Many hold that theoretical reasoning aims at truth. In this paper, I ask what it is for reasoning to be thus aim-directed. Standard answers to this question explain reasoning’s aim-directedness in terms of intentions, dispositions, or rule-following. I argue that, while these views contain important insights, they are not satisfactory. As an alternative, I introduce and defend a novel account: reasoning aims at truth in virtue of being the exercise of a distinctive kind of cognitive power, one that, unlike ordinary (...) dispositions, is capable of fully explaining its own exercises. I argue that this account is able to avoid the difficulties plaguing standard accounts of the relevant sort of mental teleology. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists hold that it cannot, and that this (...) implies that there is something illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold that the mind is uniquely irreducible, perhaps due to some limitation of our self-understanding. In this book, Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of science. While reductionism was part of the philosophical orthodoxy fifty years ago, it has been decisively rejected by philosophers of science over the past thirty years, and for good reason. True reductions are in fact exceedingly rare in the sciences, and the conviction that they were there to be found was an artifact of armchair assumptions of 17th century Rationalists and 20th century Logical Empiricists. The explanatory gaps between mind and brain are far from unique. In fact, in the sciences it is gaps all the way down.And if reductions are rare in even the physical sciences, there is little reason to expect them in the case of psychology. Horst argues that this calls for a complete re-thinking of the contemporary problematic in philosophy of mind. Reductionism, dualism, eliminativism and non-reductive materialism are each severely compromised by post-reductionist philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind is in need of a new paradigm. Horst suggests that such a paradigm might be found in Cognitive Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized, and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular representational system optimized for its own problem domain. Such an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is plausible on evolutionary grounds. (shrink)

Over the past thirty years, it is been common to hear the mind likened to a digital computer. This essay is concerned with a particular philosophical view that holds that the mind literally is a digital computer (in a specific sense of “computer” to be developed), and that thought literally is a kind of computation. This view—which will be called the “Computational Theory of Mind” (CTM)—is thus to be distinguished from other and broader attempts to connect the mind with computation, (...) including (a) various enterprises at modeling features of the mind using computational modeling techniques, and (b) employing some feature or features of production-model computers (such as the stored program concept, or the distinction between hardware and software) merely as a guiding metaphor for understanding some feature of the mind. This entry is therefore concerned solely with the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) proposed by Hilary Putnam [1961] and developed most notably for philosophers by Jerry Fodor [1975, 1980, 1987, 1993]. The senses of ‘computer’ and ‘computation’ employed here are technical; the main tasks of this entry will therefore be to elucidate: (a) the technical sense of ‘computation’ that is at issue, (b) the ways in which it is claimed to be applicable to the mind, (c) the philosophical problems this understanding of the mind is claimed to solve, and (d) the major criticisms that have accrued to this view. (shrink)

