This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begins by examining such questions from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is becoming increasingly influential in neuroscience and cognitive science. It says that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected biological and cognitive states, and that they can do so only by minimizing their free energy given that the long-term average of free energy is entropy. The paper then argues that (...) there is no singular interpretation of the FEP for thinking about the relation between life and mind. Some FEP formulations express what we call an independence view of life and mind. One independence view is a cognitivist view of the FEP. It turns on information processing with semantic content, thus restricting the range of systems capable of exhibiting mentality. Other independence views exemplify what we call an overly generous non-cognitivist view of the FEP, and these appear to go in the opposite direction. That is, they imply that mentality is nearly everywhere. The paper proceeds to argue that non-cognitivist FEP, and its implications for thinking about the relation between life and mind, can be usefully constrained by key ideas in recent enactive approaches to cognitive science. We conclude that the most compelling account of the relationship between life and mind treats them as strongly continuous, and that this continuity is based on particular concepts of life (autopoiesis and adaptivity) and mind (basic and non-semantic). (shrink)

Located at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of biology, this thesis aims to provide a novel approach to understanding the strong continuity between life and mind. This thesis applies the Free Energy Framework, predictive processing and the conceptual apparatus from ecological psychology to reveal different manners in which the organizational processes and principles underlying life have been enriched so as to result in cognitive processes. By using these anticipatory cognitive frameworks this (...) class='Hi'>thesis unveils different forms of cognition at work in surprising places and considers how such expressions of cognition are ultimately driven by various forms of environmental complexity. Importing the concepts of affordances, environmental information and perceptual medium from ecological psychology into predictive processing and the Free Energy Framework, an empirically grounded account of cognition as an anticipatory process that allows living systems to adapt to various degrees of uncertainty in their environments at distinct and yet overlapping timescales is argued for. In doing so, this thesis attempts to identify both the explanatory limits of ecological coupling accounts of perception and action, and the possible environmental conditions under which the predictive brain evolved from its decentralized non-neural predecessors as a solution to uncertainty. In contributing to a novel approach to constraining the mind, the various concepts deployed in both philosophy and cognitive science are sharpened, furthering the current debate on what cognition is and how it is related to life. (shrink)

In his review of my Prelude to Galileo, Ernan McMullin rejects my emendation of Pierre Duhem's “continuity thesis” wherein I develop the case for a pronounced medieval-scholastic influence on Galileo's science based on parallels between Galileo's early Latin compositions and lectures given by contemporary Jesuits at the Collegio Romano. He does so on two grounds: that the evidence of derivation I provide, using textual parallels, is so strong that it refutes the claim for any intellectual influence, being (...) a better instance of mindless copying than one of personal appropriation; and that, in any event, the logical structure of the argument which I attribute to Galileo's mature work is not that of demonstration ex suppositione as understood by Aquinas, and so the example I provide of Galileo's use of suppositio “does not link him in any significant way to the specifically Thomist tradition of natural science”. An adequate reply to this critique would require the introduction of more historical evidence than would be appropriate for the pages of this journal. A few remarks, however, may be in order concerning such evidence which bears directly on McMullin's first ground, and concerning the implications of this evidence for contemporary philosophy of science, which bear on his second. (shrink)

Don Marquis has put forward a non-religious argument against abortion based on what he claims is a morally relevant similarity between killing adult human beings and killing fetuses. He asserts that killing adults is wrong because it deprives them of their valuable futures. He points out that a fetus’s future includes everything that is in an adult’s future, given that fetuses naturally develop into adults. Thus, according to Marquis, killing a fetus deprives it of the same sort of valuable future (...) that an adult is deprived of in being killed and this makes abortion seriously wrong. Commentators have raised a number of objections to Marquis’s argument, to which he has satisfactorily responded. In this paper, difficulties with Marquis’s argument that have not been considered by previous commentators are pointed out. A main thesis of this paper is that Marquis does not adequately defend his argument against several important objections that he himself has raised. These new considerations support the view that Marquis’s argument is unsuccessful. (shrink)

: Continuing the dialogue begun in the March 2006 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, I suggest that Bernard Gert's response to my paper does not adequately address the criticisms I make of his theory's application to bioethics cases.

Blood supplies have become indexes of national security and the public good. While blood shortages can provoke anxiety, controversies continue to erupt in many countries over proper donor screening, especially with reference to HIV. This article sketches these dynamics in several global settings, focusing especially on activist efforts by gay men to reform exclusionary blood donor guidelines. The contours of the debate recall familiar conflicts between the putative demands of public health and the rights of individuals in the era of (...) AIDS. However, if gay activists marshal a discourse of individual rights vis-a-vis forms of institutional exclusion, they also seek a broader shift in social and cultural understandings of gay identity. To capture this complex interplay of citizenship and sociality, risk and responsibility, the article introduces the notion of `vital publics' to refer to the peculiar associational form represented by blood supplies. Vital publics are kinds of embodied association elicited through the generalized exchange of body — in this case, blood. Hailed to `give life' by the jargon of the pervasive social marketing of varied blood service systems, activists seek to contribute to the life of the `vital public' that transfusion medicine calls into being. (shrink)

