In this paper, we propose that an increasingly regarded theoretical framework in neuroscience—the predictive processing framework—can help to advance an understanding of the foundations of critical thinking as well as provide a mechanistic hypothesis for how education may increase a learner’s subsequent use of critical thinking outside of an educational context. We begin by identifying a lacuna in the understanding of critical thinking: a causal account of the internal triggers to think critically. We then introduce the (...) predictive processing framework to address this lacuna, and unpack the implications of this framework for understanding the deployment of critical thinking skills in situ, in the real world. (shrink)

This paper aims to motivate a new beginning in metaphysical thinking about persistence by drawing attention to the disappearance of change in current accounts of persistence. I defend the claim that the debate is stuck in a dilemma which results from neglecting the constructive role of change for persistence. Neither of the two main competing views, perdurantism and endurantism, captures the idea of persistence as an identity through time. I identify the fundamental ontological reasons for this, namely the shared (...) commitment to what I call ‘thing ontology’: an ontology that gives the ontological priority to static things. I conclude by briefly indicating how switching to a process ontological framework that takes process and change to be ontologically primary may allow for overcoming the dilemma of persistence. (shrink)

Against the tide of philosophers committed to this view this book presents a naturalistic view of human thinking, arguing that computers are merely...

Three correctives can get researchers out of the trap of constructing unitary theories of “thinking”: (1) Strong inference methods largely avoid problems associated with universal prescriptive normativism; (2) theories must recognize that significant modularity of cognitive processes is antithetical to general accounts of thinking; and (3) consideration of the domain-specificity of rationality render many of the present article's issues moot.

We seem to learn and use concepts in a variety of heterogenous “formats”, including exemplars, prototypes, and theories. Different strategies have been proposed to account for this diversity. Hybridists consider instances in different formats to be instances of a single concept. Pluralists think that each instance in a different format is a different concept. Eliminativists deny that the different instances in different formats pertain to a scientifically fruitful kind and recommend eliminating the notion of a “concept” entirely. In recent (...) years, hybridism has received the most attention and support. However, we are still lacking a cognitive-computational model for concept representation and processing that would underpin hybridism. The aim of this paper is to advance the understanding of concepts by grounding hybridism in a neuroscientific model within the Predictive Processing framework. In the suggested view, the different formats are not distinct parts of a concept but arise from different ways of processing a functionally unified representational structure. (shrink)

Technological artefacts have, in recent years, invited increasingly intimate ways of interaction. But surprisingly little attention has been devoted to how such interactions, like with wearable devices or household robots, shape our minds, cognitive capacities, and moral character. In this thesis, I develop an embodied, enactive account of mind--technology interaction that takes the reciprocal influence of artefacts on minds seriously. First, I examine how recent developments in philosophy of technology can inform the phenomenology of mind--technology interaction as seen through (...) an enactivist lens. Second, I show how an enactive account of remembering can improve operationalizations of the memory palace mnemonic through virtual reality devices. Third, I draw on virtue ethics to argue that an enactivist approach allows us to better grasp the morally shaping aspects of artefacts by looking at social robots. Fourth, I fend off an underlying metaphysical concern about enactivism by arguing that an embodied, enactive account is compatible with the multiple realization of cognitive processes. This principle is often seen as a crucial test favouring accounts such as extended functionalism over enactivism and I argue that some forms of enactivism pass this test as well. Finally, I conclude by considering what the future relationship between enactivism and functionalism may have in store for the study of mind--technology interaction. (shrink)

The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking. The Scientific Method tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was (...) once taught as a natural process. Henry M. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to John Dewey's vision for science education. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century-but their organic account was not to last. Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful. This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. Once seen as a natural adaptation, the method soon became a symbol of science's power over nature, a power that, until recently, has rarely been called into question. (shrink)

Should we conceive of corporations as entities to which moral responsibility can be attributed? This contribution presents what we will call a political account of corporate moral responsibility. We argue that in modern, liberal democratic societies, there is an underlying political need to attribute greater levels of moral responsibility to corporations. Corporate moral responsibility is essential to the maintenance of social coordination that both advances social welfare and protects citizens' moral entitlements. This political account posits a special capacity (...) of self-governance that corporations can intelligibly be said to possess. Corporations can be said to be "administrators of duty" in that they can voluntarily incorporate moral principles into their decision-making processes about how to conduct business. This account supplements and partly transforms earlier pragmatic accounts of corporate moral responsibility by disentangling responsibility from its conventional linkages with accountability, blame and punishment. It thereby represents a distinctive way to defend corporate moral responsibility and shows how Kantian thinking can be helpful in disentangling the problems surrounding the concept. (shrink)

Health care organizations are increasingly asked to show accountability about their performance. This paper proposes that accountability can best be achieved through evaluative methods that are based on evidence regarding the relationship between processes of care and expected outcomes. Root cause analysis (RCA) is used as an illustration of how a generic method of inquiring can be transformed into an ongoing monitoring, evaluation, user education and accountability strategy. The role of performance indicators, as well as patient and community expectations, is (...) discussed. (shrink)

Although the Philosophy for/with Children (P4wC) movement seems to have overcome two major points of criticism, these critical concerns can still be found in the literature today. The first question is whether P4wC can be placed in the field of philosophy at all, and the second asks whether children possess the cognitive abilities necessary to engage in philosophical discourse. One of the more recent articles voicing these concerns is authored by Caroline Heinrich, who describes P4wC as “an assault on philosophy (...) and an assault on children” and argues that P4wC is a “concept imposed by adults on children.” She maintains that P4wC ignores “children’s thinking, questioning and play.” Furthermore, Heinrich states that P4wC cannot be called philosophy because children are not able to philosophize. In most of her argumentation, refering to Jan Piaget’s theoretical account of the cognitive development of children. Although the P4wC discourse has already dealt with these questions over the last few decades, it seems that there is still a need for further clarification. This paper provides an overview of the main points of criticism, which form the starting point of the author’s Polylogical Process Model of (Elementary-)Philosophical Education (PPEE model). This interdisciplinary approach, which is based on the constructivist conceptual change/growththeory of Stella Vosniadou and William Brewer, attempts to add new perspectives to two central questions addressing the P4wC movement: first, can P4wC actually be called philosophy?; second, do children have the cognitive abilities to engage in philosophical discourse? In addition, the question arises as to which pedagogical considerations based on constructivist learning theory could be added to P4wC methodology? The aim of the interdisciplinary PPEE model is to build a broader scientific foundation that has the potential to reduce the main points of criticism of the P4wC movement. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes has been frequently criticised for his account of deliberation that purportedly consists merely of, in his own words, an ‘alternate succession of appetite and fear’ and therefore lacks the judgement and reflection commentators think is essential if he is to provide an adequate treatment of practical rationality. In this paper Hobbes’s account of deliberation is analysed in detail and it is argued that it is not vulnerable to this critique. Hobbes takes so-called ‘mental discourse’ to be (...) partly constitutive of the process of practical deliberation, and this provides the cognitive judgement and reflection that critics have claimed it lacks. (shrink)

