Dr Peter Sjöstedt-H reviews Dr Andrew R. Gallimore's book, Alien Information Theory. -/- This was published on PsyPressUK on 13 June 2019.

Jean Piaget was one of the most salient and inspirational figures in psychological and educational research this century. He was prolific, authoring or editing over eighty books and numerous journal papers which have spawned a huge and fertile continuation of his research over the decades. A major component of any course on children's psychological development and a research tradition that is expanding, scholars need access to the original texts rather than relying on secondhand accounts. Jean Piaget: Selected Works is a (...) chance to acquire key original texts, most of which have been previously unavailable for several years. (shrink)

This paper addresses four issues: 1. What is nonsense? 2. Is nonsense possible? 3. Is nonsense actual? 4. Why do the answers to (1)–(3) matter, if at all? These are my answers: 1. A sentence (or an utterance of one) is nonsense if it fails to have or express content (more on ‘express’, ‘have’, and ‘content’ below). This is a version of a view that can be found in Carnap (1959), Ayer (1936), and, maybe, the early Wittgenstein (1922). The notion (...) I propose abstracts away from their favored (but wrong) theories of what meaning is. It is a notion of nonsense that can be appealed to by all semantic frameworks and all theories of what content is, but structurally it is just like e.g. Carnap’s. Nonsense, as I construe it, is accompanied by illusions of thought (and I think that was part of Carnap’s conception as well). 2. Yes. In particular, I examine three arguments for the impossibility of illusion of thought (which on my construal accompanies linguistic nonsense) and they are all unsound. 3. Yes. There might be a lot of nonsense, both in ordinary and theoretical speech. In particular, it is likely that much of contemporary philosophy consists of nonsense. Empirical work is required to determine just how much. 4. The struggle to avoid nonsense (and achieve meaningfulness) is at least as important as the struggle for truth. The avoidance of nonsense is a precondition not just for having a truth value but also for more important properties such as saying something interesting or kind. (shrink)

I reply to comments on my book Perception (Routledge 2021) by Umrao Sethi, Jeff Speaks and Brian Cutter. Sethi objects to my representational view of perception on the ground that that having an experience of a color or shape can enable you to know what that color or shape is like only if it is actually present in the experience. Speaks has a very interesting discussion of my puzzle of the laws of appearance for the representational view. And Cutter asks (...) what I have against 'neural sense datum theory'. In my responses, I try to take the discussion forward. At the end, I develop a new argument against reductive physicalist theories of sensible qualities. (shrink)

Many contemporary theorists charge that naïve realists are incapable of accounting for illusions. Various sophisticated proposals have been ventured to meet this charge. Here, we take a different approach and dispute whether the naïve realist owes any distinctive account of illusion. To this end, we begin with a simple, naïve account of veridical perception. We then examine the case that this account cannot be extended to illusions. By reconstructing an explicit version of this argument, we show that it depends (...) critically on the contention that perceptual experience is diaphanous, or more minimally and precisely, that there can be no difference in phenomenal properties between two experiences without a difference in the scenes presented in those experiences. Finding no good reason to accept this claim, we develop and defend a simple, naïve account of both veridical perception and illusion, here dubbed Simple, Austere Naïve Realism. (shrink)

Recent debates between representational and relational theories of perceptual experience sometimes fail to clarify in what respect the two views differ. In this essay, I explain that the relational view rejects two related claims endorsed by most representationalists: the claim that perceptual experiences can be erroneous, and the claim that having the same representational content is what explains the indiscriminability of veridical perceptions and phenomenally matching illusions or hallucinations. I then show how the relational view can claim that errors associated (...) with perception should be explained in terms of false judgments, and develop a theory of illusions based on the idea that appearances are properties of objects in the surrounding environment. I provide an account of why appearances are sometimes misleading, and conclude by showing how the availability of this view undermines one of the most common ways of motivating representationalist theories of perception. (shrink)

