persisting when the changes it undergoes lead to improvements. The other program—inspired by Kelemen—has found that teleological considerations affect persistence judgments. For instance, people are more inclined to view a thing as persisting when it preserves its purpose. Our goal (...) in this paper is to determine what causes persistence judgments. Across four studies, we pit normative considerations against teleological considerations. And using causal modeling procedures, we find a consistent, robust pattern with teleological and not normative considerations directly causing persistence judgments. Our findings put teleology in the driver’s seat, while at the same time shedding further light on our folk notion of an object. (shrink)

Natural/social kind essentialism is the view that natural kind categories, both living and non-living natural kinds, as well as social kinds (e.g., race, gender), are essentialized. On this view, artifactual kinds are not essentialized. Our view—teleological essentialism—is that a broad range of categories are essentialized in terms of teleology, including artifacts. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments typically used to provide evidence of essentialist thinking—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2) and inferences about offspring (study 3)—we find (...) support for the view that a broad range of categories—living natural kinds, non-living natural kinds and artifactual kinds—are essentialized in terms of teleology. Study 4 tests a unique prediction of teleological essentialism and also provides evidence that people make inferences about purposes which in turn guide categorization judgments. (shrink)

Biological individuality is a notoriously thorny topic for biologists and philosophers of biology. In this paper we argue that biological individuality presents multiple, interconnected questions for biologists and philosophers that together form a problem agenda. Using a case study of an interdisciplinary research group in ecology, behavioral and evolutionary biology, we claim that a debate on biological individuality that seeks to account for diverse practices in the biological sciences should be broadened to include and give prominence to questions about uniqueness (...) and temporality. We show that broadening the problem agenda of biological individuality draws attention to underrecognized philosophical issues and discussions and thereby organizes and enriches the existing debate. (shrink)

Knowledge is widely thought to entail belief. But Radford has claimed to offer a counterexample: the case of the unconfident examinee. And Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel have claimed empirical vindication of Radford. We argue, in defense of orthodoxy, that the unconfident examinee does indeed have belief, in the epistemically relevant sense of dispositional belief. We buttress this with empirical results showing that when the dispositional conception of belief is specifically elicited, people’s intuitions then conform with the view that knowledge entails (dispositional) (...) belief. (shrink)

Background We investigated the personal philosophies of eight persons with a tetraplegic condition (four male, four female), all living in Sweden with a chronic spinal cord injury (SCI) and all reporting a good life. Our purpose was to discover if there is a philosophical mindset that may play a role in living a good life with a traumatic SCI. Methods Two rounds of in-depth qualitative interviews were performed by the same interviewer, a philosophical practitioner by training (de Miranda). The (...) second round systematically covered the following elements: bodily sense, sense of self, sense of belonging, sense of the possible, sense of purpose and philosophical sense. This six-step method developed by de Miranda is called SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. Results All the interviewees, as a consequence of their trauma, reported having gone through a reinvention of themselves which implied questioning the meaning and purpose of their life in particular and life in general. A philosophical rather than realistic sense of the possible was abstracted toward teleological growth. All interviewees developed a sense of purpose based on self-interested altruism and solidarity with disabled peers. Conclusions To reinvent a good life with SCI, in addition to physical training and willpower, one needs to consider philosophical questions about the self and life, what Kant called the cosmic interests of reason: What may I hope? What must I do? What can I know? Our results indicate that we should, in the future, explore what the philosophical health approach may bring to rehabilitation processes in the months or years that follow the trauma. (shrink)

The emerging crealectic frame posits that there are three complementary and effectual domains of intelligence, namely analytic, dialectic, and crealectic, being alternatively or complementarily used in human interactions with the world. The focus of crealectic intelligence is the relative possibilization and local realization of absolute possibility, the becoming real, biological, and social of creation. This multimodal externalization and asymptotic unification of a cosmological flux expresses itself via three realms of possibilization: physical, psychological, and philosophical. But the philosophical possible is not (...) merely abstract; it originates a generative process of exteriorizations, interiorizations, dissolutions, and unifications transforming the possible into realities. The term “crealectics,” coined by philosopher and author Luis de Miranda, is a compound of “Creal” and of two possible suffixes: “logos” or “ektos”. The ontological core of crealectics, the Creal, is the immanent process of creation understood as a ubiquitous stream of absolute possibility exteriorizing itself. For a crealectician, philosophy is not the mere logical analysis of truth conditions, but the self-questioning enterprise of thought regarding its own possibilizing and world-making power. (shrink)