In this thesis I propose an account of knowledge of one’s own mental states. My goal is set on a unified transparency account of self-knowledge. It is unified, because the proposal will account for the generation of beliefs about mental states of all types, regardless of whether they are propositional, non-propositional, experiential or non-experiential. My account will thereby be applicable to knowledge of any mental state, from beliefs and desires to fears, hopes, and sensations such as (...) pain. Moreover, it will be a transparency account because it holds on to Gareth Evans’s observation that self-ascribing mental states is done by attending outwards instead of inwards. There is a sense in which we attend to the world when we find out whether we believe something, and my proposal aims to capture this intuition. The core idea I am exploring is the following: generally, when one produces a first-order mental state, one also forms a corresponding, dispositional second-order belief about that state. Both attitudes share elements of their production, which ensures reliability while retaining fallibility. For instance, when you form a belief ‘there is a red car’ by perceiving a red car, you also generate the dispositional belief ‘I believe that there is a red car,’ if everything goes right. I argue that almost all features that make self-knowledge special can be explained with this basic idea. The assumption that the production of a first-order mental state and a second-order belief about the state go hand in hand has surprising explanatory power. Moreover, there are at least no obvious reasons why the assumption should be ruled out. The upshot will be a view that we should take seriously as a contender for an explanation of self-knowledge. I will not be able to conclusively show that it is the best explanation, but I argue that it is one worth thinking about. The thesis is structured in three parts. The first part focuses on the phenomenon of self-knowledge and the transparency idea. These chapters serve as the setup for my later proposed view. Chapter 1 and 2 discuss what exactly we want to explain when we say that we aim to explain self-knowledge. I thereby provide an overview of the conceptual landscape of self-knowledge and argue that we should understand the peculiarity of self-knowledge in terms of features of belief and belief-formation. Moreover, I commit myself to the view that the peculiarity has something to do with our cognitive access to mental states and relate that to the goal of a unified account of self-knowledge. Chapter 3 discusses how we ought to understand the other qualification of my goal: a transparency account of self-knowledge. I provide an overview of transparency accounts in the literature and lay out the path to avoid common problems of transparency accounts. In the second part I propose the single process model of self-knowledge as a unified, transparency account of self-knowledge. I provide the core principles of the view and show how it explains the features of self-knowledge I aim to explain. Chapter 4 focuses on attitudes, both propositional and non-propositional. Chapter 5 expands the view to phenomenal states, such as being in pain. The third part connects the epistemological discussion of the single process model to research on cognition. Chapter 6 proposes a cognitive story of predictive processing that is compatible with the single process model. I thereby discuss the plausibility of the predictive processing idea and its empirical support. I provide a predictive processing story of self-knowledge that fits with the single process model of self-knowledge. In chapter 7 I discuss extended mental states. Clark & Chalmers propose that at least some mental states, such as beliefs, can be extended to external devices. Given that my aim is a unified account, I ought to say something about knowledge of these extended beliefs. I argue that they cannot be known by the same processes as non-extended mental states because beliefs about extended beliefs show different features than beliefs about our non-extended states that we formed by introspection. Hence, even if my view cannot account for them this is not a problem, because they are not formed by genuine introspection. Instead, we come to know extended mental states by a distinct process that we might call extended introspection. Finally, chapter 8 provides a brief conclusion of the thesis for and points out some placed that require further development. The account is promising as an explanation of self-belief and self-knowledge, but whether it is correct also depends on future research outside the scope of philosophy. (shrink)

The direct social perception thesis claims that we can directly perceive some mental states of other people. The direct perception of mental states has been formulated phenomenologically and psychologically, and typically restricted to the mental state types of intentions and emotions. I will compare DSP to another account of mindreading: dual process accounts that posit a fast, automatic “Type 1” form of mindreading and a slow, effortful “Type 2” form. I will here analyze whether dual process accounts’ (...) Type 1 mindreading serves as a rival to DSP or whether some Type 1 mindreading can be perceptual. I will focus on Apperly and Butterfill’s dual process account of mindreading epistemic states such as perception, knowledge, and belief. This account posits a minimal form of Type 1 mindreading of belief-like states called registrations. I will argue that general dual process theories fit well with a modular view of perception that is considered a kind of Type 1 process. I will show that this modular view of perception challenges and has significant advantages over DSP’s phenomenological and psychological theses. Finally, I will argue that if such a modular view of perception is accepted, there is significant reason for thinking Type 1 mindreading of belief-like states is perceptual in nature. This would mean extending the scope of DSP to at least one type of epistemic state. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion by Selusi AmbrogioCatherine König-Pralong (bio)Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion. By Selusi Ambrogio. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. How Modern Historians of Philosophy Drew Their World MapsIn his latest book, Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European (...) Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion, Selusi Ambrogio presents an extensive survey of how Indian and Chinese traditions were conceived of and staged in modern European historiography. This study, which surpasses in detail and scope other works devoted to the same topic,1 reconstructs 150 years of philosophical historiography. Otto van Heurn's Barbaricae philosophiae antiquitatum libri duo (published in 1600) included for the first time contemporary and ancient Indian thinkers in the philosophical doxography; at the other end of the time span considered, Jacob Brucker's Historia critica philosophiae (1744) sanctioned the exclusion of Chinese and Indian thinkers by means of a detailed criticism of their pseudo-philosophies. Moreover, Ambrogio makes the choice to focus on the history of philosophy, unlike Étiemble, for example,2 who was interested in philosophy in a broad sense—academic and non-academic—as well as in travel accounts, the writings of the Jesuits, and those of their opponents, among other sources. According to Ambrogio, the histories of philosophy were more representative of "the common European understanding of these civilizations," since they "were not openly written for controversialist aims" (p. 2). Even though one may wonder whether defining philosophy ("what philosophy is and its role"—ibid.) and legitimizing its scholarly practice is a less political or less polemical undertaking than pamphlets, letters, and philosophical essays,3 it is probably true that philosophical historiography produced an effect of objectification or an appearance of neutrality.The author's main thesis is that the exclusion of all non-Greeks or non-Europeans from the history of philosophy does not date from the nineteenth century and Hegel, as is generally thought, but precisely from the moment when Indian and Chinese "civilizations" were considered by historians of philosophy and included in the philosophical historiography: from the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards (p. 3). Applying a segregationist model, modern historians of philosophy developed a dialectic of [End Page 203] identification—the author speaks of "reception"—and exclusion. They defined the European philosophical mind by demarcating it from other ways of thinking, which they situated in place and time on a civilizational world map. Encompassing the world from Europe produced in return processes of definition and situation. Philosophy was established in a territory and identified with a "culture" or "mind" that began to think itself in relation to the rest of the world under the name of Europe.4I will discuss Ambrogio's remarkable work in three moments. First, I will develop some particularly interesting conclusions drawn from the study; namely, they address periodization, the production of cultural categories, and the valorization of theory. I will then discuss the main thesis as well as some problematic issues, before concluding on the subject of a world absent from Ambrogio's book, the Near and Middle East.I. Logic of Time and Cultural TerritorializationAmbrogio's book is composed of three parts that address three successive historiographical models. First, the "perennialist universalism" (p. 57)—represented by, among others, Otto van Heurn, Thomas Burnet, Isaac Vossius, François Bernier, Georg Horn, and François de la Mothe le Vayer—included ancient India and then China in the "prisca theologia"; on the other hand, it described contemporary Indian and Chinese thinkers as "barbarian" philosophers. In this constellation, Buddhism began to function as the negative part of Oriental thought. According to the Jesuits, it had polluted and corrupted the original Chinese wisdom, often identified with Confucianism.The second model constructed an "Atheistic Asia," which was used either as a positive anthropological image (for example in Pierre Bayle), or as a negative foil for Lutheran philosophy and theology (for example in Johann Franz Buddeus). In the pages he dedicates to these endeavors, Ambrogio often moves away from philosophical doxography, represented by André-Fran... (shrink)

