A través de la documentación conservada y de una reflexión sobre la cronología, es posible descubrir la existencia de un proyecto político de al-Ghazālī y su discípulo andalusí, Abū Bakr Ibn al-‛Arabī, con el propósito de ganar para al-Gazālī el favor del príncipe almorávide Yūsuf b. Tāšufīn. Los documentos que prueban la existencia de este proyecto se conocían desde hace algún tiempo: la fatwà que al-Gazālī escribió en apoyo de Yūsuf, la carta que le escribió en alabanza de Abū Bakr (...) Ibn al-‛Arabī y la carta que obtuvo del califa, todo lo cual puede compararse con la carta de al-Ṭurṭūšī a Yūsuf sobre los mismos asuntos. La idea que pone todo esto en conexión es que se trataba de un proyecto político con apoyo en la Península, sobre todo de los sufíes y de la elite de los reyes de Taifas. Los escritos de al-Gazālī suministraron una base ideológica a esta alianza política, puesto que alaban el sufismo y critican el taqlīd, la forma usual de interpretar la ley entre los juristas de la jerarquía almorávide. El discurso de al-Gazālī, muy por encima del nivel intelectual del jurista medio, se aceptó finalmente por la elite de los periodos califal y taifa que tenía interés en las ciencias naturales, la filosofía griega y la lógica. Estos temas eran innacesibles para el jurista medio, bien porque no procuraban un provecho inmediato, bien por la dificultad práctica de encontrar libros y profesores expertos en ellos. Por tanto, fue una elite intelectual conocedora del árabe clásico y heredera de las adquisiciones intelectuales de muchas generaciones de andalusíes la que se apropió del discurso gazaliano. Frente a ese grupo, los juristas almorávides representaban a las clases medias urbanas y podían movilizar a su favor a las masas urbanas. El más importante de esos juristas, Ibn Ḥamdīn de Córdoba, temeroso de que la combinación de Ibn al-‛Arabī y al-Gazālī le expulsara del poder, orquestó la quema oficial del Iḥyā' de al-Gazālī por todo el país. Así es posible observar que el conflicto entre esos dos grupos estaba bien definido incluso antes de que la rebelión almohade en el Norte de África proporcionase a la elite intelectual un adalid militar. A cambio, esa elite suministró a los Almohades una ideología y una clase administrativa. Al-Gazālī fue identificado como un enemigo del régimen almorávide incluso antes de que Ibn Tūmart, el fundador del movimiento almohade, volviese de Oriente para lanzar su rebelión contra los almorávides desde el Atlas.Proponemos algunos cambios en el panorama de las estancias de al-Gazālī en diferentes momentos. Se ha aceptado ya una modificación básica de la idea de que abandonó Bagdad definitivamente tras dejar de dar clases a gran número de personas en la Nizāmīya, al observarse que Abū Bakr Ibn al-‛Arabī afirma haber estudiado con él en Bagdad dos años después. Aquí querríamos llamar la atención sobre el hecho de que Ibn Jallikān dice que al-Gazālī estuvo en Alejandría esperando una respuesta de Yusuf b. Tāšufīn. En el contexto de un panorama cambiante de la cronología de los viajes de al-Gazālī, la posibilidad de que Ibn Tūmart estuviera en contacto con él se convierte en una probabilidad. (shrink)

A common view is that ceteris paribus clauses render lawlike statements vacuous, unless such clauses can be explicitly reformulated as antecedents of ?real? laws that face no counterinstances. But such reformulations are rare; and they are not, we argue, to be expected in general. So we defend an alternative sufficient condition for the non-vacuity of ceteris paribus laws: roughly, any counterinstance of the law must be independently explicable, in a sense we make explicit. Ceteris paribus laws will carry a plethora (...) of explanatory commitments; and claims that such commitments are satisfied will be as (dis) confirmable as other empirical claims. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Chomsky's Commitment to CRTT Prospects and Problems of CRTT Technical Notions? Does Chomsky Need Intentionality? Chomsky's Dilemma.

There are two ways to approach political representation. We can view each type of representation or each site of representation – namely a representative actor or institution – on an individual basis and study its internal dynamics. Alternatively, we can look at how different forms of representation and representative actors and institutions interact in a system of representation. In this article, I develop the second view. I make three contributions to the theory of representation from systemic thinking. Methodologically, I explain (...) the contours of a systemic approach to political representation. Descriptively, I propose a definition of a system of representation that captures representative pluralism, distribution of representative work and different levels of representation. Normatively, I set criteria for judging the system of representation and its individual components with systemic criteria. (shrink)

Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about their superficial availability that we (...) have abundant reason to reject. Once we reject it, we can see how issues of the absorbtion of conventions, the revisability of belief, and confirmation holism are compatible with the Traditional Distinctions, and that Quine's discussion only serves to camouflage the question of whether some confirmation relations are constitutive of meaning and knowable a priori. (shrink)

According to the “Folieism” I have been recently defending, communication is a kind of folie à deux in which speakers and hearers enjoy a stable and innocuous illusion of producing and hearing standard linguistic entities (“SLE”s) that are seldom if ever actually produced. In the present paper, after summarizing the main points of the view, I defend it against efforts of Barber, Devitt and Miščević to rescue SLEs in terms of social, response-dependent proposals. I argue that their underlying error is (...) a failure to appreciate the important shift of the explanatory locus in modern linguistics, from external objects to internal conceptions. I go on to show how (i) pace Devitt, this shift is entirely compatible with there being conventional aspects to language, and also serves to distinguish the ease of natural language from the waggle dance of the bees; and (ii) pace Barber and Smith, it is compatible with an appearance / reality distinction, and with reliance on testimony in epistemology. I conclude with further arguments about why, pace Collins and Matthews, intentionality is a crucial feature of linguistic explanation, even if it is ultimately spelt out largely in terms of computational role. (shrink)

Machery neglects the crucial role of concepts in psychological explanation, as well as the efforts of numerous of the last 40 years to provide an account of that role. He rightly calls attention to the wide variation in people's epistemic relations to concepts but fails to appreciate how externalist and kindred proposals offer the needed stability in concepts themselves that underlies that variation.

