A unique treasury contains more than 1,000 quotations by spiritual masters, writers, artists, poets and wise men and women from throughout history on such topics as joy and despair, enlightenment, love and nature, in a book that includes contributions from more than 500 people, including Lao Tzu, William Shakespeare and more. Original.

Back to the Rough Ground is a philosophical investigation of practical knowledge, with major import for professional practice and the ethical life in modern society. Its purpose is to clarify the kind of knowledge that informs good practice in a range of disciplines such as education, psychotherapy, medicine, management, and law. Through reflection on key modern thinkers who have revived cardinal insights of Aristotle, and a sustained engagement with the Philosopher himself, it presents a radical challenge to the scientistic assumptions (...) that have dominated how these professional domains have been conceived, practiced, and institutionalized. (shrink)

Reliabilism—the view that a belief is justified iff it is produced by a reliable process—is often characterized as a form of consequentialism. Recently, critics of reliabilism have suggested that since it is a form of consequentialism, reliabilism condones a variety of problematic trade-offs involving cases where someone forms an epistemically deficient belief now that will lead her to more epistemic value later. In the present paper, we argue that the relevant argument against reliabilism fails because it equivocates. While there is (...) a sense in which reliabilism is a kind of consequentialism, it is not of a kind on which we should expect problematic trade-offs. (shrink)

Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs: (i) discrete constituents; (ii) role-filler independence; (iii) predicate–argument structure; (iv) logical operators; (v) inferential (...) promiscuity; and (vi) abstract content. These properties cluster together throughout cognitive science. Bayesian computational modeling, compositional features of object perception, complex infant and animal reasoning, and automatic, intuitive cognition in adults all implicate LoT-like structures. Instead of regarding LoT as a relic of the previous century, researchers in cognitive science and philosophy-of-mind must take seriously the explanatory breadth of LoT-based architectures. We grant that the mind may harbor many formats and architectures, including iconic and associative structures as well as deep-neural-network-like architectures. However, as computational/representational approaches to the mind continue to advance, classical compositional symbolic structures – that is, LoTs – only prove more flexible and well-supported over time. (shrink)

Epistemic Consequentialism Consequentialism is the view that, in some sense, rightness is to be understood in terms conducive to goodness. Much of the philosophical discussion concerning consequentialism has focused on moral rightness or obligation or normativity. But there is plausibly also epistemic rightness, epistemic obligation, and epistemic normativity. Epistemic rightness is often denoted with talk … Continue reading Consequentialism Epistemic →.

Perceptual systems respond to proximal stimuli by forming mental representations of distal stimuli. A central goal for the philosophy of perception is to characterize the representations delivered by perceptual systems. It may be that all perceptual representations are in some way proprietarily perceptual and differ from the representational format of thought (Dretske 1981; Carey 2009; Burge 2010; Block ms.). Or it may instead be that perception and cognition always trade in the same code (Prinz 2002; Pylyshyn 2003). This paper rejects (...) both approaches in favor of perceptual pluralism, the thesis that perception delivers a multiplicity of representational formats, some proprietary and some shared with cognition. The argument for perceptual pluralism marshals a wide array of empirical evidence in favor of iconic (i.e., image-like, analog) representations in perception as well as discursive (i.e., language-like, digital) perceptual object representations. (shrink)

Dispositionalism about belief has had a recent resurgence. In this paper we critically evaluate a popular dispositionalist program pursued by Eric Schwitzgebel. Then we present an alternative: a psychofunctional, representational theory of belief. This theory of belief has two main pillars: that beliefs are relations to structured mental representations, and that the relations are determined by the generalizations under which beliefs are acquired, stored, and changed. We end by describing some of the generalizations regarding belief acquisition, storage, and change.

