Based on 10 months of mixed ethnographic and archival research, this study is concerned with ways in which contemporary agro-environmental subjectivities and practices in a southwestern Oklahoma farming community are rooted in the massive state-level interventions of the New Deal era and their successors. We are likewise concerned with how those interventions have become interdigitated with moral discourses and community ethics, as simultaneous expressions of both farmers’ identities and the systems of power in which they practice farming. Through historic and (...) ethnographic evidence, we demonstrate the ways in which the localization of American agricultural conservation and the attendant, edificatory role of resource bureaucracies have shaped contemporary practices and ideologies of natural resource stewardship among conventional farmers and ranchers. (shrink)

Based on 10 months of mixed ethnographic and archival research, this study is concerned with ways in which contemporary agro-environmental subjectivities and practices in a southwestern Oklahoma farming community are rooted in the massive state-level interventions of the New Deal era and their successors. We are likewise concerned with how those interventions have become interdigitated with moral discourses and community ethics, as simultaneous expressions of both farmers’ identities and the systems of power in which they practice farming. Through historic and (...) ethnographic evidence, we demonstrate the ways in which the localization of American agricultural conservation and the attendant, edificatory role of resource bureaucracies have shaped contemporary practices and ideologies of natural resource stewardship among conventional farmers and ranchers. (shrink)

Background Escalating levels of obesity place enormous and growing demands on Health care provision in the (U.K.) United Kingdom. Resources are limited with increasing and competing demands upon them. Ethical considerations underpin clinical decision making generally, but there is limited evidence regarding the relationship between these variables particularly in terms of treating individuals with obesity. Research aim To investigate the views of National Health Service (NHS) clinicians on navigating the ethical challenges and decision making associated with obesity management in adults (...) with chronic illness. Research design A cross-sectional, multi-site survey distributed electronically. Participants A consensus sample of nurses, doctors, dietitians and final year students in two NHS Trusts and two Universities. Ethical considerations Ethical and governance approvals obtained from a National Ethics Committee (11NIR035), two universities and two teaching hospitals. Results Of the total ( n = 395) participants, the majority were nurses (48%), female (79%) and qualified clinicians (59%). Participants strongly considered the individual to have primary responsibility for a healthy weight and an obligation to attempt to maintain that healthy weight if they wish to access NHS care. Yet two thirds would not withhold treatment for patients with obesity. Discussion While clinicians were clear about patient responsibility and obligations, the majority prioritised their duty of care and would not invoke a utilitarian approach to decision making. This may reflect awareness of obesity as a multi-faceted entity, with responsibility for support and management shared amongst society in general. Conclusions The attitudes of this sample of clinicians complemented the concept of the health service as being built on a principle of community, with each treated according to their need. However limited resources challenge the concept of needs-based decisions consequently societal engagement is necessary to agree a pragmatic way forward. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce and defend the recurrent model for understanding bodily spatial phenomenology. While Longo, Azañón and Haggard (2010) propose a bottom-up model, Bermúdez (2017) emphasizes the top-down aspect of the information processing loop. We argue that both are only half of the story. Section 1 intro- duces what the issues are. Section 2 starts by explaining why the top- down, descending direction is necessary with the illustration from the ‘body-based tactile rescaling’ paradigm (de Vignemont, Ehrsson and Haggard, (...) 2005). It then argues that the bottom-up, ascending direction is also necessary, and substantiates this view with recent research on skin space and tactile field (Haggard et al., 2017). Section 3 discusses the model’s application to body ownership and bodily self-representation. Implications also extend to topics such as sense modality individuation (Macpherson, 2011), the constancy- based view of perception (Burge, 2010), and the perception/cognition divide (Firestone and Scholl, 2016). (shrink)

À travers l’ouvrage Le Successeur de pierre par Jean-Michel Truong et à la lumière des théories de Félix Guattari, de Mark B. N. Hansen et de Brian Rotman relatives aux multiples virtualités de l’être humain, cet article étudiera la narration romanesque de l’imbrication des nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication dans les processus de matérialisation et d’agentivité du posthumain. Dans son roman, Truong nous invite en effet à repenser la contextualité du corps et de l’identité humaine en substituant (...) un point de vue anthropocentrique et dualiste à une ontologie de l’émergence. This paper investigates Jean-Michel Truong’s book Le Successeur de pierre with Felix Guattari’s, Mark B. N. Hansen’s and Brian Rotman’s theories related to the multiple potentialities of human beings. It focuses more precisely on the fictional narrative of the new information and communication imbrication of technologies into the processes of posthuman’s materialisation and agency. In his novel, Truong indeed invites us to think over the contextuality of the body and the human identity by substituting an anthropocentric and dualistic point of view with an ontology of emergence. (shrink)