This book is third in a series dedicated to the first Homo sapiens: the Australian Aboriginal people. Steven and Evan Strong continue their investigation into the global impact of Aboriginal people, relaying that the First Australians are unique, and in no way descended from Africans or any other race.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:KARL ASCHENBRENNER, 19x 1-1988 Karl Aschenbrenner was born in Bison, Kansas, on November 20, 1911. He received the A. B. degree from Reed College in 1934 and his graduate degrees at Berkeley (M. A., 1938; Ph.D., 194o). After two years as an instructor at Reed College, he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve (Lieutenant in Meteorology ) from 1943 to 1946. From 1946 to 1948, he taught in the (...) Department of Speech at Berkeley and thereafter in the Department of Philosophy until his retirement in 1978. His teaching was devoted mainly to aesthetics and to the history of philosophy, most notably his course on Kant. For many years he was active as a trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics, and from 1961 as a member of the Journal's founding executive committee and, after incorporation, of the Board of Directors. Karl's first two years of attachment to theJournal coincided with service as chairman of the Department of Philosophy. This conjunction enabled him to be extraordinarily helpful in dealing with problems of bringing the Journal to birth--problems of funding, editorial appointments, publication policies, and business arrangements with the University of California Press. He welcomed the opportunity offered the Philosophy Department of collaborating in the publishing venture recommended by a special committee of the American Philosophical Association in 1958. The recognition early won by the Journal for its articles and reviews answered to his hope and work for success. At the annual meeting of the Board of Directors in San Francisco in 1987, the twenty-fifth birthday of the Journal was celebrated as was his twenty-seven years of diligent care for theJournafs excellence. Karl was a regular contributor to the philosophy series published by the University of California prior to three books issued by D. Reidel: The Concepts ofValue(1971), The ConceptsofCriticism(1974) and AnalysisofAppraisiveCharacterization (1983). He received Guggenheim, Fulbright, and NEH fellowships. Despite a physically disabling stroke in 1979, he continued his trips to Budapest which he began in 1972. He was concerned to study a non-IndoEuropean language spoken by people of European culture and had selected the Magyar tongue spoken in Hungary. He learned the language to test theories he advanced about appraisive concepts. He discovered in the structure of Magyar a mode of valuing embodied in verb usage differing significantly [333] 334 from the special appraisive vocabularies of English and German. Besides his lectures in Hungary, he responded to invitations to lecture received from universities in England, Austria, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania. Shortly after his return to Budapest on his eleventh trip, he died of a massive stroke on July 4, 1988. He is buried there in a city he loved, especially for its music. He is survived by Marie, his wife of fifty-one years, and three children: Lisabeth, an attorney in Los Angeles; Peter, a judge in Fairbanks; and John, a composer in New York. E. W. STRONG... (shrink)

The strong continuity thesis postulates that the properties of mind are an enriched version of the properties of life, and thus that life and mind differ in degree and not kind. A philosophical problem for this view is the ostensive discontinuity between humans and other animals in virtue of our use of symbols—particularly the presumption that the symbolic nature of human cognition bears no relation to the basic properties of life. In this paper, we make the case (...) that a genuine account of strong continuity requires the identification of some sort of correlate of symbol-use in basic life properties. Our strategy is three-fold: 1) we argue that examples of proto-symbolism in simple living systems would be consistent with an evolutionary trajectory that ultimately produced symbolic cognition in humans; 2) we introduce Gordon Tomkins’ biological notion of ‘symbol’ as something that represents to the organism a feature of its environment that is significant to its survival; and 3) we employ this biological understanding of symbol-use to suggest that the symbolic nature of human cognition can be understood as an enriched version of the basic symbolic properties of life, thus preserving life-mind continuity in this context. (shrink)

A weak version of the life-mind continuity thesis entails that every living system also has a basic mind (with a non-representational form of intentionality). The strong version entails that the same concepts that are sufficient to explain basic minds (with non-representational states) are also central to understanding non-basic minds (with representational states). We argue that recent work on the free energy principle supports the following claims with respect to the life-mind continuity thesis: (i) there is (...) a strong continuity between life and mind; (ii) all living systems can be described as if they had representational states; (iii) the ’as-if representationality’ entailed by the free energy principle is central to understanding both basic forms of intentionality and intentionality in non-basic minds. In addition to this, we argue that the free energy principle also renders realism about computation and representation compatible with a strong life-mind continuity thesis (although the free energy principle does not entail computational and representational realism). In particular, we show how representationality proper can be grounded in ’as-if representationality’. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is an axiomatic study of the interrelations between certain continuity properties. We show that every mapping is sequentially continuous if and only if it is sequentially nondiscontinuous and strongly extensional, and that "every mapping is strongly extensional", "every sequentially nondiscontinuous mapping is sequentially continuous", and a weak version of Markov's principle are equivalent. Also, assuming a consequence of Church's thesis, we prove a version of the Kreisel-Lacombe-Shoenfield-Tsĕitin theorem.

In their recent book Radicalizing Enactivism. Basic minds without content, Dan Hutto and Erik Myin make two important criticisms of what they call autopoietic enactivism. These two criticisms are that AE harbours tacit representationalists commitments and that it has too liberal a conception of cognition. Taking the latter claim as its main focus, this paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of AE in order to tease out how it might respond to H&M. In so doing it uncovers some reasons which not (...) only appear to warrant H&M’s initial claims but also seem to point to further uneasy tensions within the AE framework. The paper goes beyond H&M by tracing the roots of these criticisms and apparent tensions to phenomenology and the role it plays in AE’s distinctive conception of strong life-mind continuity. It is highlighted that this phenomenological dimension of AE contains certain unexamined anthropomorphic and anthropogenic leanings which do not sit comfortably within its wider commitment to life-mind continuity. In light of this analysis it is suggested that AE will do well to rethink this role or ultimately run the risk of remaining theoretically unstable. The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing theoretical development of AE by highlighting potential internal tensions within its framework which need to be addressed in order for it to continue to evolve as a coherent paradigm. (shrink)

