To see whether the mental and the neural have common attributes that could resolve some of the traditional dichotomies, we review neuroscientific data on the visual system. The results show that neuronal and perceptual function share a parallel and hierarchical architecture which is manifest not only in the anatomy and physiology of the visual system, but also in normal perception and in the deficits caused by lesions in different parts of the system. Based on the description of parallel hierarchical levels (...) of active information processing in the visual brain, we suggest a concept of dissociable levels of perception, advocating that the phenomenal perception and recognition is realized in the functional integrity of a network of reciprocal cortico-cortical connections. The properties shared by neuronal and perceptional functions provide a basis for a neuromental monism in which both functions are attributed a causal role. (shrink)

How should we reason in science? Jan Sprenger and Stephan Hartmann offer a refreshing take on classical topics in philosophy of science, using a single key concept to explain and to elucidate manifold aspects of scientific reasoning. They present good arguments and good inferences as being characterized by their effect on our rational degrees of belief. Refuting the view that there is no place for subjective attitudes in 'objective science', Sprenger and Hartmann explain the value of convincing evidence in (...) terms of a cycle of variations on the theme of representing rational degrees of belief by means of subjective probabilities (and changing them by Bayesian conditionalization). In doing so, they integrate Bayesian inference—the leading theory of rationality in social science—with the practice of 21st century science. Bayesian Philosophy of Science thereby shows how modeling such attitudes improves our understanding of causes, explanations, confirming evidence, and scientific models in general. It combines a scientifically minded and mathematically sophisticated approach with conceptual analysis and attention to methodological problems of modern science, especially in statistical inference, and is therefore a valuable resource for philosophers and scientific practitioners. (shrink)

The elucidations and regimentations of grounding offered in the literature standardly take it to be a necessary connection. In particular, authors often assert, or at least assume, that if some facts ground another fact, then the obtaining of the former necessitates the latter; and moreover, that grounding is an internal relation, in the sense of being necessitated by the existence of the relata. In this article, I challenge the necessitarian orthodoxy about grounding by offering two prima facie counterexamples. First, some (...) physical facts may ground a certain phenomenal fact without necessitating it; and they may co-exist with the latter without grounding it. Second, some instantiations of categorical properties may ground the instantiation of a dispositional one without necessitating it; and they may co-exist without grounding it. After arguing that these may be genuine counterexamples, I ask whether there are modal constraints on grounding that are not threatened by them. I propose two: that grounding supervenes on what facts there are, and that every grounded fact supervenes on what grounds there are. Finally, I attempt to provide a rigorous formulation of the latter supervenience claim and discuss some technical questions that arise if we allow descending grounding chains of transfinite length. (shrink)

Fundamentality plays a pivotal role in discussions of ontology, supervenience, and possibility, and other key topics in metaphysics. However, there are two different ways of characterising the fundamental: as that which is not grounded, and as that which is the ground of everything else. I show that whether these two characterisations pick out the same property turns on a principle—which I call “Dichotomy”—that is of independent interest in the theory of ground: that everything is either fully grounded or not even (...) partially grounded. I then argue that Dichotomy fails: some facts have partial grounds that cannot be complemented to a full ground. Rejecting Dichotomy opens the door to recognising a bifurcation in our notion of fundamentality. I sketch some of the far-reaching metaphysical consequences this might have, with reference to big-picture views such as Humeanism. Since Dichotomy is entailed by the standard account of partial ground, according to which partial grounds are subpluralities of full grounds, a non-standard account is needed. In a technical “Appendix”, I show that truthmaker semantics furnishes such an account, and identify a semantic condition that corresponds to Dichotomy. (shrink)

Among the questions to be raised under the heading of “personal identity” are these: “What are we?” (fundamental nature question) and “Under what conditions do we persist through time?” (persistence question). Against the dominant neo-Lockean approach to these questions, the view known as animalism answers that each of us is an organism of the species Homo sapiens and that the conditions of our persistence are those of animals. Beyond describing the content and historical background of animalism and its rivals, this (...) entry explores some of the arguments for and objections to this controversial account of our nature and persistence. (shrink)

The view known as animalism asserts that we are human animals—that each of us is an instance of the Homo sapiens species. The standard argument for this view is known as the thinking animal argument . But this argument has recently come under attack. So, here, a new argument for animalism is introduced. The animal ancestors argument illustrates how the case for animalism can be seen to piggyback on the credibility of evolutionary theory. Two objections are then considered and answered.