How do we determine whether some candidate causal factor is an actual cause of some particular outcome? Many philosophers have wanted a view of actual causation which fits with folk intuitions of actual causation and those who wish to depart from folk intuitions of actual causation are often charged with the task of providing a plausible account of just how and where the folk have gone wrong. In this paper, I provide a range of empirical evidence aimed at showing just (...) how and where the folk go wrong in determining whether an actual causal relation obtains. The evidence suggests that folk intuitions of actual causation are generated by two epistemically defective processes. I situate the empirical evidence within a background discussion of debunking, arguing for a two-pronged debunking explanation of folk intuitions of actual causation. I conclude that those who wish to depart from folk intuitions of actual causation should not be compelled to square their account of actual causation with the verdicts of the folk. In the dispute over actual causation, folk intuitions deserve to be rejected. (shrink)

This chapter questions the way “sex” features in behavioral ecological research as a standard explanatory variable. Researchers often use sex to explain variation in a trait or phenomenon that they are studying. This practice is widespread, partly because sex is often easy to identify and often explains some variation, thus making it easier to discover and test other causal patterns of interest. Yet, sex also frequently fails to explain variation. Using a couple of recent examples, it is shown how the (...) pervasiveness of sex as an explanatory variable is partly due to the structure of scientific research, including the use of data from large longitudinal studies, and generalization from previous studies. Researchers should more carefully assess and justify the relevance of sex to each new study, to avoid overgeneralization and the perpetuation of assumptions about sexual difference and its importance in biology. (shrink)

Many philosophers maintain that causation is to be explicated in terms of a kind of dependence between cause and effect. These “dependence” theories are opposed by “production” accounts which hold that there is some more fundamental causal “oomph”. A wide range of experimental research on everyday causal judgments seems to indicate that ordinary people operate primarily with a dependence-based notion of causation. For example, people tend to say that absences and double preventers are causes. We argue that the impression that (...) commonsense causal discourse is largely dependence-based is the result of focusing on a very narrow class of causal verbs. Almost all of the vignette-based experimental work on causal judgment has been prosecuted using the word “cause”. But much ordinary causal discourse involves special causal verbs, such as “burn” and “crack”. We find that these verbs display a quite different pattern from the verb “cause”. For instance, for absences and double preventers (Studies 1-3), we find that while people are inclined to say that X caused Y to burn, turn, crack or start, they are less inclined to think that X burned, turned, cracked or started Y. In Study 4, we find that for chains involving a distal and proximal event, people are inclined to say that the distal event is not a special cause of the outcome, though it is a “cause” of the outcome. Together, we find a surprising double dissociation between “cause” and a stock of special causal verbs. We conclude by suggesting that much commonsense causal judgment, which heavily trades in special causal verbs, might be better captured by production-based accounts of causation. (shrink)

The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivators for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane Journal of Philosophy 96:217–240 1999, Strawson 1986). And a number of recent studies find that people give apparently incompatibilist responses in vignette studies. When participants are presented with a description of a causal deterministic universe, they tend to deny that people (...) are morally responsible in that universe. Although this suggests that people are intuitive incompatibilists, Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray, in a recent series of important papers, have developed an important challenge to this interpretation. They argue that people confuse determinism with bypassing, the idea that one’s mental states lack causal efficacy. Murray and Nahmias present new experiments that seem to confirm the bypassing hypothesis. In this paper, we use structural equation modeling to re-examine the issue. We find support instead for an incompatibilist explanation of the bypassing results, i.e., incompatibilist judgments seem to cause bypassing judgments. We hypothesize that this phenomenon occurs because people think of decisions as essentially indeterministic; thus, when confronted with a description of determinism they tend to think that decisions do not even occur. We provide evidence for this in three subsequent studies which show that many participants deny that people make decisions in a deterministic universe; by contrast, most participants tend to allow that people add numbers in a deterministic universe. Together, these studies suggest that bypassing results don’t reflect a confusion, but rather the depth of the incompatibilist intuition. (shrink)

