Does a factive conception of knowability figure in ordinary use? There is some reason to think so. ‘Knowable’ and related terms such as ‘discoverable’, ‘observable’, and ‘verifiable’ all seem to operate factively in ordinary discourse. Consider the following example, a dialog between colleagues A and B: A: We could be discovered. B: Discovered doing what? A: Someone might discover that we're having an affair. B: But we are not having an affair! A: I didn’t say that we were. A’s remarks (...) sound contradictory. In this context the factivity of ‘someone might discover that’ explains this fact. So there is some reason to believe that knowability and related modalities are factive in ordinary use. For factive treatments of knowability in the context of epistemic theories of truth, compare Tennant (2000: 829) and Wright (2001: 59-60, n. 17). (shrink)

Predictive processing models of perception take issue with standard models of perception as hierarchical bottom-up processing modulated by memory and attention. The predictive framework posits that the brain generates predictions about stimuli, which are matched to the incoming signal. Mismatches between predictions and the incoming signal – so-called prediction errors – are then used to generate new and better predictions until the prediction errors have been minimized, at which point a perception arises. Predictive models hold that all bottom-up processes are (...) signals conveying prediction errors to higher areas, which respond by updating their predictions. We take issue with this claim and argue that object recognition requires bottom-up processing that cannot be understood in terms of prediction errors. Along the way, we expand on previous work casting doubt on the framework's ability to account for attention. Specifically, we argue that the type of attention that allows us to rapidly extract the gist of an object or scene presents an additional challenge to the predictive approach. We conclude by considering how the framework may be augmented to avoid these problems. (shrink)

First, this article summarizes major arguments levied against codes. Second, standards for a sound ethical code are presented. Third, a trend is described toward more concrete codes developed by specific communication organizations. Finally, positive functions of codes are examined, with special emphasis on two: the argumentative function and the character?depiction function.

The research presented in this work represents reflections in the light of Julia Kristeva's philosophy concerning empirical data drawn from research describing the everyday life of people dependent on ventilators. It also presents a qualitative and narrative methodological approach from a person‐centred perspective. Most research on home ventilator treatment is biomedical. There are a few published studies describing the situation of people living at home on a ventilator but no previous publications have used the thoughts in Kristeva's philosophy applied to (...) this topic from a caring science perspective. The paper also addresses what a life at home on a ventilator may be like and will hopefully add some new aspects to the discussion of philosophical issues in nursing and the very essence of care. Kristeva's philosophy embraces phenomena such as language, abjection, body, and love, allowing her writings to make a fruitful contribution to nursing philosophy in that they strengthen, expand, and deepen a caring perspective. Moreover, her writings about revolt having the power to create hope add an interesting aspect to the work of earlier philosophers and nursing theorists. (shrink)

The question of whether blindsight is a form of unconscious perception continues to spark fierce debate in philosophy and psychology. One side of the debate holds that while the visual information categorized in blindsight is not access-conscious, it is nonetheless a form of perception, albeit a form of unconscious perception. The opposition, by contrast, holds that blindsight is just a form of degraded conscious perception that makes the categorized information harder to access because it is degraded. In this chapter, we (...) address the opposition’s arguments for thinking that blindsight is a form of degraded conscious vision and then argue that the residual awareness found in blindsight is a form of non-perceptual awareness. To back this claim, we examine the residual visual abilities to detect and discriminate colour found in some blindsight patients and show that residual consciousness in blindsight is indirect and lacks the phenomenal character characteristic of conscious vision. (shrink)

Meanings of living at home on a ventilator Nine adults were interviewed in order to illuminate the meanings of being dependent on a ventilator and living at home. The data were analysed using a phenomenological‐hermeneutic method inspired by the philosophy of Ricoeur. Five main themes emerged through the analysis: experiencing home as a safe and comfortable space from which to reach out, experiencing the body as being frail, brave and resilient, striving to live in the present, surrendering oneself to and (...) trusting others, and experiencing technology as a burden and a relief to the lived body. Meanings of being home on a ventilator were interpreted as maintaining autonomy and persistence in interaction with the ventilator and other human beings and being able to rise above yourself and your personal boundaries in order to live a good life. These meanings indicate that aesthetic and ethical values impact on the lived body. They are bound up with experiencing a vital force and interdependency, bringing safety and courage into daily life. (shrink)