Over the past several decades, the philosophical community has witnessed the emergence of an important new paradigm for understanding the mind.1 The paradigm is that of machine computation, and its influence has been felt not only in philosophy, but also in all of the empirical disciplines devoted to the study of cognition. Of the several strategies for applying the resources provided by computer and cognitive science to the philosophy of mind, the one that has gained the most attention from philosophers (...) has been the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). CTM was first articulated by Hilary Putnam (1960, 1961), but finds perhaps its most consistent and enduring advocate in Jerry Fodor (1975, 1980, 1981, 1987, 1990, 1994). It is this theory, and not any broader interpretations of what it would be for the mind to be a computer, that I wish to address in this paper. What I shall argue here is that the notion of symbolic representation employed by CTM is fundamentally unsuited to providing an explanation of the intentionality of mental states (a major goal of CTM), and that this result undercuts a second major goal of CTM, sometimes refered to as the vindication of intentional psychology. This line of argument is related to the discussions of derived intentionality by Searle (1980, 1983, 1984) and Sayre (1986, 1987). But whereas those discussions seem to be concerned with the causal dependence of familiar sorts of symbolic representation upon meaning-bestowing acts, my claim is rather that there is not one but several notions of meaning to be had, and that the notions that are applicable to symbols are conceptually dependent upon the notion that is applicable to mental states in the fashion that Aristotle refered to as paronymy. That is, an analysis of the notions of meaning applicable to symbols reveals that they contain presuppositions about meaningful mental states, much as Aristotle's analysis of the sense of healthy that is applied to foods reveals that it means conducive to having a healthy body, and hence any attempt to explain mental semantics in terms of the semantics of symbols is doomed to circularity and regress. I shall argue, however, that this does not have the consequence that computationalism is bankrupt as a paradigm for cognitive science, as it is possible to reconstruct CTM in a fashion that avoids these difficulties and makes it a viable research framework for psychology, albeit at the cost of losing its claims to explain intentionality and to vindicate intentional psychology. I have argued elsewhere (Horst, 1996) that local special sciences such as psychology do not require vindication in the form of demonstrating their reducibility to more fundamental theories, and hence failure to make good on these philosophical promises need not compromise the broad range of work in empirical cognitive science motivated by the computer paradigm in ways that do not depend on these problematic treatments of symbols. (shrink)

In this carefully argued critique, Steven Horst pronounces the theory deficient.

Seit dem byzantinischen Bilderstreit und dem Bildersturm der Reformation ist nicht mehr in solcher Intensität über Bilder nachgedacht worden wie in den letzten Jahrzehnten. Neben der Archäologie und der Kunstgeschichte haben sich zahlreiche weitere Fächer an Fragestellungen rund um das Bild geradezu festgebissen. Angesichts dessen geht einer der bedeutendsten Kunsthistoriker der Gegenwart der Frage nach, warum Begriff und Geltung sowie Macht und Ohnmacht von Bildern so hartnäckig verfolgte Themen unserer Tage geworden sind.

This paper provides an analysis of U.S. farmland owners, operators, and workers by race, ethnicity, and gender. We first review the intersection between racialized and gendered capitalism and farmland ownership and farming in the United States. Then we analyze data from the 2014 Tenure and Ownership Agricultural Land survey, the 2012 Census of Agriculture, and the 2013–2014 National Agricultural Worker Survey to demonstrate that significant nation-wide disparities in farming by race, ethnicity and gender persist in the U.S. In 2012–2014, White (...) people owned 98% and operated 94% of all farmland. They generated 98% of all farm-related income from land ownership and 97% of income from farm owner-operatorship. Meanwhile, People of Color farmers were more likely to be tenants rather than owners, owned less land, and generated less farm-related wealth per person than their White counterparts. Hispanic farmers were also disproportionately farm laborers. In addition to racial and ethnic disparities, there were disparities by gender. About 63% of non-operating landowners, 86% of farm operators, and 87% of tenant farmers were male, and female farmers tended to generate less income per farmer than men. This data provides evidence of ongoing racial, ethnic and gender disparities in agriculture in the United States. We conclude with a call to address the structural drivers of the disparities and with recommendations for better data collection. (shrink)

This book introduces an account of cognitive architecture, Cognitive Pluralism, on which the basic units of understanding are models of particular content domains. Having many mental models is a good adaptive strategy for cognition, but models can be incompatible with one another, leading to paradoxes and inconsistencies of belief, and it may not be possible to integrate the understanding supplied by multiple models into a comprehensive and self-consistent "super model". The book applies the theory to explaining intuitive reasoning and cognitive (...) illusions and explores implications for epistemology, semantics, and disunity of science. (shrink)

Recent initiatives in Germany illustrate how major companies have changed their attitudes towards a critical public ‐ and thereby have improved their economic and ethical performance. Prof. Dr. Horst Steinmann and Dipl.‐Kfm. Ansgar Zerfaß belong to the University of Erlangen‐Nürnberg, Germany.