The strong version of the life-mind continuity thesis claims that mind can be understood as an enriched version of the same functional and organizational properties of life. Contrary to this view, in this paper I argue that mental phenomena offer distinctive properties, such as intentionality or representational content, that have no counterpart in the phenomenon of life, and that must be explained by appealing to a different level of functional and organizational principles. As a strategy, and following (...) Maturana’s autopoietic theory of cognition, I introduce a conceptual distinction between mind and cognition. I argue that cognition corresponds to the natural behaviour that every living being exhibits in the realization of its existence, and that, viewed in that way, cognition is a dynamic process of structural coupling that, unlike mental phenomena, involves no representational contents. On the basis of this distinction, I try to show that while life suffices for cognition, it does not suffice for mind. That is, that the strong continuity is not between life and mind but between life and cognition. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that before the introduction of quantum mechanics, determinism was a straightforward consequence of the laws of mechanics. However, around the nineteenth century, many physicists, for various reasons, did not regard determinism as a provable feature of physics. This is not to say that physicists in this period were not committed to determinism; there were some physicists who argued for fundamental indeterminism, but most were committed to determinism in some sense. However, for them, determinism was often not (...) a provable feature of physical theory, but rather an a priori principle or a methodological presupposition. Determinism was strongly connected with principles of causality and continuity and the principle of sufficient reason; this thesis examines the relevance of these principles in the history of physics. Moreover, the history of determinism in this period shows that there were essential changes in the relation between mathematics and physics: whereas in the eighteenth century, there were metaphysical arguments which lent support to differential calculus, by the early twentieth century the development of rigorous foundations of differential calculus led to concerns about its applicability in physics. The thesis consists of six papers. In the first paper, "On the origins and foundations of Laplacian determinism", I argue that Laplace, who is usually pointed out as the first major proponent of scientific determinism, did not derive his statement of determinism directly from the laws of mechanics; rather, his determinism has a background in eighteenth century Leibnizian metaphysics, and is ultimately based on the law of continuity and the principle of sufficient reason. These principles also provided a basis for the idea that one can find laws of nature in the form of differential equations which uniquely determine natural processes. In "The Norton dome and the nineteenth century foundations of determinism", I argue that an example of indeterminism in classical physics which has attracted attention in philosophy of physics in recent years, namely the Norton come, was already discussed during the nineteenth century. However, the significance which this type of indeterminism had back then is very different from the significance which the Norton dome currently has in philosophy of physics. This is explained by the fact that determinism was conceived of in an essentially different way: in particular, the nineteenth century authors who wrote about this type of indeterminism regarded determinism as an a priori principle rather than as a property of the equations of physics. In "Vital instability: life and free will in physics and physiology, 1860-1880", I show how Maxwell, Cournot, Stewart and Boussinesq used the possibility of unstable or indeterministic mechanical systems to argue that the will or a vital principle can intervene in organic processes without violating the laws of physics, so that a strictly dualist account of life and the mind is possible. Moreover, I show that their ideas can be understood as a reaction to the law of conservation of energy and to the way it was used in physiology to exclude vital and mental causes. In "The nineteenth century conflict between mechanism and irreversibility", I show that in the late nineteenth century, there was a widespread conflict between the aim of reducing physical processes to mechanics and the recognition that certain processes are irreversible. Whereas the so-called reversibility objection is known as an objection that was made to the kinetic theory of gases, it in fact appeared in a wide range of arguments, and was susceptible to very different interpretations. It was only when the project of reducing all of physics to mechanics lost favor, in the late nineteenth century, that the reversibility objection came to be used as an argument against mechanism and against the kinetic theory of gases. In "Continuity in nature and in mathematics: Boltzmann and Poincaré", I show that the development of rigorous foundations of differential calculus in the nineteenth century led to concerns about its applicability in physics: through this development, differential calculus was made independent of empirical and intuitive notions of continuity and was instead based on mathematical continuity conditions, and for Boltzmann and Poincaré, the applicability of differential calculus in physics depended on whether these continuity conditions could be given a foundation in intuition or experience. In the final paper, "Determinism around 1900", I briefly discuss the implications of the developments described in the previous two papers for the history of determinism in physics, through a discussion of determinism in Mach, Poincaré and Boltzmann. I show that neither of them regards determinism as a property of the laws of mechanics; rather, for them, determinism is a precondition for science, which can be verified to the extent that science is successful. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there is neither valid deductive support nor strong inductive support for Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis. There is no valid deductive support for Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis because, from the fact that the reference of the same kind terms changes or discontinues from one theoretical framework to another, it does not necessarily follow that these two theoretical frameworks are taxonomically incommensurable. There is no strong inductive support for Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis, since there (...) are rebutting defeaters against it in the form of episodes from the history of science that do not exhibit discontinuity and replacement, as Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis predicts, but rather continuity and supplementation. If this is correct, then there are no compelling epistemic reasons to believe that Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis is true or probable. (shrink)