ABSTRACTThis paper provides a naturalistic account of inference. We posit that the core of inference is constituted by bare inferential transitions, transitions between discursive mental representations guided by rules built into the architecture of cognitive systems. In further developing the concept of BITs, we provide an account of what Boghossian [2014] calls ‘taking’—that is, the appreciation of the rule that guides an inferential transition. We argue that BITs are sufficient for implicit taking, and then, to analyse explicit taking, we posit (...) rich inferential transitions, which are transitions that the subject is disposed to endorse. (shrink)

Most theories of concepts take concepts to be structured bodies of information used in categorization and inference. This paper argues for a version of atomism, on which concepts are unstructured symbols. However, traditional Fodorian atomism is falsified by polysemy and fails to provide an account of how concepts figure in cognition. This paper argues that concepts are generative pointers, that is, unstructured symbols that point to memory locations where cognitively useful bodies of information are stored and can be deployed to (...) resolve polysemy. The notion of generative pointers allows for unresolved ambiguity in thought and provides a basis for conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Motivated by Kalman residuated lattices, Nelson residuated lattices and Nelson paraconsistent residuated lattices, we provide a natural common generalization of them. Nelson conucleus algebras unify these examples and further extend them to the non-commutative setting. We study their structure, establish a representation theorem for them in terms of twist structures and conuclei that results in a categorical adjunction, and explore situations where the representation is actually an isomorphism. In the latter case, the adjunction is elevated to a categorical equivalence. By (...) applying this representation to the original motivating special cases we bring to the surface their underlying similarities. (shrink)

In this collection of recent essays (several appearing in English for the first time), John Dunn brings his characteristically acute and penetrative insight to a wide range of political issues. In the first essay, 'The history of political theory', Professor Dunn argues for the importance of a historical perspective in the study of political thought. Other pieces engage with central concepts of political philosophy such as obligation, trust, freedom of conscience and property. A group of studies tackle specific (...) contemporary problems and future dangers, for example racism and the dilemma of humanitarian intervention. The volume as a whole articulates the many dangers, but also the huge importance of, contemporary politics, and provides a representative collection of work by one of the most astute political commentators writing today. (shrink)

Powerful conversations between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and leading scientists on the most pressing issue of our time. Engage with leading scientists, academics, ethicists, and activists, as well as His Holiness the Dalai Lama and His Holiness the Karmapa, who gathered in Dharamsala, India, for the twenty-third Mind and Life conference to discuss arguably the most urgent questions facing humanity today: What is happening to our planet? What can we do about it? How do we balance the concerns of (...) people against the rights of animals and against the needs of an ecosystem? What is the most skillful way to enact change? And how do we fight on, even when our efforts seem to bear no fruit? Inspiring, edifying, and transformative, this should be required reading for any citizen of the world. (shrink)

We previously showed that owner personality and human-dog relationship predicted the performance of a human-dog dyad in a practical task. Based on the same data set we presently investigate the effects of individual and social factors on the social attraction of dogs to their owners. Twenty-two male and female owners and their intact male dogs were observed during a “picture viewing” test, where we diverted the owner's attention away from their dog whilst it was permitted to move freely around the (...) room. Owner personality axis “neuroticism” and dog personality axis “vocal and aggressive” were, respectively, positively and negatively related to the time the dog stayed in proximity to the owner. Quality of relationship and attachment also had significant effects on this proximity. We conclude that personality and the nature of the human-dog relationship may all influence dogs' social attraction to their owners. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 273-292, October 2020.

The question of whether perception is encapsulated from cognition has been a major topic in the study of perception in the past decade. One locus of debate concerns the role of attention. Some theorists argue that attention is a vehicle for widespread violations of encapsulation; others argue that certain forms of cognitively driven attention are compatible with encapsulation, especially if attention only modulates inputs. This paper argues for an extreme thesis: no effect of attention, whether on the inputs to perception (...) or on perceptual processing itself, constitutes a violation of the encapsulation of perception. (shrink)

We previously showed that owner personality and human–dog relationship predicted the performance of a human–dog dyad in a practical task. Based on the same data set we presently investigate the effects of individual and social factors on the social attraction of dogs to their owners. Twenty-two male and female owners and their intact male dogs were observed during a “picture viewing” test, where we diverted the owner’s attention away from their dog whilst it was permitted to move freely around the (...) room. Owner personality axis “neuroticism” and dog personality axis “vocal and aggressive” were, respectively, positively and negatively related to the time the dog stayed in proximity to the owner. Quality of relationship and attachment also had significant effects on this proximity. We conclude that personality and the nature of the human–dog relationship may all influence dogs’ social attraction to their owners. Keywords: companion animals; dog–human attachment; dyadic relationships; human-animal interactions; human–dog attachment; human–dog relationship; human–dog social interactions; personality; pets. (shrink)

