We analyse the tensions in a hybrid collaboration and how these are mitigated using boundary-spanning community impact, leading to compatibility between distinctive institutional logics. Our qualitative longitudinal study undertaken during 2011–2016 involved reviewing literature and archival data, key informant interviews, workshop and focus groups. We analysed common themes within the data, relating to our two research questions concerning how and why hybrids collaborate, and how resulting tensions are mitigated. The findings suggest a viable model of service delivery termed hybridized collaboration (...) in which the inherent tensions from different institutional logics do not prevent success. Paradoxically, multiple logics are a basis for the partnership’s existence, but the ability to achieve different and occasionally conflicting aims simultaneously can be difficult, resulting in tensions. We offer two novel insights. First, we highlight how social enterprise hybrids collaborate locally and in multi-organizational relationships. We found that the initial opportunity to collaborate was catalysed by the existence of shared objectives. Pre-existing relationships between organizations, and the existence of synergistic capabilities also influence the choice of partners. Secondly, we identify how tensions arise, and are mitigated via several factors including the pre-existing relationships, allowing for regular “spaces of negotiation” between collaborators, the shared social mission, community social impact, the resulting public relations, and shared resources and knowledge. (shrink)

We investigate the impact of informal arguments on judgments about thought experiment cases in light of Deutsch and Cappelen’s mischaracterization view, which claims that philosophers’ case judgments are primarily based on arguments and not intuitions. If arguments had no influence on case judgments, this would seriously challenge whether they are, or should be, based on arguments at all—and not on other cognitive sources instead, such as intuition. In Experiment 1, we replicated Wysocki’s (Rev Philos Psychol 8(2):477–499, 2017) pioneering study on (...) a Gettier-style case, and we confirmed that the informal arguments used by him had no significant effect. However, we also included an improved argument for ascribing knowledge, which did have a significant effect even in Wysocki’s original design. We therefore followed up with Experiment 2 on three Gettier-style cases, where we used a more natural dialogical format for presenting both case descriptions and informal arguments. Overall, we found a clear impact of prima facie good pro and con arguments on case judgments. The issue of argument impact is thus no obstacle to arguing about thought experiments. (shrink)

There are at least two different aspects of our rational evaluation of agents’ doxastic attitudes. First, we evaluate these attitudes according to whether they are supported by one’s evidence (substantive rationality). Second, we evaluate these attitudes according to how well they cohere with one another (structural rationality). In previous work, I’ve argued that substantive and structural rationality really are distinct, sui generis, kinds of rationality – call this view ‘dualism’, as opposed to ‘monism’, about rationality – by arguing that the (...) requirements of substantive and structural rationality can come into conflict. In this paper, I push the dialectic on this issue forward in two main ways. First, I argue that the most promising ways of resisting the diagnosis of my cases as conflicts still end up undermining monism in different ways. Second, supposing for the sake of argument that we should understand the cases as conflicts, I address the question of what we should do when such conflicts arise. I argue that, at least in a prominent kind of conflict case, the coherence requirements take precedence over the evidential requirements. (shrink)

Some combinations of attitudes--of beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on--do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of "structural rationality" that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet a number of surprisingly difficult challenges arise for this idea. These challenges have recently led many philosophers to attempt to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a "shadow" of "substantive rationality"--that is, correctly responding to one's (...) reasons. -/- In *Fitting Things Together*, Alex Worsnip pushes back against this trend--defending the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality, distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality, and tackling the most important challenges for this view. In so doing, he gives an original positive theory of the nature of coherence and structural rationality that explains how the diverse range of instances of incoherence can be unified under a general account, and how facts about coherence are normatively significant. He also shows how a failure to focus on coherence requirements as a distinctive phenomenon and distinguish them adequately from requirements of substantive rationality has led to confusion and mistakes in several substantive debates in epistemology and ethics. -/- Taken as a whole, Fitting Things Together provides the first sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phenomenon. (shrink)

