Material acquisition—buying, inheriting, being given—and nonmaterial—learning a word, assimilating a form—have been likened, and in both, meaningful acquisition cannot take place without a taxonomy, a scheme of categories into which the acquired element can be fitted. Then with these elements—both material and nonmaterial—we create a world or build and project a self, the painter and the interior decorator equally manipulating the elements in a vocabulary. The coarseness of such an outlook seems to bludgeon away long-established fine distinctions. We need not (...) deny, however, that there may be a kind of "indifference" in regard to "the real existence of the thing" which allows us "to play the part of judge in matters of taste," as Kant would have it,1 we need not deny the existence of an "aesthetic attitude: it is just that such indifference and such an attitude probably don't have much to do with our day-to-day experience of artifacts and perhaps needn't. The "aesthetic attitude" was not long ago defined by Jerome Stolnitz as "disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone."2 Stolnitz is at pains to distinguish the aesthetic attitude from "interests" with which it may be preferable to confuse it. "One of them," he writes, "is the interest in owning a work of art for the sake of pride or prestige". And again, "Another nonaesthetic interest is the 'cognitive,' i.e., the interest in gaining knowledge about an object". Both these interests sound rather acquisitive, and let us consider the "aesthetic attitude" as somehow tied in everyday practice to the bundle of "acquiring" activities. · 1. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, p. 43.· 2. Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism, excerpted in Introductory Readings in Aesthetics, ed. John Hospers, p. 19; all further citations in text. Hiram W. Woodward, Jr. is a lecturer in the department of the history of art at the University of Michigan. He is editor of Eighty Works in the University of Michigan Museum of Art: A Handbook and coeditor of Barabudur: History and Significance of a Buddhist Monument. (shrink)

Counterfactuals all the way down? Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9437-9 Authors Jim Woodward, History and Philosophy of Science, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Barry Loewer, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA John W. Carroll, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8103, USA Marc Lange, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB#3125—Caldwell Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125, USA Journal Metascience (...) Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796 Journal Volume Volume 20 Journal Issue Volume 20, Number 1. (shrink)

This chapter explores the possibility of weakening the criteria for causal explanation in Making Things Happen to yield various forms of non-causal explanation. These include the following: retaining the idea that explanations must answer what if things had been different questions but dropping the requirement the answers to such questions must take the form of claims about what would happen under interventions. Retaining the w- question requirement but allowing generalizations that hold for mathematical or conceptual reasons to figure in explanations. (...) Dropping the w-question requirement to accommodate the role of information about irrelevance in explanation. (shrink)

In a backlash against the prevalence of statistical methods, recently social scientists have focused more on studying causal mechanisms. They increasingly rely on a technique called process-tracing, which involves contrasting the observable implications of several alternative mechanisms. Problematically, process-tracers do not commit to a fundamental notion of causation, and therefore arguably they cannot discern between mere correlation between the links of their purported mechanisms and genuine causation. In this paper, I argue that committing to Woodward's interventionist notion of causation (...) would solve this problem: process-tracers should take into account evidence for possible interventions on the mechanisms they study. (shrink)

Bogen and Woodward claim that the function of scientific theories is to account for 'phenomena', which they describe both as investigator-independent constituents of the world and as corresponding to patterns in data sets. I argue that, if phenomena are considered to correspond to patterns in data, it is inadmissible to regard them as investigator-independent entities. Bogen and Woodward's account of phenomena is thus incoherent. I offer an alternative account, according to which phenomena are investigator-relative entities. All the infinitely (...) many patterns that data sets exhibit have equal intrinsic claim to the status of phenomenon: each investigator may stipulate which patterns correspond to phenomena for him or her. My notion of phenomena accords better both with experimental practice and with the historical development of science. (shrink)

An enticing view about explanation consists of two theses. First, there is the Relevance Thesis, the thesis that the truth of explanation sentences depends on a contextually selected relevance relation. The idea is that whether an utterance is true depends on what factors the context counts as relevant. Second, there is the Contrastivity Thesis, the thesis that the truth of explanation sentences depends on a contextually determined contrastive focus. This metalinguistic view is enticing, and elements of it have been defended (...) by van Fraassen, Woodward, Schaffer, and others. Nevertheless, the enticing view is flawed; both the Contrastivity Thesis and the Relevance Thesis are mistaken. (shrink)