Since the first publication of Insight and Illusion in l972, a wealth of Wittgenstein's writings have become accessible. Accordingly, in this edition Professor Hacker has rewritten six of his eleven original chapters and revised the others to incorporate the new abundant material. Insight and Illusion now fully clarifies the historical backgrounds of Wittgenstein's highly different masterpieces, the Tractatus and the Investigations, and traces the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought. Hacker explains all of Wittgenstein's writings in detail, focusing on his (...) critique of metaphysics, his famous "private language argument," and his account of self-consciousness. (shrink)

This paper considers a form of scepticism according to which sentences, along with other linguistic entities such as verbs and phonemes, etc., are never realized. If, whenever a conversational participant produces some noise or other, they and all other participants assume that a specific sentence has been realized (or, more colloquially, spoken), communication will be fluent whether or not the shared assumption is correct. That communication takes place is therefore, one might think, no ground for assuming that sentences are realized (...) during a typical conversation. I reject both this ‘folie-a-deux’ view and the arguments for it due to Georges Rey. I do so by drawing on Gilbert Harrnan’s no-false-lemmas principle. Since testimony is a form of knowledge and, according to the principle, knowledge cannot depend essentially on false assumptions, testimony is incompatible with the claim that sentence realization is but an illusion. Much of the paper is given over to defending this appeal to the no-false-lemmas principle. After all, a more attractive option might seem to be to infer instead that the principle is itself falsified by the folie-a-deux view. (shrink)

According to the idealist, facts about phenomenal experience determine facts about the physical world. Any such view must account for illusions: cases where there is a discrepancy between the physical world and our experiences of it. In this paper, I critique some recent idealist treatments of illusions before presenting my own preferred account. I then argue that, initial impressions notwithstanding, it is actually the realist who has difficulties properly accounting for illusions.

Plato links pleasure with illusion, and this link explains his rejection of the view that all desires are rational desires for the good. The Protagoras and Gorgias show connections between pleasure and illusion; the Republic develops these into a psychological theory. One part of the soul is not only prone to illusions, but also incapable of the kind of reasoning that can dispel them. Pleasure appears good; therefore this part of the soul (the appetitive part) desires pleasures qua (...) good but ignores reasoning about what is really good. Hence the new moral psychology of the Republic: not all desires are rational, and thus virtue depends on bringing one's non-rational desires under the control of reason. (shrink)

Commitment to a pattern of altruism or self-control may indeed be learnable and sometimes rational. Commitment may also result from illusions. In one illusion, people think that their present behavior causes their future behavior, or causes the behavior of others, when really only correlation is present. Another happy illusion is that morality and self-interest coincide, so that altruism appears self-interested.

Much of the contemporary debate in the philosophy of mind is concerned with the clash between certain strongly held intuitions and what science tells us about the mind and its relation to the world. What science tells us about the mind points strongly towards some version or other of physicalism. The intuitions, in one way or another, suggest that there is something seriously incomplete about any purely physical story about the mind.

Patricia Cook: A great many Hegel commentators have marveled at, and offered their interpretations of, the gallery of fascinating vignettes, metaphors, ironic illusions, and poetic or rhetorical images contained in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Donald Verene proposes to treat this “gallery of pictures” exclusively and in detail. His project is to understand the separation between imaginative thought and the evolution of the Concept - between das Bild and der Begriff - in the Phenomenology.

This is a profound and concise essay on the basic structure of contemporary politics, written throughout in a voice that is sceptical, engaged, and clear.

Since the first publication of Insight and Illusion in l972, a wealth of Wittgenstein's writings has become accessible. Accordingly, in this edition Professor Hacker has rewritten six of his eleven original chapters and revised the others to incorporate the new abundant material.Insight and Illusion now fully clarifies the historical backgrounds of Wittgenstein's highly differing masterpices, the Tractatus and the Investigations, and traces the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought. Hacker explains all of Wittgenstein's writings in detail, focusing on his critique (...) of metaphysics, his famous "private language argument," and his account of self consciousness. (shrink)

The literary qualities of humanists’ writings convey how play and illusion helped form their ideas about knowledge, ethics, and metaphysics. Timothy Kircher argues for new ways of appreciating Renaissance humanist philosophy.