Outside the philosophy classroom, global skeptics – skeptics about all (purported) knowledge of the external world – are rare. But there are people who describe themselves as “skeptics” about various more specific domains, including self-professed “skeptics” about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. There is little to no philosophical literature that juxtaposes the climate change skeptic with the external world skeptic. While many “traditional” epistemologists assume that the external world skeptic poses a serious philosophical challenge in a way that the (...) climate change skeptic doesn’t, many “applied” or “social” epistemologists assume that there isn’t much to be learned from debates about the external world skeptic, finding her challenge to be distant from both common sense and real-world concerns. I try to show that both of these views are mistaken. The external world skeptic raises deep questions that are important for our everyday deliberation about what to believe, and there are significant structural parallels between the arguments for external world skepticism and those for at least a form of climate change skepticism that is idealized – but not too idealized! – from the views of flesh-and-blood climate change skeptics. As such, we have strong reasons to think in parallel about how to reply to both skeptics’ challenges. I thus finish by (briefly) considering how different widespread responses to the external world skeptic might or might not generalize happily to the climate change skeptic’s challenge. (shrink)

Especially but not exclusively in the United States, there is a significant gulf between expert opinion and public opinion on a range of important political, social, and scientific issues. Large numbers of lay people hold views contrary to the expert consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccines, and economics. Much political commentary assumes that ordinary people should defer to experts more than they do, and this view is certainly lent force by the literally deadly effects of many denials of (...) established science. But there are complex philosophical issues here, concerning, among other things, (i) what an expert is; (ii) what kind of deference is called for; (iii) and when deference is called for. This entry gives an overview of these three issues and recent work on them. It then examines some potential collective and pragmatic disadvantages of deference, before concluding with reflections on what we can say to those who distrust experts. (shrink)

This is volume One of texts (from sanskrit and Tibetan sources) of the two planned volumes on Buddhist Ligic (the second volume to be on topics and opponents).

In this unique study Fulford combines the disciplines of rigorous philosophy with an intimate knowledge of psychopathology to overturn traditional hegemonies. The patient replaces the doctor at the heart of medicine. Moral theory and the logic of evaluation replace epistemology as the focus of philosophical enquiry. Ever controversial, mental illness is at the interface of philosophy and medicine. Mad or bad? Dissident or diseased? Dr Fulford shows that it is possible to achieve new insights into these traditional dilemmas, insights at (...) once practically relevant and philosophically significant. (shrink)

Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to capture the folk concept of lying. Four hundred participants were presented with fourteen vignettes containing utterances that communicate conversational implicatures which the speaker believes to (...) be false. We further collected several potential proxy measures of lying, to get a better understanding of when a deceptive implicature is considered a case of lying. The results indicate that most implicatures (ten out of fourteen) were evaluated as lies and that lie ratings were closely tracked by the degree to which speakers were considered to have committed themselves to the truth of the content conveyed by their deceptive implicatures. (shrink)

This essay examines a recent line of thought in aesthetics that challenges realist-leaning aesthetic theories. According to this line of thought, aesthetic diversity and disagreement are good, and our aesthetic judgments, responses, and attachments are deeply personal and even identity-constituting. These facts are further used to support anti-realist theories of aesthetic normativity. I aim to achieve two goals: (1) to disentangle arguments concerning diversity, disagreement, and personality; and (2) to offer realist-friendly replies to all three.

The ability to feel pain is a property of human beings that seems to be based entirely in our biological natures and to place us squarely within the animal kingdom. Yet the experience of pain is often used as an example of a mental attribute with qualitative properties that defeat attempts to identify mental events with physiological mechanisms. I will argue that neurophysiology and psychology help to explain the interwoven biological and subjective features of pain and recommend a view of (...) pain which differs in important respects from the one most commonly accepted. (shrink)

Foundationalist, Coherentist. Skeptic etc., have all been united in one respect—all accept epistemic justification cannot result from an unending, and non‐repeating. chain of reasons. Peter Klein has recently challenged this minimal consensus with a defense of what he calls “Intinitism”—the position that justification can result from such a regress. Klein provides surprisingly convincing responses to most of the common objections to Infinitism, but I will argue that he fails to address a venerable metaphysical concern about a certain type of regress. (...) My conclusion will be that until Klein answers these metaphysical worries he will not have restored Infinitism as a viable option in epistemology. (shrink)

The term ‘coherence’ (and its antonym ‘incoherence’) is used in a bewildering variety of ways in epistemology (and in philosophy more broadly). This entry attempts to bring some discipline to uses of the term by offering a taxonomy of notions of coherence (and incoherence), and then surveying which of the resulting notions is (or should be) at work in the various different contexts in which it is deployed.