Pearl and Woodward are both well-known advocates of interventionist causation. What is less well-known is the interesting relationship between their respective accounts. In this paper we discuss the different perspectives of causation these two accounts present and show that they are two sides of the same coin. Pearl’s focus is on leveraging global network constraints to correctly identify local causal relations. The rules by which global causal structures are composed from distinct causal relations are precisely defined by the global (...) constraints. Woodward’s focus, however, is on the use of local manipulation to identify single causal relations that then compose into global causal structures. The rules by which this composition takes place emerge as a result of local interventionist constraints. We contend that the complete picture of causality to be found between these two perspectives from the interventionist tradition must recognise both the global constraints of the sort identified by Pearl and the local constraints of the sort identified by Woodward, and the interplay between them: Pearl requires the possibility of local interventions and Woodward requires a global statistical framework within which to build composite causal structures. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the study of causal mechanisms in the social sciences. I argue that unless one adopts a clear notion of causation, such as Woodward's manipulability theory of causation, one does not find evidence for causal claims. I show that adopting Woodward’s theory entails that a researcher must take into account both the observable implications of the mechanisms, and possible interventions on those mechanisms. In a backlash against the pervasiveness of statistical methods, in the last (...) decade or so social scientists have become more focused on finding the causal mechanisms behind observed correlations. To provide evidence for such causal claims, researchers often rely on process-tracing, a method which involves contrasting the observable implications of several alternative mechanisms. Although process-tracing has gained prominence as a technique, researchers do not share a fundamental framework of what causation is. I will show what process-tracers’ reasoning would look like if they were to commit to Woodward’s manipulability theory. This theory tells us that any successful explanation of an effect must refer to causal factors that could be manipulated to change the phenomenon under study. Specifically, a variable X is a cause of another variable Y if there exists some ‘intervention variable’ I. I is an intervention variable if we can use I to change X, which will then in turn change Y without any interference of other variables linked to Y. In other words, using I we will be able to ascertain that it was X that made the change in Y happen. I will argue that if a process-tracing researcher were to adopt the manipulability notion of causation, she would not only have to find observable implications of the alternative mechanisms under study, but also information regarding an intervention variable for each link of the causal chain. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to present James Woodward's conception of the philosophy of science as it has been developed during last two decades in his essays. Compared with B. van Fraassen, N. Cartwright or W. C. Salmon the views of J. Woodward are not so popular. According to the author, however, they represent an important contribution to the contemporary philosophy of science. In the first two parts of the paper the differences between Woodward's and Hempel's (...) views of scientific explanation are shown. The third part shows Woodward's approach to the problems of the causal analysis and to the philosophical problems of the so called "regression equations". In conclusion the author makes some critical commentaries and remarks on Woodward's views. (shrink)

Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

ABSTRACT Constitutive panpsychism is the doctrine that macro-level consciousness—that is, consciousness of the sort possessed by certain composite things such as humans—is built out of irreducibly mental features had by some or all of the basic physical constituents of reality. On constitutive panpsychism, changes in macro-level consciousness amount to changes in either the way that micro-conscious entities ‘bond’ or the way that micro-conscious qualities ‘blend’. I pose the ‘Selection Problem’ for constitutive panpsychism—the problem of explaining how high-level functional states of (...) the brain ‘select’ micro-conscious qualities for bonding or blending. I argue that there are no empirically plausible solutions to this problem. (shrink)

A number of philosophers with a metaphysical orientation have criticized Making Things Happen for its failure to provide an account of the metaphysical foundations or grounds or truth-makers for causal and explanatory claims. This dialog attempts to respond to these objections and to raise some general concerns about some of the rhetoric and argumentative strategies employed in contemporary analytic metaphysics. It also explores some issues having to do with the relationship between methodology, understood as a core concern of philosophy of (...) science, and analytic metaphysics. (shrink)

This article discusses some philosophical theories of causation and their application to several areas of science. Topics addressed include regularity, counterfactual, and causal process theories of causation; the causal interpretation of structural equation models and directed graphs; independence assumptions in causal reasoning; and the role of causal concepts in physics. In connection with this last topic, this article focuses on the relationship between causal asymmetries, the time-reversal invariance of most fundamental physical laws, and the significance of differences among varieties of (...) differential equations in causal interpretation. It concludes with some remarks about “grounding” special science causal generalizations in physics. (shrink)