This paper pioneers the use of methods and findings from psycholinguistics in experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’. On this basis, it clarifies the epistemological relevance of empirical findings about intuitions – a key methodological challenge to experimental philosophy. The sources project (aka ‘cognitive epistemology of intuitions’) seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions, which help us assess their evidentiary value. One approach seeks explanations which trace relevant intuitions back to automatic cognitive processes that are generally reliable but predictably generate (...) cognitive illusions under specific vitiating circumstances. The paper develops and experimentally tests such an explanation for intuitions at the root of a historically influential paradox about perception (‘argument from illusion’). The explanation traces these intuitions to stereotype-driven amplification, an automatic process routinely involved in language comprehension (e.g., understanding philosophical case-descriptions). Distributional semantics analysis and a forced-choice plausibility ranking task are employed to establish the relevant verb-associated stereotypes. The paper argues that the inferences facilitated by these stereotypes are generally reliable, but shows that vitiating circumstances obtain in the formulation of the targeted paradox. On this basis, the paper explores two complementary strategies for assessing the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments. (shrink)

The world looks three-dimensional unless one looks closely, when it looks 3N-dimensional. But which appearance is veridical, and which the illusion? Albert contends that the three-dimensionality of the everyday world is illusory, and that 3N-dimensional wavefunction one discerns in quantum phenomena is the reality behind the illusion. What I try to do here is to argue for the converse of Albert's position; the world really is three dimensional, and the 3N-dimensional appearance of quantum phenomena is the theoretical analog (...) of an illusion; we represent quantum reality to ourselves as 3N-dimensional in order to more readily visualize the correlations between wave packets. (shrink)

These lucid studies of Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, and Rorty analyze majorcontributions to recent critical theory and forge a distinct position in the current philosophicaldebate.Thomas McCarthy is John Schaffer Professor in the Humanities ...

This essay clarifies Nietzsche's early views on truth and falsity by giving a systematic reading of On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense. Contrary to the prevailing view in recent Nietzsche scholarship, I argue that Nietzsche, in TL, affirms neither truth as correspondence nor the inevitable falsification of the world by cognition. I show that where Nietzsche appears to affirm falsification, he is in fact giving a reductio ad absurdum of truth as correspondence and the notion of objectivity on (...) which it relies. Though I limit my discussion to TL, I engage the more general debate around falsification by showing that more than one sense of falsification is at work in Nietzsche's discussions of truth and cognition. I argue that by criticizing illusory conceptions of truth, essence, and objective knowledge, Nietzsche develops a conception of cognition that prefigures his later naturalistic and perspectival accounts of knowledge. Because of the clear links between the views sketched in the early essay and Nietzsche's later philosophical project, I conclude that TL sets out positions and a project that Nietzsche continues to develop and experiment with throughout his "mature" work.Dieser Aufsatz erläutert Nietzsches frühes Verständnis von Warheit und Fälschung durch eine systematische Auslegung von Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne. Im Gegensatz zu einer voherrschenden Ansicht der heutigen Nietzsche-Forschung wird hier argumentiert, dass Nietzsche in Wahrheit und Lüge weder Wahrheit im Sinne von adacquatio versteht, noch sich für eine These von der unvermeidlichen Fälschung der Welt durch den Erkenntnisvorgang einsetzt. Die Textstellen, in denen Nietzsche von einer der Erkenntnis innewohnenden Fälschung zu sprechen scheint, kann man viel besser verstehen, wenn man diese Stellen als eine reductio ad absurdum von Warheit asl adaquatio liest, einschliesslich des Begriffs der Objektivität, dem sic entspricht. Im folgenden wird die Auslegung auf Nietzsches Verständnis von Fälschung auf den frühen Aufsatz Warheit aund Lüge begrenzt; dennoch werden die Schlüsse, die von diesem Aufsatz gewonnen werden, in die weitere Diskussion von Nietzsches Verständnis von Fälschung einbezogen. In diesem Sinne wird gezeigt, dass meberere Anischten zum Thema Fälschung in Nietzsches Texten verkommen, und folglich dass in Bezug auf Nietzsches Verständnis von Warheit und Erkenntnis Fälschung nur in dieser Vielfalt in Betracht gezogen werden kann. Ich vertete die Ansicht, dass Nietzsche eine Vorstellung von Erkenntnis entwickelt, die seine spätere naturalistische und perspektivische Auffassung von Erkenntnis ankündigt Wegen der klaren verbindung zwischen den im frühen Aufsatz skizzierten Ansichten und Nietzsches späterem philosophischen Vorhaben, komme ich zu dem Schluss, dass Warheit und Lüge philosophische Denkweisen darlegt, die Nietzsche nach und nach entwickelt und mit denen er in seinen späteren Werken experimentiert. (shrink)