Short‐term memory in vision is typically thought to divide into at least two memory stores: a short, fragile, high‐capacity store known as iconic memory, and a longer, durable, capacity‐limited store known as visual working memory (VWM). This paper argues that iconic memory stores icons, i.e., image‐like perceptual representations. The iconicity of iconic memory has significant consequences for understanding consciousness, nonconceptual content, and the perception–cognition border. Steven Gross and Jonathan Flombaum have recently challenged the division between iconic memory and VWM by (...) arguing against the idea of capacity limits in favor of a flexible resource‐based model of short‐term memory. I argue that, while VWM capacity is probably governed by flexible resources rather than a sharp limit, the two memory stores should still be distinguished by their representational formats. Iconic memory stores icons, while VWM stores discursive (i.e., language‐like) representations. I conclude by arguing that this format‐based distinction between memory stores entails that prominent views about consciousness and the perception–cognition border will likely have to be revised. (shrink)

Perceptual representations pick out individuals and attribute properties to them. This paper considers the role of perceptual attribution in determining or guiding perceptual reference to objects. We consider three extant models of the relation between perceptual attribution and perceptual reference–all attribution guides reference, no attribution guides reference, or a privileged subset of attributions guides reference–and argue that empirical evidence undermines all three. We then defend a flexible-attributives model, on which the range of perceptual attributives used to guide reference shifts adaptively (...) with context. This model underscores the remarkable and dynamic intelligence of our perceptual capacities. We elucidate implications of the model for the boundary between perception and propositional thought. (shrink)

In this article I analyse the structural and cultural conditions of low-caste women's political agency in urban north India. Whereas in Western feminist political theory, the sexual division of labour is considered to be a key constraint for women's political participation, I show how this has a secondary relevance in the context analysed. I argue that issues concerning the division of labour are intertwined with and subject to those of male consent and support for women's activities. I illustrate how it (...) is often the supposedly ‘oppressive’ household boundaries rather than alternative outer spaces that, under a series of enabling circumstances, initiate women's political activities. Against this backdrop, I show how Indian women activists’ political agency is shaped by men's role, and how agency's relational nature is embedded in women's lifecycles, everyday practices and cultural expectations; in essence, in overall gendered agency. Comparative analyses between Western and non-Western models of political participation and discourse have only just begun. In this respect, I contribute to this nascent field in the following directions: not only do the arguments I present in this article challenge the individualistic Western subject of political action, but they also complicate the idea of the resulting empowerment as a culturally constructed process whose understanding arises from the dialectics between insider and outsider values. (shrink)

According to one important proposal, the difference between perception and cognition consists in the representational formats used in the two systems (Carey, 2009; Burge, 2010; Block, 2014). In particular, it is claimed that perceptual representations are iconic, or image-like, while cognitive representations are discursive, or language-like. Taking object perception as a test case, this paper argues on empirical grounds that it requires discursive label-like representations. These representations segment the perceptual field, continuously pick out objects despite changes in their features, and (...) abstractly represent high-level features, none of which appears possible for purely iconic representations. (shrink)

Arnon Avron has written: “Dunn-McCall logic RM is by far the best understood and the most well-behaved in the family of logics developed by the school of Anderson and Belnap.” I agree. There is the famous saying: “Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.” I might say: “good enough.” In this spirit, I will examine the logic R-Mingle, exploring how it is only a “semi-relevant logic” but still a paraconsistent logic. I shall discuss the history (...) of RM, and compare RM to Anderson and Belnap’s system R of relevant implication and to classical two-valued logic. There is a “consumer’s guide,” evaluating these logics as “tools,” in the light of my recent work on “Humans as Rational Toolmaking Animals.”. (shrink)

