Do philosophers use intuitions? Should philosophers use intuitions? Can philosophical methods (where intuitions are concerned) be improved upon? In order to answer these questions we need to have some idea of how we should go about answering them. I defend a way of going about methodology of intuitions: a metamethodology. I claim the following: (i) we should approach methodological questions about intuitions with a thin conception of intuitions in mind; (ii) we should carve intuitions finely; and, (iii) we should (...) carve to a grain to which we are sensitive in our everyday philosophising. The reason is that, unless we do so, we don’t get what we want from philosophical methodology. I argue that what we want is information that will aid us in formulating practical advice concerning how to do philosophy responsibly/well/better. (shrink)

We distinguish between two categories of belief—thin belief and thick belief—and provide evidence that they approximate genuinely distinct categories within folk psychology. We use the distinction to make informative predictions about how laypeople view the relationship between knowledge and belief. More specifically, we show that if the distinction is genuine, then we can make sense of otherwise extremely puzzling recent experimental findings on the entailment thesis (i.e. the widely held philosophical thesis that knowledge entails belief). We also suggest that (...) the distinction can be applied to debates in the philosophy of mind and metaethics. (shrink)

This article explores a case study of a mindfulness teacher, Beth, and her experiences of teaching mindfulness to 11- to 16-year-olds in several English schools. It shows why Beth was drawn to teaching mindfulness, which was both to alleviate the stress amongst her pupils and improve her own mental health. It illustrates how and why she became a confident, successful mindfulness teacher: she learnt about mindfulness at various classes, retreats and teacher-education training sessions, spending thousands (...) of pounds on her own training. It argues that her positioning as a mindfulness teacher in an unmindful school system created an overwhelming demand for her services, but also huge stress upon her. It develops McCaw’s conceptions of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ mindfulness (2020), arguing that while Beth began by practising ‘thin’ mindfulness – seeing it as a way of solving exam stress amongst her pupils – she became increasingly a ‘thick’ practitioner; her experiences of mindfulness led to profound personal change and, ultimately, to her becoming very disillusioned about teaching mindfulness in an unwelcoming educational, ‘unmindful’ environment. (shrink)

Hume is known for his claim that our idea of causation is nothing beyond constant conjunction, and that our idea of necessary connection is nothing beyond a felt determination of the mind. In short, Hume endorses a "thin" conception of causation and necessary connection. In recent years, however, a sizeable number of philosophers have come to view Hume as someone who believes in the existence of thick causal connections - that is, causal connections that allow one to infer a (...) priori the effect from the cause, and vice versa. Hume doesn't wish to deny such connections, said philosopher's claim, he only seeks to demonstrate that we can't know anything about the nature of the thick causal connections that make up the natural world. In this dissertation, I defend the old or traditional interpretation of Hume on causation. I draw attention to the important but neglected role of clear and distinct perception in Hume's thought, arguing that for Hume our impressions are clear and distinct perceptions, whereas our ideas are faint and obscure. Accordingly, Hume's copy principle - the thesis that our ideas are copies of our impressions - is Hume's way of rendering our naturally obscure and confused ideas distinct. One need only discern the impression from which said ideas are copied. In this way, I show that Hume's opinion concerning our idea of thick causation is that it's an obscure and confused idea, and that the only clear and distinct idea we can have of causation is thin causation. Furthermore, since meaning for Hume is a matter of a word's being associated with an idea, Hume thinks that an expression such as "thick causation" is meaningless or confused. In one sense, then, Hume is a positivist, and as such doesn't believe in thick causal connections. (shrink)

Thin Objects: Anionist Account, by LinneboØystein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii + 238.

In Max Black’s Objection to Mind–Body Identity, Ned Block seeks to offer a definitive treatment of property dualism arguments that exploit modes of presentation. I will argue that Block’s central response to property dualism is confused. The property dualist can happily grant that mental modes of presentation have a hidden physical nature. What matters for the property dualist is not the hidden physical side of the property, but the apparent mental side. Once that ‘thin’ side is granted, the property dualist (...) has won. I conclude that although Block is wrong to think that the property dualist must argue for so-called thin mental properties, Block, and the physicalist, are able to resist property dualism. But any attempt to bolster this resistance and do more than dogmatically assert the crucial identity runs a serious risk of undermining the physicalism it is meant to save. (shrink)