Many philosophers have claimed that the folk endorse moral universalism. Some have taken the folk view to support moral universalism; others have taken the folk view to reflect a deep confusion. And while some empirical evidence supports the claim that the folk endorse moral universalism, this work has uncovered intra-domain differences in folk judgments of moral universalism. In light of all this, our question is: why do the folk endorse moral universalism? Our hypothesis is that folk judgments of moral universalism (...) are generated in part by a desire to punish. We present evidence supporting this across three studies. On the basis of this, we argue for a debunking explanation of folk judgments of moral universalism. Our results not only further our understanding of the psychological processes underpinning folk judgments of moral universalism. They also bear on philosophical discussions of folk meta-ethics. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a concept of behavioural ecological individuality. Using findings from a case study which employed qualitative methods, I argue that individuality in behavioural ecology should be defined as phenotypic and ecological uniqueness, a concept that is operationalised in terms of individual differences such as animal personality and individual specialisation. This account make sense of how the term “individuality” is used in relation to intrapopulation variation in behavioural ecology. The concept of behavioural ecological individuality can sometimes be (...) used to identify individuals. It also shapes research agendas and methodological choices in behavioural ecology, leading researchers to account for individuals as sources of variation. Overall, this paper draws attention to a field that has been largely overlooked in philosophical discussions of biological individuality and highlights the importance of individual differences and uniqueness for individuality in behavioural ecology. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subjects assertion that p matches her non-verbal behavior) a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from nearly 6,000 people across twenty-six samples, spanning twenty-two countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we suggest that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely (...) asserts that p, non-linguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

People suffering from severe monothematic delusions, such as Capgras, Fregoli, or Cotard patients, regularly assert extraordinary and unlikely things. For example, some say that their loved ones have been replaced by impostors. A popular view in philosophy and cognitive science is that such monothematic delusions aren't beliefs because they don't guide behaviour and affect in the way that beliefs do. Or, if they are beliefs, they are somehow anomalous, atypical, or marginal beliefs. We present evidence from five studies that folk (...) psychology unambiguously views monothematic delusions as stereotypical beliefs. This calls into question widespread assumptions in the professional literature about belief's stereotypical functional profile. We also show that folk psychology views delusional patients as holding contradictory beliefs. And we show that frequent assertion is a powerful cue to belief ascription, more powerful than even a robust and consistent track record of non-verbal behaviour. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is often presented as a new movement that avoids many of the difficulties that face traditional philosophy. This article distinguishes two views of experimental philosophy: a narrow view in which philosophers conduct empirical investigations of intuitions, and a broad view which says that experimental philosophy is just the colocation in the same body of (i) philosophical naturalism and (ii) the actual practice of cognitive science. These two positions are rarely clearly distinguished in the literature about experimental philosophy, both (...) pro and con. The article argues, first, that the broader view is the only plausible one; discussions of experimental philosophy should recognize that the narrow view is a caricature of experimental philosophy as it is currently done. It then shows both how objections to experimental philosophy are transformed and how positive recommendations can be provided by adopting a broad conception of experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Many philosophers insist that the revisionary metaphysician—i.e., the metaphysician who offers a metaphysical theory which conflicts with folk intuitions—bears a special burden to explain why certain folk intuitions are mistaken. I show how evidence from cognitive science can help revisionist discharge this explanatory burden. Focusing on composition and persistence, I argue that empirical evidence indicates that the folk operate with a promiscuous teleomentalist view of composition and persistence. The folk view, I argue, deserves to be debunked. In this way, I (...) take myself to have illustrated one key role cognitive science can play in metaphysics; namely by helping the revisionary metaphysician discharge the explanatory burden of providing a plausible explanation of how the folk have gone wrong. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

We have a mentalistic view of objects. This is due to the interdependence of folk psychology and folk physics, where these are interconnected by what I call Teleological Commingling. When considering events that don’t involve agents, we naturally default to tracking intentions, goal-directed processes, despite the fact that agents aren’t involved. We have a deep-seated intentionality bias which is the result of the pervasive detection of agency cues, such as order or non-randomness. And this gives rise to the Agentive Worldview: (...) we view nature as a whole as being infused with agency and purpose. Teleological Commingling and the Agentive Worldview it gives rise to are at the core of our conception of objects. I maintain that the ordinary view of material objects is rooted in an implicit, false theory. It should be given no weight in metaphysical debates about the nature of material objects. And this problematizes the central methodological assumption that metaphysical theories of material objects should be beholden to common sense. (shrink)

