My modest aim in this note is to sketch three interrelated critiques of public languages, and to respond to them. All are broadly Chomskyan, and all support the same conclusion: that, insofar as they even exist, the study of public languages is not a viable scientific project. (Related critiques of semantics, understood as involving word–world relations, will be touched on as well).

In this article I argue that the kind of scientific naturalism that tends to underwrite projects of naturalizing religion operates with a tacit conception of nature which, upon closer inspection, t...

Pragmatism has resurged explicitly in neopragmatism and implicitly in neurophilosophy. Neopragmatists have focused primarily on ideals, like human freedom, but at the expense of science. Neurophilosophers have focused primarily on scientific facts, but with an eye toward dismissing aspects of our self-conception like free will as illusory. In both cases, these resurgences are impoverished as each neglects what Dewey referred to as the method of intelligence. Neurophilosophical pragmatism - neuropragmatism - aims to overcome the deficiencies of neopragmatism and neurophilosophy by (...) carrying forth the project of reconstruction by taking both the methods and results of experimental inquiry as the means for attaining ends-in-view such as human freedom. (shrink)

Over the past century phenomenology has ably analyzed the basic structuresof consciousness as we experience it. Yet recent philosophy of mind, lookingto brain activity and computational function, has found it difficult to makeroom for the structures of subjectivity and intentionality that phenomenologyhas appraised. In order to understand consciousness as something that is bothsubjective and grounded in neural activity, we need to delve into phenomenologyand ontology. I draw a fundamental distinction in ontology among the form,appearance, and substrate of any entity. Applying (...) this three-facet ontology toconsciousness, we distinguish: the intentionality of consciousness ,the way we experience consciousness ,and the physical, biological, and cultural basis of consciousness .We can thus show how these very different aspects of consciousness fit togetherin a fundamental ontology. And we can thereby define the proper domains ofphenomenology and other disciplinesthat contribute to our understanding of consciousness. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAccording to many naturalists, our ordinary conception of the world is in tension with the scientific image: the conception of the world provided by the natural sciences. But in this paper, I present a critique of naturalism with precedents in the post-Kantian idealist tradition. I argue that, when we consider our actual linguistic behavior, there is no evidence that the truth of our ordinary judgments hinges on what the scientific image turns out to be like. I then argue that the (...) best explanation of this result is that the norms and presuppositions operating in ordinary discourse are different from the norms and presuppositions operating in scientific discourse. So naturalistic attempts to undermine the manifest image are illegitimate attempts to critique a practice ‘from the outside’. (shrink)

I shall argue that when Hume refers to the laws of dynamics, he tacitly assumes a mechanism. Nevertheless, he remains agnostic on whether the hidden micro-constitution of bodies is machinelike. Hence this article comes to the following conclusion. Hume is not a full-blown mechanical philosopher. Still his position on dynamic laws and his concept of causation instantiate a tacitly mechanical understanding of the interactions of bodies.

Wilfrid Sellars is widely known for two positions that he calls “nominalism.” On the one hand, there is his “psychological nominalism,” according to which any awareness one might have of abstract entities—be they properties, relations, or facts—is a thoroughly linguistic affair, and so cannot be presupposed in thinking about the process of learning a (first) language. On the other hand, there is his ontological nominalism, according to which the world, as it is in itself, is fundamentally a world of concrete (...) particulars and so does not ultimately contain such things as properties, relations, or propositionally-structured facts. Sellars clearly takes these two sorts of “nominalism” to go together. However, one of the most influential inheritors of Sellars's philosophy, Robert Brandom, thinks that they do not. Brandom endorses the former, but denies that the latter “is in the end so much as intelligible.” In this paper, I articulate the connection between Sellars's psychological and ontological nominalism and draw on Brandom's own development of Sellars's functional role semantics to argue, against Brandom, that Sellars's ontological nominalism not only harmonizes with the rest of his philosophical commitments, but is actually made fully intelligible by the very aspect of Sellars's theory that Brandom himself develops. (shrink)

Philosophical Psychology, Volume 24, Issue 4, Page 561-573, August 2011.