Integration information theories posit that the integration of information is necessary and/or sufficient for consciousness. In this paper, we focus on three of the most prominent information integration theories: Information Integration Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and Attended Intermediate-Level Theory. We begin by explicating each theory and key concepts they utilize. We then argue that the current evidence indicates that the integration of information is neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness. Unlike GWT and AIR, IIT maintains that conscious experience is both (...) necessary and sufficient for consciousness. We present empirical evidence indicating that simple features are experienced in the absence of feature integration and argue that it challenges IIT’s necessity claim. In addition, we challenge IIT’s sufficiency claim by presenting evidence from hemineglect cases and amodal completion indicating that contents may be integrated and yet fail to give rise to subjective experience. Moreover, we present empirical evidence from subjects with frontal lesions who are unable to carry out simple instructions and argue that they are irreconcilable with GWT. Lastly, we argue that empirical evidence indicating that patients with visual agnosia fail to identify objects they report being conscious of present a challenge to AIR’s necessity claim. (shrink)

There is little doubt that we perceive the world as tensed—that is, as consisting of a past, present and future each with a different ontological status—and transient—that is, as involving a passage of time. We also have the ability to execute precisely timed behaviors that appear to depend upon making correct temporal judgments about which changes are truly present and which are not. A common claim made by scientists and philosophers is that our experiences of entities enduring through transient changes (...) are illusory and that our apparently accurately timed behaviors do not reflect dynamical time. We argue that our experiences of objects enduring through transient changes need not be thought of as illusory even if time is not dynamic at the fundamental level of reality. For, the dynamic properties we experience objects as having need not be fundamental properties. They could be weakly emergent from static, temporal properties. Temporal properties, on this view, are similar to ordinary properties like that of being solid, which are correctly experienced as properties of medium-sized material bodies even though they are not instantiated at the fundamental level of reality. (shrink)

Many with schizophrenia find social interactions a profound and terrifying threat to their sense of self. To better understand this we draw upon dialogical models of the self that suggest that those with schizophrenia have difficulty sustaining dialogues among diverse aspects of self. Because interpersonal exchanges solicit and evoke movement among diverse aspects of self, many with schizophrenia may consequently find those exchanges overwhelming, resulting in despair, the sensation of fusion with another, and/or self-dissolution. In short, compromised dialogical capacities may (...) be a contributing factor to social dysfunction in schizophrenia. (shrink)

In this article I explore if and how very young children can be the educators of their early childhood educators. I describe and discuss a story constructed form a fieldwork done in one early childhood setting in Norway. The story is read with Levinas and his concepts Said and Saying. Further I discuss if and how this might be understood as education arguing that the children`s expressions are offering new beginning and change in the pedagogical thinking and praxis within the (...) early childhood setting. (shrink)

Background:Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948, human rights as set out in government documents have gradually changed, with more and more power being transferred to individual.Objectives:The aim of this article is to analyze how the position of the patient in need of care is constructed in Norway’s renamed and revised Patients’ and Service Users’ Rights Act (originally Patients’ Rights Act, 1999) and published comments which accompanying this legislation from the Norwegian (...) Ministry of Health and Care Service.Research design:A constructivist design was used, and Fairclough’s critical discourse approach was adopted to analyze the text of the Patients’ and Service Users’ Rights Act and comments.Findings:The analysis identified three discourses: (a) political discourse, containing ethical discourses about priority and economy, in which patients are constructed as powerless individuals; (b) expert discourse, containing a theme about patients’ trust in the healthcare team and its knowledge, in which patients are constructed as helpless individuals lacking knowledge; and (c) patient participation and patient autonomy discourse, containing ethical discourses about decision-making, in which patients are constructed not only as individuals with needs and rights but also as “troublesome.”Conclusion:Dominant paternalistic discourses in the legal text validate the power of medicine, the healthcare system, and heath personnel over the needs, rights, participation, and autonomy of the patient. (shrink)