A major recurrent feature of the intellectual landscape in cognitive science is the appearance of a collection of essays by Noam Chomsky. These collections serve both to inform the wider cognitive science community about the latest developments in the approach to the study of language that Chomsky has advocated for almost fifty years now,1 and to provide trenchant criticisms of what he takes to be mistaken philosophical objections to this approach. This new collection contains seven essays, the earliest of which (...) were first published about ten years ago. So the linguistic work that is summarised is within the principles and parameters approach and some of the essays (particularly the first and last) provide an outline of the main ideas of the emerging minimalist programme.2 But this is not primarily a book about the details of recent linguistic theory. Rather, in these essays Chomsky offers a wealth of critical commentary on some of the most influential arguments in the philosophy of mind and language that have appeared over the past two decades or so. Indeed, Chomsky discusses a vast range of philosophical topics and reaches some radical conclusions – that many influential philosophical discussions on language and mind are utterly misconceived and that, for example, the traditional mind-body problem cannot even be coherently stated. (shrink)

Résumé La recherche économique contemporaine a perdu (de) sa puissance explicative. Bien que cela transparaisse déjà depuis un bon moment, ce n’est que depuis la récente crise économique que cet état de fait est reconnu de manière plus générale. Cependant, plusieurs initiatives ont étés lancées dans l’espoir d’améliorer la situation. Une initiative phare fut celle qu’a lancée George Soros, à partir du constat suivant: si la réflexivité est une composante majeure de la réalité sociale, les contributions dominantes actuelles en économie (...) n’intègrent pas cette dimension. Le propos de mon article est de montrer que si Soros nous donne un éclairage pertinent, il ne pousse pas assez loin son raisonnement. L’essence de son message risque de se perdre en conséquence de certains propos qu’il faut mettre en doute et qui ne sont peut-être pas nécessaires à son argumentation centrale – des propos que l’on peut retrouver ailleurs dans la quête d’alternatives, et qui méritent à ce titre une attention particulière. (shrink)

Le temps n’est plus où les médecins de Molière étaient seulement raillés pour leur stupidité, et où l’art d’Hippocrate, tel qu’on le pratiquait au Grand Siècle, ne suscitait que moqueries condescendantes de la part d’esprits « modernes » qui se jugeaient mieux éclairés. Certes, l’on ne réhabilite pas aujourd’hui la purge et la saignée érigées en panacée, mais du moins les études sur la médecine ancienne, qui se multiplient depuis les travaux féconds de Patrick Dandrey, permettent-elles de per...

s the 'telling' of defuturing, this text arrives as something confronting n impossibility and a necessity. What is impossible is the telling of the story, ...

Sur le versant Sud d'une colline appelée Sténokorifi, non loin de Drama, de nombreux filons de marbre dolomitique, gris clair et de petite granulométrie, affleurent sur une étendue d'environ 19 000 m2 entre une végétation dense. Excepté le front de taille vertical d'une exploitation marbrière des années 1950 qui a fait des essais d'extraction en profondeur à l'aide du marteau-piqueur, il n'y a que des fronts de taille obliques (selon la pente) et les extractions sont superficielles. Dès lors que les (...) filons présentent une masse homogène et compacte, des traces d'extraction sont visibles ; certaines d'entre elles (canaux, emboîtures, entailles pour coins, négatifs de blocs extraits) sont conformes à celles des techniques d'extraction de l'époque romaine, alors que d'autres «enfonçures » sont les témoins de la technique d'extraction à l'époque proto-byzantine. Deux fours à chaux ont été identifiés, l'un d'époque byzantine et l'autre contemporain de l'exploitation moderne, d'où la rareté des blocs abandonnés. (shrink)