As part of his case for emergent dualism, William Hasker proffers a _unity-of-_ _consciousness_ (UOC) argument against materialism. I formalize the argument and show how the warrant for two of its premises accrues from the warrant one assigns to two distinct theses about unified conscious experience. I then argue that though both unity theses are plausible, the materialist has little to fear from Hasker.

It is a matter of continuing scholarly dispute whether Descartes offers a metaphysics of the material world that is “monist” or “pluralist.” One passage that has become crucial to this debate is from the Synopsis of the Meditations, in which Descartes argues that since “body taken in general” is a substance, and since all substances are “by their nature incorruptible,” this sort of body is incorruptible as well. In this article I defend a pluralist reading of this passage, according to (...) which there are indefinitely many bodies-taken-in-general, each of which counts as an incorruptible material substance. However, I also consider some surprising features of the argument in the Synopsis. One is that this argument conflicts with the implication in Descartes that any two “really distinct” substances can each exist without the other existing. Another is that the argument tends to undermine his suggestion that there is room at a fundamental metaphysical level for ordinary material objects. (shrink)

El artículo se propone, en primer lugar, ofrecer un nuevo concepto de naturaleza humana, más allá de la metafísica tradicional y de la interpretación naturalista de las actuales neurociencias, superando así la unilateral apropiación cientificista del concepto de naturaleza humana y defendiendo una biohermenéutica, que cuenta con la pluralidad de perspectivas para comprender la realidad humana, como en el dualismo epistémico habermasiano. En segundo lugar, se indaga si en el cerebro tiene arraigo la libertad en el sentido de «libre albedrío» (...) y de «autonomía», teniendo en cuenta la posición de acreditados neurólogos y el estudio de las disposiciones naturales en la concepción kantiana de la autonomía moral. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the purported conflict between science and common sense within the context of scientific realism. I argue for a version of scientific realism which retains commitment to realism about common sense rather than seeking to eliminate it.

Analytic pragmatism is a framework of analysis elaborated by Robert Brandom, whose goal is to explain the relations between meaning and use according to a systematic and general method of inquiry. In April 2009, a workshop was organized to discuss the recent developments of this new theoretical approach. Brandom delivered three lectures, where he explored some aspects of analytic pragmatism and addressed the motivating themes of this enterprise, while the contribution from the other speakers ranged over specific aspects of the (...) theory. This special issue is the outcome of that workshop. In this introduction we briefly outline the context of the debate and present the contribution to this issue selected from a much wider range of papers, using the reviewing process of Philosophia. (shrink)

I examine John McDowell's attitude towards naturalism in general, and evolutionary theory in particular, by distinguishing between "transcendental descriptions" and "empirical explanations". With this distinction in view we can understand why McDowell holds that there is both continuity and discontinuity between humans qua rational animals and other animals -- there is continuity with regards to empirical explanations and discontinuity with regards to transcendental descriptions. The result of this examination is a clearer assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of McDowell's contribution (...) to philosophical naturalism. (shrink)

Shaun Gallagher argues that we need a new philosophy of nature that accommodates the insights of existential phenomenology. On his view existential phenomenology needs a philosophy of nature that is holistic, relational, and non-reductionist. I argue that his reasoning is based on a misunderstanding of the difference between the manifest image and the scientific image. The reasons why we should prefer a non-reductionist philosophy of nature are internal to the historical development of the scientific image itself. We have good reasons (...) for preferring enactivism over cognitivism as a research program for the cognitive sciences, but compatibility with the manifest image is not one of those reasons. (shrink)

Rorty regards himself as furthering the project of the Enlightenment by separating Enlightenment liberalism from Enlightenment rationalism. To do so, he rejects the very need for explicit metaphysical theorizing. Yet his commitments to naturalism, nominalism, and the irreducibility of the normative come from the metaphysics of Wilfrid Sellars. Rorty's debt to Sellars is concealed by his use of Davidsonian arguments against the scheme/content distinction and the nonsemantic concept of truth. The Davidsonian arguments are used for Deweyan ends: to advance secularization (...) and anti-authoritarianism. However, Rorty's conflation of theology and metaphysics conceals the possibility of post-theological metaphysics. The key distinction lies between “metaphysics” and “Metaphysics.” The former provisionally models the relations between different vocabularies; the latter continues theology by other means. Sellars shows how to do metaphysics without Metaphysics. This approach complements Rorty's prioritization of cultural politics over ontology and his vision of Enlightenment liberalism without Enlightenment rationalism. (shrink)