Buddhist philosophers provide several toolkits for exploring the relationship between meditation and introspection. Drawing on some of their tools, we explore three models of mind, which offer different ways of thinking about the possibility of introspection: an entirely mindful observer, who introspectively experiences 'pure consciousness'; a thin mind, which avoids appealing to a witness or observer of mental episodes by positing a form of reflexive selfawareness; and a thicker mind, which is active, historically situated, and dependent upon an ecological (...) and social context. We then explore practical and theoretical models of a thicker mind, which suggest that meditation is not simply a matter of representing mental episodes and then using these representations for online behavioural control. Drawing upon these models, we close by proposing that meditation should be understood as a practice of mental cultivation, which requires a more radical reconceptualization of knowing a mind. (shrink)

This chapter suggests that, when considering the philosophical problem of other minds, we distinguish between "thick" and "thin" versions of it. While traditional approaches take the problem to be a thick one, more recent work can be seen as addressing only a thin variant. Dretske, while acknowledging the thick problem, proposes a perceptual model of our knowledge of other minds which addresses only the thin version. The chapter proposes that, in the place of the thick problem, we (...) consider the quality of our interactions with others. Following Wittgenstein, it suggests that where individuals share a nature their interactions exhibit a quality that it calls "depth." Where that nature is not, or is only partially, shared, there one might expect to find the quality of the interaction between persons disturbed. The chapter suggests that this disturbance might explain the impaired quality of interaction between autistic and non-autistic individuals. (shrink)

Is our experience of the world 'rich' or 'thin'? In other words, are we aware of unattended sensory stimuli, or are the contents of our consciousness constrained by what we attend to? A recent, ingenious, attempt to address this issue offers us a seemingly unavailable, 'moderate' option; our experience is somewhere between the two. But before we make our minds up about this conclusion, we should see that it resulted from conflating two ways of construing the relevant concepts. I (...) claim that, one way of reading 'rich' vs. 'thin', echoes the psychologists' distinction between 'early' vs. 'late' accounts of selective attention, and I argue that 'perceptual load theory', a recent response to this empirical issue, offers us a satisfying solution to our philosophical problem. Ultimately, we are only aware of what we attend to, so we can conclude that our experience of the world is philosophically 'thin'. Nonetheless, the second way of reading 'rich' vs. 'thin' relates to the range of sensory stimuli that we can be aware of. I claim that this range depends upon the attentional load that our sensory systems are placed under. The 'moderate' position, then, merely marks out one possible degree of sensory awareness on a continuum that runs from 'rich' to 'thin'. (shrink)

This book addresses five main topics of metaphysics in its first section: formal objects and truth-makers; tropes; properties and predicates; varieties of relations; and the notion of explanation in metaphysics. The second part of this volume focuses on the history of philosophy with an emphasis on Austrian philosophy: the ideas of Bolzano, Wittgenstein, Locke and Bergson, amongst others, are explored in the papers presented here. This is the first volume in a two-volume set that originates from papers presented to Professor (...) Kevin Mulligan, covering the subjects that he contributed to during his career including ontology, mind and value, history and philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. This volume contains thirty two chapters, written by researchers from across Europe, North America and North Africa. These papers cover topics in metaphysics ranging from Lehrer and Tolliver’s discussion of truth and tropes, to Johansson’s defence of the distinction between thick and thin relations and Persson and Sahlin’s presentation of the difficulties inherent in applying the concept of explanation in metaphysics. Papers on the history of philosophy include a look at Bolzano’s formative years and his conception of mathematics. De Libera examines Brentano’s adverbial theory of judgment and Fisette traces the history of the Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th century. Marion contests the trendy pragmatist accounts that lump Wittgenstein and Heidegger together and there are analyses of Locke and Bergson’s work, amongst the many papers presented here. This volume contains three chapters in French and one in Spanish. The second volume of this set looks at ethics, values and emotions, epistemology, perception and consciousness, as well as philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. (shrink)

When applied in population-level contexts, such as schools or business, mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) find themselves in a crossfire between two different kinds of criticisms. On one side, some worry that MBIs’ normative commitments might be “too thick,” worrying that MBIs might come with a particular conception of the good, and significant ethical and religious commitments. On the other side, some worry that contemporary MBIs are ethically “too thin,” as they shed too many of their original Buddhist ethical and (...) soteriological goals. In this chapter, it is argued that contemporary MBIs should remain normatively thin, as that makes them more suitable for population-level contexts. Against “thickness worries,” it is argued that MBIs are compatible with liberal respect for autonomy, as the benefits are often autonomy-enhancing, which makes MBIs potentially valuable across a broad range of conceptions of the good. The second line of argument is developed through a discussion of MBIs in schools. (shrink)