Since the publication of David Lewis’ Counterfactuals, the standard line on subjunctive conditionals with impossible antecedents (or counterpossibles) has been that they are vacuously true. That is, a conditional of the form ‘If p were the case, q would be the case’ is trivially true whenever the antecedent, p, is impossible. The primary justification is that Lewis’ semantics best approximates the English subjunctive conditional, and that a vacuous treatment of counterpossibles is a consequence of that very elegant theory. Another justification (...) derives from the classical lore than if an impossibility were true, then anything goes. In this paper we defend non-vacuism, the view that counterpossibles are sometimes non-vacuously true and sometimes non-vacuously false. We do so while retaining a Lewisian semantics, which is to say, the approach we favor does not require us to abandon classical logic or a similarity semantics. It does however require us to countenance impossible worlds. An impossible worlds treatment of counterpossibles is suggested (but not defended) by Lewis (Counterfactuals. Blackwell, Oxford, 1973), and developed by Nolan (Notre Dame J Formal Logic 38:325–527, 1997), Kment (Mind 115:261–310, 2006a: Philos Perspect 20:237–302, 2006b), and Vander Laan (In: Jackson F, Priest G (eds) Lewisian themes. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004). We follow this tradition, and develop an account of comparative similarity for impossible worlds. (shrink)

Cognitive dissonance is a kind of ambivalence in which your apprehension of the fact that you performed or want to perform an action of which you disapprove gives rise to psychological distress. This, in turn, causes you to solicit unconscious processes that can help you reduce the distress. Here we look at the role that cognitive dissonance plays in explaining the inner workings of racism. We distinguish between three types of racist acts: inadvertent bigotry, habitual racism, and explicit racism. Unlike (...) inadvertent bigots, habitual and explicit racists are racially motivated and they therefore are responsible for their racial acts. But unlike the explicit racists, habitual racists aren’t immediately aware of their racial motives. As habitual racists hold overt egalitarian attitudes, the conflict between their over attitudes and their covert racial motives are a potential source of distress. To avoid having to face their racial motives, they tend to turn to confabulation. While explicit racists aren’t bothered by a similar form of cognitive dissonance, their explicit racial attitudes and desires to cause black people to suffer are at odds with majority public opinion, which can be a source of shame. To escape this kind of negative self-realization, explicit racists seek to justify their actions as honorable or as necessary for the good of society. We conclude by briefly pondering how cognitive dissonance can be used as a strategy for transforming habitual and explicit racists. (shrink)

Lewis/Stalnaker semantics has it that all counterpossibles (i.e., counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents) are vacuously true. Non-vacuism, by contrast, says the truth-values of counterpossibles are affected by the truth-values of the consequents. Some counterpossibles are true, some false. Williamson objects to non-vacuism. He asks us to consider someone who answered ‘11’ to ‘What is 5 + 7?’ but who mistakenly believes that he answered ‘13’. For the non-vacuist, (1) is false, (2) true: (1) If 5 + 7 were 13, x (...) would have got that sum right (2) If 5 + 7 were 13, x would have got that sum wrong Williamson is not persuaded by the initial intuitiveness of such examples: ... they tend to fall apart when thought through. For example, if 5 + 7 were 13 then 5 + 6 would be 12, and so (by another eleven steps) 0 would be 1, so if the number of right answers I gave were 0, the number of right answers I gave would be 1. (2006) That’s the whole argument—much of it implicit. Alan Baker’s critique (2007) of Brogaard and Salerno (2007) prompts us to say something less abbreviated about a less abbreviated form of Wiliamson’s argument. Then we further develop our (2007) counterfactual analysis of essense. (shrink)

I respond to three arguments aimed at establishing that natural kind properties — a kind of high-level properties — occur in the experiential content of visual perceptual experience: the argument from phenomenal difference, the argument from mandatory seeing, and the argument from associative agnosia. I conclude with a simple argument against the view that natural kind properties occur in the experiential content of visual experience.