The thesis deals with the concept of truth and the paradoxes of truth. Philosophical theories usually consider the concept of truth from a wider perspective. They are concerned with questions such as - Is there any connection between the truth and the world? And, if there is - What is the nature of the connection? Contrary to these theories, this analysis is of a logical nature. It deals with the internal semantic structure of language, the mutual semantic connection of (...) sentences, above all the connection of sentences that speak about the truth of other sentences and sentences whose truth they speak about. Truth paradoxes show that there is a problem in our basic understanding of the language meaning and they are a test for any proposed solution. It is important to make a distinction between the normative and analytical aspect of the solution. The former tries to ensure that paradoxes will not emerge. The latter tries to explain paradoxes. Of course, the practical aspect of the solution is also important. It tries to ensure a good framework for logical foundations of knowledge, for related problems in Artificial Intelligence and for the analysis of the natural language. Tarski’s analysis emphasized the T-scheme as the basic intuitive principle for the concept of truth, but it also showed its inconsistency with the classical logic. Tarski’s solution is to preserve the classical logic and to restrict the scheme: we can talk about the truth of sentences of a language only inside another essentially richer metalanguage. This solution is in harmony with the idea of reflexivity of thinking and it has become very fertile for mathematics and science in general. But it has normative nature | truth paradoxes are avoided in a way that in such frame we cannot even express paradoxical sentences. It is also too restrictive because, for the same reason we cannot express a situation in which there is a circular reference of some sentences to other sentences, no matter how common and harmless such a situation may be. Kripke showed that there is no natural restriction to the T-scheme and we have to accept it. But then we must also accept the riskiness of sentences | the possibility that under some circumstances a sentence does not have the classical truth value but it is undetermined. This leads to languages with three-valued semantics. Kripke did not give any definite model, but he gave a theoretical frame for investigations of various models | each fixed point in each three-valued semantics can be a model for the concept of truth. The solutions also have normative nature | we can express the paradoxical sentences, but we escape a contradiction by declaring them undetermined. Such a solution could become an analytical solution only if we provide the analysis that would show in a substantial way that it is the solution that models the concept of truth. Kripke took some steps in the direction of finding an analytical solution. He preferred the strong Kleene three-valued semantics for which he wrote it was "appropriate" but did not explain why it was appropriate. One reason for such a choice is probably that Kripke finds paradoxical sentences meaningful. This eliminates the weak Kleene three valued semantics which corresponds to the idea that paradoxical sentences are meaningless, and thus indeterminate. Another reason could be that the strong Kleene three valued semantics has the so-called investigative interpretation. According to this interpretation, this semantics corresponds to the classical determination of truth, whereby all sentences that do not have an already determined value are temporarily considered indeterminate. When we determine the truth value of these sentences, then we can also determine the truth value of the sentences that are composed of them. Kripke supplemented this investigative interpretation with an intuition about learning the concept of truth. That intuition deals with how we can teach someone who is a competent user of an initial language (without the predicate of truth T) to use sentences that contain the predicate T. That person knows which sentences of the initial language are true and which are not. We give her the rule to assign the T attribute to the former and deny that attribute to the latter. In that way, some new sentences that contain the predicate of truth, and which were indeterminate until then, become determinate. So the person gets a new set of true and false sentences with which he continues the procedure. This intuition leads directly to the smallest fixed point of strong Kleene semantics as an analytically acceptable model for the logical notion of truth. However, since this process is usually saturated only on some transfinite ordinal, this intuition, by climbing on ordinals, increasingly becomes a metaphor. This thesis is an attempt to give an analytical solution to truth paradoxes. It gives an analysis of why and how some sentences lack the classical truth value. The starting point is basic intuition according to which paradoxical sentences are meaningful (because we understand what they are talking about well, moreover we use it for determining their truth values), but they witness the failure of the classical procedure of determining their truth value in some "extreme" circumstances. Paradoxes emerge because the classical procedure of the truth value determination does not always give a classically supposed (and expected) answer. The analysis shows that such an assumption is an unjustified generalization from common situations to all situations. We can accept the classical procedure of the truth value determination and consequently the internal semantic structure of the language, but we must reject the universality of the exterior assumption of a successful ending of the procedure. The consciousness of this transforms paradoxes to normal situations inherent to the classical procedure. Some sentences, although meaningful, when we evaluate them according to the classical truth conditions, the classical conditions do not assign them a unique value. We can assign to them the third value, \undetermined", as a sign of definitive failure of the classical procedure. An analysis of the propagation of the failure in the structure of sentences gives exactly the strong Kleene three-valued semantics, not as an investigative procedure, as it occurs in Kripke, but as the classical truth determination procedure accompanied by the propagation of its own failure. An analysis of the circularities in the determination of the classical truth value gives the criterion of when the classical procedure succeeds and when it fails, when the sentences will have the classical truth value and when they will not. It turns out that the truth values of sentences thus obtained give exactly the largest intrinsic fixed point of the strong Kleene three-valued semantics. In that way, the argumentation is given for that choice among all fixed points of all monotone three-valued semantics for the model of the logical concept of truth. An immediate mathematical description of the fixed point is given, too. It has also been shown how this language can be semantically completed to the classical language which in many respects appears a natural completion of the process of thinking about the truth values of the sentences of a given language. Thus the final model is a language that has one interpretation and two systems of sentence truth evaluation, primary and final evaluation. The language through the symbol T speaks of its primary truth valuation, which is precisely the largest intrinsic fixed point of the strong Kleene three valued semantics. Its final truth valuation is the semantic completion of the first in such a way that all sentences that are not true in the primary valuation are false in the final valuation. (shrink)

The paper studies the relation between systems of modal logic and systems of consequential implication, a non-material form of implication satisfying "Aristotle's Thesis" (p does not imply not p) and "Weak Boethius' Thesis" (if p implies q, then p does not imply not q). Definitions are given of consequential implication in terms of modal operators and of modal operators in terms of consequential implication. The modal equivalent of "Strong Boethius' Thesis" (that p implies q implies that (...) p does not imply not q) is identified. (shrink)

Uniform sequential continuity, a property classically equivalent to sequential continuity on compact sets, is shown, constructively, to be a consequence of strong continuity on a metric space. It is then shown that in the case of a separable metric space, uniform sequential continuity implies strong continuity if and only if one adopts a certain boundedness principle that, although valid in the classical, recursive and intuitionistic setting, is independent of Heyting arithmetic.

This article argues that the long-standing tension in Jeffrey Alexander’s work between theoretical multidimensionality and socio-cultural idealism has intensified in his recent writings, to problematical effect. Whilst Alexander has shifted of late towards a more substantive and normative style of thinking, his new emphases continue to be grounded in arguments pitched at the general theoretical level. One of these involves a particular reading of the nature of post-positivist meta-theory today, and the other, within this, is a determined effort to distinguish (...) a project of ‘cultural sociology’ from ‘sociology of culture’ approaches. I take issue with both of these theoretical moves, showing that they are rhetorically and conceptually flawed, and of a strongly idealist cast. They also run counter to those aspects of Alexander’s outlook that do seem more robustly multidimensional and sociologically promising. (shrink)

A natural extension theorem for strongly continuous mappings, the morphisms in the category of apartness spaces, is proved constructively.