The present article is a primary introduction to the semi-structured interviewing method SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. Beyond grounding this new methodology theoretically (a work that is started here but will in the future necessitate several developments), the main motivation here is pragmatic: to provide the recent philosophical health movement with a testable method and show that philosophically-oriented interviews are possible in a manner that can be reproduced, compared, tested and used systematically with (...) a population that has received no training in philosophy. The SMILE_PH approach was conceived by the author during an ethically approved pilot study focused on the philosophy of life of persons living with spinal cord injury (SCI), with the intention of rectifying the epistemic obstacles generated by rationalist, Socratic or unstructured ways of in-depth interviewing. The six-step structure of the method is also inspired by hundreds of individual dialogue sessions with philosophical counselees, led by the author between 2018 and 2022: the SMILE_PH method progressively gathers phenomenological data about 1 – our bodily sense, 2 – our sense of self, 3 – our sense of belonging, 4 – our sense of the possible, 5 – our sense of purpose and 6 – our philosophical sense. (shrink)

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation. While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political and (...) ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle. (shrink)

« Ce petit livre est un bijou d’intelligence, de finesse, de culture, qui prend un objet technique sans rechigner et le tourne et le retourne comme Heidegger nous avait appris à le faire avec les chaussures de Van Gogh. Ce qui frappe, c’est l’ambition d’une méditation sur les cartes de la modernité contemporaine, sur le fameux Grand Paris, sur le sujet, sur le pluriel, sans les faux-fuyants du postmoderne, de la citation absurde. Luis de Miranda se promène, il vous (...) conte qu’il se promène, mais il vous mène avec une grande maîtrise et sait où il veut aller. Rien de gratuit dans cette rencontre de l’enseigne de kebabs sur la table de dissection de la Ville Néon. C’est plutôt une nouvelle méditation cartésienne après Descartes et Husserl : où le poêle et sa chaleur ont fait place au bruit vrillant du gaz dans un tube. Je suis, je crée, donc j’entends. » Yann Moulier-Boutang, ancien élève de l’ENS, professeur agrégé d’économie à l’université de technologie de Compiègne, directeur de la revue Multitudes. Né d’une rencontre inopinée avec un néon sur le quai du Louvre, ce livre a été composé à partir d’un séminaire donné par l’auteur à l’hiver 2012. Un voyage inspiré à travers la nuit, qui déchiffre les halos du passé et les reflets du présent pour donner à entendre une certaine magie du futur. Luis de Miranda, philosophe, romancier, révélateur du créalisme, est notamment l’auteur d’un essai remarqué, L’art d’être libres au temps des automates (Max Milo, 2010). (shrink)

When do the folk think that material objects persist? Many metaphysicians have wanted a view which fits with folk intuitions, yet there is little agreement about what the folk intuit. I provide a range of empirical evidence which suggests that the folk operate with a teleological view of persistence: the folk tend to intuit that a material object survives alterations when its function is preserved. Given that the folk operate with a teleological view of persistence, I argue for a debunking (...) explanation of folk intuitions, concluding that metaphysicians should dismiss folk intuitions as tied into a benighted view of nature. (shrink)

The tendency to idealise artificial intelligence as independent from human manipulators, combined with the growing ontological entanglement of humans and digital machines, has created an “anthrobotic” horizon, in which data analytics, statistics and probabilities throw our agential power into question. How can we avoid the consequences of a reified definition of intelligence as universal operation becoming imposed upon our destinies? It is here argued that the fantasised autonomy of automated intelligence presents a contradistinctive opportunity for philosophical consciousness to understand itself (...) anew as holistic and co-creative, beyond the recent “analytic” moment of the history of philosophy. Here we introduce the concept of “crealectic intelligence”, a meta-analytic and meta-dialectic aspect of consciousness. Intelligent behaviour may consist in distinguishing discrete familiar parts or reproducible functions in the midst of noise via an analytic process of segmentation; intelligence may also manifest itself in the constitution of larger wholes and dynamic unities through a dialectic process of association or assemblage. But, by contrast, crealectic intelligence co-creates realities in the image of an ideal or truth, taking into account the desiring agent imbued with a sense of possibility, in a relationship not only with the Real but also with the creative sublime or “Creal”. (shrink)

