Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the (...) class='Hi'>looks view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks-related reasons. (shrink)

Matthew McGrath has recently challenged all theories that allow for immediate perceptual justification. This challenge comes by way of arguing for what he calls the “Looks View” of visual justification, which entails that our visual beliefs that are allegedly immediately justified are in fact mediately justified based on our independent beliefs about the looks of things. This paper shows that McGrath’s arguments are unsound or, at the very least, that they do not cause genuine concern for the (...) species of dogmatism called “Phenomenal Explanationism”, recently introduced and defended by Kevin McCain and Luca Moretti. (shrink)

Many philosophers take experience to be an essential aspect of perceptual justification. I argue against a specific variety of such an experientialist view, namely, the Looks View of perceptual justification, according to which our visual beliefs are mediately justified by beliefs about the way things look. I describe three types of cases that put pressure on the idea that perceptual justification is always related to looks-related reasons: unsophisticated cognizers, multimodal identification, and amodal completion. I then provide (...) a tentative diagnosis of what goes wrong in the Looks View: it ascribes a specific epistemic role to beliefs about looks that is actually fulfilled by subpersonal perceptual processes. (shrink)

Michael Devitt’s views on realism and naturalism have a lot in common with those of W.V. Quine. Both appear to be realists; both accept naturalized epistemology and abandon the old goal of first philosophy; both view philosophy as continuous with the empirical procedures of science and hence view metaphysics as similarly empirical; and both seem to view realism as following from naturalism. Although Quine and Devitt share quite a bit ideologically, I think there is a deeper, more (...) fundamental dissimilarity between the two. I will explore the difference between them in an attempt to bring out the subtle complexities surrounding the issue of realism--complexities, I will argue, Devitt sometimes overlooks. I will also explore a real tension in Quine between his earlier, more pragmatic (or anti-realist) tendencies and his later, more austere realism. I will conclude by defending a more Quinean brand of realism I call internal realism. (shrink)

While the traditional understanding of the look views it in terms of shame and oppression, I read Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics with Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity to argue that the look always gives me the world and inaugurates my freedom. Even the oppressor’s look reveals that I am free and that my existence is conditioned by the existence of other free beings. Because the look gives me the world as the arena within which I act freely, it is a (...) means of grace, and receiving it only in shame is bad faith. Although my existence remains unjustifiable and this grace cannot promise salvation, the look calls me out of shame to the pursuit of my and others’ freedom, and this call is a gift. (shrink)

We can know some things about each others' mental lives. The view that some of this knowledge is genuinely perceptual is getting traction. But the idea that we can see any of each others' mental states themselves - the Simple Perceptual Hypothesis - remains unpopular. Very often the view that we can perceptually know, for example, that James is angry, is thought to depend either on our awareness of James' expression or on the way James appears - versions (...) of what I call the Expressive Hypothesis. The Expressive Hypothesis is intuitive. But in this chapter I argue that it does not allow us to do away with the thought that we sometimes perceive people's mental states. I take my arguments to provide some tentative support for the Simple Perceptual Hypothesis. (shrink)

Eugenics is often referred to in debates on the ethics of reproductive technologies and practices, in relation to the creation of moral boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable technologies, and acceptable and unacceptable uses of these technologies. Historians have argued that twentieth century eugenics cannot be reduced to a uniform set of practices, and that no simple lessons can be drawn from this complex history. Some authors stress the similarities between past eugenics and present reproductive technologies and practices (what I define (...) throughout the paper as ‘the continuity view’) in order to condemn the latter. Others focus on the differences between past and present practices (what I define throughout the paper as ‘the discontinuity view’) in order to defend contemporary reproductive technologies. In this paper, I explore the meanings of the word ‘eugenics’ and the relationship between its past and present uses in terms of contemporary debates on reproductive technologies and practices. I argue that moral disagreement about present technologies originate in divergent views of condemnable and justifiable features of the past. (shrink)

This article is on a precise kind of color primitivism, ‘ostensivism.’ This is the view that it is in the nature of the colors that they are phenomenal, non-reductive, structural, categorical properties. First, I differentiate ostensivism from other precise forms of primitivism. Next, I examine the core belief ‘Revelation,’ and propose a revised version, which, unlike standard statements, is compatible with a yet unstated but plausible core belief: roughly, that there are interesting things to be discovered about the nature (...) of the colors. Finally, I show that ostensivism is the only view on color that can accommodate both proposed core beliefs. (shrink)

The violation of Bell inequalities seems to establish an important fact about the world: that it is non-local. However, this result relies on the assumption of the statistical independence of the measurement settings with respect to potential past events that might have determined them. Superdeterminism refers to the view that a local, and determinist, account of Bell inequalities violations is possible, by rejecting this assumption of statistical independence. We examine and clarify various problems with superdeterminism, looking in particular at (...) its consequences on the nature of scientific laws and scientific reasoning. We argue that the view requires a neo-Humean account of at least some laws, and creates a significant problem for the use of statistical independence in other parts of physics and science more generally. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to defend what I call the action-oriented coding theory (ACT) of spatially contentful visual experience. Integral to ACT is the view that conscious visual experience and visually guided action make use of a common subject-relative or 'egocentric' frame of reference. Proponents of the influential two visual systems hypothesis (TVSH), however, have maintained on empirical grounds that this view is false (Milner & Goodale, 1995/2006; Clark, 1999; 2001; Campbell, 2002; Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003; (...) Goodale & Milner, 2004). One main source of evidence for TVSH comes from behavioral studies of the comparative effects of size-contrast illusions on visual awareness and visuo- motor action. This paper shows that not only is the evidence from illusion studies inconclusive, there is a better, ACT-friendly interpretation of the evidence that avoids serious theoretical difficulties faced by TVSH. (shrink)

