What unites Arizona's current xenophobic, border cultural politics and the exemplary life of Benjamin Franklin, “True-blue English/First American”? What transhistorical resonances and parallels are there in those states of affairs? Casting a double look at “the inside looking out” and “the outside looking in,” Anglo Americana vis-à-vis Pax Britannica and vice versa, this piece turns to the postcolonial identity disorder endured then by our dear Ben, a ghostly transitory figure here, as a way to initiate a critical philosophical discourse on (...) transatlantic Anglocentrism and its psycho-geopolitical legacy of xeno-thinking in the cultural and historical imaginary of the United States, where a psycho-geopolitical reaction-formation of WAS self-identities has been the operative norm, a particular form and force of ethnonationalizing racial discourse in the United States, namely, “xenoracism”: the amalgamated categorical interactions of xenophobia and racism, a porous subgenre rather than sealed subset of xenophobia or racism, where the foreign is racialized and particular “aliens” become further alienized at once with catalytic, categorical reciprocity. Presented as a preamble to a fuller conceptualization of U.S. xenoracism, this exposition spotlights the post/colonial complexity, including irony, of that “special” gray/grey tie between the two bound and “divided” by shared Anglophonocentrism, “Comyn Englysshe,” this wounded attachment. (shrink)

Focusing on the first four images of the Other mobilized in René Descartes’ Meditations—namely, the blind, the mad, the dreamy, and the bad—Reading Descartes Otherwise casts light on what have heretofore been the phenomenological shadows of “Cartesian rationality.” In doing so, it discovers dynamic signs of spectral alterity lodged both at the core and on the edges of modern Cartesian subjectivity. Calling for a Copernican reorientation of the very notion “Cartesianism,” the book's series of close, creatively critical readings of Descartes’ (...) signature images brings the dramatic forces, moments, and scenes of the cogito into our own contemporary moment. While unravelling the knotted skeins of ambiguity that have been spun within philosophical modernity out of such clichés as “Descartes, the abstract modern subject” and “Descartes, the father of modern philosophy,” the analysis highlights a figure who is at once everywhere and nowhere, a living Cartesian ghost. This effort at revitalizing and reframing the legacy of Cartesian modernity, in a way mindful of its proto-phenomenological traces, also involves reflecting on some of the trends in contemporary Cartesian scholarship while putting Descartes in dialogue with a host of twentieth century and contemporary Continental philosophers ranging from Edmund Husserl, Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, and Alain Badiou among others. (shrink)

Gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, culture, etc., etc., etc…. How are we to rearticulate and retool those kaleidoscopic “problems” of social categories and identities each time differently, with different productivity, even as different “products”?—this capital, frontal problema, this “sufficient” bodily evidence in and of reality, “in front of you” and me. Such is the broad philosophical force, background and foreground, of the questions I dwell on here if only briefly. What interests me in particular, just as an example if not (...) exemplar, concerns the “Asian female” question, with which I happen to have some auto-ethnographical familiarity: the material specificity as well as translatability of some of the stereotypical identity markers of it categorically isolatable as such—I also show why a categorically responsive reflection matters, as my ultimate aim here is to advance a case for the social ontological centrality of this issue of Asian gender stereotypes to feminist and critical race theories. (shrink)

(2002). A Meditation on Knell, Funeral Melancholia and the Question of Self-Reflexivity: 'To Whom Would the Reflexive be Returned?' Angelaki: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 93-105.