Vous éprouvez souvent l'embarras du choix? Que sera la liberté au XXIe siècle? Depuis l'invention des machines et des computeurs, notre quotidien semble avoir gagné du temps. Mais en contrepartie, il paraît de plus en plus codé, soumis aux automatismes. Depuis Leibniz jusqu'à la puce biométrique, l'auteur raconte une histoire alternative de l'ère informatique. Il démontre que le " numérisme ", le principe ordinateur, est une vertu humaine ancestrale et nécessaire. Mais insuffisante. Après le sauve-qui-peut du postmodernisme, un nouveau paradigme (...) est en train de naître, le " créalisme " : le monde est notre création commune incessante. L'horizon de notre liberté politique et existentielle, c'est la Terre comme oeuvre d'art. Construit comme une odyssée philosophique curieuse et empreinte d'humour, voici un traité de cocréativité pour une époque aux forces actives éclatées. Où l'on découvre que l'ordre et l'aventure ne sont pas incompatibles. (shrink)

Orthodoxy has it that knowledge is a composite of belief and non-mental factors. However, Timothy Williamson suggests that orthodoxy implies that the concept of belief is acquired before the concept of knowledge, whereas developmental data suggest the reverse. More recently, Jennifer Nagel reviews the psychological evidence, building a psychological case that the concept of knowledge emerges prior to belief. I assess the psychological state of the art and find support for the opposite conclusion. Overall the empirical evidence supports the orthodox (...) view that the concept of belief is prior to the concept of knowledge. (shrink)

Pierre Duhem’s philosophy of science has influenced many philosophers in the twentieth century, and even today. Many of the subjects he addressed are still highly discussed today, especially the distinction between science and metaphysics. My aim in this paper will be to motivate a naturalistic approach where the difference between physics and metaphysics is only a matter of degree. I focus on whether it would be possible to articulate this gradual distinction from a duhemian point of view. Although Duhem thought (...) that metaphysics is an entirely different and more excellent activity than physics, I believe that Duhem’s philosophy of science also supports a naturalistic distinction in terms of degrees. I offer three reasons to justify this conclusion: Duhem’s notion of common sense; Duhem’s holism and his views on the generality of our theories, and Duhem’s notion of natural classification. At the end of the paper I will argue that a naturalistic approach accomplishes must of what Duhem wanted to achieve with his distinction. (shrink)

Failing -- Ontology and desire in Dionysius the Areopagite -- Apophatic theology and its vicissitudes -- The death drive: from Freud to Žižek -- The gift and violence -- Divine violence as trauma -- Mystical theology and the four discourses -- Theology as failure.

Empirical research has recently emerged as a key method for understanding the nature of causation, and our concept of causation. One thread of research aims to test intuitions about the nature of causation in a variety of classic cases. These experiments have principally been used to try to resolve certain debates within analytic philosophy, most notably that between proponents of transference and dependence views of causation. The other major thread of empirical research on our concept of causation has investigated the (...) role that normative considerations play in causal judgments. These experimental results suggest that philosophical accounts of our concept of causation should take a broader view of what might be relevant. For both lines of research, we describe some of the significant experiments and outline key philosophical morals that have been drawn, all while pointing out various limitations. We conclude by considering other kinds of empirical research that should be philosophically interesting for those studying the nature of causation and our concept of causation. In particular, we point towards the need for philosophical research about causal perception, causal reasoning, and causal learning, as well as ways in which this research could play a role in prescriptive metaphysics. (shrink)

This study focused on the significant relationship between Creative Thinking Skills and Problem-Solving Skills in Mathematics among Grade 6 pupils. The study's respondents were thirty (30) Grade 6 pupils from one of the elementary schools in the District of Sta. Ana, Pampanga. The respondents were selected using simple random sampling techniques. The study used a survey questionnaire comprising the Creative Thinking Skills Test (Pentang et al., 2022) and a researcher-made word problem-solving written test and rubrics. The researchers found a high (...) level of Creative Thinking Skills among the Grade 6 pupils, while the respondents' problem-solving skills were categorized as competent. The study revealed that the Creative Thinking Skills and Problem-Solving Skills in Mathematics of the Grade 6 pupils were very lowly correlated. Still, creative thinking and problem-solving in the applied subject are recommended to help students acquire the 21st-century skills that empower them to develop holistically and career ready. (shrink)

