Various theories of moral cognition posit that moral intuitions can be understood as the output of a computational process performed over structured mental representations of human action. We propose that action plan diagrams—“act trees”—can be a useful tool for theorists to succinctly and clearly present their hypotheses about the information contained in these representations. We then develop a methodology for using a series of linguistic probes to test the theories embodied in the act trees. In Study 1, we validate the (...) method by testing a specific hypothesis (diagrammed by act trees) about how subjects are representing two classic moral dilemmas and finding that the data support the hypothesis. In Studies 2–4, we explore possible explanations for discrete and surprising findings that our hypothesis did not predict. In Study 5, we apply the method to a less well‐studied case and show how new experiments generated by our method can be used to settle debates about how actions are mentally represented. In Study 6, we argue that our method captures the mental representation of human action better than an alternative approach. A brief conclusion suggests that act trees can be profitably used in various fields interested in complex representations of human action, including law, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, robotics, and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Shaun Nichols (2002) presents a theory that offers an explanation of the cognitive processes underlying moral judgment. His Affect-Backed Norms theory claims that (i) a set of normative rules coupled with (ii) an affective mechanism elicits a certain response pattern (which we will refer to as the “moral norm response pattern”) when subjects respond to transgressions of those norms. That response pattern differs from the way subjects respond to violations of norms that lack the affective backing (...) (here referred to as the “conventional norm response pattern”). In response, Daniel Kelly and colleagues (2007) present data that, the authors claim, undermine Nichols’ Affect-Backed Norms theory by showing that there are novel cases in which (i) and (ii) are in place, yet subjects respond in the way typical of the conventional response pattern. In Section I of this paper we summarize the challenge to the Affect-Backed Norms theory from the novel cases introduced by Kelly et al. We then show how the challenge is potentially flawed because no verification was provided that subjects were experiencing affect when reading the cases, nor was level of affect controlled for. In Section II, we describe the study we conducted to determine what level of affect was induced when subjects read the novel cases. In Section III, we present our findings, namely that subjects respond to the novel cases with different levels of affect, which tracks their judgments of the severity of the transgressions in the cases. In Section IV, we discuss the results and show that the Affect-Backed Norms theory can explain subjects’ responses to the novel cases given this new 2 information about affective response. In Section V, we conclude with a thought about how these findings inform the traditional moral/conventional distinction. (shrink)

Darwin the writer -- Learning to see : Darwin's prophetic apprenticeship on the Beagle voyage -- The prose of On the origin of species -- Surprise and paradox : Darwin's artful legacy -- Darwinian mind and Wildean paradox -- Hardy's Woodlanders and the Darwinian grotesque -- Coda : the comic Darwin.

David Levine and Mathew Bowker explore cultural and political trends organized around the conviction that the world we live in is a dangerous place to be, that it is dominated by hate and destruction, and that in it our primary task is to survive by carrying on a life-long struggle against hostile forces. Their method involves the analysis of public fantasies to reveal their hidden meanings. The central fantasy explored is the fantasy of a destroyed world, which appears most (...) commonly in the form of post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives. Their special concern in the book is with defenses against the painful consequences of the dominance of this fantasy in the inner world, especially defenses involving the use of guilt to assure that something can be done to repair the destroyed world. Topics explored include: the formation of internal fortresses and their projection into the world outside, forms of guilt including bystander guilt and survivor guilt, the loss of and search for home, and manic forms of reparation. (shrink)

This paper explores how phenomenological notions of rhythm might accommodate a richer description of preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue. Developmental psychologists have theorized a crucial link between rhythm and intercorporeality in the emergence of intersubjectivity and self. Drawing on the descriptions of rhythm in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Erwin Straus, Henri Maldiney and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, the paper emphasizes the role of art and aesthetic processes proposing that they not only be considered as metaphorical or representational aspects of rhythm but as primary (...) resources that can enrich and deepen our understanding of self-emergence and intercorporeality in preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue. (shrink)

Introduction: sustainable critique and the lost vocation of international relations -- "For we born after:" the challenge of sustainable critique -- Sustainable critique and critical IR theory: against emancipation -- The realist dilemma: politics and the limits of theory -- Communitarian IR theory -- Individualist IR theory: disharmonious cooperation -- Conclusion: toward sustainably critical international theory.