A central claim in contemporary philosophy of mind is that the phenomenal character of experience is entirely determined by its content. This paper considers an alternative called Mode Intentionalism. According to this view, phenomenal character outruns content because the intentional mode contributes to the phenomenal character of the experience. I assess a phenomenal contrast argument in support of this view, arguing that the cases appealed to allow for interpretations which do not require positing intentional modes as phenomenologically manifest (...) aspects of experience. (shrink)

In Reasons and Persons, Parfit (1984) posed a challenge: provide a satisfying normative account that solves the Non-Identity Problem, avoids the Repugnant and Absurd Conclusions, and solves the Mere-Addition Paradox. In response, some have suggested that we look toward person-affecting views of morality for a solution. But the person-affecting views that have been offered so far have been unable to satisfy Parfit's four requirements, and these views have been subject to a number of independent complaints. This paper describes a person-affecting (...) account which meets Parfit's challenge. The account satisfies Parfit's four requirements, and avoids many of the criticisms that have been raised against person-affecting views. (shrink)

Simple claims with the verb ‘seem’, as well as the specific sensory verbs, ‘look’, ‘sound’, etc., require the speaker to have some relevant kind of perceptual acquaintance (Pearson, 2013; Ninan, 2014). But different forms of these reports differ in their perceptual requirements. For example, the copy raising (CR) report, ‘Tom seems like he’s cooking’ requires the speaker to have seen Tom, while its expletive subject (ES) variant, ‘It seems like Tom is cooking’, does not (Rogers, 1972; Asudeh and Toivonen, 2012). (...) This contrast has led some theorists to hold that the matrix subject in CR constructions is uniformly interpreted as the perceptual source (p-source) (Asudeh and Toivonen, 2012; Rett and Hyams, 2014). Others, based on examples of CR reports that seem not to require perception of the referent of the matrix subject, have taken the p-source interpretation instead to be non-uniform across CR reports (Landau, 2011; Doran, 2015). We reconsider these theoretical approaches to copy raising in light of new experimental work probing the sensitivity of these requirements to the matrix verb, the embedded ‘like’-clause, and the context. While we find some motivation for a non-uniform p-source analysis, it comes from importantly different cases than those others have relied on. Furthermore, our findings cast doubt on the prevalent assumption that the perceptual requirements of CR reports are to be captured solely by the presence or absence of the p-source interpretation. We suggest that the data motivating a non-uniform p-source view are better captured by an alternative approach, which makes use of a more minimal evidential source role, in place of the perceptual source role. We close by considering the relationship between English copy raising and evidential constructions cross-linguistically. (shrink)

In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into the naturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity (...) is constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ) philosophy. (shrink)

Susan Wolf famously claimed that the life of the moral saint is unattractive from the “point of view of individual perfection.” I argue, however, that the unattractive moral saints in Wolf’s account are self-defeating on two levels, are motivated in the wrong way, and are called into question by real-life counter-examples. By appealing to a real-life case study, I argue that the best life from the moral point of view is not necessarily unattractive from the individual point of (...) view. (shrink)

The functionalist approach to kinds has suffered recently due to its association with law-based approaches to induction and explanation. Philosophers of science increasingly view nomological approaches as inappropriate for the special sciences like psychology and biology, which has led to a surge of interest in approaches to natural kinds that are more obviously compatible with mechanistic and model-based methods, especially homeostatic property cluster theory. But can the functionalist approach to kinds be weaned off its dependency on laws? Dan Weiskopf (...) has recently offered a reboot of the functionalist program by replacing its nomological commitments with a model-based approach more closely derived from practice in psychology. Roughly, Weiskopf holds that the natural kinds of psychology will be the functional properties that feature in many empirically successful cognitive models, and that those properties need not be localized to parts of an underlying mechanism. I here skeptically examine the three modeling practices that Weiskopf thinks introduce such non-localizable properties: fictionalization, reification, and functional abstraction. In each case, I argue that recognizing functional properties introduced by these practices as autonomous kinds comes at clear cost to those explanations’ counterfactual explanatory power. At each step, a tempting functionalist response is parochialism: to hold that the false or omitted counterfactuals fall outside the modeler’s explanatory aims, and so should not be counted against functional kinds. I conclude by noting the dangers this attitude poses to scientific disagreement, inviting functionalists to better articulate how the individuation conditions for functional kinds might outstrip the perspective of a single modeler. (shrink)

Suppose you're unable to discriminate the colors of two objects. According to the triangulation view, their colors might nonetheless look different to you, and that's something you can discover as a result of further comparisons. The primary motivation for this view is its apparent ability to solve a puzzle involving a series of pairwise indiscriminable objects. I argue that, due to visual noise, the triangulation view doesn't really solve the puzzle.