Generic statements, such as "Bees are striped" are thought to be a central vehicle by which essentialist beliefs are transmitted. But work on generics and essentialism almost never focuses on the type of properties mentioned in generic statements. We test the hypothesis that teleological properties, what something is for, affect categorization judgments more strongly than behavioral, biological, or social properties. In Experiment 1, participants categorized properties as being either behavioral, biological, social, or teleological. In Experiment 2, we used the top (...) four properties from each group to describe a generic noun or a specific individual. Participants then categorized creatures that had one of their properties transformed. We found that changes to teleological properties had the strongest impact on categorization judgments. In Experiment 3, we also found that teleological properties mattered more in an induction task. We suggest that teleological properties play this privileged role in categorization because they are treated as essential properties. (shrink)

This paper addresses a relatively new mode of ecological research: data synthesis studies. Data synthesis studies involve reusing data to create a general model as well as a reusable, aggregated dataset. Using a case from movement ecology, I analyse the trade-offs and strategies involved in data synthesis. Like theoretical ecological modelling, I find that synthesis studies involve a modelling trade-off between generality, precision and realism; they deal with this trade-off by adopting a pragmatic kludging strategy. I also identify an additional (...) trade-off, the synthesis trade-off, between making data easy to synthesise for a particular project, on the one hand, and facilitating data reuse for other projects, on the other. In response to this synthesis trade-off, researchers create flexible datasets that are relatively easy to use for particular projects and can be adjusted to suit some other purposes. The flexibility compromise is also found in broader open data efforts, making it a significant element in the future of data-intensive ecology. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to trace an entanglement of an event documented in my PhD research which contests dominant modes of enquiry. It is experimental research which resists the human subject as the most important aspect of research, the only one with agency or intentionality. In particular, I analyse the process of the making of the circle, and how integral it is in contributing to building the Community of Enquiry, the pedagogy of Philosophy with Children. I offer a critical (...) posthuman analysis which engages with the material-discursive entanglements of the making of the circle. I move beyond the linguistic turn by paying attention to the intra-actions in between human and more-than-human, place, the circle and the chairs. I show how the mainly authoritarian adult-child relationships prevalent in most South African schools, can be disrupted through this pedagogical approach. This research takes place with a group of Grade 2 learners in a government school in South Africa. (shrink)

Tracking technology has been heralded as transformative for animal ecology. In this paper I examine what changes are taking place, showing how current animal movement research is a field ripe for philosophical investigation. I focus first on how the devices alter the limitations and biases of traditional field observation, making observation of animal movement and behaviour possible in more detail, for more varied species, and under a broader variety of conditions, as well as restricting the influence of human presence and (...) observer bias. I reconstruct these as shifts in scope, objectivity, accuracy and fruitfulness. The second transformation is slightly less obvious but equally significant for animal ecology. Tracking devices generate complex data that demands both statistical and biological expertise, which has led to increasingly frequent and intensive collaborations between statisticians and biologists. Based on interviews, I examine how researchers in these interdisciplinary collaborations negotiate the collection, analysis and interpretation of movement data, integrating research interests, methodological constraints, previous field observations, and background theory. Tracking technology is therefore also shifting which disciplinary considerations are brought to bear on research into animal movement and behaviour and how this research is conducted. (shrink)

The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this (...) is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility. We conclude that judgments based on these scenarios are not reliable evidence for natural compatibilism. (shrink)