Von Natur aus ist der Mensch so frei wie wölfisch. Um sich selbst zu bändigen, muß er folglich einen künstlichen Riesen schaffen, den Staat, der als übergeordnete Instanz den permanenten Bürgerkrieg zu unterdrücken und Frieden zu schaffen vermag. Diese Essenz von Thomas Hobbes'"Leviathan" ist bis heute ebenso vehement verworfen wie bekräftigt worden. In den letzten Jahrzehnten wurden vor allem die historischen Bedingungen erschlossen, unter denen Hobbes sein epochales Werk verfaßte; aber seine bestürzende Grundthese, daß es des Schreckens bedarf, um inneren (...) Frieden zu erzeugen, ist eine Herausforderung für jedwede Staats- und Gesellschaftstheorie geblieben. Zu den Mitteln, mit denen der Leviathan die Menschen vom Unfrieden abhält, gehören Bilder, und aus diesem Grund steht dem Leviathan ein Frontispiz voran. Obwohl seit Jahrhunderten selbst entfernteste Aspekte von Hobbes' Werk ausgeleuchtet wurden, ist dieses grundlegende Element seiner Lehre bislang nicht erörtert worden. Eine systematische Untersuchung seiner Wertschätzung des Augensinnes fehlt ebenso wie eine umfassende Analyse seiner Bildmittel. Horst Bredekamp erschließt mit Abraham Bosse den Künstler des Frontispizes, stellt sämtliche Varianten dieses Urbildes des modernen Staates zusammen und versucht, die Vorgeschichte seiner politischen Ikonographie zu klären. Im Zentrum stehen die königlichen Kunstleiber von Westminster Abbey sowie optische Geräte, mit deren Hilfe Hobbes neben dem Körper und dem Raum auch eine künstliche Zeit als Wirkmittel des Leviathan zu etablieren suchte. Gegen Ende seiner prägnanten Analyse erörtert der Autor die Wiederkehr der Hobbesschen Staatsikone im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert sowie die Zukunft des Staates als Bild. (shrink)

Shaping the Future maps out the ascetic practices of a Neitzschean way of life. Hutter argues that Nietzsche's doctrines are attempts and "temptations" that aim to provoke his free-spirited readers into changing themselves by putting philosophy into practice in their lives.

This book challenges the standard view that modern hermeneutics begins with Friedrich Ast and Friedrich Schleiermacher, arguing instead that it is the dialectic of reflective and teleological reason in Kant’s Critique of Judgment that provides the actual proto-hermeneutic foundation. It is revolutionary in doing so by replacing interpretive truth claims by the more appropriate claim of rendering opaque contexts intelligible. Taking Gadamer’s comprehensive analysis of hermeneutics in Truth and Method (1960) as its point of departure, the book turns to Kant’s (...) Critiques, reviewing his major concepts as a coherent system in relation to his sensus communis. At the heart of the book is the interaction between reflective, bottom-up search and teleological, top-down interpretative projection as provided in Part II of the third Critique. This text contends that Kant’s broad definition of nature invites the liberation of the reflective-teleological judgment from its biological exemplifications and so permits us to establish its generalised status as a path-breaking, methodological tool. Kant’s dialectic of reflective search and meaning bestowing, stipulated teleology is asserted to anticipate a series of motifs commonly associated with hermeneutics. Figures covered include Dilthey, Husserl, Ingarden, Heidegger, Gadamer, Apel, Habermas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Vattimo, Nancy and Caputo. Their collective contributions to interpretation allow for a review of the evolution of hermeneutics from the perspective of the Kantian critique of the limitations of human cognition. The book is written for the informed, general reader, but will likewise appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophers of mind claim to be in search of a 'naturalistic' theory. However, when we look more closely, we find that there are a number of different and even conflicting ideas of what would count as a 'naturalization' of the mind. This article attempts to show what various naturalistic philosophies of mind have in common, and also how they differ from one another. Additionally, it explores the differences between naturalistic philosophies of mind and naturalisms found in ethics, epistemology, (...) and philosophy of science. Section 1 introduces a distinction between two types of project that have been styled 'naturalistic', which I call philosophical naturalism and empirical naturalism . Sections 2 to 6 canvass different strands of philosophical naturalism concerning the mind, followed by a much briefer discussion of attempts to provide empirical naturalizations of the mind in Section 7 . Section 8 concludes the essay with a consideration of the relations between philosophical and empirical naturalism in philosophy of mind, arguing that at least some types of philosophical naturalism are incompatible with empirical naturalism. (shrink)