I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing should be taken seriously by philosophers of mind, language, and cognition. I begin with interpretations of key Sellarsian texts in order to show that picturing is best understood as a theory of non-linguistic cognitive representations through which animals navigate their environments. This is distinct from the kind of discursive cognition that Sellars called ‘signifying’ and which is best understood in terms of socio-linguistic inferences. I argue that picturing is required because reflection (...) on signifying cannot adequately explain our need for cognitive friction. I then show how the idea of picturing is further developed by Paul Churchland, Ruth Garrett Millikan, and Huw Price. I finally turn to predictive processing as a theory of cognitive representation, and in particular Andy Clark’s ‘radical predictive processing’, to further characterize picturing. However, doing so has the cost of pushing picturing and signifying further apart than Sellars intended. (shrink)

In our Introduction to the special issue on Hegel and Sellars, we explain why there needs to be a more detailed analysis of the similarities and differences between Hegel and Sellars. Sellars is usually regarded as closer to Kant than to Hegel, but this obscures the more Hegelian features of his theoretical and practical philosophy. We briefly describe each article in the special issue.

Taking Arthur Fine’s The Shaky Game as my inspiration, and the recent 25th anniversary of the publication of that work as the occasion to exercise that inspiration, I sketch an alternative to the “Naturalism” prevalent among philosophers of physics. Naturalism is a methodology eventuating in a metaphysics. The methodology is to seek the deep framework assumptions that make the best sense of science; the metaphysics is furnished by those assumptions and supported by their own support of science. The alternative presented (...) here, which I call “Locavoracity,” shares Naturalism’s commitment to making sense of science, but alters Naturalism’s methodology. The Locavore’s sense-making projects are piecemeal, rather than sweeping. The Locavore’s hypothesis is that the collection of local sense-making projects fails to issue a single overarching unifying framework deserving of the title “the metaphysics that makes the best sense of science.” I muster some examples supporting the Locavore hypothesis from the interpretation of quantum field theories. (shrink)

Central to Wilfrid Sellars ' philosophical system is his belief that science's current ontology is inadequate as it fails to provide for an acceptable account of perceptual experience. Unfortunately, this remains the most puzzling plank in his philosophy. Sellars himself argues for this position via his wellknown example of a pink ice cube and its homogeneous colour. This homogeneity, says Sellars, bars the acceptance of science's present ontology of achromatic particles, and requires the introduction of items which are truly coloured. (...) Only with such a revised and expanded ontology, with all that entails, can science adequately meet its explanatory demands. I aim here to remedy at least some of the confusions and misunderstandings this position has engendered. But I mean to take a different route from Sellars. In short, given the problems with Sellars ' views on homogeneity, I will argue for the Sellarsian conclusion as to the inadequacy of present scientific ontologies, yet without reliance on the puzzling doctrine of homogeneity. I begin then with a detailed examination of Sellars official position, indicate the trouble spots, and begin an alternative route. As I conceive things, however, the position I will sketch is still thoroughly Sellarsian, for it proceeds from premises Sellars himself has endorsed. (shrink)

In the course of developing a semantics with epistemological intent, Brandom claims that his inferentialism is Hegelian. This paper argues that, even on a charitable reading, Brandom is an anti-Hegelian.

