This article introduces and defends the “pathological complexity thesis” as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that led to the extinction of complex multicellular animal life following the Avalon explosion and that was subsequently solved during the Cambrian explosion. This is the economic trade-off problem of (...) having to deal with a complex body with high degrees of freedom, what I call “pathological complexity.” By modeling the explosion of this computational complexity using the resources of state-based behavioral and life history theory we will be able to provide an evolutionary bottom-up framework to make sense of subjective experience and its function in nature by paying close attention to the ecological lifestyles of different animals. (shrink)

Objective: The aim of this study is to evaluate relationship between ostiomeatal complex variations (OMC) and maxillary sinus pathologies in children and adolescents using cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT). -/- Methods: CBCT images of 72 patients (44 males and 28 females) aged 7-18 years were evaluated retrospectively. Presence of nasal septal deviation (NSD), nasal septal pneumatization (NSP), concha bullosa (CB), accessory maxillary ostium (AMO), agger nasi cell (ANC), Haller cell (HC), Onodi cell (OC), ethmoid sinusitis and maxillary sinus pathologies were investigated. (...) Maxillary sinus pathologies were classified. Correlations of OMC variations with each other, maxillary sinus pathologies and ethmoid sinusitis were investigated. Chi-square test was used to analyze relationships among variables and distribution of parameters. -/- Results: NSD was determined in 70.8%, NSP in 40.3%, ethmoid sinusitis in 75%, maxillary sinus pathology in 34.8% of images. OMC variations rates were detected as CB 31.3%, AMO 16%, ANC 16%, HC 24.3% and OC 18.8%. The most common maxillary sinus pathology was localized mucosal thickening, with a rate of 15.3% on right and 22.2% on left. Statistically significant differences were determined between almost all OMC variations with each other, and between anatomical variations in OMC with maxillary sinus pathologies except for NSP and AMO (p < 0.05). The presence of ethmoid sinusitis was more common in males (p =0.026). -/- Conclusion: Anatomical variations in OMC had no significant effect on maxillary sinus pathology except for NSP and AMO. Besides, most of anatomical variations in OMC were statistically significantly correlated with each other. CBCT visualization of these variations is important for sinonasal surgery and is an effective method in children and adolescents with low radiation dose and high image quality compared to computed tomography. (shrink)

While some trust theorists have adverted to the vulnerabilities involved in trust, especially vulnerability to betrayal, the literature on trust has not engaged with recent work on the ethics of vulnerability. This paper initiates a dialogue between these literatures, and in doing so begins to explore the complex interrelations between vulnerability and trust. More specifically, it aims to show how trust can both mitigate and compound vulnerability. Through a discussion of two examples drawn from literary sources, the paper also investigates (...) the effects of pathogenic vulnerability on the psychic economies of trust and distrust. (shrink)

From the outset, critical social theory has sought to diagnose people’s participation in their own oppression, by revealing the roots of irrational and self-undermining choices in the complex interplay between human nature, social structures, and cultural beliefs. As part of this project, Ideologiekritik has aimed to expose faulty conceptions of this interplay, so that the objectively pathological character of what people are “freely” choosing could come more clearly into view. The challenge, however, has always been to find a way (...) of doing this without arrogantly assuming special access to what is good for people. And this danger of paternalism is one to which social theorists have all too often fallen prey. In this brief essay, I focus on contemporary instances of clearly self-defeating behavior in contexts of complex choices. I begin by discussing a recent attempt to diagnose and solve these failures of choices, namely the public policy recommendations of behavioral economist Richard Thaler and reform-minded legal theorist Cass Sunstein. Their influential “libertarian paternalist” approach is particularly interesting, both in what it includes (attention to the socially constructed nature of choice situations and the roots of the problems in human nature) and in what it leaves out (an understanding of the social construction of human nature and an adequate appreciation of the value of autonomy). After discussing it, I consider a broadly perfectionist alternative, to the effect that the problem lies in a failure to adequately appreciate the importance of developing autonomy. I then turn to sketching the outlines of a new approach, based on the concept of “autonomy gaps,” which approaches overly demanding policies in relational and action-theoretical terms. In the final section, I show how this provides the basis for an analysis both in terms of a critique of ideology and of social pathology. (shrink)

This goal of this thesis in the philosophy of nature is to move us closer towards a true biological science of consciousness in which the evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity of consciousness are moved from the field’s periphery of investigations to its very centre. Rather than applying theories of consciousness built top-down on the human case to other animals, I argue that we require an evolutionary bottomup approach that begins with the very origins of subjective experience in order to (...) make sense of the place of mind in nature. To achieve this goal, I introduce and defend the pathological complexity thesis as both a framework for the scientific investigation of consciousness and as a lifemind continuity thesis about the origins and function of consciousness. (shrink)

Ideologies, worldviews, or simply personal theories, often acquire a distorted and pathological character, and become a factor of alienation rather than an epistemic resource and an aid for personal existence. This paper attempts to better define the limits and characteristics of this experience, which we call distorted intellectual beliefs, or general conceptual beliefs (GB), while trying to highlight both its sometimes dramatic background and its personal and social consequences, which are no less potentially deleterious. We believe that such experiences (...) should not be confused tout court with a broader and more complex phenomenon, such as extremism and politico-religious radicalism, but are a specific typology of that broader and multifaceted fact that is self-deception. We hypothesize that the self-deception implicit in experiences of intellectual distortion produces a cognitive dissonance of which the subject is normally, though with varying intensity, aware (or may become aware through honest introspection). The phenomenon occurs in two forms: one is normal (sporadic), the other is exceptional (systematic). The passage from one to the other is a complex process of escalation and de-escalation, on which multiple external and internal variables act. In its ascending path, it essentially coincides with a process of psychological polarization and cognitive "de-pluralization", while its descending phase marks a return to reality and a "re-pluralization", where the subject returns to being what he basically is, namely, an active and tireless meaning seeker. In the central part of the chapter, similarities and differences between processes of deradicalization and phenomena of religious deconversion are analyzed, with reference, among others, to the case of the Austro-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler. -/- An abridged version of this text has been delivered for the Workshop "Explaining Extreme Belief and Extreme Behavior", September 15-16, 2022, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I am grateful to David Konstan (NYU) for reading and commenting on a first version of this chapter and to Rik Peels (VUA) for his comments and questions during the Workshop. I would also like to thank my bachelor's and master's students at UDG, who discussed these topics at length with during semester 2022-B. (shrink)

