This article examines the Buddhist idea of anātman, ‘no- self ’ and pudgala, ‘the person’ in relation to the notion of ‘self ’ emerging from contemporary cognitive science. The Buddhist no-self doctrine is enriched by the cognitive scientist’s understanding of the multiple facets of selfhood, or structures of experience, and the causative action of a functional self in the world. A proper understanding of the Buddhist concepts of anātman and pudgala proves critical to mindfulness-based therapeutic interventions: this is as the (...) ‘person’, as constituted by various structures of selfhood, including—the ecological, interpersonal, extended, private, narrative, relational and conceptual selves—which may be disrupted by traumatic events which disorder one’s experience of time, defence, relationality, memory, resource and agency. In the absence of this understanding, the no-self doctrine might encourage a sort of bypass, in which traumatic facets of selfhood are overlooked in the quest for spiritual liberation. With a proper understanding of the function served by the Buddhist concepts of no-self and ‘person’, psychotherapeutic work may be situated as a necessary ‘preliminary practice’ for meditative exploration of deeper transpersonal domains and soteriological goals. (shrink)

The work of Gregory Bateson offers a metaphysical basis for a “process psychology,” that is, a view of psychological practice and research guided by an ontology of becoming—identifying change, difference, and relationship as the basic elements of a foundational metaphysics. This article explores the relevance of Bateson's recursive epistemology, his re-conception of the Great Chain of Being, a first-principles approach to defining the nature of mind, and understandings of interaction and difference, pattern and symmetry, interpretation and context. Bateson's philosophical contributions (...) will be drawn into relationship with Wittgenstein's philosophy of language as use, Melnyk's theory of causal levels of explanation, Korzybski's account of map and territory, the rejection of the heuristic rigidity of substantialist ontologies, and a cybernetics communication science-informed approach to contextual bi-directionality of causality. We thereby arrive at an understanding of Bateson's process psychology that, given its ecological-systemic nature, is explanatorily applicable across the mind sciences. This process psychology equips us to answer the question: What is mind? Not by explanatory appeal to substantial entities contained within mind, but instead by recourse to the contextually relevant patterns for understanding mind to a particular purpose. We have thereby attended to the gulf between heuristics and fundamentals, between psychological models and an onto-epistemic account of reality. Insufficient attention has been given to characterising the vital nature of Bateson's philosophical oeuvre to psychological practice. This article draws out Bateson's relevance to establishing foundational principles for a process psychology capable of reinvigorating psychological thought. (shrink)

In exploring how our brains contribute to shaping our mind’s construction of reality McGilchirst draws together the domains of neuropsychology, epistemology and metaphysics; how we can come to know, and the nature of what it is that is known are subjects inextricable from the equipment we rely upon in our exploration. His contention is that today there is an urgent need to transform how we see the world and thus what we make of ourselves. As such his ambition is to (...) disclose a way of looking at the world which diverges significantly from the manner of seeing that has dominated human civilisations for millennia and which, he contends, has produced systemic misunderstandings of the nature of reality. with The Matter With Things, McGilchirst takes the reader on a tour de force of the world of ideas and into a landscape not of a material world composed of ‘things’, but rather discloses the more fundamental ‘process’ quality of reality. We explore the relevance and application to the philosophy of cognitive science and psychological practice. (shrink)

Through a close study of T. Yunkaporta's 2019’s Sand Talk, this article explores fractal thinking and the pattern of creation in Indigenous cosmology; the role of custodianship in respectful interaction between living systems; alternative Indigenous understandings of nonlinearity, time, and transience; the process-panpsychism and animism present in Indigenous perceptions of cosmos as living Country, illustrated in the Dreaming and Turnaround creation event; the role of embodied cognition and haptic and situated knowledge in Indigenous science; Indigenous holistic reasoning and the mind-body (...) connection; the process-relational metaphysic embedded in ritual and yarning practice; the knowledge encoded in place-based totemic mythology, lore, and ritual; and Indigenous understandings of complex systems as adaptive, self-organizing, and patterned. This article does not offer a process reading of Indigenous thought but rather demonstrates the significant contribution to process metaphysics that may be provided by an Aboriginal Australian perspective. Yunkaporta's text carves out a language of resistance to the McDonaldization of Indigenous research. While historic scholarly engagement with Aboriginal culture has overemphasized content, Yunkaporta demonstrates how this has occurred to the exclusion of the processes of Indigenous knowledge transmission and creation. Yet a process view requires engagement with the how, not only with the what. Such knowledge transmission is discerned in daily lived relationships among land, spirit, and people—binding epistemology to participation in a specific landscape embedded within a living culture. Place-making for Indigenous knowledges requires exploring how Indigenous ways of valuing, knowing, and being, shaped by cultural activities on Country, offer new understandings for Western metaphysics. (shrink)