According to a classic but nowadays discarded philosophical theory, perceptual experience is a complex of nonconceptual sensory states and full-blown propositional beliefs. This classical dual-component theory of experience is often taken to be obsolete. In particular, there seem to be cases in which perceptual experience and belief conflict: cases of known illusions, wherein subjects have beliefs contrary to the contents of their experiences. Modern dual-component theories reject the belief requirement and instead hold that perceptual experience is a complex of nonconceptual (...) sensory states and some other sort of conceptual state. The most popular modern dual-component theory appeals to sui generis propositional attitudes called ‘perceptual seemings’. This article argues that the classical dual-component theory has the resources to explain known illusions without giving up the claim that the conceptual components of experience are beliefs. The classical dual-component view, though often viewed as outdated and implausible, should be regarded as a serious contender in contemporary debates about the nature of perceptual experience. (shrink)

In the current debate on republicanism the relationship between republicanism and democracy is an aspect whose historical dimension has thus far hardly been investigated. It offers instead also the chance to clear up ambiguities on the opposition between republicanism and liberalism. In this sense, recent research on the radical Enlightenment, on the link between economics and politics, by a new reading of physiocracy as political discourse, and on the foundations of political representation represent some of the most important advances made (...) by historical research over the last few years. This essay wishes to trace these results back to a long line of research on a modern republicanism that had already been investigated many decades ago by a historian of the Enlightenment interested in republican tradition, Franco Venturi, the author of Settecento riformatore and of Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, to which John Pocock dedicated the first volume of his recent Barbarism and Religion. By means of a successful integration of three recent essays by John Israel on the uniqueness of Dutch republican discourse, by Richard Whatmore on the economic roots of French republicanism and by Nadia Urbinati on the foundations of representative democracy in Condorcet, it is possible to isolate the characteristics of a democratic republicanism. Among the various threads that have been followed up, the theme of equality has surfaced in various ways in the search for the characteristics of modern republicanism. These highlight the idea of the emergence in the early modern age of an European political culture and of a democratic and egalitarian republicanism that was encouraged by the contribution from various national situations within which it forged its identity, against the model of an Atlantic republicanism. (shrink)

Contextualist scholars working on the rhetoric of corporeal presence in seventeenth-century English religious lyrics have naturally focused their attention on sacramental discourse of the Reformation era. As part of the Common Knowledge symposium on the future of contextualism, this full-length monograph, serialized in installments, argues that the contextualist focus on a single and time-limited “epistemic field” has resulted in a less than adequately ramified understanding of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. What the contextualist (...) approach misses is that even the religious discourses of the period were tied to a long and in no way local epistemological debate about signs and their meaning, whose roots are to be found in Greek and Latin rhetorical theory. This first installment of “Tokens of Love” commences a discussion of the role of classical pagan sign-theory in the development of Reformation sacramental discourse. (shrink)

In the second installment of this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Contextualism—the Next Generation,” Donne's religious poetry is set in dialogue not only with the “Great Controversy” of the 1560s over the nature of the eucharistic sign but also with pre-Christian semiotic discourses. From the perspective of contextualist scholarship, which recognizes in any temporal context a limited number of discourses available, Donne's religious poems of the period from about 1607 to 1620 register many contradictory conceptions, but contradictory only in (...) the sense that no contextualist map of religious identities allows for their miscibility or even collocation. Notoriously resistant to psychological and phenomenological interests, contextualism has no place for an early seventeenth-century Christian writer whose concern is less to join a school of thought on the Real Presence in the Eucharist than to dismiss the issue as vexingly trivial in comparison with the question of whether God thinks that each or any of us adequately loves him. For the questions that concern Donne, there are no determinate answers available, and no standard vocabulary. But the poet's alternating acquiescence in and fretfulness about indeterminacy and incomprehensibility constitute an intellectual and affective identity as much as does the attachment to any one or other more recognizable set of arguments and ways of framing them. (shrink)