In order to develop a true biological science of consciousness, we have to remove humans from the center of reference and develop a bottom-up comparative study of animal minds, as Donald Griffin intended with his call for a “cognitive ethology.” In this article, I make use of the pathological complexity thesis (Veit 2022a, b, c ) to show that we can firmly ground a comparative study of animal consciousness by drawing on the resources of state-based behavioral life history (...) theory. By comparing the different life histories of gastropods and arthropods, we will be able to make better sense of the possible origins of consciousness and its function for organisms in their natural environments. (shrink)

This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multidimensional phenomenon in nature rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. -/- The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a science (...) of human consciousness. This book aims to advance a true Darwinian science of consciousness in which its evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity are moved from the field’s periphery to its very centre, thus enabling us to integrate consciousness into an evolutionary view of life. Accordingly, this book has two objectives: (i) to argue for the need and possibility of an evolutionary bottom-up approach that addresses the problem of consciousness in terms of the evolutionary origins of a new ecological lifestyle that made consciousness worth having and (ii) to articulate a thesis and beginnings of a theory of the place of consciousness as a complex evolved phenomenon in nature that can help us to answer the question of what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or a crow. -/- A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in advancing our understanding of animal minds as well as anyone with a keen interest in how we can develop a science of animal consciousness. (shrink)

Like many others, I see Crump et al. (2022) as a milestone for improving upon previous guidelines and for extending their framework to decapod crustaceans. Their proposal would benefit from a firm evolutionary foundation by adding the comparative measurement of life-history complexity as a ninth criterion for attributing sentience to nonhuman animals.

Critics have often misunderstood the higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global The higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness has often been misunderstood by critics. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global workspace theory (GWT) and early sensory models (e.g. first-order local recurrency theories). For example, HOT has been criticized for over-intellectualizing consciousness. We show (...) that while higher-order states are cognitively assembled, the requirements are actually considerably less than often presumed. In this sense HOT may be viewed as an intermediate position between GWT and early sensory views. Also, we clarify that most proponents of HOT do not stipulate consciousness as equivalent to metacognition or confidence. Further, compared to other existing theories, HOT can arguably account better for complex everyday experiences, such as of emotions and episodic memories. This makes HOT particularly useful as a framework for conceptualizing pathological mental states. (shrink)

In this volume, leading philosophers of psychiatry examine psychiatric classification systems, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, asking whether current systems are sufficient for effective diagnosis, treatment, and research. Doing so, they take up the question of whether mental disorders are natural kinds, grounded in something in the outside world. Psychiatric categories based on natural kinds should group phenomena in such a way that they are subject to the same type of causal explanations and respond similarly to (...) the same type of causal interventions. When these categories do not evince such groupings, there is reason to revise existing classifications. The contributors all question current psychiatric classifications systems and the assumptions on which they are based. They differ, however, as to why and to what extent the categories are inadequate and how to address the problem. Topics discussed include taxometric methods for identifying natural kinds, the error and bias inherent in DSM categories, and the complexities involved in classifying such specific mental disorders as "oppositional defiance disorder" and pathological gambling. -/- Contributors George Graham, Nick Haslam, Allan Horwitz, Harold Kincaid, Dominic Murphy, Jeffrey Poland, Nancy Nyquist Potter, Don Ross, Dan Stein, Jacqueline Sullivan, Serife Tekin, Peter Zachar. (shrink)

This monograph contrasts two prominent models of education, Competence-Based Education (CBE), more recent and currently dominant in most school systems around the world, and Bildung-Oriented Education (BOE), once the basis of the school systems of Northern Europe. CBE is assessment-oriented and interprets learning as the acquisition of clearly definable and allegedly measurable competences, and is supported by supranational organisations, such as the OECD, which approach education from the perspective of human capital theory. BOE is instead teaching-oriented and characterises learning holistically (...) as aimed at the progressive articulation of a meaningful ‘big picture’ in the student’s mind. Emerged in Northern Europe under the influence of the ideals of the Enlightenment and Neo-Humanism of individual and collective autonomy and responsibility, BOE was subsequently enriched with a hermeneutical approach to teaching and socio-political objectives of emancipation and solidarity originating within Critical Theory. The book first analyses CBE and argues that, in spite of its celebrated ‘scientificity’, it is internally incoherent and unreliable, contributes to structural forms of oppression and injustice, can foster social pathologies, and fails to provide students with the kind of intellectual autonomy they need as both human beings and citizens of our complex post-industrial societies. Then, it introduces BOE and articulates and defends an updated version of it from objections raised by critical theorists, poststructuralists and postcolonial thinkers. It argues that BOE is a coherent and flexible model of education that endows students with autonomy and responsibility, can reduce structural forms of oppression and injustice, and can heal social pathologies. (shrink)

In clinical medicine, a diagnosis can offer an explanation of a patient's symptoms by specifying the pathology that is causing them. Diagnoses in psychiatry are also sometimes presented in clinical texts as if they pick out pathological processes that cause sets of symptoms. However, current evidence suggests the possibility that many diagnostic categories in psychiatry are highly causally heterogeneous. For example, major depressive disorder may not be associated with a single type of underlying pathological process, but with a (...) range of different causal pathways, each involving complex interactions of various biological, psychological, and social factors. This paper explores the implications of causal heterogeneity for whether psychiatric diagnoses can be said to serve causal explanatory roles in clinical practice. I argue that while they may fall short of picking out a specific cause of the patient's symptoms, they can nonetheless supply different sorts of clinically relevant causal information. In particular, I suggest that some psychiatric diagnoses provide negative information that rules out certain causes, some provide approximate or disjunctive information about the range of possible causal processes, and some provide causal information about the relations between the symptoms themselves. (shrink)

This paper brings the concept of affective scaffolding to bear on a much-debated controversy: the expanding use of psy- chiatric medications to treat an increasingly broad range of human discontents. ‘Affective scaffolding’ refers to the variety of ways that agents engage with, recruit or modify their environments to actively shape their emotions, moods, or other affective phenomena. Psychiatric drugs are designed, marketed, and prescribed as technologies that have the special power to transform affective life by intervening on the pathological (...) underpinnings of distress and suffering to change how we feel. The paper develops an account of psychiatric drug use as affective scaffolding and examines how psychiatrization – the complex social process through which psychiatry comes to influence more and more domains of human life – impacts this form of scaffolding. I propose that psychiatrization influences affective scaffolding by biasing individuals toward psychiatric drugs to manage an expanding array of affective experiences. In some cases, I argue, this results in bad pharmaceutical scaffolding. Bad pharmaceutical scaffolding emerges when an agent is influenced to select and rely upon psychiatric drugs in attempts to exert individual control over distress and suffering where (1) at least some of the key determinants of these affective experiences are properties of the agent’s environment, in contrast to, in a strict sense, properties internal to the person, and (2) pharmaceutical scaffolding obviates the need for or displaces other non-pharmaceutical options that would better serve the agent's affective needs and interests. (shrink)