This essay is an inquiry into John McDowell’s thinking on ‘subjectivity.’ The project consists in two parts. On the one hand, I will discuss how McDowell understands and responds to the various issues he is tackling; on the other, I will approach relevant issues concerning subjectivity by considering different aspects of it: a subject as a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person and (self-) conscious being in the world. The inquiry begins by identifying and resolving a tension generated by the (...) very idea of ‘rational animal’: human beings are at the same time natural and rational. Later the inquiry proceeds by considering how McDowell’s notion of ‘second nature’ enables us to be human subjects with many faces. By going through the diagnoses and responses of McDowell, two central problems in modern and contemporary philosophy – the narrow conception of nature and the Cartesian inner space model – are identified and repelled. In Episode N I first urge that we should leave room for a certain notion of ‘world.’ I further argue that mentality has many aspects, and to understand those aspects is to understand the many faces of human subject. In Episode Ⅰ the Aristotelian notion of ‘second nature’ is discussed in order to resolve the tension in the very idea of ‘rational animal.’ Later I reply to some worries about this maneuver, including the objection from Crispin Wright. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s distinction between world and environment is introduced and related to McDowell’s thinking. Episode Ⅱ discusses perception and knowledge; McDowell’s main target – the Cartesian inner space – is introduced and criticized. Barry Stroud’s and Simon Blackburn’s positions are evaluated. Later I connect the main theme of Mind and World to the present context; in particular, I discuss McDowell’s invocation of Donald Davidson and Immanuel Kant. And then I discuss a common accusation of idealism, and Robert Brandom’s accusation of ‘residual individualism.’ Episode Ⅲ concentrates on Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein, arguing that the master thesis behind the rule-following paradox is a version of the inner space model, and that Kripke’s Wittgenstein is not Wittgenstein. Martin Kusch’s objections are answered; Michael Dummett’s demand of reductionism is rebutted. After this, I turn to Davidson’s ‘no language’ claim, and discuss to what extent McDowell agrees with him. In Episode Ⅳ I evaluate objections from Hubert Dreyfus concerning action and agency. I discuss how Dreyfus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty commit ‘the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect’ identified by McDowell. I answer Michael Ayer’s charge of intellectualism in passing. Later I bring in McDowell’s objections to Derek Parfit on personhood and to Davidson on the mind-body relation. In Episode Ⅴ I focus on consciousness and self-consciousness. McDowell applies his argument against Parfit to Kant, but Maximilian de Gaynesford dissents. I reply to his objections on McDowell’s behalf. I further connect this to McDowell’s attacks on the dualism of scheme and content. This leads to my McDowellian rejection to the existence of qualia, and further brings me to the debate between intentionalism and disjunctivism in the context of the argument from illusion. I argue against Tim Crane’s ways of conceiving issues about intentionalism and the argument from illusion. Varieties of disjunctivism are also discussed. In my Epilogue, I express my worry about McDowell’s notion of ‘self-determining subjectivity.’ According to McDowell, human freedom consists in causations in the space of reason, but as Richard Gaskin points out, a satisfying story of it is yet to be provided. I close this essay with some rough ideas about how to fill in the details of the McDowellian picture. (shrink)

Le temps n’est plus où les médecins de Molière étaient seulement raillés pour leur stupidité, et où l’art d’Hippocrate, tel qu’on le pratiquait au Grand Siècle, ne suscitait que moqueries condescendantes de la part d’esprits « modernes » qui se jugeaient mieux éclairés. Certes, l’on ne réhabilite pas aujourd’hui la purge et la saignée érigées en panacée, mais du moins les études sur la médecine ancienne, qui se multiplient depuis les travaux féconds de Patrick Dandrey, permettent-elles de per...

Working parents in are struggling to balance the demands of their occupation with those of childcare and homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, studies show that women are shouldering more of the burden and reporting greater levels of psychological distress, anxiety, and depression relative to men. However, research has yet to show that increases in psychological symptoms are linked to changes in stress during the pandemic. Herein, we conduct a small-N study to explore the associations between stress and psychological symptoms (...) during the pandemic among mothers using structural equation modeling, namely latent change score models. Thirty-three mothers completed questionnaires reporting current anxious and depressive symptoms, as well as stressful life experiences prior to-versus during the pandemic. Women endorsed significantly more stressful events during the pandemic, relative to the pre-pandemic period. Additionally, 58% of mothers scored as moderate-to-high risk for developing a stress-related physical illness in the near future because of their pandemic-level stress. Depressive symptoms were associated with the degree of change in life stress, whereas anxiety symptoms were more related to pre-pandemic levels of stress. The present study preliminarily sheds light on the nuanced antecedents to mothers’ experiences of anxious and depressive symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although further work is needed in larger, more diverse samples of mothers, this study highlights the potential need for appropriate policies, and prevention and intervention programs to ameliorate the effects of pandemics on mothers’ mental health. (shrink)

