Bruner sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of the mind. He examines the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful; he calls this side of mental activity the “narrative mode,” and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature.

Closely related to this is Mr. Bruner's "evolutionary instrumentalism," his conception of instruction as the means of transmitting the tools and skills of a ...

This paper presents a general computational treatment of how mammals are able to deal with visual objects and environments. The model tries to cover the entire range from behavior and phenomenological experience to detailed neural encodings in crude but computationally plausible reductive steps. The problems addressed include perceptual constancies, eye movements and the stable visual world, object descriptions, perceptual generalizations, and the representation of extrapersonal space.The entire development is based on an action-oriented notion of perception. The observer is assumed to (...) be continuously sampling the ambient light for information of current value. The central problem of vision is taken to be categorizing and locating objects in the environment. The critical step in this process is the linking of visual information to symbolic object descriptions; this is calledindexing, from the analogy of identifying a book from index terms. The system must also identifysituationsand use this knowledge to guide movement and other actions in the environment. The treatment focuses on the different representations of information used in the visual system.The four representational frames capture information in the following forms: retinotopic, head-based, symbolic, and allocentric. The functional roles of the four frames, the communication among them, and their suggested neurophysiological realization constitute the core of the paper. The model is perforce crude, but appears to be consistent with all relevant findings. (shrink)

After a 50-page outline of the principles of clinical reasoning, over 60 actual cases are detailed that illustrate (and are keyed to) the principles, presenting case records, analysis, and references to literature. For medical students and interns, and their instructors. Annotation copyright Book Ne.

Episodic memory involves the sense that it is “first-hand”, i.e., originates directly from one’s own past experience. An account of this phenomenological dimension is offered in terms of an affective experience or feeling specific to episodic memory. On the basis of recent empirical research in the domain of metamemory, it is claimed that a recollective experience involves two separate mental components: a first-order memory about the past along with a metacognitive, episodic feeling of knowing. The proposed two-tiered account is contrasted (...) with other, reductionist two-tiered accounts as well as with reflexive accounts of episodic memory to be found in the literature. (shrink)

A popular idea at present is that emotions are perceptions of values. Most defenders of this idea have interpreted it as the perceptual thesis that emotions present (rather than merely represent) evaluative states of affairs in the way sensory experiences present us with sensible aspects of the world. We argue against the perceptual thesis. We show that the phenomenology of emotions is compatible with the fact that the evaluative aspect of apparent emotional contents has been incorporated from outside. We then (...) deal with the only two views that can make sense of the perceptual thesis. On the response–dependence view, emotional experiences present evaluative responsedependent properties (being fearsome, being disgusting, etc.) in the way visual experiences present response-dependent properties such as colors. On the response–independence view, emotional experiences present evaluative response-independent properties (being dangerous, being indigestible, etc.), conceived as ‘Gestalten’ independent of emotional feelings themselves. We show that neither view can make plausible the idea that emotions present values as such, i.e., in an open and transparent way. If emotions have apparent evaluative contents, this is in fact due to evaluative enrichments of the non-evaluative presentational contents of emotions. (shrink)

" In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the ...

This article aims to demonstrate that a careful examination of Peirce's original manuscripts shows that there are five main periods in Peirce's evolution in his mathematical and philosophical conceptualizations of continuity. The aim of this article is also to establish the relevance of Peirce's reflections on continuity for philosophers and mathematicians.

A theory that treats language not as an abstract symbol system but as a function of our brains and experience, integrating recent findings from biology, ...

Following Meinong, many philosophers have been attracted by the view that emotions have intrinsically evaluative correctness conditions. On one version of this view, emotions have evaluative contents. On another version, emotions are evaluative attitudes; they are evaluative at the level of intentional mode rather than content. We raise objections against the latter version, showing that the only two ways of implementing it are hopeless. Either emotions are manifestly evaluative or they are not. In the former case, the Attitudinal View threatens (...) to collapse into the Perception View or any other view according to which emotions are evaluative at the level of content. In the latter case, the Attitudinal View does not stand up to an obvious alternative, namely that emotions can only be assessed with respect to extrinsic norms or conditions of correctness. (shrink)

Philosophical and popular ethics tend to focus on the question "What ought I to do?" Is there, in addition to the ethics of action, an ethics of fantasy? Are there fantasies one ought not to have? Of course there are fantasies with horrific content. Does it follow that there is something wrong with a person who has such fantasies or that they ought to make efforts to suppress them or to otherwise change themselves? Do the problems such fantasies raise depend (...) on their links to desire and action? Masturbation fantasies are considered as well as fantasies that may emerge during sex with others, fantasies that include actual others, and fantasies that get embodied in pornography. Psychoanalytic and legal aspects of the issues are emphasized. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The behaviours Flack and de Waal describe as origins of human morality lack the most essential features of the human ethical competence; namely, application of the concepts good and bad to events, the capacities for guilt and empathy for another's state, and the ability to suppress actions that would compromise the self's virtue. These serious differences between apes and humans challenge the suggestion that primate behaviour lies on a continuum with human morality.