The lack of access to gender-affirming surgery represents a significant unmet health care need within the transgender community, frequently resulting in depression and self-destructive behavior. While some transgender people may have access to gender reassignment surgery, an overwhelming majority cannot afford facial feminization surgery. The former may be covered as a “medical necessity,” but FFS is considered “cosmetic” and excluded from insurance coverage. This demarcation between “necessity” and “cosmetic” in transgender health care based on specific body parts is in direct (...) opposition to the scientific community’s understanding of gender dysphoria and professional guidelines for transgender health. GRS affects one’s ability to function in an intimate relationship, while FFS has the same impact on social interactions an, therefore may have a far greater implication for one’s quality of life. FFS is a cost-effective intervention that needs to be covered by insurance policies. The benefits of such coverage far exceed the insignificant costs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 29.2 (2005) 269-285 [Access article in PDF] Oedipus The King: Temperament, Character, and Virtue Grant Gillett Robin Hankey University of Otago I Recent discussions of ethics and literature suggest that there is a relationship between reading (or, better, immersing oneself in) literature (in particular, fiction) and the virtues. Nussbaum goes so far as to claim not only that good literature is conducive to moral sense (...) and sensibility but also that "the well-lived life is a work of literary art."1 The character development in most substantial fictional work that aims to engage us through its realism and truth to the human condition suggests that there is such a thing as a quasi-stable character and that an agent's character plays a significant role in the way not only that the person acts but also in the kinds of thing that happen to him or her. For a certain kind of virtue theorist, the internal harmony of character required for a person to do the right thing in a diverse range of situations involves cultivating exactly those skills required to live well. This thesis amounts to a claim that there is a close, indeed conceptual, relationship between right living and good living and that the type of character which results from cultivating the virtues is a character conducive to getting the best out of the situations that life throws in our way, whereas the vicious character reveals itself by causing strife, harm, and even tragedy.Gilbert Harman, criticizing virtue ethics on the basis of some key experiments in social psychology which have led to the idea of a "fundamental attribution error," argues that people do not have enduring character traits of the type required to sustain such a position.2 His critique has itself been attacked on the basis that what the experiments show is not the absence of character traits but their ability [End Page 269] to be influenced by the demands of a situation.3 Our objection is against the conception of virtues being attacked and also his sweeping conclusion about human nature and it has two strands. First we argue that phronesis, as the hallmark of a virtuous character, is a mix of skills, abilities, and attitudes honed in such a way as to allow the person to act fittingly in different life situations. Second, character runs true to type in an individual and even runs in families.We find support for both claims in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. This is, of course, a myth but one that has spoken to human beings across the ages and it recognizes both that different individuals show certain regularities in their modes of relationship and their conduct and that these tendencies are often familial, contributing significantly to the events marking family stories and traditions. Phronesis or practical wisdom is the skill to negotiate the challenges that life produces when fate deals one a hand of this (genetic and genealogical) kind. In the process of making the case we will support the claim that fiction "can significantly contribute to moral understanding by revealing what certain situations amount to" and therefore that it "can bring home to us the force of, for example, moral dilemmas" and indeed moral concepts, and we will use the Oedipus story to reflect on the lessons emerging from one version of virtue ethics.4We approach the Oedipus myth through Sophocles' tragedy in which an oracle about patricide and incest plays itself out in the lives of certain characters. The relevance for virtue ethics arises from the ways in which characters in the play react to their predicament and try to cope with the situations they must face. In moral life, individuals need to find strategies to deal with challenges they face both as individuals and as persons-in-relationships-with-others. The reactions portrayed in Oedipus make vivid not only the idea of character traits but also the role of virtue in moderating what we might do in situations that interact with our characters in potentially disastrous ways. II Harman's challenge begins... (shrink)