From the publisher: -/- This important new study reevaluates British art writing and the rise of formalism in the visual arts from 1900 to 1939. Taking Roger Fry as his starting point, Sam Rose rethinks how ideas about form influenced modernist culture and the movement’s significance to art history today. -/- In the context of modernism, formalist critics are often thought to be interested in art rather than life, a stance exemplified in their support for abstract works that exclude (...) the world outside. But through careful attention to early twentieth-century connoisseurship, aesthetics, art education, design, and art in colonial Nigeria and India, Rose builds an expanded account of form based on its engagement with the social world. Art and Form thus opens discussions on a range of urgent topics in art writing, from its history and the constructions of high and low culture to the idea of global modernism. Rose demonstrates the true breadth of formalism and shows how it lends a new richness to thought about art and visual culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. -/- “This book is a gem. It gives the most comprehensive and accessible account of the importance of form in the last hundred years of writing about art. It should be compulsory reading not just for art historians, but also for aestheticians and anyone interested in visual culture.” —Bence Nanay, author of Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception -/- “This is an exceptionally wide-ranging and successful study of a central topic in the history of modernism. Rose moves with enviable facility between archival research and historical concerns and a crisply incisive discussion of the status and integrity of the key ideas. The final section, which extends the story outward into new areas, will be an invaluable spur to future research.” —David Peters Corbett, author of The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914 -/- “It’s time we had a sophisticated account of form in the modern visual arts to replace the crude caricatures that have dominated the literature on so-called modernist formalism. Sam Rose supplies this with precision (in his careful readings of modernist texts that have too often been oversimplified) and imagination (in relating them to wider, sometimes surprising, contexts). Demolishing the notion that formalism must be escapist, he provides a cogent explanation for how the study of the Old Masters could go hand in hand with the theorization of a modern art. This lucidly written book not only challenges preconceptions about formalism but shows why we cannot ignore the question of form in discussions of the visual arts up to and including the present day.” —Elizabeth Prettejohn, author of Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting -/- “A brilliant and timely account of aesthetic form and formalism. Debates about form are fundamental to modernism, and indeed to the story of the arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, yet until now we have been lacking a sustained investigation of how this came to be. Art and Form is a great work of art history, and it will also prove indispensable to literary scholars, philosophers, and cultural critics.” —Rebecca Beasley, author of Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism. (shrink)

Dr Miranda Anderson is an Honorary Fellow in History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. She has held several prestigious fellowships and was principal investigator of an AHRC-funded project, titled ‘The Art of Distributed Cognition’, which involved collaboration with the Talbot Rice Gallery. Her work has investigated the relations between cognition and culture, particularly literary works, challenging the boundaries between disciplines and engaging with numerous contemporary science, technology and society (...) (STS) questions. In this perspective article, she evokes the ‘fission-fusion’ concept on which she has been working for some years now – a concept that contributes to debates surrounding the issue of identity by drawing on the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. (shrink)

Book review : The philosophy of person‐centred healthcareBy Derek Mitchell, Michael Loughlin, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2023.201 pp. £64.99. ISBN (10): 1‐5275‐9058‐5, ISBN (13): 978‐1‐5275‐9058‐8.

La tesis principal de este trabajo es que los modelos estadísticos facilitan explicaciones acerca de los errores que pueden cometer nuestros procedimientos de inferencia de datos a fenómenos, en el contexto de la estadística clásica o frecuentista. La explicación del error es una operación que, a su vez, ayuda a evitarlo en donde es evitable e intolerable; tolerarlo donde es inevitable y tolerable; y suspender el juicio donde es inevitable e intolerable. Todas estas operaciones son elementos de una práctica generadora (...) de evidencia confiable. Se ilustra esta tesis con el modelo lineal en econometría, el estimador de mínimos cuadrados ordinarios, el estimador y modelo de variables instrumentales y con los conceptos relacionados con las pruebas de hipótesis. Se pone especial énfasis en las propiedades de insesgadez, consistencia y precisión como caracterizaciones del tipo de error que se puede cometer usándo un estimador. Se sostiene que los modelos explican identificando patrones de dependencia contrafáctica entre características del mecanismo estocástico representadas por el modelo y características de los procedimientos inferenciales. (shrink)

The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate readers unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different approaches within distributed cognition and discussion of the value of a distributed cognitive approach to the humanities.

For ancient philosophers, philosophy was not only a theory about the big questions but also a way of life, yet it was not only a way of life but also a theory. Pierre Hadot showed the importance of philosophy as a way of life in antiquity. Moreover, he defended, as this paper demonstrates, the view that ancient philosophy was primarily a way of life and that philosophical discourse or theory played a secondary role. The paper argues against Hadot, taking the (...) paradigmatic Socratic way of life as an illustration, that theory is as crucial for philosophy as practice is. Doing spiritual exercises and living in a particular way was very important for the ancients, but so were truth and understanding reality. (shrink)