All humans share a universal, evolutionarily ancient approximate number system (ANS) that estimates and combines the numbers of objects in sets with ratio-limited precision. Interindividual variability in the acuity of the ANS correlates with mathematical achievement, but the causes of this correlation have never been established. We acquired psychophysical measures of ANS acuity in child and adult members of an indigene group in the Amazon, the Mundurucú, who have a very restricted numerical lexicon and highly variable access to mathematics education. (...) By comparing Mundurucú subjects with and without access to schooling, we found that education significantly enhances the acuity with which sets of concrete objects are estimated. These results indicate that culture and education have an important effect on basic number perception. We hypothesize that symbolic and nonsymbolic numerical thinking mutually enhance one another over the course of mathematics instruction. (shrink)

It is an orthodoxy in cognitive science that perception can occur unconsciously. Recently, Hakwan Lau, Megan Peters and Ian Phillips have argued that this orthodoxy may be mistaken. They argue that many purported cases of unconscious perception fail to rule out low degrees of conscious awareness while others fail to establish genuine perception. This paper presents a case of unconscious perception that avoids these problems. It also advances a general principle of ‘phenomenal coherence’ that can insulate some forms of evidence (...) for unconscious perception from the methodological critiques of Lau, Peters and Phillips. (shrink)

Although we are beginning to understand the neurocognitive processes that underlie the emergence of dreaming, what accounts for the bizarre phenomenology of dreams remains debated. I address this question by comparing dreaming with waking mind wandering and challenging previous accounts that utilize bizarreness to mark a sharp divide between conscious experiences in waking and sleeping. Instead, I propose that bizarreness is a common, non-deficient feature of spontaneous offline simulations occurring across the sleep-wake cycle and can be tied to the specific (...) characteristics of spontaneous thought as being dynamic, unconstrained, (hyper)associative and highly variable in content. Rather than misrepresenting waking reality, bizarreness can be employed to investigate the very building blocks of spontaneous cognition. The absence of bizarreness in thought processes is imposed by automatic and deliberate cognitive constraints. By contrast, thought and memory processes operating on their own without such constraints are inherently marked by different degrees and types of bizarreness. (shrink)

Nous remercions chaleureusement Manuela Ivone Cunha et la revue Terrain. Revue d'ethnologie de l'Europe de nous avoir autorisés à reproduire ce texte. Celui-ci a déjà paru dans Terrain, N° 29, 1997, p. 59-68 et été mis en ligne ici. Résumé : Le temps est une référence omniprésente de la vie en prison, l'un et l'autre étant parfois assimilés. L'emprisonnement entraîne un changement du rapport à un temps qui devient plus objectivé. Multiforme, ce rapport varie selon les diverses périodisations mises (...) en œuvres - Anthropologie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay aims at reconsidering the impact of Physiocratic ideas on the United States context during and after the American Revolution, which represented the first turning point concerning the democratic implications of political economy. In the confrontation in the 1790s between Jefferson’s Republicans and Hamilton’s Federalists the early scientific analysis of economics, grounded in the central role of agriculture formulated by Physiocracy, gave strong theoretical validation of the agrarian democracy ideology as an alternative to the British model and contributed (...) to shaping the American identity. The article will investigate this opposition and the economic culture that provides theoretical foundations to two opposed political projects. The reasons and the forms of this impact will be explored through the confrontation between Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures and George Logan’s series of pamphlets conceived as an orchestrated campaign against the Secretary of the Treasury. The study of Physiocracy beyond Europe and the Old Regime can offer new and divergent outlooks compared to recent studies aiming at questioning the relevance of Physiocratic theory in the Old Regime social and political context and its impact during the French Revolution. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to return to the genesis of the American agrarian myth in the eighteenth century, as a path to investigate the origins of the American national identity. This will be done by means of a comprehensive reassessment of St. John de Crèvecoeur, the Norman noble whose name is bound to the success of Letters from an American Farmer. His work contains the origins of the agrarian ideal as a peculiarly American phenomenon, prior to independence and (...) before Republican ideology placed agrarian democracy at its foundations, making the project of agrarian development and democratic participation inseparable one from another. A Frenchman who became American and then, after 25 years, French again, Crèvecoeur represents an ideal lens through which to analyse the hitherto insufficiently explored contribution of French economic culture to the creation of American national identity. As a multi-faceted figure whose richness has been dominated by his image as the author of a best-selling autobiographical novel, Crèvecoeur is here also seen as an agronomist who was no stranger to physiocracy and as a diplomat and French intellectual who always felt profoundly American. It was precisely this attachment to the land, seen as fundamental to the vision of a new and distinct form of peaceful cohabitation and democratic partnership, that became a political theme and an economic development project of the new nation and, as such, was a main plank of the agrarian ideology of Thomas Jefferson's Republicans. (shrink)