Since the seventeenth century, our understanding of the natural world has been one of phenomena that behave in accordance with natural laws. While other elements of the early modern scientific worldview may be rejected or at least held in question—the metaphor of the world as a great machine, the narrowly mechanist assumption that all physical interactions must be contact interactions, the idea that matter might actually be obeying rules laid down by its Divine Author – the notion of natural law (...) has continued to play a pivotal role in actual scientific practice, in our philosophical interpretations of science, and in their its metaphysical implications. (shrink)

Although the semantic insights about natural language produced so far by neuroscientific research have been meagre, (Pulvermüller 2010) they have provided one important empirical finding which lang...

The seal of the a priori is imprinted on the reception of Kant's philosophy. Piaget's epistemological argumentation seems to ascribe knowledge a more fruitful constructiveness than Kant, seeing the a priori as rooted in unvarying reason. Yet, it seems, he failed to recognize the complexity of Kant's theory, which does not always follow a quid iuris line. Moments of experience, analysis and self-observation played more than a marginal role in his discovery of the a priori. Indeed, Kant himself raises the (...) question of ontogenetic category assimilation in a review which pre-empts Piaget, borrowing the category of `original acquisition' from the doctrine of the laws of natural right. And although Kant should not be elevated to the harbinger of the knowledge on development issues delivered thus far by the history of science and experiments, he did recognize the temporal reference of their categories in principle without resolving their validity in psychogenetic terms. Key Words: a priori • categories • genetic epistemology • Geneva School • neo-Kantianism • original acquisition • Jean Piaget • psychogenesis • self-observation. (shrink)

the article deals with the interrelation between galileo and the visual arts. it presents a couple of drawings from the hand of galileo and confronts them with viviani's report that galileo had not only wanted to become an artist in his youth but stayed close to the field of visual arts throughout his lifetime. in the ambiance of these drawings the famous moon watercolors are not in the dark. they represent a very acute and reasonable tool to convince the people (...) who trusted images more than words. the article ends with panofsky's argument that it was galileo's anti-mannerist notion of art that evoked a repulsion of kepler's ellipses. it tries to show that it was again an aesthetical prejudice that hindered einstein from accepting panofsky's theory. (shrink)

English summary: What does Dada mean? The answer lies in the distinction between the perceptible and the designation and the failure to mediate discursively between the two. With the inception of Dada-Zurich - at the intersection between literary and art studies, comparative studies, image-text theory and philosophy - the relationship between modernity and avant-garde as well as between avant-garde and Dadaism was redefined. This redefinition was a consequence of the scandalous aesthetic theoretical insights of Dada Zurich, which concretized in practical (...) and poetic form an aesthetic theory that in itself is aesthetic, and developed an aesthetic-theoretical understanding in which aisthesis takes up a central position. Dada uses the avant-garde as material. The aesthetic theoretical potential of Dada Zurich in turn had an impact not only on the artefacts that were actually used and aesthetically reflected by Dada, but on all modern - including avant-garde - artefacts. German description: Was bedeutet Dada? Die Antwort liegt in der Differenz von Wahrnehmbarem und Bezeichnung und deren scheiternder diskursiven Vermittlung. Mit der Konstitution des Gegenstandes Dada-Zurich - im Schnittfeld von Literatur- und Kunstwissenschaft, Komparatistik, Bild-Text-Theorie und Philosophie - wird das Verhaltnis von Moderne und Avantgarde sowie von Avantgarde und Dada neu bestimmt. Diese Neubestimmung resultiert aus der Erkenntnis der asthetisch-theoretischen Form Dada-Zurichs, deren Konstitution das theoretische Skandalon Asthetischer Theorie (als einer Theorie, die selber asthetisch wird) in praktischer und poietischer Form konkretisiert. Sie entwickelt eine asthetisch-theoretische Erkenntnisform, in der Aisthesis eine zentrale Stellung einnimmt. Dada nutzt die Avantgarde als Material. Das asthetisch-theoretische Potential Dada-Zurichs wirkt dabei nicht nur zuruck auf die von Dada tatsachlich verwendeten (asthetisch reflektierten), sondern auf alle modernen - auch avantgardistischen - Artefakte. (shrink)