In 2008 the authors held Involving Interface, a lively interdisciplinary event focusing on issues of biological, sociocultural, and technological interfacing (see Acknowledgments). Inspired by discussions at this event, in this article, we further discuss the value of input from neuroscience for developing robots and machine interfaces, and the value of philosophy, the humanities, and the arts for identifying persistent links between human interfacing and broader ethical concerns. The importance of ongoing interdisciplinary debate and public communication on scientific and technical advances (...) is also highlighted. Throughout, the authors explore the implications of the extended mind hypothesis for notions of moral accountability and robotics. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that Spinoza's metaphysics reflects the Kabbalist metaphysical system. In much of the contemporary literature, the influence of early modern thinkers such as Descartes has been aggrandized to the detriment of other influences on his thought, such as the Kabbalistic tradition. I will argue that there is strong historical evidence to suggest that Spinoza was exposed to and engaged in Kabbalah, such as his references to Kabbalah in his works and letters, the books he owned (...) and the opinions of his contemporaries. Secondly, I shall argue that Spinoza's metaphysical system mirrors Kabbalistic metaphysics. Although some concepts are substituted and alternate methodologies adopted, I advocate that the mechanics of the two systems are strikingly similar. I posit that Spinoza sublates the Kabbalist system into an atemporal form. Finally, I argue that reading Spinoza through the lens of Kabbalah can elucidate some of the obscurities in his work and can solve problems that seem to arise when determining the relationship between God and attributes and can explain seemingly anachronistic metaphysical concepts which scholars have located in Spinoza’s oeuvre. (shrink)

We study whether it is possible to generalise Seidenfeld et al.’s representation result for coherent choice functions in terms of sets of probability/utility pairs when we let go of Archimedeanity. We show that the convexity property is necessary but not sufficient for a choice function to be an infimum of a class of lexicographic ones. For the special case of two-dimensional option spaces, we determine the necessary and sufficient conditions by weakening the Archimedean axiom.

Do young children have a teleological conception of the essence of natural kinds? We tested this by examining how the preservation or alteration of an animal’s purpose affected children’s persistence judgments (N = 40, ages 4 - 12, Mean Age = 7.04, 61% female). We found that even when surface-level features of an animal (e.g., a bee) were preserved, if the entity’s purpose changed (e.g., the bee now spins webs), children were more likely to categorize the entity as a member (...) of a different natural kind (e.g., a spider) and these effects were similar in magnitude to altering the surface-features of a natural kind. Our results suggest that we might view teleological properties as partially constitutive of the essence of natural kinds. (shrink)

What happens to our minds when we listen to a story or read a book? How about when we watch a play or film? Any story, like a piece of music, plays out across our minds and in the process changes the nature of our notes and expands their range. Stories enable a metamorphosis of our minds through biological and sociocultural processes operating in concert.

In the Terry Achane case, a birth father who was in the military was not notified when his child's birth mother put up their child for adoption. Birth fathers are often stereotyped as uninvolved and irresponsible, especially when they are not married to the birth mother. Terry Achane was married. The adoption agency made little effort to contact him, raising ethical issues about the roles played by the race, economic status, and perhaps religious beliefs of the adopting parents.

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally ‘‘games are made’’) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel back in (...) time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential ‘‘limit situations.’’ This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—‘‘anthrobotic’’—environments. (shrink)

« Voici un livre vif, intelligent, nullement béni-oui-oui. Avec Lacan, il démontre que le capitalisme est une machine à faire jouir massivement. Ce qui s'obtient n'est pas pour autant une jouissance toute, mais seulement des lichettes. La jouissance demeurera toujours tonneau des Danaïdes. » Hervé Castanet, professeur des universités, psychanalyste, membre de l'école de la Cause freudienne. -/- Partout la qualité de vie prend la forme d'une quantité d'envies. Le nouveau monde oscille entre deux versants d'une même pièce de théâtre (...) : côté cour, des passages à l'acte obscènes ; côté coulisses, un puritanisme coupable. Pouvons-nous nous comporter autrement que comme des machines à jouir détraquées, dont le courant alternatif oscillerait entre avidité et rétention, gaspillage et dette ? Beaucoup se demandent pourquoi, une fois réunies les conditions imaginaires ou symboliques de la jouissance, c'est un réel vide ou perverti qui s'installe. C'est que la mécanique même de l'économie libidinale capitaliste repose sur l'angoisse sans cesse repoussée d'un désir dévoyé. Dans un monde globalement structuré par la plus-value, la jouissance prend la forme internationale du « plus-de-jouir ». -/- Faut-il pour autant renoncer à la joie de vivre et se réfugier dans le moralisme et l'austérité ? Lacan, Heidegger et Marx, articulés ensemble, permettent de dire comment une forme d'existence créative est encore possible. Une telle liberté est l'horizon de ce livre. (shrink)