In the monograph Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience, Hauskeller raises the important subject of individualization and alienation in psychedelic psychotherapy. Under the prevailing conditions of neoliberalism, Hauskeller contends that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy appropriates Indigenous knowledges in an oppressive fashion, may be instrumentalised to the ends of productivity gain and symptom suppression, and may be utilised to mask societal systems of alienation. Whilst offering a valuable socio-political critique of psychedelics' clinical uptake, we suggest that Hauskeller's view does not adequately acknowledge (...) the ways in which psychedelics offer a challenge to the Western reductive bio-medical understanding of healing and wellbeing. It is contended herein that Indigenous knowledges, in alliance with a range of emerging sciences, offer both an engagement with ethnomedicines in a less harmfully appropriative fashion, and a renewed understanding of the means by which psychedelics achieve therapeutic change. With this understanding, what becomes apparent are the potential ways in which psychedelic medical usage may produce positive feedback upon the oppressive systems in which we are embedded. That is, transpersonal experience through encounters with the ineffable may offer a revisioning of Western psychology and cognitive science. Indeed, if psychedelics are approached with an understanding of the actual means by which they produce therapeutic outcomes—changing mental representations of the self, or self-insight derived through non-ordinary states of consciousness—then psychedelic psychotherapy offers a reimagining of psychiatric nosology, challenging conventional understandings of both pathology and wellbeing through an overturning of specified and discrete deficit models of psychopathology. This may provide both a critique of the prevailing categories used to describe madness and an expansion of our understanding of the mind-body relation, as well as an increased recognition of positive psychology grounded in cross-cultural contemplative traditions. This provides an implicit challenge to the pharmaceutical industrial-complex and its profit motives; and the corresponding neoliberalist, globalising tendencies which Hauskeller seeks to address. -/- . (shrink)

The terms immanence and transcendence have played a significant role in philosophical thought since its inception. Implicit in the notions of immanence and transcendence, as typified within the history of ideas, is often a separation and division between the human and the godly. This division has served to generate ontologies of isolation and set up epistemologies that can be both binary and divided. The terms immanence and transcendence thus sit at the heart of contemporary onto-epistemic accounts of the world. As (...) such, in seeking to examine the nature of what is, this paper traces a line through the history of ideas in an attempt to clarify the connections and dissonances in the notions of immanence and transcendence. This is done for the purpose of demonstrating what philosophical and religious accounts may offer in attempting to create a sound account of the godly and thus the world in a secular age. (shrink)

It is well known in contemporary Madhyamaka studies that the seventh century Indian philosopher Candrakīrti rejects the foundationalist Abhidharma epistemology. The question that is still open to debate is: Does Candrakīrti offer any alternative Madhyamaka epistemology? One possible way of addressing this question is to find out what Candrakīrti says about the nature of buddha’s epistemic processes. We know that Candrakīrti has made some puzzling remarks on that score. On the one hand, he claims buddha is the pramāṇabhūta-puruṣa (person of (...) epistemic and moral authority), sarvākārajñatājñānaṃ (omniscient, wise), pratyakṣalakṣaṇam (exclusively perceptual in characteristic) [Candrakīrti (MABh VI.214)], and claims that there are clearly four pramāṇas—epistemic warrants—direct perception (pratyakṣa), inference (anumāna), testimony (āgama) and analogy (upamāna) [Candrakīrti (Pp I.3), cf. MacDonald 2015, pp. 287–288]. On the other hand, somewhat paradoxically, Candrakīrti claims that buddhahood is an embodiment of a complete cessation of “mind and mental processes” [Candrakīrti (MABh XI.1, 155a; MAB XI.17d)] Now how are we to make sense of these two seemingly contradictory statements? Do these statements reflect any deeper conflicts within Candrakīrti’s system or is there a coherent way to interpret these statements? The Tibetan Prāsaṅgika interpreters of Candrakīrti’s Madhyamaka largely agree that there is no internal contradiction in Candrakīrti’s system, and agree there is a way to make coherent sense of these statements. Nevertheless, the Tibetans exegetes bring to the table two radically conflicting proposals to approach Candrakīrti’s Mādhyamaka; both claiming to successfully address the apparent tension arising from Candrakīrti’s statements. One proposal is made by Tsongkhapa Losang Dakpa (Tsong kha pa bLo bzang grags pa, 1357–1419), who maintains the tension can be plausibly resolved by demonstrating that Candrakīrti’s unique non-foundationalist epistemological program renders him an epistemological coherentist. In contrast Taktsang Lotsawa Sherap Rinchen (sTag tshang Lo tsā ba Shes rab rin chen, 1405–1477) argues that according to Candrakīrti buddha is a global agnostic, on the ground of the nonexistence of mind and mental processes for those who have attained fully awakening. Taktsang instead proposes the no-mind thesis as a more plausible way to resolve the tension in Candrakīrti’s philosophy, categorically refusing to attribute to buddha any cognitive processes and epistemic warrants. This paper is an analysis of Taktsang’s no-mind thesis—the claim that buddhas utterly lack any knowledge of the world because they do not have epistemic processes and warrants to perceive the world—in what follows a rational reconstruction of his arguments is developed in order to evaluate his thesis. We shall then assess the implications of accepting Taktsang’s no-mind thesis. (shrink)