In “Topology of Balasaguni’s Kutadgu Bilig: Thinking the Between,” Onur Karamercan focuses on the philosophical dimension of Kutadgu Bilig, a poetic work of Yūsuf Balasaguni, an 11th century Central Asian thinker, poet, and statesman. Karamercan pays special attention to the meaning of betweenness and, in the first step of his argument, discusses the hermeneutic and topological implications of the between, distingushing the dynamic sense of betweenness from a static sense of in-betweenness. He then moves on to analyze Balasaguni’s notion (...) of language, which he interprets as an early critique of the instrumental account of language and, by examining several selected fragments from Kutadgu Bilig, illustrates Balasaguni’s designation of language as an inexhaustible phenomenon. In the process, he also points to the possible parallels between Balasaguni’s and Heidegger’s ideas of language. In the final section of the article, building on his argument, Karamercan thematizes the margins of Turkic languages and of Islamic philosophy, suggesting that they need to be reexamined. He problematizes the very meaning of Asia itself by decentering what he calls “its internal East–West antagonism” and puts forth instead a framework based on in-betweenness reinterpreted from a topological perspective, proposing it as an alternative view which might help us make sense of the hermeneutic neighborhoods of Asian philosophies. (shrink)

I have two aims in this paper. The first is to add to a growing case against reading the sovereign individual, discussed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality, as Nietzsche’s ethical ideal. I suggest that the conception of responsibility active in the sovereign individual passage is directly at odds with what, as a second aim, I argue Nietzsche’s positive account of responsibility to be. Thinking that the sovereign individual, a sort of distant and composed individual who (...) stands apart, represents Nietzsche’s ideal fails to appreciate what we can call the social aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche’s positive account of responsibility is a conception that sees as central and crucial our place in a community of interpreting and self-interpreting others who figure in the processes by which we, as Nietzsche puts it, become what we are. (shrink)

A popular “Reductionist” account of personal identity unifies person stages into persons in virtue of their psychological continuity with one another. One objection to psychological continuity accounts is that there is more to our personal identity than just mere psychological continuity: there is also an active process of self-interpretation and self-creation. This criticism can be used to motivate a rival account of personal identity that appeals to the notion of a narrative. To the extent that they comment (...) upon the issue, proponents of narrative accounts typically reject Reductionist metaphysics that (ontologically) reduce persons to aggregates of person stages. In contrast to this trend, we seek to develop a narrative account of personal identity from within Reductionist metaphysics: we think person stages are unified into persons in virtue of their narrative continuity with one another. We argue that this Reductionist version of the narrative account avoids some serious problems facing non-Reductionist versions of the narrative account. (shrink)

In this paper, I will give a three-stage analysis of the origin of phenomenal consciousness. The first one has to do with a non-causal stage. The second one has to do with a causal stage. The third one has to do with a correlation stage. This paper is divided into three sections. In section I, I will discuss a non-causal stage which focuses on finite consciousness as an irreducible emergent property—i.e., a simple non-structural property that is unique to the “emergent” (...) level of reality. I will examine currently dominant accounts of the emergence of phenomenal consciousness—which require consciousness to have some sort of causal link to its base level. Those who think of the emergence of consciousness in casual terms, often have in mind, brain complexity as a source of such causality. However, the causal proposal faces two serious empirically supported objections, namely: the gametes problem and the complexity problem, respectively. The first objection deals with conception (i.e., fertilization) and the impossibility of tracking down/spotting the origin of consciousness at any point during the process of the development of a foetus. The second objection focuses on demonstrating that, no amount of analysis of the physical basis of complex brain will unfold anything substantial about the origin of consciousness. Both of these two objections show why the diachronic account of the origin of the phenomenal consciousness is hard to come by. In section II, I will discuss a causal stage which focuses on, how once it emerges, consciousness enters into the domain of causal interaction with brain states. This is the stage where we come across both ‘the explanatory gap problem’ and ‘the hard problem of consciousness.’ In section III, I will discuss the correlation stage which focuses on the manner in which phenomenal consciousness continues to co-exist with its physical base (e.g., brain). To show this, I will discuss the notion of correlation and its relation to causation. The upshot of my discussion in the above three sections will constitute the view I call the non-causal spontaneous emergence of phenomenal consciousness. According to the view I am proposing, there is no causal-link between strongly emergent property (in this case, consciousness) and its base level—although the base level (as far as we know) serves as a sufficient condition (but not as a necessary condition) for its emergence. In light of this, I conclude this paper by claiming that phenomenal consciousness is a strongly emergent property. (shrink)