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States and the second cause of death among those ages 15–24 years. The current standard of care for suicidality management often involves an involuntary hospitalization deemed necessary by the attending psychiatrist. The purpose of this article is to reexamine the ethical tradeoffs inherent in the current practice of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization for suicidal patients, calling attention to the often-neglected harms inherent in this practice and proposing a path for future (...) research. With accumulating evidence of the harms inherent in civil commitment, we propose that the relative value of this intervention needs to be reevaluated and more efficacious alternatives researched. Three arguments are presented: (1) that inadequate attention has been given to the harms resulting from the use of coercion and the loss of autonomy, (2) that inadequate evidence exists that involuntary hospitalization is an effective method to reduce deaths by suicide, and (3) that some suicidal patients may benefit more from therapeutic interventions that maximize and support autonomy and personal responsibility. Considering this evidence, we argue for a policy that limits the coercive hospitalization of suicidal individuals to those who lack decision-making capacity. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider how certain longstanding philosophical questions about mental representation may be answered on the assumption that cognitive and perceptual systems implement hierarchical generative models, such as those discussed within the prediction error minimization framework. We build on existing treatments of representation via structural resemblance, such as those in Gładziejewski :559–582, 2016) and Gładziejewski and Miłkowski, to argue for a representationalist interpretation of the PEM framework. We further motivate the proposed approach to content by arguing that it (...) is consistent with approaches implicit in theories of unsupervised learning in neural networks. In the course of this discussion, we argue that the structural representation proposal, properly understood, has more in common with functional-role than with causal/informational or teleosemantic theories. In the remainder of the paper, we describe the PEM framework for approximate Bayesian inference in some detail, and discuss how structural representations might arise within the proposed Bayesian hierarchies. After explicating the notion of variational inference, we define a subjectively accessible measure of misrepresentation for hierarchical Bayesian networks by appeal to the Kullbach–Leibler divergence between posterior generative and approximate recognition densities, and discuss a related measure of objective misrepresentation in terms of correspondence with the facts. (shrink)