The papers collected in this issue were solicited to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Donald Davidson’s birth. Four of them discuss the implications of Davidson’s views—in particular, his later views on triangulation—for questions that are still very much at the centre of current debates. These are, first, the question whether Saul Kripke’s doubts about meaning and rule-following can be answered without making concessions to the sceptic or to the quietist; second, the question whether a way can be found to answer (...) Davidson’s own doubts about the continuity of non-propositional thought and language; third, the question whether normative properties can be at once causal and prescriptive; fourth, the question whether folk psychological explanations can be at once illuminating and autonomous. The fifth paper reexamines Davidson’s take on the principle of compositionality, which always was at the centre of his theorizing about language. (shrink)

Memory perspectives on past events allegedly take one of two shapes. In field memories, we recall episodes from a first-person point of view, while in observer memories, we look at a past scene from a third-person perspective. But this mere visuospatial dichotomy faces several practical and conceptual challenges. First, this binary distinction is not exhaustive. Second, this characterization insufficiently accounts for the phenomenology of observer memories. Third, the focus on the visual aspect of memory perspective neglects emotional, agential, and (...) self-related social aspects. Fourth, the focus on the time of recall neglects the fact that visual, emotional, agential, and social aspects of perspective can also be dissociated in the original experience. In this chapter, we move away from the standard visual dichotomy. Instead, we propose that memory perspective is better understood along four lines: visual, agential, emotional, and social. Drawing on empirical research, we argue that these dimensions predict a disposition to recall a past event based on the present situation of the memorizer. This account supports seeing episodic memory as a natural kind, supported by scenario construction mechanisms and minimal memory traces. By remapping the classic distinction between field and observer perspectives along four dimensions, our proposal provides explanatory advantages and secures practical gains by enabling testable hypotheses. (shrink)

Eli Feiring has developed a concept of forward-looking responsibility in healthcare. On this account, what matters morally in the allocation of scarce healthcare resources is not people's past behaviours but rather their commitment to take on lifestyles that will increase the benefit acquired from received treatment. According to Feiring, this is to be preferred over the backward-looking concept of responsibility often associated with luck egalitarianism. The article critically scrutinises Feiring's position. It begins by spelling out the wider implications of Feiring's (...) view. Against this background, it shows that (i) Feiring's distinction between backward-looking and forward-looking responsibility is incompatible with the Scanlonian notion of responsibility she apparently endorses; (ii) her favoured forward-looking notion of responsibility is subject to the objections levelled against the luck egalitarian view (whatever the strength of such objections). (shrink)

There is more than one ‘hard problem'. Just as it is hard for consciousness to grasp itself, it is also hard to examine your own society from the ‘outside'. The same problem applies to scientific paradigms , our taken-for-granted assumptions generally, and the collective representations that sustain them -- such as soup spoons and scientific conferences . To get an ‘outside’ view of ‘Tucson III', I asked my friend Tjiniman, who is a stone-age hunter, to help me out. He (...) is studying anthropology part-time, though he does not believe everything he is told, and prefers to retain his traditional world-view. The following account is mainly his, with a few suggestions from me. (shrink)

The paper argues against a widely held synchronic view of emotional rationality. I begin by considering recent philosophical literature on various backward‐looking emotions, such as regret, grief, resentment, and anger. I articulate the general problem these accounts grapple with: a certain diminution in backward‐looking emotions seems fitting while the reasons for these emotions seem to persist. The problem, I argue, rests on the assumption that if the facts that give reason for an emotion remain unchanged, the emotion remains fitting. (...) However, I argue there are rationally self‐consuming attitudes: affective attitudes that become less fitting the longer they endure while the facts that give reason for them persist. A widely held synchronic view of fitting affective attitudes denies that fittingness at a time depends on the agent's attitudes at different times and therefore denies that the fittingness of an affective attitude can depend on its duration. Once we reject the synchronic view, we may see that affective attitudes are often fitting due to the fitting processes of which they are part. These fitting processes explain the fitting diminution of backward‐looking emotions as well as other diachronic aspects of the fittingness of emotions. -/- . (shrink)

Relevant logics provide an alternative to classical implication that is capable of accounting for the relationship between the antecedent and the consequence of a valid implication. Relevant implication is usually explained in terms of information required to assess a proposition. By doing so, relevant implication introduces a number of cognitively relevant aspects in the de nition of logical operators. In this paper, we aim to take a closer look at the cognitive feature of relevant implication. For this purpose, we develop (...) a cognitively-oriented interpretation of the semantics of relevant logics. In particular, we provide an interpretation of Routley-Meyer semantics in terms of conceptual spaces and we show that it meets the constraints of the algebraic semantics of relevant logic. (shrink)

periphery looks at you with hate. This phrase in red neon struck the visitors of Landscapes, an exhibition by Domenico Antonio Mancini in the Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples, in 2019. It was not addressed to the public but to the nineteenth-century pictorial views relocated in the last room of the exhibition, as if repainted by the immaterial vandalism of the colored light. The exhibition’s theme was the visibility of contemporary suburban environments, now accessible through Google street view (...) visualizations. Mancini’s non-representational Landscapes are Google addresses, not aesthetically appreciable but pragmatically challenging: the visitor must type on a touch screen to access to the outskirts of Naples, Palermo, Catania, Rome and Milan. The words at the end of the exhibition almost literally replicated a black graffiti drawn on Palazzo Missori in Milan. Are these relocation and remediation just about artification? What happens when, browsing Google street view, I take a close look at that graffiti recalling the political protests during the streets the 1960s? The deictic transitability in space and time of the hypermediated image can activate a fortuitous narrative and an open interpretation by looking back on the present as if it were past. Even a digital landscape is a moral landscape like that of public art for Danto, with a «internal beauty» whose meaning is not already embodied in architectural and artistic media but accessible and shareable through our portable devices. (shrink)