Dual-process theories of conditional reasoning predict that relationships among four basic logical forms, and to intellectual ability and thinking predictions, are most evident when conflict arises between experiential and analytic processing (e.g., Stanovich & West, 2000). To test these predictions, 210 undergraduates were presented with conditionals for which the consequents were either weakly or strongly associated with alternative antecedents (i.e., WA and SA problems, respectively). Consistent with predictions, modus ponens inferences were not related to inferences on the uncertain (...) forms (affirmation of the consequent, denial of the antecedent). On WA problems, modus tollens, affirmation of the consequent, and denial of the antecedent were related to each other and to verbal ability. Modus ponens was linked to verbal ability only when disabling conditions were activated. In accord with the predictions of Stanovich and West (2000), on most problems, thinking dispositions predicted variance in inferences independently from verbal ability. We argue that a largely automatic experiential processing system governs performance on modus ponens, unless disablers are activated. Consciously controlled analytic processing predominates on the uncertain forms and, under some conditions, on modus tollens. (shrink)

After a quick overview of the field of study known as “Lexical Semantics”, where we advocate the need of accessing additional information besides syntax and Montague-style semantics at the lexical level in order to complete the full analysis of an utterance, we summarize the current formulations of a well-known theory of that field. We then propose and justify our own model of the Generative Lexicon Theory, based upon a variation of classical compositional semantics, and outline its formalization. Additionally, we discuss (...) the theoretical place of informational, knowledge-related data supposed to exist within the lexicon as well as within discourse and other linguistic constructs. The formalization of the structure of natural language utterances around a surface form (phenogrammatics), a deep structure (tectogrammatics) and the meaning thereof as a logical form (semantics) has developed from the original theories of Curry and Montague to form coherent, type-driven models. Most of these new theories rely upon variations of the compositional analysis of the sentence: from pheno to tectogrammatics, and then to semantics. Our contribution to this work aims at giving such a model a means to overcome the problems posed by polysemous lexical units during the semantical analysis of the tectogrammatical form. Building upon an assumed “deep structure”, we formalize parts of Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon Theory, linguistically motivated in Pustejovsky (The generative lexicon, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995), in a pre-processing of the semantics of the sentence. The mechanisms of Lexical Semantics we propose are an additional layer of classical Montague compositional semantics, and, as such, integrate smoothly within such an analysis; we proceed by converting the lexical data to modifiers of the logical form. This treatment of Lexical Semantics furthermore induces us to think that some sort of non-evident background knowledge of the common use of words is necessary to perform a correct semantic analysis of an utterance. This “commonsense metaphysics” would therefore not be strictly confined to pragmatics, as is often assumed. (shrink)

Fodor and others who think that scientific, computational psychology will vindicate commonsense belief-desire psychology have maintained that belief can be identified with the explicit storage of a token with appropriate content. I review and develop problems for the explicit storage view and show that a more plausible account identifies belief with the disposition to use a token with appropriate content in explicit reasoning and planning processes and as a basis for action. I argue that this type of inner disposition (...) account will also apply to most other common sense attitudes. The result is a realism about commonsense belief-desire psychology that is more modest than Fodor's: While such inner dispositions probably do exist, these states will probably not be the main focus of scientific psychological theories. (shrink)

This volume offers an English translation of John of St. Thomas's Cursus theologicus I, question I, disputation 2. In this particular text, the Dominican master raises questions concerning the scientific status and nature of theology. At issue, here, are a number of factors: namely, Christianity's continual coming to terms with the "Third Entry" of Aristotelian thought into Western Christian intellectual culture - specifically the Aristotelian notion of 'science' and sacra doctrina's satisfaction of those requirements - the Thomistic-commentary tradition, and the (...) larger backdrop of the Iberian Peninsula's flourishing "Second Scholasticism." In this latter context, John of St. Thomas applies the theological principles of Thomas Aquinas to the Scholastic disputes preoccupying Thomist, Franciscan, and Jesuit theologians, such as Cajetan, Bañez, Luis de Molina, Vazquez, Suárez - to name only a few - in a tour de force of theological thinking throughout the entire period of Scholasticism. In the process - and not insignificantly - the status quaestionis of theology's scientific character is clearly framed and answered according to John's satisfaction. Key to John of St. Thomas's resolution of the question is his understanding of the continuity of the power of human reason with the super-intelligibility of divine revelation spelled out in terms of what he calls "virtual revelation." This text presented in this volume is a quintessential example of the deep and abiding harmony that flourished between faith and reason as well as grace and nature within the golden era of Baroque Scholasticism. (shrink)

In this study, we examine the belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning under both standard presentation and in a condition where participants are required to respond within 10 seconds. As predicted, the requirement for rapid responding increased the amount of belief bias observed on the task and reduced the number of logically correct decisions, both effects being substantial and statistically significant. These findings were predicted by the dual-process account of reasoning, which posits that fast heuristic processes, responsible for (...) belief bias, compete with slower analytic processes that can lead to correct logical decisions. Requiring rapid responding thus differentially inhibits the operation of analytic reasoning processes, leading to the results observed. (shrink)

The nature and value of autonomy has long been debated in diverse philosophical traditions, including moral and political philosophy. Although the notion dates back to ancient Greek philosophy, it was during the Age of Enlightenment that autonomy drew much attention. Thus, as may be known, moral philosophers tended to emphasize self-regulation, particularly one’s own will to abide by universal moral laws, as the term “autonomy” originates from the Greek words “self” (auto) and “rule” (nomos). In parallel, modern epistemologists supposedly espoused (...) the idea of intellectual autonomy as self-reliance. In this classical view, an intellectually autonomous explorer of knowledge must not depend on a belief that is obtained from another’s testimony, until one can justify it to oneself. However, accompanying the growing focus on the importance of social dimensions of acquiring knowledge and understanding, recent epistemologists have doubted the classical view and have since reconsidered intellectual autonomy from distinct approaches such as social and virtue epistemology. This paper propounds an interpersonal-epistemic approach to intellectual autonomy. First, it is argued that thinking through questioning both individually and with other epistemic peers is an interpersonal-epistemic practice. Second, it is demonstrated that with particular cognitive features inherent within us, an intellectually autonomous person must think through questioning in necessary situations. This interpersonal account of intellectual autonomy can conceptually enrich intellectual autonomy by considering its relationship with not only responsibility but also with vulnerability. Specifically, regarding responsibility, an intellectually autonomous person must be responsible for his or her own actions throughout questioning processes. Regarding vulnerability, our intellectual autonomy lies in retaining autonomy with vulnerability in the plastic control of the questioning processes. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Thinking at the Edge (TAE) method, developed by Eugene Gendlin with Mary Hendricks and Kye Nelson. In the context of the international research project and training initiative Embodied Critical Thinking (ECT), TAE is understood as a political and critical practice. Our objective is to move beyond a criticism of reductionism, into a practice of thinking that can complement empirical, conceptual and logical implications with what is implied by the vibrant complexity of one’s lived (...) experience in one’s place and time. The second person helps the first to explore, elaborate and clarify very carefully felt dimensions of thinking, which hold intricate structures, contexts, perplexities and intuitions that prove relevant for one’s research. The second person also supports the first to become sensitive to the effects of the language and concepts she uses. A non-imposing, tentative use of language that touches the intricate texture of lived experience is at the core of this method, allowing to widen one’s conceptual structure. In this paper, the cluster of TAE moves are characterized with examples of accounts of TAE processes. The description of the TAE phases includes concepts of Gendlin’s embodied theory of meaning that explain the efficacy of the moves (“direct reference,” “explication,” “crossing”). (shrink)

