In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts. Moving smoothly between moral philosophy and social theory, Honneth offers insights into such issues as the social forms of recognition and nonrecognition, the moral basis of interaction in human conflicts, the relation between the recognition model and conceptions of modernity, the normative basis of social theory, and the possibility of mediating between Hegel and Kant.

The System of Pragmatic Idealism is of special importance for Nicholas Rescher's philosophical work, because here he has presented the systematic approach at once. Dedicated to his 70th birthday a group of European and U.S-american philosophers discuss the main topics of Rescher's philosophical system. The contributions which are presented here for the first time and Nicholas Rescher's responses cover the most important topics of philosophy and give a deep and detailed insight into the strenght of Rescher's pragmatic idealism. This volume (...) is of interest for philosophers studying Rescher's philosophy and for all those who are interested in systematic philosophy and the vividnes of pragmatism and idealism in present philosophy. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of joint attention as based on, and explicable in terms of, the exercise of a minimal kind of perceptual joint know-how. On the action-based view I shall be developing, joint forms of perception are object-involving processes constituted by perceivers’ skillfully co-ordinated motor movements in social space. Joint experience can then be understood as presenting the process to the involved perceivers and joint attention as perceivers’ focus on the object of this process. This theory reconciles at (...) least some primitivist and reductionist intuitions about joint attention. (shrink)

Taking scientific practice as its starting point, this book charts the complex territory of models used in science. It examines what scientific models are and what their function is. Reliance on models is pervasive in science, and scientists often need to construct models in order to explain or predict anything of interest at all. The diversity of kinds of models one finds in science – ranging from toy models and scale models to theoretical and mathematical models – has attracted attention (...) not only from scientists, but also from philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science. This has given rise to a wide variety of case studies that look at the different uses to which models have been put in specific scientific contexts. By exploring current debates on the use and building of models via cutting-edge examples drawn from physics and biology, the book provides broad insight into the methodology of modelling in the natural sciences. It pairs specific arguments with introductory material relating to the ontology and the function of models, and provides some historical context to the debates as well as a sketch of general positions in the philosophy of scientific models in the process. (shrink)

Though to deny the geological impact of human force on nature is now essentially quasi-criminal, many theorists remain, nonetheless, unimpressed with what this “new era” has afforded us in terms of critical potential. This article is concerned with what Srinivas Aravamudan deems “the escapist philosophy of various dimension of the hypothesis concerning the Anthropocene.” Following Erik Swyngedouw's indictment of apocalyptic discourses' vital role in displacing social antagonisms and nurturing capitalism, this article argues that the new regimes of Anthropocenean consciousness have (...) been powerful in disavowing racial antagonisms. It discusses the ways in which Anthropocene ethics have foreclosed proper political framings by promoting a moral philosophy unequipped to face the racial histories of our current ecological predicament. It contends that the “political Anthropocene” will remain an impossibility until it is able to wrestle with the problem of black suffering. (shrink)

The first book since Coady's 1992 'Testimony: A Philosophical Study' to offer a thorough survey and a philosophical introduction to testimony and its epistemological problems, while at the same time advancing a novel view that proposes independent justificatory pathways for the acceptance and rejection of testimony, respectively. // Table of Contents: // Introduction / 1. What is Testimony? / 2. The Testimonial Conundrum / 3. Testimony, Perception, Memory, and Inference / 4. Testimony and Evidence / 5. Reductionism and Anti-Reductionism / (...) 6. Hybrid Theories of Testimony / 7. Testimonial Knowledge: Transmission and Generation / 8. Trust and Assurance / 9. Expert Testimony / 10. Pathologies of Testimony / 11. Testimony and the Value of Knowledge / Glossary / Bibliography / Index. (shrink)

Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause–effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e., generative) models of the world optimized by standard cognitive functions (e.g., perception, action, learning). This paper presents an active inference formulation that views cognitive niche construction as (...) a cognitive function aimed at optimizing organisms' generative models. We call that process of optimization extended active inference. (shrink)

What do people learn when they do not know that they are learning? Until recently, all of the work in the area of implicit learning focused on empirical questions and methods. In this book, Axel Cleeremans explores unintentional learning from an information-processing perspective. He introduces a theoretical framework that unifies existing data and models on implicit learning, along with a detailed computational model of human performance in sequence-learning situations.