The purpose of this writing is to propose a frame of view, a form as the eternal world element, that is compatible with paradox within the history of ideas, modern discovery as they confront one another. Under special consideration are problems of representation of phenomena, life, the cosmos as the rational facility of mind confronts the physical/perceptual, and itself. Current topics in pursuit are near as diverse and numbered as are the possibilities for a world composed strictly of uniqueness (...) able to fill infinite space; it is assumed that not all of the paths chosen in contemporary pursuits will produce coherent determinations in an appropriate frame able to accommodate a world of nominals in motion, containing motion, and is commensurate with basic physical law and the propagation of form, change from within. Intended as a potential guiding post for the aim of reason seeking to select, define and capture topics, chosen as special examples are the works of logistician/mathematician Lewis Carroll as he presents a paradox of actuality verses the reality of perception in Alice in Wonderland, the theory of relativity of Albert Einstein as he fails to elaborate a mathematics to communicate an inertial frame of reference, and the reconstruction ideas of Jacques Derrida as he refers for contrast with the scientific world view constructed of dualisms, monisms that are conceived to have no opposites. Supporting discussion is evolved from the works of Bertrand Russell, Erwin Schrodinger, Jurgen Habermas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Michel Foucault. (shrink)

Pacifists and their opponents disagree not only about moral questions, but rather often about factual questions as well—as seen when looking at the controversy surrounding the crisis in Kosovo. According to my reconstruction of pacifism, this is not surprising since the pacifist,legitimately, looks at the facts in the light of her system of value. Her opponent, in turn, looks at the facts in the light of an alternative value system, and the quarrel between the two parties about supposedly (...) descriptive matters never ceases, as there is no objective reality about the war in question that could settle the issue.In my view, the pacifist's value-laden way of looking at reality implicitly obeys three epistemic imperatives. First, the Epistemic Imperative concerning Human Nature ("Resist demonizing the other side; always try to understand the case from the other point of view"). Second, the Epistemic Imperative concerning Non-Violent Alternatives ("Always search for non-violent alternatives to military action"). Third, the Epistemic Imperative concerning Uncontrolled Escalation ("Hone your senses to the uncontrolled, irreversible side effects of military action, particularly to the danger of military escalation leading to another world war"). Objective reality has no way of telling us how far we should go in following these imperatives. Rather, we have to make the decision about how far we are going to take them ourselves. In this way, the pacifist's epistemic imperatives are comparable to Kant's regulative principles. (shrink)

A “conceptual spaces” approach is used to formalize Aristotle’s main intuitions about time and change, and other ideas about temporal points of view. That approach has been used in earlier studies about points of view. Properties of entities are represented by locations in multidimensional conceptual spaces; and concepts of entities are identified with subsets or regions of conceptual spaces. The dimensions of the spaces, called “determinables”, are qualities in a very general sense. A temporal element is introduced by (...) adding a time variable to state functions that map entities into conceptual spaces. That way, states may have some permanency or stability around time instances. Following Aristotle’s intuitions, changes and events will not be necessarily instant phenomena, instead they could be processual and interval dependent. Change is defined relatively to the interval during which the change is taking place. Time intervals themselves are taken to represent points of view. To have a point of view is to look at the world as it is in the selected interval. Many important concepts are relativized to intervals, for instance change, events, identity, ontology, potentiality, etc. The definition of points of view as intervals allows to compare points of view in relation to all these concepts. The conceptual space approach has an immediate semantic and structural character, but it is tempting to develop also logics to describe them. A formal language is introduced to show how this could be done. (shrink)

According to Mathias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser, racial profiling can be justified in a society, such as the contemporary United States, where the legacy of slavery and segregation is found in lesser but, nonetheless, troubling forms of racial inequality. Racial profiling, Risse and Zeckhauser recognize, is often marked by police abuse and the harassment of racial minorities and by the disproportionate use of race in profiling. These, on their view, are unjustified. But, they contend, this does not mean that (...) all forms of racial profiling are unjustified; nor, they claim, need one be indifferent to the harms of racism in order to justify racial profiling. In fact, one of the aims of their paper is to show that racial profiling, suitably understood, “is consistent with support for far-reaching measures to decrease racial inequities and inequality.” Hence, one of their most striking claims, in an original and provocative paper, is that one can endorse racial profiling without being in any way indifferent to the disadvantaged status of racial minorities. In an initial response to these claims, I argued that Risse and Zeckhauser tend to underestimate the harms of racial profiling. I suggested two main reasons why they did so. The first is that they tend to identify the more serious harms associated with profiling with background racism, and therefore to believe that these are not properly attributable to profiling itself. The second reason is that they ignore the ways in which background racism makes even relatively minor harms harder to bear and to justify than would otherwise be the case. Hence, I concluded, racial profiling cannot be a normal part of police practice in a society still struggling with racism, although under very special conditions and with special regulation and compensation in place, it might be justified as an extraordinary police measure. I want to stand by those claims. However, Risse’s response to my arguments persuades me that I misinterpreted his earlier position in one significant respect. So I will start by explaining what interpretive mistake I believe that I made. I will then argue that despite Risse’s patient and careful response to my arguments, my initial concerns with his justification of profiling remain valid. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper I respond to Mathias Risse's objections to my critique of his views on racial profiling in Philosophy and Public Affairs. I draw on the work of Richard Sampson and others on racial disadvantage in the USA to show that racial profiling likely aggravates racial injustices that are already there. However, I maintain, clarify and defend my original claim against Risse that racial profiling itself is likely to cause racial injustice, even if we abstract from unfair background conditions. (...) I then respond to Levin's claims that there is no serious racial injustice in the contemporary USA and differentiate between Risse's attempt - albeit unsuccessful - to provide an egalitarian justification for racial profiling from the frankly inegalitarian assumptions that underpin the claims of Michael Levin. (shrink)