This piece revisits this old Asian American trope, “the perpetual foreigner-stranger over there and here,” by showing how and why irony, “invAsian” irony in particular, becomes the constant in the cultural ontology and phenomenology of Asian Americana, where the Asian American subject still figures as encroaching builder or unbuilding resident, a transfigurative threat to the narrative coherence of the nationalist US imaginary. These particularly “InvAsian,”1 dangerous and honorary “CauASIAN,” characters—however outdated and yellowing they may seem in the year 2015—still seem (...) real enough; they are downwardly mobile noodle delivery men or upwardly mobile medical overachievers, riding up and down on the Great Chain of American Being, except that they are not laterally mobile, for they are still a little too strange, stupidly or smartly. So, the alien permanence of the “invAsian” irony of permanent aliens: how does this diehard cliché of fascination and fear, this contradictory object of condescension and condemnation, exist or subsist? The economized, i.e., selective and “invested”2 performance and mobilization of ethnoracial stereotypes captures the invAsian irony of America, which mirrors the deeper and wider Euro-American irony of identitarian anxieties over mythologized reality or territorialized origin. America, come on, really, where is your originality from? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cogito Interruptus:The Epistolary Body in the Elisabeth-Descartes Correspondence, June 22, 1645-November 3, 1645Kyoo LeeCogito interruptus is typical of those who see the world inhabited by symbols and symptoms. Like someone who, for example, points to the little box of matches, stares hard into your eyes, and says, "You see, there are seven...," then gives you a meaningful look, waiting for you to perceive the meaning concealed in that unmistakable (...) sign.Cogito interruptus is also typical of those who see the world inhabited not by symbols but by symptoms: indubitable signs of something that is neither here below nor up above, but that sooner or later will happen....Cogito interruptus is not a great prophetic, poetic, psychological technique. Only that it is ineffable. And it takes real faith in cogito interruptus—and a wish that readers understand me—for me to venture to speak of it, no matter what.—Umberto Eco, "Cogito Interruptus," Travels in HyperrealityIntroduction: Back to the Letters ThemselvesWhile looking through the private letters that the philosopher M. René Descartes (1596-1650) exchanged with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680) for the last seven years (1643-1650) of his life, I was fascinated [End Page 173] by the discussion of experiences of inconveniences, just small everyday interruptions that get in the way of the life of the so-called mind. They conversed and debated on matters ranging from metaphysical conundrums to psychosomatic troubles, on issues both extremely metaphysical and physical, ultimately impersonal and personal, all at once, such as pain; including other people's pain and especially other people as a pain. We are hardly short of such troubles in our own lives. The philosophical genius of Elisabeth, called by some "the first Cartesian" (Zedler 1989, 41), a title Descartes himself would not have deserved as he confesses but would have given her unreservedly (AT VI 325/CSM I 190-2), detects a fatal irony of an insulated and disciplined subjectivity.My concern in this paper is to keep alive Descartes's "mind-body problem" especially as a feminist issue. I am interested in reanimating that classical problem somehow otherwise. Here, I am hearing the voice of an unhappy and restless character, Elisabeth "la Grècque" (Nye 1999, 8), the autodidact who, embarrassed and curious, always has a question for the knowledgeable one, especially on that problem that mattered to her most. For some reason that becomes vitally important as we will see, the lady philosopher keeps reporting to the bearded one, without being asked to, how and how many times her act of letter writing has been interrupted by those around her who want every piece of her: "more than seven" at one point (Elisabeth to Descartes, Sept. 30, 1645, AT IV 303; Nye 1999, 64).From the early stage of correspondence that began in May 1643 and ended in December 1649 with Descartes's death, and specifically between June 22, 1645, and November 3, 1645, on which my analysis focuses, Elisabeth highlights, over and over again, this particular issue of sociomaterial obstacles and somatic disruptions in life. The young princess is constantly drawing and keeping the old philosopher's attention to the lived and living body; Descartes is relentlessly reminded of the blind spot in his carefully constructed house of the cogito, the mental foundation of selfhood. Consequently, almost precisely on November 3, 1645, just a year after publishing Principles of Philosophy (1644) where the key idea, floated between the two letter writers, on the obscure but "substantial" union of the mind and the body had already begun to surface, Descartes set out to pen the Passions of the Soul (1649) as a way of explicating answers to and for Elisabeth; she had been forcing him to think seriously and serially about the role of passions in the complementarily interactive relation between the mind and the body and, more significantly, the debilitating disrelations or dissonances between the two at times of psychosomatic troubles.What engages my attention here is the contextual porosity of epistolary cogitation: the bidirectional, transferential dance of the textured soul, in search of its truth. Call it an aesthetic phenomenology of correspondence; a [End Page 174] co... (shrink)

« On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.»: “One is not born but becomes (a) woman,” thus spake Simone de Beauvoir in Le deuxième sexe (1949), The Second Sex (1953, 2009). Which one? And how, in what language(s), would one read that line today in the age of gender variance and trans revolution? Why The Second Sex again? This article spotlights the translingual simplexity of the Beauvoirean lifeline, its conceptual genius that appears second to none, whether in French or (...) English or Korean or Chinese …. (shrink)