This book does two things. First, it introduces a novel kind of non-factualist view, and it argues that we should endorse views of this kind in connection with a wide class of metaphysical questions, most notably, the abstract-object question and the composite-object question (so, more specifically, the book argues that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any such things as abstract objects or composite objects—or material objects of any other kind). Second, the book explains how these non-factualist (...) views fit into a general anti-metaphysical view called neo-positivism, and it explains how we could argue that neo-positivism is true. Neo-positivism is (roughly) the view is that every metaphysical question decomposes into some subquestions—call them Q1, Q2, Q3, etc.—such that, for each of these subquestions, one of the following three anti-metaphysical views is true of it: non-factualism, or scientism, or metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism. These three views can be defined (very roughly) as follows. Non-factualism about a question Q is the view that there’s no fact of the matter about the answer to Q. Scientism about Q is the view that Q is an ordinary empirical-scientific question about some contingent aspect of physical reality, and Q can’t be settled with an a priori philosophical argument. And metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism about Q is the view that Q asks about the truth value of a modal sentence that’s metaphysically innocent in the sense that it doesn’t say anything about reality and, if it’s true, isn’t made true by reality. (shrink)

As much a portrait of his time as a biography of the man, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion returns the author of Das Kapital to his nineteenth-century world, before twentieth-century inventions transformed him into Communism’s patriarch and fierce lawgiver. Gareth Stedman Jones depicts an era dominated by extraordinary challenges and new notions about God, human capacities, empires, and political systems—and, above all, the shape of the future. In the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, a Europe-wide argument began about (...) the industrial transformation of England, the Revolution in France, and the hopes and fears generated by these occurrences. Would the coming age belong to those enthralled by the revolutionary events and ideas that had brought this world into being, or would its inheritors be those who feared and loathed it? Stedman Jones gives weight not only to Marx’s views but to the views of those with whom he contended. He shows that Marx was as buffeted as anyone else living through a period that both confirmed and confounded his interpretations—and that ultimately left him with terrible intimations of failure. Karl Marx allows the reader to understand Marx’s milieu and development, and makes sense of the devastating impact of new ways of seeing the world conjured up by Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Ricardo, Saint-Simon, and others. We come to understand how Marx transformed and adapted their philosophies into ideas that would have—through twists and turns inconceivable to him—an overwhelming impact across the globe in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Can we ever experimentally disentangle phenomenal consciousness from the cognitive accessibility inherent to conscious reports? In this commentary, we suggest that (1) Block's notion of phenomenal consciousness remains intractably entangled with the need to obtain subjective reports about it; and (2) many experimental paradigms suggest that the intuitive notion of a rich but non-reportable phenomenal world is, to a large extent illusory – in a sense that requires clarification.