Nancy Cartwright is one of the most distinguished and influential contemporary philosophers of science. Despite the profound impact of her work, there is neither a systematic exposition of Cartwright’s philosophy of science nor a collection of articles that contains in-depth discussions of the major themes of her philosophy. This book is devoted to a critical assessment of Cartwright’s philosophy of science and contains contributions from Cartwright's champions and critics. Broken into three parts, the book begins by addressing Cartwright's views on (...) the practice of model building in science and the question of how models represent the world before moving on to a detailed discussion of methodologically and metaphysically challenging problems. Finally, the book addresses Cartwright's original attempts to clarify profound questions concerning the metaphysics of science. With contributions from leading scholars, such as Ronald N. Giere and Paul Teller, this unique volume will be extremely useful to philosophers of science the world over. (shrink)

A central question for psychologists, economists, and philosophers is how human lives should be valued. Whereas egalitarian considerations give rise to models emphasizing that every life should be valued equally, empirical research has demonstrated that valuations of lives depend on a variety of factors that often do not conform to specific normative expectations. Such factors include emotional reactions to the victims and cognitive considerations leading to biased perceptions of lives at risk (e.g., attention, mental imagery, pseudo-inefficacy, and scope neglect). They (...) can lead to a valuation function with decreasing marginal value and sometimes even decreasing absolute value as the number of victims increases. As a result, people spend more money to save an individual while at the same time being insensitive and apathetic to large losses of life, despite endorsing egalitarian norms. In this conceptual paper, we propose a descriptive model highlighting the role of different motivations and the conditions under which cognitions and emotions result in deviations from egalitarian normative valuations of human lives. (shrink)

Since the 1860s, petroleum companies, through their influence on local governments, port authorities, international actors and the general public gradually became more dominant in shaping the urban form of ports and cities. Under their development and pressure, the relationships between industrial and urban areas in port cities hosting oil facilities evolved in time. The borders limiting industrial and housing territories have continuously changed with industrial places moving progressively away from urban areas. Such a changing dynamic influenced the permeability of these (...) borders. Port cities are nodes and logistic points where various flows of commodities, wealth, and knowledge gathered before further re‐distribution. These flows affected port cities by changing their spatial organization and the availabiity of space between borders. The main question here is: How did industrial and urban borders evolve through time in port cities? Through a historical analysis, the article explores the settlements of oil facilities and the influence of oil companies over local, regional, and national governments in creating borders and how it influenced the porosity of port cities. This article, through the petroleum narrative, illustrates the impacts of past borders on the contemporary urban form through the evolution of the French port city of Dunkirk, in the North of France. As a historical study, the article analyzes the changing relationships between petroleum industrial sites and housing areas in the city of Dunkirk, using aerial pictures, archival sources, and regulations of different periods. The importance of this analysis lies in knowing that former oil sites previously located on the periphery of Dunkirk, that were forgotten by the authorities are now located within the current urban tissue. This process demonstrates the importance of historical developments to understand current challenges in the urban planning of industrial port cities. (shrink)

Science strives for coherence. For example, the findings from climate science form a highly coherent body of knowledge that is supported by many independent lines of evidence: greenhouse gas emissions from human economic activities are causing the global climate to warm and unless GHG emissions are drastically reduced in the near future, the risks from climate change will continue to grow and major adverse consequences will become unavoidable. People who oppose this scientific body of knowledge because the implications of cutting (...) GHG emissions—such as regulation or increased taxation—threaten their worldview or livelihood cannot provide an alternative view that is coherent by the standards of conventional scientific thinking. Instead, we suggest that people who reject the fact that the Earth’s climate is changing due to greenhouse gas emissions oppose whatever inconvenient finding they are confronting in piece-meal fashion, rather than systematically, and without considering the implications of this rejection to the rest of the relevant scientific theory and findings. Hence, claims that the globe “is cooling” can coexist with claims that the “observed warming is natural” and that “the human influence does not matter because warming is good for us.” Coherence between these mutually contradictory opinions can only be achieved at a highly abstract level, namely that “something must be wrong” with the scientific evidence in order to justify a political position against climate change mitigation. This high-level coherence accompanied by contradictory subordinate propositions is a known attribute of conspiracist ideation, and conspiracism may be implicated when people reject well-established scientific propositions. (shrink)