Research on nursing ideology and the ethics of child and adolescent psychiatric nursing care is limited. The aim of this study was to describe and explore the ideological approaches guiding psychiatric nursing in child and adolescent psychiatric inpatient wards in Finland, and discuss the ethical, theoretical and practical concerns related to nursing ideologies. Data were collected by means of a national questionnaire survey, which included one open-ended question seeking managers' opinions on the nursing ideology used in their area of practice. (...) Questionnaires were sent to all child and adolescent psychiatric inpatient wards (n = 69) in Finland; 61 ward mangers responded. Data were analysed by qualitative and quantitative content analysis. Six categories - family centred care, individual care, milieu centred care, integrated care, educational care and psychodynamic care - were formed to specify ideological approaches used in inpatient nursing. The majority of the wards were guided by two or more approaches. Nursing models, theories and codes of ethics were almost totally ignored in the ward managers' ideological descriptions. (shrink)

Misinformation perceptions related to global crises such as COVID-19 can have negative ramifications for democracy. Beliefs related to the prevalence of falsehoods may increase news avoidance or even vaccine hesitancy – a problematic context for successful interventions and policymaking. To explore how misinformation beliefs developed over a six-month pandemic period and how they corresponded to (digital) media preferences and selective exposure to the news, we rely on a five-wave panel survey conducted in the Netherlands (N =1,742). Our main findings show (...) that misinformation perceptions got more pronounced as the pandemic evolved. Social media use related to more pronounced misinformation beliefs within waves, whereas mainstream news use corresponded to less pronounced misinformation beliefs. An important implication for journalists and policymakers is to lower the over-time accumulation of misinformation perceptions, for example, by increasing transparency and acknowledging “honest mistakes.”. (shrink)

Populist attributions of blame have important effects on citizens’ attitudes, cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. Extending previous studies that have mostly looked at populist messages blaming political elites, we use an online survey experiment (N = 805) to investigate the effects of blaming different elitist actors in populist and non-populist ways: (1) political elites, (2) corporate elites, (3) scientific elites, and (4) a combination of these elites. We compare mere causal responsibility attribution to populist blame attributions that highlight a central opposition (...) between “pure ordinary people” and “corrupt elites” to tease out the specific effect of populist rhetoric. Results suggest that populist messages blaming all elites have stronger effects than isolated cues. Furthermore, populist blame attribution leads to more negative perceptions of the elites than non-populist blame attribution. The finding that populist frames can – under some conditions – activate negative perceptions toward different elites is alarming in times of declining trust in societal institutions, and calls for a more encompassing understanding of populists’ scapegoats. (shrink)

Lower levels of news use are generally understood to be associated with less political engagement among citizens. But while some people simply have a low preference for news, others avoid the news intentionally. So far little is known about the relationship between active news avoidance and civic engagement in society, a void this study has set out to fill. Based on a four-wave general population panel survey in the Netherlands, conducted between April and July 2020 (N = 1,084) during a (...) crisis situation, this research-in-brief investigates the development of news avoidance and pro-social civic engagement over time. Results suggest that higher news topic avoidance results in higher levels of civic engagement. The study discusses different explanations for why less news can mean more engagement. (shrink)

To combat the OneHealth threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the use of antibiotics in agriculture is subject to significant governance-led initiatives to change food system behaviours, including promoting more responsible use of antibiotics on farms through market-level interventions. To combat knowledge gaps about how consumers perceive risks associated with antibiotic use and AMR in farming, the current study carried out an in-depth qualitative focus group study incorporating a risk information exposure exercise with food consumers on the island of Ireland (_n_ (...) = 36). Using a theoretical lens of social representation theory, a thematic analysis of the collected data identified how participants made sense of, often new, information on agricultural antibiotic use and AMR. Participants displayed high awareness and concern for AMR but low understanding and misconceptions around AMR transmission from the agri-food sector. Social representations about antibiotics and food and farming systems shaped preferences for a movement away from antibiotics in farming, and in particular, prophylactic use. However, participants acknowledged the role of antibiotics to protect animal health and the integrity of the food supply chain. They debated the lack of a simple fix to antibiotics in the agri-food system and revealed preferences for preventive actions at farm level and supporting actions at market level. The study highlights the need to first tackle low levels of public understanding through effective risk communication including strategies such as targeted message framing and proactive, cross-sector OneHealth awareness campaigns, followed by the introduction of a trusted antibiotic use food labelling system. (shrink)

