An automated system for monitoring facial expressions could increase the reliability, sensitivity, and precision of the research on the relationship between facial signs and experiences of pain, and it could lead to new insights and diagnostic methods. This commentary examines whether the research on facial expression of pain, as reported by Williams, provides a sufficient basis for machine understanding of pain-associated facial expressions.

How do thought and language manage to be 'about' aspects of the world? J. Robert G. Williams investigates how representation arises out of a fundamentally non-representational world, showing the explanatory relations between the representational properties of language, of thought, and of perception and intention.

A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist’s ‘knowledge = apt belief’ template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity (e.g., Sosa 2020), to how it is realised at the individual level—viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by alethically (...) affirming that p. An advantage of the proposal developed is that it is shown to be compatible with competing views—viz., joint acceptance accounts and social-distributive accounts—of how group members must interact in order to materially realise a group belief. I conclude by showing how the proposed judgment-focused collective (telic) virtue epistemology has important advantages over a rival version of collective virtue epistemology defended in recent work by Jesper Kallestrup (2016). (shrink)

It is generally agreed that organisms are Complex Adaptive Systems. Since the rise of Cybernetics in the middle of the last century ideas from information theory and control theory have been applied to the adaptations of biological organisms in order to explain how they work. This does not, however, explain functionality, which is widely but not universally attributed to biological systems. There are two approaches to functionality, one based on etiology (what a trait was selected for), and the other based (...) in autonomy. I argue that the etiological approach, as understood in terms of control theory, suffers from a problem of symmetry, by which function can equally well be placed in the environment as in the organism. Focusing on the autonomy view, I note that it can be understood to some degree in terms of control theory in its version called second order cybernetics. I present an approach to second order cybernetics that seems plausible for organisms with limited computational power, due to Hooker, Penfold and Evans. They hold that this approach gives something like concepts, certainly abstractions from specific situations, a trait required for functionality in its system adaptive form (i.e., control of the system by itself). Using this cue, I argue that biosemiotics provides the methodology to incorporate these quasi concepts into an account of functionality. (shrink)

Strange inversions occur when things work in ways that turn received wisdom upside down. Hume offered a strangely inverted story about causation, and Darwin, about apparent design. Dennett suggests that a strange inversion also occurs when we project our own reactive complexes outward, painting our world with elusive properties like cuteness, sweetness, blueness, sexiness, funniness, and more. Such properties strike us as experiential causes, but they are really effects—a kind of shorthand for whole sets of reactive dispositions rooted in the (...) nuts and bolts of human information processing. Understanding the nature and origins of that strange inversion, Dennett believes, is thus key to understanding the nature and origins of human experience itself. This paper examines this claim, paying special attention to recent formulations that link that strange inversion to the emerging vision of the brain as a Bayesian estimator, constantly seeking to predict the unfolding sensory barrage. (shrink)

Moral philosophers tend to discriminate, explicitly or implicitly, three types of action from the point of view of moral worth. First, they recognize actions that are a duty, or obligatory, or that we ought to perform, treating these terms as approximately synonymous; second, they recognize actions that are right in so far as they are permissible from a moral standpoint and not ruled out by moral considerations, but that are not morally required of us, like the lead of this or (...) that card at bridge; third, they recognize actions that are wrong, that we ought not to do. (shrink)

The meta-problem is 'the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness' (Chalmers, 2018, p. 6). This presupposes that we think there is a problem in the first place. We challenge the breadth of this 'we', arguing that there is already sufficient empirical evidence to cast doubt on the claim. We then add to this body of evidence, presenting the results of a new cross-cultural study extending the work of Sytsma and Machery (2010).

The conservation of energy and momentum have been viewed as undermining Cartesian mental causation since the 1690s. Modern discussions of the topic tend to use mid-nineteenth century physics, neglecting both locality and Noether’s theorem and its converse. The relevance of General Relativity has rarely been considered. But a few authors have proposed that the non-localizability of gravitational energy and consequent lack of physically meaningful local conservation laws answers the conservation objection to mental causation: conservation already fails in GR, so there (...) is nothing for minds to violate. This paper is motivated by two ideas. First, one might take seriously the fact that GR formally has an infinity of rigid symmetries of the action and hence, by Noether’s first theorem, an infinity of conserved energies-momenta. Second, Sean Carroll has asked how one should modify the Dirac–Maxwell–Einstein equations to describe mental causation. This paper uses the generalized Bianchi identities to show that General Relativity tends to exclude, not facilitate, such Cartesian mental causation. In the simplest case, Cartesian mental influence must be spatio-temporally constant, and hence 0. The difficulty may diminish for more complicated models. Its persuasiveness is also affected by larger world-view considerations. The new general relativistic objection provides some support for realism about gravitational energy-momentum in GR. Such realism also might help to answer an objection to theories of causation involving conserved quantities, because energies-momenta would be conserved even in GR. (shrink)

Autonomous Knowledge: Radical Enhancement, Autonomy, and the Future of Knowing motivates and develops a new research programme in epistemology that is centred around the concept of epistemic autonomy.

Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) have become a household word among health economists. Their use as a means of comparing the value of health programmes and medical interventions has stirred up controversy in the medical profession and the academic community. In this paper, I argue that QALY analysis does not adequately take into account the differentiated nature of the health state values it measures. Specifically, it does not distinguish between needs and preferences with respect to its valuation of health states. (...) I defend the view that needs and preferences are clearly distinguishable, and that the concept of needs cannot be dispensed with, as many health economists suggest. It is argued that the scale along which health states are measured in QALY analysis is not a continuous interval scale, but one which concerns two distinctly different value dimensions. Measuring the values of health state intervals may reveal the weighting attached to the different value dimensions. (shrink)

A change in sense of self is an outcome commonly associated with Buddhist meditation. However, the sense of self is construed in multiple ways, and which changes in self-related processing are expected, intended, or possible through meditation is not well understood. In a qualitative study of meditation-related challenges, six discrete changes in sense of self were reported by Buddhist meditators: change in narrative self, loss of sense of ownership, loss of sense of agency, change in sense of embodiment, change in (...) self-other or self-world boundaries, and loss of sense of basic self. Changes in sense of self could be transient or enduring, positive or distressing, enhancing or impairing. These changes were also given varied appraisals, ranging from insights associated with Buddhist doctrines to psychopathologies such as depersonalization. In this study of practitioners reporting meditation-related challenges, more global changes in sense of self were associated with higher levels of impairment. These results have implications for both Buddhist meditation as well as mindfulness-based interventions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe seminal work of David Marr, popularized in his classic work Vision, continues to exert a major influence on both cognitive science and philosophy. The interpretation of his work also co...

In the paper, the originator of the hiddenness argument, J. L. Schellenberg, responds to papers that challenge his reasoning. In his remarks he puts an emphasis on the concept of divine love and he explains why it is not only connected to the idea of the Christian God. He also clarifies his position on ultimism.

This commentary serves as a reply to Hoffart and Johnson’s article contending that psychodynamic psychotherapy (PDT) models cannot be examined with regard to mechanism of change or represent within-person causal relationships. Hoffart and Johnson cite purportedly paradigmatic examples of PDT and cognitive therapy and examine them with respect to Kazdin’s requirements for investigation of mechanisms of change. We highlight inaccuracies in Hoffart and Johnson’s representation of PDT and, in doing so, provide reasoning in support of the empirical examinability of PDT. (...) We conclude by recommending a metatheoretical system (i.e., functionalism) and empirical methodologies that clinical scientists may consider when investigating mechanisms of PDT in the future. (shrink)

Rorty saw the course of philosophy in the twentieth century as an effort to part from two major philosophical trends, namely historicism and naturalism, only to inevitably return at the end of a tortuous path to these very same tendencies. If we can concede without major objections Rorty’s diagnosis of the trends in contemporary continental and analytical philosophy, which seem to reveal the exhaustion of modern philosophy, based as it has been on epistemology, we must, on the other hand, examine (...) carefully the three main questions that this diagnosis leaves open: How does Rorty reconcile continental idealist subjectivism with materialistic behaviorism? Is it really inevitable that philosophy blinded by Geist are unable to question prevalent beliefs? Finally, is the acceptance of a liberalism that is not able to give reasons for itself the most effective and pragmatic liberalism? In answering these questions, it may not be possible to avoid a non-dogmatic, but pragmatic, metaphysics: a vocabulary of vocabularies that allows Rorty to speak of the problems of justice in Plato and Rawls, of the soul in Aristotle and Descartes, of the dystopias in Moro and Orwell. On pragmatic terms, perhaps a modest version of a metaphysic’s “vocabulary” turns out to be as legitimate and practical as any other vocabulary. (shrink)

Here I reply to criticisms by Jeroen de Ridder and S. Kate Devitt to my "Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology".

Conceptual clarity is essential when engaging in dialogue to avoid unnecessary disagreement and to promote mutual understanding. In this issue devoted to clinical bioethics, the authors exemplify the virtue of careful conceptual analysis as they explore complex clinical questions regarding the essential nature of medicine, the boundaries of killing and letting die, the meaning of irreversibility in definitions of death, the argument for a right to try experimental medications, the ethical borders in complex medical billing, and the definition and modeling (...) of complex disease states. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 8, August 2022.