In the 21st century, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) remains one of the key figures in the field of analytical psychology - and Psychological Types, or The Psychology of Individuation, published in 1921, is one of his most influential works. It was written during the decade after the publication of Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), which effectively ended his friendship and collaboration with Sigmund Freud. Whereas the earlier work had clearly marked Jung's psychoanalytical divergence from Freud it is the Psychology (...) of Types that fully clarifies and presents the nature, quality and characteristics of his analytical psychology. The work, which was in part a consequence of his need to reconcile the competing theories of Freud, whom he regarded as extraverted, and Alfred Adler, whom he saw as introverted, develops his concept of descriptive categories for understanding the human mind in terms of the two essential attitude types: introversion and extraversion. These basic attitudes operate in tandem with four principal interacting functions of consciousness which Jung identifies as sensation and intuition, which are functions of perception, and thinking and feeling, which are functions of judgment. The eight resulting psychological types are then explored, described, identified, characterised and explained in considerable detail, with a soaring range of examples drawn from the whole of human history, culture and experience. In his efforts to explore and illuminate the nature of the unconscious mind and indeed the collective unconscious, he investigates the problems posed by the differing psychological types and how these have manifested from classical and medieval times to the 20th century. His observations range from Aristotle, Socrates and Plato to Tertullian and Origen, and from Abélard and Master Eckhart to Martin Luther and the problem of transubstantiation. Jung takes the listener on an odyssey of human thinking. He considers the problem of types in the works of Schiller and Goethe, and Spitteler and his treatment of the Prometheus myth. He contrasts idealism and realism, the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Nietzsche, and explores a host of philosophical and religious sources from the Bible to Taoism to Brahminism. He considers the nature of the reconciling symbol in Spitteler before analysing the nature of types in modern philosophy, aesthetics and biography, giving detailed consideration to William James' characteristic pairs of opposites and Furneaux Jordan's 'character sketch of the emotional types'. Jung goes on to fully identify and describe the characteristic differences between the extraverted and introverted types and provides an extensive chapter on definitions to fully clarify the meaning of the language he employs and make his meaning more accessible. Authoritatively read by Martyn Swain for Ukemi Audiobooks, Psychological Types is an inexhaustible treasure chest of ideas and creative inspiration worth listening to time and time again. (shrink)

An adequate understanding of the ubiquitous practice of mechanistic explanation requires an account of what Craver termed “constitutive relevance.” Entities or activities are constitutively relevant to a phenomenon when they are parts of the mechanism responsible for that phenomenon. Craver’s mutual manipulability account extended Woodward’s account of manipulationist counterfactuals to analyze how interlevel experiments establish constitutive relevance. Critics of MM argue that applying Woodward’s account to this philosophical problem conflates causation and constitution, thus rendering the account incoherent. These criticisms, we (...) argue, arise from failing to distinguish the semantic, epistemic, and metaphysical aspects of the problem of constitutive relevance. In distinguishing these aspects of the problem and responding to these critics accordingly, we amend MM into a refined epistemic criterion, the “matched interlevel experiments” account. Further, we explain how this epistemological thesis is grounded in the plausible metaphysical thesis that constitutive relevance is causal betweenness. (shrink)

Biologists rely heavily on the language of information, coding, and transmission that is commonplace in the field of information theory developed by Claude Shannon, but there is open debate about whether such language is anything more than facile metaphor. Philosophers of biology have argued that when biologists talk about information in genes and in evolution, they are not talking about the sort of information that Shannon’s theory addresses. First, philosophers have suggested that Shannon’s theory is only useful for developing a (...) shallow notion of correlation, the so-called causal sense of information. Second, they typically argue that in genetics and evolutionary biology, information language is used in a semantic sense, whereas semantics are deliberately omitted from Shannon’s theory. Neither critique is well-founded. Here we propose an alternative to the causal and semantic senses of information: a transmission sense of information, in which an object X conveys information if the function of X is to reduce, by virtue of its sequence properties, uncertainty on the part of an agent who observes X. The transmission sense not only captures much of what biologists intend when they talk about information in genes, but also brings Shannon’s theory back to the fore. By taking the viewpoint of a communications engineer and focusing on the decision problem of how information is to be packaged for transport, this approach resolves several problems that have plagued the information concept in biology, and highlights a number of important features of the way that information is encoded, stored, and transmitted as genetic sequence. (shrink)