Persia’s Imperial Power in Late Antiquity: The Great Wall of Gorgān and Frontier Landscapes of Sasanian Iran. By Eberhard W. Sauer; Hamid Omrani Rekavandi; Tony J. Wilkinson; and Jebrael Nokandeh. British Institute of Persian Studies Archaeological Monographs. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013. Pp. xvi + 711, illus. $150. [Distributed by the David Brown Book Co., Oakville, CT.].

This article argues that "gratitude to" and "gratitude that" are fundamentally different concepts. The former (prepositional gratitude) is properly a response to benevolent attitudes, and entails special concern on the part of the beneficiary for a benefactor, while the latter (propositional gratitude) is a response to beneficial states of affairs, and entails no special concern for anyone. Propositional gratitude, it is argued, ultimately amounts to a species of appreciation. The tendency to see prepositional gratitude and propositional “gratitude” as two species (...) of the same genus results from several deep-seated social and psychological factors, but must be resisted if we are to engage in constructive philosophizing about both gratitude and appreciation. (shrink)

We provide a taxonomy of the two most important debates in the philosophy of the cognitive and neural sciences. The first debate is over methodological individualism: is the object of the cognitive and neural sciences the brain, the whole animal, or the animal--environment system? The second is over explanatory style: should explanation in cognitive and neural science be reductionist-mechanistic, inter-level mechanistic, or dynamical? After setting out the debates, we discuss the ways in which they are interconnected. Finally, we make some (...) recommendations that we hope will help philosophers interested in the cognitive and neural sciences to avoid dead ends. (shrink)

Purpose – Does copyright protection reduce or foster intellectual and industrial creation? Based on a case study from history of science, the aim is to provide more controversial evidence to this debate. Design/methodology/approach – The investigation used primary and secondary sources from the history of science and made the link to the actual debate on copyright, piracy and scientific communication. Findings – The paper describes how Elzevier, through non-authorized exploitation of a new product and without consideration of the editor's legitimate (...) interests, in a context of missing copyright protection, largely contributed to the dissemination of the French Journal de Savants and its content, and finally to the success of scientific journals. Obviously, rights infringement can not only promote the interest and objective of the rights holder but also and above all contribute to the emergence and development of new forms of scientific life. Sometimes, when barriers to communication and debate are too strong, tolerated and calculated infringement may be an option to move the lines/change the situation. Research limitations/implications – In the post-Gutenberg galaxy, made up of open access, common goods and public domain, open data and e-Science, evaluation, innovation, sustainability, communication and sharing, copyright is not necessarily the option to develop scientific communication. At least, the authors have to study lessons from academic publishing, copyright protection and piracy very carefully. Originality/value – The paper sheds light on a surprising and not very well-known part of the history of academic publishing. (shrink)

Philosophers generally agree that gratitude, the called-for response to benevolence, includes positive feelings. In this paper, I argue against this view. The grateful beneficiary will have certain feelings, but in some contexts, those feelings will be profoundly negative. Philosophers overlook this fact because they tend to consider only cases of gratitude in which the benefactor’s sacrifice is minimal, and in which the benefactor fares well after performing an act of benevolence. When we consider cases in which a benefactor suffers severely, (...) we see the feelings associated with gratitude can be negative, and even quite painful. I conclude with a discussion of the implications negative feelings of gratitude have for the normative question of when gratitude is owed, and for the descriptive claim in positive psychology that gratitude enhances wellbeing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Issues concerning the putative perception/cognition divide are not only age-old, but also resurface in contemporary discussions in various forms. In this paper, I connect a relatively new debate concerning perceptual confidence to the perception/cognition divide. The term ‘perceptual confidence’ is quite common in the empirical literature, but there is an unsettled question about it, namely: are confidence assignments perceptual or post-perceptual? John Morrison in two recent papers puts forward the claim that confidence arises already at the level of perception. (...) In this paper, I first argue that Morrison’s case is unconvincing, and then develop one picture on perceptual precision with the notion of ‘matching profile’ and ‘supervaluation’ : 481–495.), highlighting the fact that this is a vagueness account, which is similar to but importantly different from indeterminacy accounts : 156–184.). With this model in hand, there can be rich resources with which to draw a theoretical line between perception and cognition. (shrink)

Crespi & Badcock (C&B) hypothesize that psychosis and autism represent opposite poles of human social cognition. I briefly outline how computational models of cognitive brain function may be used as a resource to further develop and experimentally test hypotheses concerning 1.