It is shown that the facts of behavior which Freud sought to encompass by his distinction of Primary and Secondary Process can be formulated in terms of Skinner's system of behavior. This is illustrated by considering the 'primary process' behavior in dreaming, some of whose characteristics according to Freud are: it is illogical and random; visual images predominate in primary process thinking; it is highly charged with affect compared to 'secondary process' thinking; it shows (...) 'condensation' — the fusing together of two or more images into a single image. It is shown that all of these properties can be derived from Skinner's account of behavior. It is then pointed out that both Freud and Skinner have pointed to similar controlling variables of behavior, utilized mainly similar processes, and drawn many of the same distinctions. Implications for contemporary criticisms of Skinner's account of 'thinking' are pointed out. The above is preceded by a preliminary argument that since both Freud and Skinner performed functional analyses of behavior, it should be possible to compare the two accounts if the 'superfluous' middle term — the intrapsychic apparatus — in Freud's account is ignored. It is pointed out that in extrapolating his system to human behavior, Skinner has described in terms of his own system some of the characteristically 'Freudian' facts of behavior, and his formulations on the phenomena of 'repression' are summarized. The Skinnerian formulation of the primary and secondary process distinction is then presented in support of the argument that other facts of behavior which have not been discussed by Skinner can nevertheless be represented within his system of behavior. (shrink)

Emergence has traditionally been described as satisfying specific properties, notably nonreducibility of the emergent object or properties to their substrate, novelty, and unpredictability from the properties of the substrate. Sometimes more mysterious properties such as independence from the substrate, separate substances and teleological properties are invoked. I will argue that the latter are both unnecessary and unwarranted. The descriptive properties can be analyzed in more detail in logical terms, but the logical conditions alone do not tell us how to identify (...) the conditions through interactions with the world. In order to do that we need dynamical properties – properties that do something. This paper, then, will be directed at identifying the dynamical conditions necessary and sufficient for emergence. Emergent properties and objects all result or are maintained by dissipative and radically nonholonomic processes. Emergent properties are relatively common in physics, but have been ignored because of the predominant use of Hamiltonian methods assuming energy conservation. Emergent objects are all dissipative systems, which have been recognized as special only in the past fifty years or so. Of interest are autonomous systems, including living and thinking systems. They show functionality and are self governed. (shrink)

This paper provides suggestions for educators who have a desire to learn about, or are already committed to, challenging ableism and disablism. As philosophy teachers, we have the opportunity to facilitate student reflection regarding disability, which puts students in a position to make decisions about whether to retain their habitual ways of comporting themselves toward disabled people or to begin the process of forming new perceptual practices. I contend that existential phenomenology, as formulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Linda Martín (...) Alcoff, provides insights regarding the habitual formation of perceptual practices that are useful for thinking about ways that perception may be informed by ableism and disablism. Jessica Cadwallader demonstrates how their insights can be usefully applied to thinking about perceptions of disability. Through analysis of past encounters with people with disabilities, Cadwallader suggests that students change their habitual ways of responding to people with disabilities. While such reflections may be valuable for making habitual perceptual practices explicit, I would suggest that this is only a condition for the possibility of changing ablist perceptual practices rather than the change itself. Students are likely to enter the classroom lacking the insight that they are even engaging in perceptual practices informed by cultural narratives rather than simply perceiving people with impairments as they are. I argue that an approach to teaching on disability that thematizes perceptual practices regarding disability, and takes experiences of disabled people into account, would be more effective than the one Cadwallader describes. Understanding the ways that people with disabilities experience being constructed as a problem through ableist perceptual practices could help students recognize their own potential to impact others in positive and negative ways. (shrink)

How do creative people think? Do great works of the imagination originate in words or in images? Is there a rational explanation for the sudden appearance of geniuses like Mozart or Einstein? Such questions have fascinated people for centuries; only in recent years, however, has cognitive psychology been able to provide some clues to the mysterious process of creativity. In this revised edition of Notebooks of the Mind, Vera John-Steiner combines imaginative insight with scientific precision to produce a startling (...) account of the human mind working at its highest potential. To approach her subject John-Steiner goes directly to the source, assembling the thoughts of "experienced thinkers"--artists, philosophers, writers, and scientists able to reflect on their own imaginative patterns. More than fifty interviews, along with excerpts from the diaries, letters, and autobiographies of such gifted giants as Leo Tolstoy, Marie Curie, and Diego Rivera, among others, provide illuminating insights into creative activity. We read, for example, of Darwin's preoccupation with the image of nature as a branched tree while working on his concept of evolution. Mozart testifies to the vital influence on his mature art of the wondrous "bag of memories" he retained from childhood. Anais Nin describes her sense of words as oppressive, explaining how imagistic free association freed her as a writer. Adding these personal accounts to laboratory studies of thought process, John-Steiner takes a refreshingly holistic approach to the question of creativity. What emerges is an intriguing demonstration of how specific socio-cultural circumstances interact with certain personality traits to encourage the creative mind. Among the topics examined here are the importance of childhood mentor figures; the lengthy apprenticeship of the talented person; and the development of self- expression through highly individualistic languages, whether in images, movement or inner speech. Now, with a new introduction, this award-winning book provides an uniquely broad-based study of the origins, development and fruits of human inspiration. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that the question of how dual process theories of reasoning and judgement account for conflict between System 1 (heuristic) and System 2 (analytic) processes needs to be explicated and addressed in future research work. I demonstrate that a simple additive probability model that describes such conflict can be mapped on to three different cognitive models. The pre-emptive conflict resolution model assumes that a decision is made at the outset as to whether a heuristic (...) or analytic process will control the response. The parallel-competitive model assumes that each system operates in parallel to deliver a putative response, resulting sometimes in conflict that then needs to be resolved. Finally, the default-interventionist model involves the cueing of default responses by the heuristic system that may or may not be altered by subsequent intervention of the analytic system. A second, independent issue also emerges from this discussion. The superior performance of higher-ability participants on reasoning tasks may be due to the fact that they engage in more analytic reasoning ( quantity hypothesis ) or alternatively to the fact that the analytic reasoning they apply is more effective ( quality hypothesis ). (shrink)