Hoyningen-Huene develops an account of what science is, distinguishing it from common sense. According to Hoyningen-Huene, the key distinguishing feature is that science is more systematic. He identifies nine ways in which science is more systematic than common sense. I compare Hoyningen-Huene’s view to a view I refer to as the “Continuity Thesis.” The Continuity Thesis states that scientific knowledge is just an extension of common sense. This thesis is associated with Quine, Planck, and others. (...) I argue that Hoyningen-Huene ultimately rejects the Continuity Thesis, and I present further evidence to show that the Continuity Thesis is false. I also argue that it is the systematicity of science that ultimately grounds the epistemic authority of science. Hoyningen-Huene thus draws attention to an important feature of science that explains the place of science in contemporary society. (shrink)

The life–mind continuity thesis is difficult to study, especially because the relation between life and mind is not yet fully understood, and given that there is still no consensus view neither on what qualifies as life nor on what defines mind. Rather than taking up the much more difficult task of addressing the many different ways of explaining how life relates to mind, and vice versa, this paper considers two influential accounts addressing how best to understand the life–mind (...) continuity thesis: first, the theory of autopoiesis (AT) developed in biology and in enactivist theories of mind; and second, the recently formulated free energy principle in theoretical neurobiology, with roots in thermodynamics and statistical physics. This paper advances two claims. The first is that the free energy principle (FEP) should be preferred to the theory of AT, as classically formulated. The second is that the FEP and the recently formulated framework of autopoietic enactivism can be shown to be genuinely continuous on a number of central issues, thus raising the possibility of a joint venture when it comes to answering the life–mind continuity thesis. (shrink)

This essay reviews John Gardner’s recent books, From Personal Life to Private Law, and Torts and Other Wrongs. Both books offer profound insights into private law’s concerns with justice and our reasons for action. The essay focuses on Gardner’s continuity thesis, and in particular on his idea that a third party may act on behalf of a wrongdoer as her delegee. Three settings are considered. First, I will discuss settings in which the state or another third party acts (...) to remedy a wrong without the wrongdoer’s consent. Second, I will review settings in which the legal remedies at issue – e.g., general damages or punitive damages – may not fit well with the idea that the state is acting on behalf of a wrongdoer. Third, I will analyze settings in which the state may be acting on behalf of right holders, yet still be concerned with the continuity thesis. Assessing each of these contexts offers further insights into the purpose of private law remedies. (shrink)

The life–mind continuity thesis holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to life. The biggest challenge faced by proponents of this thesis is to show how an explanatory framework that accounts for basic biological processes can be systematically extended to incorporate the highest reaches of human cognition. We suggest that this apparent ‘cognitive gap’ between minimal and human forms of life appears insurmountable largely because of the methodological individualism that is prevalent in cognitive (...) science. Accordingly, a twofold strategy is used to show how a consideration of sociality can address both sides of the cognitive gap: (1) it is argued from a systemic perspective that inter-agent interactions can extend the behavioral domain of even the simplest agents and (2) it is argued from a phenomenological perspective that the cognitive attitude characteristic of adult human beings is essentially intersubjectively constituted, in particular with respect to the possibility of perceiving objects as detached from our own immediate concerns. These two complementary considerations of the constitutive role of inter-agent interactions for mind and cognition indicate that sociality is an indispensable element of the life–mind continuity thesis and of cognitive science more generally. (shrink)

An artificial general intelligence (AGI) might have an instrumental drive to modify its utility function to improve its ability to cooperate, bargain, promise, threaten, and resist and engage in blackmail. Such an AGI would necessarily have a utility function that was at least partially observable and that was influenced by how other agents chose to interact with it. This instrumental drive would conflict with the strong orthogonality thesis since the modifications would be influenced by the AGI’s intelligence. AGIs (...) in highly competitive environments might converge to having nearly the same utility function, one optimized to favorably influencing other agents through game theory. Nothing in our analysis weakens arguments concerning the risks of AGI. (shrink)

According to the Strong Belief Thesis (SBT), intending to X entails the belief that one will X. John Brunero has attempted to impugn SBT by arguing that there are cases in which an agent intends to X but is unsure that she will X. Moreover, he claims that the standard reply to such putative counterexamples to SBT – namely, to claim that the unsure agent merely has an intention to try – comes at a high price. Specifically, it (...) prevents SBT from playing the kind of explanatory role the cognitivist requires. This article meets Brunero's challenge to SBT by offering an account of trying and intending to try that not only saves SBT from Brunero's criticism, but does so in a way that preserves the explanatory significance that cognitivists typically take SBT to have. (shrink)

Naturalistic philosophers ought to think that the mind is continuous with the rest of the world and should not, therefore, be surprised by the findings of the extended mind, cognitive integration and enactivism. Not everyone is convinced that all mental phenomena are continuous with the rest of the world. For example, intentionality is often formulated in a way that makes the mind discontinuous with the rest of the world. This is a consequence of Brentano’s formulation of intentionality, I suggest, and (...) can be overcome by revealing that the concept of intentional directedness as he receives it from the Scholastics is quite consistent with the continuity thesis. It is only when intentional directedness is conjoined with intentional inexistence that intentionality and content are consistent with a discontinuity thesis (such as Brentano’s thesis). This makes room to develop an account of intentional directedness that is consistent with the continuity thesis in the form of Peirce’s representational principle. I also argue against a form of the discontinuity thesis in the guise of the derived/underived content distinction. Having shown that intentionality is consistent with the continuity thesis I argue that we should focus on intentionality and representation as bodily enacted. I conclude that we would be better off focussing on representation and intentionality in action rather than giving abstract functional accounts of extended cognition. (shrink)