We study properties of certain subclasses of the Dedekind finite sets in set theory without the axiom of choice with respect to the comparability of their elements and to the boundedness of such classes, and we answer related open problems from Herrlich’s “The Finite and the Infinite.” The main results are as follows: 1. It is relatively consistent with ZF that the class of all finite sets is not the only finiteness class such that any two of its elements are (...) comparable. 2. The principle “Small Violations of Choice” —introduced by A. Blass—implies that the class of all Dedekind finite sets is bounded above. 3. “The class of all Dedekind finite sets is bounded above” is true in every permutation model of ZFA in which the class of atoms is a set, and in every symmetric model of ZF. 4. There exists a model of ZFA set theory in which the class of all atoms is a proper class and in which the class of all infinite Dedekind finite sets is not bounded above. 5. There exists a model of ZF in which the class of all infinite Dedekind finite sets is not bounded above. (shrink)

Die Forschung zu und über Leonhard Euler verweist oft darauf, dass das Entstehen und Etablieren neuer Zeichenpraktiken zum dominierenden Legitimationsmuster der übersichtlichen Mathematik in der Zeit der Aufklärung wird. Bei genauerem Hinsehen fällt jedoch auf, dass die konkreten Formen der Erscheinung und Durchsetzung dieser Praktiken mit ihren symbolischen Dimensionen über Jahrzehnte kaum ins Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit gerückt wurden. Gerade diesen Formen der Wissensentfaltung und -vermittlung versuchen die hier versammelten Aufsätze eine zentrale Position zukommen zu lassen. Denn im Falle Eulers beschränkt (...) sich die Problematik solcher Erscheinungen nicht auf das mathematische Abstrahieren der zu lösenden Aufgaben, sind diese doch mit den graphischen Abstrahierungen vernetzt, deren Erscheinungskriterien untersucht werden. (shrink)

Many virtue epistemologists conceive of epistemic competence on the model of skill —such as archery, playing baseball, or chess. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: epistemic competences and skills are crucially and relevantly different kinds of capacities. This, I suggest, undermines the popular attempt to understand epistemic normativity as a mere special case of the sort of normativity familiar from skilful action. In fact, as I argue further, epistemic competences resemble virtues rather than skills—a claim that (...) is based on an important, but often overlooked, difference between virtue and skill. The upshot is that virtue epistemology should indeed be based on virtue, not on skill. (shrink)

Contemporary biographies of Galilei emphasize, in several places, that he was a masterful draughtsman. In fact, Galilei studied at the art academy, which is where his friendship with Ludovico Cigoli developed, who later became the official court artist. The book focuses on this formative effect – it tracks Galilei’s trust in the epistemological strength of drawings. It also looks at Galilei’s activities in the world of art and his reflections on art theory, ending with an appreciation of his fame; after (...) all, he was revered as a rebirth of Michelangelo. For the first time, this publication collects all aspects of the appreciation of Galilei as an artist, contemplating his art not only as another facet of his activities, but as an essential element of his research. (shrink)