A layoff is a threatening yet common event which employees might face at some point in their working lives. In two scenario-based experiments, we investigated which actions of a layoff agent during a dismissal notification meeting may contribute to laid-off employees’ fairness judgments and negative attitudes toward the employer. In general, the extent to which layoff victims were treated with respect was consistently found to increase perceptions of interpersonal and procedural fairness and to mitigate negative attitudes toward the employer. Further (...) results showed that layoff victims preferred to be given an adequate explanation of the reasons for the layoff and to receive notice from the direct supervisor. Relationships between the layoff agent’s actions and layoff victims’ negative attitudes toward the employer were mediated by perceptions of procedural fairness. In addition, delegating the layoff agent’s task to an external consultant increased perceived psychological contract breach. Our findings have important implications for organizational justice research and for the managerial practice of implementing fair layoffs. In particular, small actions, such as treating employees with respect, might be of benefit both to humans and organizations. (shrink)

To date, we know very little about the effects of the differences in attachment classifications on the physiological correlates of stress regulation in adolescent age groups. The present study examined for the first time heart rate and heart rate variability during an attachment interview in adolescents. HR and HRV data were collected during a baseline assessment as well as during the administration of the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System in a community-based sample of 56 adolescents. We additionally used the Adult (...) Attachment Interview in 50% of our sample to test the convergent validity. Adolescents with a secure attachment representation showed a higher HRV from baseline to the AAP interview compared to those with an insecure-dismissing and the unresolved group. A comparison between the two insecure attachment groups showed no significant difference related to HR and HRV. Cohen’s Kappa revealed an almost perfect agreement between the AAP and the AAI for the four-group classification. Our results indicate that adolescents with a secure attachment representation are more capable of dealing with attachment-related distress which is represented in higher HRV during an attachment interview. (shrink)

This commentary critically examines the view of the relationship between perception and memory in Ned Block's *The Border Between Seeing and Thinking*. It argues that visual working memory often stores the outputs of perception without altering their formats, allowing online visual perception to access these memory representations in computations that unfold over longer timescales and across eye movements. Since Block concedes that visual working memory representations are not iconic, we should not think of perceptual representations as exclusively iconic either.

The target article attempted to draw connections between broad swaths of evidence by noticing a common thread: Abstract, symbolic, compositional codes, that is, language-of-thoughts (LoTs). Commentators raised concerns about the evidence and offered fascinating extensions to areas we overlooked. Here we respond and highlight the many specific empirical questions to be answered in the next decade and beyond.

Gender bias is a recalcitrant problem in academia and society. However, dissent has been created on this issue. We focus on dissenting studies by Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, arguing that they reach conclusions that are unwarranted on the basis of the available evidence and that they ignore fundamental objections to their methodological decisions. Drawing on discussions from other contexts, particularly on manufactured dissent concerning anthropogenic climate change, we conclude that dissent on gender bias substantially contributes to the (...) exacerbation of biases in society and an increasing number of attacks on researchers, making it both epistemically and socially problematic. (shrink)

We establish the Robinson joint consistency theorem for the infinite-valued propositional logic of Łukasiewicz. As a corollary we easily obtain the amalgamation property for MV-algebras—the algebras of Łukasiewicz logic: all pre-existing proofs of this latter result make essential use of the Pierce amalgamation theorem for abelian lattice-ordered groups together with the categorical equivalence Γ between these groups and MV-algebras. Our main tools are elementary and geometric.