This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the political position it occupies and on the nature of populism. Employing analytic techniques of concept clarification and recent analytic ideology critique, it develops populism as a political kind in three steps. First, it descriptively specifies the stereotype of populist platforms as identified in extant research and thereby delimits the peculiar political position populism occupies in representative democracies as neither inclusionary nor fascist. Second, it (...) specifies on this basis analytically–normatively the particular stance towards liberal representative democracy (in particular towards popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy) that unifies populism’s political position and explains how populist politics can be compelling for democratic citizens. The normative core (populist ideology) turns out to require no more than two general principles of legitimizing political authority by elections. Surprisingly, it does not need a separate anti-pluralist or exclusionary commitment: it entails it. Third, this normative model allows a response to a contested question in the theoretical discussion, namely, whether populism (properly specified) can be democracy-enhancing. The article defends the negative answer in virtue of the normative core alone and does so as much vis-à-vis a minimal (purely electoral) as vis-à-vis a normatively ambitious (liberal) conception of democracy. The reconstruction of the normative core of populist ideology enables a novel argument to show that populism is incompatible with the continued democratic legitimation of political authority even in the normatively most austere conception of ‘electoral democracy’, not just with ‘liberal democracy’. Assuming a normatively more ambitious concept of democratic legitimation in terms of political autonomy, the model also produces an extremely direct argument showing that populists cannot fulfil their promise of ‘taking back control’ over political decision-making to the population. (shrink)

In evolutionary biology, niche construction is sometimes described as a genuine evolutionary process whereby organisms, through their activities and regulatory mechanisms, modify their environment such as to steer their own evolutionary trajectory, and that of other species. There is ongoing debate, however, on the extent to which niche construction ought to be considered a bona fide evolutionary force, on a par with natural selection. Recent formulations of the variational free-energy principle as applied to the life sciences describe the properties of (...) living systems, and their selection in evolution, in terms of variational inference. We argue that niche construction can be described using a variational approach. We propose new arguments to support the niche construction perspective, and to extend the variational approach to niche construction to current perspectives in various scientific fields. (shrink)

Despite being a new term, ‘fake news’ has evolved rapidly. This paper argues that it should be reserved for cases of deliberate presentation of false or misleading claims as news, where these are misleading by design. The phrase ‘by design’ here refers to systemic features of the design of the sources and channels by which fake news propagates and, thereby, manipulates the audience’s cognitive processes. This prospective definition is then tested: first, by contrasting fake news with other forms of public (...) disinformation; second, by considering whether it helps pinpoint conditions for the proliferation of fake news. (shrink)

Is it fair to leave the next generation a public debt? Is it defensible to impose legal rules on them through constitutional constraints? From combating climate change to ensuring proper funding for future pensions, concerns about ethics between generations are everywhere. In this volume sixteen philosophers explore intergenerational justice. Part One examines the ways in which various theories of justice look at the matter. These include libertarian, Rawlsian, sufficientarian, contractarian, communitarian, Marxian and reciprocity-based approaches. In Part Two, the authors look (...) more specifically at issues relevant to each of these theories, such as motivation to act fairly towards future generations, the population dimension, the formation of preferences through education and how they impact on our intergenerational obligations, and whether it is fair to rely on constitutional devices. (shrink)