Depression is vastly heterogeneous in its symptoms, neuroimaging data, and treatment responses. As such, describing how it develops at the network level has been notoriously difficult. In an attempt to overcome this issue, a theoretical “negative prediction mechanism” is proposed. Here, eight key brain regions are connected in a transient, state-dependent, core network of pathological communication that could facilitate the development of depressive cognition. In the context of predictive processing, it is suggested that this mechanism is activated as a (...) response to negative/adverse stimuli in the external and/or internal environment that exceed a vulnerable individual’s capacity for cognitive appraisal. Specifically, repeated activation across this network is proposed to update an individual’s brain so that it increasingly predicts and reinforces negative experiences over time—pushing an individual at-risk for or suffering from depression deeper into mental illness. Within this, the negative prediction mechanism is poised to explain various aspects of prognostic outcome, describing how depression might ebb and flow over multiple timescales in a dynamically changing, complex environment. (shrink)

Precision medicine and molecular systems medicine (MSM) are highly utilized and successful approaches to improve understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of many diseases from bench-to-bedside. Especially in the COVID-19 pandemic, molecular techniques and biotechnological innovation have proven to be of utmost importance for rapid developments in disease diagnostics and treatment, including DNA and RNA sequencing technology, treatment with drugs and natural products and vaccine development. The COVID-19 crisis, however, has also demonstrated the need for systemic thinking and transdisciplinarity and the limits (...) of MSM: the neglect of the bio-psycho-social systemic nature of humans and their context as the object of individual therapeutic and population-oriented interventions. COVID-19 illustrates how a medical problem requires a transdisciplinary approach in epidemiology, pathology, internal medicine, public health, environmental medicine, and socio-economic modeling. Regarding the need for conceptual integration of these different kinds of knowledge we suggest the application of general system theory (GST). This approach endorses an organism-centered view on health and disease, which according to Ludwig von Bertalanffy who was the founder of GST, we call Organismal Systems Medicine (OSM). We argue that systems science offers wider applications in the field of pathology and can contribute to an integrative systems medicine by (i) integration of evidence across functional and structural differentially scaled subsystems, (ii) conceptualization of complex multilevel systems, and (iii) suggesting mechanisms and non-linear relationships underlying the observed phenomena. We underline these points with a proposal on multi-level systems pathology including neurophysiology, endocrinology, immune system, genetics, and general metabolism. An integration of these areas is necessary to understand excess mortality rates and polypharmacological treatments. In the pandemic era this multi-level systems pathology is most important to assess potential vaccines, their effectiveness, short-, and long-time adverse effects. We further argue that these conceptual frameworks are not only valid in the COVID-19 era but also important to be integrated in a medicinal curriculum. (shrink)

Malicious moral envy is an aversive reaction to a rival’s moral properties or accomplishments, accompanied by a tendency to level-down the target by morally tarnishing or sabotaging them. In this essay I give an account of malicious moral envy, showing how it is a sub-type of envy more generally. I describe Donald Trump’s behaviors toward Barack Obama and Anthony Fauci as a case study of malicious moral envy. I argue that malicious moral envy is puzzling, first because it is self-defeating, (...) and then—more interestingly—because it betrays an ambivalence about morality and moral requirements. I explore how malicious moral envy relates to other issues in the literature on moral ambivalence, including moral exemplars, moral saints, admirable immorality, and the pathologizing of moral outliers. Ultimately I suggest that mild forms of malicious moral envy may play an important role in helping agents navigate the socially complex and constantly changing landscape of moral requirements. (shrink)

Abstract This chapter addresses the meta-ethical and psychological implications of Murdoch’s epistemic internalism—her claim that moral responsiveness is a condition of reliable and accurate moral evaluations. Part 1 examines Murdoch’s view that moral judgments feature a quasi-experiential phenomenology analogous to that of certain perceptual ones. Focussing on the phenomenology of our perception-based judgments of certain aspectual properties (e.g., pictorial and musical ones) it argues that such judgments support both Murdoch’s analogy and the internalism she takes it to imply. In Part (...) 2 this chapter considers Murdoch’s internalism as a psychological thesis, assessing it in view of several empirical studies of psychopathic subjects. It argues that the psychopath’s distinctive complex of cognitive and motivational deficits supports Murdoch’s conviction that moral judgment and moral motivation are interdependent. Just as Murdoch believed, many of our ordinary, non-pathological moral beliefs seem to be the natural progeny of our responsiveness to other persons, and so inherit the intrinsic power that others have to move us. (shrink)

Does self-knowledge help? A rationalist, presumably, thinks that it does: both that self-knowledge is possible and that, if gained through appropriate channels, it is desirable. Descartes notoriously claimed that, with appropriate methods of enquiry, each of his readers could become an expert on herself or himself. In this paper I reject the widespread interpretation of Descartes which makes his dualist view of the body as negative or as pathological as that expressed by Socrates in Plato's *Phaedo*. I argue not (...) just that the old moral cosmobiological disgust at the body is absent in Descartes, but that, positively, Descartes *requires* us to contract full intimacy with our own body and our own peculiar past. He does wish for objective knowledge in these difficult domains, but this does not render his neurological ethics a universal prescription, for such objective knowledge is nevertheless knowledge of local phenomena, of the peculiarities of idiosyncratic associations. Civilsing the body, in seeking dominion over it, is a *process*; and, I will argue, Descartes was too firmly convinced that the body constantly changes its nature to have thought consistently that the process could come to an end. My case rests first on an analysis, in the next three sections, of capacities which, according to Descartes, we share with other animals. Sections 2 and 3 argue for strongly dynamic interpretations of Descartes' views on body and on corporeal memory respectively. Then Section 4 backtracks to support more firmly the surprisingly complex form of 'automatic' responses which I attribute to Descartes' beast- and body-machines. Finally, in section 5, I reintroduce the soul and the capacities for reflection which it allows in the human compound, showing how closely Descartes thinks we must work with the body, its habits and its history, in deliberately moulding our associative responses with active mind. (shrink)