Summary The controversy about the strong AI-thesis was recently revived by two interrelated contributions stemming from J. R. Searle on the one hand and from P. M. and P. S. Churchland on the other hand. It is shown that the strong AI-thesis cannot be defended in the formulation used by the three authors. It violates some well accepted criterions of scientific argumentation, especially the rejection of essentialistic definitions. Moreover, Searle's ‘proof’ is not conclusive. Though it may (...) be reconstructed in a conclusive manner, the modified proof is trivial. Beyond that, the most interesting aspect is formulated as an axiom that is not justified either. Therefore Searle's criticism of strong AI-thesis fails to be a convincing proof — it can be reduced to an unjustified presupposition. (shrink)

Different analyses of complex cardinal numerals have been proposed in Generative Grammar. This article provides an analysis of these expressions based on the Strong Minimalist Thesis, according to which the derivations of linguistic expressions are generated by a simple combinatorial operation, applying in accord with principles external to the language faculty. The proposed derivations account for the asymmetrical structure of additive and multiplicative complexes and for the instructions they provide to the external systems for their interpretation. They harmonize (...) with those of coordinate nouns, and thus offer a unified Minimalist account of their core properties. Firstly, the empirical problem addressed is stated. Secondly, the theoretical framework is presented. Thirdly, Minimalist derivations for additive and multiplicative complexes are provided. Fourthly, the proposed derivations are contrasted with derivations not relying on the Strong Minimalist Thesis. Lastly, consequences for linguistic theory are identified as well as questions open to further inquiry. (shrink)

A strongly independent preorder on a possibly in finite dimensional convex set that satisfi es two of the following conditions must satisfy the third: (i) the Archimedean continuity condition; (ii) mixture continuity; and (iii) comparability under the preorder is an equivalence relation. In addition, if the preorder is nontrivial (has nonempty asymmetric part) and satisfi es two of the following conditions, it must satisfy the third: (i') a modest strengthening of the Archimedean condition; (ii') mixture continuity; and (...) (iii') completeness. Applications to decision making under conditions of risk and uncertainty are provided. (shrink)

Living things are autonomous agents distinguished from nonliving things in having the purpose to actively maintain their existence. All living things, including single-celled organisms, have certain degrees of freedom from physical causality to choose their actions with intentions to fulfill their purpose. This circumstance is analogous to that of human intention-actions guided by mind, and points to the ubiquitous presence of the dimension of mind in the living world. The primordial form of mind in single-celled organisms eventually evolved into the (...) human mind by virtue of the adaptive value of mind for survival. Life seems to have originated from nonliving matter in processes that are continuous. Thus the dimension of mind must extend to the nonliving world, and the origin of mind should be taken to relate to the origin of matter. Inasmuch as matter exists in a hierarchy of levels of complexity extending from quarks up to the whole universe, mind must also be presumed to exist in a hierarchy of levels of complexity associated with matter. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for an embodied, embedded approach to predictive processing and thus align the framework with situated cognition. The recent popularity of theories conceiving of the brain as a predictive organ has given rise to two broad camps in the literature that I call free energy enactivism and cognitivist predictive processing. The two approaches vary in scope and methodology. The scope of cognitivist predictive processing is narrow and restricts cognition to brain processes and structures; it does not (...) consider the body-beyond-brain and the environment as constituents of cognitive processes. Free energy enactivism, on the other hand, includes all self-organizing systems that minimize free energy and thus does not offer any unique explanations for more complex cognitive phenomena that are unique to human cognition. Furthermore, because of its strong commitment to the mind-life continuity thesis, it does not provide an explanation of what distinguishes more sophisticated cognitive systems from simple systems. The account that I develop in this paper rejects both of these radical extremes. Instead, I propose a compromise that highlights the necessary components of predictive processing by making use of a mechanistic methodology of explanation. The starting point of the argument in this paper is that despite the interchangeable use of the terms, prediction error minimization and the free energy principle are not identical. But this distinction does not need to disrupt the status quo of the literature if we consider an alternative approach: Embodied, Embedded Predictive Processing. EEPP accommodates the free energy principle, as argued for by free energy enactivism, but it also allows for mental representations in its explanation of cognition. Furthermore, EEPP explains how prediction error minimization is realized but, unlike cognitivist PP, it allocates a constitutive role to the body in cognition. Despite highlighting concerns regarding cognitivist PP, I do not wish to discredit the role of the neural domain or representations as free energy enactivism does. Neural structures and processes undeniably contribute to the minimization of prediction error but the role of the body is equally important. On my account, prediction error minimization and free energy minimization are deeply dependent on the body of an agent, such that the body-beyond-brain plays a constitutive role in cognitive processing. I suggest that the body plays three constitutive roles in prediction error minimization: The body regulates cognitive activity, ensuring that cognition and action are intricately linked. The body acts as distributor in the sense that it carries some of the cognitive load by fulfilling the function of minimizing prediction error. Finally, the body serves to constrain the information that is processed by an agent. In fulfilling these three roles, the agent and environment enter into a bidirectional relation through influencing and modeling the structure of the other. This connects EEPP to the free energy principle because the whole embodied agent minimizes free energy in virtue of being a model of its econiche. This grants the body a constitutive role as part of the collection of mechanisms that minimize prediction error and free energy. The body can only fulfill its role when embedded in an environment, of which it is a model. In this sense, EEPP offers the most promising alternative to cognitivist predictive processing and free energy enactivism. (shrink)