Traditional debates about scientific realism tend to focus on issues concerning scientific representation and de-emphasize issues concerning scientific intervention. Questions about the relation between theories and the world, the nature of scientific inference, and the structure of scientific explanations have occupied a central place in the realism debate, while questions about experimentation and technology have not. Ian Hacking's experimental realism attempts to reverse this trend by shifting the defense of realism away from representation to intervention. Experimental realism, according to Hacking, (...) does not require us to believe that our theories are true, nor does its defense depend on inference to the best explanation. For Hacking, the strongest proof for realism is that we can manipulate objects: 'So far as I'm concerned, if you can spray them, then they are real'. (shrink)

According to a certain kind of naïve or folk understanding of physical matter, everyday ‘solid’ objects are composed of a homogeneous, gap-less substance, with sharply defined boundaries, which wholly fills the space they occupy. A further claim is that our perceptual experience of the environment represents or indicates that the objects around us conform to this sort of conception of physical matter. Were this further claim correct, it would mean that the way that the world appears to us in experience (...) conflicts with the deliverances of our best current scientific theories in the following respect: perceptual experience would be intrinsically misleading concerning the structure of physical matter. I argue against this further claim. Experience in itself is not committed to, nor does it provide evidence for, any such conception of the nature of physical matter. The naïve/folk conception of matter in question cannot simply be ‘read-off’ from perceptual appearances. (shrink)

Sellars’s definition of the aim of philosophy, ‘to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’, corresponds to my aspirations for the subject. In this article I lay out a very different view of what realism should be, in the hope that it may contribute to that inspiring aim. The difference between our two versions of realism lies in the opposition between Sellars’s picture of two ‘images’, the (...) ‘manifest image’ and the ‘scientific image’, with the scientific image being the ‘measure’ of what is, and the picture I offer, in which there are not sharply delineated ‘scientific images’ and ‘manifest images’, but forms of human discourse that interpenetrate and depend on one another. (shrink)

On the surface, one of the main differences between John McDowell and Wilfrid Sellars when it comes to their conceptions of intentionality has to do with their respective accounts of meaning. McDowell advocates a relational account of meaning, whereas Sellars holds, on the contrary, that a correct view of intentionality is only possible through a non-relational account of meaning. According to McDowell, Sellars does not consider the possibility of his own relational view because he suffers from a ‘blind spot’. It (...) is implied that if Sellars saw this possibility, he would see the light and embrace something like McDowell’s own account. I would like to argue in this paper that the whole issue goes much deeper than that. Sellars does not suffer from a ‘blind spot’ and showing why this is the case should give us an idea of how far apart these two thinkers really are, appearances notwithstanding. It will also reveal that the heart of their disagreement does not consist in a dispute over whether the correct shape of an account of meaning should be relational or not. Sellars’s and McDowell’s respective outlooks on intentionality differ fundamentally with regards to the concept of objectivity. (shrink)

In its most general form, the issue of intentionality takes the following shape: How can something be about something else? In basic cases, this relation is one between a subjective occurrence and a state of affairs, allowing the problem of intentionality to be articulated in this manner: What makes it the case that a subjective occurrence has the capacity to be about something external to it? The views of John McDowell on intentionality form the focus of this article. They are (...) examined through the notion of content and via the later Wittgenstein's standpoint on content and intentionality. The main objective is to reach a conspicuous perspective of McDowell's stance on intentionality in order to uncover its presuppositions. This leads to the identification of a pivotal point of tension in McDowell's philosophical commitments, in particular the extent to which he can legitimately claim to be a quietist. (shrink)

There may be various reasons for claiming that meaning is normative, and additionally, very different senses attached to the claim. However, all such claims have faced fierce resistance from those philosophers who insist that meaning is not normative in any nontrivial sense of the word. In this paper I sketch one particular approach to meaning claiming its normativity and defend it against the anti-normativist critique: namely the approach of Brandomian inferentialism. However, my defense is not restricted to inferentialism in any (...) narrow sense for it encompasses a much broader spectrum of approaches to meaning, connected with the Wittgensteinian and especially Sellarsian view of language as an essentially rule-governed enterprise; and indeed I refrain from claiming that the version of inferentialism I present here is in every detail the version developed by Brandom. (shrink)