1. Law and morals as two systems of norms, and the inner morality of law 2. Law as a value bearer and as a mere external indicator 3. The inner and external moral credit of legislator 4. The inner morality of law. As to the last paragraph, the most striking feature of the inner morality of law is that it is such a possible characteristic, surplus quality which is not a sine qua non, which law is conceivable without. However, it (...) is a question whether law can long do without it? In principle, the legislator is free in deciding on what legal consequence he attaches to what course of conduct14 and it is also desirable that legal concepts be freed from moral overtones. Nevertheless, the legal complex cannot be torn out of its social context, nor can it steadily conflict with other complexes (religions, moral, or political values, norms and ideologies) law is to develop in living interrelationship with. Otherwise, it is subject to danger that (I) law-observance in average cases is weakened; (2) the reified functioning of and approach to law are strengthened and make law alienated; and (3) it blurs the social objectives the law intends to serve and, especially in hard cases, makes its application rootless and floating. A pathological situation only becomes more pathological, if the pathology of contents is accompanied by the pathology of means. Or, it brings the promise of real solution closer, if the adequateness of means also provides, by the strength of publicity, for the direct mobilization of society. That explains why it is a topical question what I have proposed to term the inner morality of law. [For the text, see my L&Ph, 77–89] . (shrink)

The article presents the sources and definitions of the concepts «system» and «lifeworld», emphasizing how the colonization of the lifeworld by the system appears as a pathological process, in the presence of which a critical stance must be maintained. Facing the increase of the systemic complexity, it is necessary to ensure the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld through communicative action. Although we share with Habermas the meaning of his critique of the colonization, we present some objections to the (...) dichotomous opposition of both spheres, inasmuch as it confers the economical and administrative systems with an ontological status that ultimately safeguards them from any possible critique. (shrink)

In the monograph Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience, Hauskeller raises the important subject of individualization and alienation in psychedelic psychotherapy. Under the prevailing conditions of neoliberalism, Hauskeller contends that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy appropriates Indigenous knowledges in an oppressive fashion, may be instrumentalised to the ends of productivity gain and symptom suppression, and may be utilised to mask societal systems of alienation. Whilst offering a valuable socio-political critique of psychedelics' clinical uptake, we suggest that Hauskeller's view does not adequately acknowledge (...) the ways in which psychedelics offer a challenge to the Western reductive bio-medical understanding of healing and wellbeing. It is contended herein that Indigenous knowledges, in alliance with a range of emerging sciences, offer both an engagement with ethnomedicines in a less harmfully appropriative fashion, and a renewed understanding of the means by which psychedelics achieve therapeutic change. With this understanding, what becomes apparent are the potential ways in which psychedelic medical usage may produce positive feedback upon the oppressive systems in which we are embedded. That is, transpersonal experience through encounters with the ineffable may offer a revisioning of Western psychology and cognitive science. Indeed, if psychedelics are approached with an understanding of the actual means by which they produce therapeutic outcomes—changing mental representations of the self, or self-insight derived through non-ordinary states of consciousness—then psychedelic psychotherapy offers a reimagining of psychiatric nosology, challenging conventional understandings of both pathology and wellbeing through an overturning of specified and discrete deficit models of psychopathology. This may provide both a critique of the prevailing categories used to describe madness and an expansion of our understanding of the mind-body relation, as well as an increased recognition of positive psychology grounded in cross-cultural contemplative traditions. This provides an implicit challenge to the pharmaceutical industrial-complex and its profit motives; and the corresponding neoliberalist, globalising tendencies which Hauskeller seeks to address. -/- . (shrink)

In § 6 of his General Psychopathology (1st edition 1913) Jaspers distinguished between drives, wants and volitions as three different and irreducible kinds of motivational phenomena which are involved in human decision making and which may lead to successful actions. He has characterized the qualitative differences between volitions in comparison with basic vital drives and emotional wants such as being (a.) intentional, (b.) content-specific and (b.) directed towards concrete objects and actions as goals. Furthermore, Jaspers has presented and discussed three (...) kinds of pathological problems about motivation and willing. (1.) The first kind is impulsive action or impulsive behaviour, as e.g. in psychoses or personality disorders, which he compares with instinctive action which are both without any previous hesitation, deliberation and reflection of any presumable consequences, but still very different with respect to their motivational content. (2.) The second kind of pathological problems about motivation and willing are the inhibitions of the will and Jaspers is discussing two major kinds of them: (a.) the energetic or motivational inhibition of the will which is an inability of willing due to the mere lack of any drives and motives, as in the case of any severe and pathological depression; (b.) the cognitive inhibition of the will which is due to the pathological inability to be aware of and understand properly the complexity and difficulty of real life situations in order to solve some given tasks by appropriate decision making, as e.g. in some cases of schizophrenia. (3.) The third kind is a pathological weakness of the will which is extraordinary and not familiar to normal human adults. This pathological kind of weakness of the will consist in the complete causal ineffectiveness of the subjectively felt impulse of willing which is not leading to any inward and outward observable action, such as e.g. as a movement of the limbs or some verbal utterance. This pathological weakness of the will is a complete ineffectiveness of the volitional impulse and therefore different from what philosophers discuss under the heading of weakness of the will which presuppose some evaluation of the intended resp. realized action as ethically, morally or religiously right or wrong. Finally, there are three kinds of normal or non-pathological weakness of the will, as discussed by philosophers: (A.) ethical weakness of the will as in Aristotle’s disagreement about akrasia with the Platonic Socrates; (B) moral weakness of the will as in Kant’s analysis of the absence or failure of any specific moral reasoning by pure practical reason as opposed to mere strategic and pragmatic reason or as the occurrence of a self-deceptive “dialectics of the exception“; (C.) religious weakness of the will as in Pauls personal insight about the incoherence between his high spiritual aspirations and his factual ethical achievements. (shrink)

Is the boundary between the normal and the pathological real or fiction? Are health and disease just a matter of fact or are they value-laden? Here we present some examples of how alleged diseases can be invented and propagated by the industry (disease mongering) or by the methodology of medical science itself. We show that the boundary between health and disease is blurred and depends on individual and social representations, culture relative ways of categorising things and people, and by (...) the society’s degree of medicalisation. However, we do not mean that it is not real, rather that it is more complex than expected, as the subjectivity of social constructions and individual experiences makes them no less real. Finally, we conclude that health and disease belong to both objective and subjective kinds of reality, so the fictional can be real. (shrink)