In this paper, we argue that the neo-Aristotelian conception of “friendships of character” appears to misrepresent the essential nature of "genuine", or "true", friendship. We question the neo-Aristotelian imperative that true friendship entails disinterested love of the other “for their own sake” and strives at enhancing moral virtue. We propose an alternative conception of true friendship as involving affective and motivational features which we call closeness, intimacy, identity, and trust. Even on this minimal construal, however, friendship can turn vicious when (...) one of its characteristics becomes overpowering and thereby destroys the very goods for which the friendship was originally sought. (shrink)

Moral relativism provides a compelling explanation of linguistic data involving ordinary moral expressions like 'right' and 'wrong'. But it is a very radical view. Because relativism relativizes sentence truth to contexts of assessment it forces us to revise standard linguistic theory. If, however, no competing theory explains all of the evidence, perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift. However, I argue that a version of moral contextualism can account for the same data as relativism without relativizing sentence truth to (...) contexts of assessment. This version of moral contextualism is thus preferable to relativism on methodological grounds. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to shed new light on the question of what newly sighted subjects are capable of seeing on the basis of previous experience with mind- independent, external objects and their properties through touch alone. This question is also known as "Molyneux’s question." Much of the empirically driven debate surrounding this question has been centered on the nature of the representational content of the subjects' visual experiences. It has generally been assumed that the meaning of "seeing" (...) deployed in these disputes is more or less clear and unproblematic, and therefore requires no analysis or clarification. In this chapter, we wish to challenge this assumption. We argue that getting clear on the meaning of "seeing" is the only feasible way to determine whether the empirical attempts to answer Molyneux’s question accurately capture what newly sighted subjects are in fact capable of seeing. Specifically, we show that the dominant interpretations of the empirical results from a recent study (Held et al., 2011) fail to take into account that seeing can be not only purely visual but also epistemic in that it requires background knowledge (such as what an object with a particular viewpoint-independent shape looks like from a particular perspective). (shrink)

Reductionists about knowledge-wh hold that "s knows-wh" (e.g. "John knows who stole his car") is reducible to "there is a proposition p such that s knows that p, and p answers the indirect question of the wh-clause." Anti-reductionists hold that "s knows-wh" is reducible to "s knows that p, as the true answer to the indirect question of the wh-clause." I argue that both of these positions are defective. I then offer a new analysis of knowledge-wh as a special kind (...) of de re knowledge. (shrink)

According to the inferential view of language comprehension, we hear a speaker’s utterance and infer what was said, drawing on our competence in the syntax and semantics of the language together with background information. On the alternative perceptual view, fluent speakers have a non-inferential capacity to perceive the content of speech. On this view, when we hear a speaker’s utterance, the experience confers some degree of justification on our beliefs about what was said in the absence of defeaters. So, in (...) the absence of defeaters, we can come to know what was said merely on the basis of hearing the utterance. Several arguments have been offered against a pure perceptual view of language comprehension, among others, arguments pointing to its alleged difficulties accounting for homophones and the context-sensitivity of ordinary language. After responding to the arguments against the perceptual view of language comprehension, I provide a new argument in favor of the perceptual view by looking closer at the dependence of the justificatory qualities of experience on the notion of a defeater as well as the perceptual nature of language learning and language processing. (shrink)

Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion The first in-depth philosophical analysis of personal hate and group hate, Hate: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion explores how personal hatred can foster domestic violence and emotional abuse, how hate-proneness is a main contributor to the aggressive tendencies of borderlines, narcissists and psychopaths, how seemingly ordinary people embark on some of history's worst hate crimes, and how cohesive groups, subjected to spontaneous forces of group polarization, can develop extremist viewpoints of the sort that motivate (...) hate crimes, mass shootings, and terrorism. The book's first part explores hate in intimate relationships, looking for an answer to the question of why our intimate relationships can survive hate and resentment, but not disrespect or contempt. Berit "Brit" Brogaard shows that where contempt creates an irreparable power imbalance, hate is tied to fear, which our brains may reinterpret as thrill, attraction and excitement. But this can also make hate a dangerous emotion that convinces people to hang onto abusive relationships. When tied to vengeance and the dark triad of personality, hate is not only dangerous but also dehumanizing. Vengeance and the dark personalities are not essential to hate, however. Without them, hate can have more admirable ends. The book's second part explores the polarizing forces that can bias cohesive groups of like-minded individuals and contribute to what is effectively a hate crisis. Drawing on history, politics, legal theory, philosophy, and psychology, Brogaard shows how cultural myths about femininity, ethnic groups, and the land of opportunity perpetuate misogyny, white supremacy and anti-Semitism. But, she argues, politicians and policymakers have it in their power to address the hate crisis through legislation that preserves the original incentive behind the first-amendment right to free speech. (shrink)

Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions provides the first book-length exposition and defense of semantic temporalism, the view that propositions are contents or semantic values that can change their truth-values across time.

This volume provides novel approaches to a variety of questions about ambivalence and the role it plays in our lives. As the contributions illustrate, ambivalence finds its way into a gamut of philosophical and psychological debates about rationality, skepticism, emotions, intentionality, racism, global justice, well-being, mindfulness, and intersubjectivity. These debates concern questions like: “Is ambivalence distinct from uncertainty?”, “Does ambivalence affect the way we respond to paradoxes?”, “How can two nations come to an agreement about nuclear disarmament?”, “Is ambivalence irrational (...) when it frustrates effective action?”, “Why do people who have had training in law enforcement commit such heinous acts of violence?”, “How does mindfulness resolve ambivalence?”, and “Why isn’t valuing your interests and ends and taking them seriously sufficient for self-love?” . (shrink)

Blindsight and vision for action seem to be exemplars of unconscious visual processes. However, researchers have recently argued that blindsight is not really a kind of uncon- scious vision but is rather severely degraded conscious vision. Morten Overgaard and col- leagues have recently developed new methods for measuring the visibility of visual stimuli. Studies using these methods show that reported clarity of visual stimuli correlates with accuracy in both normal individuals and blindsight patients. Vision for action has also come under (...) scrutiny. Recent findings seem to show that information processed by the dor- sal stream for online action contributes to visual awareness. Some interpret these results as showing that some dorsal stream processes are conscious visual processes (e.g., Gallese, 2007; Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003). The aim of this paper is to provide new support for the more traditional view that blindsight and vision for action are genuinely unconscious per- ceptual processes. I argue that individuals with blindsight do not have access to the kind of purely qualitative color and size information which normal individuals do. So, even though people with blindsight have a kind of cognitive consciousness, visual information process- ing in blindsight patients is not associated with a distinctly visual phenomenology. I argue further that while dorsal stream processing seems to contribute to visual awareness, only information processed by the early dorsal stream (V1, V2, and V3) is broadcast to working memory. Information processed by later parts of the dorsal stream (the parietal lobe) never reaches working memory and hence does not correlate with phenomenal awareness. I con- clude that both blindsight and vision for action are genuinely unconscious visual processes. (shrink)

It may seem that when you have an emotional response to a perceived object or event that makes it seem to you that the perceived source of the emotion possesses some evaluative property, then you thereby have prima facie, immediate justification for believing that the object or event possesses the evaluative property. Call this view ‘dogmatism about emotional justification’. We defend a view of the structure of emotional awareness according to which the objects of emotional awareness are derived from other (...) experiences such as bodily sensation, inner awareness, sensory perception, memory, and imagination. On this basis, we argue that dogmatism about emotional justification is an untenable position, regardless of whether the special feature of an immediate justifier that makes it an immediate justifier is its presentational phenomenology or its evidence insensitivity. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have appealed to the phenomenological similarity between visual experience and visual imagery to support the hypothesis that there is significant overlap between the perceptual and imaginative domains. The current evidence, however, is inconclusive: while evidence from transcranial brain stimulation seems to support this conclusion, neurophysiological evidence from brain lesion studies (e.g., from patients with brain lesions resulting in a loss of mental imagery but not a corresponding loss of perception and vice versa) indicates that there are functional and (...) anatomical dissociations between mental imagery and perception. Assuming that the mental imagery and perception do not overlap, at least, to the extent traditionally assumed, then the question arises as to what exactly mental imagery is and whether it parallels perception by proceeding via several functionally distinct mechanisms. In this review, we argue that even though there may not be a shared mechanism underlying vision for perception and conscious imagery, there is an overlap between the mechanisms underlying vision for action and unconscious visual imagery. On the basis of these findings, we propose a modification of Kosslyn’s model of imagery that accommodates unconscious imagination and explore possible explanations of the quasi-pictorial phenomenology of conscious visual imagery in light of the fact that its underlying neural substrates and mechanisms typically are distinct from those of visual experience. (shrink)