Davidson’s anomalous monism is based on the assumption that a human being can be described or accounted for in two very different ways, using two very different and indeed incommensurable conceptual frameworks, namely the physicalistic vocabulary of science and the mentalistic vocabulary employed by the ‘theories’ we make about each other when we interact and communicate. Also Sellars maintains that we have two alternative pictures of the world and especially of us humans as its parts, namely the scientific image and (...) the manifest image. At first sight, the views of the two philosophers may seem quite similar; however, the true extent of this apparent similarity is worth exploring. To that end, in this paper we tackle the following questions: Are Sellars’ reasons for claiming the irreducibility of his manifest image to the scientific image the same or similar to those that Davidson has for asserting the irreducibility of his mentalistic idiom to the scientific one? Is the normativity informing Sellars’ manifest image of the same kind as that informing Davidson’s mentalistic idiom? Do the notions of rationality considered by Sellars and Davidson coincide? (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the postulation of irreducible, distributed cognitive systems is necessary for the successful explanatory practice of cognitive science and sociology. Towards this end, and with an eye specifically on the phenomenon of distributed cognition, the debate over reductionism versus emergence is examined from the perspective of Dynamical Systems Theory. The motivation for this novel approach is threefold. Firstly, DST is particularly popular amongst cognitive scientists who work on modelling collective behaviors. Secondly, DST (...) can deliver two distinct arguments in support of the claim that the presence of mutual interactions between group members necessitates the postulation of the corresponding group entity. Thirdly, DST can also provide a succinct understanding of the way group entities exert downward causation on their individual members. The outcome is a naturalist account of the emergent, and thereby irreducible, nature of distributed cognitive systems that avoids the reductionists’ threat of epiphenomenalism, while being well in line with materialism. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare the original version of the enactive view—autopoietic enactivism—with Husserl’s phenomenology, regarding the issue of the relationship between consciousness and nature. I refer to this issue as the “problem of naturalism.” I show how the idea of the co-determination of subject and object of cognition, which is at the heart of autopoietic enactivism, is close to the phenomenological form of correlationism. However, I argue that there is a tension between an epistemological reading of the subject-object correlation (...) that renounces to search for its metaphysical ground, and the enactivist focus on the biological basis of cognition, which seems to imply a view of nature as the metaphysical ground of the conscious mind. A similar problem arises in Husserl’s phenomenology in the contrast between the idea of the fundamental subject-object correlation, the concept of nature as a correlate of transcendental constitution, and the investigation of the corporeal and material grounding of consciousness. I find a way out of this problem by drawing on the distinction between static and genetic phenomenology. I argue that the investigation of the temporality of experience in genetic phenomenology leads us to investigate the metaphysical ground of the subject-object correlation, understood dynamically as co-constitution and co-origination. Then I propose to complement phenomenology and enactivism with a form of neutral monism, which conceives of the co-constitution of subject and object as grounded in a flow of fundamental, pre-phenomenal qualities. (shrink)

The thought of Wilfrid Sellars has figured prominently in recent discussions of the relationship between naturalism and normativity . On the one hand, some have appealed to Sellars' philosophy in defence of the thesis that what he called the normative 'space of reasons' is in some sense sui generis and irreducible to the natural causal order described by the natural sciences. On the other hand, others have exploited equally central aspects of Sellars' philosophy in defence of the seemingly incompatible project (...) of attempting to give an exhaustive scientifically naturalist account of mind and meaning, and perhaps of the nature of normativity itself. I contend that what Sellars described as 'the Janus-faced character of languagings as belonging to both the causal order and the order of reasons' ( Naturalism and Ontology ) is the key to understanding his normative and pragmatist variety of naturalism. Sellars saw himself as having articulated a detailed philosophical perspective within which the normative aspects of meaning, knowledge, truth, and representation are themselves opened up, in principle, to naturalistic explanation. (shrink)