The intersection between philosophy and psychedelics is explored in the book “Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience”. The authors aim to develop a dialogue between the two disciplines and explore the various frameworks for understanding exceptional experiences that psychedelics have afforded human beings. The book delves into foundational, ontological, and epistemological questions, including the hard problem of consciousness, the metaphysical understanding of the self, and the aesthetic meaning of the sublime in psychedelic experience. The book provides valuable exploration of (...) questions concerning prevailing metaphysical frameworks, epistemic belief structures, and modes of inquiry, and the effort made by the authors to bring into dialogue multiple dialectics and practices, perspectives and methods is commendable. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Thematic analysis is the most widely used method for analysing qualitative data. Recent debates, highlighting the binary distinctions between reflexive TA grounded within the qualitative paradigm and codebook TA with neo-positivist orientations, have emphasized the existence of numerous tensions that researchers must navigate to produce coherent and rigorous research. This article attempts to resolve some of these tensions through developing an approach to TA underpinned by realist philosophy of science. Focusing on interview data, we propose the use of three (...) types of themes and the use of corresponding validity indicators. Using an illustrative example, we outline the conceptual foundations of a realist approach to TA and present recommendations for conducting it in practice. This approach, we claim, reconciles several existing binaries between distinctive types of TA by incorporating the contributions of both for the development of different types of themes. (shrink)

The emotions are at the centre of our lives and, for better or worse, imbue them with much of their significance. The philosophical problems stirred up by the existence of the emotions, over which many great philosophers of the past have laboured, revolve around attempts to understand what this significance amounts to. Are emotions feelings, thoughts, or experiences? If they are experiences, what are they experiences of? Are emotions rational? In what sense do emotions give meaning to what surrounds us? (...) -/- The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction introduces and explores these questions in a clear and accessible way. The authors discuss the following key topics: -/- the diversity and unity of the emotions the relations between emotion, belief and desire the nature of values the relations between emotions and perceptions emotions viewed as evaluative attitudes the link between emotions and evaluative knowledge the nature of moods, sentiments, and character traits. -/- Including chapter summaries and guides to further reading, The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal starting point for any philosopher or student studying the emotions. It will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as psychology and the social sciences. (shrink)