Sometimes mereologists have problems with counting. We often don't want to count the parts of maximally connected objects as full-fledged objects themselves, and we don't want to count discontinuous objects as parts of further, full-fledged objects. But whatever one takes "full-fledged object" to mean, the axioms and theorems of classical, extensional mereology commit us to the existence both of parts and of wholes – all on a par, included in the domain of quantification – and this makes mereology look counterintuitive (...) to various philosophers. In recent years, a proposal has been advanced to solve the tension between mereology and familiar ways of counting objects, under the label of Minimalist View . The Minimalist View may be summarized in the slogan: "Count x as an object iff it does not overlap with any y you have already counted as an object". The motto seems prima facie very promising but, we shall argue, when one looks at it more closely, it is not. On the contrary, the Minimalist View involves an ambiguity that can be solved in quite different directions. We argue that one resolution of the ambiguity makes it incompatible with mereology. This way, the Minimalist View can lend no support to mereology at all. We suggest that the Minimalist View can become compatible with mereology once its ambiguity is solved by interpreting it in what we call an epistemic or conceptual fashion: whereas mereology has full metaphysical import, the Minimalist View may account for our ways of selecting "conceptually salient" entities. But even once it is so disambiguated, it is doubtful that the Minimalist View can help to make mereology more palatable, for it cannot make it any more compatible with commonsensical ways of counting objects. (shrink)

I argue against the skeptical epistemological view exemplified by the Groarkes that “all theories of informal argument must face the regress problem.” It is true that in our theoretical representations of reasoning, infinite regresses of self-justification regularly and inadvertently arise with respect to each of the RSA criteria for argument cogency (the premises are to be relevant, sufficient, and acceptable). But they arise needlessly, by confusing an RSA criterion with argument content, usually premise material.

This chapter concerns the nature of our obligations as individuals when it comes to our emissions-producing activities and climate change. The first half of the chapter argues that the popular ‘expected utility’ approach to this question faces a problematic dilemma: either it gives skeptical verdicts, saying that there are no such obligations, or it yields implausibly strong verdicts. The second half of the chapter diagnoses the problem. It is argued that the dilemma arises from a very general feature of the (...) view, and thus is shared by other views as well. The chapter then discusses what an account of our individual obligations needs to look like if it is to avoid the dilemma. Finally, the discussion is extended beyond climate change to other collective impact contexts. (shrink)

Marya Schechtman has raised a series of worries for the Psychological Continuity Theory of personal identity (PCT) stemming out of what Derek Parfit called the ‘Extreme Claim’. This is roughly the claim that theories like it are unable to explain the importance we attach to personal identity. In her recent Staying Alive (2014), she presents further arguments related to this and sets out a new narrative theory, the Person Life View (PLV), which she sees as solving the problems as (...) well as bringing other advantages over the PCT. I look over some of her earlier arguments and responses to them as a way in to the new issues and theory. I argue that the problems for the PCT and advantages that the PLV brings are all merely apparent, and present no reason for giving up the former for the latter. (shrink)

The Westermarck Effect posits that intimate association during childhood promotes human incest avoidance. In previous work, I articulated and defended a version of the Westermarck Effect by developing a phylogenetic argument that has purchase within primatology but that has had more limited appeal for cultural anthropologists due to their commitment to conventionalist or culture-first accounts of incest avoidance. Here I look to advance the discussion of incest and incest avoidance beyond culture-first accounts in two ways. First, I shall dig deeper (...) into the disciplinary grooves within cultural anthropology that make attractive the view that incest has a naturalness to it that is countered only or primarily by explicit social rules, such as taboos. Second, I further explore the emerging, post-conventionalist view of incest avoidance in a more positive vein by elaborating on the nature of the Westermarckian mechanism and how it relates to such explicit social rules and our innate biological endowments. One general aim here is to overcome the bifurcation between perspectives that are seen as biological and those seen as cultural, preempting or countering the claim that rejecting culture-first accounts entails a form of biological reductionism, a general aim I have pursued in related publications on bioessentialism about kinship. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the temporal content of perceptual experience. It argues that we must recognize the existence of temporal perceptions, i.e., perceptions the content of which cannot be spelled out simply by looking at what is the case at an isolated instant. Acts of apprehension can cover a succession of events. However, a subject who has such perceptions can fall short of having a concept of time. Similar arguments have been put forward to show that a subject who (...) has spatial perceptions can fall short of having a concept of space. In both cases, it is the fact that perception is from a point of view which stands in the way of it constituting an exercise of a concept of how things are objectively. However, the paper also shows that the way in which perception is perspectival takes a different form in each of the two cases. (shrink)