The modern concept and study of civilization have their roots, not in western Europe, but in the long tradition of scientific and philosophic inquiry that began in a self-conscious Islamicate civilization. They emerged—as Heidegger would say—within a “region of being” proper to systematic science. Western European thought has introduced new elements that have completely altered how collective and personal identities are conceived and experienced. In this age of “globalization,” expressions of identity survive precariously outside their former boundaries, and humanity faces (...) numerous challenges—environmental degradation, policy inertia, interstate bellicosity, cultural rivalries. Yet, the world has been globalized for at least a millennium, a fact partially obscured by the threadbare but widespread belief that modernity is a product of something called the West. One is thus justified in asking, as many people do today, if humanity has not lost its initiative. This is not a historical, a sociological or an empirical question, but fundamentally a philosophical one. The modern concepts of identity and personhood have come under heavy scrutiny because there can be no human initiative without the human agency that flows from them. Given their present inscrutability, and at the same time profound importance to us, Dr. Shaker brings to bear a wealth of original sources from both German thought and Ḥikmah, the latter based on material previously unavailable to scholars. He shows why posing the age-old question of identity anew in the light of these two traditions, whose special place in history is assured, can help clear the confusion surrounding modernity and civilization—i.e., the way we, the acting subject, live and deliberate on the present and the past. Proximity to Scholasticism, and therefore Islamicate philosophy, lends German thought up to Heidegger a unique ability to dialogue with Ḥikmah, as scholars since Max Horten and Henry Corbin have been discovering. Two fecund elements common to Heidegger, Qūnawī and Mullā Ṣadrā are of special importance: logos as the structural embodiment of the primary meaning of a thing, and the unity-in-difference that Ṣadrā finally formulated as the substantial movement of existentiation. Heidegger, who occupies a good portion of this study, questioned modern ontology at a time of social collapse and deep spiritual crisis not unlike ours. Yet, that period also saw the greatest breakthroughs in modern physics and social science. With the waning of the old naïvetés of biologism, psychologism and social evolutionism, our very conception of time and space as measurable determinations was overturned. Dr. Shaker thus concludes with a few chapters on the theme of identity renewal in Western literature and Muslim “reformism.” The roots of the latter point to a civilizational point of convergence between the Eurocentric worldview, which provides the secular aesthetics roots of modernism, and an intellectual current originating in Ibn Taymiyyah’s epistemological reductionism. Both expressed the longing for pristine origin in a historical “golden age,” an obvious deformation of the commanding, creative oneness of being that has guided thought for millennia. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars described the moral syllogism that supports the inference “I ought to do x” from “Everyone ought to do x” as a “syntactical disguise” which embodies a “mistake.” He nevertheless regarded this form of reasoning as constitutive of the moral point of view. Durkheim was the source of much of this reasoning, and this context illuminates Sellars’ unusual philosophical reconstruction of the moral point of view in terms of the collective intentions of an ideal community of rational members for (...) which the syllogism is empirically valid. The reconstruction also sheds light on the question of the status of common sense and normativity in Sellars’ naturalistic metaphysics. (shrink)

Whether understood as an adherence to the given, as an appeal to observe traditions, or as the wish to return to some bygone age, conservatism is bedevilled by paradoxes. The present essay attempts to overcome these paradoxes by putting forward a new conception of conservatism, identifying it as a worldview bent on the preservation of the totality of human knowledge with the aim of enhancing the survival chances of future generations. Conservatism thus understood targets the achievement of real knowledge. Hence (...) by necessity it must associate itself with a realist epistemology and ontology. I argue that any realism worthy of the name is common-sense realism, and that common-sense realism takes into account not merely the verbal level of cognition but also its visual and motor dimensions. The paper devotes special attention to Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work has been intensively discussed in recent decades in the context both of conservatism and realism. (shrink)

In the last half of the twentieth century, some of the most prominent historians of Philosophy turned their attention to the historiography of the subject. Arguably the most important and most infl...

In learning chemistry at the entry level, many learners labor under misconceptions about the subject matter that are so fundamental that they are typically never addressed. A fundamental misconception in chemistry appears to arise from an adding of existing phenomenal concepts to newly-acquired chemical concepts, so that beginning learners think of chemical entities as themselves having the very same ‘macro’ properties that we observe through the senses. Those who teach or practice chemistry never acquire these misconceptions because they were able (...) to naturally pick up the nature of the subject to begin with. But as a result, they remain unaware of the foundational assumptions and understanding that they operate with and that many beginning learners persistently lack. Thus, a systematic picture of the workings of chemical theory as they relate to observable phenomena needs to be elucidated so that the attention of chemical educators is drawn to the fundamental understanding of the subject that they already possess and that beginning learners of chemistry lack, so that beginning learners can be given the opportunity to gain an understanding of how chemical explanations are in general related to observable phenomena. The ‘layered’ way in which chemical and physical entities are related to each other within chemical theory can also be clarified in this way. To afford this picture, the philosophical concepts of supervenience and emergence are explained and applied to chemistry, as philosophers of chemistry have already done. The result provides a model for teaching chemistry that, if consistently applied, has the potential to greatly enhance fundamental understanding of the subject matter. (shrink)