This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, and William James’s psychology, which (...) begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mental Disorder and Moral Responsibility:Disorders of Personhood as Harmful Dysfunctions, With Special Reference to AlcoholismJerome C. Wakefield (bio)Keywordsalcohol dependence, philosophy of psychiatry, mental disorder, harmful dysfunction, psychiatric diagnosis, person, moral responsibilityIn his paper, Ethical Decisions in the Classification of Mental Conditions as Mental Illness, Craig Edwards grapples with a profound problem: why is it that when we classify a mental condition as a mental disorder, that tends to take (...) the condition out of the sphere of moral responsibility or virtuousness of character? For example, it is not uncommon when someone commits suicide and the question is raised as to why he or she did it, that instead of a reason or character trait that would place the act within a moral calculus, one is offered the explanation "she was clinically depressed" or "he was bipolar," and this tends to terminate discussion and make reasons and moral evaluation superfluous. Why does such a comment have that effect?As Edwards notes, this can get complicated as the moral and the disordered interact. Certainly people are sometimes morally responsible for acting on their disordered impulses (as in pedophilia), and they are responsible for putting themselves in the way of disorder, as when someone imbibes in a way likely to lead to alcoholism. But at the normal/disorder divide, there seems to be a consistent lifting of some responsibility, reflecting the application of the sick role. For example, the rough equivalent of our current category of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was recognized as a disorder in earlier wars ("shell shock," "war neurosis"), but often considered an expression of cowardice; the cowardice was morally evaluable as a failure of virtue (even if, like many personality traits, being a coward is not within the person's direct voluntary control) and led to contempt for those with PTSD, but nonetheless—except in cases thought to be malingering—the PTSD that resulted constituted a disorder for which the individual was [End Page 91] not in the same direct sense blameworthy. This moral shift requires explanation.This topic also has important social ramifications. Relief from responsibility may sound like a good thing, and it is trumpeted by mental health advocates as a reason for supporting the classification of many conditions as disorders. But as Edwards is aware, it is a two-edged sword. Disordered status may allow escape from censure and offer the protections of the sick role, but it also changes the relationship of the agent to his or her own actions and imposes the responsibility of the sick role on the individual to attempt to change ("get better"). The sick role allows for no defense of an idiosyncrasy based on normal variation ("It takes all kinds…") or the individual's eccentric vision or steadfast integrity, for that vision or sense of integrity are now seen as pathological and not morally legitimate. The individual is subjected to endless entreaties to seek help and it is implied that not to do so is irresponsible, so that a decision to embrace one's nature and remain as one is becomes illegitimate. Moreover, the sick role allows for no explanation in terms of the individual's normal defensive response to unjust, deprived, or challenging social or environmental circumstances, thus weakening the motives for social change rather than individual intervention.In sum, there is an inevitable sense in which being placed in the sick role inherently stigmatizes the "sick" condition in virtue of the special moral attitudes extended to the disordered. Cultures can thus easily exploit the sick role and its much-touted relief from responsibility to extend the reach of social control processes. This is one reason why the distinction between disorder and non-disorder is so important, and why it is crucial to identify when non-disordered conditions are mislabeled as disorders—as when, for example, psychiatry gets it wrong about the distinction between normal and disordered sadness (Horwitz and Wakefield, 2007). Such overpathologization can redefine the boundaries of our moral universe on mistaken grounds.Edwards offers two provocative answers—not entirely at ease with each other—to the question of why mental disorders relieve the patient from moral responsibility: (1) mental disorders are... (shrink)

This book provides a much-needed critical introduction to the main doctrines of Frank Ramsey's work and assesses their contemporary significance.

Perceptual experiences have been construed either as representational mental states—Representationalism—or as direct mental relations to the external world—Disjunctivism. Both conceptions are critical reactions to the so-called ‘Argument from Hallucination’, according to which perceptions cannot be about the external world, since they are subjectively indiscriminable from other, hallucinatory experiences, which are about sense-data ormind-dependent entities. Representationalism agrees that perceptions and hallucinations share their most specific mental kind, but accounts for hallucinations as misrepresentations of the external world. According to Disjunctivism, the phenomenal (...) character of perceptions is exhausted by worldly objects and features, and thus must be different from the phenomenal character of hallucinations. Disjunctivism claims that subjective indiscriminability is not the result of a common experiential ground, but is because of our inability to discriminate, from the inside, hallucinations from perceptions. At first sight, Representationalism is more congenial to the way cognitive science deals with perception. However, empirically oriented revisions of Disjunctivism could be developed and tested by giving a metacognitive account of hallucinations. Two versions of this account can be formulated, depending on whether metacognition is understood as explicit metarepresentation or as implicit monitoring of first-order informational states. The first version faces serious objections, but the second is more promising, as it embodies a more realistic view of perceptual phenomenology as having both sensory and affective aspects. Affectbased phenomenology is constituted by various metacognitive feelings, such as the feeling of being perceptually confronted with the world itself, rather than with pictures or mere representations. (shrink)