Abstract A COMPARISON OF THE VIEWS OF AUGUSTINE SHUTTE AND THADDEUS METZ ON AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY AND UBUNTU ETHICS In the theoretical study of Ethics much emphasis has traditionally been placed on established ethical theories, via approaches typified e.g. as deontological, divine command, utilitarian, virtue ethics and natural ethics. At UWC all these approaches, very much entrenched in the Western academic canon, have been taught, together with ethical views carried by the world religions. Over the last few years, however, an interest (...) in the study of African ideas (philosophy, theology, worldview studies, especially around the elusive but fascinating concept of Ubuntu) has grown. This study is an attempt to make a contribution towards a more serious exchange with African ethical ideas and their application in a global context. In this mini-thesis I compare the views of two academics, Augustine Shutte and Thaddeus Metz, who have actively and deliberately worked in the field of African philosophy and ethics. Through this comparative study of two rather different readings of Ubuntu philosophy, I wish to contribute to the growing interest in ethical views and discourse emanating from African ways of looking at the world and at humanity. The well-known, recently deceased, Augustine Shutte, a Catholic scholar of repute, taught Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, and published books such as Philosophy for Africa, The Mystery of Humanity; Ubuntu, An ethic for a New South Africa and The Quest for Humanity in Science and Religion, The South African Experience. The other scholar, the American born philosopher Thaddeus Metz, started teaching Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg and shifted his intellectual attention to African ideas and ethics. Coming from a rational Kantian approach, mixed with utilitarian ethical concerns, Metz discovered the difficulty of adding another “African mix” to main stream academia, based on the comprehensive scope of the very inclusive look at what it means to be human in the quite unique African worldview. He has published widely and in depth on many aspects of this “clash of cultures” while also holding on to enlightenment ideals and an ongoing conversation with science, especially also social science. These two authors thus share many concerns and interests, but also represent two different angles and approaches into African philosophy and ethics. The question for this limited study is formulated in the short introduction: How do Shutte and Metz connect the ethical implications of a widely shared “African worldview” with the core idea of Ubuntu, and which ethical implications do they draw from their reading of Ubuntu – for Africa and the world? These questions are addressed via five chapters: In the first an introduction to the research focus and question and the second of these the field of African Philosophy and Ethics is briefly covered via appropriate literature, thus providing a framework for comparing Shutte and Metz. The third chapter deals with Shutte’s search for an Ubuntu approach to South Africa’s problems within the African and global context - via his emphasis on an inclusive anthropology of caring and justice in which the pitfalls of individualism, materialism and consumerism can be avoided while promoting a sustainable work ethos and attunement with “science”. The fourth chapter focuses on Metz’ critical deontological approach, and his attempt to take the comprehensive African worldview seriously in conversation with utility, reason and science. In the fifth chapter the comparison of these two overlapping, but still quite different with an approach that can lead to a concrete ethical conclusion and application for South Africa, Africa and the world. (shrink)

In the philosophy of perception, representationalism is the view that all phenomenological differences among mental states are representational differences, in other words, differences in content. In this paper I defend an alternative view which I call external sortalism, inspired by traditional adverbialism, and according to which experiences are not essentially representational. The central idea is that the external world serves as a model for sorting, conceptualizing, and reasoning surrogatively about perceptual experience. On external sortalism, contents are construed as (...) a kind of gloss on experiences themselves. We can retain what is attractive about representationalism, namely, that perceptual experiences can be evaluated for accuracy, without problematic commitment to the idea that they bear a substantive, representational relation to external objects and properties and that this relation determines the phenomenal character of experience. (shrink)

The concept of speciesism, coined in 1970 as an analogy to racism, has been discussed almost exclusively within philosophical circles. Here, Waldau looks at how non-human animals have been viewed in the Buddhist and Christian religious traditions.

The notion of intentionality has been in the center of the debate between dualism and physicalism quite some time. Dualism insists that intentionality is the mark of mental phenomena which separates humans from other animals whereas physicalism roughly claims that whatever there is either reducible to some physical states or explainable in terms of some physical language. But both of them are deeply troubled. Is there any other alternative? Where can we look for one? We know that Asian tradition is (...) full of organic world views. I am inclined to think that one alternative world view may come from this background. This paper tries to show that the notion of cheng(誠) intentionality is such a candidate. -/- I will advance a thesis in this paper that cheng(誠) intentionality is holistic. The notion is not only applicable to humans but also to all other phenomena. This may seem indistinguishable from physicalism in its monistic settings. Since I believe that the notion of cheng(誠) is more persuasive in explaining mental phenomena in evolutionary terms, I would argue here that the thesis can also be supported by some notions like that an information is a syntactical structure which reflects physical states and that the physicalisitic view of the world is not sufficient. (shrink)

Bioethics, neuroscience, medicine are contributing to a debate on the definition and criteria of death. This topic is very controversial, and it demonstrates clashing views on the meaning of human life and death. Official medical and legal positions agree upon a biological definition of death as irreversible cessation of integrated functioning of the organism as a whole, and whole-brain criterion to ascertain death. These positions have to face many criticisms: some scholars speak of logical and practical inconsistency, some others of (...) invalid scientific theory about the supreme integrator. In this paper some criticisms are exposed and discussed in order to reconstruct the state of the art in bioethical debate. -/- . (shrink)