During the interwar years psychologists Louis Leon Thurstone and Rensis Likert produced newly standardized forms of questionnaires. Both built on developments in mental testing, including the use of restricted sets of answers and the emergence of statistical techniques, to create questionnaires that employed numerical scaling. This transformation in shape of questionnaires was intimately tied up with both psychologists’ nominal subject of investigation: attitudes. Efforts to render psychology a socially valuable and influential science spurred psychologists to create sophisticated and increasingly precise (...) means of measuring social attitudes. Reducing mental dispositions to mere numbers on a scale, these developments also initiated new relationships between psychology and the public. Rather than engage a wide spectrum of the public directly in the research process, questionnaire research was limited to those within academic circles. Even so, research with questionnaires aimed to comment on attitudes in the public more broadly. The kind of ‘thin description’ afforded by numerical scales, though used to measure individual psychological subjects, afforded psychologists the opportunity to craft their vision of an increasingly attitudinal public, one positioned as best governed with the aid of psychological expertise. (shrink)

This essay argues that the "classical" or "standard" computation model of an enviroment of thought may hamstring the nascent cognitive science of religion by masking the ways in which the bare biological brain is prosthetically extended and embedded in the surrounding landscape. The motivation for distinsuishing between the problem-solving profiles of the basic brain and the brain-plus-scaffolding is that in many domains non-biological artifacts support and augment biological modes of computation - often allowing us to overcome some of the brain's (...) native computation limitations. The recognition that in some contexts not all of the relevant computational machinery fits inside the head suggests that we should reconsider the possible role and significance of material culture in religious cognition. More specifically, the broad spectrum of rituals, music, relics, scriptures, statues and buildings typically associated with religious traditions may be more than quaint ethnographic window dressing. Rather than thin cultural wrap arounds that decorate the real cognitive processes going on underneath, these elements could represent central components of the relevant machinery of religious thought. By introducing tangible features of the world that can be physically manipulated and tracked in real-time, for example, the cognitive scaffolding that religious material culture affords seems tailor-made for allowing people to exchange the intricate "off-line" problems that arise from dealing with invisible, counter-intuitive supernatural agents for the kinds of "on-line" cognitive tasks they are naturally good at doing. (shrink)

The value of psychology as a science has been challenged in phenomenology and in other epistemological trends. The main objective of this book is to draw the attention of students of human and animal behaviour to important achievements in phenomenological psychology and comparative physiology which are mostly overlooked, although they offer a genuine approach to subjective experience in relation to behavioural regulations. The work of Brentano, Stumpf, Husserl, Politzer, Katz, Michotte, Buytendijk and many others is analysed from this epistemological standpoint. (...) The significance of the phenomenological approach for the biology of behaviour is discussed. The meaning of Sherrington's physiology of the behavioural field is evaluated in the same framework. Basic reading for students of experimental psychology, comparative psychology and ethology, this book will appeal particularly to those interested in the philosophy of psychology and biology. Originally published in 1977. (shrink)

Recent studies support a model in which the progeny of SOX9+ epithelial progenitors at the distal tip of lung branches undergo cell allocation and differentiation sequentially along the distal‐to‐proximal axis. Concomitant with the elongation and ramification of lung branches, the descendants of the distal SOX9+ progenitors are distributed proximally, express SOX2, and differentiate into cell types in the conducting airways. Amid subsequent sacculation, the distal SOX9+ progenitors generate alveolar epithelial cells to form alveoli. Sequential cell allocation and differentiation are integrated (...) with the branching process to generate a functional branching organ. This review focuses on the roles of SOX9+ cells as precursors for new branches, as the source of various cell types in the conducting airways, and as progenitors of the alveolar epithelium. All of these processes are controlled by multiple signaling pathways. Many mouse mutants with defective lung branching contain underlying defects in one or more steps of cell allocation and differentiation of SOX9+ progenitors. This model provides a framework to understand the molecular basis of lung phenotypes and to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of lung patterning. It builds a foundation on which comparing and contrasting the mechanisms employed by different branching organs in diverse species can be made. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to share cross-border challenges in the ethical design, establishment, implementation, and evaluation of the performance of alliance...