According to one influential view, model-building in science is primarily a matter of simplifying theoretical descriptions of real-world target systems using abstraction and idealization. This view, however, does not adequately capture all types of models. Many contemporary models in the natural and social sciences – from physics to biology to economics – stand in a more tenuous relationship with real-world target systems and have a decidedly stipulative element, in that they create, by fiat, ‘model worlds’ that operate according to some (...) set of specified rules. While such models may be motivated by an interest in actual target phenomena, their validity is not – at least not primarily – to be judged by whether they constitute an empirically adequate representation of any particular empirical system. The present paper compares and contrasts three such types of models: minimal models, toy models, and exploratory models. All three share some characteristics and thus overlap in interesting ways, yet they also exhibit significant differences. It is argued that, in all three cases, modal considerations have an important role to play: by exploring the modal structure of theories and phenomena – that is, by probing possibilities in various ways – such models deepen our understanding and help us gain knowledge not only about what there is in the world, but also about what there could be. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, representationalist and dynamicist positions in the philosophy of cognitive science have argued over whether neurocognitive processes should be viewed as representational or not. Major scientific and technological developments over the years have furnished both parties with ever more sophisticated conceptual weaponry. In recent years, an enactive generalization of predictive processing – known as active inference – has been proposed as a unifying theory of brain functions. Since then, active inference has fueled both representationalist and dynamicist (...) campaigns. However, we believe that when diving into the formal details of active inference, one should be able to find a solution to the war; if not a peace treaty, surely an armistice of a sort. Based on an analysis of these formal details, this paper shows how both representationalist and dynamicist sensibilities can peacefully coexist within the new territory of active inference. (shrink)

69 Thompson-Schill, S.L. _et al. _(1997) Role of left inferior prefrontal cortex 59 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1996) Functional anatomic studies of memory in retrieval of semantic knowledge: a re-evaluation _Proc. Natl. Acad._ retrieval for auditory words and pictures _J. Neurosci. _16, 6219–6235 _Sci. U. S. A. _94, 14792–14797 60 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1995) Functional anatomical studies of explicit and 70 Baddeley, A. (1992) Working memory: the interface between memory implicit memory retrieval tasks _J. Neurosci. _15, 12–29 and cognition (...) _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _4, 281–288 61 Bäckman, L. _et al. _(1997) Brain activation in young and older adults 71 Petrides, M. (1994) Frontal lobes and behavior _Curr. Opin. Neurobiol._ during implicit and explicit retrieval _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _9, 378–391. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of the paradoxes of teaching democracy, the paradoxes of being a citizen in a liberal democracy, and the insights that can be gained from the model of citizenship that T.H. Green promoted. Green thought citizenship was predicated on the twin foundations of the community and the common good. Freedom for Green means individual self-determination coupled with recognition of the dependency relations between individuals and the community. Green is noteworthy not only as a theorist but also (...) as an active contributor to the development of public schools in England. A consideration of his arguments provides a model for educating citizens, addresses the paradoxes of democracy in education, and reveals elements of his philosophy that are relevant to educational issues today. (shrink)

When it comes to behavioral change, economic design and behavioral science are complements, not substitutes. Chater & Loewenstein give examples from policy design. In this commentary, I use examples, often from my own research, to show how behavioral insights inform the design of the rules that govern market transactions.

Complete URL to this document: http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/93-Principles.html.

La falibilidad es una condición ubicua de nuestras empresas, la cual emana del hecho de que, comúnmente, las cosas que más nos interesan, como el descubrir la verdad, referirnos a cosas que de hecho existen, evitar dañar a los otros, etc., escapan nuestro alcance y, sin embargo, no dejamos de hacer grandes esfuerzos para conseguirlas. Es posible que hagamos todo lo que está en nuestras manos para actuar de manera cuidadosa y responsable y aun así nuestros actos tengan consecuencias negativas; (...) e igualmente es posible que nuestros actos tengan consecuencias positivas sin que podamos cobrar crédito por ellas como un logro. En este volumen, el autor se propone no solo explicar qué caracteriza a los casos de buena y mala suerte, sino también por qué valoramos más un logro que podemos atribuir al esfuerzo propio que el obtener lo que deseamos de manera accidental. (shrink)