Is color experience cognitively penetrable? Some philosophers have recently argued that it is. In this paper, we take issue with the claim that color experience is cognitively penetrable. We argue that the notion of cognitive penetration that has recently dominated the literature is flawed since it fails to distinguish between the modulation of perceptual content by non-perceptual principles and genuine cognitive penetration. We use this distinction to show that studies suggesting that color experience can be modulated by factors of the (...) cognitive system do not establish that color experience is cognitively penetrable. Additionally, we argue that even if color experience turns out to be modulated by color-related beliefs and knowledge beyond non-perceptual principles, it does not follow that color experience is cognitively penetrable since the experiences of determinate hues involve post-perceptual processes. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications that these ideas may have on debates in philosophy. (shrink)

Blindsight is a kind of residual vision found in people with lesions to V1. Subjects with blindsight typically report no visual awareness, but they are nonetheless able to make above-chance guesses about the shape, location, color and movement of visual stimuli presented to them in their blind field. A different kind of blindsight, sometimes called type 2 blindsight, is a kind of residual vision found in patients with V1 lesions in the presence of some residual awareness. Type 2 blindsight differs (...) from ordinary visual experience in lacking the particularity, transparency and fine-grainedness often taken to be essential to visual experience, at least in veridical cases. I argue that the case of type 2 blindsight provides a counterexample to the view that these characteristics are essential to veridical visual experience and that this gives us reason to resist the view that visual experience is essentially a perceptual relation to external objects. In the second part of the paper I argue that the case of type 2 blindsight yields important insights into the effects of attentional modulation on perceptual content and that cases of attentional modulation of appearance are not at odds with the view that the phenomenology of visual experience flows from its content. (shrink)

There are two competing views of knowledge-how: Intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. According to the reductionist varieties of intellectualism defended by Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001) and Berit Brogaard (2007, 2008, 2009), knowledge-how simply reduces to knowledge-that. To a first approximation, s knows how to A iff there is a w such that s knows that w is a way to A. For example, John knows how to ride a bicycle if and only if there is a way w such (...) that John knows that w is a way to ride a bicycle. John Bengson and Marc Moffett (2007) defend an anti-reductionist version of intellectualism which takes knowledge-how to require, in addition, that s understand the concepts involved in her belief. According to the anti-intellectualist accounts originally defended by Gilbert Ryle (1946) and many others after him, knowledge-how requires the possession of a practical ability and so knowing that w (for some w) is a way to A does not suffice for knowing-how. For example, John knows how to ride a bicycle only if John has the ability to ride it; if John merely knows that w (for some w) is a way to ride a bicycle, John does not know how to ride a bicycle. Here I will argue for a conciliatory position that is compatible with the reductionist variety of intellectualism: knowledge-how is reducible to knowledge-that. But, I argue, there are knowledge states which are not justification-entailing and knowledge states which are not belief-entailing. Both kinds of knowledge state require the possession of practical abilities. I conclude by arguing that the view defended naturally leads to a disjunctive conception of abilities as either essentially involving mental states or as not essentially involving mental states. Only the former kind of ability is a kind of knowledge-state, viz. a knowledge-how state. (shrink)

This volume of new essays brings together philosophers representing many different perspectives to address central questions in the philosophy of perception.