I argue that Sellars’s naturalization of Kant should be understood in terms of how he used behavioristic psychology and cybernetics. I first explore how Sellars used Edward Tolman’s cognitive-behavioristic psychology to naturalize Kant in the early essay “Language, Rules, and Behavior”. I then turn to Norbert Wiener’s understanding of feedback loops and circular causality. On this basis I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing, which he introduces in “Being and Being Known,” can be understood in terms of what (...) I call cybernetic behaviorism. I interpret picturing in terms of cycles of cybernetic behavior and signifying in terms of coordination between cybernetic behavior systems, or what I call triangulated cybernetic behavior. This leads to a formal, naturalistic understanding of personhood as the capacity to engage in triangulated cybernetic behavior. I conclude by showing that Sellars’s thought has the resources, which he did not exploit, for introducing the concept of second-order cybernetics. This suggests that Sellars’s philosophy of mind could be developed in the direction of autopoiesis and enactivism. (shrink)

The dominant neuroscientific theory of spatial memory is, like many theories in neuroscience, a multilevel description of a mechanism. The theory links the activities of molecules, cells, brain regions, and whole organisms into an integrated sketch of an explanation for the ability of organisms to navigate novel environments. Here I develop a taxonomy of interlevel experimental strategies for integrating the levels in such multilevel mechanisms. These experimental strategies include activation strategies, interference strategies, and additive strategies. These strategies are mutually reinforcing, (...) providing a kind of interlevel and intratheoretic robustness that has not previously been recognized. (shrink)

This chapter explores the unifying themes of “the Pittsburgh School” of Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell: a social pragmatist account of intentionality, the rejection of the Myth of the Given, and the partial rehabilitation of Hegel for analytic philosophy. In addition this chapter also discusses three points of disagreement within the Pittsburgh School: whether or not we should posit sense-impressions, whether perceptual intentionality is world-relational, and whether the natural sciences have epistemic authority over other ways of thinking about nature. The chapter (...) concludes with a metaphilosophical concern about the status of a return to Hegel within analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy follows an anti-Hegelian neo-Kantian institution of a divide between philosophy and the social and natural sciences. Hegel would reject such a divide, since he conceives of philosophy as investigating “shapes of a world” and not just “shapes of consciousness”. In these terms the Pittsburgh School marks a return to Hegel trimmed to suit the needs of analytic philosophy rather than questioning those needs. (shrink)

A wide range of ecological and evolutionary models predict variety in phenotype or behavior when a population is at equilibrium. This heterogeneity can be realized in different ways. For example, it can be realized through a complex population of individuals exhibiting different simple behaviors, or through a simple population of individuals exhibiting complex, varying behaviors. In some theoretical frameworks these different realizations are treated as equivalent, but natural selection distinguishes between these two alternatives in subtle ways. By investigating an increasingly (...) complex series of models, from a simple fluctuating selection model up to a finite population hawk/dove game, we explore the selective pressures which discriminate between pure strategists, mixed at the population level, and individual mixed strategists. Our analysis reveals some important limitations to the ESS framework often employed to investigate the evolution of complex behavior. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Once Received View (ORV) Criticisms of the ORV The “Model Model” of Scientific Theories Mechanisms: Investigating Nonformal Patterns in Scientific Theories Conclusion.