This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the political position it occupies and on the nature of populism. Employing analytic techniques of concept clarification and recent analytic ideology critique, it develops populism as a political kind in three steps. First, it descriptively specifies the stereotype of populist platforms as identified in extant research and thereby delimits the peculiar political position populism occupies in representative democracies as neither inclusionary nor fascist. Second, it (...) specifies on this basis analytically–normatively the particular stance towards liberal representative democracy that unifies populism’s political position and explains how populist politics can be compelling for democratic citizens. The normative core turns out to require no more than two general principles of legitimizing political authority by elections. Surprisingly, it does not need a separate anti-pluralist or exclusionary commitment: it entails it. Third, this normative model allows a response to a contested question in the theoretical discussion, namely, whether populism can be democracy-enhancing. The article defends the negative answer in virtue of the normative core alone and does so as much vis-à-vis a minimal as vis-à-vis a normatively ambitious conception of democracy. The reconstruction of the normative core of populist ideology enables a novel argument to show that populism is incompatible with the continued democratic legitimation of political authority even in the normatively most austere conception of ‘electoral democracy’, not just with ‘liberal democracy’. Assuming a normatively more ambitious concept of democratic legitimation in terms of political autonomy, the model also produces an extremely direct argument showing that populists cannot fulfil their promise of ‘taking back control’ over political decision-making to the population. (shrink)

While the study of implicit learning is nothing new, the field as a whole has come to embody — over the last decade or so — ongoing questioning about three of the most fundamental debates in the cognitive sciences: The nature of consciousness, the nature of mental representation (in particular the difficult issue of abstraction), and the role of experience in shaping the cognitive system. Our main goal in this chapter is to offer a framework that attempts to integrate current (...) thinking about these three issues in a way that specifically links consciousness with adaptation and learning. Our assumptions about this relationship are rooted in further assumptions about the nature of processing and of representation in cognitive systems. When considered together, we believe that these assumptions offer a new perspective on the relationships between conscious and unconscious processing and on the function of consciousness in cognitive systems. (shrink)

Among contemporary epistemologists of testimony, David Hume is standardly regarded as a "global reductionist", where global reductionism requires the hearer to have sufficient first-hand knowledge of the facts in order to individually ascertain the reliability of the testimony in question. In the present paper, I argue that, by construing Hume's reductionism in too individualistic a fashion, the received view of Hume on testimony is inaccurate at best, and misleading at worst. Hume's overall position is more amenable to testimonial acceptance than (...) has traditionally been thought. In particular, Hume believes that indirect evidence of human nature and of the social world around us, can take the place of first-hand evidence of the track record of individual speakers or specific classes of testimony. In developing this interpretation of Hume's views on testimony, the present paper draws on discussions found in the Treatise, the Enquiry, and in Hume's writings on historical knowledge. (shrink)

Conventionally, multilevel analysis of covariance (ML-ANCOVA) has been the recommended approach for analyzing treatment effects in quasi-experimental multilevel designs with treatment application at the cluster-level. In this paper, we introduce the generalized ML-ANCOVA with linear effect functions that identifies average and conditional treatment effects in the presence of treatment-covariate interactions. We show how the generalized ML-ANCOVA model can be estimated with multigroup multilevel structural equation models that offer considerable advantages compared to traditional ML-ANCOVA. The proposed model takes into account measurement (...) error in the covariates, sampling error in contextual covariates, treatment-covariate interactions, and stochastic predictors. We illustrate the implementation of ML-ANCOVA with an example from educational effectiveness research where we estimate average and conditional effects of early transition to secondary schooling on reading comprehension. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 581-591, September 2021.