This paper deals with a classical issue that remains at the core of the contemporary philosophical debate: the fact that the meaning of life is interlaced—in both negative and positive ways, with respect to morality—with happiness. On some historical conceptions, individual happiness must be sacrificed for the moral (universal, objective) good of a life, where the good fundamentally coincides with the meaning of life. On other approaches, happiness and flourishing (where flourishing is understood in terms of life’s meaningfulness) consist in (...) good action and a good life. On still other views, happiness, while equated with the meaning of life, is reduced to mere pleasure, to a sensorial state that can be influenced by outside forces. In the current literature, the prevailing interpretations of this question are largely deontological, eudaimonic or hedonic in character. Moving from the Schelerian theory of the stratification of the emotional life, and emphasizing the affective side of this broadly ethical question, this paper intends to examine this issue through the lens of phenomenology. From this perspective, the connection between happiness and the meaning not only of life but also of existence can be understood in light of what appears to underlie both phenomena: the entire existence of the individual, which is revealed most clearly in an act of personal love. Since this paper considers the condition humaine in all its complexity, that is to say, even in its fragility and vulnerability, within this framework I will also consider possible abnormal manifestations of happiness. Following Rümke’s clinical observations of pathological frameworks in which the feeling of happiness manifests itself, this paper shows how the deepest feeling of happiness, understood as a Schelerian personality feeling, can remain untouched by pathology. In his classic (but largely unappreciated) enquiry into the happiness syndrome, Rümke engages in a fruitful dialogue with Scheler, whose theory of the stratification of emotional life plays a crucial role in the former’s study of the phenomenology and the clinical aspects of happiness. Not only is Rümke’s Zur Phänomenologie und Klinik des Glücksgefühls an excellent example of applied phenomenology, but it also confirms the results of Scheler’s research on affective life. (shrink)

We propose that Saussure’s signifiers must be processed in the left brain hemisphere (in right handed people) and the signified may be processed in the right. This proposition has consequences for understanding human cognitive phenomena and their pathologies, and can also be related to the passive and active process of thinking, as described by Karl Jaspers. Saussure studied signifiers and their relationships. He left the signified to be studied by psychologists, but there is no consensus about it. According to some (...) linguists, the signified, or the meaning, is the specific activity or succession of bodily states related to each signifier. Learning is the process of linking a signifier (a represented object) to a signified or meaning (a specific activity). However, human beings can represent signifiers autonomously because words and drawings are easily produced with small movements and have syntactic, referential and logical rules of combination. If they are processed in the left hemisphere, the meaning (the signified) is only found when the right hemisphere is reached. The right hemisphere can also work independently, as for instance, when we imagine a story which has to find the words in the left hemisphere. The complex relationship between the hemispheres through the corpus callosum is decisive for telling stories and having self-consciousness. (shrink)

During the Middle Ages, physicians, philosophers, and theologians developed a complex and rich discourse on the concept of sickness. Illness (infirmitas) was perceived as the natural state of existential imperfection for homo viator, fallen due to sin and impaired in his bodily integrity. Leprosy, smallpox, plague and the other collective diseases that constantly plagued medieval societies prompted reflections on etiology and modes of transmission of epidemics. Building on Galenic teachings, medieval medicine – both Arabic and Latin – delved into the (...) study of fevers. Key concepts in medical pathology, such as the humors, humidum radicale, and spiritus, were assimilated and reinterpreted within philosophical and theological frameworks. The ten contribution collected in this volume explore this rich array of concepts and themes by closely examining the theories and works of prominent and lesser-known figures in medicine, theology, and philosophy active across Latin Christendom, the Islamic context, and the Jewish world: from Augustine to ʿAlī ibn al-ʿAbbas al-Maǧūsī, from Avicenna to Constantine the African, from Maimonides to Albert the Great, from Arnau de Vilanova to Gentile da Foligno, from Henry of Herford to Michele Savonarola. (shrink)

In recent years, an array of critical emotion theorists have emerged who call for change with respect to how emotion theory is done, how emotions are understood, and how we do emotion. In this chapter, I draw on the work that some of these authors have produced to analyze how emotional marginalization of trans and disabled identities is experienced, considering in particular how this emotional marginalization results from the long history of pathologization of trans and disabled people. The past and (...) current pathologization of trans and disabled people is produced through normative assumptions, values, and beliefs that uphold systems of normalcy, including assumptions, values, and beliefs about how we feel and express emotions. In order to examine these issues, I identify three different stages at which emotional marginalization may take place: emotion experience, emotional display, and emotion recognition. In other words, emotional marginalization of trans and disabled people can occur at any of these stages. The central concern of my chapter is thus to show how emotional marginalization, at each of these stages, affects trans and disabled people. (shrink)

Pathologies of agency affect both groups and individuals. I present a case study of agential pathology in a group, in which supposedly rogue members of a group act in light of what they take the group’s interests and attitudes to be, but in a way that goes against the group’s explicitly stated agential point of view. I consider several practical concerns brought out by rogue member action in the context of a group agent, focusing in particular on how it undermines (...) the agency of the group and whether or not the group agent itself may be responsible for it. (shrink)

Aside from the systematic theory of recognition, Honneth’s work in the last decade has also centered around a less commented-upon theme: the critical social theoretic diagnosis of social pathologies. This paper claims first that his diverse diagnoses of specific social pathologies can be productively united through the conceptual structure evinced by second-order disorders, where there are substantial disconnects, of various kinds, between first-order contents and second-order reflexive understandings of those contents. The second major claim of the paper is that once (...) we understand social pathologies as second-order disorders, it becomes apparent that critical social theory must do more than accurately identify and explicate these disorders at the phenomenological and action-theoretic levels. It must further engage in insightful sociological explanations of the social causes of those pathologies in order to further the prognostic and therapeutic tasks implied by the aim of developing a social theory with emancipatory intent. The paper argues that the identificatory and explicative components of diagnostic social theory have been fulfilled by Honneth to a much greater degree than the latter components of explanation, prognosis and therapy. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, Axel Honneth has written extensively on the notion of social pathology, presenting it as a distinctive critical resource of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, in which tradition he places himself, and as an alternative to the mainstream liberal approaches in political philosophy. In this paper, I review the developments of Honneth's writing on this notion and offer an immanent critique, with a particular focus on his recent major work "Freedom's Right". Tracing the use of, and problems (...) internal to, Honneth's concept of social pathology serves to demonstrate his increasing reformism. It also serves to catalogue some of the dead ends that Critical Theory should avoid in taking up the idea of social pathology. The implication is not that this idea should be dropped. Rather, the paper is undertaking the necessary step of clearing the ground for further progress to take place on the question of what role the idea of social pathology can and should play in Critical Theory. The paper is critical in nature (and relentlessly so), but ultimately serves a constructive purpose. (shrink)