Long-Term Potentiation (LTP) is a kind of synaptic plasticity that many contemporary neuroscientists believe is a component in mechanisms of memory. This essay describes the discovery of LTP and the development of the LTP research program. The story begins in the 1950's with the discovery of synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus (a medial temporal lobe structure now associated with memory), and it ends in 1973 with the publication of three papers sketching the future course of the LTP research program. The (...) making of LTP was a protracted affair. Hippocampal synaptic plasticity was initially encountered as an experimental tool, then reported as a curiosity, and finally included in the ontic store of the neurosciences. Early researchers were not investigating the hippocampus in search of a memory mechanism; rather, they saw the hippocampus as a useful experimental model or as a structure implicated in the etiology of epilepsy. The link between hippocampal synaptic plasticity and learning or memory was a separate conceptual achievement. That link was formulated in at least three different ways at different times: reductively (claiming that plasticity is identical to learning), analogically (claiming that plasticity is an example or model of learning), and mechanistically (claiming that plasticity is a component in learning or memory mechanisms). The hypothesized link with learning or memory, coupled with developments in experimental techniques and preparations, shaped how researchers understood LTP itself. By 1973, the mechanistic formulation of the link between LTP and memory provided an abstract framework around which findings from multiple perspectives could be integrated into a multifield research program. (shrink)

I argue that Quine’s naturalization of Lewis’s Kantian pragmatism should be understood in terms of Lewis’s attempt to de-psychologize pragmatist epistemology. Lewis wants epistemology to be a priori in order to be distinct from psychology. Quine’s criticisms of Lewis result in a picture that weakens the distinction between epistemology and psychology. Nevertheless, Quine’s naturalized Kantian pragmatism remains far more Kantian than is widely recognized, due to what Quine retains from Lewis.

A core, constitutive norm of science is to remove or remedy the artefacts in one’s data. Here, we consider examples of artefacts from many fields of science (for example, astronomy, economics, electrophysiology, psychology, and systems neuroscience) and discuss their contribution to a more general evidential selection problem at the heart of the epistemology of evidence. Synthesizing and building on previously disparate discussions in many areas of the philosophy of science, we provide a novel, causal–pragmatic account that fits the examples and (...) clarifies the practices by which artefacts are discovered and remedied. (shrink)

In a recent issue of The Monist, Alisa Bokulich argues that those who embrace an ontic conception of scientific explanation are committed to rejecting an explanatory role for idealized, i.e., deliberately false, models. Her argument is based on an inaccurate characterization of the ontic view. Indeed, her positive view of idealization embraces rather than opposes the ontic conception. Because Bokulich is not alone in this misunderstanding, an effort to diagnose and correct it might prevent scholars from talking past one another (...) and, hopefully, nudge future discussions down more inviting paths. (shrink)

It is a common assumption in contemporary cognitive neuroscience that discovering a putative realized kind to be dissociably realized (i.e., to be realized in each instance by two or more distinct realizers) mandates splitting that kind. Here I explore some limits on this inference using two deceptively similar examples: the dissociation of declarative and procedural memory and Ramachandran's argument that the self is an illusion.

We address Turkheimer’s argument that genome-wide association studies of behaviors and psychiatric traits will fail to produce coherent explanations. We distinguish two major sources of potential i...

ABSTRACT This paper aims to show that intuitionistic Kripke models are a powerful tool for interpreting Kant’s ‘Critical Philosophy’. Part I reviews some old work of mine that applies these models to provide a reading of Kant’s second antinomy about the divisibility of matter and to answer several attacks on Kant’s antinomies. But it also points out three shortcomings of that original application. First, the reading fails to account for Kant’s second antinomy claim that matter is divisible ‘ad infinitum’ and (...) his first antinomy claim that empirical space extends only ‘ad indefinitum’. Secondly, in conformity with the ‘assertability’ heuristics for Kripke models, it attributes an assertability semantics to Kant. In fact, it attributes a pair of assertability semantics to Kant, but neither of these accords with modern assertabilism. And finally, one must wonder the propriety of using contemporary assertability and contemporary formal logic to save an eighteenth-century text. Part II goes historical to solve the problems about assertability. It outlines the Descartes–Leibniz dialectic about the infinite/indefinite distinction and demonstrates how each position reflects larger philosophical positions. It then demonstrates that Kant’s two versions of assertability and his version of the infinite/indefinite dichotomy emerge naturally from his attempts to resolve a tension in Leibniz’s philosophy. In light of this demonstration, Part III adapts the Kripke model interpretation so that it does reflect that dichotomy. It then refines the Kripke semantics in order to model some of Kant’s signature critical doctrines, and it shows how Kant’s critical version of the infinite/indefinite distinction differs from all those of his predecessors and from his own pre-critical version. It also addresses the question of using contemporary logical machinery to interpret Kant. Part IV turns the tables and uses what we have learned about Kant and modern semantics in order to address a pair of issues in the contemporary critical foundations of logic. (shrink)