Philosophy of Medicine provides a fresh and comprehensive treatment of the topic. It offers a novel theory of the nature of medicine, and proposes a new attitude to medicine, aimed at improving the quality of debates between medical traditions and facilitating medicine's decolonization.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.1 (2005) 23-24 [Access article in PDF] Schechtman's Narrative Account of Identity Grant Gillett Keywords personal identity, narrative self, memory I have long been an admirer of Schechtman's sensitive and psychologically realistic account of personal identity. In the present piece, she addresses the issues surrounding personal identity through Locke's view and problems attending that view and the psychological continuity theories descended from it.She examines (...) the claim that the person is more extensive than the conscious mind and includes aspects of nonconscious mental activity. Schechtman argues that one must have a self-conception that includes a trajectory where present experience unfolds meaningfully out of one's past replete with implications for what one does and how one does it. She locates, in current writing on the self, the idea of a perceiver or narrator self who tries to make sense out of herself as a human being with certain thoughts and feelings and is sometimes at a loss to do so. To this potentially very rich starting point we need only add the fact that a person draws on discursive and narrative skills that have been inscribed in her being to do this narrative, editorial, and judicial task and that many of these skills have been imbibed with mother's milk (and father's voice). From this discursively inscribed set of resources and orientations arise guilt, shame, pride, aspiration, vulnerability, and that crucial sense of who one is as a person among others.It follows that here we might also find the source of the discontents that induce a person to apply to a psychiatrist or counselor for help with the narrative work required to fashion a liveable self. If Schechtman is right, the cognitive capacities contributing to memory and "keeping track of oneself"(in a deep and satisfying way) are to be found in part in the nonconscious domain rather than the thin layer of consciousness and propositional attitude psychology that enters the mind of an analytic philosopher or a psychiatrist uninterested in depth.I think she is right and that this paper and her more extensive work on the constitution of self represent a fertile point at which psychiatrists and psychotherapists can begin the task of understanding the nature of identity and the challenges involved in finding one that will serve the unfolding project of understanding and forming the self. I believe that the resources that individuals need for this task are derived from one's rootedness in culture and human relationships where the levels of self that support consciousness can be nurtured according to what Michel Foucault calls the techniques proper to the care of the self. Schechtman has done us a favor in taking the debates surrounding neo-Lockean [End Page 23] views of personal identity and outlining a perspective on identity and memory that can lead us to develop our understanding of the complexity of the human psyche as it roams through the jungle/jumble of discursive life and tries to nourish itself on what it finds there.Grant Gillett is a Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He is also a practicing neurosurgeon. His philosophical work is in philosophy of mind and psychiatry, continental philosophy, and bioethics. His most recent books are The Mind and Its Discontents (Oxford University Press) and Bioethics in the Clinic (Johns Hopkins University Press). He works on postmodern and traditional analytic approaches to mind, language, and psychiatry. He can be reached at Dunedin Hospital and Otago Bioethics Centre, University of Otago Medical School, PO Box 913, Dunedin, New Zealand, or via e-mail at grant.gillett@stonebow.otago.ac.nz.... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2 (2002) 123-125 [Access article in PDF] The Self as Relatum in Life and Language Grant Gillett THE STUDY REPORTED by van Staden is extremely interesting to any psychological theorist influenced by Jacques Lacan because of Lacan's insistence that the unconscious is not only structured like a language but actually reflects and is produced by linguistic interactions between the subject and others.The distinction he (...) draws, on the basis of Frege's analysis of logical and grammatical structure, is not straightforwardly evident on a superficial inspection of the sentences concerned. It is also less clear than the agent-patient or subject-object distinction that one might look for on the basis of considering the action being performed. van Staden makes both of these points in the course of illustrating the relevant deep grammatical property on which the study turns. In doing so he engages with the subtle work on subject and object by Strawson (1959) who was one of the first, in the "descriptive metaphysics" of Individuals, to explore the resonance between what we might call (after Frege) "logical grammar" and the deep metaphysical structure of our thought. Strawson noted that the position of grammatical subject in a sentence was typically occupied by a particular or individual substance rather than the accident or property of a substance so that the subject predicate structure of language reflects a basic feature of our world picture whereby the world is seen to be populated by particular objects that instance universal features.Chomsky is the other player whose thought is important in this area in that he argues that we have an innate sense of deep structure, which allows us to disambiguate any sentence so as to reveal the state of affairs that is being represented. Thus we discern that what is denoted by "John loves Mary" is the same thought as that conveyed by "Mary is loved by John." van Staden focuses on something more general—the deep structure that expresses semantic relations or positions. This is not the same as the agent or the simply grammatical subject and van Staden calls it the owner of the relation involved as distinct from the accident of that relation. The terms are well chosen because ownership is a term a la mode in postmodern thought to express the relationship of a human being to the events and attributes associated with him or her. When we look at this subtle grammatological or semantic feature of language we see that the linguistic feature in question is the kind of thing that could easily be overlooked were it not for a post-Fregean analysis of the type van Staden offers.The content that van Staden identifies in relation to what is signified or represented by an utterance is difficult to characterize. It is not what Frege would call logical content in that it does not contribute to the truth value of any of the propositions concerned. It is also problematic to call it psychological content because it is not part of the conscious message conveyed by the utterance. Nevertheless, the study concerned raises [End Page 123] the possibility that it is psychic in a very significant way, which is best approached by considering the relationships between language and the unconscious.Chomsky is regarded as having defined a number of linguistic operations that take propositional or meaningful content and transform it into the form in which it is uttered. The relevant cognitive operations are usually regarded as being performed by the cognitive unconscious, which in some sense applies the rules of grammar to yield well-formed utterances on the basis of speaker intentions. In any event, nobody would seriously question the idea that there are unconscious operations that underpin the production of grammatically structured utterances.If we add to this the possibility that a more dynamic aspect to the unconscious has a role to play in the semantic content of our utterances, then a fruitful line of thought begins to emerge. The dynamic unconscious has to do with self-image and those influences that form the psyche... (shrink)

One of the main early forms of “functionalism,” developed by writers like Jerry Fodor and William Lycan, focused on “mechanistic” explanation in the special sciences and argued that “functional properties” in psychology were continuous in nature with the special science properties posited in such mechanistic explanations. I dub the latter position“Continuity Functionalism” and use it to critically examine the “Standard Picture” of the metaphysics of functionalism which takes “functional” properties to be second-order properties and claims there are two metaphysical forms (...) of “functionalism,” in so-called “role” and “realizer” functionalism. Looking at mechanistic explanations, I show that the “functional properties” posited in the special sciences are not second-order properties and that Continuity Functionalism is a distinctive metaphysical version of functionalism not covered by the Standard Picture. My conclusion is that the Standard Picture offers us a false dichotomy of ways to be a “functionalist” and that “functionalists” thus need to look once more to the special sciences to configure their views, thus eschewing the machinery inherited from “analytic” philosophers. (shrink)