I argue that Berkeley's distinctive idealism/immaterialism can't support his view that objects of sense, immediately or mediately perceived, are causally inert. (The Passivity of Ideas thesis or PI) Neither appeal to ordinary perception, nor traditional arguments, for example, that causal connections are necessary, and we can't perceive such connections, are helpful. More likely it is theological concerns,e.g., how to have second causes if God upholds by continuously creating the world, that's in the background. This puts Berkeley closer to Malebranche (...) than to Hume. -/- As far the what I call the "first strategy;" defending the passivity of ideas by ordinary introspection, I refer to the work of the French psychologist Albert Michotte,(1940) and those now extending his experiments, to show that (1) there is an immediate and quite robust visual impression of causality, (admitted in fact by Berkeley, Malebranche and Hume) and (2) of more importance, the impression isn't due to projecting into nature expectations gained from experienced regularities. (shrink)

Does Carnap’s treatment of philosophical questions about existence, such as “Are there numbers?” and “Are there physical objects?”, depend on his analytic–synthetic distinction? If so, in what way? I answer these questions by clarifying, defending, and developing the reading of Carnap’s paper “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” that W. V. Quine proposes, with little justification or explanation, in his paper “On Carnap’s Views on Ontology”. The primary methodological value of studying Quine’s reading of “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” is that it prompts (...) us to look for, and helps us to see the significance of, passages by Carnap that reveal the logical foundations of his views on ontology. Guided in this way by Quine’s reading, I show that (1) in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” Carnap’s preferred treatment of philosophical questions relies on paraphrasing them so that their answers are immediately obvious elementary logical truths, and are therefore, by his standards, trivially analytic; and (2) in its most general form, Carnap’s treatment of philosophical questions about existence depends on his controversial view that the analytic truths of a language L may include sentences that are not elementary logical truths, but that are nevertheless, by Carnap’s standards, analytic-in-L simply because we have stipulated that they are to be among the “meaning postulates” of L. (shrink)

Public attitudes towards cognitive enhancement––e.g., using stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin to improve mental functioning––are mixed. Attitudes vary by context and prompt ethical concerns about fairness, obligation, and authenticity/character. While people may have strong views about the morality of cognitive enhancement, how these views are affected by the physical characteristics of enhancers is unknown. Visible facial anomalies (e.g., scars) bear negatively on perceptions of moral character. This pre-registered study (osf[dot]io/uaw6c/) tested the hypothesis that such negative biases against people with facial (...) anomalies extend to moral beliefs surrounding their use of cognitive enhancement. In an online survey, 941 participants made moral judgments in response to a vignette about a person who had to decide whether or not to enhance. The vignette was accompanied by a face photograph that ostensibly depicted the potential enhancer and either did or did not have visible anomalies. Participants then learned whether the person ultimately decided to enhance. Next, participants played a modified Trust Game with, they were told, the person from the photograph/vignette. Participants judged enhancement to be less fair and enhancers less authentic if they had facial anomalies, while effects on judgments of moral obligation and on behavior were not detected. These findings extend previous work showing that people with visible differences are subject to an “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype that has negative consequences for perceptions of their moral character. While anomalous faces were judged more harshly, these judgments did not appear to affect behavior. These results are discussed in relation to discrimination and policy. (shrink)

Dedication: I would like to dedicate this essay to Mort Morehouse, whose intelligence, warmth, and good humour sustains NAACI to this day. I would like, too, to dedicate this essay to Nadia Kennedy who, in her paper “Respecting the Complexity of CI,” suggests that respect for the rich non-reductive emergent memories and understandings that evolve out of participating in the sort of complex communicative interactions that we experienced at the 2012 NAACI conference requires “a turning around and looking back so (...) that we might understand it better.” Thus, though “we cannot grasp the essence of the system in some determinate way, since each description provides a limited view, and portrays some aspect of the system from a specific position inside or outside it, and at a specific point in time,” nonetheless respect requires that we try “to take different ‘snapshots’ of such systems and attempt to make sense of them.” It is as a result of this urging that the following snapshot was attempted. My thanks to Nadia for being such an inspiration, and to all the participants for making this conference such a memorable occasion. (shrink)

Recent studies demonstrating epigenetic and developmental sensitivity to early environments, as exemplified by fields like the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and environmental epigenetics, are bringing new data and models to bear on debates about race, genetics, and society. Here, we first survey the historical prominence of models of environmental determinism in early formulations of racial thinking to illustrate how notions of direct environmental effects on bodies have been used to naturalize racial hierarchy and inequalities in the past. (...) Next, we conduct a scoping review of postgenomic work in environmental epigenetics and DOHaD that looks at the role of race/ethnicity in human health (2000–2021). Although there is substantial heterogeneity in how race is conceptualized and interpreted across studies, we observe practices that may unwittingly encourage typological thinking, including: using DNA methylation as a novel marker of racial classification; neglect of variation and reversibility within supposedly homogenous racial groups; and a tendency to label and reify whole groups as pathologized or impaired. Even in the very different politico-economic and epistemic context of contemporary postgenomic science, these trends echo deeply held beliefs in Western thinking which claimed that different environments shape different bodies and then used this logic to argue for essential differences between Europeans and non-Europeans. We conclude with a series of suggestions on interpreting and reporting findings in these fields that we feel will help researchers harness this work to benefit disadvantaged groups while avoiding the inadvertent dissemination of new and old forms of stigma or prejudice. (shrink)

Philosophers have been contemplating the nature of the mind for centuries and have produced mountains of intricate jargon, thought experiments, and views, that map a landscape of interminable disputes. One such dispute is between philosophers who believe that the mind can be explained as a mechanism and philosophers who insist it cannot. In this paper I take a look at this dispute and argue that it is unique in philosophy and a key to the nature of the mind.