The growing field of machine morality has becoming increasingly concerned with how to develop artificial moral agents. However, there is little consensus on what constitutes an ideal moral agent let alone an artificial one. Leveraging a recent account of heroism in humans, the aim of this paper is to provide a prospective framework for conceptualizing, and in turn designing ideal artificial moral agents, namely those that would be considered heroic robots. First, an overview of what it means to be an (...) artificial moral agent is provided. Then, an overview of a recent account of heroism that seeks to define the construct as the dynamic and interactive integration of character strengths and situational constraints that afford the opportunity for moral behavior . With this as a foundation, a discussion is provided for what it might mean for a robot to be an ideal moral agent by proposing a dynamic and interactive connectionist model of robotic heroism. Given the limited accounts of robots engaging in moral behavior, a case for extending robotic moral capacities beyond just being a moral agent to the level of heroism is supported by drawing from exemplar situations where robots demonstrate heroism in popular film and fiction. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest that differing approaches to the science of social cognition mirror the arguments between radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognition. We contrast the use in social cognition of theoretical inference and mental simulation mechanisms with approaches emphasizing a direct perception of others’ mental states. We build from a recent integrative framework unifying these divergent perspectives through the use of dual-process theory and supporting social neuroscience research. Our elaboration considers two complementary notions of direct perception: one (...) primarily stemming from ecological psychology and the other from enactive cognition theory. We use this as the foundation from which to offer an account of the informational basis for social information and assert a set of research propositions to further the science of social cognition. In doing so, we point out how perception of the minds of others can be supported in some cases by lawful information, supporting direct perception of social affordances and perhaps, mental states, and in other cases by cues that support indirect perceptual inference. Our goal is to extend accounts of social cognition by integrating advances across disciplines to provide a multi-level and multi-theoretic description that can advance this field and offer a means through which to reconcile radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Complex work in teams requires coordination across team members and their technology as well as the ability to change and adapt over time to achieve effective performance. To support such complex interactions, recent efforts have worked toward the design of adaptive human-autonomy teaming systems that can provide feedback in or near real time to achieve the desired individual or team results. However, while significant advancements have been made to better model and understand the dynamics of team interaction and its relationship (...) with task performance, appropriate measures of team coordination and computational methods to detect changes in coordination have not yet been widely investigated. Having the capacity to measure coordination in real time is quite promising as it provides the opportunity to provide adaptive feedback that may influence and regulate teams’ coordination patterns and, ultimately, drive effective team performance. A critical requirement to reach this potential is having the theoretical and empirical foundation from which to do so. Therefore, the first goal of the paper is to review approaches to coordination dynamics, identify current research gaps, and draw insights from other areas, such as social interaction, relationship science, and psychotherapy. The second goal is to collate extant work on feedback and advance ideas for adaptive feedback systems that have potential to influence coordination in a way that can enhance the effectiveness of team interactions. In addressing these two goals, this work lays the foundation as well as plans for the future of human-autonomy teams that augment team interactions using coordination-based measures. (shrink)

Is shame social? Is it superficial? Is it a morally problematic emotion? Researchers in disciplines as different as psychology, philosophy, and anthropology have thought so. But what is the nature of shame and why are claims regarding its social nature and moral standing interesting and important? Do they tell us anything worthwhile about the value of shame and its potential legal and political applications? -/- In this book, Julien Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno, and Fabrice Teroni propose an original philosophical account (...) of shame aimed at answering these questions. The book begins with a detailed examination of the evidence and arguments that are taken to support what they call the two dogmas about shame: its alleged social nature and its morally dubious character. Their analysis is conducted against the backdrop of a novel account of shame and ultimately leads to the rejection of these two dogmas. On this account, shame involves a specific form of negative evaluation that the subject takes towards herself: a verdict of incapacity with regard to values to which she is attached. One central virtue of the account resides in the subtle manner it clarifies the ways in which the subject's identity is at stake in shame, thus shedding light on many aspects of this complex emotion and allowing for a sophisticated understanding of its moral significance. -/- This philosophical account of shame engages with all the current debates on shame as they are conducted within disciplines as varied as ethics, moral, experimental, developmental and evolutionary psychology, anthropology, legal studies, feminist studies, politics and public polic. (shrink)

Multiple theories of problem-solving hypothesize that there are distinct qualitative phases exhibited during effective problem-solving. However, limited research has attempted to identify when transitions between phases occur. We integrate theory on collaborative problem-solving with dynamical systems theory suggesting that when a system is undergoing a phase transition it should exhibit a peak in entropy and that entropy levels should also relate to team performance. Communications from 40 teams that collaborated on a complex problem were coded for occurrence of problem-solving processes. (...) We applied a sliding window entropy technique to each team's communications and specified criteria for identifying data points that qualify as peaks and determining which peaks were robust. We used multilevel modeling, and provide a qualitative example, to evaluate whether phases exhibit distinct distributions of communication processes. We also tested whether there was a relationship between entropy values at transition points and CPS performance. We found that a proportion of entropy peaks was robust and that the relative occurrence of communication codes varied significantly across phases. Peaks in entropy thus corresponded to qualitative shifts in teams’ CPS communications, providing empirical evidence that teams exhibit phase transitions during CPS. Also, lower average levels of entropy at the phase transition points predicted better CPS performance. We specify future directions to improve understanding of phase transitions during CPS, and collaborative cognition, more broadly. (shrink)