One of the main early forms of “functionalism,” developed by writers like Jerry Fodor and William Lycan, focused on “mechanistic” explanation in the special sciences and argued that “functional properties” in psychology were continuous in nature with the special science properties posited in such mechanistic explanations. I dub the latter position“Continuity Functionalism” and use it to critically examine the “Standard Picture” of the metaphysics of functionalism which takes “functional” properties to be second-order properties and claims there are two metaphysical forms (...) of “functionalism,” in so-called “role” and “realizer” functionalism. Looking at mechanistic explanations, I show that the “functional properties” posited in the special sciences are not second-order properties and that Continuity Functionalism is a distinctive metaphysical version of functionalism not covered by the Standard Picture. My conclusion is that the Standard Picture offers us a false dichotomy of ways to be a “functionalist” and that “functionalists” thus need to look once more to the special sciences to configure their views, thus eschewing the machinery inherited from “analytic” philosophers. (shrink)

There is a fairly closed circle between culture, language, meaning, and truth such that the world of a given culture is a world understood in terms of the meanings produced in that culture. Medicine is, in fact, a subculture of a powerful type and has its own language and understanding of the range of illnesses that affect human beings. So how does medicine get at the truth of people and their ills in such a way as to escape its own (...) limited constructions? There is a way out of the closed circle implicit in the idea of a praxis and the engagement with reality that is central to it and the further possibility introduced by Jacques Lacan that signification is never comprehensive in relation to the subject's encounter with the real. I will explore both of these so as to develop a conception of truth that is apt for the knowledge that arises in the clinic. (shrink)

This open access book is a systematic update of the philosophical and scientific foundations of the biopsychosocial model of health, disease and healthcare. First proposed by George Engel 40 years ago, the Biopsychosocial Model is much cited in healthcare settings worldwide, but has been increasingly criticised for being vague, lacking in content, and in need of reworking in the light of recent developments. The book confronts the rapid changes to psychological science, neuroscience, healthcare, and philosophy that have occurred since the (...) model was first proposed and addresses key issues such as the model’s scientific basis, clinical utility, and philosophical coherence. The authors conceptualise biology and the psychosocial as in the same ontological space, interlinked by systems of communication-based regulatory control which constitute a new kind of causation. These are distinguished from physical and chemical laws, most clearly because they can break down, thus providing the basis for difference between health and disease. This work offers an urgent update to the model’s scientific and philosophical foundations, providing a new and coherent account of causal interactions between the biological, the psychological and social. (shrink)

Part I -- Scientific Composition and the New Mechanism. - 1. Laura Franklin-Hall: New Mechanistic Explanation and the Need for Explanatory Constraints. - 2. Kenneth Aizawa: Compositional Explanation: Dimensioned Realization, New Mechanism, and Ground. - 3. Jens Harbecke: Is Mechanistic Constitution a Version of Material Constitution?. - 4. Derk Pereboom: Anti-Reductionism, Anti-Rationalism, and the Material Constitution of the Mental. Part II -- Grounding, Science, and Verticality in Nature. - 5. Jonathan Schaffer: Ground Rules: Lessons from Wilson. - 6. Jessica Wilson: (...) The Unity and Priority Arguments for Grounding. - 7. Carl Gillett: The Metaphysics of Nature, Science, and the Rules of Engagement. - 8. Andrew Melnyk: Grounding and the Formulation of Physicalism. - 9. Alyssa Ney: Grounding in the Philosophy of Mind: A Defense. (shrink)

Priority monism is the view that the cosmos is the only independent concrete object. The paper argues that, pace its proponents, Priority monism is in conflict with the dependence of any whole on any of its parts: if the cosmos does not depend on its parts, neither does any smaller composite.

This chapter explores the idea that causal inference is warranted if and only if the mechanism underlying the inferred causal association is identified. This mechanistic stance is discernible in the epidemiological literature, and in the strategies adopted by epidemiologists seeking to establish causal hypotheses. But the exact opposite methodology is also discernible, the black box stance, which asserts that epidemiologists can and should make causal inferences on the basis of their evidence, without worrying about the mechanisms that might underlie their (...) hypotheses. I argue that the mechanistic stance is indeed a bad methodology for causal inference. However, I detach and defend a mechanistic interpretation of causal generalisations in epidemiology as existence claims about underlying mechanisms. (shrink)