Two experiments are reported that employed think-aloud methods to test predictions concerning relevance effects and rationalisation processes derivable from Evans' (1996) heuristic-analytic theory of the selection task. Evans' account proposes that card selections are triggered by relevance-determining heuristics, with analytic processing serving merely to rationalise heuristically cued decisions. As such, selected cards should be associated with more references to both their facing and their hidden sides than rejected cards, which are not subjected to analytic rationalisation. Experiment 1 used a (...) standard selection-task paradigm, with negative components permuted through abstract conditional rules. Support was found for all heuristic-analytic predictions. This evidence was shown to be robust in Experiment 2, where "select - don't select" decisions were enforced for all cards. Both experiments also clarify the role played by secondary heuristics in cueing the consideration of hidden card values during rationalisation. We suggest that whilst Evans' heuristic-analytic model and Oaksford and Chater's (e.g., 2003) optimal data selection model can provide compelling accounts of our protocol findings, the mental models theory fares less well as an explanation of our full dataset. (shrink)

We present a meta-analytic review on the processing of negations in conditional reasoning about affirmation problems (Modus Ponens: "MP", Affirmation of the Consequent "AC") and denial problems (Denial of the Antecedent "DA", and Modus Tollens "MT"). Findings correct previous generalisations about the phenomena. First, the effects of negation in the part of the conditional about which an inference is made, are not constrained to denial problems. These inferential-negation effects are also observed on AC. Second, there generally are reliable effects of (...) a negation in the clause referred to by the categorical premise, and these referred-negation effects are constrained to the logically fallacious AC and DA inferences. All findings are presented and discussed in relation to contemporary mental model (MM) and mental logic (ML) theories. It is argued that a double-negation elimination hypothesis provides a sufficient explanation of inferential-negation effects within both MM theory and ML theory, if the latter is extended by a validating search for counter examples. Both MM and ML theories adhere to a processing scheme that allows them to incorporate an account of referred-negation effects based on the thesis that counter-example frequency is modulated by the scope of a contrast class delineated by a false affirmative. We conclude that MM and ML theories provide adequate processing schemes to accommodate for the explanatory hypotheses, at least in principle. In practice, both approaches remain equivocal as regards the connectivity and interactivity with long-term memory knowledge invoked in generating, manipulating, and testing the mental representations of negative state of affairs. (shrink)

One of the deepest and longest-lasting debates in ethics concerns a version of the Euthyphro question: are choiceworthy things choiceworthy because agents have certain attitudes toward them or are they choiceworthy independent of any agents’ attitudes? Reasons internalists, such as Bernard Williams, Michael Smith, Mark Schroeder, Sharon Street, Kate Manne, Julia Markovits, and David Sobel answer in the first way. They think that all of an agent’s normative reasons for action are grounded in facts about that agent’s pro-attitudes (e.g., her (...) desires, valuing states, normative judgments). According to the most popular brand of internalism, idealizing internalism, an agent’s reasons are grounded, not in her actual pro-attitudes, but rather in what her pro-attitudes would be in suitably idealized conditions. Idealizing internalists presuppose that, for any agent with an irrational set of attitudes, there is one uniquely rational set that that agent would have if she were to undergo the relevant idealizing process. I argue that this assumption is false and that it raises two puzzles for idealizing internalism: one about the existence of practical reasons and another about their normative weight. I argue that idealizing internalists have an adequate solution to the first puzzle but not the second. Indeed, when they try to solve the second puzzle, they confront a dilemma. This second puzzle and the associated dilemma thus constitutes a powerful, but so far unnoticed, difficulty for idealizing internalism. (shrink)

Sympathy is a powerful principle in human nature, which can change our passions, sentiments and ways of thinking. For the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, sympathy is a working mechanism accountable for a wide range of communication: the ways of interacting with the others’ affections, emotions, sentiments, inclinations, ways of thinking and even opinions. The present paper intends to find a systematic reading of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature from the point of view of what the mechanism (...) of sympathetic communication implies in terms of strengthening our action of understanding, of being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of others. Hume’s description of the sympathetic mechanism appears to suggest that sympathetic passions come upon us purely by natural means in a passive manner, without the active use of any of our faculties. Consequently, scholarly attention is drawn to the mechanistic character of the sympathetic process; its automatic nature is emphasized to such an extent that some experts even find it to be completely void of any reflective process. The current study investigates to what extent the sympathetic process can actively be modified and in what manner sympathetic feelings can be generated as described in Hume’s system of emotions. The paper identifies at which points the otherwise mechanically and passively operating process of sympathetic feelings is open to be modified by actively altering or strengthening certain skeletal points of the mechanism. I argue that the alterations can be initiated by the person who receives the sympathetic feelings and also by the person whose passions are transmitted, moreover even by a third party. In a seemingly mechanic model, there is room for altering or at least amplifying one’s sympathetic feelings. (shrink)

Empirical research in the field of moral cognition is increasingly being used to draw conclusions in philosophical moral psychology, in particular regarding sentimentalist and rationalist accounts of moral judgment. This paper calls for a reassessment of both the empirical and philosophical conclusions being drawn from the moral cognition research. It is proposed that moral decision making is best understood as a species of Kahneman and Frederick's dual-process model of decision making. According to this model, emotional intuition-generating processes and reflective (...) processes operate in an integrated way in moral deliberation, and metacognition is assigned an essential role in the monitoring and shaping of moral intuitions. In combination with observations from philosophical moral psychology, this proposal cautions against endorsing simple sentimentalism or rejecting rationalist accounts on the basis of the moral cognition research. (shrink)