According to transhumanists who urge the radical enhancement of human beings, humanity’s top priority should be engineering “posthumans,” whose features would include agelessness. Increasingly, transhumanism is critiqued on foundational grounds rather than based largely on anticipated results of its implementation, such as rising social inequality. This expansion is crucial but insufficient because, despite its radical aim, transhumanism reflects beliefs and attitudes that are evident in the broader culture. With a focus on the yearning to eliminate aging, I consider four of (...) these: a disproportionate reliance on science and technology to address major human challenges; the conceptualization of human beings in terms of binaries like “young-old”; a repudiation of vulnerability; and intensifying perfectionism. Illuminating these interlocked commitments both deepens an existing critique of transhumanism and draws our attention to deleterious cultural views that must be vigorously contested if our commitment to human flourishing is to be deep and unwavering. (shrink)

Excerpt from Studies in Philosophical Criticism and Construction In the following pages my aim is to illustrate the principles of philosophic method by endeavouring critically to establish certain fundamental principles or Grundbegriffe in the spheres of Psychology, Logic and Epistemology, Ethics and Metaphysics; in other words, to lay the foundation for a more complete structure in each of these three branches of Philosophy. This double aim, however much it complicates the inquiry, is inevitable. A general discussion of philosophical method in (...) abstracto, without concurrently developing a general philosophical position, would seem to me to be futile even if it were possible. This is true of all branches of knowledge - true of the physical sciences as much as of any others. Generalisations as to scientific method - that is, as to the intellectual processes by which actual scientific results ought to be obtained - must assuredly be of very little value unless drawn in close connexion with concrete scientific work. But nowhere is the connexion more close than in Philosophy. Here, we cannot formulate our problems unless we are prepared with at least partial solutions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This article argues that we could improve the design of research protocols by developing an awareness of and a responsiveness to the social contexts of all the actors in the research enterprise, including subjects, investigators, sponsors, and members of the community in which the research will be conducted. ?Social context? refers to the settings in which the actors are situated, including, but not limited to, their social, economic, political, cultural, and technological features. The utility of thinking about social contexts is (...) introduced and exemplified by the presentation of a hypothetical case in which one central issue is limitation of the probability of injury to subjects by selection of individuals who are not expected to live long enough for the known risks of the study to become manifest as harms. Benefits of such considerations may include enhanced subject satisfaction and cooperation, community acceptance, and improved data quality, among other desirable consequences. (shrink)

Darwin in Argentina -- Conflicting Systems -- Francisco Javier Muniz (1795-1871) -- Hermann Burmeister (1807-1891) -- Francisco P. Moreno (1852-1919) -- Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811-1888) -- Eduardo Holmberg (1852-1937) -- Florentino Ameghino (1854-1911) -- Jose Ingenieros (1877-1925) -- Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875-1918).

This volume offers the first substantial study of Heidegger’s phenomenology of perception, focusing on perception as capacities that can be developed in learning processes, notably in ways befitting ontological mindfulness. The author proposes new interpretations of Heidegger’s five most important key words.

In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to a great number (...) of unexpected factors, some of which seem rather peripheral to causation. One of those is the norm effect (Knobe & Fraser, 2008): Agents who, in acting as they do, break a salient norm, are more likely to be considered as having caused a certain consequence than when they do not violate a norm. According to some (e.g., Alicke, 1992) this constitutes a bias. According to others (e.g., Sytsma, 2020), the folk concept of causation is sensitive to normative factors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In this paper, we explore the question whether the norm effect should be considered a bias from the legal perspective on the one hand, and from the psychological perspective on the other. To do this, we test whether norms which are nonpertinent to the consequences or outright silly also impact causation judgements. The data from two preregistered experiments (total N=593) clearly show they do. This, we argue, makes the bias interpretation plausible from the psychological perspective, and both plausible and problematic from the legal perspective. It also shows that the law should abstain from unreflectively assuming conceptual correspondence between legal and ordinary language concepts. (shrink)

Philosophical Papers, Volume 41, Issue 1, Page 149-165, March 2012.