Following the recent practice turn in privacy research, informational privacy is increasingly analyzed with regard to the “appropriate flow of information” within a given practice, which preserves the “contextual integrity” of that practice (Nissenbaum, 2010, p. 149; 2015). Such a practice-theoretical take on privacy emphasizes the normative structure of practices as well as its structural injustices and power asymmetries, rather than focusing on the intentions and moral considerations of individual or institutional actors. Since privacy norms are seen to be institutionalized (...) via the role obligations of the practice's participants, this approach can analyze structural and systematic privacy infringements in terms of “defective role performances and defective social relations” (Roessler & Mokrosinska, 2013, p. 780). -/- Unfortunately, it is still often somewhat unclear what this exactly means within the context of informational privacy, why these performances and relations are defective and for whom. This raises the common objection of a so-called “practice positivism” (Applbaum, 1999, p. 51), that is, the difficulty of practice–theoretical accounts to take a practice-independent standpoint, from which to normatively evaluate the existing practice norms themselves. For example, Nissenbaum herself initially argues for a “presumption in favor of the status quo” with respect to the appropriateness and flow of privacy norms within a practice (Nissenbaum, 2004, p. 127). Such a “practice conservatism” (Nissenbaum, 2010, p. 169) comes dangerously close to committing a naturalistic fallacy, if not undergirded by practice-external criteria (which is ultimately what she does). -/- Merely resorting to existing practice norms to assess what defective role performances amount to, only shifts the question from how to recognize an appropriate flow of information to the question of how to recognize those defective role performances and social relations. Against this backdrop, the central aim of this article is to shed light on this question without resorting to practice-independent first principles or far-reaching universalistic anthropological assumptions. For this, I will analyze the notion of “defective role performances and social relations” in terms of social pathologies.1 Doing so has two advantages: First of all, it can draw on already existing concepts and distinctions, which help to categorize the different levels of analysis that exist in informational privacy research and situate the notion of “defective role performances” within them (Section 1). Second, those concepts and distinctions can serve as a basis for establishing a typology of phenomena with regard to deficient practices of informational privacy (Section 4). (shrink)

In Vagueness and Contradiction (2001), Roy Sorensen defends and extends his epistemic account of vagueness. In the process, he appeals to connections between vagueness and semantic paradox. These appeals come mainly in Chapter 11, where Sorensen offers a solution to what he calls the no-no paradox—a “neglected cousin” of the more famous liar—and attempts to use this solution as a precedent for an epistemic account of the sorites paradox. This strategy is problematic for Sorensen’s project, however, since, as we establish, (...) he fails to resolve the semantic pathology of the no-no paradox. (shrink)

This chapter aims to distinguish between pathologies of agency in the strict sense and mere sources of impediments or distortion. Expanding on a recent notion of necessarily less-than-successful agency, it complements a mainstream approach to mental disorders and anomalous psychological conditions in the philosophy of mind and action. According this approach, the interest of such clinical case studies is heuristic, to differentiate between facets of agency that are functionally and conceptually separate even though they typically come together. Yet, in the (...) absence of independent criterion for a pathology of as opposed to inner obstacle to agency, this heuristic is at risk of becoming circular or uninformative, falling back on a clinical diagnosis it is meant to take as a starting point only. The chapter develops such a criterion and shows how it could work tracking agential achievement across two core dimensions of agency: planning and responsiveness to reasons. The discussion concludes with some implications on assessing decisional capacity and safeguarding agent autonomy in psychiatric settings. (shrink)

Complex problem solving (CPS) and related topics such as dynamic decision-making (DDM) and complex dynamic control (CDC) represent multifaceted psychological phenomena. In a broad sense, CPS encompasses learning, decision-making, and acting in complex and dynamic situations. Moreover, solutions to problems that people face in such situations are often generated in teams or groups. In turn, this adds another layer of complexity to the situation itself because of the emerging issues that arise from the social dynamics of group interactions. This (...) framing of CPS means that it is not a single construct that can be measured by using a particular type of CPS task (e.g. minimal complex system tests), which is a view taken by the psychometric community. The proposed approach taken here is that because CPS is multifaceted, multiple approaches need to be taken to fully capture and understand what it is and how the different cognitive processes associated with it complement each other. (shrink)

Bradley Armour-Garb and James A. Woodbridge, in Pretense and Pathology, make an ambitious and far-ranging case that philosophical fictionalism (particularly the pretence variety that they favour) illuminates several long-standing philosophical puzzles posed by words in ordinary language, such as ‘exist’, ‘true’ and ‘means that’, as well as the more technical, ‘refers to’, ‘proposition’ and ‘satisfies’. Along the way, Armour-Garb and Woodbridge discuss topics in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, ontology, epistemology and more. An important aspect of their project is (...) its nominalist aspiration: by showing (if they do) that pretence is involved when we use the foregoing terms, they hope to show that it’s false that these uses induce ontological commitments (to, e.g., propositions or properties). In this respect, their pretence approach is yet another attempt to undercut the family of indispensability arguments (pioneered by W.V.O. Quine) that prima facie force ontological commitments by means of indispensable language usage. (shrink)

Does a diagnosis of brain dysfunction matter for ascriptions of moral responsibility? This chapter argues that, while knowledge of brain pathology can inform judgments of moral responsibility, its evidential value is currently limited for a number of practical and theoretical reasons. These include the problem of establishing causation from correlational data, drawing inferences about individuals from group data, and the reliance of the interpretation of brain findings on well-established psychological findings. Brain disorders sometimes matter for moral responsibility, however, because they (...) change an individual’s moral psychology in a way that is beyond their control. While control over psychological changes is not an excusing factor, brain disorders can mitigate moral responsibility because they confront individuals with new psychological deficits or urges for which their previous moral education and existing external and internal moral resources have not prepared them. (shrink)

This essay examines the connection between fear and the psychopathologies it can bring, looking in particular at the fears that individuals experience in the face of the climate crisis and environmental degradation more generally. We know that fear can be a source of good and ill. Fears of climate-change-driven heat waves, for instance, can spur both activism and denial. But as of yet, we don’t have a very good understanding of why eco-fears, as we will call them, shape our thoughts (...) and actions in the ways that they do. More importantly, we also don’t really understand why some experiences of eco-fear can lead to depression, PTSD, and other psychopathologies. In an effort to make some progress on this front, we look more closely at the role that feelings of agency – our general feeling that we have enough ability to address the threats and challenges we face – play in shaping our fears. (shrink)