This essay introduces the work of the “first generation” Korean feminist photographer Youngsook Park. Highlighting the spirited and critical “wildness” of her feminist aesthetic agenda, with a topical focus on her iconic Michinnyeon Project, this dossier also contextualizes her more current projects such as Michinnyeon · Balhwa-hada and Could Not Have Left Them Behind along with her broader lifetime achievements thus far.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Going Polyphonic I: With Namita Goswami et al.Alyson Cole and Kyoo LeeThis time around, we go polyphonic.The articles in the next two issues, Vol. 13 and Vol. 14, explore critical questions, paradigm-shifting idseas, and fresh connections arising from the intimately networked fields of intersectional, decolonial, and trans studies today. “Polyphonia,” a term we borrowed from music, is meant to characterize ways in which each piece as in a (...) “note” remains distinctly their own while dialogically and dynamically connected to an evolving ecosystem of ideas and visions in the making. As an umbrella term, it is meant to shelter resonances from each article that speaks directly not only of, but to, theory today by doing it in their own way.In this issue, we are presenting “A Forum on Namita Goswami’s Subjects That Matter.” It consists of seven responses to Goswami’s pioneering work on intersectionality as exemplified by her recent book, Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (SUNY Press, 2019) as well as the earlier co-edited volume, Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach (Routledge, 2014, co-edited by Maeve M. O’Donovan, Namita Goswami, and Lisa Yount). What is polyphonic about this assemblage is its interlocutory structure and orientation: each scholar—Al Frankowski, Falguni Sheth, Jennifer Scuro, Lauren Guilmette, Luce deLire, Russell Ford, and Tyler M. Williams, all coming from different angles, perspectives, and positions—discusses their reading of Goswami on intersectionality while showing how and where their own scholarship meets hers. Goswami, in turn, responds to each response while providing a synthesized account of what she gleans from this choral interaction, what she finds inspiring, as well as challenging. The articles in the next issue, [End Page 1] Vol. 14, following the forum, will virtually continue the music, although not in direct response to Goswami’s work.We hope you will join us in this somewhat experimental virtual symposium that is not even on Zoom. We hope you will join us in thinking that this more literalized model of a “scholarly conversation,” actual and virtual, vitally embodies the very spirit of interdisciplinary, intergenerational, intercontinental intersectionality as a conversation, ongoing intellectual encounters among many of us in various “sub-fields,” for the lack of a better word, that, again literally, cannot be neatly contained in any disciplinary terms, boxes, or territories.The tranScripts section in this issue consists of two entries, the first of which is the fourth installment of Mieke Bal’s Moments of Meaning-Making, J–L. Then we have Margaret Carson’s translation of Juliana González on Remedios Varo.Again, this issue has been a labor of collective love. We would like to thank all the brilliant authors and extraordinarily generous and helpful peer reviewers for this issue, not to mention the ever so resourceful and skillful editorial staff at the press we constantly rely on for expert guidance and feedback, all of whom have been inspirations for us editors. [End Page 2]Copyright © 2024 State University of New York... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coeditors’ IntroductionRetro III: As We RestartAlyson Cole and Kyoo Leethe covid-19 pandemic drags on, and, as the world is now trying to recover from it by learning to at least live with it better, philoSOPHIA has arrived at the third and final issue of RETRO. The fact that this series ended up being framed by the turbulent temporality of the current pandemic is something that some future editors (...) of philoSOPHIA, too, might find worth remembering.For now, we return to the now-point, as expected. To that end, here we have assembled articles on historical, individual, and gendered stigmas and wounds and traumas, among others, focusing also on their relationships to existential time, namely, present moments that persist.We turn first to the pressing issue presented by “Shackling Pregnant Women: US Prisons, Anti-Blackness, and the Unfinished Project of American Abolition”: Brady Heiner offers a lucid “interpretation of the social meaning of shackling imprisoned pregnant women and its persistence despite widespread normative consensus in favor of its abolition,” a joltingly specific, haunting reminder of how deeply the legacy of slavery is embedded in the US criminal legal system and the ways in which American abolition remains an “unfinished project.”Finally, RETRO III marks an ending and a restart of another kind. As of this issue—or, rather, this volume—philoSOPHIA is transitioning from a biannual to an annual publication schedule. In recent years, the journal has transformed in various ways. In 2018, we adopted a new transContinental approach and, with it, a new subtitle. We have expanded to include different [End Page v] genres, media, and voices, always aiming to reflect on our current moment and rethink persistent feminist philosophical questions from divergent angles. Publishing one volume per year is, we are certain, the best way to sustain this breadth of inquiry and continue deepening our alliances with critical race, disability, literary, media, and queer studies, among other fields. As we restart, readers can expect us to keep pushing boundaries, as we always have, while maintaining the same high quality and standards. This is essentially a change in the journal’s format, not in its substance.Wound/stigma as process also emerged as a key notion in Retro III partly because of our preliminary editorial conversation with Annette-Carina van der Zaag about three years ago, who, in response to our call for proposals on “retro” themes, had proposed an idea of guest editing an issue. Although that plan unfortunately did not materialize as we dealt with various pandemic challenges still faced by so many of us on a daily basis, Annette did write a spirited article while encouraging some other colleagues to explore related ideas, for which we remain grateful. In this piece, “Touching Wounds: On the Fugitivity of Stigma,” which explores stigma’s queer-responsive “transformational energy,” van der Zaag articulates ways of “inhabiting” wounds on three registers—material, affective, and fugitive—as an open-ended, future-embracing pathway beyond identity-bound ontology. Ghalya Saadawi, in turn, in her engagingly autobiographical essay “Critical Incision: Hypochondria, Autotheory, and the Health-Illness Dialectic,” autotheoretically draws out “critical” energy from this critical “illness” of hers, hypochondria, to the effect of destabilizing the temporally linearized and medically coordinated discursive ideals of health and being/living well.Survival, at the end of the day, often requires some literal transcending. A case in point has been movingly portrayed and theorized by Na-Young Lee, a sociologist and justice activist who, in “Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities,” revisits questions of historical trauma and collective stigma. Here, she introduces and reflects on her oral history interviews with Korean “Halmoni Activist-Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery as Postcolonial Subjects,” with whom she herself continues to fight in solidarity. Focusing on the stories of two foundational figures, “Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape the fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist,” Lee shows how “overcoming trauma and reaching out to others continues to drive the redress movement” and how “through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from... (shrink)