What stands out when we blend in? Performing Ground is the first book to explore camouflage as a performance practice, arguing that the act of blending into one's environment is central to the ways we negotiate our identities in and through space. Laura Levin tracks contemporary performances of camouflage through a variety of forms - performative photography; environmental, immersive, and site-specific performance; activist infiltration; and solo artworks - and rejects the conventional dismissal of blending in as an abdication of self. (...) Instead, she contemplates the empowering political possibilities of 'performing ground,' of human bodies intermingling with the material world, while directly engaging with the reality that women and other marginalized persons are often relegated to the background and associated with the properties of space. Performing Ground engages these questions through the works of some of today's most exciting performance artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Liu Bolin, Janieta Eyre, and Violeta Luna, and groups like Gob Squad, Punchdrunk, The Yes Men, and Urban Mimics. (shrink)

Contemporary process metaphysics has achieved a number of important results, most significantly in accounting for emergence, a problem on which substance metaphysics has foundered since Plato. It also faces trenchant problems of its own, among them the related problems of boundaries and individuation. Historically, the quest for ontology may thus have been largely responsible for the persistence of substance metaphysics. But as Plato was well aware, an ontology of substantial things raises serious, perhaps insurmountable problems for any account of our (...) epistemic access to such things. Physical things are subject to change, and as such, they are poor objects of knowledge—if knowledge is to be more reliable than mere opinion. There is a reading of Plato’s Theaetetus on which knowledge may be understood as a relation between an epistemic subject and a logos, where logoi are intrinsically dialectical, and where dialectic is a kind of intersubjective activity. Insofar as this epistemology may be attributed to Plato, the project of this paper is Platonic in spirit. It is also, in a sense, Kantian, in that it divorces ontology from the search for things-in-themselves, redirecting our attention from things to objects: epistemic objects. Such objects can be understood, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed, as shared by multiple subjects by virtue of their participation in an intersubjective world, constituted by what Shaun Gallagher calls ‘‘participatory sense-making.’’ On an epistemology constructed in this way, the fact that both epistemic objects and their subject are mutable is no obstacle to knowledge. Far-from-equilibrium systems are forever mutable; at thermodynamic equilibrium, there would be neither subject, nor object. Epistemic objects, on this picture, are metastable loci of interactive potential. (shrink)

Original reading of Heidegger suggesting what his project could mean for building an ethical way of life now and in the future.

This chapter contains sections titled: Sex Talk Just Friends and Sex Too? Casual Sex History and Prevalence So, Why have Sex with a Friend? Communication in Friends with Benefits Relationships The Bottom Line.

This chapter contains section titled: Context: Irrelevant and Relevant Hume's Argument against Justified Belief in Miracles Explained Immortality References Further Reading.

In this chapter, the author wants to respond to Noam Chomsky's claim, repeated often in different ways. He argues both that Chomsky's own position suffers from inconsistency – he dismisses the apparent problem while at the same time promoting it as a “mystery” – and that his principal reason for maintaining his position, that there is no clear conception of body, or the physical, with which to contrast the mind, or the mental, does not really dispense with the issue that (...) rightfully worries philosophers. A good analogy for the mind–body problem is the “naturalization” debate in metaethics; indeed, naturalization is a term that occurs often in the context of both debates. Chomsky explicitly disparages the claim that the mental–physical relation poses an “explanatory gap." Maybe, as Chomsky says concerning at least some mental attributes, it will always remain a mystery how the organized matter of our brains can support these features. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author shows that the affinity between the two thinkers is far greater than interpreters like Farrell allow. He focuses on evaluating the argument that Richard Rorty is not able to get past the dichotomies ‐ although he will have cause to comment on the first one as well. In the context of a continued anti‐representationalism, Rorty comes to admit that there is a “truth in realism” and that our relations to the world are not just causal (...) but also normative. The author argues that with these admissions Rorty comes to articulate a view that can, with some plausibility, be said to have gotten beyond the dichotomies of scheme and content, subject and object, and realism and antirealism. D. Davidson agrees with Rorty that truth is not definable by simpler and more transparent concepts. Davidson has a pronged attack on the concept of representation. (shrink)

_Provides a critique of reason, demanding that we take greater responsibility for nature and other people._.