Marion Godman makes the argument that Pathological Withdrawal Syndrome (PWS) makes the case for psychiatric disorders as a natural kind. Godman argues that we can classify kinds according to their shared ‘grounding’, but we need not know what the grounding is to know that the natural is a natural kind. However, I argue that Godman erroneously classifies PWS as its own natural kind when it is in fact a variant of depression, which is its own natural kind. Cooper highlights (...) culture-bound syndromes, which can explain the discrepancy between the different diagnosis rates for psychiatric disorders among different cultures. Taking culture-bound syndromes into account, I conclude that PWS is a type of depression that is culture-specific. (shrink)

Consciousness has been the bone of contention for philosophers throughout centuries. Indian philosophy largely adopted lived experience as the starting point for its explorations of consciousness. For this reason, from the very beginning, experience was an integral way of grasping consciousness, whose validity as a tool was considered self-evident. Thus, in Indian philosophy, the question was not to move from the brain to mind but to understand experience of an individual and how such an experience is determined through mental structures (...) (and secondarily, the preoccupation with the brain and its relation to the mind). In contrast, cognitive science (the study of mind and cognition through 1 interdisciplinary methods, with emphasis on computational methods) found its debates soaked in discussion which primarily involved the brain and mind. Experience was not considered a primary source of information and its validity had to be established to consider it a source of information of mind. With the rise of physicalism and realization that mental states are correlative to brain states, the body was virtually neglected from involvement in understanding the mind and the attempts to reduce mind to the brain were rampant. The inability to explain subjective experience of an individual through neuroscientific findings alone has urged philosophers to explore other ways of understanding the ontology of mind. Over the last few years, embodied cognition and enactive approach have brought back the body as a central participant in this debate, providing fertile grounds to explain the relation of brain, body and mind. This paper proposes that we understand the brain as a complex system from which the mind emerges. This emergence is marked by the development of novel property of self-consciousness in human beings. The mind is a process which is embedded throughout the body and thus, the body acts as an actualizing medium for the individual. Thus, the brain is a necessary condition for the mind to be while the mind is embedded throughout the body. The brain and mind are in reciprocal causal relationship with one another, as is the body and environment with one another. In this paper, embodied cognition is understood through principles of Merleau Ponty's idea of embodiment, than through Andy Clark and Francis Varela's alone. (shrink)

‘Complexics’ denotes the meta-transdisciplinary field specifically concerned with giving us suitable cognitive tools to understand the world’s complexity. Additionally, the use of the adjective ‘complexical’ would avoid the common confusion caused by the adjective ‘complex’, which belongs to everyday usage and already has its own connotations of complication and confusion. Thus, ‘complexical’ thinking and ‘complexical’ perspective would provide clearer terms, be freer of confusion, and refer more precisely to epistemic elements in contrast to the ‘complexity’ typical of many (...) phenomena of reality. In short, the world would be ‘complex’, but our way of looking at the world would be ‘complexical’. As a meta-transdiscipline, ‘complexics’ would carry on the perspective of cybernetics: “Cybernetics deals with all forms of behaviour insofar as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible. The materiality is irrelevant… The truths of cybernetics are not conditional on their being derived from some other branch of science. Cybernetics has its own foundations” (Ashby, 1956:1). Thus, it has a distinctly transdisciplinary mission to provide concepts, schema and possibilities of thinking and representation able to express the multidimensional and systemic interwovenness and interdependence of the many, highly significant phenomena of reality that have these characteristics. On the level of theory, complexics needs to provide a set of principles, concepts and conceptual landscapes that can be applied transversally to distinct areas of knowledge and phenomena of reality, enabling us to gain a much firmer grasp of the complex aspects of their existence than we currently have. For this reason, our aim needs to be, as Morin says, not “to reduce complexity to simplicity, [but] to translate complexity into theory” (1994:315). (shrink)

Just as sadness is not always a symptom of mood disorder, irrational beliefs are not always symptoms of illness. Pathological irrational beliefs are distinguished from non-pathological ones by considering whether their existence is best explained by assuming some underlying dysfunctions. The features from which to infer the pathological nature of irrational beliefs are: un-understandability of their progression; uniqueness; coexistence with other psycho-physiological disturbances and/or concurrent decreased levels of functioning; bizarreness of content; preceding organic diseases known to be (...) associated with irrational beliefs; treatment response to medical intervention, etc. Severe irrationality is sometimes caused by normal human motivation rather than by mental or physical dysfunction. Pure forms of self-deception may satisfy the diagnostic criteria of delusional disorder, but there may be no evidence that suggests that they are caused by illness. Although those with pathological delusions do not recognize their delusions as symptomatic of illness, differentiating pathological beliefs from normal irrational beliefs is vitally important: If a belief is pathological, psychiatrists must seriously consider treating the patient against her will. If it is not pathological, conversely, involuntary treatments are prohibited because they offend her basic autonomy. (shrink)

Unified and causal complex-dynamic origin of standard (special and general) relativistic and quantum effects revealed previously at the lowest levels of world interaction dynamics is explicitly generalised to all higher levels of unreduced interaction processes, thus additionally confirming the causally complete character of complex-dynamical, naturally quantised relativity, which does not contain any artificially added, abstract postulates. We demonstrate some elementary applications of this generalised quantum relativity at higher levels of complex brain and social interaction dynamics.

This paper, "The Ecological Pathology of Man," is an expanded excerpt from the author's book, "The Pathology of Man: A Study of Human Evil." ¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶ When taken as a serious and dispassionate object of study from the standpoint of the science of pathology, the human species is easily recognized as a global pathogen. Incontrovertible evidence on all sides tells us this, and yet we have steadfastly avoided an honest look in the mirror. We so often choose—willfully and with strong convictions (...) sustained by homocentric prejudice—to hide the facts from ourselves, and to proceed with untroubled ignorance to overlook the worldwide human and natural devastation for which our species is responsible. (shrink)

Computational complexity has often been ignored in the philosophy of mind, in philosophical artificial intelligence studies. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First and foremost, to show the importance of complexity rather than computability in philosophical and AI problems. Second, to rephrase the notion of computability in terms of solvability, i.e., treating computability as non-sufficient for establishing intelligence. The Church-Turing thesis is therefore revisited and rephrased in order to capture the ontological background of spatial and temporal (...) class='Hi'>complexity. Third, to emphasize ontological differences between different time complexities, which seem to provide a solid base for a better understanding of artificial intelligence in general. (shrink)