Those who are optimistic about the prospects of a science of consciousness, and those who believe that it lies beyond the reach of standard scientific methods, have something in common: both groups view consciousness as posing a special challenge for science. In this paper, we take a close look at the nature of this challenge. We show that popular conceptions of the problem of consciousness, epitomized by David Chalmers’ formulation of the ‘hard problem’, can be best explained as a cognitive (...) illusion, which arises as a by-product of our cognitive architecture. We present evidence from numerous sources to support our claim that we have a specialized system for thinking about phenomenal states, and that an inhibitory relationship exists between this system and the system we use to think about physical mechanisms. Even though the ‘hard problem’ is an illusion, unfortunately it appears that our cognitive architecture forces a closely related problem upon us. The ‘genuine problem’ of consciousness shares many features with the hard problem, and it also represents a special challenge for psychology. Nonetheless, researchers should be careful not to mistake the hard problem for the genuine problem, since the strategies appropriate for dealing with these problems differ in important respects. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss aspects of Herbert Leyendecker’s 1913 doctoral dissertation, Towards the Phenomenology of Deceptions, which he defended in 1913 at the University of Munich. Leyendecker was a member of the Munich and Göttingen Phenomenological Circles. In my discussion of his largely neglected views, I explore the connection between his ideas concerning “attitudes”, e.g., of searching for, observing, counting, or working with objects, and the central topic of his text, perceptual illusions, thematized by Leyendecker as a kind of (...) perceptual “deception”. Indeed, Leyendecker argues that a change of attitude is a necessary aspect of an illusion. I argue that Leyendecker’s use of the notion of attitude in accounting for illusions is problematic; yet I also suggest that his ideas are not devoid of philosophical interest, in relation to current debates. (shrink)

A thoroughly revised edition of the much-sought-after early work by Terence and Dennis McKenna that looks at shamanism, altered states of consciousness, and the organic unity of the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.

In the present essay we explore a form of linguistic witchery (Wittgenstein) aimed at forging a sense of unity from incompatible visions of reality—namely, the formation of oxymoronic hybrids.

Saul Smilansky presents an original new approach to the problem of free will, which lies at the heart of morality and self-understanding. He maintains that the key to the problem is the role played by illusion. Smilansky boldly claims that we could not live adequately with a complete awareness of the truth about human freedom and that illusion lies at the center of the human condition.

It is pretended to show the influence Cervantes had on Freud. Freud was worried about the psychic disorders. He was also disappointed by the methods of psychiatry had at that time. Freud was very interested in the plays of Cervantes, especially in El coloquio de los perros and El Quixote, where reality and illusion, and the relationship between sanity and insanity are their central axes. One of the possible readings of the great play is the one where limits between (...) reason and unreason are not clear, to the point of achieving “the reason of the unreasonableness”, which would make it understandable and explicable. Real fantasy, fantastic reality, the demarcation between them was one of the topics that worried Freud. Freud is not a simple lawyer of the irrationality, but he also tries to find “the reason of the unreasonableness” that neurotics show in the symptoms he tried to explain in detail. (shrink)

This article discusses Du Châtelet’s challenging claim that entertaining illusions, especially illusions of being esteemed by posterity, is conducive to happiness. It does so by taking a contextualizing approach, contrasting her views with some Epicurean aspects of the views on illusions and happiness in Bernard de Fontenelle and Julien Offray de La Mettrie. I will argue for three claims: (1) Du Châtelet’s comparison between self-related illusions and illusions in the theater is vulnerable to objections deriving from some distinctions that Fontenelle’s (...) poetics draws between the role of illusions in the theater and the role of illusions in real life. (2) Examining Fontenelle’s analysis of the detrimental effects of self-related illusions indicates several respects in which Du Châtelet has underestimated the ambivalent nature of illusions. (3) Du Châtelet’s view that illusions are akin to sensations that are favorable to us problematically generalizes La Mettrie’s insight that some acts of the imagination have a quasi-perceptual nature. (shrink)