Ne serait-ce que par son titre, dont l’oxymore est d’emblée assumée (p.11) et dont les protagonistes sont associés d’une manière qui ne laisse de surprendre, l’ouvrage de Julien Boudon publié dans la collection « Les sens du droit » des éditions Dalloz, mériterait de retenir l’attention.Dans ce court opus, l’auteur entend, à travers un examen qui puise tout à la fois aux sources de l’histoire, de la philosophie, du droit, de la science politique, et qui emprunte à la fois (...) au style de la monog.. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a fresh understanding of the sense in which emotions are evaluations. We argue that we should not follow mainstream accounts in locating the emotion–value connection at the level of content and that we should instead locate it at the level of attitudes or modes. We begin by explaining the contrast between content and attitude, a contrast in the light of which we review the leading contemporary accounts of the emotions. We next offer reasons to think (...) that these accounts face substantial problems since they locate the link emotions bear to values at the level of content. This provides the incentive to pursue an alternative approach according to which emotions qualify as evaluations because they are specific types of attitudes, an approach we substantiate by appealing to felt bodily stances. We conclude by considering two reasons why this approach may be resisted; they respectively pertain to the alleged impossibility of drawing the attitude–content contrast in the case of the emotions and to the suspicion that so doing raises qualia-related worries. (shrink)

How can we use models to understand real phenomena if models misrepresent the very phenomena we seek to understand? Some accounts suggest that models may afford understanding by providing causal knowledge about phenomena via how-possibly explanations. However, general equilibrium models, for example, pose a challenge to this solution since their contribution appears to be purely mathematical results. Despite this, practitioners widely acknowledge that it improves our understanding of the world. I argue that the Arrow–Debreu model provides a mathematical how-possibly explanation (...) which establishes claims of mathematical dependence. The account developed reveals how mathematical knowledge can inform claims about the world, allow ‘what-if-things-had-been-different’ inferences, and thus improve our understanding. (shrink)

Models typically have actual, existing targets. However, some models are viewed as having non-actual targets. I argue that this interpretation comes at various costs and propose an alternative that fares better along two dimensions: (1) agreement with practice and (2) ontological and epistemological parsimony. My proposal is that many of these models actually have actual targets.

One puzzle concerning highly idealized models is whether they explain. Some suggest they provide so-called ‘how-possibly explanations’. However, this raises an important question about the nature of how-possibly explanations, namely what distinguishes them from ‘normal’, or how-actually, explanations? I provide an account of how-possibly explanations that clarifies their nature in the context of solving the puzzle of model-based explanation. I argue that the modal notions of actuality and possibility provide the relevant dividing lines between how-possibly and how-actually explanations. Whereas how-possibly (...) explanations establish claims of possible explanations, how-actually explanations establish claims of actual ones. Models, in turn, simply provide evidence for these claims. (shrink)

There is a traditional conception of knowledge but it is not the Justified True Belief analysis Gettier attacked. On the traditional view, knowledge consists in having a belief that bears a discernible mark of truth. A mark of truth is a truth-entailing property: a property that only true beliefs can have. It is discernible if one can always tell that a belief has it, that is, a sufficiently attentive subject believes that a belief has it if and only if it (...) has it. Requiring a mark of truth makes the view infallibilist. Requiring it to be discernible makes the view internalist. I call the view Classical Infallibilism. (shrink)

Since Saul Kripke’s influential work in the 1970s, the revisionary approach to semantic paradox—the idea that semantic paradoxes must be solved by weakening classical logic—has been increasingly popular. In this paper, we present a new revenge argument to the effect that the main revisionary approaches breed new paradoxes that they are unable to block.

This paper examines the current use of the terms ‘story’, ‘narrative’ and ‘voice’ within health care. It argues that the focus on narrative forms is related to nursing's professional development of an alternative epistemology to science, and to nursing theorists' mistrust of ‘Enlightenment’ modes. However, in order for this project to be productively developed it is necessary to distinguish story from narrative: the former is an informal activity, the latter is meditative and theoretical. Both have dierapeutic dimensions.