Is a human more conscious than an octopus? In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is for a (...) degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. (shrink)

This paper examines the idea of "objective phenomenology," or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are (...) objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap. (shrink)

Totalitarianism is perhaps unanimously regarded as one of the greatest political evils of the last century and has been the grounds for much of Anglo-American political theory since. Confucianism, meanwhile, has been gaining credibility in the past decades among sympathizers of democratic theory in spite of criticisms of it being anti-democratic or authoritarian. I consider how certain key concepts in the classical Confucian texts of the Mencius and the Xunzi might or might not be appropriated for ‘legitimising’ totalitarian regimes. Under (...) an Arendtian approach to understanding totalitarianism, it is precisely an unproblematised relation to a normative History and Nature that underlies the potential compatibility or incompatibility. I argue against a longstanding prejudice that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it would have to be Xunzian. Against this, I hope to show that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it might well be a naturalistic Mencian Confucianism instead of a constructivist Xunzian one. (shrink)

Social philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural distortions of (...) reasoning or knowledge practices, undermining their status as responsible moral agents. But attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness allows us to see how having it does not eo ipso render someone an inappropriate target of blame. I focus here on the 1889 anti-suffragist manifesto “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage,” arguing that its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both conditions for ordinary blameworthiness. I consider three prominent signatories, observing that the irrationality characterisation is unsustainable beyond group-level diagnoses, and that their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was not compromised. Following recent work on epistemic injustice, I also argue that culpable mechanisms constituted their false consciousness, rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal. (shrink)

False consciousness requires a general explanation for why, and how, oppressed individuals believe propositions against, as opposed to aligned with, their own well-being in virtue of their oppressed status. This involves four explanatory desiderata: belief acquisition, content prevalence, limitation, and systematicity. A social constructionist approach satisfies these by understanding the concept of false consciousness as regulating social research rather than as determining the exact mechanisms for all instances: the concept attunes us to a complex of mechanisms conducing oppressed individuals to (...) mistake social understandings of themselves as natural self-understandings—the limits lie where these overlap (sometimes), or are entirely absent. (shrink)

Are a material object, such as a statue, and its constituting matter, the clay, parts of one another? One wouldn't have thought so, and yet a number of philosophers have argued that they are. I review the arguments for this surprising claim showing how they all fail. I then consider two arguments against the view concluding that there are both pre-theoretical and theoretical considerations for denying that the statue and the clay are mutual parts.

Shun Kwong-loi argues that the distinction between first- and third-person points of view does not play as explanatory a role in our moral psychology as has been supposed by contemporary philosophical discussions. He draws insightfully from the Confucian tradition to better elucidate our everyday experiences of moral emotions, arguing that it offers an alternative and more faithful perspective on our experiences of anger and compassion. However, unlike the distinction between first- and third-person points of view, Shun’s descriptions of anger and (...) compassion leave unarticulated what would be necessary to differentiate these responses from non-moral responses. Here, I make a friendly suggestion on how this explanatory gap might be filled, providing complementary grounding for Shun’s observations by way of K. C. Bhattacharyya’s phenomenological analysis of feeling. It fills the gap by means of a gradation in the possible depth of emotional responses found in the a priori structure of a feeling experience for any subject. The payoff of such a comparison between Shun’s explication of Confucian moral psychology and Bhattacharyya’s explication of rasa theory is not only a possible phenomenological grounding for the former but also a potential way to articulate a missing ethics in Bhattacharyya’s thought. (shrink)

Dorothy Edgington’s work has been at the centre of a range of ongoing debates in philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology. This work has focused, although by no means exclusively, on the overlapping areas of conditionals, probability, and paradox. In what follows, I briefly sketch some themes from these three areas relevant to Dorothy’s work, highlighting how some of Dorothy’s work and some of the contributions of this volume fit in to these debates.