The article is a more detailed consideration of the problems that were outlined in the first part of this study, “The Application of the Proprioception of Thinking in Doing Philosophy with Children” (Socium and Power, 2019, no. 4). This time, the author pays attention to the characterization of thinking as a process in the practice of philosophizing with children, justifying the effectiveness of this practice, which forms the awareness of actions and develops emotional intelligence. The author contrasts (...) static abstract thinking with the dynamics of a tacit concrete process of thought. Philosophizing with children in a dialogue form completely engages in the thought process, focuses on the very thinking, which is constantly developing taking into account different points of view, is complicated and deepens the understanding on an emotional level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 55-59 [Access article in PDF] Response to Bennett Reimer, "Once More with Feeling: Reconciling Discrepant Accounts of Musical Affect" Charlene Morton University of British Columbia, Canada In A Philosophy of Music Education, Bennett Reimer reminds us that "the starting point is always an examination of values linked to the question, 'Why and for what purpose should we educate?'"1 But because, as he (...) puts it, the nature of pluralism in multicultural societies makes consensus about the purpose of education impossible, he suggests looking for the answer within the subject itself. For this reason, he returns to the debate about the relationship between inherent and delineative meaning in music. One of his objectives is to caution music educators against constructing "artificial" lessons that define musical feeling as exclusively manifest in either inherent or delineative meaning. I believe that this caution is warranted: contrived or superficial lessons can be miseducative and disappointing. I am less inclined to go the step further to investigate Reimer's position that "it is the complex middle-where both dimensions of music's power help shape and reshape musical reception-that poses the provocative dilemmas" because, although I acknowledge that sound stimulates psycho-physiological reactions, I am more sympathetic with Tia DeNora's observation that we need to think more [End Page 55] about "an interactionist conception of musical affect that moves beyond conundrums concerning whether music's affect is 'immanent' or 'attributed.'"2DeNora explains an interactionist conception of musical affect as an "appropriation of aesthetic materials" by consumers to construct meaning and identity in the context of their everyday lives.3 Her observation and research affirms John Shepherd's claim that music has not simply musical and extra-musical meaning but also ideological significance, "form[ing] an integral part of the social process."4 All to say that I am not going to involve myself in a conundrum revolving around inherent and delineated meaning, appreciated best by musicologists and psychologists. Instead, I want to return to "the starting point" Reimer identifies above, to a discussion about the purpose of public schooling.Beginning with the premise that people appropriate music to construct their realities and, subsequently, music has socio-political significance in how it is produced, presented, and received, I argue that, in addition to the more familiar raisons d'etre of developing subject-specific outcomes such as musicianship, musical intelligence, and, of course, musical enjoyment, music education should be better and explicitly fashioned as a path toward the broad goals of public education. Thus, the thesis of this response advocates a philosophical understanding of what music education can offer that is less about "involving all students in the very same matters to which [many of us] are devoted"-that is, musicianship, musical intelligence, and related philosophical and pedagogical conundrums-and more about realizing the purpose of education through the musical lives of students. To explore this line of thought, I will first review familiar and exceptional mission statements about the purpose of education. I will then revisit Reimer's second story which will serve as an autobiographical episode illustrating what might be educative about an interactionist understanding of musical affect. My conclusion will emphasize that although music, like "each subject studied in schools affords the student a distinctive window or frame through which the world can be viewed,"5 music educators, like all educators, should attend to teaching outside the subject itself if public schooling is to succeed in its distinctive and important mission. The Purpose of Education When anyone asked him where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world."6As a starting point for her study of cosmopolitan citizenship and its importance in educational reform in the United States, Martha Nussbaum cites the words of Diogenes. Her concerns about the force and consequences of American [End Page 56] nationalism and ethnocentrism motivate her argument "for making world citizenship, rather than democratic/national citizenship, as education's central focus." She is clear that her position does not... (shrink)

This paper explores the phenomenon of thought insertion, an experience reported by some schizophrenics where it is believed that other persons or forces are inserting thoughts into their minds. This relatively circumscribed symptom of schizophrenia raises difficult questions concerning our sense of agency for our thoughts. How is it possible that persons can think that their thoughts are not their own? Gallagher, drawing on Husserl’s early work on timeconsciousness, provides a subtle and sophisticated answer to this problem, suggesting that protention (...) may underlie our sense of agency for thinking and that the experience of inserted thoughts may occur in the event of an intermittent failure in this protentional function. More recent Husserl scholarship suggests, however, that this account may face problems on phenomenological grounds. It is argued here that our sense of agency for thinking requires more than protention, and, consequently, that the absence of protention cannot fully explain the loss of agency for thinking characterizing the experience of thought insertion. In order to contextualize this discussion of the phenomenon theoretically and, in the process, to provide an introduction to the difficulties in explaining it, this paper proceeds with a consideration of Frith’s early cognitive account of thought insertion and the contribution of Stephens and Graham in this regard. In conclusion, it is argued that, despite the merits of all three accounts presented, they remain unable to account for the phenomenon of inserted thoughts, and that we might more fruitfully understand this experience as bein a type of uncontrollable passive or autochthonous thinking. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 2 August 2006. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 55-59 [Access article in PDF] Response to Bennett Reimer, "Once More with Feeling: Reconciling Discrepant Accounts of Musical Affect" Charlene Morton University of British Columbia, Canada In A Philosophy of Music Education, Bennett Reimer reminds us that "the starting point is always an examination of values linked to the question, 'Why and for what purpose should we educate?'"1 But because, as he (...) puts it, the nature of pluralism in multicultural societies makes consensus about the purpose of education impossible, he suggests looking for the answer within the subject itself. For this reason, he returns to the debate about the relationship between inherent and delineative meaning in music. One of his objectives is to caution music educators against constructing "artificial" lessons that define musical feeling as exclusively manifest in either inherent or delineative meaning. I believe that this caution is warranted: contrived or superficial lessons can be miseducative and disappointing. I am less inclined to go the step further to investigate Reimer's position that "it is the complex middle-where both dimensions of music's power help shape and reshape musical reception-that poses the provocative dilemmas" because, although I acknowledge that sound stimulates psycho-physiological reactions, I am more sympathetic with Tia DeNora's observation that we need to think more [End Page 55] about "an interactionist conception of musical affect that moves beyond conundrums concerning whether music's affect is 'immanent' or 'attributed.'"2DeNora explains an interactionist conception of musical affect as an "appropriation of aesthetic materials" by consumers to construct meaning and identity in the context of their everyday lives.3 Her observation and research affirms John Shepherd's claim that music has not simply musical and extra-musical meaning but also ideological significance, "form[ing] an integral part of the social process."4 All to say that I am not going to involve myself in a conundrum revolving around inherent and delineated meaning, appreciated best by musicologists and psychologists. Instead, I want to return to "the starting point" Reimer identifies above, to a discussion about the purpose of public schooling.Beginning with the premise that people appropriate music to construct their realities and, subsequently, music has socio-political significance in how it is produced, presented, and received, I argue that, in addition to the more familiar raisons d'etre of developing subject-specific outcomes such as musicianship, musical intelligence, and, of course, musical enjoyment, music education should be better and explicitly fashioned as a path toward the broad goals of public education. Thus, the thesis of this response advocates a philosophical understanding of what music education can offer that is less about "involving all students in the very same matters to which [many of us] are devoted"-that is, musicianship, musical intelligence, and related philosophical and pedagogical conundrums-and more about realizing the purpose of education through the musical lives of students. To explore this line of thought, I will first review familiar and exceptional mission statements about the purpose of education. I will then revisit Reimer's second story which will serve as an autobiographical episode illustrating what might be educative about an interactionist understanding of musical affect. My conclusion will emphasize that although music, like "each subject studied in schools affords the student a distinctive window or frame through which the world can be viewed,"5 music educators, like all educators, should attend to teaching outside the subject itself if public schooling is to succeed in its distinctive and important mission. The Purpose of Education When anyone asked him where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world."6As a starting point for her study of cosmopolitan citizenship and its importance in educational reform in the United States, Martha Nussbaum cites the words of Diogenes. Her concerns about the force and consequences of American [End Page 56] nationalism and ethnocentrism motivate her argument "for making world citizenship, rather than democratic/national citizenship, as education's central focus." She is clear that her position does not... (shrink)