This is a reminiscence and short biographical sketch of the late philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor. It includes a summary of his main proposals about the mind: his “Language of Thought” hypothesis; his rejection of analyticity and conceptual role semantics; his “mad dog nativism”; his proposal of mental modules and—by contrast—his skepticism about a computational theory of central cognition; his anti‐reductionist, but still physicalist, views about psychology; and, lastly, his attacks on selectionism. I conclude with some discussion of his (...) idiosyncratic style and of his aesthetic and other interests. An appendix provides some memorable quotes. (shrink)

I reply to Stainton and Viger by pointing out that my “folieist” claim—that standard linguistic entities (“SLEs”) such as words and phonemes are illusions—would not have the calamitous consequences for linguistics that they fear. Talk of “a language” need only be understood as talk of an I‐language precisely as Chomskyans have proposed; and I reply to Adger by pointing out that, since SLEs are not generally describable as real, local physical phenomena, perception of them cannot be explained as any sort (...) of “transduction.” An intentionalist understanding of “representation of” is needed where mere transduction fails. (shrink)

Wilson et al. focus on one class of AGL tasks: the cognitively demanding task of detecting non‐adjacent dependencies (NADs) among items. They provide a typology of the different types of NADs in natural languages and in AGL tasks. A range of cues affect NAD learning, ranging from the variability and number of intervening elements to the presence of shared prosodic cues between the dependent items. These cues, important for humans to discover non‐adjacent dependencies, are also found to facilitate NAD learning (...) in several nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

In asking what it means to be an empiricist, the present volume does not seek to provide a definitive or authoritative introduction to the foundation and establishment of empiricism. Instead, our objectives are to deconstruct some misleading preconceptions and to propose some new perspectives on this much used but still somehow ambiguous concept. It marks the beginning of a new reflection rather than a conclusion.Throughout this volume, we aim to present empiricism as the result of two parallel dialogues. First, it (...) was born out of an exchange between several distinct observational and experimental traditions in Europe. We therefore advocate speaking in the plural about empirical methods, underlining the distinctions between local uses and grand, national standards, while also highlighting the complex discussion around the values and norms of empiricism.Secondly, it emerged as part of a dialog between several positions within the theory of knowledge which for too long have been reduced to a simple dualism. The most important lesson to be learned from the eighteenth century is that there wasn’t such a thing as a war between rationalism and empiricism, but rather a constant attempt to accommodate both. This forces us to conceive of a more complex and fruitful relationship, but also a much more interesting one. (shrink)

The present article articulates the strategy of much of my work to date, which has been concerned to understand how we can possibly come to have any objective understanding of the mind. Generally, I align myself with those who think the best prospect of such an understanding lies in a causal/computational/representational theory of thought (CRTT). However, there is a tendency in recent developments of this and related philosophical views to burden the crucial property of intentionality with what I call Strong (...) Externalism, a state’s intentional content being determined by some real external phenomenon to which the state is causally related. I argue against this tendency, drawing attention to the crucial role in cognitive scientific explanations of empty concepts, such as [angel], and the “intentional inexistents” that such concepts “represent.” This obliges me to take a brief excursion into what I hope is a minimal metaphysics, defending a methodology I call the “LEXX” strategy that treats phenomena as real only insofar as they are needed in genuine explanations. After a brief discussion of the need for greater patience generally regarding a theory of intentionality, I deploy this strategy with regard to many phenomena that are the purported objects of mental states, e.g. triangles, cones, words, sentences, colors, mental images and qualia. I argue that these phenomena do not actually exist: they are mere intentional inexistents, unreal projections of the intentional content of various mental states, and not themselves needed in any genuine explanations. In a concluding section, I summarize my suggestions about how a CRTT can explain the various illusions we have in this regard, particularly those concerning consciousness and qualia. (shrink)

In 1720, Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande wrote Physicis elementa mathematica, experimentis confirmata. Sive introductio ad philosophiam Newtonianam. Although he was undoubtedly one of the most important popularizers of Newtonian physics, experimental methodology and epistemology in the 1720s, his empirical claim somehow backfired: in applying tenets of Newtonian methodology, he was ultimately led to validate the Leibnizian principle of the conservation of living forces, contrary to the Newtonians. This conclusion invited a great deal of anger, particularly from Samuel Clarke who, in (...) a volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from 1729, accused ’s Gravesande of having written the book with the aim of “darkening Newton’s philosophy”. In a reply, which ’s Gravesande published as a supplement to his Essay upon a New Theory of the Collision of Bodies, he developed a hybrid methodology that relied upon both experimentation and reason. In my paper, I shall thoroughly analyse this interesting combination. (shrink)