What are the relative epistemic merits of building prosthetic models versus building nonprosthetic models and simulations? I argue that prosthetic models provide a sufficient test of affordance validity, that is, of whether the target system affords mechanisms that can be commandeered by a prosthesis. In other respects, prosthetic models are epistemically on par with nonprosthetic models. I focus on prosthetics in neuroscience, but the results are general. The goal of understanding how brain mechanisms work under ecologically and physiologically relevant conditions (...) is narrow compared to the search for maker's knowledge about how the brain can be made to work for us. (shrink)

The rise of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology—the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind—could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by “teleology” as well as what is meant “nature”. I shall examine a specific episode in the history of this debate in the twentieth century with the rise of cybernetics: the science of seemingly “self-controlled” systems. Against cybernetics, Hans Jonas argued that cybernetics (...) failed as a naturalistic theory of teleology and that the reality of teleology is grounded in phenomenology, not in scientific explanations. I shall argue that Jonas was correct to criticize cybernetics but that contemporary work in biological organization succeeds where cybernetics failed. I will then turn to contemporary uses of Jonas’s phenomenology in enactivism and argue that Jonas’s phenomenology should be avoided by enactivism as a scientific research program, but that it remains open whether enactivism as a philosophy of nature should also avoid Jonas. (shrink)

Recent accounts of teleological naturalism hold that organisms are intrinsically goaldirected entities. We argue that supporters and critics of this view have ignored the ways in which it is used to address quite different problems. One problem is about biology and concerns whether an organism-centered account of teleological ascriptions would improve our descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena. This is different from the philosophical problem of how naturalized teleology would affect our conception of nature, and of ourselves as natural beings. (...) The neglect of this metatheoretic distinction has made it difficult to understand the criteria we should use for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology. We argue that a clearer distinction between scientific and philosophical contexts shows that we need more than one set of criteria for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology, and that taking these into account might advance or dissolve recurring debates in the literature. (shrink)

Zhuangzi and Henry David Thoreau share a critical interest in the relations between wandering, nature, and experience. Their attitudes toward nature provide a basis for their views of human well-being, which in turn inform their attitudes toward language, society, and politics. Both celebrate nature as a source of constant novelty, change, and nourishing life. These values clash against social conformity and political homogeneity. For both Zhuangzi and Thoreau, how we experience life is already constitutive of human well-being. Wandering thus provides (...) a unique vision of freedom, one that binds experience, nature, and social-political criticism. (shrink)

I argue that phenomenology should take seriously what Wilfrid Sellars calls “the Myth of the Given”. Phenomenologists have either ignored this idea or misunder-stood it. I argue that the Myth of the Given, if understood correctly, could be an objection to phenomenological method. Specifically I argue that Husserl’s static phenomenology is vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism. However, I also show that Merleau-Ponty is not vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism because of how he navigates the relationship between phenomenology and science. This (...) shows that the question as to whether phenomenology is vulnerable to the Sellarsian criticism is more complicated than has been assumed by phenomenologists or their critics. (shrink)

The prestige of science, derived from its claims to certainty, has adversely affected the humanities. There is, in fact, a “politics of certainty”. Our ability to predict events in a limited sphere has been idealized, engendering dangerous illusions about our power to control nature and eliminate time. In addition, the perception and propagation of science as a bearer of certainty has served to legitimate harmful forms of social, sexual, and political power. Yet, as Ilya Prigogine has argued, renewed attention to (...) the irreducible reality of time has brought us to “the end of certainty”. As we enter the age of uncertainty, there is disagreement about how science should be understood and communicated. Some scientists cling to the ideal of certainty, while others emphasize the creative potential of spontaneity, novelty, and surprise. (shrink)

A critical review of "The Spirit of Trust". The review provides a very compressed overview of Brandom's project and concludes with a minor criticism of how Brandom addresses "the masters of suspicion" (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud).