Are counterfactuals with true antecedents and consequents automatically true? That is, is Conjunction Conditionalization: if (X & Y), then (X > Y) valid? Stalnaker and Lewis think so, but many others disagree. We note here that the extant arguments for Conjunction Conditionalization are unpersuasive, before presenting a family of more compelling arguments. These arguments rely on some standard theorems of the logic of counterfactuals as well as a plausible and popular semantic claim about certain semifactuals. Denying Conjunction Conditionalization, then, requires (...) rejecting other aspects of the standard logic of counterfactuals, or else our intuitive picture of semifactuals. (shrink)

The debate over Hypothetical Syllogism is locked in stalemate. Although putative natural language counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism abound, many philosophers defend Hypothetical Syllogism, arguing that the alleged counterexamples involve an illicit shift in context. The proper lesson to draw from the putative counterexamples, they argue, is that natural language conditionals are context-sensitive conditionals which obey Hypothetical Syllogism. In order to make progress on the issue, I consider and improve upon Morreau’s proof of the invalidity of Hypothetical Syllogism. The improved proof (...) relies upon the semantic claim that conditionals with antecedents irrelevant to the obtaining of an already true consequent are themselves true. Moreover, this semantic insight allows us to provide compelling counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism that are resistant to the usual contextualist response. (shrink)

Moti Mizrahi (2013) presents some novel counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism (HS) for indicative conditionals. I show that they are not compelling as they neglect the complicated ways in which conditionals and modals interact. I then briefly outline why HS should nevertheless be rejected.

The future is kid stuff -- Sinthom-osexuality -- Compassion's compulsion -- No future.

What is post-truth? -- Science denial as a road map for understanding post-truth -- The roots of cognitive bias -- The decline of traditional media -- The rise of social media and the problem of fake news -- Did post-modernism lead to post-truth? -- Fighting post-truth.

Two compelling principles, the Reasonable Range Principle and the Preservation of Irrelevant Evidence Principle, are necessary conditions that any response to peer disagreements ought to abide by. The Reasonable Range Principle maintains that a resolution to a peer disagreement should not fall outside the range of views expressed by the peers in their dispute, whereas the Preservation of Irrelevant Evidence Principle maintains that a resolution strategy should be able to preserve unanimous judgments of evidential irrelevance among the peers. No standard (...) Bayesian resolution strategy satisfies the PIE Principle, however, and we give a loss aversion argument in support of PIE and against Bayes. The theory of imprecise probability allows one to satisfy both principles, and we introduce the notion of a set-based credal judgment to frame and address a range of subtle issues that arise in peer disagreements. (shrink)

The brain–computer interface (BCI) has made remarkable progress in the bridging the divide between the brain and the external environment to assist persons with severe disabilities caused by brain impairments. There is also continuing philosophical interest in BCIs which emerges from thoughtful reflection on computers, machines, and artificial intelligence. This article seeks to apply BCI perspectives to examine, challenge, and work towards a possible resolution to a persistent problem in the mind–body relationship, namely dualism. The original humanitarian goals of BCIs (...) and the technological inventiveness result in BCIs being surprisingly useful. We begin from the neurologically impaired person, the problems encountered, and some pioneering responses from computers and machines. Secondly, the interface of mind and brain is explored via two points of clarification: direct and indirect BCIs, and the nature of thoughts. Thirdly, dualism is beset by mind–body interaction difficulties and is further questioned by the phenomena of intentions, interactions, and technology. Fourthly, animal minds and robots are explored in BCI settings again with relevance for dualism. After a brief look at other BCIs, we conclude by outlining a future BCI philosophy of brain and mind, which might appear ominous and could be possible. (shrink)

I sketch here an intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types, which are individuated in part by historical paths (re)production. Although attractive, this view has been rejected by a number of authors on the basis of general claims about abstract objects. On consideration, however, these general claims are overgeneralizations, which whilst true of some abstracta, are not true of all abstract objects, and in particular, are not true of created types. The intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types (...) is, then, left in place. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures that capture three independent ways in which (...) a system can be more or less analog. We explain how our theory improves upon prior accounts of analog representation, provides plausible diagnoses for novel challenge cases, extends to hybrid systems that are partially analog and partially symbolic, and accounts for some of the advantages and disadvantages of representing analogically versus symbolically. (shrink)