The concept of supervenience and a regimented concept of grounding are often taken to provide rival explications of pre-theoretical concepts of dependence and determination. Friends of grounding typically point out that supervenience claims do not entail corresponding grounding claims. Every fact supervenes on itself, but is not grounded in itself, and the fact that a thing exists supervenes on the fact that its singleton exists, but is not grounded in it. Common lore has it, though, that grounding claims do entail (...) corresponding supervenience claims. In this article, I show that this assumption is problematic. On one way of understanding it, the corresponding supervenience claim is just an entailment claim under a different name. On another way of understanding it, the corresponding claim is a distinctive supervenience claim, but its specification gives rise to what I call the "reference type problem": to associate the classes of facts that are the relata of grounding with the types of facts that are the relata of supervenience. However it is understood, supervenience rules out prima facie possibilities: alien realizers, blockers, heterogeneous realizers, floaters, and heterogeneous blockers. Instead of being rival explications of one and the same pre-theoretical concept, grounding and supervenience may be complementary concepts capturing different aspects of determination and dependence. (shrink)

This article focuses on existential feelings. To begin with, it depicts how they differ from other affective phenomena and what type of intentionality they manifest. Furthermore, a detailed analysis shows that existential feelings can be subdivided, first, into elementary and nonelementary varieties, and second, into three foci of primary relatedness: oneself, the social environment, and the world as such. Eventually, five strategies of emotion regulation are examined with respect to their applicability to existential feelings. In the case of harmful existential (...) feelings, it turns out that none seems fitting except one, attentional deployment. (shrink)

Philosophical and sociological approaches in technology have increasingly shifted toward describing AI (artificial intelligence) systems as ‘(moral) agents,’ while also attributing ‘agency’ to them. It is only in this way – so their principal argument goes – that the effects of technological components in a complex human-computer interaction can be understood sufficiently in phenomenological-descriptive and ethical-normative respects. By contrast, this article aims to demonstrate that an explanatory model only achieves a descriptively and normatively satisfactory result if the concepts of ‘(moral) (...) agent’ and ‘(moral) agency’ are exclusively related to human agents. Initially, the division between symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, the black box character of (deep) machine learning, and the complex relationship network in the provision and application of machine learning are outlined. Next, the ontological and action-theoretical basic assumptions of an ‘agency’ attribution regarding both the current teleology-naturalism debate and the explanatory model of actor network theory are examined. On this basis, the technical-philosophical approaches of Luciano Floridi, Deborah G. Johnson, and Peter-Paul Verbeek will all be critically discussed. Despite their different approaches, they tend to fully integrate computational behavior into their concept of ‘(moral) agency.’ By contrast, this essay recommends distinguishing conceptually between the different entities, causalities, and relationships in a human-computer interaction, arguing that this is the only way to do justice to both human responsibility and the moral significance and causality of computational behavior. (shrink)

In the past decade well‐designed research studies have shown that the practice of collaborative philosophical inquiry in schools can have marked cognitive and social benefits. Student academic performance improves, and so too does the social dimension of schooling. These findings are timely, as many countries in Asia and the Pacific are now contemplating introducing Philosophy into their curricula. This paper gives a brief history of collaborative philosophical inquiry before surveying the evidence as to its effectiveness. The evidence is canvassed under (...) two categories: schooling and thinking skills; and schooling, socialisation and values. In both categories there is clear evidence that even short‐term teaching of collaborative philosophical inquiry has marked positive effects on students. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research and a final claim that the presently‐available research evidence is strong enough to warrant implementing collaborative philosophical inquiry as part of a long‐term policy. (shrink)

A estética da existência, com todo o seu caráter propriamente foucaultiano, possui uma dimensão cosmopolítica que muitas vezes escapa às nossas tentativas de definir o que seria a ética da cultura de si. Com base nisso, busco caracterizar a importância da experiência do mundo plural para a ética do cuidado de si em três atos. Em primeiro lugar, reflito sobre a falta moral do Humano de bem. Em segundo lugar, indico o caráter heterotópico do mundo plural. Em terceiro lugar, problematizo (...) a relação entre a interiorização da imagem do mundo plural, que se manifesta na topografia interna dos sujeitos como o profundo sentimento do mundo, e a experiência cosmo-etho-política de nós mesmos. Para tanto, entrecruzo a ética estoica com as análises de Foucault sobre a cultura de si e a heterotopia, mas também com as interpretações de Butler sobre a responsabilidade moral e a vida psíquica do poder. (shrink)