Frances Burney is primarily known as a novelist and playwright, but in recent years there has been an increased interest in the medical writings found within her private letters and journals. John Wiltshire advocates Burney as the unconscious pioneer of the modern genre of pathography, or the illness narrative. Through her dramatic accounts of distinct medical events, such as her own infamous operation without anaesthetic, to those she witnessed, including the 'madness' of George III and the inoculation of her (...) son against smallpox, Burney exposes the ethical issues and conflicts between patients and doctors. Her accounts are linked to a range of modern narratives in which similar events occur in the changed conditions of the public hospital. The genre that Burney initiated continues to make an important contribution to our understanding of medical practice in the modern world. (shrink)

When spelled out properly infallibilism is a viable and even attractive view. Because it has long been summary dismissed, however, we need a guide on how to properly spell it out. The guide has to fulfil four tasks. The first two concern the nature of knowledge: to argue that infallible belief is necessary, and that it is sufficient, for knowledge. The other two concern the norm of belief: to argue that knowledge is necessary, and that it is sufficient, for justified (...) certainty. With such a guide in hand infallibilism can be evaluated on its own merits. The most controversial parts are the first and fourth. The idea that knowledge requires infallible belief is thought to be excessively sceptical. The idea that knowledge warrants certainty is thought to be excessively dogmatic. The present paper addresses the first. It argues that knowledge requires infallible belief. (shrink)

One can find in the literature two sets of views concerning the relationship between understanding and explanation: that one understands only if 1) one has knowledge of causes and 2) that knowledge is provided by an explanation. Taken together, these tenets characterize what I call the narrow knowledge account of understanding. While the first tenet has recently come under severe attack, the second has been more resistant to change. I argue that we have good reasons to reject it on the (...) basis of theoretical models that provide how-possibly explanations. These models, while they do not explain in the strict sense, afford understanding. In response, I propose an alternative epistemology of understanding, broad KAU, that takes cases of theoretical modelling into account. (shrink)

Two recent contributions have discussed, and disagreed, over whether so-called toy models that attempt to represent dispositions have the power to explain. In this paper, I argue that neither of these positions is completely correct. Toy models may accurately represent, satisfy the veridicality condition, yet fail to provide how-actually explanations. This is because some dispositions remain unmanifested. Instead, the models provide how-possibly explanations; they _possibly_ explain.

Argumentation has been an important topic in knowledge representation, reasoning and multi-agent systems during the last twenty years. In this paper, we propose a new abstract framework where arguments are associated with a strength, namely a quantitative information which is used to determine whether an attack between arguments succeeds or not. Our Strength-based Argumentation Framework combines ideas of Preference-based and Weighted Argumentation Frameworks in an original way, which permits to define acceptability semantics sensitive to the existence of accruals between arguments. (...) The question of accruals arises in situations where several arguments defending the same position against another argument are unable to individually defeat this argument, but could do it collectively if they combine their strengths. We investigate some of the theoretical and computational properties of our new framework and semantics, and present a reasoning algorithm that is based on a translation of the problem into pseudo-boolean constraint satisfaction. This paper proposes an intuitive framework which allows strength compensations in an argumentation context where attacks may not succeed, completed by an approach which detects accruals throughout the reasoning process without requiring the elicitation of all compensatory combinations of arguments as an input. (shrink)

This is a personal account of one man’s experience of the months during which COVID-19 spread in Australia. Though personal, it aims to also be representative, so that readers will find in it reflections of their own experiences. Various social incidents are described, some in which social distancing is involved. The altering states of the author’s mind as time passes are carefully described in sequence, and the impact of continued anxiety and isolation on his mental well-being is presented as a (...) form of madness, in one dramatic incident. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Are there justified emotions? Can they justify evaluative judgements? We first explain the need for an account of justified emotions by emphasizing that emotions are states for which we have or lack reasons. We then observe that emotions are explained by their cognitive and motivational bases. Considering cognitive bases first, we argue that an emotion is justified if and only if the properties the subject is aware of constitute an instance of the relevant evaluative property. We then investigate the (...) roles of motivational bases. Finally, we argue that justified emotions are sufficient for justified evaluative judgements. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.From Justified Emotions to Justified Evaluative Judgements*Volume 51, Issue 1JULIEN A. DEONNA and FABRICE TERONI DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000236Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. From Justified Emotions to Justified Evaluative Judgements*Volume 51, Issue 1JULIEN A. DEONNA and FABRICE TERONI DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000236Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. From Justified Emotions to Justified Evaluative Judgements*Volume 51, Issue 1JULIEN A. DEONNA and FABRICE TERONI DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000236Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Knowledge-first evidentialism combines the view that it is rational to believe what is supported by one's evidence with the view that one's evidence is what one knows. While there is much to be said for the view, it is widely perceived to fail in the face of cases of reasonable error—particularly extreme ones like new Evil Demon scenarios (Wedgwood, 2002). One reply has been to say that even in such cases what one knows supports the target rational belief (Lord, 201x, (...) this volume). I spell out two versions of the strategy. The direct one uses what one knows as the input to principles of rationality such as conditionalization, dominance avoidance, etc. I argue that it fails in hybrid cases that are Good with respect to one belief and Bad with respect to another. The indirect strategy uses what one knows to determine a body of supported propositions that is in turn the input to principles of rationality. I sketch a simple formal implementation of the indirect strategy and show that it avoids the difficulty. I conclude that the indirect strategy offers the most promising way for knowledge-first evidentialists to deal with the New Evil Demon problem. (shrink)