In this paper it is shown that in his conception of value, published in the first volume of Capital, Marx relies on Hegel’s concept of pure recognition to organise the relations between use- and exchange-value on the one hand and the relation between the social relations between things (goods) and actors (sellers) on the other hand. Establishing this thesis is important in three respects: Firstly it demonstrates that there is a strong continuity in the philosophical thought of (...) Karl Marx, making visible an essential relation between his Economic-philosophical Manuscripts and his later writings. Secondly it helps to better understand Marx’s conception of value; and thirdly it shows that “recognition” is an important conception in his critique of political economy. (shrink)

Minimal cognition is an emerging field of research in the context of the life-mind continuity thesis. It stems from the idea that life and mind are strongly continuous, involving the same basic set of organisational principles. Minimal cognition has been sometimes regarded as the analysis of the minimum requirements for the emergence of cognitive phenomena. In the target article, Deacon describes the emergence of the autogenic system as an interpreting system that displays the simplest form of interpretive competence, (...) its most critical function being the capacity to re-present itself in ever new substrates and to interpret environmental conditions with respect to system self-maintenance. Since Deacon describes the autogen in cognitive terms, this article examines whether the autogen model can embody the critical disposition that underpins the emergence of minimal cognition. It finds that it does so, but argues that the autogenic system itself fails to be cognitive because it lacks the displacement of constraints that enable the semiotic scaffolding exhibited by life processes. The article then discusses the implications of the idea that autogenic processes underpin the emergence of minimal cognition for the life-mind continuity thesis. (shrink)

Susanne Langer’s idea of the primary apparition of music involves a dichotomy between two kinds of temporality: “felt time” and “clock time.” For Langer, musical time is exclusively felt time, and in this sense, music is “time made audible.” However, Langer also postulates what we would call ‘a strong suspension thesis’: the swallowing up of clock time in the illusion of felt time. In this paper we take issue with the ‘strong suspension thesis’ and its implications (...) and ramifications regarding not only musical meaning, but also the purported metaphysics of music construed as essentially inhering in felt time. We argue that this thesis is overstated and misdirecting insofar as it purports to describe what we experience when we hear music with understanding. We discuss a selection of examples of repetitive formations, from mediaeval music to contemporary music, which show that persistent, motion-inhibiting repetition undermines the listener’s ability to identify order and coherence due to a relative inability to anticipate the next occurrence of a differentiating musical event. We argue that Langer’s one-sided view of musical temporality, which patently relies on the conceptual framework of memory time and the specious present, exemplifies what we propose to call ‘the searchlight model of musical understanding,’ wherein the constant span of illumination of the searchlight (representing the span of the specious present) moves continuously parallel to, and along, its postulated target, i.e., the music heard, as it ‘illuminates’ it. We argue that, in the last analysis, memory time conceptually presupposes the publicly identifiable means of chronometric length. One maintains the ‘strong suspension thesis’ on pain of conceptual confusion. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical and formal framework to understand how the proprioceptive and kinesthetic system learns about body position and possibilities for movement in ongoing action and interaction. Whereas most weak embodiment accounts of proprioception focus on positionalist descriptions or on its role as a source of parameters for internal motor control, we argue that these aspects are insufficient to understand how proprioception is integrated into an active organized system in continuous and dynamic interaction (...) with the environment. Our strong embodiment thesis is that one of the main theoretical principles to understand proprioception, as a perceptual experience within concrete situations, is the coupling with kinesthesia and its relational constitution—self, ecological, and social. In our view, these aspects are underdeveloped in current accounts, and an enactive sensorimotor theory enriched with phenomenological descriptions may provide an alternative path toward explaining this skilled experience. Following O'Regan and Noë sensorimotor contingencies conceptualization, we introduce three distinct notions of proprioceptive kinesthetic-sensorimotor contingencies, which we describe conceptually and formally considering three varieties of perceptual experience in action: PK-SMCs-self, PK-SMCs-self-environment, and PK-SMC-self-other. As a proof of concept of our proposal, we developed a minimal PK model to discuss these elements in detail and show their explanatory value as important guides to understand the proprioceptive/kinesthetic system. Finally, we also highlight that there is an opportunity to develop enactive sensorimotor theory in new directions, creating a bridge between the varieties of experiences of oneself and learning skills. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the strong thesis of cognitive penetrability (CPs), to wit, th at the perceptual states (P) of a subject (S) are pervasively influenced, affected, or caused by cognitive factors (C) as expectations, memories, thoughts, goals, and so on, at all levels of perceptual processing. I argue that following the predictive coding models of perception (PC), the strong thesis of cognitive penetrability is to be expected.

ABSTRACT A new algebraic construction -called rotation- is introduced in this paper which from any left-continuous triangular norm which has no zero divisors produces a left-continuous but not continuous triangular norm with strong induced negation. An infinite number of new families of such triangular norms can be constructed in this way which provides a huge spectrum of choice for e.g. logical and set theoretical connectives in non-classical logic and in fuzzy theory. On the other hand, the introduced construction brings (...) us closer to the understanding the structure of these connectives and the corresponding logics. From the application point of view, results of this paper can be especially useful in the field of non-classical logic, fuzzy sets, and fuzzy preference modeling. (shrink)

This paper is the continuation of [11] where the rotation construction of left-continuous triangular norms was presented. Here the class of triangular subnorms and a second construction, called rotation-annihilation, are introduced: Let T1 be a left-continuous triangular norm. If T1 has no zero divisors then let T2 be a left-continuous rotation invariant t-subnorm. If T1 has zero divisors then let T2 be a left-continuous rotation invariant triangular norm. From each such pair the rotation-annihilation construction produces a left-continuous triangular norm with (...) strong induced negation. An infinite number of new families of such triangular norms can be constructed in this way, and this further extends our spectrum of choice for the proper triangular norm e.g. in probabilistic metric spaces, or for logical and set theoretical connectives in non-classical logic, or e.g. in fuzzy sets theory and its applications. On the other hand, the introduced construction brings us closer to the understanding of the structure of these operations. (shrink)

In the paper we introduce two conditions and ) which are strengthenings of Birkhoff’s conditions. We prove that an upper continuous and strongly atomic lattice is distributive if and only if it satisfies and ). This result extends a theorem of R.P. Dilworth characterizing distributivity in terms of local distributivity and a theorem of M. Ward characterizing distributivity by means of covering diamonds.