Despite widespread support for the claim that death can harm the one who dies, debate continues over how to rescue this harm thesis (HT) from Epicurus’s challenge. Disagreements focus on two of the three issues that any defense of HT must resolve: the subject of death’s harm and the timing of its injury. About the nature of death’s harm, however, a consensus has emerged around the view that death harms a subject (when it does) by depriving her of the goods (...) life would’ve afforded had she continued living. This deprivation view of death’s harm (DV) derives some of its credibility from the general deprivation theory of which it is an instance: mortal harm is subject to the same kind of analysis plausibly given of other non-mortal harms. Furthermore, note that the weak formulation of HT—asserting only that death can inflict harm, not that it always or necessarily does—accommodates the intuition that instances of rational suicide and justifiable euthanasia present cases in which death fails to harm. DV is equipped to explain how in these cases the harms involved in continued existence outweigh the goods of which death deprives the subject. I agree that suicide can be rational and that euthanasia can be justifiable. Likewise I accept both HT and DV as far as they go. But they do not go far enough. Specifically, I argue here that death harms even those who die as a result of rational suicide or justifiable euthanasia; that death’s harm is neither undifferentiated nor wholly contingent, but multifaceted and partly necessary; that the necessary part of death’s harm is distinctive, inflicting a peculiar restriction on the autonomy of one who dies; and, regarding the timing and subject issues, that this restriction harm is inflicted on the antemortem subject prior to her death. (shrink)

There has been much concern with the abundance of misinformation in public discourse. Although misinformation has always played a role in political debate, its character has shifted from support fo...

Supervenience is a topic-neutral, broadly logical relation between classes of properties or facts. In a slogan, A supervenes on B if and only if there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference. The first part of this paper considers different ways in which that slogan has been cashed out. The second part discusses applications of concepts of supervenience, focussing on the question whether they may provide an explication of determination theses such as physicalism.

Adaptation and Validation of the Steen Happiness Index into Polish Authentic happiness is a construct comprising 3 factors: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Three studies involving altogether 464 participants adapted and validated the authentic happiness measure Steen Happiness Index into Polish. In Study 1 the Polish version of the scale was developed and its convergence with the original SHI was assessed using bilingual response method, r =.98, p <.001. In Study 2 cluster analysis confirmed the theoretical profiles of happiness, testing the (...) proposed 3-factor structure of the scale, χ2 = 180.62, GFI =.95, CFI=.97, SRMR =.04, RMSEA =.04, RMSEA 90% CI [.25 -.45]. Test-retest reliability yielded satisfactory results, rtt =.87, p <.01. This is the first study providing empirical support for the structural validity of the authentic happiness construct. It also shows the cross-cultural generality of the construct. We discuss some practical applications of the scale. (shrink)

Existing discussions of partiality have primarily examined special personal relationships between family, friends, or co-nationals. The negative analogue of such relationships – for example, the relationship of enmity – has, by contrast, been largely neglected. This chapter explores this adverse relation in more detail and considers the special reasons generated by it. We suggest that enmity can involve justified negative partiality, allowing members to give less consideration to each other’s interests. We then consider whether the negative partiality of enmity can (...) be justified through projects or the value inherent in the relationship, following two influential views about the justification of positive partiality. We argue that both accounts of partiality can be conceptually extended to the negative analogue, but doing so brings into focus the problems with such accounts of the grounds of partiality. (shrink)

We give several characterizations of Schnorr trivial sets, including a new lowness notion for Schnorr triviality based on truth-table reducibility. These characterizations allow us to see not only that some natural classes of sets, including maximal sets, are composed entirely of Schnorr trivials, but also that the Schnorr trivial sets form an ideal in the truth-table degrees but not the weak truth-table degrees. This answers a question of Downey, Griffiths and LaForte.

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 2 Seiten: 251-265.

Determining the knowledge that guides human judgments is fundamental to understanding how people reason, make decisions, and form predictions. We use an experimental procedure called ‘‘iterated learning,’’ in which the responses that people give on one trial are used to generate the data they see on the next, to pinpoint the knowledge that informs people's predictions about everyday events (e.g., predicting the total box office gross of a movie from its current take). In particular, we use this method to discriminate (...) between two models of human judgments: a simple Bayesian model (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2006) and a recently proposed alternative model that assumes people store only a few instances of each type of event in memory (MinK; Mozer, Pashler, & Homaei, 2008). Although testing these models using standard experimental procedures is difficult due to differences in the number of free parameters and the need to make assumptions about the knowledge of individual learners, we show that the two models make very different predictions about the outcome of iterated learning. The results of an experiment using this methodology provide a rich picture of how much people know about the distributions of everyday quantities, and they are inconsistent with the predictions of the MinK model. The results suggest that accurate predictions about everyday events reflect relatively sophisticated knowledge on the part of individuals. (shrink)