According to logical inferentialists, the meanings of logical expressions are fully determined by the rules for their correct use. Two key proof-theoretic requirements on admissible logical rules, harmony and separability, directly stem from this thesis—requirements, however, that standard single-conclusion and assertion-based formalizations of classical logic provably fail to satisfy :1035–1051, 2011). On the plausible assumption that our logical practice is both single-conclusion and assertion-based, it seemingly follows that classical logic, unlike intuitionistic logic, can’t be accounted for in inferentialist terms. In (...) this paper, I challenge orthodoxy and introduce an assertion-based and single-conclusion formalization of classical propositional logic that is both harmonious and separable. In the framework I propose, classicality emerges as a structural feature of the logic. (shrink)

How does shame differ from guilt? Empirical psychology has recently offered distinct and seemingly incompatible answers to this question. This article brings together four prominent answers into a cohesive whole. These are that (a) shame differs from guilt in being a social emotion; (b) shame, in contrast to guilt, affects the whole self; (c) shame is linked with ideals, whereas guilt concerns prohibitions and (d) shame is oriented towards the self, guilt towards others. After presenting the relevant empirical evidence, we (...) defend specific interpretations of each of these answers and argue that they are related to four different dimensions of the emotions. This not only allows us to overcome the conclusion that the above criteria are either unrelated or conflicting with one another, it also allows us to tell apart what is constitutive from what is typical of them. -/- . (shrink)

Tarski's Undefinability of Truth Theorem comes in two versions: that no consistent theory which interprets Robinson's Arithmetic (Q) can prove all instances of the T-Scheme and hence define truth; and that no such theory, if sound, can even express truth. In this note, I prove corresponding limitative results for validity. While Peano Arithmetic already has the resources to define a predicate expressing logical validity, as Jeff Ketland has recently pointed out (2012, Validity as a primitive. Analysis 72: 421-30), no theory (...) which interprets Q closed under the standard structural rules can define nor express validity, on pain of triviality. The results put pressure on the widespread view that there is an asymmetry between truth and validity, viz. that while the former cannot be defined within the language, the latter can. I argue that Vann McGee's and Hartry Field's arguments for the asymmetry view are problematic. (shrink)

Abstract The content of an emotion, unlike the content of a perception, is directly dependent on the motivational set of the subject experiencing the emotion. Given the instability of this motivational set, it might be thought that there is no sense in which emotions can be said to pick up information about the environment in the same way that perception does. Whereas it is admitted that perception tracks for us what is the case in the environment, no such tracking relation, (...) it is argued, holds between one's emotions and what they are about. It is to this worry – that the construal of the emotions as perceptions inevitably raises – that this paper tries to respond. In this paper, I suggest that when it is realized that one dimension of perception itself is directly dependent on the perceiver's perspective on her environment, then emotion, which is also essentially perspectival in this sense, bears the comparison with perception very well. After having clarified the nature and the role that perspective plays in perception, I argue that, in the case of emotions, the same perspectival role can be played by agents’ long-standing evaluative tendencies and character traits. The resulting conception of emotion as perception is then tested against possible objections. (shrink)