A general mathematical framework, based on countable partitions of Natural Numbers [1], is presented, that allows to provide a Semantics to propositional languages. It has the particularity of allowing both the valuations and the interpretation Sets for the connectives to discriminate complexity of the formulas. This allows different adequacy criteria to be used to assess formulas associated with the same connective, but that differ in their complexity. The presented method can be adapted potentially infinite number of connectives and (...) truth values, therefore, it can be considered a general framework to provide semantics to several of the known logic systems (eg, LC, L3 LP, FDE). The presented semantics allow to converge to different standard semantics if the separation complexity procedure is annulled. Therefore, it can be understood as a framework that allows greater precision (in complexity terms) with respect to formula satisfaction. Naturally, because of how it is built, it can be incorporated into non-deterministic semantics. The presented procedure also allows generating valuations that grant a different truth value to each formula of propositional language. As a positive side effect, our method allows a constructive proof of the equipotence between N and N^n for all Natural n. (shrink)

Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) names a contingently clustered class of methods and theses that have dominated English-speaking epistemology for about the past half-century. The major contemporary theories of SAE include versions of foundationalism, coherentism, reliabilism, and contextualism. While proponents of SAE don’t agree about how to define naturalized epistemology, most agree that a thoroughgoing naturalism in epistemology can’t work. For the purposes of this paper, we will suppose that a naturalistic theory of epistemology takes as its core, as its starting-point, (...) an empirical theory. The standard argument against naturalistic approaches to epistemology is that empirical theories are essentially descriptive, while epistemology is essentially prescriptive, and a descriptive theory cannot yield normative, evaluative prescriptions. In short, naturalistic theories cannot overcome the is-ought divide. Our main goal in this paper is to show that the standard argument against naturalized epistemology has it almost exactly backwards. (shrink)

In Kripke’s classic paper on truth it is argued that by adding a new semantic category different from truth and falsity it is possible to have a language with its own truth predicate. A substantial problem with this approach is that it lacks the expressive resources to characterize those sentences which fall under the new category. The main goal of this paper is to offer a refinement of Kripke’s approach in which this difficulty does not arise. We tackle this characterization (...) problem by letting certain sentences belong to more than one semantic category. We also consider the prospect of generalizing this framework to deal with languages containing vague predicates. (shrink)

We introduce the notion of complexity, first at an intuitive level and then in relatively more concrete terms, explaining the various characteristic features of complex systems with examples. There exists a vast literature on complexity, and our exposition is intended to be an elementary introduction, meant for a broad audience. -/- Briefly, a complex system is one whose description involves a hierarchy of levels, where each level is made of a large number of components interacting among themselves. The (...) time evolution of such a system is of a complex nature, depending on the interactions among subsystems in the next level below the one under consideration and, at the same time, conditioned by the level above, where the latter sets the context for the evolution. Generally speaking, the interactions among the constituents of the various levels lead to a dynamics characterized by numerous characteristic scales, each level having its own set of scales. What is more, a level commonly exhibits ‘emergent properties’ that cannot be derived from considerations relating to its component systems taken in isolation or to those in a different contextual setting. In the dynamic evolution of some particular level, there occurs a self-organized emergence of a higher level and the process is repeated at still higher levels. -/- The interaction and self-organization of the components of a complex system follow the principle commonly expressed by saying that the ‘whole is different from the sum of the parts’. In the case of systems whose behavior can be expressed mathematically in terms of differential equations this means that the interactions are nonlinear in nature. -/- While all of the above features are not universally exhibited by complex systems, these are nevertheless indicative of a broad commonness relative to which individual systems can be described and analyzed. There exist measures of complexity which, once again, are not of universal applicability, being more heuristic than exact. The present state of knowledge and understanding of complex systems is itself an emerging one. Still, a large number of results on various systems can be related to their complex character, making complexity an immensely fertile concept in the study of natural, biological, and social phenomena. -/- All this puts a very definite limitation on the complete description of a complex system as a whole since such a system can be precisely described only contextually, relative to some particular level, where emergent properties rule out an exact description of more than one levels within a common framework. -/- We discuss the implications of these observations in the context of our conception of the so-called noumenal reality that has a mind-independent existence and is perceived by us in the form of the phenomenal reality. The latter is derived from the former by means of our perceptions and interpretations, and our efforts at sorting out and making sense of the bewildering complexity of reality takes the form of incessant processes of inference that lead to theories. Strictly speaking, theories apply to models that are constructed as idealized versions of parts of reality, within which inferences and abstractions can be carried out meaningfully, enabling us to construct the theories. -/- There exists a correspondence between the phenomenal and the noumenal realities in terms of events and their correlations, where these are experienced as the complex behavior of systems or entities of various descriptions. The infinite diversity of behavior of systems in the phenomenal world are explained within specified contexts by theories. The latter are constructs generated in our ceaseless attempts at interpreting the world, and the question arises as to whether these are reflections of `laws of nature' residing in the noumenal world. This is a fundamental concern of scientific realism, within the fold of which there exists a trend towards the assumption that theories express truths about the noumenal reality. We examine this assumption (referred to as a ‘point of view’ in the present essay) closely and indicate that an alternative point of view is also consistent within the broad framework of scientific realism. This is the view that theories are domain-specific and contextual, and that these are arrived at by independent processes of inference and abstractions in the various domains of experience. Theories in contiguous domains of experience dovetail and interpenetrate with one another, and bear the responsibility of correctly explaining our observations within these domains. -/- With accumulating experience, theories get revised and the network of our theories of the world acquires a complex structure, exhibiting a complex evolution. There exists a tendency within the fold of scientific realism of interpreting this complex evolution in rather simple terms, where one assumes (this, again, is a point of view) that theories tend more and more closely to truths about Nature and, what is more, progress towards an all-embracing ‘ultimate theory’ -- a foundational one in respect of all our inquiries into nature. We examine this point of view closely and outline the alternative view -- one broadly consistent with scientific realism -- that there is no ‘ultimate’ law of nature, that theories do not correspond to truths inherent in reality, and that successive revisions in theory do not lead monotonically to some ultimate truth. Instead, the theories generated in succession are incommensurate with each other, testifying to the fact that a theory gives us a perspective view of some part of reality, arrived at contextually. Instead of resembling a monotonically converging series successive theories are analogous to asymptotic series. -/- Before we summarize all the above considerations, we briefly address the issue of the complexity of the {\it human mind} -- one as pervasive as the complexity of Nature at large. The complexity of the mind is related to the complexity of the underlying neuronal organization in the brain, which operates within a larger biological context, its activities being modulated by other physiological systems, notably the one involving a host of chemical messengers. The mind, with no materiality of its own, is nevertheless emergent from the activity of interacting neuronal assemblies in the brain. As in the case of reality at large, there can be no ultimate theory of the mind, from which one can explain and predict the entire spectrum of human behavior, which is an infinitely rich and diverse one. (shrink)