I use the distinction between sentience and sapience to reconstruct the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell. I argue that Dreyfus's critique of McDowell's conceptualism relies on conflating detached contemplation with conceptual activity as such. I then argue that McDowell's conceptualism can be enriched and brought into deeper conversation with pragmatism and phenomenology if we take reasons to be a special kind of affordance. Contra Dreyfus, reasons need not disrupt affordances but do so only in specific contexts. I conclude (...) with a suggestion about how to understand the emergence of rational animality within the hominid lineage. (shrink)

In section i, I sketch the main arguments to date for legal moralism, And show the ways in which they are unpersuasive. In sections ii and iii, I sketch and evaluate a seemingly compelling argument, Dependent on the concept of wrongful conduct, For the weak thesis that the immorality of conduct is a reason, But not a sufficient reason for making it illegal. Despite the apparent persuasiveness of this argument, The particular conclusions of the legal moralist, That various non-Harmful immoralities (...) ought on balance to be criminal, Do not obviously follow. Finally, Once the argument for the weak thesis is understood, Even its initial persuasiveness is undermined by considerations of legal philosophy. (shrink)

Any interpretation of Nietzsche’s criticisms of morality must show whether or not Nietzsche is entitled both to deny free will and to be concerned with furtheringhuman freedom. Here I will show that Nietzsche is entitled to both claims if his theory of freedom is set in the context of a naturalistic drive-psychology. The drive-psychology allows Nietzsche to develop a modified but recognizable account of freedom as autonomy. I situate this development in Nietzsche’s thought through a close reading of Daybreak (Morgenröte). (...) In conclusion I contrast Nietzsche’s naturalistic account of autonomy with the transcendental account developed by Kant. (shrink)

Japan and China have long resisted the Western trend of organ transplantation from brain‐dead patients, based on a ‘Confucian’ respect for integrity of ancestors’ bodies. While their general publics continue to harbor grave doubts about such practices, their medical and political elites are hastening towards the road of organ‐harvesting and organ‐marketing, largely for economic reasons. This report illustrates the ways that economics is motivating brain‐death legislation in Japan and criminal executions in China.

Recent ethical misconduct in American business has resulted in volumes of written commentary, various legislative responses, as well as litigation by those identified as victims. While legislators, judges, juries, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) pursue an increasing number of cases, there is little attention devoted to understanding what drives executives and other leaders to behave in ways that violate the ethical and legal standards of business in the United States. This understanding is a prerequisite to selecting leaders and (...) designing interventions that prevent future misconduct. Understanding leadership’s nature and functioning is one key to understanding the ethical behavior of an organization as a system and of the people who lead the organization. Two models or frameworks provide the foundation for this paper. The first is a model of leadership competencies. This model identifies five key areas of competence related to overall, long-term leadership success. The second model targets leadership effectiveness. This model has three components – motivational patterns, decision criteria, and competencies. Using the Leadership Effectiveness Model to frame the discussion, the authors describe the nature and importance of the models, with particular focus on motivational patterns. Research suggests these patterns often account for 40–60% of overall leadership effectiveness. This article defines motivational patterns and describes key patterns that may impact ethical behavior of leaders. The article concludes with a discussion of how to use data on motivational patterns in leadership selection, development, and evaluation processes. (shrink)

Asserting that traditional Western religious groundings for ethics neither reach a modern international audience nor solve the interpersonal and global problems ...