Teachers’ emotions may be affected by structural reforms of education that emphasizes performance-based accountability and by individual psychological processes like thinking style, but there is a lack of research concerning the relationship between the three factors. In this study, thus, we attempted to test the influence of PBA on teacher emotions and to examine whether the relationship was moderated by a zhongyong thinking style in a Chinese context. A sample of 402 primary and secondary schoolteachers from Hubei, Liaoning, (...) and Beijing in China participated in this study. Structural equation modeling was applied to develop moderation models. The results demonstrated that PBA is a singificant factor with respect to teachers’ joy, sadness/frustration, anger, and fear, as related to their job of teaching, but not love of their profession. Moreover, the ZYT style may moderate the relationship between PBA and joy. (shrink)

Our culture and its scientific endeavor direly need a holistic characterization of mind and body. Many phenomena attest to the profound effects of beliefs on bodily function (e.g., open-label placebo's effects on chronic pain) and interoceptive systems’ role in mental processes (e.g., the emerging role of gut microbiomes in the mood). We need a mechanistic, integrative framework to account for these phenomena and generate novel predictions. Major advances have been made in understanding how the nervous system senses and regulates (...) the body and in modeling how the brain implements the computations that subserve such activities. However, the vestiges of Cartesianism have entrained a style of thinking in which systems from the brainstem downward exist as the implementation layer of computational processes supporting sensation and behavior, rather than a complementary locus of information processing. As speakers and microphones, rather than other members of the chorus. We are thus forced to perceive well-documented, belief-driven phenomena like placebo, ritual, and psychosomatic disorders as mysterious obstacles or dubious allies rather than as a wellspring of potential. (shrink)

The last few decades have seen a steady growth of interest in doing philosophy with children and young people in educational settings. Philosophy with children is increasingly offered as a solution to the problems associated with what is seen by many as a disoriented, cynical, indifferent and individualistic society. It represents for its practitioners a powerful vehicle that teaches children and young people how to think about particular problems in society through the use of interpretive schemes and procedures especially designed (...) for this. It typically conceives of truth-telling as the work of dialogical reasoning, which is understood in turn as leading to increasing awareness of mental and methodological processes. This article starts from another point of view. What is at stake, I shall argue, is not so much the question of how to think for oneself in an appropriate way. Rather, in line with Michel Foucault, I want to identify philosophy as a practice oriented by the care of the self and of transformation of the self by the self. From this angle, philosophy with children will not be understood as something that orients us towards valid knowledge claims, but as an act of becoming present in the present. This way of conceiving of philosophy with children will be explored in the context of a concrete philosophical experiment with children that I planned and carried out in Cambodia. (shrink)

A post-Darwinian conception of feeling and emotion is necessary in order to better appreciate the embodied, personalized, and socialized nature of cognition in Peirce's late 1860's Journal of Speculative Philosophy "cognition series." Peirce both distinguishes between and renders synonymous the terms "feeling" and "emotion," a fruitful ambiguity that underscores how easily one's process of thinking can be influenced by idiosyncratic concerns. My reading of this series is a proactive one in which I employ the work of Antonio Damasio (...) to highlight the implicit post-Darwinian embodiment themes in this series. (shrink)

For advocates of critical realism emergence is a central theme. Critical realists typically ground their defence of the relative disciplinary autonomy of various sciences by arguing that emergent phenomena exist in a robust non-ontologically, non-causally reductionist sense. Despite the importance they attach to it critical realists have only recently begun to elaborate on emergence at length and systematically compare their own account with those developed by others. This paper clarifies what is distinctive about the critical realist account of (...) emergence by comparing it with an alternative. Critical realism and interactivism are shown to independently converge on the same general process (or constraint) view of emergence and develop complementary accounts of particular emergents. (shrink)

Traditionally, conceptual thinking is explored via philosophical analysis or psychological experimentation. We seek to complement these mainstream approaches with the perspective of a first person exploration into pure thinking. To begin with, pure thinking is defined as a process and differentiated from its content, the concepts itself. Pure thinking is an active process and not a series of associative thought-events; we participate in it, we immerse ourselves within its active performance. On the other hand, (...) concepts are also of an experiential nature. And yet, little is known about what is it like to have or produce a thought, a concept, or an idea? Is a concept our own construction, a product of our own activity, or is it something we merely discover instead of producing it? We address these issues in a systematic first person enquiry into pure thinking. (shrink)

In the present study it was shown that decision heuristics and confidence judgements play important roles in the building of preferences. Based on a dual-process account of thinking, the study compared people who did well versus poorly on a series of decision heuristics and overconfidence judgement tasks. The two groups were found to differ with regard to their information search behaviour in introduced multiattribute choice tasks. High performers on the judgemental tasks were less influenced in their decision (...) processes by numerical information format (probabilities vs. frequencies) compared to low performers. They also looked at more attributes and spent more time on the multiattribute choice tasks. The results reveal that performance on decision heuristics and overconfidence tasks has a bearing both on heuristic and analytic processes in multiattribute decision making. (shrink)