Evidence from functional neuroimaging of the human brain indicates that information about salient properties of an object¿such as what it looks like, how it moves, and how it is used¿is stored in sensory and motor systems active when that information was acquired. As a result, object concepts belonging to different categories like animals and tools are represented in partially distinct, sensory- and motor property-based neural networks. This suggests that object concepts are not explicitly represented, but rather emerge from weighted activity (...) within property-based brain regions. However, some property-based regions seem to show a categorical organization, thus providing evidence consistent with category-based, domain-specific formulations as well.Acronyms and DefinitionsBiological motion: motion of animate agents characterized by highly flexible, fully articulated motion vectors, in contrast to the rigid, unarticulated motion vectors associated with most tools.Category-specific disorder: a relatively greater impairment in retrieving information about members of one superordinate object category (e.g., animals) as compared with other categories following brain injury or diseaseIPS: intraparietal sulcusLO: lateral occipital cortexObject concept: memory representations of a class or category of objects. Necessary for numerous cognitive functions including identifying an object as a member of a specific category and drawing inferences about object propertiespMTG: posterior middle temporal gyruspSTS: posterior superior temporal sulcusRepetition suppression: decreased neural response associated with repeated presentation of an identical, or a semantically/conceptually related, stimulusSD: semantic dementiaSemantic memory: a large division of long-term memory containing knowledge about the world including facts, ideas, beliefs, and conceptsSemantic priming: a short-lasting facilitation in processing a stimulus due to the prior presentation of a semantically related stimulusTMS: transcranial magnetic stimulationVPMC: ventral premotor cortex. (shrink)

Much of our ordinary thought and talk about responsibility exhibits what I call the ‘pie fallacy’—the fallacy of thinking that there is a fixed amount of responsibility for every outcome, to be distributed among all those, if any, who are responsible for it. The pie fallacy is a fallacy, I argue, because how responsible an agent is for some outcome is fully grounded in facts about the agent, the outcome and the relationships between them; it does not depend, in particular, (...) on how responsible anyone else is for that same outcome. In this paper, I explore how the pie fallacy can arise by considering several different kinds of case in which two or more agents are responsible for the same outcome. I’ll end with some brief remarks on the potential consequences of my arguments for how to think about responsibility in war. (shrink)

In discussing Disembodied Persons we need to confront two problems:A. Under what conditions would we consider that a person was present in the absence of the normal bodily cues?B. Could such circumstances arise?The first question may be regarded as epistemic and the second as metaphysical.

Mark Johnston has recently argued that four-dimensionalist theories of persistence are incompatible with some of our most basic ethical and prudential principles. I argue that although Johnston’s arguments succeed on a worm-theoretic account of persistence, they fail on a stage-theoretic account. So much the worse, I conclude, for the worm theory.

Recent work on rationality has been increasingly attentive to “coherence requirements”, with heated debates about both the content of such requirements and their normative status (e.g., whether there is necessarily reason to comply with them). Yet there is little to no work on the metanormative status of coherence requirements. Metaphysically: what is it for two or more mental states to be jointly incoherent, such that they are banned by a coherence requirement? In virtue of what are some putative requirements genuine (...) and others not? Epistemologically: how are we to know which of the requirements are genuine and which aren’t? This paper tries to offer an account that answers these questions. On my account, the incoherence of a set of attitudinal mental states is a matter of its being (partially) constitutive of the mental states in question that, for any agent that holds these attitudes jointly, the agent is disposed, when conditions of full transparency are met, to give up at least one of the attitudes. (shrink)

Perceptual experiences justify beliefs—that much seems obvious. As Brewer puts it, “sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs” (this volume, xx). In Mind and World McDowell argues that we can get from this apparent platitude to the controversial claim that perceptual experiences have conceptual content: [W]e can coherently credit experiences with rational relations to judgement and belief, but only if we take it that spontaneity is already implicated in receptivity; that is, only if we take it that experiences have (...) conceptual content. (1994, 162) Brewer agrees. Their view is sometimes called conceptualism; nonconceptualism is the rival position, that experiences have nonconceptual content. One initial obstacle is understanding what the issue is. What is conceptual content, and how is it different from nonconceptual content? Section 1 of this paper explains two versions of each of the rival positions: state (non)conceptualism and content (non)conceptualism; the latter pair is the locus of the relevant dispute. Two prominent arguments for content nonconceptualism—the richness argument and the continuity argument—both fail (section 2). McDowell’s and Brewer’s epistemological defenses of content conceptualism are also faulty (section 3). Section 4 gives a more simple-minded case for conceptualism; finally, some reasons are given for rejecting the claim—on one natural interpretation—that experiences justify beliefs. (shrink)