On a widespread naturalist view, the meanings of mathematical terms are determined, and can only be determined, by the way we use mathematical language—in particular, by the basic mathematical principles we’re disposed to accept. But it’s mysterious how this can be so, since, as is well known, minimally strong first-order theories are non-categorical and so are compatible with countless non-isomorphic interpretations. As for second-order theories: though they typically enjoy categoricity results—for instance, Dedekind’s categoricity theorem for second-order PA and Zermelo’s quasi-categoricity (...) theorem for second-order ZFC—these results require full second-order logic. So appealing to these results seems only to push the problem back, since the principles of second-order logic are themselves non-categorical: those principles are compatible with restricted interpretations of the second-order quantifiers on which Dedekind’s and Zermelo’s results are no longer available. In this paper, we provide a naturalist-friendly, non-revisionary solution to an analogous but seemingly more basic problem—Carnap’s Categoricity Problem for propositional and first-order logic—and show that our solution generalizes, giving us full second-order logic and thereby securing the categoricity or quasi-categoricity of second-order mathematical theories. Briefly, the first-order quantifiers have their intended interpretation, we claim, because we’re disposed to follow the quantifier rules in an open-ended way. As we show, given this open-endedness, the interpretation of the quantifiers must be permutation-invariant and so, by a theorem recently proved by Bonnay and Westerståhl, must be the standard interpretation. Analogously for the second-order case: we prove, by generalizing Bonnay and Westerståhl’s theorem, that the permutation invariance of the interpretation of the second-order quantifiers, guaranteed once again by the open-endedness of our inferential dispositions, suffices to yield full second-order logic. (shrink)

Beall and Murzi :143–165, 2013) introduce an object-linguistic predicate for naïve validity, governed by intuitive principles that are inconsistent with the classical structural rules. As a consequence, they suggest that revisionary approaches to semantic paradox must be substructural. In response to Beall and Murzi, Field :1–19, 2017) has argued that naïve validity principles do not admit of a coherent reading and that, for this reason, a non-classical solution to the semantic paradoxes need not be substructural. The aim of this paper (...) is to respond to Field’s objections and to point to a coherent notion of validity which underwrites a coherent reading of Beall and Murzi’s principles: grounded validity. The notion, first introduced by Nicolai and Rossi, is a generalisation of Kripke’s notion of grounded truth, and yields an irreflexive logic. While we do not advocate the adoption of a substructural logic, we take the notion of naïve validity to be a legitimate semantic notion that points to genuine expressive limitations of fully structural revisionary approaches. (shrink)

It is sometimes held that rules of inference determine the meaning of the logical constants: the meaning of, say, conjunction is fully determined by either its introduction or its elimination rules, or both; similarly for the other connectives. In a recent paper, Panu Raatikainen (2008) argues that this view - call it logical inferentialism - is undermined by some "very little known" considerations by Carnap (1943) to the effect that "in a definite sense, it is not true that the standard (...) rules of inference" themselves suffice to "determine the meanings of [the] logical constants" (p. 2). In a nutshell, Carnap showed that the rules allow for non-normal interpretations of negation and disjunction. Raatikainen concludes that "no ordinary formalization of logic ... is sufficient to `fully formalize' all the essential properties of the logical constants" (ibid.). We suggest that this is a mistake. Pace Raatikainen, intuitionists like Dummett and Prawitz need not worry about Carnap's problem. And although bilateral solutions for classical inferentialists - as proposed by Timothy Smiley and Ian Rumfitt - seem inadequate, it is not excluded that classical inferentialists may be in a position to address the problem too. (shrink)

We cast doubts on the suggestion, recently made by Graham Priest, that glut theorists may express disagreement with the assertion of A by denying A. We show that, if denial is to serve as a means to express disagreement, it must be exclusive, in the sense of being correct only if what is denied is false only. Hence, it can’t be expressed in the glut theorist’s language, essentially for the same reasons why Boolean negation can’t be expressed in such a (...) language either. We then turn to an alternative proposal, recently defended by Beall (in Analysis 73(3):438–445, 2013; Rev Symb Log, 2014), for expressing truth and falsity only, and hence disagreement. According to this, the exclusive semantic status of A, that A is either true or false only, can be conveyed by adding to one’s theory a shrieking rule of the form A & ~A |- \bot, where \bot entails triviality. We argue, however, that the proposal doesn’t work either. The upshot is that glut theorists face a dilemma: they can either express denial, or disagreement, but not both. Along the way, we offer a bilateral logic of exclusive denial for glut theorists—an extension of the logic commonly called LP. (shrink)