Bell-CHSH inequalities are trivial algebraic properties satisfied by each line of an Nx4 spreadsheet containing ±1 entries, thus it is surprising that their violation in some experiments allows us to speculate about the existence of non-local influences in nature and casts doubt on the existence of the objective external physical reality. Such speculations are rooted in incorrect interpretations of quantum mechanics and in a failure of local realistic hidden variable models to reproduce quantum predictions for spin polarization correlation experiments (SPCE). (...) In these models, one uses a counterfactual joint probability distribution of only pairwise measurable random variables (A, A′, B, B′) to prove Bell-CHSH inequalities. In SPCE, Alice and Bob, using 4 incompatible pairs of experimental settings, estimate imperfect correlations between clicks registered by their detectors. Clicks announce the detection of photons and are coded by ±1. Expectations of corresponding random variables—E (AB), E (AB′), E (A′B), and E (A′B′)—are estimated and compared with quantum predictions. These estimates significantly violate CHSH inequalities. Since variables (A, A′) and (B, B′) cannot be measured jointly, neither Nx4 spreadsheets nor a joint probability distribution of (A, A′, B, B′) exist, thus Bell-CHSH inequalities may not be derived. Nevertheless, imperfect correlations between clicks in SPCE may be explained in a locally causal way, if contextual setting-dependent parameters describing measuring instruments are correctly included in the description. The violation of Bell-CHSH inequalities may not therefore justify the existence of a spooky action at the distance, super-determinism, or speculations that an electron can be both here and a meter away at the same time. In this paper we review and rephrase several arguments proving that such conclusions are unfounded. Entangled photon pairs cannot be described as pairs of socks nor as pairs of fair dice producing in each trial perfectly correlated outcomes. Thus, the violation of inequalities confirms only that the measurement outcomes and ‘the fate of photons’ are not predetermined before the experiment is done. It does not allow for doubt regarding the objective existence of atoms, electrons, and other invisible elementary particles which are the building blocks of the visible world around us. (shrink)

A liberalism which scorns all individualism is fundamentally misguided. This is the chief thesis of this paper. To argue for it, I look closely at some key concepts. The concepts of morislity and individualism are crucial. I emphasize Dewey on the "individuality of the mind" and a Deweyan discussion of language, communication, and community. The thesis links individualism and liberalism, and since appeals to liberalism have broader appeal in the present context of discussions, I start with consideration of liberalism. The (...) aim is to dispute overly restrictive conceptions and explore a broader perspective. To bring the argument to a close, attention turns first to Dewey on value inquiry, to Dewey's "democratic individualism" (cf. Dewey 1939, 179), and to the concept of moral community. Disputing the acquisitiveness of utilitarian influences in classical liberalism, a Deweyan argument from the nature of moral community supports re-emphasis on individualism in contemporary liberal thought. (shrink)

Bell-CHSH inequalities are trivial algebraic properties satisfied by each line of an Nx4 spreadsheet containing ±1 entries, thus it is surprising that their violation in some experiments allows us to speculate about the existence of non-local influences in nature and casts doubt on the existence of the objective external physical reality. Such speculations are rooted in incorrect interpretations of quantum mechanics and in a failure of local realistic hidden variable models to reproduce quantum predictions for spin polarization correlation experiments (SPCE). (...) In these models, one uses a counterfactual joint probability distribution of only pairwise measurable random variables (A, A′, B, B′) to prove Bell-CHSH inequalities. In SPCE, Alice and Bob, using 4 incompatible pairs of experimental settings, estimate imperfect correlations between clicks registered by their detectors. Clicks announce the detection of photons and are coded by ±1. Expectations of corresponding random variables—E (AB), E (AB′), E (A′B), and E (A′B′)—are estimated and compared with quantum predictions. These estimates significantly violate CHSH inequalities. Since variables (A, A′) and (B, B′) cannot be measured jointly, neither Nx4 spreadsheets nor a joint probability distribution of (A, A′, B, B′) exist, thus Bell-CHSH inequalities may not be derived. Nevertheless, imperfect correlations between clicks in SPCE may be explained in a locally causal way, if contextual setting-dependent parameters describing measuring instruments are correctly included in the description. The violation of Bell-CHSH inequalities may not therefore justify the existence of a spooky action at the distance, super-determinism, or speculations that an electron can be both here and a meter away at the same time. In this paper we review and rephrase several arguments proving that such conclusions are unfounded. Entangled photon pairs cannot be described as pairs of socks nor as pairs of fair dice producing in each trial perfectly correlated outcomes. Thus, the violation of inequalities confirms only that the measurement outcomes and ‘the fate of photons’ are not predetermined before the experiment is done. It does not allow for doubt regarding the objective existence of atoms, electrons, and other invisible elementary particles which are the building blocks of the visible world around us. (shrink)

Looking at every sense this article proves through deduction; that your mind needs a source to dream. Dreams are old experienced essences of platonic forms. You can only experience new forms essences when you are awake because of initial experiences. If dreams are old, experienced essences (what this article proves) therefore you know you are awake when you initially sense new experienced essences.