Participants in the cognitive phenomenology debate have proceeded by (a) proposing a bifurcation of theoretical options into inflationary and non-inflationary theories, and then (b) providing arguments for/against one of these theories. I suggest that this method has failed to illuminate the commonalities and differences among conscious intentional states of different types, in the absence of a theory of the structure of these states. I propose such a theory. In perception, phenomenal-intentional properties combine with somatosensory properties to form P-I property clusters (...) that serve as phenomenal modes of presentations of particulars. In imagination, somatosensory properties are replaced with phenomenal-intentional properties whose intentional objects are somatosensory properties, thus resulting in imaginative facsimiles of perceptual P-I property clusters. Such structures can then be used as phenomenal prototypes that pick out individuals and kinds. Sets of such prototypes constitute a subject’s conception of individuals and kinds. Combined with a few additional elements, these imaginative P-I property clusters serve as the building-blocks of conscious cognitive states. Different ways of carving up theoretical space classify my theory either as inflationary or as non-inflationary. I conclude that the theory is anti-inflationary in letter but inflationary in spirit. (shrink)

It is intuitive that free action depends on consciousness in some way, since behavior that is unconsciously generated is widely regarded as un-free. But there is no clear consensus as to what such dependence comes to, in part because there is no clear consensus about either the cognitive role of consciousness or about the essential components of free action. I divide the space of possible views into four: the Constitution View (on which free actions metaphysically consist, at least in part, (...) in phenomenally conscious episodes of a special sort), the Causal-Dependence View (on which free actions are necessarily caused by conscious episodes), the Counterfactaul-Dependence View (on which free actions necessarily counterfactually dependent on conscious episodes of certain types), and the Independence View (on which there are no necessary dependence-relations that hold between free action and conscious episodes). After surveying recent empirical literature that purports to show that consciousness plays a smaller role in generating action than is usually supposed, I conclude that it is plausible that free action depends on consciousness in two ways. First, free action causally depends on consciousness control. Second, free action counterfactually depends on the agent's being responsive to certain reasons. (shrink)

Angela Mendelovici’s book The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality is a paradigm-establishing monograph within the phenomenal intentionality research program. Mendelovici argues that extant theories of intentionality that do not appeal to consciousness are both empirically and metaphysically inadequate, and a coherent, consciousness-based alternative can adequately explain (or explain away) all alleged cases of intentionality. While I count myself a fellow traveler, I discuss four choice-points where Mendelovici has taken, I believe, the wrong fork. (1) The explanatory relation that holds between intentional (...) and phenomenal properties is not identity but realization. (2) The mechanism that generates derivatively representational states is not content self-ascription but neural re-wiring. (3) The source of semantic structure within phenomenal-intentional states is not external structure and/or second-order co-instantiation but primitive phenomenal ascription. (4) The mode of presence of contents within phenomenal-intentional states is not being part of a superficial characterization, but being monadically present as an intentional object. (shrink)

I discuss three tiers of technological innovation: mild innovation, or the acceleration by technology of a human activity aimed at a good; moderate innovation, or the obviation by technology of an activity aimed at a good; and radical innovation, or the altering by technology of the human condition so as to change what counts as a good. I argue that it is impossible to morally assess proposed innovations within any of these three tiers unless we rehabilitate a natural-law ethical framework. (...) And I offer some moral starting points within such a framework, in connection with innovations of each of the three types. (shrink)

Aesthetics in Continental Philosophy Although aesthetics is a significant area of research in its own right in the analytic philosophical tradition, aesthetics frequently seems to be accorded less value than philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and other areas of value theory such as ethics and political philosophy. Many of the most prominent analytic philosophers … Continue reading Aesthetics in Continental Philosophy →.

Karl Rahner Karl Rahner was one of the most influential Catholic philosophers of the mid to late twentieth century. A member of the Society of Jesus and a Roman Catholic priest, Rahner, as was the custom of the time, studied scholastic philosophy, through which he discovered Thomas Aquinas. From Aquinas’ epistemology and philosophical … Continue reading Rahner, Karl →.