This book investigates context-sensitivity in natural language by examining the meaning and use of a target class of theoretically recalcitrant expressions. These expressions-including epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague language -exhibit systematic differences from paradigm context-sensitive expressions in their discourse dynamics and embedding properties. Many researchers have responded by rethinking the nature of linguistic meaning and communication. Drawing on general insights about the role of context in interpretation and collaborative action, Silk develops an improved contextualist theory of CR-expressions (...) within the classical truth-conditional paradigm: Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the distinctive linguistic behavior of a CR-expression from a particular contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. It is shown how in using CR-expressions, speakers can exploit their mutual grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to coordinate their attitudes and negotiate about how the context should evolve. The book focuses primarily on developing a Discourse Contextualist semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals. The Discourse Contextualist framework is also applied to other categories of epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague adjectives. The similarities/differences among these expressions, and among context-sensitive expressions more generally, have been underexplored. The development of Discourse Contextualism in this book sheds light on general features of meaning and communication, and the variety of ways in which context affects and is affected by uses of language. Discourse Contextualism provides a fruitful framework for theorizing about various broader issues in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a new account of plural logic. They argue that there is such a thing as genuinely plural denotation in logic, and expound a framework of ideas that includes the distinction between distributive and collective predicates, the theory of plural descriptions, multivalued functions, and lists.

The article concerns a mediaeval Indian debate over whether, and if so how, we can know that a self exists, understood here as a subject of cognition that outlives individual cognitions, being their common substrate. A passage that has not yet been translated from Sanskrit into a European language, from Jayanta Bhaṭṭa’s Nyāyamañjarī, ‘Blossoms of Reasoning’, is examined. This rich passage reveals something not yet noted in secondary literature, namely that Mīmāṃsakas advanced four different models of what happens when the (...) self perceives itself. The article clarifies the differences between the four, and the historical and logical relationships between them. It also hypothesizes pressures that constituted the need for the creation of the newer views, i.e. perceived problems with the earlier views, which the proponents of the newer views saw themselves as overcoming. (shrink)

Abstract: There has recently been controversy over the existence of 'multiple realization' in addition to some confusion between different conceptions of its nature. To resolve these problems, we focus on concrete examples from the sciences to provide precise accounts of the scientific concepts of 'realization' and 'multiple realization' that have played key roles in recent debates in the philosophy of science and philosophy of psychology. We illustrate the advantages of our view over a prominent rival account ( Shapiro, 2000 and (...) 2004 ) and use our work to rebut recent objections to the long-standing claim that psychological properties are multiply realized. For we use scientific evidence, in combination with our more precise theoretical framework, to show that we have strong reason to believe that psychological properties are indeed multiply realized both at the biochemical and neuronal levels. (shrink)

This is the first book to systematically examine the underlying theory of evidence in Anglo-American legal systems. Stein develops a detailed and innovative theory which sets aside the traditional vision of evidence law as facilitating the discovery of the truth. Combining probability theory, epistemology, economic analysis, and moral philosophy, he argues instead that the fundamental purpose of evidence law is to apportion the risk of error in conditions of uncertainty.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 3, Page 687-709, November 2021.

Response-dependence theories have historically been very popular in aesthetics, and aesthetic response-dependence has motivated response-dependence in ethics. This chapter closely examines the prospects for such theories. It breaks this category down into dispositional and fittingness strands of response-dependence, corresponding to descriptive and normative ideal observer theories. It argues that the latter have advantages over the former but are not themselves without issue. Special attention is paid to the relationship between hedonism and response-dependence. The chapter also introduces two aesthetic properties that (...) lead to wrong kinds of reasons problems for aesthetic response-dependence: insightfulness and the capacity to change one’s perspective. These properties do not have obvious parallels in the ethical domain, and so present an obstacle for response-dependence even in aesthetics. The chapter ends by examining replies on behalf of the response-dependence theorist, ultimately suggesting that a restricted form of response-dependence is the most promising way forward for fans of such theories. (shrink)