Directed forgetting is a successful method for thought control whereas thought suppression is notoriously ineffective. We tested a specific hypothesis about what difference between the two paradigms causes the difference in outcomes. Both paradigms instruct participants to suppress certain thoughts, but in thought suppression experiments participants are also told to report intrusions of unwanted thoughts. We added a condition to the typical directed forgetting experiment that instructed participants to report intrusions. When participants tried to forget a word list but also (...) reported intrusions, forgetting did not occur. The results are important for understanding control of conscious contents and have implications for practicable applications of individual thought control. (shrink)

Examines the origin and early development of the classical theory of distribution up to 1767, stressing the concept of economic `surplus' as a key determinant of economic phenomena.

This article examines the relations between methods used in both animal work and study and concepts of animal mind. By "animal work" the authors mean humans and animals working together, and by "animal study" they mean the discipline of ethology, especially the emerging area of cognitive ethology. Within these areas the wide range of conceptions of animal mind includes varying emphases on intelligence, forms of rationality and language, cognition, consciousness, and intentionality. The authors' central concern is to elucidate the vocabulary (...) and the concepts which seem necessary to establishing successful working relationships with sheepdogs and gundogs. Their argument moves toward an emphasis on the appreciation of particular intentional states and recognizes that they invariably deploy elements of a moral vocabulary in achieving creative teamwork performances with dogs and other animals. The article concludes by consid enng the relevance of accounts of work with animals for associated considerations of intentionality. (shrink)

This article investigates a puzzle about gratitude—the proper response, in a beneficiary, to an act of benevolence from a benefactor. The puzzle arises from three platitudes about gratitude: 1) the beneficiary has certain obligations of gratitude; 2) these obligations are owed to the benefactor; and 3) the benefactor has no right to the fulfillment of these obligations. These platitudes suggest that gratitude is a counterexample to the “correlativity thesis” in the moral domain: the claim that strict moral obligations correlate to (...) moral rights on the part of the person to whom the obligation is owed. The goal of this chapter is to determine whether the three gratitude platitudes are true, and, if they are, what they tell us about the correlativity thesis. Sections 1 through 3 argue for the truth of each of the platitudes. It is then argued that while benefactors lack standing to demand, they do possess an imperfect right to gratitude: a special and morally significant standing to remonstrate with ungrateful beneficiaries. These facts suggest the following modification of the standard correlativity thesis: moral obligations entail moral rights on the part of the person to whom they are owed, which may be perfect (demandable) or imperfect. (shrink)

In its most fundamental, constructive parts devoted to descriptive theory, The Wealth of Nations is first and foremost an account of the causes of economic growth and development. Smith’s theory of economic development gives primary place, at least as the proximate determinants of development, to labour productivity growth and capital accumulation. This chapter examines successively, under six heads, the key dimensions of Smith’s treatment of labour and capital, and the relations between the two, both in The Wealth of Nations and (...) other writings: division of labour, the concept of capital, capital accumulation and economic development, productive versus unproductive labour, the theory of real wages and of profit rates, and economic policy in relation to labour and capital. There are some concluding reflections on Smith’s legacy in relation to these matters. (shrink)

There have recently been various empirical attempts to answer Molyneux’s question, for example, the experiments undertaken by the Held group. These studies, though intricate, have encountered some objections, for instance, from Schwenkler, who proposes two ways of improving the experiments. One is “to re-run [the] experiment with the stimulus objects made to move, and/or the subjects moved or permitted to move with respect to them” (p. 94), which would promote three dimensional or otherwise viewpoint-invariant representations. The other is “to use (...) geometrically simpler shapes, such as the cube and sphere in Molyneux’s original proposal, or planar figures instead of three-dimensional solids” (p. 188). Connolly argues against the first modification but agrees with the second. In this article, I argue that the second modification is also problematic (though still surmountable), and that both Schwenkler and Connolly are too optimistic about the prospect of addressing Molyneux’s question empirically. (shrink)