Autism Spectrum Condition presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many influential theories argue that social deficits and impairments of the self are the core problems in ASC. Predictive processing approaches address these based on general purpose neurocognitive mechanisms that are expressed atypically. Here we use the High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism approach in the context of cultural niche construction to explain (...) atypicalities of the relational self, specifically its minimal, extended, and intersubjective aspects. We contend that the social self in ASC should not be seen as impaired, but rather as an outcome of atypical niche construction. We unpack the scientific, ethical, and practical consequences of this view, and discuss implications for how the challenges that autistic persons face should be approached. (shrink)

Implicit learning is the process through which we become sensitive to certain regularities in the environment (1) in the absence of intention to learn about those regularities (2) in the absence of awareness that one is learning, and (3) in such a way that the resulting knowledge is difficult to express.

Values in dialogue offers a practical and theoretical model for ethics in care, that has grown from experience and research. The foundation of this ethical model is laid in the care relationship and in relational personalism. It consists of three pillars: values, dialogue, and attitudes. On this basis, a practical model for ethical reflection is developed. The aim is to empower professionals in their own ethical reflection and responsibility in concrete care situations. The model is applied on several topics, such (...) as collaboration between professionals, collaboration with clients and significant others, restriction of freedom and use of coercion, and exchange of information and confidentiality. 'Values in dialogue' is written for care professionals in their daily practice and in ethics commitees, but also for teachers and students in ethics courses. It focuses in particular on mental healthcare, support for people with mental disabilities, and care for elderly persons. (shrink)

Consciousness has many elements, from sensory experiences such as vision and bodily sensation, to nonsensory aspects such as memory and thought. All are presented as experiences of a single subject, and all seem to be contained within a unified field of experience. This unity raises many questions: How do diverse systems in the brain co-operate to produce a unified experience? Are there conditions under which this unity breaks down? Is conscious experience really unified at all? Such questions are addressed in (...) this thought-provoking book. (shrink)

I put forward an externalist theory of social understanding. On this view, psychological sense making takes place in environments that contain both agent and interpreter. The spatial structure of such environments is social, in the sense that its occupants locate its objects by an exercise in triangulation relative to each of their standpoints. This triangulation is achieved in intersubjective interaction and gives rise to a triadic model of the social mind. This model can then be used to make sense of (...) others’ observed actions. Its possession plays a vital role in the development of the capacity for false belief reasoning. The view offers an integrated account of the development of social cognition from primary intersubjectivity to level-2 perspective taking. It incorporates insights from interactionism and mindreading theories of social cognition and thus offers a way out of the stalemate between defenders of the two views. Because psychological sense making is perspectival, the frame problem does not arise for social reasoners: the perspective they bring to bear on the action that is to be interpreted constrains the information they can select to make sense of what others do. (shrink)

Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models exposed to large quantities of human language display sensitivity to the implied knowledge states of characters in written passages. In pre‐registered analyses, we present a linguistic version of the False Belief Task (...) to both human participants and a large language model, GPT‐3. Both are sensitive to others' beliefs, but while the language model significantly exceeds chance behavior, it does not perform as well as the humans nor does it explain the full extent of their behavior—despite being exposed to more language than a human would in a lifetime. This suggests that while statistical learning from language exposure may in part explain how humans develop the ability to reason about the mental states of others, other mechanisms are also responsible. (shrink)

Philosophical writings on the free energy principle in the life sciences often give the impression that minimising free energy is sufficient for life. But minimising free energy is not a sufficient condition for life. In fact, one can perfectly well conceive of a system that actively minimises its free energy, and for this very reason moves inexorably towards death. So, where does the assumption of this entailment relation come from? There is indeed an entailment relation, but it goes the other (...) way around: life entails minimising free energy. Put another way, if you exist, now, under the right conditions, it is because you’ve done something like minimising your free energy. However, the question of whether you will exist tomorrow cannot be settled purely by resorting to the fact that you will minimise your free energy to get there. The simple point I make in this paper is that the free energy principle is not concerned with the sufficient conditions of existence, but rather with what must have been the case, given that you exist. It’s not about figuring out what it takes to be alive; it’s about figuring out what took you there. (shrink)