The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debate over ‘internal’ and ‘external’ relations is well explored, as far as its course in Britain is concerned. F. H. Bradley’s idealistic internalism, on the one hand, and Bertrand Russell’s realistic externalism, on the other, were at the center of this debate. Less well known, however, is that there was also a discussion about relations in the United States at the time. The central figures in this discussion were Edward Gleason Spaulding and John Dewey. (...) Like Russell, Spaulding advocated a realist-inspired externalism, while Dewey criticized this viewpoint from a pragmatist perspective. The aim of the present paper is to reconstruct the exchange between Spaulding and Dewey and to elaborate the specifics of this exchange. In doing so it will emerge, among other things, that, in contrast to Bradley’s idealist rejection of externalism, Dewey’s pragmatist attempt at a refutation was more in line with common sense and science and that Spaulding’s version of externalism differed markedly from Russell’s in its strong empirical orientation. Overall, an undeservedly forgotten chapter in the history of early twentieth-century American philosophy is revisited and reassessed. (shrink)

The most basic divide amongst analytic metaphysicians separates realists from anti-realists. By examining certain characteristic and problematic features of these two families of views, we uncover their underlying metametaphysicalorientations, which turn out to coincide. This shared philosophical picture that underlies both the realist and the anti-realist project we call the Modern Picture. It rests on a crucial distinction between reality as it is for us and reality as it is in itself. It is argued that this distinction indeed generates the (...) realism/anti-realism dichotomy, and is also responsible for the problematic aspects highlighted earlier. We conclude by sketching an alternative philosophical picture that rejects the distinction between reality as it is for us and reality as it is in itself, which we call the Aristotelian Picture, and consider whether it is able to avoid the issues to which the Modern Picture gives rise. (shrink)

The metaphor of a branching tree of future possibilities has a number of important philosophical and logical uses. In this paper we trace this metaphor through some of its uses and argue that the metaphor works the same way in physics as in philosophy. We then give an overview of formal systems for branching possibilities, viz., branching time and (briefly) branching space-times. In a next step we describe a number of different notions of possibility, thereby sketching a landscape of possibilities. (...) In the final section of the paper we look at the place of branching-based possibilities in that larger landscape of possibilities. Our main message is that far from being an outlandish metaphysical extravagancy, branching-based possibilities are epistemically as well as metaphysically basic. (shrink)

In this article I discuss Daniel Dennett’s view of the role of natural language in the evolution of the human mind. In contrast with defenders of the Language of Thought Hypothesis, Dennett claims that natural language is an evolved tool for communication, originating in behavioural habits of which users were initially not aware. Once in place, such habits changed access to information in human brains and were crucial for the evolution of human consciousness. I assess Dennett’s approach from the viewpoint (...) of philosophy of mind and language and consider its ontological implications. I contrast Dennett’s views with the universalist and internalist claims of Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky and show how, by appealing to memes and cultural evolution, Dennett resists such claims. I then analyse how this picture goes together with a deflationary view of consciousness. I end by pointing out that although Dennett’s global picture seems to point towards a pluralistic ontology, he himself refrains from taking such a step. (shrink)

I defend a version of color subjectivism — that colors are sortals for certain neural events — by arguing against a sophisticated form of color objectivism and by showing how a subjectivist can legitimately explain the phenomenal fact that colors seem to be properties of external objects.

Experimental realism aims at striking a middle ground between scientific realism and anti-realism, between the success of experimental physics it would explain and the realism about scientific theories it would supplant. This middle ground reinstates the engineering idea that belief in scientific entities is justified on purely experimental grounds, without any commitment to scientific theories and laws. This paper argues that there is no defensible middle ground to be staked out when it comes to justifying physicists' belief in colored quarks, (...) and that experimental realism shifts, under analysis, into scientific realism. (shrink)