Christian theology still condemns the sin of pride, yet many modern political movements stake their claims in terms of pride (Black Pride, Gay Pride, Deaf Pride, etc.). In the age of identity politics, it would seem pride may help to overcome self-loathing and to transform society. To see the appropriate personal and political place of pride, one must properly understand the differing roles of responsibility and value in the constitution of pride. A distinction between self-respect and self-esteem also helps clarify (...) the issues. (shrink)

We prove a local normal form theorem of the Gaifman type for the infinitary logic L∞ωω whose formulas involve arbitrary unary quantifiers but finite quantifier rank. We use a local Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé type game similar to the one in [9]. A consequence is that every sentence of L∞ωω of quantifier rank n is equivalent to an infinite Boolean combination of sentences of the form ψ, where ψ has counting quantifiers restricted to the -neighborhood of y.

This collection of original essays, from both established scholars and newcomers, takes up a debate that has recently flared up in philosophy, sociology, and disability studies on whether disability is intrinsically a harm that lowers a person's quality of life. While this is a new question in disability scholarship, it is also touches on one of the oldest philosophical questions: What is the good human life? Historically, philosophers have not been interested in the topic of disability, and when they are (...) it is usually only in relation to questions such as euthanasia, abortion, or the moral status of disabled people. Consequently, implicitly or explicitly, disability has been either ignored by moral and political philosophers or simply equated with a bad human life, a life not worth living. This collection takes up the challenge that disability poses to basic questions of political philosophy and bioethics, among others, by focusing on fundamental issues as well as practical implications of the relationship between disability and the good human life. (shrink)

However one conceives of the relation between a sign and its significate, referring is a communicative act in which a speaker must intentionally direct the attention of an interlocutor to some object, event, or state of affairs that the speaker has in mind. This article examines the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of acts of referring, with special concern for the possible nature of sign-significate relationships. Findings from developments psychology indicate that a group of abilities and skills underlie the ability to refer. (...) Infants follow the gaze of others to objects of attention, and enjoy joint attention with others. Interactions with caregivers in routines well known to the child enable her to achieve joint attention with the adult on a particular ingredient in the routine. In this way, the ability to refer develops from certain "language games ", interactions that combine goal-seeking and joint attention. (shrink)

Environmental ethics and environmental justice have followed widely disparate paths, and this disassociation has resulted in an analytical schism. On the one side, environmental ethics embraces humankind’s relations with nature; on the opposite side, environmental justice embraces human-to-human relations via the medium of nature. Hans Jonas’ work is a bridge that crosses this conceptual divide: he spotlights the narrow correlation between human identity and responsibility, and insists on their inextricable bond with nature. However, this bond is a de facto bond (...) that all human beings have with each other. (shrink)

As with mathematics, logic is easier to do if its symbols and their rules are better. In a graphic way, the logic symbols introduced in thís paper show their truth-table values, their composite truth-functions, and how to say them as either ?or? or ?if ? then? propositions. Simple rules make the converse, add or remove negations, and resolve propositions.

The algebra of sets has, basically, two different types of symbols. One type of symbol (∩, ?, +, ?) defines another set from two other sets. A second type of symbol (?, ?, =, ?) makes a proposition about two sets. When the construction of these two types of symbols is based on the same four-dot matrix as the logic symbols described in a previous paper, the three symbol types then dovetail together into a harmonious whole that greatly simplifies derivation (...) in the algebra of sets. (shrink)

“Imagine A rather short-sighted person told to read an inscription in small letters from some way off….' So begins the quest for “the real nature of justice and injustice” undertaken in response to the challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus to show that “justice pays”. It is often alleged that the search leads through analogy to a monster “organic” state that lives by devouring individual rights. I believe that these charges are mistaken. Plato's political theory does not derive from an analogy (...) which makes the state a monster individual with interests superior to and independent of those of ordinary citizens; it derives rather from a doctrine of objective interests discernible by those with special training and ability, interests which later thinkers have taken to be the object of a “real will”, unerring even where a person's mere empirical desires are shortsightedly misdirected. Plato identifies the interests of his ideal state with the objective interests of its citizens , and in his harmonious world, metaphysics, moral psychology, and political organization combine to ensure that those interests need never override individual mundane interests for they never conflict: they coincide. That the whole theory is dubious should not prevent us from seeing that just what the theory is may be clarified by examining the arguments which putatively lead to it, and that those arguments provide grounds for not confounding Plato's theory with others which may reach similar conclusions about political organization and obligation. (shrink)

Norval Morris, Madness and the Criminal Law Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982, 235 pp.