Volume 10, Issue 2, June 2019, Page 237-245.

Under the assumption that all "rules" are recursive (ECT) the statement $\operatorname{Cont}(N^N,N)$ that all functions from N N to N are continuous becomes equivalent to a statement KLS in the language of arithmetic about "effective operations". Our main result is that KLS is underivable in intuitionistic Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory + ECT. Similar results apply for functions from R to R and from 2 N to N. Such results were known for weaker theories, e.g. HA and HAS. We extend not only (...) the theorem but the method, fp-realizability, to intuitionistic ZF. (shrink)

The classical view of computing positions computation as a closed-box transformation of inputs (rational numbers or finite strings) to outputs. According to the interactive view of computing, computation is an ongoing interactive process rather than a function-based transformation of an input to an output. Specifically, communication with the outside world happens during the computation, not before or after it. This approach radically changes our understanding of what is computation and how it is modeled. The acceptance of interaction as a new (...) paradigm is hindered by the Strong Church–Turing Thesis (SCT), the widespread belief that Turing Machines (TMs) capture all computation, so models of computation more expressive than TMs are impossible. In this paper, we show that SCT reinterprets the original Church–Turing Thesis (CTT) in a way that Turing never intended; its commonly assumed equivalence to the original is a myth. We identify and analyze the historical reasons for the widespread belief in SCT. Only by accepting that it is false can we begin to adopt interaction as an alternative paradigm of computation. We present Persistent Turing Machines (PTMs), that extend TMs to capture sequential interaction. PTMs allow us to formulate the Sequential Interaction Thesis, going beyond the expressiveness of TMs and of the CTT. The paradigm shift to interaction provides an alternative understanding of the nature of computing that better reflects the services provided by today’s computing technology. (shrink)

W. V. Quine famously defended two theses that have fallen rather dramatically out of fashion. The first is that intensions are “creatures of darkness” that ultimately have no place in respectable philosophical circles, owing primarily to their lack of rigorous identity conditions. However, although he was thoroughly familiar with Carnap’s foundational studies in what would become known as possible world semantics, it likely wouldn’t yet have been apparent to Quine that he was fighting a losing battle against intensions, due in (...) large measure to developments stemming from Carnap’s studies and culminating in the work of Kripke, Hintikka, and Bayart. These developments undermined Quine’s crusade against intensions on two fronts. First, in the context of possible world semantics, intensions could after all be given rigorous identity conditions by defining them (in the simplest case) as functions from worlds to appropriate extensions, a fact exploited to powerful and influential effect in logic and linguistics by the likes of Kaplan, Montague, Lewis, and Cresswell. Second, the rise of possible world semantics fueled a strong resurgence of metaphysics in contemporary analytic philosophy that saw properties and propositions widely, fruitfully, and unabashedly adopted as ontological primitives in their own right. This resurgence — happily, in my view — continues into the present day. -/- For a time, at any rate, Quine experienced somewhat better success with his second thesis: that higher-order logic is, at worst, confused and, at best, a quirky notational alternative to standard first-order logic. However, Quine notwithstanding, a great deal of recent work in formal metaphysics transpires in a higher-order logical framework in which properties and propositions fall into an infinite hierarchy of types of (at least) every finite order. Initially, the most philosophically compelling reason for embracing such a framework since Russell first proposed his simple theory of types was simply that it provides a relatively natural explanation of the paradoxes. However, since the seminal work of Prior there has been a growing trend to consider higher-order logic to be the most philosophically natural framework for metaphysical inquiry, many of the contributors to this volume being among the most important and influential advocates of this view. Indeed, this is now quite arguably the dominant view among formal metaphysicians. -/- In this paper, and against the current tide, I will argue in §1 that there are still good reasons to think that Quine’s second battle is not yet lost and that the correct framework for logic is first-order and type-free — properties and propositions, logically speaking, are just individuals among others in a single domain of quantification — and that it arises naturally out of our most basic logical and semantical intuitions. The data I will draw upon are not new and are well-known to contemporary higher-order metaphysicians. However, I will try to defend my thesis in what I believe is a novel way by suggesting that these basic intuitions ground a reasonable distinction between “pure” logic and non-logical theory, and that Russell-style semantic paradoxes of truth and exemplification arise only when we move beyond the purely logical and, hence, do not of themselves provide any strong objection to a type-free conception of properties and propositions. -/- Most of my arguments in §1 are largely independent of any specific account of the nature of properties and propositions beyond their type-freedom. However, I will in addition argue that there are good reasons to take propositions, at least, to be very fine-grained. My arguments are thus bolstered significantly if it can be shown that there are in fact well-defined examples of logics that are not only type-free but which comport with such a conception of propositions. It is the purpose of §2 to lay out a logic of this sort in some detail, drawing especially upon work by George Bealer and related work of my own. With the logic in place, it will be possible to generalize the line of argument noted above regarding Russell-style paradoxes and, in §3, apply it to two propositional paradoxes — the Prior-Kaplan paradox and the Russell-Myhill paradox — that are often taken to threaten the sort of account developed here. (shrink)